He descended, placing himself between the two most dangerous things in existence, at least as far as humanity was concerned. A ship a little larger than a house placed between an Endbringer and the queen of the Titans.

The Simurgh crashed into him. Damaged parts of her body were like the teeth of a saw, her feathers sheared through parts of the Marduk like blades longer than he was tall, passing into the very chamber he sat within.

He turned his eyes to his left, where he should have been able to see terminals. There was only a wall of electrical ruin, blinding a cyborg eye that was supposed to be able to see in any combat scenario.

I didn’t deserve this, he thought.

If the entire situation was a referendum on where he had come as a person, then this moment would be a test of his past actions.

The damning thing about it all was that the past dogged at everyone’s heels. There was no escaping it, and as much as they had heralded second chances, they were defined by what had come before, weighed down by it, destroyed by it.

So why?

The electrical ruin to the left of the Pendragon was Dauntless’s shield, raised between the Marduk and the Simurgh. But for that shield, the Simurgh would have crashed right through him on her course to Titan Fortuna.

Dauntless had saved him, and it felt like the man shouldn’t have.

The Marduk couldn’t fly. Defiant did what he could to disengage from his chair, and ran up a sloped deck that was partially obstructed by feathers. He grabbed a spear and an old halberd he’d kept for posterity.

Fire, he thought. He couldn’t see the countdown, but he knew it should be time.

The signal was distorted. He could hear the scream, and in that three-dimensional sprawl of data, that part of his brain that he’d replaced with technology was parsing the data as corrupted. Out of his reach.

He reversed course, his feet shifting, the treads in his boots relaxing, letting him slide down the sloped deck toward the console. His combat program helped his movements to coordinate.

“Dauntless!” he called out, at the top of his lungs.

He reached the space next to his chair, the wall of that crackling shield illuminating everything, until his surroundings looked like ninety-nine percent white, one percent almost-white. The trajectory and his program-coordinated movement saw his hand meet the button.

G-driver, second shot.

He could see it in his readouts from the console. Disruption in the power supply. The signal wasn’t getting through from button to weapon.

He checked. Reading transcripts.

“They’re saying they’ll help you!” he bellowed. “After! But we need you to do like we discussed before!”

Dauntless moved, the spear sweeping to one side, striking the Simurgh.