Chapter 4: King versus General

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Khan’s final phrase hit Hiss like a physical blow—his own training methods turned into a promise of defeat. Khan’s tactical lessons, his combat techniques, his strategic mind—all weaponized against their teacher.

Khan exploded forward with inhuman speed, his corrupted reflexes enhanced beyond natural limits. No hesitation. No mercy. The attack came with surgical precision—not to kill, but to disable, to break, to force submission exactly as Hordak had commanded.

Khan’s claws swept in a precise scissor strike—the Naja’tar Submission Hold, a technique Hiss himself had perfected decades ago. Designed to incapacitate without killing, to force surrender through pressure and pain rather than death.

But Hiss had been ready for this moment since the night he felt their bond sever. He pivoted with fluid grace, his serpentine reflexes honed by centuries of combat. Khan’s enhanced speed meant nothing when Hiss had taught him every move he knew.

          “You’re using the Third Form,” Hiss said quietly as Khan’s claws sliced empty air. “But you’ve forgotten the counter.”

His staff whipped around in a low arc, striking Khan’s exposed ribs with the precision of a master facing his most gifted student.

          CRACK.

Hiss’s staff connected with Khan’s ribs in a blow that should have shattered bone. The impact echoed through the chamber like splitting stone, but Khan absorbed it with unnatural resilience. The Slime had reinforced his frame, turning muscle and scale into something approaching armor.

Khan’s retaliation came instantly—a sweeping leg kick that caught Hiss at the ankles, disrupting his balance with the same technique Hiss had used to end a hundred sparring matches. But where those sessions had ended in laughter and instruction, this strike carried lethal intent.

Before Hiss could recover, Khan was airborne, descending with both claws extended like twin scythes aimed at pressure points that would paralyze rather than kill. The student had become the weapon, and every lesson learned was now turned against its teacher.

Hiss twisted at the last second, taking Khan’s claws on his armored forearm rather than his throat. The impact split ancient scales and drew dark blood, but the defensive maneuver saved him from paralysis. Pain lanced up his arm, but decades of combat had taught him to fight through worse.

Around the chamber’s perimeter, his warriors tensed with barely restrained fury. Rattlor’s massive frame coiled forward, rattle singing a sharp warning, before he caught himself and held position. Viper’s grip tightened on his sacred spear until his knuckles went white. Scales bit back a cry of anguish, watching his mentor’s blood stain the throne room floor.

But they held. Even as their King bled, even as their brother-turned-enemy pressed his attack, they held. Because this was more than combat—this was surgery. An attempt to cut away corruption without destroying the patient.

Khan flowed into his next attack without pause—the Sil’naja Vor’kess, a grappling technique designed to immobilize larger opponents. But where Hiss had taught it as a defensive maneuver, Khan applied it with calculated brutality. His enhanced strength, boosted by Slime corruption, turned a restraining hold into a bone-crushing embrace.

Each strike targeted specific nerve clusters—not random violence, but systematic dismantling. Khan was methodically breaking down his former King’s defenses, following Hordak’s command with surgical precision: alive, broken, kneeling. The corruption had turned his protective instincts inside out, transforming every lesson in safeguarding into techniques for subjugation.

This wasn’t warrior against warrior anymore. This was a scalpel cutting apart everything it had once been trained to heal. Khan pressed the assault—no hesitation, no wasted breath. Each strike was precise— And then a feint. A spin. A savage elbow drove into Hiss’s jaw—hard enough to shatter pride, but not the skull.

Hiss reeled—then countered with a coiling grapple, his serpentine body wrapping around Khan’s midsection, squeezing tight. Khan snarled, fangs barred, as he twisted and slammed Hiss against the floor. Stone cracked beneath them.

They separated with mutual wariness, both warriors marked by combat. Dark blood seeped from claw marks on Hiss’s forearm, while Khan’s enhanced frame showed stress fractures where ancient technique had found weak points in his corruption.

Khan’s red gaze swept over his former King with tactical precision, cataloguing injuries, measuring remaining strength, calculating optimal angles for the next assault. But something flickered behind the mechanical assessment—surprise, perhaps, that his enhanced abilities hadn’t overwhelmed the older warrior as quickly as projected.

Hiss studied his corrupted General with equal intensity, seeing past the Slime’s enhancements to read the subtle tells that no corruption could completely erase—the slight favor of his left leg, the unconscious shift in stance when preparing to strike. Teacher’s knowledge against student’s strength.

For precious minutes, they matched each other blow for blow—Hiss’s ancient mastery against Khan’s corrupted enhancement. Neither could gain decisive advantage. Experience countered raw power, while tactical innovation met centuries of refined technique.

But Khan’s red eyes began to glow brighter, pulsing with renewed intensity. The Slime was adapting, learning from each exchange, feeding combat data back into his nervous system. What had been evenly matched was shifting toward Khan’s favor as the corruption analyzed and adjusted to Hiss’s fighting style.

The two Horde Troopers maintained their perimeter, weapons ready but passive—programmed to recognize this as their asset’s primary mission. They would only intervene if Khan faced certain defeat, turning this sacred confrontation into a tactical extraction.

Khan’s eyes blazed brighter, the red glow pulsing like warning beacons as the Slime flooded his system with synthetic aggression. The whispers weren’t whispers anymore—they were commands screaming through his neural pathways:

          HE HESISTATES. COMPLETE THE MISSION. BREAK HIM.

Where Khan had fought with controlled precision before, now raw fury took hold. The corruption abandoned subtlety, pouring every enhancement into overwhelming force. His muscles swelled with unnatural strength, his reflexes sharpened beyond mortal limits.

With a sound that was part roar, part electronic shriek, Khan launched himself forward—no longer the calculated warrior, but something approaching a living weapon programmed for a single purpose: breaking the one person who refused to yield.

Khan’s assault came in relentless waves, each strike backed by strength that exceeded natural limits. His claws carved through Hiss’s defensive positions with mechanical precision, forcing the King to give ground step by precious step across the throne room floor.

Where Hiss had relied on technique and experience, Khan now brought raw overwhelming force enhanced by alien corruption. Each blocked strike sent shockwaves up Hiss’s arms. Each successful hit drew dark blood from ancient scales. The mathematical certainty was becoming clear—endurance favored the enhanced warrior.

The whispers pulsed through Khan’s mind with increasing urgency:

          HE’S FALTERING. MAINTAIN PRESSURE. ACHIEVE SUBMISSION.

The Slime fed him tactical data in real-time, analyzing Hiss’s defensive patterns and exploiting every micro-hesitation, every fractional delay in aging reflexes.

Hiss felt his strength ebbing with each brutal exchange, felt his defensive timing slow by crucial fractions. Mathematical certainty: he would fall within minutes if this continued. But warfare had taught him that when conventional tactics failed, only unconventional ones remained.

As Khan’s claws swept toward him in another crushing strike, Hiss made a choice that defied every combat instinct honed over centuries. He stopped defending entirely.

His arms dropped to his sides. His serpentine frame straightened to full royal height. He met Khan’s blazing red gaze with steady yellow eyes that held no fear—only resolve.

Hiss’s voice cut through the chamber with quiet authority—not the tone of a desperate King, but of a teacher calling an unruly student to attention:

          “Khan.”

The name struck like a physical blow. Khan’s strike halted mid-air, confusion flickering across his corrupted features. This wasn’t in any tactical scenario. Prey didn’t simply… stop.  And yet, something deeper than programming responded to that simple syllable. Not “General.” Not “traitor.” Just… his name. Spoken without fear, without hatred, but with the same patient recognition Hiss had used in a thousand strategy sessions.

For one crystalline moment, the red glow in Khan’s eyes flickered. The Slime’s tactical assessments stuttered as conflicting data flooded his corrupted neural pathways—this wasn’t how targets were supposed to behave. Prey didn’t call their hunters by name with such… familiarity

          “Look at this place, Khan. Really look.”

Hiss gestured to the carved walls surrounding them, his voice carrying the weight of shared history.

          “That mural behind you—it shows the Thornwood victory. Your first major campaign as my General. You were so proud when the artisans asked to immortalize your tactics in stone.”

Khan’s gaze flickered involuntarily toward the carved relief, and for a heartbeat, something shifted behind the red glow.

          “The brazier by the throne still burns with the same sacred oil we lit the night I promoted you. Remember? You knelt right there—” Hiss pointed to the exact spot on the polished floor “—and swore the oath of protection. Not to me. Not to conquest. To your brothers. To home.”

The word “home” hung in the air like an anchor thrown into stormy waters, seeking something solid beneath the corruption.

Khan’s frame convulsed as competing realities tore through his mind. The memories Hiss painted clashed violently with mission parameters, creating feedback loops that made his enhanced nervous system spark and misfire. His claws dug into his own palms, drawing blood as he fought to maintain focus.

The Slime flooded his system with synthetic rage, trying to drown the recognition in chemical fury as the whispers returned:

          LIES. DECEPTION. SUBDUE HIM. COMPLETE THE MISSION.

But underneath the programming, something stirred—not quite memory, but the echo of belonging. Of brotherhood. Of home. His breathing became ragged, shoulders trembling with the effort of containing two warring sets of directives. Sweat beaded along his scaled brow as the internal battle intensified, each of Hiss’s words striking like hammer blows against the Slime’s control.

Hiss saw the fracture in Khan’s composure and pressed forward with surgical precision.

          “I made you General not because I wanted a soldier,” his voice carried the weight of absolute truth, “but because I saw in you a leader. A protector. A son.”

The word “son” hit like a blade finding its mark. Khan’s entire frame shuddered, the red glow stuttering like a failing power source. The whispers screamed for action now, layered, and relentless:

          YOU ARE MINE. ELIMINATE THE THREAT. COMPLETE OBJECTIVES

But something deeper was surfacing, clawing its way up through layers of corruption.

          “You protected your brothers,” Hiss continued relentlessly, each word precisely aimed at the cracks in Khan’s programming.

          “You led them home from battles they should never have survived. You were their shield, their strength, their hope.”

Khan dropped to one knee, claws clutching his head as the internal war reached its crescendo. The Slime pulsed frantically through his system, but for the first time since his capture, something was fighting back with equal force.

The pressure built to an unbearable crescendo—The whispers screaming against buried memories, artificial loyalty warring with genuine love. Khan’s enhanced frame couldn’t contain the conflict any longer.

With a sound like breaking glass mixed with electronic feedback, something snapped inside his mind. The red glow in his eyes flickered rapidly, strobing between crimson corruption and natural yellow as two consciousnesses fought for control.

And then, for the first time since entering the throne room, the real Khan spoke—not with mechanical precision, but with raw, desperate anguish:

          “No… no no no! Get out of me! Stop! Stop!”

The words tore from his throat like they were ripping through layers of synthetic control. But even as he fought, the Slime responded with its cruelest weapon—not pain, but pleasure. That warm, electric bliss that had seduced him in the pit, reminding his corrupted nervous system what surrender felt like.

          “Why fight? You remember how good it felt. The warmth. The peace. No more pain, no more guilt. Just surrender again…”

Khan’s enhanced frame shuddered, but not entirely from revulsion. Part of him—the part the Slime had rewired—craved that chemical bliss. His corrupted nervous system had been conditioned to associate obedience with euphoria, rebellion with agony. Even now, fighting for his soul, his body betrayed him with phantom sensations of that terrible pleasure.

His claws flexed involuntarily, muscle memory of submission warring against conscious will. The Slime’s greatest cruelty wasn’t control through pain—it was making him complicit in his own corruption, making him want the chains that bound him.

King Hiss recognized the signs—the involuntary muscle tremors, the conflicted expressions, the way Khan fought against his own body’s responses. This wasn’t just corruption; this was conditioning. The Slime had made Khan complicit in his own enslavement.

But Hiss had seen warriors overcome impossible odds before. Not through strength alone, but through something deeper than programming could touch. He stepped closer, deliberately making himself vulnerable, showing Khan that trust still existed even when it shouldn’t.

          “I know what it’s offering you,” Hiss said quietly, his voice cutting through the chemical warfare in Khan’s mind. “I know it feels easier to stop fighting. But you’re stronger. You always were.”

          “Your King commands you—resist. Come back to us. Come back to me.”

The royal command crashed into Khan’s consciousness like a battering ram against castle gates. Two absolute authorities—Hordak’s mission parameters and Hiss’s sovereign decree—collided with devastating force. His enhanced nervous system couldn’t process both directives simultaneously. And inside the broken, twisted labyrinth of Khan’s mind—something cracked. A flicker. A tremor beneath the surface of his rage.

His eyes remained open, locked on the world around him— but his mind fell inward like a trapdoor collapsing beneath his feet.

Darkness. Not the clean darkness of sleep, but something hungry and alive. It pressed against his consciousness like deep water, thick with alien presence and corrupted thought.

Voices erupted from every direction. Not whispers now, but a cacophony of synthetic commands layered over stolen memories. They crashed through his mental landscape like competing radio frequencies, each one fighting for dominance:

          “He abandoned you.”
          “You are perfected now.”
           “The past was weakness.”
           “Horde is strength.”
          “Obey. OBEY. OBEY.”

Khan’s consciousness—if that’s what remained—shuddered under the assault. The voices weren’t external anymore; they were coming from inside his own thoughts, indistinguishable from his internal voice. In that storm of synthetic loyalty… Khan’s body—real or imagined—trembled beneath the weight of them. And somewhere in that storm of sound… Khan obeyed.

His physical form remained motionless for a heartbeat, knees pressed into the cracked stone floor where droplets of Slime continued their steady, acidic drip. The throne room held its breath—Snake Warriors frozen, King Hiss watching with desperate hope for any sign of breakthrough.

Then Khan’s frame began to rise. Slowly. Deliberately. Each movement precise and controlled, but wrong somehow—like a marionette being pulled upright by invisible strings. When he stood to his full height, his red eyes locked onto Hiss with renewed intensity.

The internal battle was over. But Khan’s blank expression revealed everything of who had won.

From the perimeter, the Snake Warriors immediately recognized the signal. The chamber erupted in desperate warnings as trained warriors recognized imminent death:

          “My King—MOVE!” Rattlor’s voice cracked with panic, his massive frame already running forward despite the distance.

          “The Neth’kari Strike!” Viper shouted, using the ancient name for Khan’s signature killing technique. “He’s going to—”

          “No shield!” Scales screamed, his young voice breaking. “You have no protection!”

They had all seen this attack before—had watched Khan use it to end battles in heartbeats. But never against their King. Never against family.

Scales didn’t hesitate. The warrior ripped the ceremonial shield from his own arm—the same bronze disc Khan had blessed when promoting him to temple guard—and hurled it with desperate strength across the throne room.

          “My King! Shield!” he cried, his voice cracking with terror and determination.

The bronze disc spun through the air, catching torchlight as it arced toward Hiss. Time stretched impossibly thin—would it reach him before Khan’s strike? The mathematical certainty was brutal: seconds to impact, and Khan’s venom moved faster than thrown metal.

But Scales had thrown with his heart, not his head. Sometimes that was enough.

Khan’s spine straightened, every muscle fiber aligning for maximum strike efficiency. His serpentine frame uncoiled like a siege weapon preparing to fire, hood fully extended, venom sacs swelling beneath his jaw with deadly pressure.

His red eyes locked onto Hiss with targeting precision—calculating distance, trajectory, the exact angle needed to bypass any defensive maneuver.

Hiss caught Scales’ shield with desperate reflex, bronze ringing against his gauntlets. But even as his fingers closed around the rim, both warriors knew the brutal mathematics: Khan’s strike would come faster than any shield could fully deflect. And then— Khan unleashed it.

The attack wasn’t just deadly—it was an abomination. Sacred biology twisted into a weapon that would have horrified the Khan who once knelt in this very chamber.

Hiss had milliseconds to react. Training older than the temple itself kicked in—he angled the bronze shield not to absorb the full impact, but to deflect what he could while minimizing exposure time. But nothing in centuries of combat had prepared him for this.

The corrupted venom struck the ceremonial bronze like concentrated hellfire. Hiss felt the impact travel up his arm like a sledgehammer blow, the ancient metal screaming as molecular bonds dissolved under chemical assault. The shield’s surface didn’t just corrode—it liquefied, bronze running like molten tears down his gauntlets.

Toxic vapor erupted from the point of impact, and Hiss caught the full scent of his own death—ozone, melting metal, and something underneath that burned his nostrils like inhaling acid. The ceremonial runes that had protected Snake Men for generations bubbled and vanished as if they had never existed. The metal grew scalding hot, burning through his gauntlets as structural integrity collapsed.

Hiss gritted his teeth and held on, trying to buy precious seconds as the shield disintegrated around the edges. But physics and chemistry cared nothing for royal determination. The ceremonial bronze had reached its molecular limits.

          “Khan has never unleashed this before. Never at me. Never at anyone.” Hiss thought.

With a sound like breaking glass mixed with escaping steam, the shield cracked down its center. And then—it shattered, dissolving into steaming shards that fell at his feet. King Hiss staggered back, teeth clenched, the toxic fumes biting at his eyes and throat. His arm ached. His palm still tingled with the memory of the shield’s final tremor, as if it had cried out before dying.

Khan stood motionless across the smoking crater his venom had carved in the throne room floor. His enhanced frame showed the toll of the massive attack—shoulders heaving slightly, venom sacs depleted, the red glow in his eyes flickering like dying embers as his corrupted biology recovered.

Slime continued its steady drip from his scales, each drop hissing against heated stone. No expression crossed his features—no satisfaction at near-success, no frustration at missing his target. Only the mechanical patience of a weapon cycling between firing modes.

The silence stretched between them. Both warriors calculating their next move. The first exchange had ended in stalemate, but Khan’s enhanced reserves would recover faster than Hiss’s reflexes.

And in that moment, for just a breath—Hiss forgot the war.

He saw something else. Not the puppet standing before him. But the young warrior he had chosen. The blade he had sharpened. The son he never claimed aloud.

His lips parted.

          “Khan—”

But the word died in his throat as those red eyes fixed on him with predatory focus. This wasn’t his General studying battlefield tactics. This was a weapon calculating kill shots. The creature wearing Khan’s face tilted its head with mechanical curiosity, as if wondering why its target had spoken. His eyes hardened. He stepped forward—not as a mentor, but as a King. Whatever flicker of mourning he felt was buried as there was no time for grief.

Khan’s shoulders were heaving. His venom spent. The air sizzled with chemical heat.
And all eyes were on him. The Snake Warriors froze—caught between awe and horror. The scent of scorched metal and vaporized stone filled their lungs. The moment stretched—long and silent – as if the world itself was waiting to see what came next.

Scales pressed back against the throne’s base, his features contorting with desperate confusion. The sword Khan had gifted him trembled in his grip—sacred steel that might now be turned against its giver.

          “General… please… don’t make me fight you.” Scales whispered.

But Khan’s approach never faltered. No flicker of recognition crossed his features, no pause at Scales plea. His red eyes studied Scales with the same clinical detachment he might show a practice target—calculating angles, measuring resistance, planning the most efficient method of neutralization. The other warriors tensed like springs, watching their brother become prey. And they were terrified.

Tung Lashor took an unconscious step back.

Viper’s grip on his blades trembled.

Scales stood frozen, caught in the crosshairs of that terrible, red gaze.

Rattlor’s massive frame exploded into motion. The veteran warrior surged forward, his powerful coils carrying him between Khan and the other warriors with protective fury. He spread his arms wide, creating a living barrier that blocked Khan’s approach completely.

His weathered face was set in grim determination, but his eyes betrayed the pain of this moment. Rattlor had served under Khan for years, had followed him through campaigns that should have killed them all. Now he stood ready to die preventing Khan from harming the any member of his brotherhood.

His armored frame rose to full height, chest forward, fangs bared. His tail lashed behind him in warning—not retreat, but challenge—and at its tip, the rattle sang a sharp, rising trill. A sound every Snake Warrior knew by instinct. A sound that meant: “Stand ready. No more ground will be given.”

Khan paused mid-step. His red eyes narrowed into slitted pupils and shifted their focus from Scales to this new obstacle. Khan tilted his head with mechanical curiosity, nostrils flaring as he processed the chemical signatures of fear, determination, and desperation that filled the throne room. His forked tongue emerged in a slow, deliberate tasting of the air—not gathering information, but broadcasting threat.

The gesture was pure psychological warfare. Every Snake Warrior knew that motion meant a predator cataloguing prey, measuring weakness, savoring the moment before the strike. Khan was letting them know he could taste their terror, and he was enjoying it.

His red gaze never left Rattlor, but his tactical assessment expanded to include the entire protective formation. Multiple targets. Emotional vulnerabilities. Exploitable loyalties. The veteran’s bravado meant nothing when Khan could simply choose a different vector of attack.

The whispers returned through Khan’s corrupted consciousness, calm and cold:

          They’re in the way.
          Target the formation’s weakest point.
          Complete the objective.
          Obey.

Khan’s claws extended with deliberate precision, each talon clicking against the stone floor like a countdown timer. The sound made every warrior’s scales crawl—they all recognized the gesture from training sessions, the moment before Khan would demonstrate a killing technique on practice targets.

Scales shifted nervously behind Rattlor’s protective bulk, his ceremonial sword wavering as he tried to find courage he’d never needed before. Viper’s grip tightened on his sacred spear until his knuckles went white beneath his scales.

          “He’s hunting us,” Viper whispered, his young voice tight with realization. “Picking which one to take first.”

Rattlor’s battle-scarred face hardened with grim understanding.

          “No. It’s worse than that.” The veteran’s rattle shook once, sharply. “He’s making us choose who dies so the others can live.”

The throne room held its breath. Not the peaceful quiet of sanctuary, but the terrible stillness that comes when predator and prey recognize each other across a killing ground. Even the torch flames seemed to freeze mid-flicker, as if the ancient stones themselves understood that violence hung in the air like a blade balanced on its edge.

In that suspended moment, torchlight caught the viscous Slime coating Khan’s scales, creating an oily sheen that made his corrupted form appear to pulse with unnatural life. He took another step forward. The corrupted General’s red gaze shifted deliberately between targets, letting each warrior feel the weight of being selected, measured, and marked for termination.

Rattlor’s tail snapped taut behind him. The rattle at its end shook again—faster, sharper this time. A rising trill of defiance. It filled the air like a warning before a storm.  The message was clear: Final warning. Cross this line and die.

And Rattlor didn’t move.

Khan raised his arm.

A single claw extended—like a guillotine about to fall.

Then— a voice cleaved through the stillness.

          “Khan!”

It wasn’t a command.
It wasn’t a threat.
It was a cry—desperate, raw, and ragged with a kind of pain no warrior ever wanted to show.

King Hiss stepped forward. No shield. No weapon. Just will and the crushing weight of regret.

          “Here! You want me—not them!”

The words tore from Hiss’s throat with desperate urgency, his royal composure finally cracking under the weight of watching his youngest warrior become prey. This wasn’t the measured command of a king, but the raw plea of someone watching his family being hunted.

Khan froze in mid-stride. His shoulders twitched. Eyes flicked toward the King. Then back toward the warriors. The red glow in his gaze flickered. Once. Twice. Hiss saw it in Khan’s eyes—and knew this had to end. Now.

Hiss’s tactical mind calculated with cold precision. Emotional appeals had failed. Memories couldn’t penetrate deep enough. But rage—rage could burn through any programming. He abandoned every instinct of mentor and father, weaponizing the one thing that might still reach Khan’s buried pride. He gambled everything.

          “Khan!” the King roared again.
          “Look at you… draped in filth. Eyes glowing red like a mindless Horde drone.
          My mistake wasn’t trusting you.
          My mistake was thinking a soft-spined coward could be worthy of the title General.”

The word “coward” struck Khan like a physical blow to the chest. His enhanced frame convulsed as if he’d been struck by lightning, every muscle fiber seizing in violent rejection of the accusation. The insult bypassed his tactical programming entirely, hitting something primal and untouchable—his warrior’s pride.

His fangs ground together with audible force, green saliva mixed with his own blood where he’d bitten his tongue. Claws extended fully, digging into his palms until dark blood seeped between his fingers. The Slime covering his scales began to bubble and hiss, reacting to the spike in his physiological stress.

When his head turned toward Hiss, the movement was slow and deliberate—not mechanical programming, but the terrible focus of rage given form. His red eyes blazed with something beyond corruption: personal fury.

The air seemed to freeze, caught between one heartbeat and the next. Even the Snake warriors, shaken though they were, stepped back. That insult didn’t just wound. It pierced something deeper.

Khan’s roar tore through the throne room like a sound from the depths of the abyss—part rage, part electronic shriek as his enhanced vocal cords strained beyond their limits. The corruption had abandoned all subtlety now, pouring every enhancement into raw destructive force.

He launched himself across the chamber with terrifying velocity, his powerful frame becoming a living projectile aimed directly at King Hiss. Stone cracked beneath his feet where he pushed off, and the air itself seemed to part before his fury-driven assault.

This wasn’t the calculated strikes of before—this was personal. The mission parameters had been consumed by something older and more dangerous: a warrior’s wounded pride weaponized by alien corruption into pure killing intent.

But Hiss had been waiting for this moment—had calculated that only Khan’s personal fury could override his tactical programming enough to make him vulnerable. As the corrupted General hurtled toward him with killing intent, Hiss made a choice that defied every survival instinct: he stepped forward into the path of destruction.

His movements flowed with ancient precision Khan had never seen—not because it wasn’t taught, but because it was forbidden. Royal bloodline techniques, held in reserve for the darkest necessities. For moments when Kings must act against their own sons.

Hiss’s strike sequence unfolded with lethal precision—three points of contact executed faster than thought. The first blow found the nerve cluster beneath Khan’s scaled neck frills, the second targeted the neural junction beneath his dominant arm, and the final strike drove directly into the spinal column where enhanced musculature met corrupted bone.

Each impact released a pulse of golden energy—not magic, but bioelectric disruption channeled through royal bloodline knowledge. Khan’s enhanced nervous system, already strained by Slime corruption, couldn’t process the targeted neural assault.

His killing charge transformed into catastrophic collapse. Enhanced muscles seized mid-motion, his roar cutting off in a strangled wheeze as his diaphragm locked. The fury-driven projectile became dead weight, crashing to the throne room floor with bone-jarring impact.

Around him, the Snake Warriors tensed.

          Yet Hiss held up a hand, “No. This is not the end. Not yet.”

Then the Slime’s corrupted biology began its counterassault against the neural disruption. Khan’s fingers twitched first—not voluntary movement, but synapses misfiring as alien enhancement protocols fought to reestablish control.

One claw scraped against stone, finding purchase. Then another. His recovery was a grotesque parody of birth—dragging himself upward inch by agonizing inch while his nervous system rewired itself around the damage. Each breath came as a ragged hiss, part pain, part mechanical ventilation as enhanced biology struggled to bypass paralyzed pathways.

When he finally stood, his frame trembled with the effort of forcing corrupted muscle to obey damaged nerves. But his red eyes burned with undiminished fury. The Naja’vak Strike had wounded him, slowed him—but it had also proven that even royal bloodline techniques couldn’t break what the Slime had made him.

His gazed locked back on to his old King.

Hiss knew he had wounded him. The strike had been calculated and cruel—but necessary. It wouldn’t hold Khan down for long.

But it had worked. “The Naja’vak Strike” (The Cobra’s Silent Strike) —three pressure points in perfect succession—passed down through royal bloodlines. A serpent’s secret, known only to Kings. Developed in the age of the First Fang, it was designed not to kill, but to cripple a rival long enough to issue judgment. A last resort—used only when a warrior of the bloodline strayed too far to be reasoned with. Its said its precision echoed the cobra’s hood: sudden, silent, and absolute.

Then the Slime struck back with vengeance. The whispers didn’t return gradually—they exploded through Khan’s damaged neural pathways like acid through open wounds, burning away any progress Hiss’s technique had made.

          WEAKNESS. FAILURE. PAIN IS IRRELEVANT.

The commands came layered with synthetic endorphins, drowning his agony in chemical compliance.

          MISSION PARAMETERS UNCHANGED. TARGET IDENTIFIED. COMPLETE OBJECTIVE. OBEY KHAN OBEY.

The corruption flooded his system with artificial purpose, turning damaged nerves into weapons, broken bones into tools of submission. Pain became fuel. Injury became motivation.

Khan’s damaged frame began its inexorable advance across the throne room. Each step was a study in corrupted determination—his left leg dragging slightly from nerve damage, his right shoulder held at an unnatural angle, yet still he moved with mechanical certainty toward his objective.

The sound of his approach was worse than his previous fluid stalking. Now each footfall carried the wet scrape of damaged biology forced beyond its limits, claws clicking against stone not with predatory grace but with the rhythm of a broken machine still following its programming.

Slime oozed from stress fractures in his scales where the Naja’vak Strike had disrupted his enhanced physiology, but the corruption simply rerouted around the damage, turning wounds into weapons, pain into purpose.

The Snake Warriors froze.  Rattlor’s tail rattled without meaning to. Tung Lashor took an unconscious step back, tongue flicking in distress. Scales clenched his spear tighter with whitening knuckles. Even Viper felt it — fear.

His gaze locked onto his old King.

And Hiss knew Khan wasn’t fighting for ground, or for survival anymore. He was coming to finish the mission. Without hesitation, pain, or fear. The Slime coursed through him, an invisible engine driving his limbs, silencing mercy, drowning memory. It masked the agony. Fed the fury.

Each labored step echoed like a drumbeat of doom—claws tapping fractured stone, breath wheezing through fangs, venom clinging to the corners of his mouth.

Hiss could see it now—the calculation behind the rage. The mission that lived inside the monster.

          Bring him down. Deliver him to Hordak. Broken. Kneeling.

The psychological approach had reached its limits. Khan had heard his true name, had responded to being called ‘son,’ but the corruption was too deeply rooted for words alone to break.

This was no longer Khan. Not the son he trained. Not the warrior he raised. This was a walking weapon. And it would not stop until he was defeated or Khan was dead.

          “I led him to this… I chose this path—for all of us. But I never expected it to break him.” The King thought to himself.

A chill crept beneath the King’s scales. His instincts—sharpened across a hundred campaigns—whispered the truth he didn’t want to face:

          “This mission has failed. He couldn’t save Khan. Not like this.”

King Hiss felt the weight of centuries pressing down upon his shoulders as the terrible mathematics became clear. Every tactical option exhausted. Every emotional appeal failed. Every technique in his arsenal proven insufficient against the corruption that had devoured his son’s soul.

His claws trembled—not from fear, but from the crushing recognition of what duty now demanded. The Fang of Ser’quess. The technique every Snake Men King learned but prayed never to use. A mercy killing disguised as combat, designed for the moment when love required the ultimate sacrifice.

The last time it had been employed, King Sss’thaal had wept for seven days after ending his brother’s torment during the Plague of Madness. Now Hiss understood why those ancient tears had been carved into the throne room’s memorial stones—not from grief at the killing, but from the agony of being the one who had to do what love demanded. Passed down as legend, dreaded as necessity, it was never meant for this. Never meant for a son.

Hiss’s heart twisted as he steadied his hand. His eyes lingered on Khan, broken and writhing in the Slime’s grip.

          “I swore I would never call upon it… and yet here I stand.”

He bowed his head ever so slightly, the words forming only in his mind:

          “Serpos, see me. Guide my hand. Let his spirit find the coils of our ancestors, free from this corruption. And if there is judgment to come… place it upon me.”

When his gaze rose again, it was steel.

          “If this is the only way to end his suffering… then let me bear the curse.”

Before Khan’s damaged frame could complete another step toward his objective, reality tore open behind him. A column of concentrated arcane force erupted through the throne room—not the golden energies of Snake Men mysticism, but something alien and violent. Sapphire fire laced with veins of midnight purple carved through the air with a sound like reality screaming.

The magical impact sent shockwaves radiating outward in visible rings of distorted air. Ancient stone that had weathered millennia of wars cracked like eggshell, serpentine carvings splitting along their carved scales. Ceremonial braziers exploded in showers of molten bronze, while sacred flame-crystals embedded in the walls shattered, bleeding their stored light across the devastation.

Khan’s enhanced frame became a projectile of flesh and corruption, hurled backward with such force that the air itself seemed to part before him. He struck the carved pillar depicting the First Fang’s victory—tons of sacred stone that had stood since the temple’s founding—and the ancient monument simply disintegrated around his impact point.

When the explosion of debris settled, Khan lay embedded in a crater of pulverized stone and twisted metal, his enhanced physiology the only thing that had prevented complete obliteration.

When the dust settled, Khan was motionless—embedded in the ruins, twitching, smoke rising from his chest. The glow from the blast still shimmered faintly across his scales.

Through the smoke and settling debris, Khan’s enhanced biology began its automatic recovery. His claws found purchase in the rubble, and he started to drag himself upright—damaged but unbroken, his red eyes already scanning for the source of the magical assault.

But his attacker had anticipated this resilience. A second incantation crackled through the air—not the overwhelming force of the first blast, but surgical precision. Bands of crystallized energy erupted from the stone around Khan, wrapping around his limbs like living chains.

The magical restraints bit deep into his enhanced flesh, conducting electricity directly into his nervous system with each attempted movement. Where the Naja’vak Strike had disrupted his motor control through pressure points, these bindings turned his own enhanced strength against him—the harder he struggled, the deeper the energy burned.

Khan’s enhanced physiology fought against the magical restraints with desperate fury. His corrupted muscles strained against the energy bands, each movement sending arcs of electricity through his nervous system. The Slime covering his scales bubbled and hissed where the magical energy made contact, as if two alien forces were rejecting each other at the molecular level.

But the more he struggled, the tighter the bindings constricted. His enhanced strength, turned against him by superior magical engineering, only increased his torment. His roars of rage dissolved into hisses of frustrated agony.

From the shadows behind King Hiss, a figure emerged with theatrical precision—cape billowing, staff crackling with residual energy. Skeletor stepped into the torchlight as if he had been waiting for exactly this moment, his skull-face grinning with dark satisfaction.

          “Well, well,” his voice echoed through the devastated throne room, “looks like someone could use a hand with pest control.”

          “I can smell the sweat beneath your scales, my King.” The title dripped from his lips like venom, mockery wrapped in false reverence.
          “Your heartbeat echoes off these walls like a war drum.”

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