Delta Marathon ring
4.13 million light years of Masari engineering loomed large in the universe. Just minutes ago, a conflict raged there between the Hierarchy, the Thoughtsin, and the Coalition that opposed both the genocidal armies of aliens and the all consuming parasite. Most of the earthborn heroes had already gone home; Barak'Talak was dead, Grand Overseer Mu had fled to lead his crusade towards the Earth with all the Hierarchy could spare. But there was still the issue of the Thoughtsin. While the final push was made to the primary activation chamber of the ring, the Malpsyche sneakily infiltrated it's forces into the former capital of the Hierarchy and had consumed the entire 75,000 light year artificial galaxy in a matter of minutes; driving away both secessionists and loyalist fleets, with the latter joining Mu and the former establishing a quarantine.
The problem was that below Klo'Vis was the MARATHON ring, with a massive amount of god-like technology from the long extinct Masari that could very well be claimed by the parasite were it to break the quarantine. Nobody had the firepower to destroy it; not while the Thoughtsin could man it's shields and power up it's defenses. Jade might have had that firepower; but her and Dave were needed elsewhere to deal with the Hierarchy's last crusade.
"+You sure you've got enough ships to secure this thing? Only takes one spore and we're on a parasite chase.+" Glitch cut in over the comm-links, his metallic voice tinged with pessimism regarding the Hierarchy Secessionists and Coalition's ability to keep that thing properly contained.
"+Glitch if you could answer that question you'd be 'bot of the year kid.+" Marshall Alloy snorted as he lit a thermite cigar. The droids; being mechanical, were deemed to be best suited for ensuring nothing got in or out of the quarantine, and Alloy was just the bot to get saddled with watching this big hunk of infested nastiness.
"+...Maybe we don't have to watch it?+" John said, his armoured frame looking at the enormous; festering mass of flesh covered metal through the visor of his helmet, the enormous station essentially taking up his entire view. That the Hierarchy could build something so vast confounded him. The Masari? Most religions prayed to far lesser powers than the Masari, so that didn't surprise him too much. But the Hierarchy? He shook his head.
"+He's right, we do not necessarily need to keep a patrol over the device, should John be able to move it, and I do not doubt that for a moment.+" Rose cut in, eyeballing the entirety of the corrupted station as John steeled himself, gathering his determination to draw on the strength of his emotions.
"+Move it!? That's a seventy f*cking five thousand light year space station son! It exponentially outmasses entire scrap f*cking damned galactic clusters yu ignorant ****head. Only Hierarchy super science stops that f*ck off huge pile of **** from f*cking collapsing into an observable universe swallowing black hole. You're not f*cking moving that f*cking thing against it's own volition!+" Chief Droid scientist Krunk explained; seeming to go for the maximum number of f-bombs he could drop in a single paragraph.
Snorting at his self-bleeps, John shook his head. "+Clear a path around it. Lemme see if I can't get that hunk of junk out of the way!+" He said, getting more confident by the moment as he approached the bottom spire of the enormous station. He looked up at the enormity of the station as thoughtsin forms buzzed around it; forming a thick; oppressive cloud of spores and spaceflight capable forms and infested spacecraft. He couldn't even begin to imagine how heavy the thing was, any number he thought up of just seemed too small. For a moment, he was daunted, he sucked in air he didn't need, but when he exhaled, he just became more determined to finish the task.
Twirling his hammer around by it's strap, he conjured forth the essence of Breath, the power of freedom; the winds of stars and the vessel's own atmospheric bubble. The winds rapidly began to envelop the entirety of the station; taking on a deep blue colour as they formed into weaving tendrils that began stretching for light years. Emboldened by his own initial success, he raised his shield and extended it's flaps to deflect incoming fire from the station's thoughtsin corrupted weapons; not even feeling the heat of weapons that could pulverize whole sectors of space so long as he kept his shield between himself and the massive turret guns on the station.
Farther and farther did the blue knots stretch; more and more did he have to move around to keep deflecting the massive firepower the thoughtsin sought to bring to bear on him as the winds he summoned broke the light speed barrier trillions of times over; tearing apart anything they caught in their path but still unable to breach the shielding of the enormous station even as it was enwrapped in a bubble of deep blue winds; winds he commanded to remain around the station until he was assured of their self perpetuity. Now with the station completely enwrapped in the winds while lightning that stretched for billions of miles across struck at the station from within the storm he generated; he flew right at the spire.
".+..Holy f*cknuts.+" Krunk cut in over the commlinks.
"+You're not seriously thinking about *throwing* that damn thing are you?+" Alloy asked, disbelieving that anyone was strong enough to throw something that large.
"He is, and he can, and I would advise that you move your fleets back." Rose commented as John batted away enormous tendrils of thoughtsin corrupted flesh that snaked for billions of miles; braving the storm he had generated to try and grasp the child; only for them to be crushed by blows from his hammer so powerful that they could be clearly detected from superluminal scanners even through the power of the galactic storm. With the last of the enormous thoughtsin supercell tentacles out of the way; John, still riding on the power boost of his fight with Barak'Talak and the battle on Earth and the Ring, went to work.
Grabbing at the base of the spire, once he got word that the coalition fleets had moved to a safe distance, he set his suit to Maximum strength mode; diverting as much power as he could to strength functions so that he could pull this off. He strained with effort; pulling at the station to shift it's path through the stars. Gritting his teeth and focusing his determination to see this danger to his friends put out of the way as soon as possible, the Heir of Breath actually managed the impossible. With a might yell; he managed to swing the station downwards; sending it's enormous bulk crossing thousands of light years in mere seconds as he began to spin in place, holding the station down all the while as he prepared a hammer toss.
The disbelieving psychic shrieks of the Thoughtsin were clearly audible across psychic channels as he actually managed to use tactile telekinetics to hold the entire thing together; aided by the station's molecular reinforcement fields, all to make sure that no part of Klo'Vis broke off while he spun around faster and faster. Soon enough, Klo'vis became a hyperluminal blur, invisible to the naked eye as it traversed billions of times light speed in a circle.
To those there to witness the impossible sight, the fabric of space and time themselves began distorting under the pressure of this unimaginable deed of strength before John's mind calculated out a trajectory that would take the Thoughtsin to a so called metal space sector; a section of the universe where the background radiation prevented any sort of organic life from developing and so had been overtaken by machines that would not be susceptible to the thoughtsin.
With a final roar of primordium hard determination, he let the station go at just the precise moment; slingshotting it and the storm he kept around it right through the heavens. Receding at a velocity that any Earth based scientist would have just shook his or her head at if presented to, the Klo'Vis station shot off into the distance as John flew right along side it; preparing the equally implausible deed of stopping it to prevent it from overshooting his intended trajectory. Overtaking the station, John crossed a gulf of space that dwarfed our observable universe thrice over in the blink of an eye and placed himself in the path he calculated out for the vessel.
Creating yet another series of storms; nets that would sap the velocity of the station as it crossed it's final stretch, he breathed in deeply; feeling the station pass through each stellar storm in turn before it loomed impossibly large right before him. Throwing his hammer arm back behind his head, he shouted something in truespeech; a command to reality to give him the immovability he needed to pull this off, if just for a moment. And with a final swing of the hammer; a blast wave tore through the universe that sparked off scientific interest for light years to come, a colossal impact of hammer on shield that even the Malpsyche itself felt and feared as Scmalmharu slammed into the shielding of Klo'vis, broke it, then dug right into it's plating before the Malpsyche forced the station to hold up with layer after layer of psychic shielding and thoughtsin biomass.
In an instant, the kinetic energy of the entire station was halted by a single blow, and when the dust cleared, John still stood; bringing up his shield to defend from the retaliation fire before shooting off into the stars; using his hammer to help give him a speed boost and leaving behind the Malpsyche; contained by the storm with nothing to eat for billions of light years until it got the disabled metaspace drives repaired.
When he returned to his friends, he made a simple comment. "+Whew...I hope I don't have to try that hard anytime soon.+" He said cheerily, a smile on his face beneath the helmet.
"+I am afraid that the cosmos will be needing more of such feats in the near future, but for now, we can relax. I was absolutely certain that you would be able to enact this deed, and I am glad that you proved more than adequete to the task.+" The verbose Novii said, placing an armoured hand on his shoulder once her; clad in the Viktor suit, flew up to him in space.
"+Sh!t I want those powers, would make opening packaging a hell of a lot easier.+" Marshall Alloy remarked to everyone's laughter.
Despite all the jokes and jovialty, the Marathon war had one last act to complete before the Stars could find peace from Mu or the Thoughtsin. One last dramatic chapter in this hundred thousand year long story.
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