Chapter 171: A Step from Death
The low, steady thrum of the starship's engine, a comforting vibration that had defined his entire young life, abruptly vanished. It was replaced by a silence so sudden and absolute it was painful.
Then, the world exploded.
A piercing, ear-splitting alarm blared through the ship, painting the sterile corridors in pulsing, frantic strokes of red. "ALARUM! ALARUM! HULL BREACH, DECK 3! IT'S THE BORISIN!"
The security captain's roar over the intercom was choked with a terror Orion had never heard. It was cut short by a wet, tearing sound, followed by a gurgling scream that was mercifully brief.
The sounds of battle—flesh being torn, screams rising and falling, the heavy thud of bodies hitting the bulkhead—were almost instantly drowned out by the hiss of atmosphere venting. And with it came the smell. A musky, acrid, coppery scent that pricked at his nose and made his young mind recoil.
[Inorin's Note: The Borisin are a fanfic-specific, wolf-like alien race known for their brutality and the use of a fear-inducing pheromone called 'Wolfbane'.]
The door to their small cabin burst open. His mother, her usually pristine white Foxian ears pinned flat against her silver hair in terror, rushed in. Her face was as pale as voidfrost.
"Orion, Jiang Li! Quick!" Her voice was a strained, desperate whisper. She didn't cry or scream; there was no time. She scooped both of them up, her arms trembling but strong.
"Quick, hide! In here!"
Her trembling hands opened a hidden compartment built into a large cargo box in the corner, a smuggler's cache meant for contraband, now a desperate, tiny ark.
"Remember," she shoved them inside, the space cramped and dark, smelling of dust and metallic oil. "No matter what you hear, no matter what happens... do not make a sound! Do you understand? Do not make a sound!"
She kissed their foreheads, a quick, wet, desperate press of her lips. "Mommy and Daddy love you. We love you so much..."
Then, with a final, heartbreaking sob, she heavily closed the lid, plunging them into suffocating darkness.
In the black, the sounds of the massacre outside became horrifyingly clear. The clang of metal, the wet thuds, the guttural roars of the Borisin. Claws tearing through the ship's metal. Bones breaking. Screams rising and falling, each one a familiar voice from the crew, extinguished one by one.
Most terrifyingly, the acrid smell of Wolfbane grew stronger, seeping even through the sealed compartment. It was a scent designed to cripple, to erode sanity and replace it with primal, debilitating fear. His younger sister, Jiang Li, was shaking violently in his arms. Her tiny claws dug into his shirt, and a high-pitched, terrified keen started in her throat.
Orion clamped his hand over her mouth, his own small body trembling. He pressed his face against a narrow crack in the box, suppressing his own terror, forcing himself to watch, to know.
His father was fighting desperately. He was a Foxian, built for speed, not brawn. He ducked under a wild swing, his own combat knife finding a gap in the attacker's armor, but it was like stabbing a rock.
His father's body was already a ruin, covered in deep wounds that showed the white gleam of bone beneath. Yet, he stood firm, his white fox ears torn and bleeding, planted between the Borisin and the cargo box.
"If you want to touch my family," he roared, his voice thick with blood, "you'll have to step over my corpse first!"
A burly, gray-furred Borisin leader, easily a head taller than his father, stepped forward. One of his ears was torn, a 'one-eared' monster. "As you wish," the leader grunted.
It was disgustingly casual. He didn't lunge. He simply swung a claw. The air whistled. His father, in his wounded state, was too slow. The Borisin's claws easily tore open his throat, silencing his defiance forever.
"No—!!" His mother let out a soul-tearing shriek. She wasn't screaming just from grief. She was screaming because the leader had turned, his cold eyes landing directly on the cargo box.
She did the only thing she could. She rushed from her own hiding spot, grabbing the fallen dagger, and charged the Borisin leader from behind. She was impaled before she took two steps, a claw from another Borisin punching straight through her back and out her stomach.
She fell, her momentum carrying her forward. She landed directly facing the cargo box. Through the crack, Orion saw her eyes, already glazing over, lock with his. He saw her lips form one last, silent word: 'Live.' Then, the light in them vanished.
Their blood mixed, a dark, dazzling red pool spreading across the metal floor.
In his arms, Jiang Li, overwhelmed by the Wolfbane and the sheer terror, went limp, her sanity stripped away, leaving only a primal, whimpering fear.
As for Orion... he felt nothing. No sadness. No anger. No fear. The five-year-old child's brain, faced with a horror it could not process, simply... shut down. All emotion was purged. All that remained was a cold, sharp, terrifyingly clear instinct.
Survive. Take Jiang Li, and survive.
The sounds of Borisin rummaging through the cargo hold grew closer. "Check everything! Take all the supplies!"
"Boss, there's still cargo here! This one's sealed!" A rough voice. Orion's heart stopped.
Bang—!
The lid of the box was kicked open by a massive, furred leg. Blinding light streamed in, exposing the two small, trembling fox cubs huddled within. Jiang Li let out a desperate, muffled whimper against his hand.
"Huh. Two little fox cubs," the one-eared Borisin who had killed his father said impatiently. He seemed annoyed. "Look at 'em. Too small to even sell, too little meat to eat. Just rip them apart and toss 'em out the airlock."
He raised his blood-stained claw.
In that infinitesimal slice of time, as the claw began its descent, Orion made his choice. The calculation was instant, cold, and absolute.
He didn't shield his sister. He didn't try to fight. He did the unthinkable.
With one hand, he kept his sister's mouth tightly covered, silencing her scream. With his other hand, he used all his strength to slam her small, twitching body flat against the ground, forcing her into a prone position.
Then, under the astonished gaze of the Borisin, Orion himself knelt down. He pressed his forehead heavily against the cold metal floor, his small body prostrating fully in the still-wet pool of his parents' blood.
"We… we can be slaves… Please don't kill us…"
His voice was thin, emotionless, devoid of the hatred and terror that should have been there. He lowered his head, pressing his pure white fox ears—the symbols of his Foxian pride, his very lineage—humiliatingly flat against his scalp, grinding them into the sticky, crimson floor.
He offered the most abject, most complete submission possible to the enemies who had murdered his family just moments before.
"We will be obedient."
The one-eared Borisin paused, his claw hovering. This... was new. He let out a short, barking laugh.
The gray-furred leader, his claws still dripping with his father's blood, walked over. He crouched down, using one blood-stained claw to roughly lift Orion's chin, forcing the boy to look at him. "Little fox cub," he mused, his voice a low growl. "We just slaughtered your parents. Don't you hate us?"
Orion met his gaze. His own golden eyes were empty, bottomless. He slowly, deliberately, shook his head.
"What's the use of hatred?" his small voice echoed in the ruined cabin. "Hatred can't make us survive."
Hearing this, the surrounding Borisin burst into loud, cruel laughter. "Hahaha! Did you hear that, boss? 'Hatred can't make us survive!'" "What a sensible pup! He knows his place!" "Hahaha, what a good dog!"
The leader was very satisfied. This level of broken submission was exactly what he liked to see. It affirmed his power. "Then keep them," he said with a wave. "Toss them in the slave pen. A 'sensible' pet is always useful."
Their vigilance, in the face of his absolute, groveling humility, had dropped to its lowest point. They saw a broken-backed cub, a "good dog." They didn't see the predator coiling in the dark.
Now!
The instant the leader turned his back, the obedient, broken "dog" vanished. Orion moved.
His small body exploded from its kneeling position, not with a child's clumsiness, but with a desperate, venomous speed. His right hand shot past his sister, reaching for his mother's cold, still corpse—for the small, silver-hilted dagger still clutched in her belt!
His submission was a lie. His obedience was a mask. His entire being was focused on this one, single chance.
But just as his fingertips brushed the dagger's hilt, an extremely strong, concentrated wave of Wolfbane washed over him, far stronger than the ambient scent. His vision swam.
"Trying to pull a trick, little rat?" another Borisin sneered. It was not the leader; it was a different one who had been watching, more perceptive than the others. He was already closing in.
"Die!" he said, swinging his own heavy claw.
The targeted pheromone attack was overwhelming. The Wolfbane made Orion's movements sluggish, his limbs heavy as lead. He tried to dodge, to grab the dagger, but his body wouldn't obey. He was too slow. Despair, cold and absolute, threatened to swallow him.
He watched helplessly as the claw swung towards him, an arc of death.
And just then, in that moment suspended between life and death, he saw it.
The world didn't just stop. It fractured.
On the advancing Borisin's body—on his arm, his chest, his neck—countless, intricate, crisscrossing lines suddenly appeared. They weren't black. They were... voids. They were cracks in the very fabric of the creature's existence, visible only to him. They covered every corner of the Borisin, like shattered porcelain.
What are those lines…?
He didn't understand. He didn't have to. His soul, boiling with a hatred he had suppressed so deep it had become a part of him, was whispering madly in his mind. It was an instinct, a knowledge he was born with but had never known.
These lines… they are fragile. Just cut along them... and you can kill anything!
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