A gout of flame gushed from Ridley's maw, and was answered by a hail of arm cannon fire. The hunter, Aran, was closing fast - but so was he, to his goal. His victory was nearly assured.
Ridley was powerful. And not merely in terms of strength; He belonged to an ancient species capable of surviving and navigating the void between stars. His racial memory held secrets and resources that even ancient races like the Chozo had long forgot.
And more than that, he was intelligent. Oh, yes. It was an alien kind of intelligence, utterly different to that of humans, or the Chozo, or even the space pirates he'd allied himself with - but it was a vast intelligence, as cold and deep as the void between the stars; Able to plot and foresee with a clarity lesser species could only fear.
It was that foresight that had led him to his alliance with the space pirates. A temporary alliance, however permanent it might have seemed to others; Ridley's species was long-lived, and even an alliance of decades was but a brief span of his extended life. In truth, given space pirate psychology, the "alliance" was but a case of each side agreeing to use the other.
And to what end? For the space pirates, power and profit. For Ridley... His ultimate goal lay far in the future. This alliance was but a single fleeting step...
...But still, a longer and more difficult step than he had anticipated. The creature the space pirates called "the Hunter," the humanoid they regarded with almost religious fear, was a genuine threat even to Ridley's own existence. She wielded technology powerful enough to harm even a space dragon, after all - technology that had defeated Ridley more than once. Those past engagements had left Ridley scored with scars and cybernetics, both products of primitive space pirate biotech...
And that was enough to make him angry.
Ridley was arrogant and proud, but suffered no illusion; He knew that his vast strength and intelligence, his burning breath and puppet allies were simply insufficient to defeat the hunter Aran. The knight in powered armour was, ultimately, more powerful than he.
Thus, borrowed strength was needed - and the space dragon had lived long, and seen much, and knew well where strength could be borrowed, or seized. Every move he made now - every dodge and claw strike and blast of breath - was a feint designed to distract Aran from the true weapon he had obtained: The wheel at the back of the chamber. The wheel made of apparently-primitive materials, utterly devoid of any mere physical power source, yet layered with enough psychic potential to change the mood of reality itself, making Ridley - its soon-to-be-spinner - into the metaphorical center of the universe.
And then a stray shot from the Hunter's arm cannon struck the outer edge of the wheel, setting it spinning - and Ridley let out a great cry of rage...
Sun Feb 19 01:03:26 2017