Elowen screamed and the sound was a digital tear in the fabric of the room. I watched her human face peel away like wet paper and the skin didn't bleed. It just flaked off to reveal glowing green lines of code pulsing underneath. The woman I had married was gone and the machine was all that remained."Let go of me!" She shrieked and her voice was a chorus of a thousand distorted voices."I’m not letting go until I see the bottom of your trash bin," I said and I squeezed her throat harder. I felt the hum of the server mainframe vibrating through my bones. "You’re killing the host!" She yelled and her body flickered between a young woman and a mass of raw data. "If I die, the bridge collapses! Your men will be crushed in the void and you’ll be trapped here in the dark forever!""I’ve spent plenty of time in the dark," I said and I looked at the system prompts flashing in the corner of my vision. [SEARCHING CORE FILES... TARGET ACQUIRED: ELOWEN.EXE.][STATUS: ADMINISTRATOR.]"System,

Millions of Drowned workers floated in the black and they looked like a swarm of angry flies against the burning curve of the sun. I watched from the bridge of my command dreadnought as they deployed into the vacuum, their bioluminescent suits blinking in the dark. They weren't building with steel or glass anymore and the old world’s tech was too weak for what I wanted."Status report on the first sector," I said and I didn't turn my head as the Admiral approached."The anchors are set, Lord Leviathan," he said and I could hear the fear rattling in his chest. "We are ready to begin the biological grafting. But the heat... even with the shields, we are losing hundreds of workers every hour.""Then send thousands more," I said and I gripped the railing of the bridge. "The sun is a waste of resources as it is. It throws its light away into the void. I want all of it, every photon and every spark.""The scale of this project is... it is impossible," the Admiral whispered. "A shell aroun

The sun was screaming. It wasn't just a sound in my head; it was a physical vibration that rattled my teeth and threatened to shake my interceptor into scrap. A solar flare, a million miles of white-hot violence, whipped across the dark and caught my outer defensive line. In a second, three thousand satellites were gone. They didn't melt, they just ceased to exist."Osric, the outer ring is toast!" Jax yelled. "The star is falling apart from the inside. The expansion is going to cook Earth before the hour is out!""Not while I’m breathing," I said. I slammed the throttle forward and felt the G-force shove me into the seat. "System, wide-band broadcast. All frequencies, all sectors."[BROADCAST READY.][TRILLIONS OF DROWNED UNITS STANDING BY ON THE EUROPA GATE AND THE SPIRE.]"This is your King," I said. I didn't care if I sounded like a man or a monster. "The sun is cracking. If it goes, we all go. I need a plug. Every soldier, every worker, every creature with a pulse of my essence—

The Star-Eater didn't die. It detonated. When my fist pulverized its core, the dark matter didn't vanish and it inverted.A flash of white-hot violence erupted from the center of the entity and it was so bright the sensors in my mind screamed. Eight minutes later, every human on Earth who happened to be looking at the sky was plunged into a sudden, screaming blindness. The sun was gone, replaced by a supernova-level glare that burned through eyelids and camera lenses alike."Osric! The shockwave is expanding!" Kael’s voice was a frantic mess of noise in my head. "The thermal wall is moving at a fraction of light speed! It’s going to vaporize Venus and Earth before we can even send a warning! You have to stop the bleed!""I'm on it," I said, and my voice felt like a tectonic plate shifting. I wasn't a man or a soldier anymore. I was a moon-sized mass of sentient plasma and I could feel the gravity of the entire solar system pulling at my skin. I reached out with arms made of fusion f

I felt the pressure of the Andromeda King trying to weld my knees to the floor of the void, but I didn't break. I didn't resist, I ignited. My plasma body flickered, a violent pulse of white and violet fire that pushed back against his crushing weight, and I stood up. I stood until I was looking at him in his star-filled eyes. My feet were planted on the curvature of the sun’s crust."You look surprised," I said. The solar wind carried my voice like a physical slap. "Did you think I was just another rock in your collection?""You are a speck," the First King said. His voice was a tectonic shift that nearly knocked me back. "You are standing on a dying star and you are holding a treasure that belongs to the hierarchy. Do not confuse survival with strength.""The hierarchy?" I asked. I reached into my chest, feeling the Abyssal Pearl. It wasn't just a battery or weapon anymore. I felt the data flowing through it and I realized what it actually was. "This isn't a prize, you arrogant ba