[Thaedus's P.O.V.]
The grand council chamber of Talescria was a marvel of Coalition engineering, a sprawling nexus of polished obsidian where the fate of thousands of worlds was debated and decided. Yet today, despite the cavernous size of the room, the air felt stagnant.
I sat at the head of the luminescent table, pressing my fingers to my temples. Across the room, Allen the Alien was pacing the floor, his heavy footsteps echoing against the vaulted ceiling. The Unopan champion was throwing his massive orange hands around in animated desperation, his single eye wide with an optimism I found increasingly naive, if not outright dangerous.
"I am telling you, Great Thaedus, this is the opening we have been waiting centuries for," Allen argued, leaning his substantial weight over the council table, staring down the assembly of seasoned generals. "I was just there. I stood on their soil. John Kaisen saved my life twice. I saw the aftermath of the Viltrumite invasion. That world is full of powered individuals that could seriously assist the resistance!" He paused for a moment, his single eye focused on me, and I could see how desperate we was for someone to strongly consider his words.
"They even turned Nolan, the greatest champion of the Viltrum Empire, into a domesticated farmhand! If we formalize an alliance with Earth right now, and if we integrate Kaisen's powers and Earth's meta-humans into the Coalition armada, we could finally push the Empire back. We could win this war!"
An uneasy murmur rippled through the assembled alien generals. To defeat a Viltrumite in open combat was a monumental task that usually cost the Coalition entire fleets. To enslave one? To mentally and magically bind a pure-blooded Viltrumite? It was a myth. It was heresy against the very laws of reality they had come to understand.
"You place far too much faith in a chaotic variable, Allen," I replied, my voice quiet but carrying the weary weight of a thousand-year war. "Earth is a fractured and still primitive. Their governments are divided, their so-called 'heroes' lack even basic military discipline, and this John Kaisen operates entirely in the shadows. He does not answer to anyone. We cannot rely on a man like him."
"He answers to results!" Allen countered, slamming a fist into his palm. "And he gets them! The Great Nolan of Viltrum is off the board. If we don't send diplomats to secure this alliance before the Empire retaliates—"
The heavy blast doors hissed open, cutting him off mid-sentence.
General Telia rushed into the chamber. Her normally stoic face was drained of color. She bypassed every protocol of the high council, ignoring the indignant mutters of the politicians as she marched straight to the central holographic projector.
"Forgive the interruption, Great Thaedus," Telia said, her fingers flying across the glowing console with frantic speed. "Our deep-space stealth probes orbiting Sector 314 have just decrypted telemetry data from Earth's Global Defense Agency. It was heavily encrypted, but our algorithms managed to piece together the raw visual feed."
I felt a cold knot form in my stomach. "What is it, General?"
"Another Viltrumite incursion," Telia stated grimly, not looking up from the console. "An elite scout group of Lucan, Kradd, and Anissa."
Allen immediately bristled, his fists clenching so hard his knuckles popped. "Three elites?! Thaedus, we have to scramble a strike team right now! Earth's defenders might have managed to hold off Nolan through some trap, but an elite hit squad will slaughter them! We cannot afford to lose this asset!"
"No, Allen," Telia interrupted as she stared blankly at the projector lens. "Just... watch."
She hit playback.
The massive holographic display in the center of the room flared to life, rendering the chaotic battle of New Chicago in terrifyingly crisp detail.
We expected to see a massacre, expected to see the Viltrumites tearing through the primitive human defenders like wet paper, painting the city streets in blood.
And we did see a massacre. But the victims weren't human.
A heavy silence fell over the council chamber as we witnessed a clinical extermination. We watched two human adolescents, clad in the most advanced Geldarian armor we've seen, flawlessly ambush Kradd. The same Kradd was a monster who had cracked meteors in half, yet he was rendered entirely helpless. The female human shattered his equilibrium with a sonic weapon, bypassing his durability entirely. Then, without any hesitation, the male pinned the thrashing Viltrumite, shoved a cannon down his throat, and suffocated him from the inside out with a rapid-hardening chemical foam.
A Viltrumite dying not in a blaze of glory, but choking on concrete in the dirt.
The feed switched as we watched a silver-haired human act as an indestructible bullet. We watched Nolan himself hurl this human at unseen speeds and saw as Lucan braced for the impact, expecting the human to shatter against his near-impenetrable Viltrumite skin. Instead, the human cored straight through Lucan's torso in a geyser of blood and viscera, leaving a gaping hole in a warrior who had survived the Scourge Virus.
And finally, the feed tracked to the sky. We watched a half-breed viltrumite systematically dismantle Anissa. He didn't brawl with her or simply rely on brute force. He fought with the terrifying skills of a hunter, predicting her movements and severing her tendons with a bone-blade.
But it was what happened next that made my ancient blood run ice cold.
A human in a butler's uniform appeared out of thin air, displacing no wind or registering no energy signature on the probe's sensors. He casually placed a hand over Anissa's ruined stomach and manipulated her biology, fusing her joints with alien magic to leave her permanently crippled, ensuring she would survive the vacuum of space but be useless otherwise.
The hologram zoomed in, freezing on the final image. The butler was looking directly up at the sky. His eyes seemed to pierce through the cloaked, high-orbiting probe, looking right into the council chamber itself.
"Tell your Grand Regent that the Great Betrayer, and the legacy of the betrayed, are here on Earth. Tell him to either leave this planet alone in fear... or I will personally clear away his Empire like dust from a mantelpiece."
The projection winked out, leaving the room bathed in dim lighting.
Several council members were visibly trembling, others were openly gasping for air, as if the sheer aura of the butler had transmitted through the data stream. Allen stumbled back, leaning heavily against the console, his single eye blinking in rapid succession.
"By the stars..." Allen whispered, the color completely drained from his orange skin. "They decimated them."
"This is not a victory," I said softly.
The chilling realization settled deep into my bones. I stood up, resting my hands on the table as I raced through the facts, calculating the catastrophic implications of what we had just witnessed.
"Look at the anomalies of that planet," I addressed the council, keeping my voice tight, forcing them to look past the immediate spectacle. "We celebrated Earth as a potential shield, but we were utter fools. We were looking at a loaded weapon pointed at our own heads. They harbor a being known as the Immortal, whose body completely rejects the concept of death. They have mutants capable of infinite duplication, which violates the conservation of mass. They have a teenage girl who manipulates base matter with a mere thought. And now, they possess a human who's actually 'Invincible'."
I looked around the room, making sure every general understood the apocalyptic gravity of the situation.
"Now factor in their new acquisitions," I continued, my voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Thula and Nolan have defected. They are actively breeding with these humans and now we know Viltrumite DNA is aggressively dominant. It overwrites the host. But what happens if it overwrites the human half while retaining those physics-breaking mutations? Imagine an army of Viltrumites with absolute invulnerability. Imagine a Viltrumite who can manipulate matter on a molecular level. Imagine a Viltrumite who can clone himself endlessly."
I let the sentence hang. A species of Viltrumites with reality-bending powers is not something the universe could handle. They would be gods who would conquer everything in a matter of weeks, and the Coalition could slow them down.
But it was the butler's message that terrified me most of all.
The Great Betrayer.
That was my title. I was the one who had assassinated Lord Argall. I had plunged the knife into his back and sparked the civil war to stop the Viltrumite path of universal destruction, sacrificing my honor, my home, and millions of my people to save the galaxy from our own violent nature. I had carried that blood on my hands for a millennia.
But the legacy of the betrayed.
The truth shook me with the force of a collapsing star as I gripped the edges of the table so hard the metal groaned.
Lord Argall's true heir was alive. And he was hiding on Earth.
If the Viltrum Empire discovered that the rightful king lived, Thragg's illegitimate rule would crumble overnight. The zealots would all rally behind Argall's bloodline. It wouldn't end the Viltrumite threat; it would reinvigorate it. It would plunge the entire galaxy into a holy war of succession, a crusade of blood and fire that would consume the Coalition in its wake.
I couldn't let Argall's bloodline survive. It didn't matter how helpful Earth could be against Thragg or that they were currently fighting the Empire. The risk was simply too apocalyptic. If the heir lived, my sacrifice, my millennia of leading the resistance, meant absolutely nothing.
"Cancel the diplomatic envoys," I ordered, my voice dropping to an uncompromising gravel that echoed through the silent chamber. "Reclassify Earth. They are no longer a potential ally. They are a Class-1 Existential Threat."
Allen snapped his head up, pushing off the console. "Thaedus, you can't be serious! We need them! They are the only ones who have ever bled the Empire like this!"
"We will not be replaced by a second, deadlier coming of the Viltrumite race," I declared, my mind made up, my guilt buried under sheer pragmatic survival. "I will not trade one tyrant for a pantheon of invincible gods. General Telia, prepare the Coalition Armada, ready all dreadnoughts and charge the planetary siege weapons. We are going to Earth."
[A/N]:
If you want to read Chapters in advance, check out my P@treon - Max_Striker.
If you wanna hang out, join my Discord server- https://discord.gg/XxGEYk2PM5