The hunter peered down from the branches, its head cocked. A low, grinding hum came from its chest.Cora froze. Valeria slowly moved her hand toward her sidearm. Finn just stared, breath held.The wounded Observer at their feet did something surprising. It didn't cower. It lifted its head and let out a soft, pulsing chime of light from its own core. It wasn't a weapon. It was a signal.The hunter above tilted its head the other way. The grinding hum stopped. For three long heartbeats, nothing moved.Then, the hunter shifted. Its focus wasn't on its wounded kin anymore. It was scanning the area the glowing moss, the thick, vibrant roots of the Synth-zone trees, the very air that hummed with the distant Song of the Core. Its posture changed from predatory to… cautious. Even confused.The wounded Observer chimed again, a more complex series of pulses. It pointed a trembling finger at the ground, at the roots, then at its own chest, and finally at Cora.It was telling the hunter something

The silence after the hunters left felt thin, like a sheet of ice over deep water. New Haven was a mess. The cracked Ursa-Tree, the smoldering meeting hall, the shattered silo they were wounds that would heal. The deeper wound was in the air, in the way people looked at the sky, at the Emissary, at each other.They had been attacked. Not by beasts or rival clans, but by star-faring enforcers with a grudge. Because they’d sheltered a listener.Sable found Cora in the command center, her anger cooled into something harder. “You stood against them. I’ll give you that. But you also painted a target on our backs the size of a planet. What happens when the ‘Three’ come back with more?”“We get stronger,” Cora said, her voice raw. “We finish the Nexuses. We learn everything the Emissary has to teach. We make our ‘Song’ so loud and so strong that they can’t afford to mess with us.”“Or they just drop a rock on us from space,” Sable muttered, but she didn’t argue further. The shared shock of t

The Reclaimers worked fast. Within hours of landing, they’d transformed a ten-mile stretch of the European Chasm’s edge. Where there had been jagged ruins and toxic soil, there was now flat, graycrete foundation.Towering machines, like skeletal praying mantises made of gunmetal gray alloy, walked on spindly legs, their “mouths” blasting rock with focused sonic beams and sucking up the dust.They processed it on the spot, extruding neat, identical bricks of refined material that other, smaller machines stacked into featureless, blocky structures. It wasn't building. It was packaging."They're not even terraforming," Marc said, his voice tight over the comms as they watched the live satellite feed. "They're… asset-stripping. Turning a planet into a warehouse."ANALYSIS CORRECT, the Emissary intoned. THEIR GOAL IS MATERIAL DENSIFICATION FOR TRANSPORT. THEY WILL REDUCE THE PLANET TO ITS MOST COMPACT FORM. ORGANIC MATTER IS A LOW-PRIORITY CONTAMINANT TO BE VAPORIZED."Us," Lia said flatly

The three ships of the Chorus hung in the sky, silent and beautiful, like frozen music. They made no move to descend, no move to attack the battling horrors below or the wounded world. They simply observed.The contrast was excruciating. Below: a raging, grinding conflict between sterile order and screaming chaos. Above: serene, intelligent grace.INITIAL CONTACT PROTOCOLS ENGAGED, the Emissary announced, its mental voice carefully modulated. THE CHORUS IS A COLLECTIVE OF PASSIVE XENO-HISTORIANS. THEY POSE NO DIRECT THREAT. THEIR PRESENCE COMPLICATES THE STRATEGIC SITUATION.“Complicates?” Roric barked over the comms, the sound of the distant battle still roaring behind him. “We’ve got space angels watching us throw mud. This is worse than complicated.”The Listener had gone utterly still, its chiming silenced. It was fixated on the ships. A feeling of profound, humble reverence mixed with sharp anxiety flowed from it.They are the Great Listeners, it chimed privately to Cora, Finn,

The Director Beacon project, dubbed "Salvage Symphony," became the heartbeat of their new world. It wasn't perfect. Sometimes a Reclaimer excavator would glitch, interpreting a command wrong and veering off to gnaw at the edge of a safe zone before the Beacon could correct it. It required constant, vigilant oversight from a new team of "Earth-Shapers" a mix of Aetherius technicians, Ironblood engineers, and Sylvan Weavers who could sense the land's distress.But it worked. The Deadzone began to shrink, not into sterile blocks, but into clean, leveled earth. The radioactive rubble was processed, the toxins isolated and vitrified into inert glass blocks that were then buried deep in sealed vaults. What remained was fertile, empty soil.And that's where the second part of the symphony began.Using the Emissary's vast biological archives and the Gardener units' skills, they began planting. Not just the hardy, hybrid Synth-zone trees. They planted old-Earth seeds, recovered from vaults a