Chapter 355: Beloved son, friend and Tech Genius part 2

The air around both Harbingers began to shimmer as invisible forces pressed against their enhanced physiology. The creatures staggered, their movements becoming sluggish as the intense electromagnetic fields disrupted their nervous systems and interfered with their reflexes.

Kelvin pushed himself away from the power junction, his left arm hanging useless at his side but his right hand still crackling with green energy. The energy blade felt heavier than usual, but his suit enhanced strength compensated as he advanced on the nearest Harbinger.

The creature tried to dodge, but the electromagnetic interference had slowed its reflexes just enough. Kelvin’s blade carved a deep furrow across its chest, alien blood spraying in a wide arc as the weapon’s edge disrupted sliced through the thick armour.

But the second Harbinger had recovered from the coolant bath, its natural healing factor regenerating damaged tissue even as steam rose from chemical burns. It moved with deadly purpose, massive hands reaching for Kelvin’s throat.

He tried to dodge, but his damaged suit couldn’t provide the mobility he needed. The creature’s grip closed around his left arm instead—the useless one—and began to pull with inexorable force.

’This is going to hurt,’ Kelvin realized, just before his shoulder joint separated with a wet tearing sound that he felt more than heard.

"Arghhhh!!!" Kelvin screamed in agony as it came off.

The arm came away at the socket, servos and muscle fiber separating as the Harbinger’s grip proved stronger than human anatomy. Blood sprayed across the creature’s chest, but Kelvin’s combat stimulants kept him conscious as his suit’s medical systems immediately began sealing the wound around his missing arm’s shoulder with emergency nanobots.

The pain was being doused by analgesics that his suit released throughout his body.

’Well, that’s inconvenient,’ he gasped, stumbling backward while his remaining arm tried to keep the energy blade steady. ’But I wasn’t using that one anyway.’

The Harbinger advanced, holding his severed arm like a trophy, but Kelvin’s technopathic abilities were still connected to the facility’s systems. He reached out with his consciousness, finding the waste management system’s high-pressure disposal units.

Another command, another safety override, and the ground beneath the creature’s feet exploded upward as pressurized waste disposal lines ruptured simultaneously. The Harbinger disappeared into a geyser of sewage and industrial chemicals, its roars of rage echoing from somewhere inside the toxic fountain.

But the third creature was already moving, having learned from its companions’ mistakes. It came low and fast, staying below the electromagnetic field’s most intense effects, its massive fists aimed at Kelvin’s center mass.

Kelvin’s energy blade met the attack head-on, the weapon’s edge carving deep into alien bone and muscle. But the creature’s momentum carried it forward, its other fist connecting with Kelvin’s right shoulder with bone-crushing force.

His second arm separated at the socket, the energy blade tumbling away as his remaining hand lost all sensation. More blood, more emergency medical protocols, more nanobots working frantically to keep him alive as his body temperature began dropping toward shock levels.

’Okay,’ Kelvin said conversationally, standing in a widening pool of his own blood while facing an eight-foot killing machine with exactly zero functional upper limbs. ’This is definitely not how I planned to spend my afternoon.’

The Harbinger advanced with predatory confidence, clearly expecting an easy kill now that its opponent had been effectively disarmed. Literally.

But Kelvin’s eyes were still glowing green, his technopathic abilities still connected to every system in the facility. And he’d just had a very creative idea.

’’You know what the best part about technopathy is?’’ he asked the approaching monster, his consciousness reaching deep into the facility’s core systems. ’’I never actually needed hands to hack anything,’’

The facility’s primary fusion reactor responded to his will, safety protocols dissolving under direct neural interface. He didn’t shut it down—that would have been too simple. Instead, he began rerouting the reactor’s entire output through the external array system, overloading capacitors and power relays in a cascade that would either destroy the facility or turn it into the galaxy’s largest improvised weapon.

’Time to see if physics still works the same way when you’re bleeding to death,’ Kelvin thought, feeling the massive energies building toward critical thresholds.

The Harbinger reached for his throat, but green lightning suddenly arced between every metal surface in the facility. The creature convulsed as millions of volts coursed through its enhanced physiology, its nervous system overloading under electrical trauma that would have killed a dozen normal humans.

Kelvin used the moment to stagger toward the facility’s main node, his vision blurring from blood loss but his technopathic senses still burning bright. The communication array was right there, its alien technology finally within reach of his enhanced consciousness.

’Noah, Lucas, Sophie, Lyra and well Ice queen herself,’ he thought desperately, his mental fingers reaching into the communication network’s deepest protocols. ’Please tell me you’re still alive to hear this.’

’Come on, come on,’ he thought, his vision blurring from blood loss as green energy crackled between his temples and the alien interfaces. ’Just need to break through the jamming frequencies and—’

The breakthrough came suddenly, his enhanced perception piercing through the interference like a hot knife through butter. But what he found on the other side made his blood run colder than the shock from his severed arms ever could.

The jamming signals weren’t just blocking communications. They were carrying something else, something that made his technopathic senses recoil in instinctive horror. Waveforms that matched no known electromagnetic pattern, but somehow felt familiar in the worst possible way.

’Those aren’t radio frequencies,’ Kelvin realized, his mind analyzing the complex signal patterns even as fusion containment alarms reached fever pitch around him. ’They’re neural patterns. Brainwaves. Human brainwaves.’

The data streams flowing through the communication network told a story that made everything they’d thought they knew about their enemy suddenly, terrifyingly wrong. The jamming signals were broadcasting human neural patterns—thoughts, emotions, memories—across every frequency spectrum, creating a psychic white noise that didn’t just block communications but actively interfered with human consciousness itself.

’What the hell?’ Kelvin whispered, his consciousness touching the edge of something vast and terrible hidden within the network’s deepest protocols. ’These patterns... they’re not artificial. Someone human is generating these signals.’

The neural patterns weren’t random. They were coordinated, synchronized, broadcasting from multiple facilities in perfect harmony. And at the center of it all, like a spider at the heart of an enormous web, was a single human consciousness being used as a relay point for every signal in the network.

One mind, stretched across dozens of facilities, forced to process and broadcast the psychic interference that was keeping every human in the system in bondage and vulnerable. A human being, turned into a living jamming system and a control system at the same time.

’The bastards,’ Kelvin snarled, his technopathic abilities recording everything even as the reactor’s containment began its final collapse. ’They’ve got someone. Some poor soul they’re using to cut everyone off from each other. Every person who can’t call for help, every team that loses coordination, every moment of isolation and fear—that’s all coming from one person being used to broadcast their own neural patterns across the entire star system.’

The fusion reactor’s warning systems reached critical as Kelvin began his desperate transmission, uploading everything he’d discovered about the network’s true nature. But even as he fought to get the information out, he could feel the neural jamming signal trying to interfere with his own consciousness, that distant, tortured mind reaching across space to block the very communication that might save them all.

’I’m sorry,’ Kelvin thought, directing the message toward that unknown, suffering consciousness. ’I’m so damn sorry they did this to you, whoever you are. But I’m going to make sure my team knows the truth.’

The reactor containment failed just as his transmission completed, but in those final milliseconds before the explosion claimed everything, Kelvin’s visor detected something impossible—a blue flash of light approaching his position at impossible speed.

’Storm?’ he wondered, just before several megatons of improperly contained fusion energy turned the entire facility into a miniature star.

But his message was already racing across the quantum communication channels, carrying the terrible truth about their enemy’s greatest weapon: not the Harbingers themselves, but the human mind they’d twisted into a tool for keeping every other human isolated, chained and alone.