The Last of Nova Group

Seventeen-year-old Kona, six feet tall, is lean but powerfully built. Her raven hair, styled in a chic bob, frames a face people call breathtaking. Her green eyes hold a quiet intensity. She's a striking mix of Eastern and Western ancestry. But there's a dark truth hidden underneath all of it, one almost no one knows. She's a Hybrid.

An orphan since infancy, Kona became the subject of Nova Group, an organization started by a rogue group of Xeno-Warfare scientists. Their founder, Doctor Conforto, was obsessed with creating human-alien Hybrids for war. He took eighteen-month-old Kona and fused her with the DNA and living essence of a young alien Princess—a creature of terrifying power. She was the only child to survive the procedure that fused a human with the DNA and essence of the alien species. Kona's whole childhood was combat training. Weapons were her toys. Combat drills were her games. The alien bond gave her incredible strength, speed, and sharp intelligence. She mastered every kind of combat, plus stealth and infiltration—no lock or computer system could stop her. She moved like a ghost. And despite carrying the genes and killing power of a deadly alien, Kona stayed quiet, unassuming, and respectful. A natural introvert, she preferred being alone.

Nova Group, which had grown into a mercenary outfit, once had fifty Hybrids like her. Kona, the youngest, became the last Hybrid Nova Group ever created when Doctor Conforto lost his mind and killed himself only months after completing her procedure.

Their missions: clearing out supposedly empty facilities, space stations, and derelict ships—often taken over by pirates or gangs. Corporations big and small, even governments, paid Nova Group heavily to forcibly clear people out of areas they wanted to expand into or exploit. Other jobs involved retrieving data or valuable items. Sometimes it meant finding and eliminating high-value targets. They moved in, wiped out the resistance, and took control with cold efficiency. Nova Group usually worked in two-person teams, sometimes four-person teams, and that was always enough. Kona, due to the power of her Hybrid symbiote, usually went in solo.

Despite shrinking numbers—the cost of years of brutal missions—Nova Group's success never wavered. Their dominance bred deep resentment among rival mercenary outfits, jealous of their lucrative contracts and formidable reputation. With only twelve Hybrids left, a group of rivals decided now was the best time to end them for good. A corporation tired of paying Nova Group's high fees teamed up with a competing mercenary outfit to set a trap. Nova Group was hired to secure a massive underground facility, supposedly held by a large and heavily armed militia. The contract called for something unheard of: every remaining Hybrid deployed together.

Their ship usually served as a staging point—Operators were dropped off, and then the ship pulled back into orbit to wait. But this time, for the first time, the ship would stay on-site for the whole mission. The target, they were told, sat beneath an old mining facility. This would be the first time Kona and her fellow Hybrids—despite years together in Nova Group—worked as one full team. Even living aboard the same ship, their lives stayed somewhat separate: meals, drills, chores. Nothing more. Personal conversation was not common. Mealtime was the only time all the Hybrids were together. Mostly small talk, critiquing combat missions and training exercises. They viewed each other as comrades, nothing more. Oddly, their alien symbiotes could somehow sense each other's species, which sometimes sparked quiet tension. But the humans wearing them always kept things professional. Every Hybrid's symbiote recognized what lived inside Kona. All respected it; some even feared it. Still, they teased her anyway, the way older siblings do. Kona always acted like she wasn't happy with it. In reality, she liked it. It made her feel a connection. Years of hard, synchronized training meant they could fall into step together instantly, no matter how little they understood each other on any personal level.

Nova Group stepped off their transport, boots hitting the ground as the ship's ramp lowered. Sixteen figures moved out onto the moon's surface—twelve Hybrids, four supervisors. Each supervisor was a veteran of elite special forces, responsible for planning, training, and logistics. One of the supervisors was Nova Group's Commander. Usually staying behind to supervise from their command ship, he felt he had to lead this mission directly.

This wasn't their usual kit. Every Operator wore fully plated armor—heavier and more encompassing than anything they trained in day to day, closer to what you'd see on a boarding party expecting to fight their way through a warship than a standard clearance job. Reinforced helmets with sealed visors, built-in HADAR night vision goggles and comm units. Chest plates thick enough to stop small-arms fire outright, articulated joints at the shoulders and hips to keep the weight from slowing them down. Self-contained oxygen on the back, paired with a small jet pack for minor lift—just enough to clear obstacles or cross a gap, nothing more. It was the kind of gear that told you, before a single order was given, that whoever had planned this contract expected a real fight, not a clean-up job. All of them carried rifles and full loadouts. Even Kona, who preferred to move light and fast, said nothing about the extra weight. If Nova Group was going in this heavy, there was a reason for it.

Kona brought up the rear, rifle in hand, sidearm and knife holstered on her vest. They moved toward a large storage warehouse that stood before the outpost. They split into two teams of eight. The Commander led the first team, with Kona taking up the rear of the stack. Upon entering, all they could see was old mining equipment and debris scattered across the floor, leftovers from a different era. They cleared it before continuing toward the outpost, a large two-level structure with one massive steel airlock door. When the teams got to the front of the outpost, they formed a perimeter. Kona moved to the front and crouched at the airlock, her digital lock-pick already working the controls. Alarms sounded. Compressed air hissed as the outer door split open. Then she stepped into the darkness inside, rifle raised. Her softly glowing green eyes swept the inside of the dark airlock. The Commander and the remaining six of her team followed her into the airlock. The second team took a defensive position, waiting for their turn to enter the airlock. Kona hit the control for the outer door. It groaned shut behind them, and the airlock cycled, pressure building to match the atmosphere inside. The inner door released with a soft sigh, and they stepped through into true darkness.

The whole facility was dead. Only the airlock retained power, supplied by an independent solar cell kept alive in case anyone ever returned. She switched on her helmet visor's HADAR mode, bathing the dark rooms in a soft green glow. She moved fast and quiet toward the control room, the other Operators following behind her. As they made their way through the outpost, she could hear the alarm sounding again. The rest of the team was coming in now. They had left one Hybrid outside to guard the entrance. They secured the place quickly. Kona began restoring power. She then sat at the terminal and started accessing the central database, hunting for the hidden entrance to the underground complex—the real target. Locating it meant tracing a hidden path and cracking whatever locked it. She expected to find that information waiting in the central system.

She didn't. To her shock, there was no underground complex. This was just an abandoned mining depot—nothing more, no hidden structure, no trace of anything else. Her scans confirmed it, over and over. She showed her findings to the Commander, who stood closely behind her as he reviewed the results. He realized instantly what it meant. A trap. He gave the order to pull out immediately.

As they moved, an explosion tore through the silence—their ship was engulfed in flames as massive explosions ripped it apart. Kona, who'd gone in first, was now last out, falling in at the back of the group heading toward the burning wreck. Part of her thought they should've stayed in the outpost instead. But she'd been trained to follow orders, and she did. They came out onto the open tarmac, now illuminated by the flames coming off their ship. Kona spotted the Hybrid who'd been guarding the airlock—dead, a single hole through his visor. A sniper's kill.

Then the ambush hit. Gunfire and fusion lasers erupted from every direction. Bright lights snapped on, illuminating the whole tarmac in front of the outpost, right where Nova Group had just emerged. Whoever set this up knew exactly how dangerous the Hybrids were and came prepared. Nova Group snapped into a defensive formation, firing back with everything they had. In the dark, all they had to aim at were muzzle flashes, while the lit-up tarmac made them easy targets in return. The only blessing was that debris from the Super Nova rained across the tarmac, creating scattered positions of cover.

Surrounded and outgunned, Nova Group started taking losses fast. A few pushed into what they called "Beast Mode," letting their alien physiology take over completely as the situation turned desperate. They fought back hard, weaving through gunfire, closing the distance, and tearing into the enemy at point-blank range. When they ran out of ammo or it was just too close to shoot, it turned to hand-to-hand—necks snapped, limbs broken, bodies destroyed. They took out a good number of the enemy, but it wasn't enough. They were simply outnumbered. One by one, they fell. The mercenaries kept firing, staying just out of the deadliest crossfire, until they confirmed it: Nova Group's ship, the Super Nova, was gone. Everyone aboard was dead. The first part of the ambush was a success. Now they started closing in to finish the job.

The Commander made a desperate call—retreat into the mining outpost, force close-quarters fighting where the odds shifted a little in their favor. They fell back in stages, a slow, bloody trickle against overwhelming numbers. Kona fought at the Commander's shoulder for a stretch of it—the two of them falling into the same rhythm they'd drilled a hundred times, him calling targets, her taking them out, neither needing to check that the other was still there. A few feet away, Igor tore through anything that got close with short, controlled bursts from his minigun, still grinning even now, still enjoying himself even as the odds turned against them. Helena moved behind the line, patching what she could patch, dragging what she could drag, her rifle never far from her hand. For a few minutes, it almost felt like it might hold. But the mercenaries redirected their fire to prevent the Hybrids from coming together, forcing them farther apart.

The Commander saw the mercenaries forcing them apart and changed the plan. His voice cracked through the chaos, ordering the few remaining Hybrids to fall back to his position. He sent Igor to cover the withdrawal and ordered Kona forward to clear a path to the outpost, while he remained in the middle directing whoever was left. Helena stayed near Igor, searching for anyone she could still save. Kona glanced back, certain she would be more useful beside him, but her training won out. She obeyed and moved toward the outpost. The remaining Hybrids were being cut down before they could reach the Commander. Igor saw the Commander get pinned first—caught between two advancing mercenary positions, unable to move without exposing himself further, still shouting out orders anyway. Igor started toward him immediately, cutting a path with his minigun. Kona saw it in the same instant and broke that way too. Neither of them made it in time.

A fusion laser found the Commander mid-sentence and cut him in half, the words dying with him, silencing the order before it finished leaving his mouth. Kona froze completely, every system in her body simply stopping at once. Igor didn't freeze. Helena, closer to him than anyone, heard a sound from him unlike anything she had ever heard before—not a battle cry, not even words, but pure animal grief turned into noise. He charged the position that had killed the Commander with absolutely no regard for his own safety, minigun screaming, cutting down mercenary after mercenary in his path. For a few seconds, it looked like nothing could stop him. Then he became the only thing anyone was shooting at. Rounds and laser fire converged on him from every direction, and still he kept moving, kept firing, blood soaking through his vest, until the minigun finally ran dry in his hands. He didn't stop. He dropped the empty weapon and kept walking toward where the Commander had fallen, one boot in front of the other, refusing to go down even as his body was failing him completely. He made it another six feet before his legs finally gave out.

Helena reached him seconds later, already pulling her medical kit open, hands moving through motions she'd performed a thousand times before she'd even fully processed what she was looking at. It took her only a moment to understand there was nothing left to save. She stopped. Let the kit fall from her hands. And reached out instead to rest her palm against the side of his face, gently, the way you'd touch someone sleeping, not someone gone. She didn't have time to grieve him properly. More mercenaries were already closing in, drawn by the same chaos that had swallowed Igor. Helena rose, planting herself between the advancing line and Igor's body, and opened fire. She dropped two of them before the third and fourth cut her down where she stood, still trying to shield a man who no longer needed shielding.

It was that—not the sight of it, but the sudden absence of it, the bond between her and her own symbiote registering a loss it had no words for—that finally broke through whatever had frozen Kona in place. She hadn't seen Helena fall. One moment there was a presence she'd felt every day of her life since she was small enough to be carried, and the next there simply wasn't, a hole where a person used to be. She turned, expecting to find Helena somewhere ahead of her. Instead, she found her lying motionless in the wreckage. Kona ran to her.

Helena's lifeless body lay at her feet. Their training had never included one thing: how to actually connect with each other. Kona wouldn't have known to call them friends—she only understood comradeship. They had shared bunk beds. She always made time for Kona, even letting her climb down to her bunk and sleep beside her when Kona suffered nightmares as a child. Kona always slept with her stuffed dog, embarrassed that anyone else might discover it. When Helena had to get up first, Kona always awoke tucked beneath Helena's blanket, her stuffed dog resting on the pillow beside her head. For reasons Kona never understood, talking to Helena had always mattered. Kona respected her and genuinely liked her. Helena had always understood her in ways no one else ever had. Only then did Kona realize the comrade Helena had been protecting was Igor. Two of the people she trusted most...gone. She looked at Helena's lifeless body. A terrible emptiness opened inside her chest. It hurt in a way she'd never experienced before. On instinct, Kona pulled the body against her with her left arm. Tears started rolling down her cheeks, but she couldn't understand why. She had no time to think about it. With all her attention fixed on her fallen comrades, she failed to realize the mercenaries had closed in on her. Raising her rifle with her right arm, she could see enemies coming toward her. She emptied her magazine into one, dropping him. Then a flash to her left—another laser—and everything went white.

Her right arm was gone, torn away six inches below the shoulder in a blinding flash. Weapon and limb spun through the air as her whole world seemed to break apart. Only adrenaline kept the pain from swallowing her whole. She searched for the shooter, her grip slipping off Helena. She reached for her sidearm—set up to be drawn from her right hand, the one she no longer had. Her severed arm lay more than ten feet away. She fumbled at the holster, left-handed, and another laser found her—this one tearing through her lower right side, throwing her to the ground. She tried to get up. For a second, she actually considered crawling back for her arm. She didn't.

That's when the alien mind inside her—the quiet partner she had known only through shared thoughts, feelings, and instinct—took over completely. Her eyes lit up, glowing bright emerald green with fire. A raw snarl tore out of her throat, something ancient and furious breaking loose. She ran, wounded, desperate, toward the light of the outpost's airlock, her vision swimming, that glow her only anchor in the dark. Then another heavy laser blast slammed into her back and triggered her jet pack. Designed only for small lifts, it launched her two feet above the ground and hurled her toward the airlock. She hit the ground hard, twenty feet short of safety, and slammed face-first into the visor on her helmet. Her limp body skidded to a halt. 

Everything went black.

Hours later, consciousness returned to her, with it a brutal truth: she was the last member of Nova Group. The only one left alive in the wreckage of a massacre. The attack had started before dawn, in total darkness. Now dusk was settling again, returning the moon to the same darkness in which she had lost consciousness.

A loud shriek ripped through the silence and jolted her eyes open. Something that hit her somewhere deep, beyond hearing. She turned her head slowly and painfully. What she saw was a nightmare: more than a dozen towering creatures, at least seven feet tall, tearing into the bodies of her fallen comrades. The mercenaries had taken their dead and left only Nova Group's dead. Claws like blades ripped through flesh and bone. Long fangs sank in without effort. They tore through the armored suits and fed on what remained inside, methodical and unhurried.

Panic hit her. Her hand went for her holster—empty. Everything gone: pistol, magazines, her knife, even her spare rifle mags. The ground, usually littered with gear after a fight like this, was stripped bare. The mercenaries hadn't just retreated—they'd looted every body they left behind. They'd assumed she was dead too, and left her for the dark, rather than finish the job. If she had shown any sign of life, they would have finished the job. Instead, they had simply taken her weapons and gear, then moved on.

She looked toward the airlock. The outer door hung open. Only the inner one stood between her and safety. Waiting for the outer door to seal, the chamber to pressurize, and the inner door to open—that delay alone could kill her. Those creatures could reach her long before the cycle finished. It was her only chance anyway. She reached deep for whatever strength her alien blood could give her, pushing past the pain screaming through her body. Missing an arm, she forced herself upright, every movement a fight. The same lasers that had ravaged her had also cauterized her wounds, sparing her from bleeding out. Only the pain remained, and her alien half worked hard to dull it.

Trained for exactly this kind of movement, Kona picked her way silently across the wreckage-strewn tarmac, careful, quiet, invisible. She reached the open outer hatch and risked one glance back. The creatures hadn't noticed. She slipped inside and hit the controls to close the outer door. A deafening alarm tore through the stillness as it began grinding shut. The creatures' eyes snapped toward the sound—red, hungry, furious—and they surged toward the airlock as one, a wall of shrieking, clawing bodies. Time seemed to stretch. Kona pressed herself against the wall, raising her one remaining arm in defiance, like it could stop what was coming. She'd go down fighting if she had to. Then, an instant before the lead creature reached her, the outer door slammed shut—a wall of metal between her and a mouth full of teeth. The impact hit like a gunshot. Snarls and shrieks hammered against the door from outside, furious at being denied. The airlock pressurized. The inner door released. She pulled her helmet off with her one good hand and let it fall. She'd restored the power earlier—the lights were on now and the life support systems were back online. She dropped into the nearest chair and was unconscious before her head touched the back of it.

When morning came, it found Kona in the outpost's reception area. She tried to stand, but the pain slowed her down. This wasn't just any outpost, she remembered now—it had been a mineral exchange point, where smaller mining operations delivered ore to be picked up later by bigger transports. Whatever profit it once made had dried up, and the place had been abandoned fast.

She made her way to the window. What she saw outside was horrific. Wreckage lay scattered everywhere, and blood stained the gray tarmac in dark streaks. The huge storage warehouse, built to hold tons of ore, sat completely empty. If there'd been any remains of her team left behind, she figured the wind had probably scattered them into nothing but red stains by now. A cold thought hit her—they'd all been eaten. Her own severed arm lay somewhere out there in the wreckage. She whispered a small, bitter wish—she hoped those things had choked on it.

She searched what was left of the outpost—the command center, a common area, a galley that reeked of long-forgotten meals, living quarters heavy with the memory of people who used to live there, and a cluster of empty workrooms. For a moment, hope flared when she found the medical bay—then died just as quickly when she saw it had been stripped bare. The whole place had been picked clean: no medicine, no food, no weapons, except for a two-foot length of rebar she grabbed for what little protection it offered.

She was close to giving up when, in the supervisor's quarters, she found something—a first-aid kit, untouched, tucked behind a cabinet. Someone had pulled out all the drawers, but no one had bothered to check behind it. Healing paste. Pain injectors. Scissors. A little gauze. Not much, but enough. She tried removing her suit, but the fabric around her wounds had fused to her skin—the same heat that cauterized her wounds had melted the material tightly around them, forming an accidental pressure seal. That fusion was probably the only reason she survived; normally, a breached suit out here meant death. She cut around the wounds as best she could and peeled away what she was able to. Exhausted, she applied the healing paste to the worst of the damage and gave herself a pain injection. The sharp sting of the needle barely registered next to everything else. The empty outpost pressed in around her—violence and loss stretching in every direction.

Five days passed. Her medicine ran out. She found no food. Thankfully, the water recycler kept humming quietly, the only thing keeping her alive. She hadn't eaten since before the mission started. She slept alone on the supervisor's cot, the isolation total. Without a suit, she couldn't leave. Water was all she had. Her wounds were getting worse. Her symbiote conserved what little energy remained, but even it could not keep her alive indefinitely. Death started to feel close, patient, waiting. She pushed herself up, made her way to the reception area, and sat at the desk, staring out at the wreckage through the window—and then heard it. A roar. A ship was descending, out of sight from the reception area's only window.

Mercenaries, she assumed instantly—coming back to make sure Nova Group was really gone. Her hand tightened around the length of rebar she'd been carrying as a weapon. She rose slowly, silently asking her symbiote for one more surge of strength, one last push from what they still had left between them. She thanked it—for staying, for being part of her, mind and body and whatever else made up a soul. It answered without words, its presence folding into hers like a promise. She crouched at the side of the inner door, out of line of sight, ready to pounce on the first combatant who entered the outpost.

Minutes stretched on forever. Then the outer airlock groaned to life, alarms screaming, metal grinding against metal. Every muscle in her body locked tight, ready. The pain faded, replaced by a rush of adrenaline—a brief, temporary gift. Taking down even one or two of them would be enough. If this was how it ended, she'd end it fighting, on her feet, like a warrior. She spun the rebar in her hand, fast and precise, a small ritual to steady her nerves before whatever came next. The outer door sealed. Pressure equalized with a soft hiss. The inner door began to open.

Kona's heart slammed against her ribs, her breath catching in her throat. Her eyes hardened, blazing with the brightest emerald glow they had ever produced. The softness in her face burned away by pure resolve. She whispered one last thing, quiet and defiant, before the door finished opening:

"Nova Group... my brothers, sisters... I'm coming home."