In the American spaceship known as the Dreadnought, a young man was facing the entrance of a room while his handprint was being analyzed by a monitor. His name was Dylan Ulrich, a seventeen years old boy who was about to start his final test on the academy of space recruits from the same spaceship.

  A lot of people were looking at him from behind, but he didn't feel pressured in any shape or form. What he was about to do was something he had done countless times and prepared for years. When the door in front of him suddenly opened, he just took a break and fixed a bit of his light brown hair that was starting to cover his forehead. His green eyes showed his determination once he stepped inside the dark room.

  Dylan was wearing a combat suit that entered combat mode once he grabbed his combat knife on his waist and his pistol with his right hand. The suit worked like organic armor that enhanced his physical abilities and granted him mobility in harsh environments. It could change to suit the needs of its user, but Dylan was using the standard assault mode that made it turn black while making him look like he was wearing light armor with a helmet that covered his whole face and that only had some metallic protections on the shoulders, knees, and elbows.

  The dark room began to get brighter, and then Dylan saw himself standing in the middle of a city in flames. He had heard that such an environment was a digital copy of one of many places that the planet called Earth had. Still, he didn't feel any familiarity coming from it. For him, it was only another place that he had never been to or seen with his own eyes.

  There was a single road ahead of Dylan while countless piles of rubble and buildings fell apart on the sides, but he ignored them all and ran for it. He barely could feel his feet touching the ground since the battle suit helped him with mobility that much, and it was only the version for recruits… the real deal was much better.

  Dylan put those thoughts aside when he saw some shadows emerging from the piles of rubble and jumping to block his path. They didn’t look even a bit like humans. The shadows had arms and legs, but blades coming from their elbows and knees that looked like sharp weapons could be seen. The shadows were extremely dangerous, and a single hit from it would be considered ending the mission in failure.

  Three of the shadows jumped toward Dylan while moving the blades in their arms and easily crossed twenty meters of distance. Dylan pointed his gun at one of them, and the same crossed the blades on its arms to block the attack since the shadow could tell that Dylan’s attack would hit its head. Still, in the end, Dylan changed his aim and then hit the elbow of the creature, forcing it to move and hit its ally with the blade on the right arm.

  The blade only hit the left arm of the other monster, but it caused enough damage to slow down both of them. In that short window of time, Dylan passed through the hole of their formation by throwing himself and sliding into the ground and fired three more bullets. The first two got hit on the sides of their head, and the third one got hit in the forehead.

  When he got up and resumed his run, Dylan saw others emerging from other piles of rubble as well, but the distance between them was larger, so he changed his knife to a reverse grip and increased his grip strength.

  When the first enemy got close enough to attack, the creature swung both the blades on its arms, but Dylan jumped to the side and dodged them before slashing his combat knife at the neck of the creature. In the next moment, the beast completely disappeared.

  The next one approached while jumping with all its might and in a straight line like a bullet, pointing the blades on its knees toward Dylan. He stopped moving for a second and then raised his knife to block it. Even with the battle suit, he wouldn’t be able to block all the weight behind the attack, but he still tried. When the blades hit his knife and began to push him backward, Dylan moved his knife downward and forced the enemies blades to go down as well, and he used that fraction of a second to aim and pull the trigger of his pistol, exploding the head of the creature and freeing him from all that weight.

  Two other shadow creatures approached Dylan from the sides with their arm blades aiming for his stomach and neck, but in the next moment, he jumped and avoided their attacks while exploding the head of one and piercing it with his combat knife in the other. The easy part of the simulation was over, and then Dylan was forced to take a deep breath and then stop breathing while running with all his might because the nearby buildings began to collapse.

  Dylan thought that he was doing pretty well, but then the first building fell, and the shockwave of the impact made his body tremble a bit, and he confirmed that he was wrong… still, he kept dashing with all his might.

  In the next moment, two buildings collide from opposite sides of the road right above Dylan, and numerous earth blocks began to fall and almost smashed him. He somehow dodged them all, but he still was engulfed in a massive dust curtain when the buildings fell behind him.

  As if they were there from the very beginning, several shadow creatures emerged from the dust curtain as soon as Dylan left it. Three more buildings ahead were starting to fall, but Dylan also could see the extraction point with a chopper five hundred meters away. He just had to reach it without suffering any damage…

  The five shadow creatures kept dashing toward Dylan, and when they got dangerously close, he looked over his shoulder and then pointed his pistol and fired the last three bullets. The enemies were so close that they died with bullets in their heads and were unable to do anything.

  “That is what you get from screaming like bitches while attacking,” Dylan thought and threw away his gun since he couldn’t reload it.

  While increasing the grip on his knife, Dylan left another falling building behind but once again was engulfed in a dust cloud. He ran to his right side and felt the hot wind increase when the enemies jumped to attack him, but they didn’t hit anything. When he left the dust cloud, Dylan found them looking for him, and then he stabbed one in the back and dropped, kicked the other and snapped its neck with his hands in one single motion.

  “This is going a bit too fast…” Dylan thought when he saw the final building already falling in front of him.

  Dylan knew that the final test would be hard, but not that much harder. Still, he resumed his run with all his might, even when he basically entered a building that had already fallen on the ground and was being crushed by its own weight.

  The interior of the building was dark, but some parts inside were burning and showed Dylan the path. The interior of the building was still collapsing, and the final pillars almost smashed Dylan, but he increased his speed by jumping around and avoiding the obstacles, thanks to some tables on the way.

  In the final moment, Dylan threw himself against a massive glass window and rolled on the ground for a few moments before reaching the extraction point inside the chopper. He got up with one knee still touching the ground and checked the area behind falling.

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  The electronic voice and message coming from the helmet didn’t show any emotion, and Dylan didn’t celebrate or look happy either. Still, he showed a large smile when the room got dark, and then the exit opened in front of him, and his classmates excitedly jumped around in celebration. It was hard for a recruit to pass the final test, after all.

  Dylan high-five everyone and showed his appreciation for their support. Still, he didn’t feel like they were truly celebrating for him… they were celebrating the success of the son of the heroes who saved the Dreadnought fifteen years from her demise and gave the chance for her and other ships crew to reach a new technological age that might give the survivors of the human race some hope after two hundred years. Dylan was smiling, but his head was somewhere else.

  ‘What a pain…’ Dylan thought.

  — —

  The year is 2255. Two hundred years have passed since the human race was forced to leave Earth after having more than ninety percent of its population decimated by a single creature beyond their understanding. The creature was bigger than a cruiser, and not only was completely immune to all forms of weaponry that the humans had access to, it even consumed it by turning it into energy.

  The power to turn matter into energy was a power that many sought over the years and something that came out of nowhere had that much power, but it came to destroy the human race. If a single grain of dust about 0.4 mg were completely converted into energy using Einstein’s equation E=mc2E = mc^2E=mc2, it would release approximately 36 giga joules (GJ) of energy, equivalent to about 8.6 tons of TNT. This is an immense amount of energy for such a tiny mass, demonstrating the incredible power stored in matter when fully converted into pure energy. Omega Alien not only could turn anything it touched into energy, but it could also use it freely.

  The creature received the name of Omega Alien since wherever it went, it destroyed everything down to atomic levels just by touching it or turned into energy. In a few months, the entire human civilization had been destroyed, and the survivors had to work hard to build spaceships that helped them not only to leave the planet, but to also defend themselves against it. At the cost of many losses, they managed to leave the planet, but some spaceships still were hunted down by the Omega alien, and people still believed that the creature was searching for humans…

  The reason as to why the creature attacked humans was uncertain at first, but then people noticed that the creature left alone all other lifeforms on the planet. Only a few species of animals and plants were destroyed, and that made people believe that the Omega alien only targeted humans because they were about to doom their planet… as if the human race was a cosmic virus and the Omega alien was a cosmic antibody.

  For almost two hundred years, the human race crossed the cosmos, unable to find a new home that they could properly use. When they found one twenty years ago, they tried to colonize it, but the planet already had its own inhabitants. After losing their home planet, humans were itching to get a new home, and some of them started a conflict with the inhabitants of the same planet. It didn’t take long before the Omega alien appeared again and destroyed five of the twenty-five human spaceships…

  The others managed to escape, but once again, humans suffered a great loss. During that incident, some humans managed to obtain a lot of data about a new source of energy that they could use and could find on most planets. It was the energy called ether… it was completely free energy, but since it was a spiritual source that was created after the death of all living creatures, it was hard to find with human technology.

  However, Andrew Ulrich and Rebecca Ulrich were soldiers, but they were also researchers good enough to obtain some results after analyzing the information that they got in that world and after seeing how the Omega alien worked up close. They got close enough to get the data and send it back home and to all other ships of the human race, but they got too close to be still able to escape.

  With the data, the human species was able to improve their weaponry and battle suits. It was said that the beings that had ether could live longer and become extremely powerful, but humans weren’t able to wield ether all of a sudden… that is why they improved their battle suits to help them with that. In recent years, some humans became able to wield mana, but their progress was still in the early stages.

  Dylan had heard that lesson so many times that he probably knew it better than the instructor, Miss Amanda. If she weren’t such a nice person and an old friend of Dylan’s parents who looked after him over the years, he would have fallen asleep half of the time during those lectures. Still, Dylan endured it since it was the last time.

  In the final moments of the lecture, instructor Amanda showed a hologram of the combat suit of the soldiers since one of them was going to join their ranks, and the recruits always asked her to use it, even though they had seen it many times.

  The battle suit was made of a material that they also found on planet Aurora, the place that they tried to invade fifteen years ago. It was a metal that had a semi-conscious nature and could change into several shapes that it had memorized. Still, it required ether to be used, so not only it had a time limit of use in most situations, but the user also varied from person to person since half of the ether that they obtained during the missions stayed with the soldiers and the other half was taken by the scientist of the Dreadnought.

  Dylan watched the hologram of the suit until it changed, and he recognized the red shape; it was the sprinter mode that his parents liked to use. He was a bit interested, but he didn’t look like it since he was holding his chin with the palm of his hand in the lecture hall.

  “That is all for today,” Instructor Amanda said while she was turning off the monitor in the middle of the room. “Don’t use the simulators too much and neglect your actual studies. Dylan, can you stay for a second?”

  The other recruits left the room, and Dylan showed a few smiles to them when they said farewell to him. He was leaving the dorms of the recruits soon to join the dorms of the soldiers, so meeting with them will be hard now.

  Regardless, Dylan approached the center of the room while he watched instructor Amanda packing up her things. He had been there many times, so he couldn’t tell if he would miss the lecture hall, which was basically a round room with many seats around it and the monitor hologram in the middle where instructor Amanda usually stays and speaks.

  Instructor Amanda was a thirty years old woman who had shoulder-length blond hair and green eyes. While she was also a soldier on paper, she spent most of her time teaching and looking after the recruits. She rarely would scold anyone, and since she was pretty and the recruits around their age often would fall in love with older women and soldiers due to their particular aura, she was quite popular. As for Dylan, she was like an older sister that looked after him for many years, but recently he had been thinking if it was truly out of concern or if it was because she felt guilty for not having been with his parents when they needed, she was also participating on that same mission, after all.

  ‘I hate that I am becoming such a person full of suspicions…” Dylan put his index finger on his forehead and shook it while thinking about that. “I need to get rid of those thoughts, and they might cause my downfall from here on out.’

  “Congratulations on your graduation!” Amanda smiled brightly. “I heard that you completed the simulation with flying colors, considering that it was your first time. You also broke the record of the recruits when it comes to the final test.”

  “Thanks, but anyone can do that much in a simulation as long as they keep their cool,” Dylan smiled back since it was a matter of fact what he had said.

  “Hmm, I suppose,” Amanda tilted her head and said. “You are going to move this afternoon, right? Do you need any help? What about a party?”

  “Claire already prepared one yesterday… I thought you were busy, but I guess she didn’t invite you.” Dylan bowed his head apologetically. “She still is a kid, and I apologize for her.”

  “It is fine. This is a small thing,” Amanda said, while showing a nervous smile. “Anyway, your practical scores are awesome, but your theoretical ones are also amazing. You can also become an instructor or an engineer, and you don’t have to rush and join the working soldiers on their missions yet.”

  “I really appreciate you looking out for me, but I don’t want to receive special treatment,” Dylan scratched the back of his head. “We need soldiers, since our numbers didn’t grow that much in the last few years. Few people can adapt to battle suits, after all.’

  “Right…” Amanda said and then sighed. “I am not supposed to say this, but it doesn’t matter since you are going to join the frontline soon, but we are going to get quite busy now. So, don’t do anything harsh and try to learn by observing, all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dylan said and then saluted, and then turned around to leave.

  Amanda sighed when Dylan crossed the door. It seemed that her job was over, but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to forgive herself if something happened to Dylan.

  ‘He looks exactly like you, Rebecca,’ Amanda thought while looking at the ceiling. ‘He behaves exactly like you as well, Andrew. I just hope that he won’t do anything harsh while working like you usually did…’