The council chamber had never felt small before. It was a cathedral of steel and cold light, a place built to intimidate the unprepared and silence the inexperienced. Yet as the commanders and directors filled the tiered seats, an unmistakable tension draped across the room like a weighted curtain. They whispered in tight clusters, glancing toward the elevated central platform where Leon would soon stand. Some wore their unease openly. Others hid it behind military discipline or political masks. But all of them felt it—the shift in the Dominion’s center of gravity. Leon arrived without ceremony. He walked down the central aisle with a deliberate, measured stride, Kael on his right and Lira on his left. Conversations choked off row by row as they approached, a wave of silence following them up to the central platform. By the time Leon reached the podium, the room was silent. Not respectfully but fearfully. Expectantly. He didn’t begin with a speech. He simply stood there, lettin

Dawn crept across the Dominion like a blade of pale gold, slicing through the last remnants of night. The Citadel’s upper windows caught the first light, scattering it across the tactical chamber where Leon stood with Lira and Kael. The air felt denser now—charged, waiting—as if the entire nation was holding its breath for his command.Outside, the horizon brightened. Inside, the room darkened around Leon as the holo-map shifted into its final lock-in configuration.—SYSTEM REQUIRES FINAL AUTHORIZATION—His palm hovered inches above the biometric panel. Once he pressed it, there would be no turning back. No pause. No negotiation. The purge would ignite through every node of the Dominion, sweeping through the ranks with surgical precision, extracting traitors and collapsing every hidden structure the Accord had grown like mold inside his world.Lira stood slightly behind him, her posture steady but her eyes tracking every flicker in his expression. Kael stood to his left, battle-ready,

The Dominion slept beneath the velvet hush of night, unaware that far beyond its borders, the Accord made its first move. It began subtly—so subtly that not even the Citadel’s hyperwave scanners detected the shift. No alarms. No warnings. Only a faint ripple through the atmospheric grid, like a whisper passing across the sky.The Accord didn’t strike with armies.They struck with erasure.In a small, isolated district on the Dominion’s far western border, a facility known only to a handful of Leon’s intelligence officers fell silent. At exactly 02:14, its power grid collapsed. Cameras froze mid-frame. Communications died mid-transmission. Lights flickered once, then vanished altogether. To the inhabitants of the sector, it looked like a sudden blackout caused by a failing substation.But inside the darkened facility, twelve researchers lay slumped over consoles, still breathing but unconscious. A paralytic gas, engineered to dissipate in minutes while leaving no trace, hovered like a

The dropship’s landing gear scraped against the scorched desert floor, kicking up a cyclone of dust that spiraled into the air like a living creature fleeing the heat. Leon stepped out first. The storm winds whipped at his coat, flaring it behind him like the mantle of a king approaching a throne he hadn’t yet taken—but fully intended to. The ground beneath his boots vibrated with a pulse not born from tectonics, but from something living. Something waiting.Lira and Kael followed, weapons drawn, scanning the frontier that had ceased to look like a desert and now resembled the outer skin of a colossal, slumbering beast. Bioluminescent veins—blue, purple, and faintly gold—snaked beneath the sand, converging toward the massive black structure rising from the heart of the wasteland.The hive.It towered like a twisted cathedral of bone and obsidian flesh, its surface shifting under its own weight, as though breathing. Tendrils of resinous material stretched like petrified roots, crawling

The chamber couldn’t hold them.The moment Leon and the Progenitor collided again, the hive’s walls reacted like a living organism in pain—shuddering, contracting, then expanding violently as cracks split the resin-like material from floor to ceiling. Light bled through them in rapid pulses, as though the hive itself couldn’t decide whether to stay intact or collapse entirely.Leon struck first this time.He pivoted sharply, landing a blow to the Progenitor’s side that detonated in a burst of gold. The impact threw the Progenitor off balance for the first time—but only for a breath. Its body restructured instantly, muscles reweaving, bone realigning, the wound sealing before the fragments even hit the floor.“You cannot win,” the Progenitor said, its voice smooth now—fully formed, fully resonant. “You fight with borrowed power, Leon. I am the source.”Leon didn’t answer. He drove forward again.The Progenitor caught his wrist.The moment their skin touched, Leon felt something invasiv