Oblivion's Throne-Chapter 116: Burial Ground

Orion sat in silence.

The simulation had ended hours ago, but the weight of it hadn't left his body. It settled deep in his chest, like smoke that wouldn't clear. He didn't blink as the holographic display continued its quiet rotation in front of him—death counts, fleet reports, grainy combat footage that blurred together in a haze of destruction.

The number still burned into the center of his vision: 195,462,009,311.

It was the confirmed death toll.

He watched the numbers scroll, his thoughts caught somewhere between disbelief and a hollow understanding. The Selunir War had lasted ninety years. A one-sided slaughter from the moment it started. What the simulation showed wasn't exaggerated. If anything, it had softened the worst of it. Some of the footage was real. Some of it reconstructed. All of it brutal.

The Confederacy's secrets suddenly didn't feel so strange anymore.

Everything he'd never understood about the Confederacy began to line up. Why certain technologies had shot forward at impossible speeds—ship propulsion, orbital defenses, energy transfer—while others like medical science, education systems, or social welfare had either plateaued. Why genetic diseases still existed. Why people lived longer, but not necessarily better.

Because the progress hadn't been organic. Humanity hadn't evolved—it had scavenged.

The war had forced adaptation, not development. The only reason humanity still existed was because it had stolen time—time bought with lives, desperation, and someone else's technology. The leaps they'd made weren't earned. They were side effects of disaster.

The realization dug into him as he watched another data stream play out: Cerus-IV, a colony with a population of eighteen billion, burned from orbit. Entire families. Gone in seconds. Civilian transports turned to vapor. Communications jammed before warnings could even be sent.

And then there was Earth.

He pulled up the restricted logs—most of them heavily redacted, but the metadata was enough. Earth's location was classified under six layers of clearance. Visuals were forbidden. Even saying the name aloud in certain channels triggered internal surveillance. Humanity's origin world had become a ghost—unreachable, unsearchable, and deliberately erased from public knowledge.

And that's when it really sank in.

This wasn't history. This wasn't past trauma that the Confederacy had moved on from. This was the reason everything still operated like a military emergency. It was the shadow that shaped every law, every restriction, every ounce of paranoia.

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The deeper Orion dug, the worse it became.

There was a file on the early use of genetic boosters. He opened it. It didn't contain much, just clinical data and a few behavioral notes. But the implications were clear. After the first decades of loss, the military had resorted to using augmentation to raise soldiers faster. Accelerated growth. Cognitive enhancement. Emotional suppression. They made children into weapons. By five years old, they had the bodies and mental processing of teenagers—but most didn't survive long enough to make it past that point.

Later generations would be refined, shaped under the control of the Archon families. Booster tech would become more stable. But in those early years, the death rates were obscene. Children were just another resource in a war that didn't care.

Orion leaned back in the chair and rubbed at his face. There was no comfort here. No lesson to feel inspired by.

The simulation had dropped them at the worst point in history—when humanity had already lost billions and had nothing left but collapsing systems and retreat orders. There had been no perfect answers. Only choices between different versions of failure.

Do you sacrifice civilians to preserve military strength?

Do you retreat and let planets fall, or do you fight knowing you'll lose?

Do you keep going when everything else breaks?

These were the questions. And there were no right answers. Just consequences.

And that's what stung the most.

Humanity hadn't survived because of its strength. It had survived because something else had distracted the predator.

Orion stared at the screen for a long time. The casualty counts. The planetary destruction summaries.

Orion accessed the Reyes database again. His fingers moved fast, but his mind dragged behind. He opened the entry on Earth.

He leaned back in the chair and exhaled through his nose.

What a joke.

He understood now. Earth wasn't just a birthplace—it was a scar. A reminder of failure. Of desperation. Of how close humanity had come to being erased.

The simulation from the trial—it hadn't taken place on some random battlefield. The terrain, the toxic skies, the splintered cityscapes—they hadn't been fabricated. That was Earth.

They hid it because every square meter reeked of what they'd done. Of what they couldn't undo.

Orion's eyes stayed locked on the blinking cursor. He didn't click away. He didn't close the file. He let the silence stretch until it hurt.

Maybe, he thought, the secrecy around Earth wasn't just bureaucratic paranoia. Maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe it was a rite of passage. You weren't truly part of the Confederacy's upper structure until you understood what came before it. Until you looked the weight of 195 billion deaths in the face and still chose to move forward.

And then a thought crept in.

A cold, mechanical thought.

If I had been born just 35 years earlier... I wouldn't be here.

He would've been conscripted by default. Not as a soldier—but as a test subject. One of the thousands of children used in the first waves of genetic augmentation. Boosters that hadn't been refined. Mental acceleration injections that scrambled half the subjects before they even spoke full sentences.

They'd called it "projected cognitive advancement." The goal was to take five-year-olds and turn them into functioning thirteen-year-olds in weeks. Sharpen their minds. Harden their muscles. Remove fear. Increase aggression.

But most just broke.

Orion imagined himself among them. A tiny soldier with perfect posture, black boots too large for his feet, gun trembling in his small hands. No childhood. No memories outside of combat briefings. A lifespan capped at five years, six if he got lucky. Eight if the augmentation worked better than expected. Ten if he learned not to scream when the injections burned.

The simulation footage had shown some of them. Not for shock value—just in the background. Barely more than shadows, rushing into firestorms. Kids. Faces frozen in focus. Or fear. Or nothing at all.

He would've been one of them.

And if he survived?

He'd be crippled. Some malformed husk with muscles that aged five times faster than bone. Brain chemistry permanently rewired. Maybe he'd spend his final years on a medical ship, body rotting from the inside while the nurses politely pretended not to see it.

The Confederacy never healed from the war. They didn't even try. They just built over it. Covered it with polished metal and synthetic light. Buried the bones beneath artificial gardens.

That's what Earth was now.

Not a cradle. A burial ground.

The place where humanity threw its ethics into the fire and called it progress.

And now everything made sense.

The Confederacy's obsession with the Raptures. The reckless push toward uncharted space. The way they treated risk like a currency. The way every scientific breakthrough was wrapped in military application first, civilian application second.

They weren't building toward a better future.

They were running. Sprinting toward something—anything—that made them feel like the past couldn't catch up.

The Raptures weren't exploration. The next great bet. Not driven by ambition—but by fear.

Fear that the Selunir could come back.

Orion finally closed the file.

There was no closure here. Just a new kind of clarity.

He stood up and stepped away from the console, the air around him cold despite the environmental controls. He walked toward the viewing deck. Outside the glass, the stars looked distant and small.

He felt... awake.

And that was enough.