Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial by Mason Elliott

and agony, boiling and scorching away slowly.
    Naero looked it in its black, cavernous eyes of Darkforce energy and watched as it slowly perished, seeing the fell G’lothc spirit glaring straight back at her with hate.
    Naero matched that hate with her own rage and fury.
    “I know what you are now. From this moment on, there will be no deceiving me again. You tried to destroy me, my life, and all that I love. You tried to rob me of all of that. Filthy scum; you used my own honor and my child against me. You used my people and our ways against me. I was nearly killed at the hands of my own beloved and you nearly got away with it!”
    Naero snarled and struck the thing point blank with concussive beams of violet force that punched into the monster’s eyes and bored and raked several meters deep through the canyon wall.
    Sparks and flames shot up as she lasered the abomination in twain, and then focused those same destroying beams on the wyrm itself.
    A massive Darkforce explosion detonated and the fell creature imploded like a collapsing singularity. Terrible energies unleashed within the thing caused it to utterly destroy itself.
    Naero was flung clear of the final disintegration by that blast.
    She unfolded her psyonic wings and rocketed up out of the canyon only to see the area around the Mystic compound, the starport, and the dome city engulfed in conflict and destruction.
    Everywhere she looked there seemed to be Chaos, ruin, and death. Fires and explosions raged almost everywhere.
    She transported back to the trial and execution area.
    Khai and the others had not only held their own against the fake jury members, but driven them back toward the starport nearby and by the looks of things in the distance, only a few of the abominations yet lived, if they could truly be called lifeforms any longer.
    With Khai and the first Cosmic Sword of Legend Yii leading them, the Prime adepts had slaughtered half of the possessed, and driven the others off, killing more along the way.
    Naero contacted Admiral Klyne over their secured link. “Klyne, this is Naero. What is our current sitrep?”
    “Naero! Excellent.”
    “The fake Master Tree is gone. I took him down and destroyed him. It looks as if Khai and the other adepts have the fake jury on the run and should finish them off very soon.”
    “I’m back in orbit on my flagship, with the fleets over Kalathar,” Klyne informed her. “I evacuated the Mystic compound and the starport as much as we could, right before things all went to hell.”
    Naero paused. “Just how bad is it?”
    “Very. Hundreds of thousands of possessed have erupted and taken over almost everything across the entire planet. They’re infecting or destroying anyone who wasn’t taken over like them. Our enemies knew what they were doing. Millions of these monsters are virtually unstoppable. Imagine this plague spreading from world to world!”
    “None of us want that, sir.”
    “I’m sending down an entire armored Spacer Marine Division to these drop zone coordinates. Link back up with Khai and get your people out of there. That’s an order, Naero.”
    “I’m on it, sir. Naero out.”
    Things all around them did sound as if they were degenerating into something akin to one or all of the Nine Hells.
    Yet even before finding Khai again, she had to find Naero-3.
    Stray possessed were already ambling about, wandering into the compound itself. Some of them acted mindless, roving around, destroying stuff at random. Others seemed to be still conscious in some way and still possessed cunning enough to systematically search the evacuated buildings and abandoned nanohuts, looking for any survivors to either turn or murder.
    Even Naero knew that she could not fight endless numbers of such creatures. She cloaked herself and used teknomancy to summon some stealth fixers to her on their coded frequencies. Soon she had a small cloud of them around her.
    With their help, she found enough equipment left behind to