The First King looked at the red pings flooding my system and he laughed. It wasn't a human sound. It was a roar that tore through the vacuum and I watched as a serrated rift opened behind him. The shockwave hit the debris of the solar system. Saturn’s rings didn't scatter; they were sucked into the tear like dust into a furnace."You think you have started a war, little ghost," the King said. He leaned back on his throne and the stars in his armor pulsed with a mocking light. "But you have only invited the debt collectors. And I will take the first payment.""I don't owe you a damn thing," I said. I tightened my grip on the solar fire and I prepared to lunge."You owe me for the breath I allow you to take," the King said. He reached out with a single finger and pointed toward the distant blue speck of Earth. "Let us see how your 'Sovereign Abyss' handles the weight of its own arrogance."I saw a beam of black light shoot from his fingertip. It traveled across the system in a blink

I stood on the edge of the Himalayan ruins and I let the Pearl’s pulse sweep across the globe. Billions of signals hit my mind. They were all corrupted by the System’s code. But then I found it. One single heartbeat. It was soft, steady and clean. Out of billions of lives, only one heart beats with pure human blood. "I have the lock," I said. I didn't wait for a reply. I launched myself from the peak and tore through the sky like a falling star."Osric, wait!" Sora’s voice was a crackle. "The Drowned units in that sector are starving. The Gravity Anchor is cutting off their energy supply. They’re hunting anything that moves.""Let them try," I said. I slammed into the ruins of Oakhaven. The ground shattered under my feet and I stood up in a cloud of gray dust. The town was a graveyard of rusted cars and collapsed roofs. I followed the pulse and I found a hatch buried under a mound of lead-lined rubble. It was an old-world fallout shelter."Get out of the way, Lord Leviathan," a voi

I hit the seafloor of the Atlantic trench and the impact sent a tremor through the base of my spine. Elara was tucked against my chest and she was shivering against the heat of my plasma-scorched armor. "We’re inside," I said. I kicked the blast doors of Base-Zero shut. The sound echoed like a gunshot through the empty halls."Osric, the Anchor is at maximum draw!" Kael’s voice barked through my neural link. "The Earth’s core is down to 40% thermal capacity. If that engine doesn't turn over in the next five minutes, the magnetic field fails. We all turn into cosmic dust.""I’m at the console," I said. I set Elara down on the cold steel floor. The Anti-Gravity Engine sat in the center of the room and it looked like a heart made of brass and ancient glass. It was silent and it was waiting. The heart-shaped chamber at its center hissed open. A Sleep Chamber slid out on a hydraulic rail. It was a glass coffin and it was lined with needle-thin sensors.[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: UNREGISTERED

The deletion of the Overseer didn't bring peace and it didn't bring clarity. It brought a riot. Without the System to regulate the Pearl’s output, the energy surged through my marrow. My skin split. I felt my ribcage expand and snap, then reform into something broader and sharper. My obsidian scales were falling off in wet clumps and new, serrated plates were punching through the raw meat beneath."Osric, what is happening to your biometrics?" Kael asked. "I’m not seeing levels anymore. I’m not seeing Tiers. Your DNA is... it’s unraveling. You’re mutating at a thousand percent per second!""The leash is gone," I growled. My voice sounded like a shovel dragging over gravel.I looked at my hands. They weren't hands anymore. They were clusters of twitching claws and black eyes that blinked from my palms. My jaw unhinged and more teeth slid into place, row after row of ivory. I was becoming a nightmare that the Andromeda Kings hadn't factored into their math."You look like a monster,"

The Atlantic had turned into a boiling graveyard. I dropped Elara on a stable ledge of coral and dived back into the trench. The First King was standing on the ocean floor and the water was screaming as it hit his overheated plates. He looked like a fallen sun and the deep-sea pressure didn't even make him flinch. I hit the sand twenty feet away from him and the impact sent a cloud of silt into the dark. "You’re still breathing," I said. I flexed my fingers and my black claws slid out. "That’s a mistake.""I am an Eternal," the King said. He straightened his back. The emerald radiation leaking from his chest hissed in the water. "You are a fluke of evolution. A stray dog that bit its master. You think because I fell that I am beaten?""I think you’re in my world now," I said. I stepped forward and the silt swirled around my ankles. "No throne, no fleet. Just you and me in the dirt.""I don't need a fleet to erase a speck like you," he said. He raised his gauntlets and two blades of