SSS Rank: Strongest Beast Master-Chapter 260: Moonshot

The transmission came through at 0400 hours.

"We have the codes." Her voice cracked.

Jonah was at her side in seconds. He'd been pretending to sleep in the captain's chair.

"Seraph came through?" he asked.

"She came through." Vanessa brought up the data stream, watching the encryption keys scroll across her screen. "Defense grid access. Satellite command protocols. Everything we need to reach the Moon without getting turned into dust."

Behind them, Ariana limped onto the bridge. Her leg was still healing from the Apex battle. The Celestial Falcon had taken damage too, but both of them refused to stay down.

"The ground team?" she asked.

"They are alive. Wounded. But alive." Vanessa didn't mention the other part. The part where Seraph's voice on the recorded message had sounded different.

Jonah pulled up the fleet status. Thirty-nine ships. They had started with forty-three. Four lost in the battle against the Apex.

"All ships," he said into the comm, his voice carrying to every vessel in the Ghost Fleet. "Form up. We are going to the Moon."

The response was immediate. Ships that had been drifting in loose formation went into position. The ship hummed, excited and ready. They had been bred for war millennia ago. This was what they were made for.

Jonah took Nomad's pilot seat. The ship responded to his touch with systems lighting up, solar sails unfurling. Through their bond, he felt its anticipation mixed with something else. Worry, maybe. Or the ship's version of it.

"You feel it too, huh?" he muttered. "Yeah. Me too."

"Coordinates locked," Vanessa said. "Jump point calculated. We're ready when you are."

Jonah looked at the Moon on their viewscreen. Just a gray sphere from this distance. Peaceful. Quiet. Nothing to suggest what waited for them there.

But he knew better now. He'd learned that lesson the hard way. Nothing was ever as simple as it looked.

"All ships. Jump on my mark." He took a breath. Let it out. "Three. Two. One. Mark."

Reality folded.

Then they were there.

Lunar orbit. Close enough to see details. Close enough to die if this went wrong.

"Defense grid is locking on," Vanessa reported. Her fingers moving fast across her console. "Feeding them Kaine's codes now."

The satellites that ringed the Moon like a crown of thorns all swiveled toward the fleet at once. Thousands of them. Each one armed with enough firepower to break a ship in half.

For three seconds, nothing happened.

Three seconds that felt like three years.

Then, one by one, the satellites' targeting lasers went from red to green.

"Access granted," Vanessa said. "We're through."

Cheers erupted across the comm channels. Pilots celebrating like they'd already won. Like getting through the front door meant the house was theirs.

Jonah didn't celebrate. He was looking at the Moon.

Really looking at it.

"Oh no," he said quietly.

The gray surface was moving. Like something underneath was waking up.

Then the gray peeled back like dead skin, and underneath was black. Metallic black. Veins of it spreading across the lunar surface.

And in the center of it all, rising from the Moon like a finger pointing at the sky, was the Nexus.

It was a spire of twisted metal and corrupted flesh that reached up into space itself, pumping green smoke into the void. .

"What did he do?" Ariana whispered. "What did Sterling do to the Moon?"

Warden's hologram appeared, analyzing the data flooding in. The ancient AI's voice was clinical, but even it sounded disturbed.

[Scanning. Analysis complete. The Nexus is not merely a facility. It is a terraforming engine. Sterling has infected the Moon's crust with a hybrid biomechanical organism. He is consuming the lunar core to power a mass production system.]

"How much power are we talking about?" Vanessa asked.

[If the current rate continues, enough to manufacture one million Weaver units within six months.]

The bridge went silent.

One million. Not hundreds. Not thousands. A million soldiers, all linked to Sterling's hive mind. An army that could sweep across not just one planet but dozens. Hundreds.

An empire built on stolen souls.

"Well," Jonah said, his voice somehow steady despite everything. "Guess we are in the right place."

He opened the channel to the entire fleet. Every ship. Every captain. Every flawed Weaver who had found stability in their bond. Every person who had answered his call.

"You all see it. The Nexus. That's our target. We land, we breach, we tear that thing down from the inside." He paused. "This is going to be bad. Worse than the Apex. Some of us won't make it. But if we don't do this, everything we've fought for dies. Everyone we've lost died for nothing."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"So let's make sure their sacrifice meant something. All ships, begin descent. Target coordinates directly below the spire. We're going in."

The Ghost Fleet tilted as one and dove toward the corrupted Moon.

For about thirty seconds, it looked like it might actually work.

Then the surface opened fire.

The black veins on the Moon's surface rippled and rose, forming structures that looked like trees made of thorns. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All pointed up at the descending fleet.

"What are those?" Ariana asked.

"Weapons," Vanessa said, her console screaming warnings. "Organic anti-air cannons. They're powering up!"

Sterling's voice cut across every channel. Smooth. Amused. The sound of someone watching ants walk into a trap.

"Codes only open doors, Jonah. You still have to walk through the hallway."

The Thorn-Cannons fired.

Not bullets. Not lasers. Streams of acid mixed with something else. Void energy, maybe. Whatever it was, it ate through matter like it was hungry.

The first ship to get hit was the Dancing Light, piloted by a young engineer from the capital who'd answered Jonah's call with hope in her eyes.

The acid stream punched through her ship's hull. Through the living armor. Through everything.

Her scream echoed across the psychic link for half a second. Then nothing.

The Dancing Light broke apart, it's pieces tumbling toward the Moon's surface.

"Evasive maneuvers!" Jonah shouted. "Scatter! Don't give them grouped targets!"

The formation broke. Ships peeling off in every direction, trying to dodge streams of death that filled the sky like deadly rain.

Two more ships went down. The Iron Will. The Quiet Dawn. Names Jonah had memorized. Faces he would never forget.

Nomad weaved through the barrage, Jonah pushing the ship harder than he ever had. A stream of acid passed close enough that he felt the heat through the hull.

"Structural integrity at sixty percent!" Vanessa reported. "We can't take many more hits!"

"Then don't get hit!" Jonah banked hard left. A cannon swiveled to track them. He dove, using the Moon's gravity to pick up speed.

Behind them, the fleet was in chaos. Ships scattered across the sky, each one fighting its own desperate battle to reach the surface alive.

"New landing zone," Jonah said. "We are not making the primary target. Find us somewhere, anywhere, that's not directly under those cannons!"

Vanessa's fingers flew. "Got it. Three miles west of the Nexus. There's a gap in the cannon coverage."

"Good enough. All ships, secondary landing zone. Coordinates incoming. Just get down alive!"

Nomad screamed through the atmosphere, such as it was. The Moon's gravity pulled at them, hungry. The Thorn-Cannons kept firing, filling the sky with death.

They were close now. Close enough to see details on the surface. The black veins weren't veins at all. They were roots. Tendrils. A forest of metallic corruption spreading across dead rock.

"Brace for impact!" Vanessa shouted.

Jonah pulled up at the last second. Not enough to avoid the crash. Just enough to maybe survive it.

They hit.

CRASH.

The world became noise and pain and the sensation of being inside a tin can someone was beating with a hammer.

Nomad carved a trench through the corrupted forest. Metallic trees shattered against the hull. The ship bounced, rolled, finally slid to a stop in a shower of moon dust and debris.

For a moment, silence.

Then Jonah's ears stopped ringing enough to hear Vanessa groaning beside him.

"Everyone alive?" he managed to ask.

"Define alive," she said.

Behind them, Ariana pulled herself up from where she'd been thrown. Blood ran from a cut on her forehead, but she was moving. That was something.

"We're down," Jonah said into the comm. "All ships, report."

The responses came back. Scattered. Damaged. But alive. Most of them, anyway.

Twenty-eight ships had made it to the surface. Twenty-eight out of thirty-nine.

Eleven more names to memorize. Eleven more faces to haunt his dreams.

Jonah looked out at the twisted landscape around them. The forest of corrupted metal. The green fog drifting between the trees. And in the distance, visible over everything, the Nexus spire reaching toward the stars.

They were miles away from their target. Scattered and wounded. Surrounded by hostile territory.

But they were here.

The final battle had begun.