Oblivion's Throne-Chapter 114: The Selunirs

The wreckage drifted in deep space, a monument to a battle no human had ever witnessed. The ship was colossal—five kilometers long, its hull ruptured by wounds that looked too precise to be natural.

Just a dead warship swallowed by the abyss.

Dr. Alistair Lucien stared at it through the observation deck of the Sullivan Voyager. His fingers tapped against the console, his mind already racing through the possibilities. This was technology beyond anything humanity had encountered.

"Status?" he asked, voice calm.

Reimar, his lead systems analyst, adjusted his earpiece. "Scans show no movement. Gravity is weak but stable. Oxygen levels are barely detectable. There is an alien organism but it's most likely dead, sir."

Lucien exhaled. 'Then it belongs to us now.'

A discovery like this could shift the balance of power overnight. If the ship held weapons, intact data cores—anything salvageable—it would push humanity's technology decades ahead. Maybe more.

He straightened. "Prepare the boarding team. Full hazard gear."

Reimar hesitated. "Sir, this thing... it didn't just break apart. Look at the damage pattern. Some of these hull breaches are too clean for asteroids—something did this."

Lucien didn't even blink. "Then let's find out what."

The Sullivan Voyager adjusted course, maneuvering alongside the dead vessel. Docking clamps extended. Magnetic locks engaged. The connection sealed with a heavy clunk.

Then, the airlock hissed open.

This chapt𝙚r is updated by freeωebnovēl.c૦m.

The first step inside sent a shiver through the team's suits.

The corridor was enormous—too wide, too tall, built for something far larger than humans. The walls were lined with panels displaying unreadable symbols, faintly glowing even in the darkness. The air was stale, thin, yet still present.

More disturbingly, their HUDs flickered. The ship was interfering with their systems, even in its ruined state.

"Stay close," Lucien ordered, pressing forward.

They moved carefully, scanning every surface. Signs of battle were everywhere.

Scorch marks from energy weapons that left no known residue. Bulkheads ripped apart as if something had torn through them with raw force. In places, they found shattered metal restraints, bolted to the walls.

"This wasn't an attack," Reimar murmured. "It was a containment breach."

Lucien said nothing.

His gut told him the same thing.

They pushed deeper. Eventually, they reached a sealed chamber—or what was left of it. The entrance had once been a reinforced door, thick enough to withstand missile strikes.

It had been obliterated from the inside.

Beyond the wreckage lay a chamber of broken restraints and shattered control panels. And at the center of the destruction—

A creature.

Slumped against the far wall.

It was enormous, even in its motionless state—four meters tall, its silver fur gleaming under the dim emergency lights. It had broad shoulders, muscular limbs, and hands tipped with claws that could tear through steel. Its head was lupine, the muzzle sharp, its ears tall and pointed.

It looked like a giant bipedal wolf.

Reimar took a step back. "Sir... what the hell is that?"

Lucien didn't answer.

It wasn't dead.

Its chest rose and fell—slowly, too slowly. A state between life and death. Sedated? Wounded? Hybernating? He didn't know.

But what mattered was that it was alive.

Lucien's heart pounded.

This was it. This was the moment that would define his legacy.

"Containment unit," he ordered. "Now."

The team hesitated.

"Sir, what if it wakes up?"

Lucien turned, his voice like steel. "It's exactly because of that that we are not leaving. If it wakes up it will be disoriented, that's our only chance to capture it."

No one argued. The researchers worked quickly, deploying a reinforced grav-lock containment pod. It was built for high-risk specimens—top-of-the-line restraints, reinforced walls, neural dampeners.

They activated the grav-field, lifting the creature into the unit. Still no reaction.

It didn't resist. Didn't even twitch.

Reimar checked the readings. "Vital signs are steady. Still unconscious."

Lucien exhaled slowly. Good.

They moved fast, hauling the pod out of the chamber, back through the ruined corridors, back to the Sullivan Voyager.

The containment unit locked into place in the observation bay. Thick, reinforced glass separated Lucien from the prize of a lifetime.

He stood alone, staring at the alien.

Even restrained, it felt dangerous.

Too strong. Too perfectly built for war.

The ship had locked it away. And if it had been imprisoned on its own vessel—what did that say about it?

His mind raced with possibilities. How did it fight? What was its biology? Its intelligence?

He had so many questions.

And he intended to answer every single one.

Far behind them, deep in the wreckage, a single console flickered to life.

A dormant system rebooted.

Something inside the ship had activated. A failsafe, designed for a single purpose.

A transmission began.

A signal shot across the void—faster than light, directed with unerring precision.

It began with the Sullivan Voyager, the first to burn. The Selunir fleet arrived in complete silence, their ships gliding through space like shifting monoliths of blackened metal. They made no attempts at communication, ignored every desperate transmission from the research station. They didn't even announce their intentions. They simply fired.

A wave of energy, deep blue and laced with a power no human could comprehend, engulfed the station in an instant. The Sullivan Voyager and the scientists aboard barely had time to register their deaths before their forms disintegrated into nothingness, wiped from existence as if they had never been there at all. The first strike was not just a retaliation—it was a declaration of extermination.

But the Selunir did not stop there.

Somehow, they had tracked the signal. The research team's transmissions, the scans of the wrecked alien vessel, all of it had been a beacon leading directly back to human civilization. And so the hunt began.

The first world to fall was Oslo, a prosperous colony housing forty million civilians. Its planetary defense grid, designed to repel conventional invasions, activated the moment the Selunir fleet entered orbit. It didn't matter. The bombardment lasted exactly forty-eight minutes, and when it was over, the colony was gone. Not a city left standing, not a single transmission coming from the planet's surface. It was reduced to nothing more than molten rock, an open wound in space where humanity had once thrived.

Then came Elysium. The Selunirs did not simply destroy it from orbit; they landed.

They moved through the streets with terrifying efficiency, their towering forms cutting through military divisions as though they were made of paper. Soldiers fired pulse rounds, railguns, even experimental plasma weapons, and the Selunir shrugged it off as if it were nothing. They moved faster than the human eye could track, tearing through fortified positions before the defenders even registered their presence.

An entire battalion of 7 million soldiers was deployed to defend the capital city. Only ninety-four escaped.

The reports that followed were incoherent, filled with desperate accounts of the giant aliens moving too fast to follow, of how they could somehow regenerate wounds in seconds.

For the first thirty years, humanity fought blind, retreating from system to system, desperately throwing fleets into battle in the hopes of slowing down an enemy that never tired, never faltered, never negotiated. It was a war of extinction, and they were losing.

Entire planets fell within days. Space stations were left as floating tombs, their corridors filled with the bodies of those who had chosen to take their own lives rather than be hunted. Civilian evacuation efforts became bloodbaths, transport ships blasted out of the sky before they could even leave orbit.

And so, as the war raged on, humanity did the only thing it could.

It adapted.