Red Dragon Spaceship Awakening: I Gain Alien Abilities on Mars-Chapter 223: Intensity

While the fight was mostly in Tatehan’s team’s favor, the advantage was not without cost. They were losing fighters too, not many, but enough to be felt.

The Obscuron’s forces, though caught off guard by the sudden assault, were not complete pushovers. They fought back with desperation, with some kind of frantic aggression that came from knowing they were being overrun but refusing to go down without taking someone with them.

Tatehan saw one of the Waython Hollow fighters go down, a plasma blast catching him in the side where his armor was thinnest. The man collapsed, his body convulsing, and two of his comrades rushed to drag him back toward the Skyblades, away from the worst of the fighting.

Another fighter from Iron Haven took a kinetic round to the leg, the impact shattering bone and sending him sprawling. He screamed, clutching at the wound, and a medic sprinted over to stabilize him.

It was not a massacre..., I mean it wasn’t so one sided. This was a battle, and battles had casualties.

Tatehan pushed the thought aside and focused on his own fight. He was deep in the chaos now, his chakrams spinning in his hands, his armor absorbing hits and his mind processing threats faster than most people could blink.

He used everything at his disposal—Gravity Manipulation to destabilize enemies, Phase Shift to dodge attacks he could not block and Enhanced Durability to shrug off impacts that would have crippled an unarmored fighter.

A soldier fired from range, and Tatehan used Gravity Manipulation to pull a piece of debris into the path of the shot, the plasma bolt detonating harmlessly against the makeshift shield.

He was a whirlwind of motion, a blur of silver armor and spinning blades, and the enemy could not keep up.

But he was not just killing now, he was hunting.

His eyes locked onto two soldiers who were barking orders at the others, their movements coordinated, their armor bearing the insignia of squad leaders.

Those were the ones he needed.

Tatehan charged toward them, his chakrams spinning, and he took them down with precision: one struck in the leg, the other disarmed and tackled to the ground.

He summoned restraints from his inventory, something that had been handed to him by Bjorn before the battle, simple but effective magnetic cuffs that locked around their wrists and ankles. Then he grabbed them both by their armor and started dragging them across the battlefield.

The two soldiers struggled, shouting, trying to break free, but Tatehan’s Enhanced Durability and sheer strength made their efforts useless. He hauled them toward one of the Skyblades that had been designated for prisoner transport, where a handful of fighters were standing guard, weapons raised and eyes scanning the battlefield for threats.

Tatehan reached the Skyblade and shoved the two soldiers toward the waiting fighters. "Hostages," he said, his amplified voice cutting through the noise. "Lock them down. We’ll handle the rest."

The fighters nodded, grabbing the prisoners and dragging them into the interior of the craft. One of them gave Tatehan a quick thumbs-up before turning back to secure the captives.

Tatehan did not wait. He spun and charged back into the fight, his chakrams already spinning and his mind already tracking the next target.

———

Across the battlefield, Bjorn was engaged in his own fight, and it was a brutal one.

The Viking had taken down dozens of soldiers by this point, his warhammer and axe stained with blood, his armor splattered with gore. But now he was facing someone who could actually match him: the battle commander leading the base construction for the Obscuron.

The man was massive, nearly as large as Bjorn himself, and he wore armor that looked like it had been forged from the same rare alloy as the Viking’s, though that was unlikely.

He wielded a massive two-handed blade that crackled with energy, and he moved with the kind of brutal efficiency, one that suggested he had been doing this for years. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Bjorn swung his warhammer, and the commander blocked with his blade, the impact sending sparks flying. The two of them clashed again and again, their weapons slamming together with enough force to shake the ground, their voices rising in shouts and roars as they traded blows.

It was a hard fight. One of the hardest Bjorn had faced in a long time.

The commander was strong, fast, and skilled, and while Bjorn was coming out on top: slightly, he could not seem to land the decisive blow that would allow him to capture the man. Every time he got close, the commander would counter, would slip away and would force Bjorn to reset and try again.

And capturing him alive was proving to be far more difficult than just killing him would have been.

The thing was, Bjorn didn’t want to kill the man, if that was his aim, defeating him would be a lot more easier.

Tatehan saw the fight from across the battlefield, and he felt a surge of concern. Bjorn was holding his own, but he was being pushed. And if the commander managed to escape, they would lose a valuable source of intel.

Tatehan made up his mind. He was going to help.

He started moving toward the fight, his chakrams ready, his mind already calculating how he could intervene without getting in Bjorn’s way.

And then, suddenly, twenty of the Obscuron’s fighters all attacked him at once.

They had been lying in wait, hidden behind debris and collapsed structures, and they surged forward in a coordinated assault, their weapons raised, their voices shouting in unison.

They knew he was a battle god in this Battle, he and Bjorn had be so excellent in terms of pure brutality, and they had all planned to take him out in that plenty number: Twenty!

Plasma blasts erupted from all directions, slamming into Tatehan from every angle. Energy bolts, kinetic rounds, explosive charges: all of it converged on him in a devastating barrage that lit up the battlefield with fire and light.

Tatehan staggered, his armor absorbing the impacts, the internal systems flashing notifications across his retina.

[70% Absorbed]

[30% Impacted]

The force of the combined attack was overwhelming. Even with his armor absorbing most of the kinetic energy, the remaining thirty percent was enough to knock him off balance, to drive him backward and to send him crashing to the ground.

He hit the dirt hard, his visor flickering, his systems struggling to compensate for the damage. Dust billowed up around him, and for a moment, everything went silent.

The twenty fighters who had attacked him paused, their weapons still raised, their eyes locked on the fallen Knight.

And then, thinking they had won, they all ran forward and jumped on him at once.

They piled onto Tatehan’s armored form, their hands grabbing at his limbs, their weapons raised, trying to tear him apart, trying to finish what they had started. They shouted, their voices overlapping in a chaotic mess of triumph and rage.

But what they did not realize was that every impact, every blow and every ounce of force they were pouring into him was being absorbed by his Kinetic Absorption Armor.

And stored.

Tatehan felt the energy building inside the armor, felt the pressure mounting and felt the power coiling like a spring being compressed tighter and tighter.

If this goddamn spring was to bounce back, it would be tremendous...

And then, with a roar that echoed across the entire battlefield, Tatehan released it.

"ARGHHHHH!"

Tatehan threw his arms out to the sides, his entire body surging with energy, and the armor detonated the stored kinetic force in a single, devastating shockwave.

BOOM!

The explosion was not fire or light. It was pure force, a sphere of kinetic energy that erupted outward from Tatehan’s body in all directions, slamming into the twenty fighters with the combined force of every blow they had landed on him.

The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.

The fighters were flung off him like ragdolls, their bodies hurled through the air with bone-shattering velocity. They flew backward, tumbling end over end, their armor crumpling, their weapons flying from their hands. They hit the ground far away, scattered across the battlefield in a wide arc, and they did not get back up.

Some of them landed with sickening crunches, their bodies twisted at unnatural angles. Others slammed into debris or the walls of the base, the impacts leaving dents in the metal and stone. A few were thrown so far that they disappeared beyond the perimeter of the battle entirely, their fates unknown but almost certainly fatal.

All twenty of them. Dead. In a single release of kinetic energy.

Tatehan stood slowly, his armor smoking faintly from the energy discharge, his visor glowing red in the dust and smoke. He looked around at the carnage he had just created, at the scattered bodies and at the shocked faces of the fighters who had witnessed the explosion.

And then, without a word, he turned and started walking toward Bjorn and the battle commander.

It was time to end this.

He wouldn’t attack the Battle Commander as that could lead to his death or make him escape, instead he would do this another way. He had a plan.