Captured by the Yandere Space Pirates

Across the station, in the Backdrop Biome, the sound of the screaming woman hit differently.

Huddled in their gray concrete blocks, the people flinched as the broadcast crackled through worn down speakers. It could be them one day, that was a reminder.

To the King, these souls were less than human—vermin, kept alive only as "insurance" for his whims.

They were nothing more than tools—disposable, interchangeable, and ultimately worthless. Their lives held no weight, their deaths even less. Decades ago, when a rival station dared to challenge his rule, he responded not with diplomacy or strategy, but with sheer, callous brutality.

A few thousand men from the Backdrop—desperate, starving, forgotten souls—were pressed into service. They were given untested rifles, weapons that fired either way, and a single order: storm the enemy's hull.

It was a slaughter before it had even begun. The station's plasma defenses tore through them, vaporizing bodies in bursts of searing light, their screams lost to the silence of space.

Not one returned. But the King had not flinched. He had watched it all from the comfort of his private chamber, standing by the viewport with a glass of amber liquor in hand. The glow of distant explosions reflected in his youthful, impassive face.

He did not mourn. He did not rage. He merely drank, watching as their blood, weightless in the void, drifted like dying embers in the dark. Because they were a decoy in his plan, which eventually brought the entire rival station down to ruins and their leader to the King's feet.

There came a time when a small pebble created waves. The rations in the Workers Biome had grown thin, the usual supply chains stretched to their limits, and murmurs of discontent and rebellion had begun to spread like a slow-burning fire.

The King, ever watchful, sensed the shift in the air—the way shoulders tensed, the way voices hushed when his enforcers passed. He knew unrest when he saw it. And he knew how to snuff it out.

With calculated precision, he orchestrated a riot—not a real one, but something close enough. His guards stormed the Backdrop in the dead of night, setting torches to crumbling buildings, dragging screaming men and women into the open. Chaos bloomed. It didn't matter that the violence was staged, that the terror was scripted. What mattered was the message. 'There is no room for rebellion.'

When it was over, fifty families were gone, their remains of bodies ejected into the void, spinning through Saturn's orbit like forgotten wreckage. To the workers who remained, who huddled among the ruins with soot-streaked faces and hollow eyes, he offered nothing but a smirk. "Now behave," he said, a guarantee that silence was wiser than rebellion.

These weren't his people by choice. They never had been. More than a century ago, when the King's father was in his prime, when he first carved his dominion across Saturn's orbit, he had swept through the scattered colonies like a plague.

Back then, small stations dotted the void, stubborn outposts clinging to independence. They had resisted his rule, believing they could defy him. They were wrong. He had shattered them one by one, their hulls split open, their oxygen bleeding into the black.

Those who survived and those who surrendered—the broken, the orphaned, the displaced—he had gathered not as citizens, but as refuse. He dumped them in the Backdrop, a gutter of rusting corridors and dwindling hope, to wither away until the day he found a use for them.

The King spared them not from mercy, but calculation—labor for his fields, soldiers for his wars, or fodder for his blame. In the Backdrop, they lingered, a living stockpile of misery.

His tyranny wasn't reserved for them alone. It stretched across the Kingdom, a web of fear spun from the Main Biome's spires. Public executions were his art—bodies strung up in the plaza, broadcasts of agony his signature. Surveillance drones buzzed like flies, their lenses glinting in every biome, catching every tremble of dissent.

Resources bent to his will. Food from the Agricultural Biome flowed first to the Main Biome's tables, leaving workers with husks. Water from the Vaults filled the elite's fountains while the backdrop biome rationed drops. Hoarding was his privilege, obedience his demand—two million souls held tight by an iron fist.

_______-

The Royal bloodline sprawled beneath him, a sprawling lineage of royals plotting their own wars in his shadow.

Aster, once fifth in line, who had fled like a coward—now a pirate in the void. Elara, ninth, lay dead, killed by the pirates. Dozens more heirs filled the ranks, a nest of ambition and cunning, each eyeing the throne for when the King's biotech-fueled youth finally failed or he finally meets a demise at some traitor's hand.

Their wars weren't just about biomes—they were about power, pure and simple. No single prince or princess claimed a whole zone; the Kingdom's systems were too vast, too hard for one heir to hold.

Instead, they built influence—blackmailing, forcing, staging accidents, plotting assassinations—all to gather allies and climb the line, waiting for the King's death.

Prince Kaelon, third in line, led with brute force—a hulking figure with steel-gray eyes, his fists as feared as his name. He'd cornered a Water Vaults overseer, breaking the man's arm to secure a smuggling ring—water siphoned to loyal guards, his numbers swelling.

When a rival, sixth-in-line Princess Lysa, threatened to snitch, he staged an "accident"—her shuttle depressurized mid-flight, her screams cut short.

Princess Venessa, seventh in line, played a subtler game—petite, pale, her voice a silken trap. She blackmailed a tech with stolen love letters, forcing him to rig drone feeds—her rivals' meetings exposed, their allies peeling away. She'd once slipped poison into Prince Toren's wine at a Main Biome feast, but he'd survived—barely—his fifteenth place now a burning grudge.

Prince Dassar, eleventh in line, thrived on corruption—wiry, hawk-faced, his mind a blade. He bribed Manufacturing foremen to funnel solar credits to his coffers, buying soldiers' loyalty. When ninth-in-line Elara's death left a power gap, he tried to frame fourth-in-line Prince Ben for it to have leaked the information about Elara's ship to the pirates—rumors swirled, Ben's allies fled, and Dassar's rank crept higher.

Prince Toren, fifteenth, was a scarred wildcard—lanky, with a gash across his cheek, his temper wild. He forced a Workers Biome crew to sabotage Ben's forge tools—gears jammed, an "accident" crushed Ben's aide, and Toren's name rose in the chaos. He'd tried assassinating Venessa too—a rigged lamp in her chambers sparked a fire—but she'd escaped, her pale face now set on revenge.

Their schemes twisted the Kingdom into knots.

The silent wars pulsed through the station like a slow, creeping infection. A brawl there, and a few hours later, a noble's body found lying in the docks there—each incident small enough to be dismissed, yet together, they whispered of something greater.

The workers murmured behind sealed doors, their loyalties shifting with each new death. The guards, once unquestioning enforcers of order, began choosing sides, their silent allegiances marking the invisible battle lines.

Yet no biome fell.

The Kingdom's systems, engineered for resilience, held strong under the grip of the King's most loyal enforcers. The power struggles of his heirs remained just that—struggles, not revolutions.

But the game was played nonetheless, each move carving unseen lines of dominance, each betrayal a step toward the throne. Kaelon, Venessa, Dassar, Toren—each vying for a legacy that was never promised, each one believing they had what it took to wear the crown.

Aster's ghost lingered in the echoes of unfinished ambition. Once, a formidable opponent for the throne, now leads the pirates, what are her intentions, who is her real enemy, who is she fight for, Will she be a thorn for them?

And through it all, the King loomed above them. Six and a half feet of unyielding might.

Decades have passed under his rule, closing onto a century, yet he remained, untouched by time. His robes pooled at his feet as he paced the Main Biome's grand chambers, his broad shoulders casting long shadows across the marble floors.

He tolerated their games—their plots, their backstabbing, their desperate grasps for power—so long as they remembered who they bowed to.

His rule was iron, his presence eternal. From the heart of the Main Biome, he watched as the station twisted beneath his hand.

The suffering of the Backdrop, the endless wars of his children, the terror that governed the station—it was all his design. A throne built on fear and ambition. And he reigned supreme.

His only fear, which can crumble his empire, with a probability of less than 1%, were the Space Pirates. And the King was dead set on overcoming his fear, waiting for the day he will hang the bodies of the pirates in front of the palace, in display for the entire Kingdom to watch.

-- Space Pirates? My Enemies? Oh! Them? They are being roasted under the sun, no way I will let them die so easily. --