"Welcome home, children of the spark."The whisper didn't come from a speaker. It drifted from the very walls, cold and dry as bone dust.Li Xuan raised his hand, a soft golden-silver light flaring from his palm. The illumination didn't spread far. The surrounding darkness seemed to eat the light, keeping it confined to a tight circle around them."My scanners are completely dead," Elias whispered. He tapped the screen of his portable terminal, but the glass remained blank and lifeless. "No gravity readings, no atmospheric pressure, nothing. It's like we're standing in a dead zone of physics.""We are," Aria-Ra said. Her boots made no sound against the pale grey stone floor. She reached out, her gloved fingers hovering just inches from a massive pillar that stretched into the infinite gloom above. "This is my father's architecture. Pure, geometric, unchanging. He designed this place to resist the very concept of time.""Can we move forward?" Li Xua

The wave of black, entropic energy hit them like a solid wall of freezing iron."Xuan! Hold on to the platform!" Elias's scream tore through the comms, but the sound was instantly swallowed by a deep, deafening roar.Then, there was only silence.Li Xuan did not feel the impact of the stone floor. He did not feel the cold of his suit or the frantic pounding of his heart. The flashing red lights of the Genesis Chamber dissolved into a vast, featureless grey expanse.He was standing on a surface of smooth, motionless water. Above him, there were no stars, only a soft, unchanging fog."It is quiet here, is it not?"The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It was soft, melodious, and perfectly still. It carried no anger, no malice. It sounded like a mother whispering to a restless child."Where is Elias? Where is Aria?" Li Xuan asked, his hand instinctively reaching for his sword. The hilt was gone. He looked down and saw his hands wer

The smoke on the Sun-Spear bridge was thick enough to choke on. Lin Yue dragged herself across the shattered deck plates, coughing violently as her hands found the auxiliary communications console. The primary screens were completely dead, melted into useless plastic and copper by the reactor's overload."Ying Yue! Do you copy?" Lin Yue screamed into the static-filled headset. "Ying Yue, please tell me you can hear me!"A harsh, crackling sound came through the speaker. "Lin... Lin Yue? I hear you. The planetary sensors just detected a massive energy spike from your position. What happened?""The reactor," Lin Yue gasped, wiping blood from her forehead. "I had to blow the safety dampeners to force the transmission through the gate. Xuan has the data. He knows what the Unmaker is now.""But at what cost?" Ying Yue's voice was strained, background alarms blaring from her own end on Red Stone. "The Andromeda Gate is buckling, Lin Yue. The feedback f

"Aria, get back!" Li Xuan barked, shoving her behind a fractured stone pillar as a wave of dark pressure slammed into the metal catwalk."Xuan, watch out!" she screamed. "Above you!"The towering angel of shifting dark matter lunged, its colossal wings slicing through the violet air with the sound of tearing metal. The entity hovered, its bleeding purple eye fixed entirely on them. Then, the dark matter of its chest began to swirl, shifting from a dull violet into a blinding, familiar dual radiance. Gold and silver currents began to spiral around its obsidian limbs."Is that... Yang and Yin?" Aria-Ra gasped, her fingers frantically tapping her wrist pad. "The biometric sensors are off the charts! It's copy-pasting your exact neural and energy signature!""Can it copy this?" Li Xuan growled, stepping forward."Don't do it!" Aria-Ra warned. "If you attack with balanced force, it will just reflect it!""We don't have time to hesitate!" Li Xuan

The cold iron of the entropic claw squeezed tighter around Li Xuan's throat. His vision flickered, the gold and silver light of his core fracturing into jagged, painful shards inside his chest."Xuan!" Elias screamed. He dragged his battered body forward, firing his sidearm uselessly into the dark-matter arm. The plasma bolts simply dissolved into grey mist upon contact. "Let him go, you bastard!""The spark must sleep," the Unmaker's collective voices whispered, vibrating through the metal of their boots. "The pain ends now.""Not today," Li Xuan choked out.He clutched the dark wrist with both hands. He didn't try to balance his energy. He forced a raw, violent surge of golden Yang fire straight from his palm. The sudden heat hissed, boiling the entropic shadow until the claw cracked and shattered into purple dust.Li Xuan hit the deck plates, coughing violently. Cold, dark blood splattered against his cracked visor."Xuan! Can you stand?"