Over the next two months, I worked day and night. No one knew that I worked all night, though. I always made sure the person I was in bed with was asleep before I left to continue my weapon development. Noma couldn't take being so happy all the time, because she just couldn't resist letting me knock her out with Presence. She restricted herself to only once a week and it was always after one of my anger sessions, so there was no worry that I would freak out without her there to keep me company.

That meant most nights I was with Simone and she would fall asleep right after when I filled her mind with her psychic quota. It wasn't until the second week that I made the comparison between her and Noma. They both had abilities that only I seemed to be able to handle for them. They were very different and also similar, since both of them would degenerate if they didn't feed themselves regularly. One physically and one mentally.

During the start of the third week and right after I had my little revelation about Noma and Simone, Gleas came to me for another late night kissing session. She hadn't avoided me outright; but, she didn't want to admit to herself that she didn't want to complete Hailey's promise as soon as possible. I was tempted to tell her that it was okay, then thought that it was better if she came to grips with it herself. If she wanted to drag it out for as long as possible, I was fine with that.

Of course, I couldn't help myself when she showed up wearing a pair of tight pants and she knew it. I made her moan and writhe as I caressed every crease and divot of her ass through the fabric, then I had to peel the damn pants off to get at her actual flesh.

“You... really love... my ass.” Gleas managed to say between moans.

“I've never seen anything else as spectacular.” I said and lifted her hips. “Just look at the sight of you like this.”

Gleas' face flushed to a deep red as I gave her the mental picture of her like that, showing herself off to me with the mounds of her shapely ass framing it, and I let her feel how the sight made me feel.

“Hunter.” Gleas said my name, almost in a plea, so I let her feel how hard she had made me. “Oh... oh, god.” She moaned as I made love to her just like that.

Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of work done that night.

The rest of those two months I worked on duplicating the devices that created the barrier the scaly alien had created. It was an ingenious design and it worked almost on the same principal as the little circuit board that I had stumbled across that let me explode a focusing crystal and it consumed everything within the blast radius.

The problem was that both my device and this device were imperfect. They weren't meant to work how we were using them and it was kind of a cheat of the dynamics between the use of Presence and the inherent abilities that a focusing crystal had and its own built in Presence.

My device used up the Presence instantly and it consumed itself and anything inside. Kralish's device consumed anything that tried to pass through the outer energy barrier and used that energy to power itself. The barrier was quite faulty, however. Unlike what Kralish thought, it wasn't fully functional. I got by the barrier's flaws three times and could have done a fourth one, if the energy sump had been near full.

The first time was damn near blatantly obvious, because the barrier hadn't chewed away the established floor boundary they had set it to. It was easy to use the floor's own Presence to attack them.

The second time was also obvious, because I could see through it. That meant it wasn't absorbing all of the energy passing through it, since visible light wasn't blocked. Also, when Hailey died, our healing light passed through it and healed the scaly alien's foot. It took me a few minutes to adjust the assault laser rifle's settings to remove the heat energy from the laser bolts, which people would assume stopped the weapon from working.

It still worked; but, when you removed the heat aspect, it apparently also removed the visual aspect. What they didn't know about it that I did, was that it essentially made the gun into a microwave generator. It didn't have any real energy itself and caused only the target to heat up at an exponential rate as their molecules vibrated.

The third time was because we could talk through the barrier. My enhanced voice I used as a sonic attack. It also had no significant energy in the sound itself until it hit the target. It was the target's vibrating that caused the damage and not the sound itself. It worked on the same principal as the visual bypass. Neither of them were accounted for in the device's design.

If those things worked, you wouldn't be able to see or hear through the barrier and that would make it impossible to test any other aspect. There would be no communications between whoever was inside and whoever was outside, and none of the results could be recorded because there would be nothing to record for either of them.

So, I did my best to combine both devices and to enhance them to perfection. Mine was crude and effective, and the scaly alien's was overly complicated and only mostly effective. I definitely had my work cut out for me, especially if I wanted it to actually work and not consume everything inside, including itself and the barrier emitter.

My only problem was that I had no real way to safely test it until it was built and actually used it. Of course, the components were all standard size and even if I tried to miniaturize it, all I would do was reduce the effectiveness by having to leave components out.

What I wouldn't give for an electron microscope. I thought with a chuckle. I could use Presence to make nanometer sized circuit boards that would do the same thing as the normal components.

Once I let my mind wander down that path, I was pretty sure that I would blow everyone's minds by making a Light sword the size of a pen and have it still be just as effective as a full sized one. I stopped anyone from hearing my loud laugh at that thought.

Now I really want to make one. I thought and kept laughing.

During the days, Daniel and everyone else helped me work on the ships. Of course, since I had five brand new weapons platforms that were nearly identical to Hela before her refit, we had to upgrade them all to fit in with the rest of our ships, with both their speed and manoeuvrability.

Both Adona and Udelis were overjoyed to be allowed to have so many children; so much so, that they really pushed us to get the main computer core and data processors installed before we finished the other things on the ships. We were all infected by their enthusiasm and couldn't help ourselves and did as they asked. Hela, Opina, and Monna welcomed each new sister as they were born and their family grew in both numbers and deadly capacity.

Cora, Iris, Lidia, Thea, and Zoe were added to their ranks and Adona and Udelis couldn't have been happier.

I had been tempted to try and manipulate the data and make at least one of them male, then changed my mind and let 'evolution' take its course. Plus, I knew that women would be quite a bit more vengeful and thorough in their tasks. Since our upcoming tasks were going to have to be quite vengeful and thorough, letting women handle it all was perfectly fine with me.

Once the ships were done, I needed to modify more missiles with focusing crystal warheads. Their versatility was second to none and they were perfect for eliminating their targets, especially with the explosive potential of each warhead added to the focusing crystal's effect. Luckily, the poor focusing crystals worked well for this and I wasn't wasting medium or high quality crystals for it.

Those I needed for my new weapon.

It was a thing of beauty, in my eyes anyway, and I spent nearly a month making enough of them while simultaneously modifying the missiles. I had been fortuitous to order a long haul transport full of electronic components and parts, because I burned through them faster than I thought possible. Once I had finished the design on the new weapon, all I needed to do was duplicate it.

It was ridiculously easy to make a weapon like it portable and easily added to a projectile launcher. Of course, the launcher itself was made from basic components that anyone could buy. It was the specific combination with the added specialty programming and the focusing crystals that made the thing so deadly. I couldn't wait to test it out in real life and I mounted it on each of the new ships, including Hela.

All six of them were ecstatic at the potentially devastating weapon. If there was one thing that a warship enjoyed, it was a weapon that they could deploy that no one could stand against. I piloted Hela and took Noma with me, Gleas took Cora and Isabella went with her, Beatrice and Sandy took Iris, Jelly and her boyfriend took Lidia, Simone took Thea and Hailey's mother Monica went along with her, and Deborah and her husband took Zoe.

It took us a week to work out the plans we needed to jump to each connected system and start the eradication of The Order from the universe. Luckily, there was a galactic map of all known systems, ones with spacial anomalies, and all of the other small things that a ship travelling at hyperspace needed to be aware of. The Lagrange points and the coordinates for accurate jumps in certain places was invaluable for our mission.

We set our auto message beacons and we all jumped to the same system to witness the test of my new weapon. We all appeared in a system two jumps away from the Dizahl system, since my family had already cleared away all the systems a single jump away, and our ships broadcast the warning and the declaration.

A fairly large Order ship, a step just below a dreadnought, turned towards us and broadcast a warning of their own. I didn't respond and fired the very first shot. The device left the launcher and activated, and a solid black ball a hundred feet across crossed the distance between my ship and theirs at the same speed as a missile.

The Order ship reacted and shot their shipboard laser cannons at it, then their missiles soon followed. Nothing made any difference, except that the ball became a little bigger and continued on. The ball disappeared for a second, the core changed directions, then the ball appeared again and shot towards the evading ship.

It didn't stand a chance.

The black ball hit the side of the ship and as it consumed the target, it expanded and sucked in more. By the time it had passed where the ship had been, the black ball was nearly the size of the ship. It disappeared, changed directions to head towards the next target, which was an Order space station, then the black ball appeared again and slammed into the station at the same speed of a missile.

“Oh, my god.” Simone said over the inter-ship communications network we had.

“It's not perfect.” I said as the black ball flickered and then disappeared with everything that was inside of it. “I haven't quite figured out how to properly balance the overload of consumed materials and transfer it into the barrier's expansion. It's the energy to material conversion that's messing my calculations up, I think.”

“Hunter.” Gleas said. “This is...”

“I know.” I said and fired another one to finish off the space station. “The good thing is, if it can survive the initial impact and not overload the regulator, it'll keep going.”

We all watched as the next shot eliminated the rest of the space station and then it disappeared.

“Where is it?” Jelly asked.

“It's waiting for another target.” I said and let Hela's computer finish searching for The Order members in the system. “It looks like there's just the temple on the surface of the planet that we can use the missiles for, so its job is done.” I said and recalled the device.

“I can't believe they can come back after you shoot them.” Deborah said.

“Only with the same caveat that it's not overloaded by eating too many physical things.” I said. “This is a pretty lightly defended system, so when you enter a heavily defended Order one, don't just shoot one shot, all right? We need to wipe them all out as quickly as possible.”

“We know.” Simone said. “Hailey said to make them pay for what they did.”

“We're all going to honor her wishes.” Jelly said. “Everyone, let's go.”

I shot two missiles at the temple on the surface of the planet, wiped it from existence, then our six ships turned around and flew at our best speed to separate Lagrange points and entered hyperspace.

Our campaign of the systematic eradication of The Order had begun.

*

Two months later, The Order's home planet appeared to be calm and didn't show any outward signs of distress or that anything was wrong. If you looked inside the main council building however, it was a different story.

“Are you getting a copy of these reports?” One of the council members asked. “Entire outposts and their defending ships are being destroyed! Even the temples!”

“I don't know what to tell you.” The head of the council said. “A mysterious ship shows up in each system, broadcasts a ridiculous message about us condoning their actions, then they erase all traces of The Order from the surrounding space.” The female alien with antlers said. “If it wasn't for the government contacts we have in those systems to send us the relay, I doubt we would be getting the reports we are.”

“We need to do something about this!” One of the others said.

“What do you suggest we do?” The head of the council asked.

“Assemble a fleet! Lay in wait for this mystery ship and then destroy it!”

“That would be wonderful if it would work.” One of the others said. “What if we assemble a task force at one system and they hit the next one and skip what would be a heavily defended one?”

“We can't just sit here and let this happen.” Another said.

“I have a suggestion.” A disembodied voice said.

Everyone in the room looked around with both their eyes and with Presence. Their shield barrier was back in place and they didn't see anyone.

“Having trouble finding me?” The voice said. “I suggest looking up.”

They all looked up just in time for a modified missile to explode just above the building and the blast that absorbed everything stopped about midway down the walls of the council chamber.

“Hello.” A green hooded cloaked figure said as they floated down to land in the middle of the room. They wore a black bodysuit and had ten Light swords on their belt. “I'm here for Lashina.”

“You have no right to-URK!” The voice cut off as a Presence blade cut their throat.

“I wasn't asking permission.” The figure said. “For some reason, I can't feel her very well around here. She wasn't in her office or her living quarters, so I thought you idiots had her here under some kind of barrier.” A hand flashed out and the shield disappeared as the emitter was dissolved. “Tell me where she is.”

“You're him.” One of the guards at one side of the room said. “The Hunter.”

The figure turned to the guard and gave him a little bow, then a dozen laser bolts bounced off of the figure's personal shield. “That's not nice.” Another hand waved and the guards that had shot at him from the other side of the room had their legs cut off instantly. “Don't make me angry.”

“She's in the East Forest Gla-” The head of the council's word ended as her head imploded and her body slumped to the table.

“Any other lies?” The figure asked. “No? Good. Where is she?”

“She is with The Wise One.” One of them said.

“Thank you.” The figure said and walked towards the chamber door. Before anyone could breathe a sigh of relief, a dozen modified focusing crystals appeared on the table and exploded. The doors disappeared as they dissolved and the figure walked on and killed everyone between him and his destination, no matter who they were.