{All characters depicted in this work of fiction are of legal age of consent.}

1
Cracking the bolt on my battle rifle, I gave the chamber a quick press-check to make sure the first round was ready to go. Satisfied the weapon was ready to rock, I released the charging handle, then slapped it like I slapped Sniperess’ ass when she was a naughty girl… or a good girl. Any excuse, really. Point is, I had to make sure the bolt was back in battery.

That was often the under-appreciated thing about a reciprocating charging handle. It made for a nifty forward-assist, considering you ever found the need for one. Just don’t put your important bits anywhere near the thing when you fired.

The BR55HB battle rifle brought back plenty of memories. I still regret relinquishing that weapon to the SPARTAN-II who came breezing through my AO at the end of the war. Fuck that gun-stealing douche-bag.

Like my legacy battle rifle and the mish-mash of armour and civvies adorning my body, our Pelican drop ship was one of the older models. The DC77 was reliable for her age, and still looked on fondly by many Navy bus-drivers even today. Even Evony, remote piloting the thing from the Betelgeuse hanging in orbit around Aiad, seemed unusually enthusiastic, gunning the drop ship through all sorts of weather before pulling them out of a dive moments before becoming a new land-feature in the alien countryside.

Aiad was a pretty temperate place. The far off mountains were pretty rocky and levelled off into rolling hills covered in neatly parcelled fields and sporadic patches of forest or lone trees among the open plains of crop.

Eventually we left the fields behind, cruising over a carpet of dense woodland. Evony brought us low enough the belly of the ship brushed the tips of evergreens. She was trying to keep under the many sensor arrays dotting the planet. I could bump up the magnification on my VISR and spot several Covenant designed towers outlined in red by my augmented reality interface on the hilly horizon.

The smatter of what sounded like bolts being flung across the deck drew my opaque gaze to mom trotting confidently towards us in those imperious heels.

She had traded her military dress uniform for some equally formal civilian business attire. Although the skirt and blouse were arguably sexier. The pencil skirt had a high waistline hugging her curvy hips and trimmed mid-riff, a short enough cut that the opaque band of her mid-thigh tights were fully visible. Her white blouse was partially unbuttoned in order to contrast heavily with the bright red lace of her bra framing her ostentatious cleavage.

The outfit was obviously put together to boost her feminine whiles. Though I wouldn’t have thought that feminine wiles like that would work on a Sangheili… then again Terp was staring. And Sniperess often dressed up to have a similar effect on me, so why not?

Despite her six-inch heels, Captain Wolfe’s footing didn’t even wobble. She took the turbulence like it wasn’t shit, casually lifting a hand to brush back a few black tresses behind her ear and press two fingers to her comms-bud.

“This is Wolf Actual,” she called, her voice echoed across my radio. “All Wolf callsigns, comms-check.”

“Den Mother, reporting in,” Evony chimed in, her synthetic voice bored as usual.

“Wolf Alpha, reporting in. I read you loud and clear,” Terp said.

It figured mom would put her new alien fuck-buddy higher up the pecking order than me. Why even promote me to sergeant in the first place?

Pressing my PTT I did my best not to grimace at the lowly callsign I’d been assigned. “Wolf Bravo, reading you five-by-five.”

Mom’s hand slipped from her ear and returned to her slightly cocked hip. I was at the hatch holding on for dear life so Evony’s janky descent wouldn’t toss me out the back of the ship. And there Natalie Wolfe stood like a super model while she assessed our cargo.

The troop bay was piled with boxes Terp and I had lashed to the deck. Weapon’s crates, ammo containers, foam padded suitcases full to the brim with explosives, shaped charges, sidearms and other war gadgets.

The Pelican’s nose lifted us into a steep incline, but instead of driving us into the sky, we dropped to the deck with a lurch of my stomach getting sucked into my throat. The rearmost legs of the landing gear hit the grassy clearing first and we bounced hard enough to drive even Terp out of his seat. Both of us slammed into the deck groaning as the nose dropped, levelling the craft out on the landing zone.

Mom on the other hand hadn’t budged. She was still on her feet and sauntered down towards us, strategically planting one foot near Terps face.

“You boys didn’t hurt yourselves, did you?” she asked, her voice ironically devoid of concern.

Terp pressed his mandibles together and planted the Sangheili equivalent of a kiss on her toes before climbing to his feet. “The sight of you heals me from all injury, my lady.”

I cringed so hard I was pretty sure I’d pulled something in my back.

“Be a dear and get the luggage,” she told Terp, then beckoned me as she moved down the loading ramp. “Timber, you’re with me.”

I followed her down and onto the grass. The area was clear, no sign of the delegation we were meant to meet.

“Looks like your rebel buddies are late, cap,” I commented as we moved around the side and under the wing of the Pelican.

“Mom,” she said abruptly.

“What?”

“I’m your mother, Timber,” she said, still casually scanning the treeline. “We haven’t really had time to catch up. I thought perhaps we could keep this operation casual. Get in a little mother-son time.”

My jaw fell open and I leaned over to check if she was wearing the serious face. Of course she was wearing the serious face. She always wore the serious face. The woman was damn impossible to read. And even with that serious expression and tone, I still couldn’t tell if she was being real or just fucking with me somehow. Because for all intents and purposes, she seemed like she had to be joking.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I finally said. “Black bag ops, seeding an alien rebellion with weapons caches sounds like an ideal moment to tend to your otherwise neglected maternal duties?”

“No need to be so flippant, Timber. I just wanted to take this opportunity to find out how you’ve been doing all these years.”

“Do you seriously want to have this conversation, or would you prefer a properly formatted report on your desk by eighteen-hundred-zulu?”

“That sounds like it may actually be more efficient.” Again, I could not tell if she was joking.

I didn’t get much more time to figure it out when we were interrupted by the sound of bodies crashing through the woods.

I whipped about to face our flank, rifle in low-ready as several bodies appeared in the treeline. They each wore green armour with dark fatigues, a configuration I hadn’t really seen on their kind before. it seemed rather primitive, but then these were rebels of course.

The Sangheili were partially camouflaged with additional strips of dark foliage coloured cloth and woodland patterns painted into their armour. But no matter how hard you tried to hide a Sangheili, it was still a towering eight-foot-tall alien monster… most of the time.

My weapon went back down as mom reached over with one hand, gesturing me to stand down. This was clearly the delegation we were supposed to meet. Though going by the way they were sizing us up, they didn’t seem all that fond. Not even when Terp appeared and set down the first crate on the grass between us.

So far, my track record with Sangheili had been so good, I didn’t even consider fucking this up as a basic possibility. Throwing up a chaka – curling my hand into a fist and extending just the pinkie and thumb – I greeted them with some kind Sangheili words Terp had taught me on the trip.

Several of the kaidon’s warriors snarled and activated their plasma swords. Clearly my overconfidence was my weakness.

“I don’t think they liked that, Sergeant Wolfe,” Terp whispered.

“Gee. What gave it away?”

There was more crashing in the woods as a new figure appeared. This one was in dark fatigues, but wore red armour more akin to the sleek carapace his kind used to wear while under the Covenant. He was barking ‘stand down,’ to his men in Sangheili, words I’d picked up under Terps intense tutelage…

Between my mother’s intense tutelage of Terp in the ways of human lovemaking.

“Stand down,” the newcomer ordered again.

“But Kaidon,” one of the Sangheili growled. “Do you not know who this is?”

“I do indeed,” the ‘Kaidon’ said, locking eyes with me. “This is the Wolf of Verdun! And if anyone is to kill this legendary warrior…” He didn’t just pause for dramatic effect. That much was achieved when he activated his plasma sword with a flick of his wrist. “It will be me!”

Aw, man, was all I could think as the situation rapidly slid south. My rifle came back up to my shoulder, only this time we went to high-ready. The weapon was canted so I could peek through the offset iron-sights. At this range it would just take one burst to put the Sangheili down. Unless he had shields, then it would take several more that I wouldn’t be able to squeeze off before he ran me through with that sword.

“Your degeneracy will be punished!” Kaidon continued to bark in his native language, as if he knew I was able to translate most of what he was saying. “I’ll deal with you first, then I’ll find out who is writing that disgusting series of novels of your hedonistic exploits and cleanse them from this universe!”

I gaped, re-translating that in my head to make sure I’d heard him right. A series of novels about my exploits? Ossoona had rambled about the same, mentioning some stories she was a fan of.

What in the hell was going on?

Angry now, though still not sure what I was angry about exactly, I leaned into my rifle. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, split-face,” – I actually used a Sangheili word roughly translated into ‘dishonourable piece of livestock faecal matter’ – “But if you want some, come and get some. I got enough for all your retarded little friends.” – and again, I didn’t quite call them that, instead using a word that roughly translated to ‘slow learning children,’ who in and ancient Sangheili tradition were often flung off of cliffs so not to poison the blood-line. Going by the way the Sangheili shuffled angrily, even Terp flinched as if struck, the effect of my insult was pretty potent.

Kaidon brought up his blade as if he was going to charge when mom stepped in front of me, roughly shoving my rifle down by my side. And at the same time she threw Kaidon a glare so intense the towering alien stopped everything. I was pretty sure he stopped breathing too.

“Could the two of you please stop waving your dicks at each other? It provokes my envy!” she snapped angrily in Sangheili tongue I honestly didn’t know she had in her. Then again, she had spent the entire trip here with her tongue on a Sangheili so… there’s that.

I obviously hadn’t been Terp’s only student.

“Now, we crossed a damn minefield to get you this equipment,” she continued, gesturing part of the spread Terp had carried out. “My intention is to get to business. Your weapons, Kaidon. All of them unmarked, so they won’t be traced. Though I expect you to keep this shit under wraps, even after the rebellion ends.”

Kaidon looked over the crates as Terp emerged with more boxes. Then with a huff he gestured his men, who deactivated their blades and peaceably formed a line to help Terp.

“These weapons are primitive and sub-par. But they will suffice. I will uphold my end of the bargain, captain,” he said, though seemingly scowling as he did. “Aiad will evict hostile forces, and in the interest of neutrality, we will destroy the ship building facilities here. We are only interested in living our lives, not fighting a pointless conflict.”

“Good.” Mom seemed to ease her stance. 

Walking over to the larger crate Terp just set down, she held out her hand and he helped her hop up onto it. Sitting pretty, she elegantly crossed her long, sleek legs, keeping her fingers interlaced over her knee as she watched Kaidon.

“In the meantime, Kaidon, why don’t you tell me more about the situation here?” When the Sangheili hesitated, the hard look returned to mom’s eyes. I recognised the way she angled her face down a little and peered sternly at him. The same look I’d gotten when I was a kid and my room was a mess. “The more I know about the situation on Aiad, Kaidon, the more aid I can render. I may be able to recommend and provide more specialised equipment.”

Kaidon grunted, seeing the sense in that. “Very well, captain. We are not fond of humans, but Art Loko and his flock are a worse foe.

“Art Loko is a San-Shyuum. Prophet, in your tongue, formerly from the leadership hierarchy of the Covenant. He splintered away during the great schism with a sizeable portion of Covenant ships and weapons. During his time as the Minister of Relations he gained much popularity and loyalty among the easily manipulated, which in the Covenant numbered very many. He has a decent fleet and a large army. And in recent times his following has grown. He seeks out the desperate and the undisciplined, winning them over with… unusual methods. He is able to turn them into zealots.

“He even turned some of my own people against me. His treacherous tongue knows no boundaries. His dark philosophy has no limits. And when those of us who remained tried to stand up to his invasion of our world, we paid the ultimate price.”

Kaidon trailed off from there, his eyes glazing over as he gazed sorrowfully at the side of the Pelican. This guy lost something, something important. I’d seen the same look on marines after the final battle for Earth. Marines who had just learned their homes had been razed to the ground by indiscriminate orbital bombardment.

“Do you have a plan of attack?”

The Sangheili surfaced form his thousand-yard-stare and looked back at mom. He may have been thinking what Terp was thinking, as he looked her from head to toe for a moment. 

“Yes. We will be ready for an assault in a couple of months. Aside from these weapons, we are gathering troops. And there is a small fleet of ships convening on the edge of the system. They need fuel and ammunition, none of them are combat ready yet, but they will be by the time we’re ready to attack.”

It seemed like good news to me, but I saw mom stuck out her bottom lip, looking rather unhappy.

“That will not do, Kaidon,” she said, like a teacher chastising a student. And Kaidon flinched like a young boy. “The loyalists could re-arm a sizeable fleet and attack in that time.”

“Earth is not the only world at risk, Kaidon,” Terp added respectfully. “Sangheilios…”

“I know what is at stake,” Kaidon interrupted. “But we are simply not ready to begin our assault.”

He seemed thoughtful for a minute, then looked at me in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable – no homo. “Unless perhaps we had some help. Art Loko’s forces are not organised at the moment. His orbital assets are unarmed, and the only air support are a few heavy lift dropships. Again, unarmed. We could attack them now and catch them unaware. But we’d need help.”

“How much help?” I asked, knowing full well where this was going.

“If talk of the Wolf of Verdun is accurate, then you should suffice.”

I rolled my eyes. “Hard pass, dude. We got better…”

“Done,” mom snapped, cutting across me. “Gather your forces. We attack as soon as you are ready.”

Kaidon nodded firmly with a wicked smile, clearly appreciating my mother’s zeal; even if her son did not.

“The fuck are you thinking?” I demanded when Kaidon was out of earshot. “We’re here to drop off gear and guns. Not fight a war!”

She whirled around on me and without even saying something was able to make me flinch back.

“So what should we do in your opinion, Timber? Just go?” When I shrugged, she tersely added, “And where will we go? Back to Earth? Home? Don’t you understand what’s going on here? Art Loko is building an invasion fleet! And if we don’t put a stop to him, he’ll rekindle a war neither us or the Sangheili are in any fit state to fight right now. If we don’t stop him there won’t be a home to go back to!”

She was of course right, and I couldn’t argue against this suicidal plan even if I wanted to. Hell, I wanted to. I really did. But sometimes you just gotta do what’s right, not necessarily what’s smart.

“We’ll need some kind of artie support. We might be able to bust loyalist defences using the element of surprise, but if we don’t have some big guns to back us up a counter-attack could shred us.”

“Solvable?” she asked shortly, and I nodded.

“Let me make some calls. I might be able to conjure something up.”

“Good. See to it, Timber. I’m going to pull more supplies from the Betelgeuse and get ready. Be on the line in sixty minutes.”

I watched her go, a sigh almost completely fogging the inside of my visor. “Alrighty then. I guess we’re fighting a proxy war now.”

Terp grunted, sounding like he mirrored my concerns. Except his gaze on my departing mother was angled noticeably lower.

“While I agree with the captain’s arguments, this plan makes several assumptions about our enemy. That makes me uncomfortable, Sergeant Wolfe.” He said, which made me laugh just a littler harder than it should have.

“Yeah? Well, I’m still uncomfortable with you re-arranging my mother’s innards, so I guess we’re about on the same page.”



2
The Phantom’s hold was familiar even if the inhabitants weren’t.

Even mom looked strange in her custom fitted ODST armour. Her cuirass traded the bulky, eldritch angles of armour bulwarking my own body for a much more slender, flattering cut. The likes usually seen on Spartans decked out in MJOLNIR GEN2.

Trust her to pack a state of the art suit of armour for herself, but leave Terp and myself to slum it with last generation armour cobbled together to look more paramilitary. She was even packing one of the newer assault rifle variants – I honestly couldn’t recall the designation. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn her suit had a personal shield to boot.

“Are you sure you want in on this action?” I asked moving past where she sat with her long, armour-clad legs elegantly crossed.

Terp was seated nearby, eying them from her armoured ankles up to her hips. It took him a good while to take in their full length.

As if to answer my question, her opaque visor turned clear and she shot me a serious look, while at the same time yanking the charging handle on her weapon.

“I have never seen you in battle armour before, Captain Wolfe,” Terp interjected loudly. “However, now that I have, I must admit that I have become fully engorged.”

I made a gagging noise into my helmet faceplate. Mom on the other hand glowered at her alien boy-toy, her face changing expression in way she’d never done for her own son; not even in her proudest moments… though maybe that was a good thing in this case, given she was looking at Terp with a sexy mix of bossy and titillated.

“Stay close to me, Big Boy,” she said, her voice commanding as ever, but crackling with a low seductive tone at the same time. “Firefights tend to make me wet, so when this is over, I’m going to need you pretty much immediately.”

“I’m always ready to sate your desires, mistress.”

Mistress? I mouthed with a disgusted scrunch on my nose. “Oh, brother.”

As I was doing my final combat prep, Kaidon’s familiar voice crackled in my comms.

“Wolf of Verdun. Your friend of ill-repute has arrived in system. But they are having trouble navigating the mine field. They say they will be behind schedule by at least an hour.”

That was definitely a problem. “Oh, great. Can we delay the assault?”

“Negative. The enemy is aware of our approach, but have had minimal time to prepare. If we balk, they will bulwark themselves and we may never have another chance at this. Our actions are committed. We go now, or not at all.”

Pulling out my tablet I opened a tactical map of the area. “Okay then. In the face of overwhelming odds, we’re going to have to ‘ooh-rah’ the shit out of this problem.”

Checking a few recon updates, I spun the data of a rough-shod operation proposal to the Phantom’s troop computer. A holographic map of the local topology appeared in the centre of the chamber. The Phantom, part of twelve other heavily loaded dropships loaded to the brim with warriors were represented by a dozen dots moving in from the east. In the centre of the map, where the hills gave way to flat terrain covered in a carpet of forest was a tall structure. The former Sangheili keep was very much like what Lady Zestous commanded on Verdun. A defensible structure backed by the tall cliffs of a jagged mountain, the castle-like structure was brimmed with thick defensive walls and built in the form of ascending tiers all the way to the central structure, the inner sanctum.

The main assault on the front gate was hatched in bright red, where many more dots represented the ground troops who moved in using land vehicles and were already hitting the defences.

I zoomed in the map several clicks north of the main gates, where a trio of blue dots lay, hovering in what seemed to be a forgotten patch of forest.

“Recon pinged these three Wraith artillery tanks holding off from the main battle,” I explained. “The loyalists may be unaware that we know of them, which could be why they’re holding off so not to give away the position. They might be guarding something too.”

“Another way into the keep?” Mom suggested leaning forward with interest.

“Could be. Why else drop three tanks out there and not deploy them in a counter-attack?”

Mom nodded. “We should check it out. If we have another point of breach we could split the defenders, take the pressure off the main gate’s assault.” She added, looking over at the Sangheilli commander, “Drop us off here. The three of us will handle this.”

The Phantom peeled off with a hard roll and dropped to the deck of a long fire-break shearing a diagonal line through the woods. The low hover lasted about three seconds, the time it took us to leap into the glowing grav-lift and descend to the deck with two anti-tank launchers between us.

“Three of them versus three of us,” I commented, locking the rocket launcher on my back and shouldering my battle rifle.

“A fair fight!” Terp laughed. 

“Yeah. Ignoring the fact that they’re in tanks.”

“Cut the chatter boys,” Mom ordered with a swift gesture at the treeline. “We’ll do this live. Those Wraiths aren’t expecting us, we can just light ‘em up and move on.”

In a loose triangle formation, Terp on the spearhead, we eased into the woods and followed the NAV beacon shared on our tactical cloud. My VISR amplified the scant light filtering through the thick canopy, distinguishing mom and Terp’s silhouettes with green outlines from the environmental amber outlines. 

It wasn’t a long hike to the staging area. It just took us a while as we were moving with slow, deliberate steps, favouring stealth over speed. Eventually we reached the next treeline opening into a wide open grassy space interspliced with ancient, moss-covered boulders. Each of the towering rocks, some of them arranged in small clusters, didn’t seem indigenous. The local Sangheili had clearly dragged them in from quarries, as they were the same stone used to build the keep walls. Tooling marks indicated they’d been partially worked before realising whatever they had in stock to build the walls had been sufficient.

The curved perimeter wall of the keep lay to the back of the clearing. It was weathered, old and there were signs of battle damage from decades ago. But the hundred-foot-high wall stood strong as ever.

Central in my view I saw what the loyalists were guarding out here. Like mom had suggested, there was indeed another way into the keep aside from the main gates. This gate was tiny though, barely wide enough to fit two Sangheili side by side, the hatch made of the same crude grey steel alloy I’d seen on Verdun keeps. A couple of breaching charges would make short work of that.

Between us and the door lay the real problem though. The beetle-like wraith tanks hummed, overing a few feet off the deck as they softly prowled from one side of the clearing to another. The trio were faced away from us, letting us break the treeline and hide in the first cluster of rocks.

“Two teams,” mom ordered, gesturing us to arm our rocket launchers. “Timber, you take the first shot. Then as you draw fire, we’ll take the second.”

“Don’t we want to capture at least one of those?” I asked.

“That’ll be your job once we draw fire from the last Wraith,” mom suggested, gesturing a long line of rocks to the left flank. “We’ll be able to stay mobile in that mess over there. Just be quick. I bet it won’t be long before that Wraith dials us in and fries us.”

“Oh, no pressure,” I mumbled as she took Terp by the arm and they dashed off towards the flank.

Watching them delve into their concealed position, I shouldered my rocket launcher, took a knee and leaned around the nearest boulder. I had a good view of the three Wraiths, and selected the nearest through the targeting monocle. The computer isolated the single thermal signature and the reticule turned red with a bleep as it locked on.

“Here goes nothing,” I muttered, pulling the trigger. “Backblast clear! Rocket!”

A plume of smoke exploded out the back of the launcher and the air inside and outside my chest cavity rumbled with the sheer power of an angry god’s fist now rocketing at the butt-end of an alien tank. The missile looped in a vague spiral, tracking it’s intended target before ramming itself up the Wraith’s tailpipe. The rear assembly was engulfed in fire and the rear-end lifted high enough into the air for the front-end to dig into the dirt. A violent flower of explosive energy jettisoned out the front of the vehicle as the cockpit was turned into scrap, twisting and charring its squishy contents with a guttural roar.

The Wraith slumped to the deck, completely useless.

The other two pivoted on the spot, their hull-mounted plasma rifles and main cannons growling with predatory intent. I clenched so hard I was sure I’d be shitting silly-string for a week.

Before either of them could spot and fire on my position however, the second Wraith exploded into a spectacular fireball. The overpressure of the blast made the third tilt slightly to its flank and buffeted the craft out of position.

As the remains of the second tank crunched to the ground beside the first, my eyes flitted sideways to see where Terp’s shot had come from. I couldn’t see where my buddy and mother were hiding, but the last Wraith clearly did track the shot.

Ignoring my position, the third tank wheeled around drifting with the way the shockwave had buffeted it, and unleashed a shot from its main cannon. He ventral vanes on the gun fanned out, still glowing from the heat of the plasma ignition as a second sun took to the sky and traced a neat little arc.

The plasma charge then hit with enough explosive energy to turn dirt to glass and split open the towering, ancient boulders as air-pockets within rapidly expanded with the sheer heat. The flash was so brilliant it forced my visor to auto-adjust, and a small patch of Aiad eco-system about five metres in diameter became instantly uninhabitable.

“MOM!”

There was no answer on comms, and the Wraith followed up its mortar shot with a volley of suppressing fire from its plasma rifles chipping chunks out of the rocks that remained. I wanted to shove my second rocket up the Wraith’s ass so badly, but we needed that thing in one piece to support us.

So I ditched the launcher and sprinted across the clearing.

I was on the thing before the pilot realised I was on whatever sensor array the tank sported. There must have been something that pinged my approach, because as I scaled the smooth side of the vehicle, the plasma rifles halted their barrage and the Wraith turned as if trying to face me.

Whirling around with the spinning tank, I lost my footing, but managed to grab the raised lip at the top of the Wraith. Hauling myself up to the hatch, I punched the control glyphs and the panel lifted with a hiss, before rolling away to view the cockpit.

Down below me sat a surprise, which glared up at me with equal surprise to be honest. Instead of peering down at a loyalist Brute or perhaps a Grunt pilot, I was looking into the protuberant, almond shaped eyes of a Prophet.

I’d never seen a Prophet in the flesh, let alone in a combat role before. They were usually the higher ups, generals commanding battle from orbit or acting as societal bureaucrats and the like. The only hint to their existence I’d lived with were vague intel reports passed around during the war, grainy vids of recon deep in Covenant territory or the few artist renditions based on the former.

The first proper look I ever got at one was the recording Ossoona played me on the Cornerian ship. And now, of course, the Prophet flicking its wrist to activate a gauntlet mounted plasma knife and swinging the weapon up in my direction.

“Whoh, shit!” I swore with surprise, leaning back and swinging my arms for balance so I wouldn’t get stabbed in the face, but also wouldn’t slip off the Wraith’s hull and land on my ass.

As the Prophet grabbed the lip of the hatch to haul itself out and at me, I managed to react faster. My hand yanked the pistol off my thigh and I emptied it into the alien’s bulging forehead. It hadn’t managed to enable it’s personal forcefield yet, probably lulled into the false sense of security inside its tank, so the bullets went in with ease and brains came out with similar simplicity.

A mess of purple blood exploded across the cockpit as the thing wheezed with a mixture of ventilated lung and pulverised skull. And as the Prophet slumped dead in the pilot seat, the Wraith jolted to a halt underneath me as it thudded into the grass hard enough to displace my perch.

My boots slipped and I tumbled head over heels down the side of the vehicle before landing visor down with a thud. Not my most graceful landing, but that hardly mattered. 

Leaping back to my feet I abandoned the position and ran towards the cluster of rocks I’d last seen mom. The dull grey was charred black and the ground had turned into steaming, smoky sheets of cracked glass. My boots crackled noisily as I moved between the stones and saw a pair of figures sitting in the charred landscape.

Terp’s shields shimmered as they recharged and he climbed off of Captain Wolfe, checking her armoured carapace for breaches. Mom brushed him off the same flippant way she did anyone showing her concern.

“Are you okay?” I demanded.

“A little cooked,” mom answered plainly. She turned her silver gaze to Terp and gently touched his armoured mandibles, her voice suddenly much more tender. “Thank you, Terp. You get a special reward later.”

“The special mouth thing?” he asked, making me groan loudly.

“Of course, baby,” Captain Wolfe crooned seductively. “I’ll even let you decorate me. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Terp nodded enthusiastically.

I did my best to ignore the fact my mom had her deviant little claws firmly latched into my friend, as I reloaded my guns and shouldered my rifle. At the same time I keyed my comms and pinged the rebel commander, reporting three Wraiths down, one ready for capture. Moments later a Phantom swooped down and dropped off a small tank crew with a sizeable infantry detachment. A Sangheili pilot in lighter armour than his peers dragged the dead Prophet out of the cockpit and a few moments later the hover-tank was back in action.

Terp received a radio transmission and relayed it. “Captain Wolfe, the tank pilot can make us a hole in the perimeter wall so we can join the assault.”

“Thank you, darling. Give him the green light. Timber, take point.”

“Rah.” I nodded and pushed forward as behind me the Wraith’s main cannon began to glow.

With a whoosh of energy an artillery round took to the sky, flashed like a blue sun as it arched over our heads, then went supernova upon impact with blast door a hundred metres downrange.

What remained was a twisted wreck of smoking metal and crumbling masonry as the tank then proceeded to range targets and provide fire missions for the troops assaulting the main gates. I led the way through the side door, twisting to squeeze myself thought he jagged crack the tank had opened. Terp was second man in as I took a knee and covered the nearby windows. He reached back to help mom through, then the three of us spread out and crossed to the nearest building. Close behind, several dozen Sangheili mimicked our manoeuvre and branched off to secure another part of the keep. The enemy perimeter had been breached.

Time to raise some hell.

We stacked for a moment, then Terp busted down a side door, leading the charge in. my VISR amplified the low ambient light the moment I was though the threshold, and I fired into the nearest red outline.

Grunts squealed, a mixture of verbal pain response and methane gas hissing from their breached suits as they flopped over, before being replaced with Jackals sporting personal shields. My rounds splashed on the high intensity energy shield before I pulled away and the response of plasma shots came screaming in.

The outer sanctum was a series of quarters and common rooms branching off a main corridor at the end of which a mess of aliens were gathered. On our flanks were more branching routes where we could hear the thump of energy weapons as our Sangheili allies traded blows with other defenders. Above us was the rattle of boots on the wooden deck, followed by the thud of bodies dropping to the floor, and trickles of Jackal blood seeping through the gaps in the floorboards.

I had cover in some sort of sleeping quarters, the area lined with alien bunkbeds and individual methane tents for the Grunts. Mom and Terp had cover nearby, sending ammo through the main corridor into the mess of loyalists further up.

Popping a flash grenade, I called “flash out!” and tossed it. A series of cracks echoed through the main corridor along with several blinding flashes, faltering the enemy fire. It gave me the window I needed to slip out of cover and run shooting towards the enemy stronghold.

Several Grunt heads split open, followed by a Jackal who had dropped his shield to rub at his eyes. The blinded aliens dropped, giving me about a ten-metre advance. But as fast as I pushed, a Grunt who shook off the effects of the flashbang faster than his fellows came at me.

He stepped out and we shocked each other for a moment.

I recovered first, dropping the last three rounds of my mag into the alien’s chest. A gaseous cloud of bright blue blood shot from the entry wounds before the suit self-sealed, and as the alien staggered with a scream, it let off a charged plasma pistol shot.

“Crap!”

I just about managed to dive sideways into a bathroom before the charged shot slammed into the threshold above my door. The EMP discharge caused a fizzle to run through my suit and my VISR system rebooted.

As start-up diagnostics scrolled on my periphery though, I pushed myself up onto my knees only to be met by a whole new terrifying sight.

The grunt hadn’t dropped. Instead, the zealous little bastard rushed forward with a high-pitched scream. He’d dropped his plasma pistol and was clicking what looked like some sort of trigger mechanism attached to several blinking limpet charges attached to the explosive gas tank affixed to his back.

“Oh, heck!”

There wasn’t enough time to really think about what I was doing, other than lulling into the comforting notion that ‘it always works in the movies!’ So, I whirled around and dove headfirst into the bathtub.

A second later the grunt exploded. My helmet cut the aural feed just in time, and when the sounds of battle returned there was only a faint background ringing.

When my head emerged back out of the bathtub, the entire room looked like it had been remodelled by a raging bull, who also happened to be a Jackson Pollock fan. Tiles and bath-ware were shattered. The bathtub suffered a nasty exterior dent, but thankfully seemed to have been made of pretty sturdy stuff. Shards of armour turned into shrapnel lay embedded like a million daggers across the walls, floor and ceiling.

As for the Grunt, little more remained other than a black and fluorescent blue blast smear where it had stood upon exploding… and a little of the creature clung in wiry, purple blue slivers of pulverised flesh all over the bathroom.

“Ick,” I commented as I vaulted out of the tub and stepped over what looked like it belonged in a biology textbook.

The firefight outside settled to a few sporadic cracks of rifle fire and petered out completely by the time I peeked around the doorframe. The area ahead was littered with dead aliens, and looking back I saw mom and Terp ease out of cover and press to my position.

“Good?” I asked.

Mom chuckled, brushing a bit of Grunt from my shoulder as she passed. “Better than you’re doing. Try to keep up, dear.”

Terp grunted as he followed close behind her, his armour hardly hiding the bulge that was forming in his groin. Rolling my eyes I gave them a few seconds head start, then ambled after, watching the rear. 

There was an external semi-circular garden that formed the border between us in the outer sanctum and extravagant inner sanctum. Of all the places, that was likely where Art Loko was hiding. So that was where we moved to.

Except as we crossed one of the lawns, a beam of light sliced over our heads. We turned the way we’d come, only to see shadows moving in the doorway she’d just emerged from. Enemy contact had somehow gotten behind us.

It didn’t take long to realise how.

As I turned there was a flash of light, like the pop of a personal shield failing. except instead of dropping back, the alien who appeared in the flash of light remained in the threshold we’d just come through. His pulse carbine was shouldered, and he let loose a stream of shots in our direction.

He would have scored a hit too were it not for his rush. Terp was first to return fire, several rounds plinking the high-tech armour carapace worn by a lean Prophet infantryman.

Now shit was getting really fucked. I’d never imagined seeing a Prophet in a combat role driving a tank, let alone be fighting boots on the ground. But, in standing with some bit of normalcy, at least the Prophet infantrymen didn’t fight fair, as I was about to find out.

“Keep them in that fata funnel!” mom ordered as she unloaded her weapon in the doorway.

The Prophet took several hits to the armour, which sparked as he dropped back into cover. Mom backpedalled as she fired, diving backwards over a chest height hedge to break line of sight with the enemy. I followed suit, diving after her and landing in a heap beside.

By the time I sat upright to get back into the fight though, it was clear there was no keeping the Prophets in that funnel. A flash of light made me blink with confusion. Did I just get shot in the head? Did a plasma grenade just go off in my visor?

Just as quickly there was another flash and before I knew it the Prophet in tactical armour appeared outside the doorway, phasing back into existence after a short teleport through what could only be described as time and space.

“Whoa!” I screamed, panning to get a bead on the guy, but he phased again.

Vanishing in a blip of blue-white energy, he re-appeared further back, several metres up a wall where he clung like an arachnid before leaping into the air and phasing out again.

“They have teleportation tech!” Terp cried.

“Yeah, I noticed!”

With a crack of energy he appeared on the twelve o’clock high, flaring ball of explosive plasma energy forming in his hand. But as he did, I tracked his path.

When the Prophet phased out he wasn’t entirely invisible. He was reduced to a thin line of blueish energy darting to the space where he wanted to re-appear. 

I tracked the darting line of energy and as soon as he popped back into existence my finger was on the trigger and crosshairs on his head.

A burst of armour piercing rifle rounds tore through the Prophet, snapping his head back and sending him flipping backwards into a bloody pinwheel. The grenade fell and landed in the grass with a thud, right between two of his comrades.

While I had been tracking the Prophet going high, Terp and mom were laying into two more that phased into the open to clear the fatal funnel. Before either of the two newcomers could move or phase out, the grenade exploded and tossed them across the garden. One was vapourised from the waist down, his lower body a black x-ray of itself one moment, and in the next he was half the man he used to be.

The other lost his right arm and leg and did a complete cartwheel before collapsing into the grass where he screamed, finally realising the damage that had been done.

His agony didn’t last long as mom popped the top on a frag grenade and threw it into the fray. The resulting boom showered us with clods of charred earth, and not only silenced the screaming Prophet, discouraged his buddies from following.

Emptying my rifle into the fray, I watched the ammo counter under my smart-scope drop to ‘00’ and pulled back to reload. The charging lever came back and locked in place before I replaced the mag and gave that reciprocating bad-boy a good slap to chamber the first round. The counter lit up on ‘36’ and I was back in the fight.

Before I could sink more rounds into bad-guys, I looked over and spotted movement on the far flank. About a hundred metres across the gardens a cluster of figures moved. Mostly short grunts in bright coloured armour waddling along. But in their midst was a single lithe silhouette. A Prophet at the looks of him, this one bedecked in fanciful robes rather than state-of-the-art battle armour.

They moved out of the outer sanctum and were rushing up the main steps into the inner sanctum building.

“Contact, three o’clock!” I called, training my weapon. But they were moving laterally, keeping low and moving fast along the hedgerows. There was no clean shot that would guarantee a kill on the first trigger pull.

Mom at the same time patted me on the shoulder. “Focus on that Prophet. He looks important. Go get him.”

“But…”

“We’ve got this locked down. Go!” she ordered.

Rolling to my feet I got going when mom and Terp laid down the suppressing fire. The Prophet and his delegation slipped inside by the time I reached the steps, but I pounded up after them double time with my rifle at the ready.

My experience with Sangheili keeps was restricted to my visit to Lady Zestuous’ home on Verdun. But from what I had seen, the inner sanctum should have been the lavish, upper-class area. especially given the opulent nature of the Prophets who captured the place.

The inner sanctum remained as spartan as it had been under Sangheili rule, with bare walls and tapestries depicting great battles they had fought under Covenant rule. Except the whole aesthetic seemed more dungeon-like than it should have been.

Torches flickered in sconces, casting long shadows over the rust mottled bars of haphazard cages erected throughout the hall. I almost charged right past them, and paused as shadows inside shifted, reacting to my presence.

Activating my low-light filters, I saw the shadows creep away and standing behind the bars were several Sangheili. Females, old and young alike, their bodies completely bare. The sight of Sniperess in the nude could get me hard, even the thought of her would activate my libido without fail, regardless of the situation. But seeing these women like this, caged and stripped of their dignity; there was a wrongness to it. My imagination filled in the gaps of what led to these women being incarcerated, and every eventuality was grim.

“Sisters,” one of them muttered hoarsely and the group perked up to watch me approach the bars. “A human. It will surely kill us, save us from this disgrace and dishonour.”

The women, almost eagerly, lined up against the bars and bowed their heads, as if awaiting their execution. It caught me completely off guard, and I stammered in my broken Sangheili:

“I’m not here to kill you.”

The lead female who’d spoken gasped, then grasping the bars of the cage lunged closer. “It speaks! How can an infidel speak?”

“I’m learning,” I answered simply, then gesture them all to stay put. “Your people are assaulting the keep. Stay here, you’ll be safe until they catch up and free you.”

“That is not possible. You are the enemy!”

Several hushed whispers of confusion rippled through their ranks as I shook my head. “No, we’re on the same side.” I of course spared them the details I spent many of my nights balls deep in a Sangheili waifu. “I’m a friend.”

“If this is true,” the woman growled testily, “Then you will prove it. The captor went through there. Several of my sisters were taken that way earlier today.” She pointed to an adjacent hallway lined with ornate pillars carved into the vague shape of Sangheili warriors. “Rescue my sisters if you are truly a friend.”

Since the Prophet in charge had gone that way anyway, it seemed pointless not to help out where I could. I nodded firmly and recognised the look of relief wash over her fierce expression.

“I will see to it, my lady.” I made sure to add the proper title of respect as I spoke and she seemed to approve, still confused but mostly impressed I was able to speak her language. Even if I sounded a little like a retarded infant.

Following my rifle again, I moved down the corridor the Sangheili woman had pointed. Usually speaking, speed killed in this situation. The Prophet could have dumped booby traps in his wake or left a squad to intercept me. But they also had a head start and I had to close the gap. So putting my trust in my VISR’s threat identification system, I shouldered my battle rifle and pressed through with reckless velocity.

The corridor was a blur in the sprint, right until I kicked my way through the door on the other side.

I had no idea what this room had been before Art Loko’s take over, but it was immediately obvious what it had become. The whole aesthetic screamed ‘rape dungeon,’ from the dank walls, rusty shackles and the struggling Sangheili women as a mixed bag of Jackals and Grunts crammed their cocks uninvited in a variety of orifices.

The sight gave me pause and for a second and I had to really look to register what the fuck it was I was seeing.

There were three Sangheili women, the ‘sisters’ the woman in the cage had mentioned, being violated by a pair of Jackals and a pair of Grunts.

The first two Sangheli women were lashed front down to the torture table. Their wrists were shackled to the surface, bodies bent over the edge with feet parted and shackled to the floor. Standing on elevated platforms, a Jackal went to town on them from behind, clawing at the wide womanly curves of their hips hard enough to leave angry purple rakes in their skin.

The third Sangheili was on her back. Her legs were pinned to her sides by her Grunt captor slamming his hips against hers, while her wrists and throat were trapped in an old-fashioned looking stocks device. The same time medieval civilisations trapped criminals in to throw rotten tomatoes at them, this one restrained the woman so her head could be tipped back and mandibles torn open for her second Grunt captor to swab her throat. She gargled with every deep thrust of the Grunt’s cock down her oesophagus, her fingers flexing helplessly at the air as she, unlike her sisters, couldn’t even scream against the Grunt’s spit-roasting her.

Either Art Loko had told his peeps to make sure he wasn’t followed, and assuming the coast was clear they decided to take advantage of the prisoners; or they really had no idea the keep was under assault.

The room itself was like a grim reality of the thing most middle-aged women with a lewd imagination and a mainstream erotic novel thought a love dungeon looked like. The non-consensual gangbang was premeditated, that much was for sure. These weren’t just some scumbags taking advantage of their naked female prisoners. This place had been built for their pleasure and even in the height of an assault on the building they were still going at it.

They didn’t even notice me barge in, handing me a few seconds pause while I was processing the sight in front of me.

The Jackal who seemed to be in charge reacted first, rocking back to yank his cock out of his victim’s ass. His claws went for his plasma pistol but I had my rifle up already.

My first burst bodied the Jackal through the chest cavity, no shield to protect him. A spurt of blood  splattered across the bare back of the Sangheili woman under him, but with the amount of bodily fluids glistening on her skin already she didn’t seem all that concerned. She was already catatonic from hours of overuse, staring through me as I sidestepped into her field of view and targeted the others.

The second Jackal avoided a round to the dome as he dropped back and fell out of sight as I took my shot. Cursing I high ported my rifle and ran around the torture table, bringing the weapon back down into a firing position in time to catch the Jackal as he rolled to his feet. His hand touched the hilt of his plasma pistol, but I was already touching trigger.

A single shot split his skull into a canoe and the alien fell.

At the same time, the woman in the stocks convulsed as the two Grunts going to town on her were too deep in their mist of lust. Despite the gunfire, they still thrust like madmen into the third Sangheili’s pussy and throat, as if they were perfectly content to die so long as the last thing they did in this ‘verse was cum.

I didn’t know how long he’d been going that deep, but clearly it was too long as the woman’s mandibles went slack and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. I could literally see the life dripping out of her as her throat bulged from being crammed full of cock. There was literally no time to fuck this up.

Throwing my rifle on my back, I pulled my pistol and charged over. The weapon drove out and face-fucked the face-fucking grunt with a bullet at point-blank range. The force of the blow tossed his brains out the back of his skull and he flopped backwards, a cock much longer than it had any right to be popping from the Sangeili’s throat with a wet squelch. A river of pearly white cum came gushing out after.

I grabbed the other Grunt by the throat at the same time and yanked him backwards. The bulge of his oversized cock receded from the Sangheili’s flat belly before the flared head almost like that of a horse popped from her stretched vagina. The lips closed slowly, leaking a similar torrent of cum, giving just a hint of how long the Grunts had been going at the woman.

The flustered Grunt landed on his back and I tapped him twice in the chest, then thrice in the head. The second two to the dome were technically unnecessary – but emotionally essential.

Returning my pistol to its holster I quickly ran to the gagging Sangheili’s side and unclasped the stocks she was trapped in. The electronic locks let go and it swung open. She wasted no time in blindly rolling over, slipping off the edge of the torture table and splattering to the floor at my feet

I don’t use the term ‘splattering’ lightly, since she had paled with all the semen coating her violated body. And as she lay there, heaving and gasping for breath, torrents of the stuff leaked from between her thighs and shot in globs from between her mandibles with every cough. Like the other two she didn’t seem entirely aware of my presence, simply laying there like an over-used doll, leaking cum of God-only-knew how many men from every orifice.

The bad-guys shoved in body bags, I quickly shoved the horror of what I was seeing to the back of my mind and pinged Kaidon on comms.

“Kaidon, this is Wolf Bravo. I’m dropping a beacon. Send help immediately.”

“What have you found, Wolf of Verdun?”

“Take a look.” I snipped the last few minutes out of my mission recording and uploaded it to the tactical cloud for him to view.

He must have viewed it on fast forward, because a few seconds later he came back with a pensive grunt. “It seems you have found the breaking house. Drink in the sight. This is the true reason we fight Art Loko and his degenerate flock.”

“Kaidon, what the fuck is happening on this planet?”

“Do you recall I told you we paid the ultimate price for standing up to Art Loko? Well this is it, Wolf of Verdun. My daughters, my wife and my mother lay somewhere in those walls. But thanks to you, they may yet be returned to me.

“The same thing that happens to any planet Art Loko touches. He works the people to the bone. And when they resist, he takes their wives, their daughters and twists their bodies into playthings for his demented harem. It is how he also keeps his followers loyal and zealous.

“Loko’s followers are devoid of moral principles, responsibility or discipline. They follow only their hedonistic desires. Desires which Loko can appeal to with his sick methods.

“I have no love for humans, for sure. But at least your people do not enslave and defile Sanghelios’ daughters. And together, we may yet end this nightmare.

“Let us end Art Loko’s terror here.”

“Let’s,” I agreed in a murmur, moving on. The Sangheili woman would be fine now her captors were dead, at least until rescue arrived. I couldn’t begin to imagine what the road to healing might even look like. But one thing was for certain.

It was paved in the bloody remains of Art Loko.

All bets were off. I pressed on to the back of the breaking house and ascended the only exit Loko could have taken, a grand set of steps leading to a balcony that opened onto an elevated landing platform. Several Phantoms angled their noses down and swooshed into the sky to leave the fight. One remained powered down on the deck, with a familiar retinue of figures marching towards it. Art Loko stood the tallest among them, and the sights of my smart-scope were magnetically attracted to him.

Before I could let a round out the barrel however, something fell on me. Something lithe and light and frightfully familiar.

Her body twisted around mine as she dragged me to the ground. And before I knew it by battle rifle was sliding out of reach and I had been pinned flat on my bag, the deft thighs of a skinny Sangheili assassin squeezing the sides of my helmet as she sat on my chest.

I grimaced. “Ugh. You again.”

Ossoona smiled in that bright, crazy way only she could. “Hello again, my love. It’s wonderful to see you again. and it’s wonderful that you can see me.”

She giggled, doubling over and placed her mandibles close to my visor. Her flexible body twisted again as she slid off my chest, straddling my belly while her hands worked to keep mine pinned to the deck.

“Thank you for letting me hitch a ride on your ship,” she whispered as her tongue slid out the back of her throat and traced up the side of my visor. “I really appreciate you letting me watch you shower.” 

I quickly realised the uncomfortable sensation of being watched aboard the Betelgeuse hadn’t been paranoia. Ossoona had somehow followed me aboard and had been stalking around in her active camo. Though I had to wonder why she hadn’t killed me in my sleep…

Who could know what that little psycho was thinking half the time?

Wordlessly I twisted one arm from her grip and lashed out. she was still weaker than me… albeit significantly faster.

Her head darted out of the way, giggling as she twisted around my again. the world was a blur of strikes as I tried to land at least one punch, but all I could hit was air. Before I knew it, I had rolled over and she was on my back.

With one more shove she slammed my faceplate into the deck. And like that – face down, ass up and a lean Sangheili girl holding my arm behind my back – I was out for the count.

My defeat was punctuated by a slow clap. Looking up I saw it was the Prophet. It was in that moment that I realised I knew this alien like I knew the assassin pinning me down. I’d seen him before, hovering in Ossoona’s palm back on that Cornerian derelict.

Art Loko, the Prophet of Lust, clapped his hands together one more time as his laughter trailed off into a wide smile.

“So, this is the Wolf of Verdun,” he said in the same, slow and languid voice from his recording. “The one who destroyed my shield tower on Verdun.”

“Ah, that was yours, was it? Hope you got a warranty.”

Loko seemed amused, looking me up and down. “I would have thought you’d be bigger.” 

He turned his head and gestured the Grunts into the drop ship. They waddled off and a moment later I heard the vehicle’s engines kick in. The Phantom bobbed into a low hover but Loko didn’t move to board. 

Instead, he remained standing over me, chatting as if unaware of the assault ravaging his keep. 

“It’s hard to believe you’re so fearsome that no other assassin in the galaxy dares come after you. In defeating my ossoona you have cost me yet again. A reminder that I really must get around to your punishment.” He shot Ossoona a glare and the girl flinched hard. For a second that manic little smile of hers vanished and her eyes were empty, as if anticipating some horror that was yet to come.

His features softened slowly, and Art Loko explained, “All my other ossoona have abandoned me, defected into the depths of space for fear of facing you. Any man who can best my finest, most dedicated assassin in battle is certainly a force to be reckoned with.”

I glanced at Ossoona, figuring she may not have been entirely truthful with her boss about how I ‘bested’ her in battle. Honestly, she probably could have killed me outright were in not for her psychotic girl-crush on me. Even now I was at her mercy, and somehow she had Loko convinced I was some death-defying badass.

Panning my gaze back up to the Prophet I gave a scoff. “I’d hate to be such a terrible burden. But unfortunately I’m gonna have to bear some bad news too, considering I opened the lid on your fucked up little brothel back there. The rebels should be all over it in a few minutes.”

I nodded in the direction I’d come and Loko followed my gaze a moment. Strangely, he smiled despite the news.

“Ah, the breaking house. Did you see it? Did you see my magnificent vision?” His eyes sparkled like a teacher’s pet eagerly awaiting his due praise.

I frowned. “Suck dicks, asshole. Your vision is about as fucked up as you’re gonna be when I get my hands on you.”

“Oh, how disappointing. I would have thought a man like the Wolf of Verdun would have an iota of vision. Perhaps I should help you see?”

“I’ve seen enough, thanks.”

Unfortunately he ignored me and swaggered closer as if about to embrace a long lost friend.

“You and I, Wolf of Verdun. Are we not men? Do we not run everything?” he asked. “The roots of civilisation burrow deep because of our work. Watered by our sweat and blood! Men, great men, have led our people since the dawn of time, rearing the mindless cattle into a semblance of society.”

My eyes narrowed behind my visor. “You rehearse this speech in the mirror every morning, don’t you?”

He looked up at Ossoona, and I felt her tremble against me. She lowered her head submissively, a little bit of that manic demeanour of hers melting into… fear? The expression looked odd on her face. A psycho like that had nothing to fear from anyone in my opinion. Yet when Loko looked directly at her, she seemed to shrink away.

“These creatures are beneath our greatness,” Loko went on plainly, gesturing Ossoona. Stepping closer, he stooped down to where I was pinned, lowering his voice as if sharing a secret. “Females don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know any better. The female knows not of loyalty, or toil. They’ll chase power, blindly opening their legs for wealth and comfort. This is not the behaviour of a person! This is the instinct of an animal. Cattle! And like animals, females must be guided, reared, for they know not what is best.” He nodded sagely as he continued on his rant. “And those with the wisdom to guide them earns the right to use them as he sees fit. This is the universal law of possession.

“Females are simply in this universe for us to use, Wolf of Verdun. That is their” – he clenched a fist in front of my visor – “purpose.”

I groaned, staring at the Prophet who seemed rather proud of himself for that insane little speech. What annoyed me more than how cold and disconnected a guy was capable of being, was how articulate he was able to be with his point despite being a stark raving lunatic.

The upside to being articulate was of course his ability to remove all doubt about him being said stark raving lunatic.

At first Loko seemed satisfied I had nothing to counter his argument. To be honest, I had no counter. I had no idea where to even begin without resorting to the base desire to inflict gratuitous violence upon this monster.

The sheepdog inside kicked in and I lunged forward a few inches. Ossoona tightened her grip on my twisted arm, but I ignored the pain in my shoulder. Loko at the same time jumped back, smug satisfaction turning to fear in an instant. But after a few seconds, realising Ossoona still had control of me, his expression melted back into self-indulgence.

“Disappointing. So very disappointing. I would have thought a fellow alpha male would understand.”

“Fuck you!” I shouted. I wanted to dismantle his entire philosophy with a gentle application of common sense. I wanted to name-call. Call him out as the loser he really was. Call into question his very masculinity. But for some reason, everything I thought of saying just fell short of how I really felt .

After finding the females he held captive, learning what he and his kind did to them in the breaking house. And now hearing his justification or such horrors…

Nothing short of dismembering Art Loko with a shotgun was going to suffice.

“Perhaps,” Loko mused thoughtfully, “you should see the whole picture. Bring him. We will take him to Paradise Flotilla. Perhaps the sight of perfection will sway him to my line of thinking.”

Ossoona glanced up, visibly confused. “Is… is that wise, master?”

She barely got the statement past her mandibles when Loko flipped, like a switch was thrown. One moment he was calm and collected. The next his eyes widened and his pupils contracted into tiny black dots.

“I gave you an order, hole!” Loko screeched, his voice cracking into a strangely feminine pitch with anger. He sounded like a hormonal teenager whose balls were only starting to drop.

Ossoona could kick my ass for days and murder me in a colourful plethora of ways. But for some reason when the slow, crooked Prophet spoke down to her she obeyed with a fearful whimper. I wasn’t sure what was scarier. Loko’s cartoonishly evil misogyny, or the thought of what he’d done to Ossoona to make the psycho queen herself afraid of him.

“Yes, master. I’m sorry, master. Please forgive me, master,” she whimpered.

In her fear however, her grip loosened. She partially tried to cower away from Loko, completely forgetting she was supposed to be holding me down. I felt her fingers around my wrist slip and with barely any effort I was able to pull my arm from her grasp. My shoulder popped as I flexed, and in the orthopaedic relief I rolled under her scant weight and decked the tiny Sangheili in the face.

She recoiled with a yelp and I was on top of her. Then she pushed and she was back on top. Then I threw my weight against her limber frame and I was on top again. our scuffle went back and forth like this, rolling over each other throwing wild punches and kicks like a couple of teenagers in a schoolyard tussle.

Loko was screeching in the background, his voice cracking the same way it had earlier when chastising Ossoona. But as much as he yelled at her to get me under control, I eventually managed to get the upper hand.

Slipping under one of her more hap-hazard strikes, I managed to put an elbow in her gut and roll her on her back, throwing myself on top in a strangely lewd position. Were Loko not yelling at her, she likely would have wrapped her legs around my waist and offered some kinky remark. But with fear and instinct ruling the day, her hand darted for one of the knives on her belt.

My hand followed and I caught her wrist just as a blade rasped free, my corps gym-bro bulk (ooh-rah) proving superior to Ossoona’s more limber musculature.

Keeping control of the knife I pressed the flat of the blade to her abdomen and pinned her arms there, preventing her from moving. Though I had control of the weapon, we were now at an impasse. If I pulled back, she’d no doubt be fast enough to slice open my throat. And I didn’t want to stab her with her own knife…

Wait. Why didn’t I want to stab her?

She was the enemy. A Covenant Loyalist. An assassin, sent specifically to kill me – even though it was clear she had no interest getting to that part just yet. All the same, she was on the opposite side. Killing her should have been as easy as killing all those Grunts, Jackals and Prophet spec ops guys I’d been cramming into body-bags all day long.

And yet, as I held her tight, looking down at those crazy pink eyes of hers I just stopped. The urge to remove her from play vanished.

All of that psycho wrapped into a lean little Sangheili bundle suddenly seemed… innocent. I couldn’t pretend to know what was really going on but Loko was clearly doing something to keep her under his thumb. Something terrible if the shit I’d seen in the breaking house was anything to go by.

And so despite Ossoona, a trained assassin being ordered to harm me being within my control, I just couldn’t finish her off. And the feeling that stopped me was a familiar one too.

It was that sheepdog instinct I’d felt earlier. The same one that drove my need to put my fist in Loko’s face. The desire to protect I’d grown up with all my life, the thing that had driven me into the UNSC Marine Corps in the first place. The thing that led me to volunteer for the ODST.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath, realising we were stuck in a stalemate, and I had no idea what to do next.

Ossoona on the other hand knew. She read me right through my visor, and her mandibles turned into a warm smile.

“I know you don’t want to hurt me, my darling,” she whispered while Loko was still ranting and micro-managing the fight in the background. “But you have to make it look good. Here, like this.”

Her hands still on the knife, she twisted rather than push against me. Before I could stop her, she’d directed the clip point into her own abdomen.

“There,” she said, aiming the point just right of her gut. “You can press it in here. It’ll hurt, but it’s just meat.”

I gaped, my brain still playing catch up. “What the fuck…”

“Go ahead. I want you to do it,” she said with giddy anticipation. “Here, let me help.”

She pulled. I felt the resistance, then the pop of her flesh parting. Every inch I could feel the blade direct into her gut, the tar smell of Sangheili blood filling my senses as the stuff began to pool into her bodysuit.

I could only watch the tear brimmed eyes of the Sangheili girl fill with pain.

“Oh, Gods! It’s in!” she keened into my ear.

That was about the time I figured it was high time to dip out. Releasing the blade and Ossoona, I rolled off her and scrambled away, searching for my rifle while trying not to completely freak out. The way Ossoona lovingly pulled the knife into her own body, the way she moaned in my ear at the same time; I still shudder to this day thinking about it. I felt immensely dirty and the only thing keeping me from sobbing like a small child was keeping my mind on surviving long enough to wallow in the trauma later.

My weapon had fallen a few metres away, and as I ran to it, Ossoona found her feet and hobbled the opposite way as Loko beckoned her like he was trying to get an attack dog to disengage. They piled onto the Phantom, jerked up by the grav-lift and into the bowels of the ship by the time I grabbed my rifle and ran back towards the breaking house.

Two paces later I skidded to a halt, feeling a little stupid.

“No! Fuck! What am I doing!?” I cried out, realising I was letting them get away. Loko wasn’t just going to stop. he was going to go to the next planet and start this fucked up cycle all over again! 

When I wheeled around the Phantom was already starting to pull away.

With no time for a better plan than ‘get after them,’ I threw my rifle onto the hard-point on my back and bolted after the dropship. With the Phantom tipping over the edge and the end of the landing pad fast approaching, the plan didn’t get much better.

With a blind leap, I threw myself off the pad and latched onto one of the back-swept stabilising fins. The momentum of the Phantom’s take-off jerked at my body though and I slipped. One hand came loose, and dangling helplessly all I could do was pray I kept my grip as the pilot pushed the dropship into a short dive.

Then a moment later they pulled into a harsh parabolic climb.

The sudden jerk of gravity sinking into the pit of my stomach was nauseating – as was the feeling of my numb fingers slipping from my only handhold on the Phantom.

My plummet wasn’t far. I’d ditched from burning drop pods at higher altitude with little more than an emergency air-foil, which was what I was fumbling with as I dropped. I managed to get the ripcord loose and tugged hard.

The section of spine armour on my back unfurled as a quad-vane foil opened up several feet above my helmet. The steel cable attaching me pulled tight and my fall arrested with a similar jolt to what tugged me off the Phantom.

The link cable shot loose a second later and I fell the last eight or so feet in free fall, landing hard enough to drive the wind out of me.

My fall wasn’t quite over. In the fighting, large sections of the outer sanctum had been bombed by the Wraith I’d liberated, and much of the structure was haemorrhaging rubble into the front courtyard. I hit the top slope of rubble, tumbled forward and finally slid to a halt at the foot of the slope, face down and groaning.

“What a day,” I complained, clambering slowly to my feet and opening a radio channel. “All stations, this is Wolf Bravo. Be advised. Art Loko got away. I repeat, Art Loko is out of play.”

“Let the coward run!” Kaidon responded immediately. “The keep is almost ours. Crush his army into dust.”

Turning to inspect the courtyard ahead, I saw a plume of dust rise as a mass of bad guys formed an assault formation. A formation that happened to be pointed in my direction. Among the waddling grunts several plasma pistols glowed on full charge and the Jackals interlocked their shields for a slow, impenetrable approach.

“That’s if his army doesn’t crush me into dust first.”

Yanking my rifle on my back I slapped the bolt back into battery and made a go of it. The fall could have damaged my rifle, but there was no use whining about it now. It would either work and help me hold out, or it wouldn’t and my survival time would be cut drastically short.

Taking aim, I popped single shots, and the weapon cycled nicely. Bullets came out the barrel, which was a start. But my scope was out of alignment. Shots pulled significantly to the left, and where I tried to shoot one Grunt in the head, the bullet actually winged his buddy’s shoulder.

On the upside, the wounded Grunt screeched and accidentally unleashed his charged bolt of plasma into the face of the alien I’d been aiming at. Making some on-the-fly adjustments, I quickly doubled back and popped the fallen Grunt in the head before peeling off.

Keeping the assault at standoff range was not going to work. I was one rifleman and their rear line of Jackals was practically impenetrable. As I fought my way back up the debris slope, I would pause behind the larger chunks of rubble as a firestorm of plasma shots came sizzling up in my direction. My return fire either gutted the front line of Grunts or splashed harmlessly on Jackal energy shields. But even as the aliens hit the ground, their advance was undeterred.

“Fuck,” I cursed as my rifle locked and I switched out mags. Getting back to work I dumped three more grunts before incoming fire forced me to move again.

By now the Jackals were peeling off, and several fast movers lowered their heads ad clambered up the rubble on my right. I tried to track them on the move, but neither I could get shots on target, and I was luckily still outside their effective range.

They were closing fast through.

Climbing over a large chunk of rubble that used to be a vertical pillar now laying horizontally, I felt something plink my armour. The long range plasma bolt didn’t have the energy to penetrate, but it was still like getting hit with a hammer. My legs slipped out from under me and I spilled face down behind the fallen pillar. Several more shots sizzled over my head as I tried to recover, but my rifle barrel got stuck between rubble in the fall.

I was still trying to yank the weapon free when a Jackal hopped over the fallen pillar just ten feet away.

The Jackal had me dead-to-rights, finger on the trigger and plasma pistol aimed at my face. 

“Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!” I cried out at the top of my lungs, reaching for my sidearm, but knowing full well I wouldn’t be fast enough. I’d be dead by the time the weapon’s safety was off.

I wish I could tell you my mind wandered to fond memories. To visions of Sniperess smiling as her luscious red locks blew on a summer breeze. To the good times bantering with Terp. To the time I’d fallen off my bicycle when I was six years old and mom was actually home to put a plaster on my knee and give me a hug…

Except here was nothing there but the moment. My mind was busy enough trying to make my limbs faster than was humanly possible, there was no space or time for anything else. My survival instinct screamed in defiance of the simple fact that I was a dead man approaching his final second.

And yet…

An explosion hit, the overpressure of the blast buffeting the Jackal hard enough to make him stumble. He yelped with surprise and turned to see what the hell had just done that, giving me precious seconds.

My pistol came up and I snapped off a shot. The Jackal’s head exploded, but before he had even crumbled I rolled onto my side and pulled myself over the pillar. My finger worked the trigger two more times, then a third.

A staggered Jackal who had turned to see what the explosion was about caught my double tap in the back, and he fell, his guts lining the inside of his shield. The third split open the head of a nearby Grunt who turned back to me with surprise. He died with a dumbfounded expression as the overpressure of a round passing through his skull bugged his eyeballs out of their sockets.

The other Covenant Loyalists burned before my eyes as a ripple of follow up explosions ripped through the alien ranks. And as the countless rabid aliens scrambling to eat my guts turned to smears of boiling blood, my eyes flitted up to the sky to realise where all this ordinance was coming from.

Plasma bombs blanketed the courtyard from low orbit as a familiar corvette bombarded the Covenant Loyalists across the keep. Our artillery had finally arrived.

And to punctuate her arrival, I heard Mistress ping my comms directly.

“Greetings, Wolf of Verdun,” the Skirmisher pirate queen called in her familiar seductive chirp. 	

“Took your damn time, woman!”

“You know I like to make an entrance.”

The bombardment continued for several more salvos before finally Mistress pumped the breaks. All that remained of the courtyard full of enemies rushing my position was now a crater of glass and charred bone fragments. High on the walls I spotted silhouettes and zoomed in to get a better look. Sangheili rebels were beginning to raise their banners in the aftermath of the destruction. And the pops of sporadic gunfire turned to sustained wails of victory fire as the triumphant Sangheili roared and sent streams of plasma into the sky.

My comms crackled again, this time my mother’s voice filling my helmet. “Timber, are you okay?”

“Peachy. You and Terp good?”

“We are well, Sergeant Wolfe,” Terp answered. “Another glorious victory under your belt. Defying certain death is becoming quite a habit for you!”

“Yeah, I’m real proud.”

I trailed off as the silhouette of a Phantom moved overhead. It didn’t have the army green distinguishing paint-job the Sangheili used. Rather it was plastered in a hap-hazard black coat and what looked like white mandible bones complete with jagged teeth forming an X. It pulled into a low hover over the glass land before me, the sides hanging open to reveal a small crew of armed Skirmishers lounging aboard.

Female Skirmishers.

The silhouette of a female Skirmisher was impossible to mistake, even in battle armour. The aliens had a femininity and they flaunted it with sleek cuts to their armour. And even the way these long legged, avian ladies lounged was like something out of a sexy calendar.

The front frow of trim, athletic aliens lounged in a half prone sporting long barrelled beam rifles, while those with pulse carbines stood further back, sure footed even as the Phantom swayed unsteadily underfoot.

Gulping, I waved and they beckoned me aboard.

“Our shipmistress wishes to see you, Wolf of Verdun!” one of them called in passable English. I wondered if that was perhaps the only phrase she knew, then she added with a sly smirk, “Our orders are to bring you regardless of whether you co-operate. I’m actually hoping you struggle.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course she would. Still, I climbed aboard, feeling like a cut of meat laid out in front of some hungry predators. Each of the Skirmishers was looking at me like I was the first sex toy they’d seen in ages. I wondered if perhaps Mistress yapped to her girls the same way Sniperess told her friends about me.

As the Phantom’s side panels closed over and the inertia sucked my stomach into my lower intestine, I pinged my comms before we moved out of range. “Mom, it looks like my friend of ill-repute wants a face-to-face.”

“Roger that, Timber. We’ll meet you back on the Betelgeuse. I have a ‘debrief’ to attend to with Terp as well.”

I grimaced, preferring to know as little about that as possible.



3

The trip into low orbit didn’t take long, and two of Mistress’ suspiciously sexy extraction team helpfully escorted me to the bridge. And when I say ‘escort,’ I mean that in the rawest sense of the word.

One squished up to my left side, hugging my arm tightly while the other Skirmisher cuddled up my opposite flank, her hand drifting disconcertingly below the back of my belt. I couldn’t tell what either of them were jabbering on about in their native chirp, but I bet it was about me.

All eyes seemed to be on me in fact. Every Jackal and Skirmisher we passed was female. The Jackals were similar to their avian kin, though with more reptilian features akin to the Sangheili. They were long legged and bristly spine adorned ladies with significantly smaller breasts, but an obvious femininity to their shapely bodies.

Even the Jackals wearing visor-like goggles with telescoping optics for their rifles, I could tell they were eying me lustfully. It was already strange Mistress stocked her ship with an entirely female crew, but the fact all of them were making fuck-me eyes at an alien (from their perspective) made it all even stranger. What was it with me and alien women? Some sort of magnetism?

Honestly, it made about as much sense as a pair of human tits on an alien lizard bird.

And speaking of which.

The doors of the bridge parted, and clearly afraid of what their shipmistress might say, my Skirmisher escort finally peeled their hands off me. But not before the one on the right swatted me playfully on the rear and threw me a kinky wink.

Shaking it off, the first thing I saw was Mistress reading off a holo-tablet of some sort. Her silver plumage, feathers cascading down from the back of her skull as well as along her forearms along with those fierce, golden eyes brimming with sexual energy were impossible to mistake. She looked good as ever, better than her sexy underlings even. Her armour was more cut to form than function. Slim battle plate that couldn’t possibly be rated for combat sheathed her leggy figure like a corset, following the slim hourglass neck of her mid riff before flowing out over birthing hips and a pair of modestly sized breasts.

There’s those human titties on the alien space-bird, I thought humorously. I’d honestly giving up thinking critically about this shit since going balls deep in a Sangheili sniper’s throat. I sometimes wonder if I’d actually been beaten to death in that shower, and all this was just the fever dream of my neurons sparking their last.

“You wanted to see me?” I asked. Though I knew in the back of my mind it was less she wanted to ‘see’ me and more like ‘fuck’ me.

At least, I thought so. When she looked up she seemed confused, then Mistress let out an alien chirp before squaring off in a strangely hostile stance.

I frowned behind my visor, hand resting on my sidearm.

“What? Mistress what gives?”

A familiar giggle rang across the bridge and I looked over to the captain’s chair where it hovered about a foot off the deck. As it turned, the high back no longer blocked my view, revealing Mistress sitting there with her long, bare legs elegantly crossed.

Even though she was wearing a short skirted gown with a plunging V-shaped collar and showed off her bountiful alien cleavage, the Skirmisher’s resemblance to the other alien with a silver plume and sexy golden eyes was uncanny.

“I… whu-… huh?”

I stepped aside as the Skirmisher I’d thought was Mistress moved past to exit the bridge. As she moved, her eyes flashed downward, and the tiniest glimmer of a smirk appeared on her otherwise terse aspect.

“I see you’ve met my sister,” the real Mistress said smiling, her beak resting in one hand.

I grunted, feeling a little dumb.

“Why’d you call me here?” I knew full well why, but I was curious to see how Mistress was going to justify this booty call.

“I was worried you were missing me. It’s been a while, my pet.” Her claws clicked on the deck as she elegantly rose to her feet and stretched her long tapered limbs.

As her arms stretched over her head, the flimsy gown she wore rose a little over her hips, revealing the palpable gap between her slim thighs, even as her ankles crossed over. And there, glistening in the bridge’s soft purple lights was the tight little cleft of the Skirmisher pirate.

As I gulped, Mistress sauntered over, one foot in front of the other in seductive hip-swaying motions.

“I can smell you, even with that armour on,” she said, sighing deeply as she sauntered past. While she seemed to be sensing the rising arousal tenting in my shorts, I got a face full of her perfumed musk. The aura of sweet incense-like perfume penetrated my helmet’s filters and swirled around inside the face plate giving me a good double dose. “You’ve been all pent up since our last encounter. That little Sangheili fuck-slut of yours has been shirking her duties, I’ve no doubt. Admittedly I’ve been in the same boat. I’ve so missed you as well, Wolfe.”

When she turned back to me I was lounging in her throne, testing the cushions by shifting over and back as if I hadn’t been paying attention. My helmet was on the floor beside me as I got myself as comfortable as I could in a chair designed for alien booty-cheeks.

“That’s funny, because I haven’t thought of you at all,” I said, and smirked as Mistress threw me an impatient look.

Striding over like a raptor stalking her prey, Mistress leaped into my lap, pinning my shoulders against the backrest with a soft clang. The impact made the hovering chair bob slightly, and when it stabilised, she was straddling my lap in a deep squat with her feet planted on the seat either side of me.

The way I slouched she was easily able to reach back and yank open my pants. Even working blind she was quick and efficient, and I had to wonder if she was as quick and efficient in all aspects of her life.

For all my bluster, the way her gown fell open to reveal the pale nipples on the ebony mounds of flesh bouncing on her chest had an impact on me. The smooth round curves of her ass wrapped softly around my exposed cock, and the way she stroked her derriere across my intimate parts sent electric shivers up my loins.

“You did miss me, Wolfe. I can tell.” Reaching back she tested my erection with her long fingers. “Oh, my poor delicious toy has been so lonely without me. Don’t worry, little darling. You’re about to go home.”

Sinking back, she gently guided me to her entrance. I felt that warm wet opening suckle at my crown and dug my fingernails into the armrests with a soft ‘scrttch!’ Bit by bit she sank deeper into her haunches, kinking my cock slightly at the middle. It seemed we were at a stalemate, with my cock too big to fit into her opening.  But eventually, it was Mistress’ body that yielded. Her walls parted and the slippery warmth of her body engulfed me.

My gasp was almost as loud as hers as she sank all the way down until I was hilted into her tight depths.

“There!” she cooed. “Just where you belong. Nestled nice and warm in the perfect sheath of a wet goddess.”

“You’re kind of full of yourself, you know that?”

She pressed my cheeks in her hands and giggled, rubbing the tip of her beak against my nose. “Mmm, actually I’m full of you at the moment.”

Propped up on her feet she adjusted her grip on my shoulders and started to ride. There was no pomp or grandeur, she just got to it. Happy little alien bird chirps escaped her parted beak as she grabbed two handfuls of my gear, holding on tight as if she were about to fall off the ship.

Th sight of that tight Skirmisher pussy sliding up to the tip of my shaft, then elegantly sinking down with a wet squelch, the outline of my cock bulging in her tiny mid-riff was quite a thing. She was as tight as I remembered. If not twice as eager.

She rode with the vigour of a woman desperate to cum. And if she wasn’t careful, I would beat her to that goal. Her canal rippled as she moaned and squawked with ecstasy. Her feathers ruffled and her golden gaze seemed absent through her fluttering eyelashes.

“Too long,” she said between shuddering breaths. “It’s been too long, my pet. But your big cock is where it belongs now.”

“What makes you-hhnngggg~! Th-think I’m yours?” I growled, grabbing her ass and preventing her from sinking back down and feeling me nudge her cervix. She fought me, but I was able to hold her in place, and the mouth of her pussy started clenching on my tip with desperation to engulf me again.

She crooned desperately. “Don’t tease, pet. I’ll make you feel better than that Sangheili fuck-doll of yours.”

“That so?”

“Yes. Let me show you.”

She rose out of her squat and with the agility of a gymnast whipped around in my lap. As she was moving, I got to look past her and saw we’d gathered a casual audience. Several of the Jackal bridge staff were watching. One of them, a cute Jackal with pink eyes was gripping her console with her other hand out of sight down her front. But by the way she was breathing heavy while rocking back and forth, I could tell what she was up to.

Mistress’ light body sank back down in my lap. Her thighs spread open, she slid me up into her body with ease. And then she did something new.

Clenching hard like a vice around my cock, she crossed her legs. Sitting like a princess on her throne, Mistress gave a similarly haughty little grin as she tangled my fingers in hers, then using my arms for leverage started bouncing that unbelievably tight pussy on my member.

“Guh,” was about all I could say, and that pretty much summed my feelings up. She was tighter than any woman I’d been in. Tighter than Sniperess’ virginal pussy. Tighter than Zara’s grip stroking me off on Lady Zestuous’ tits.

As she rode and moaned, Mistress managed to say between gasping breaths: “This tight pussy can be yours, Wolfe. Any – ohhh~ - time you like. Forget that Sangheili, she doesn’t know how to please you. Stay with me, pet. You can use me – nghh~ - all day and night if its what you de-ah~! D-desire. And my crew isn’t off limits either. Your cock will be sheathed in the tightest cunts you can imagine. It’ll never be dry again.”

Mistress really knew how to sell a concept. And a weaker man surely would have taken her up on the offer of a massive harem of tight bodied aliens.

In my humble opinion it seemed like more of a chore having to deal with Mistress day in and day out. Even these booty-calls were simply exhausting. He couldn’t imagine fucking her every day, let alone splitting his day with a hundred crazy pirate bitches just like her.

Mistress, as if sensing my trepidation, doubled her efforts. She yanked at my hands, slamming herself harder and deeper than before. It was only a few thrusts later I realised she was close to orgasm; it was not my silence that spurred her on.

The Skirmisher let out a squeal as a ripple ran through her innards. The soft walls of her pussy trembled around my shaft, and the next time she rose, her pussy left a creamy residue along my erection. It only served to lubricate her next fall as again and again she impaled herself to the core, clenching and tightening with every thrust.

Her sheer enthusiasm set me off and I came not long after… with altogether more effort than it should have taken.

This position made Mistress so tight, I came but the semen almost didn’t get out of my cock. A hard torrent of cream rushed form my balls to my cock like a tidal wave. But where her tight canal pinched me hard, it came out the rest of the way in more of a trickle than long spurts. 

All the same, I pulled at Mistress’ arms and buried the crown all the way against her cervix, or whatever alien equivalent she had and let her feel the warmth of my cum fill her.

She shuddered again, and I’m pretty sure she creamed one more time by the way she was cooing.

We sat there panting with effort for a while. The crew eventually stopped fondling themselves and got back to whatever duties they’d been aside. The cute Jackal with pink eyes caught my gaze as she turned and she ostentatiously ran a long purple tongue across her long fingers, now glistening with the same creamy stuff decorating my cock.

“Satisfying as ever, Wolfe,” Mistress said, coming down from the afterglow. “Now get the fuck off my ship.”

I scoffed. “Whoa, wait a second. What was all this shit of you begging me to stay with you?”

“Ah, that’s just pillow-talk, baby. You know I’d get bored of you if we did this too regularly.” She giggled, stroking a talon along my jaw. “Keeping me a little thirsty for your cock is a good thing.”

I rolled my eyes. “Clearly.”