The 200th floor of the Obsidian Spire was no longer a normal room. It was a battlefield where the laws of physics had gone to die. The heavy black glass roof was completely gone, shattered by the giant golden sphere that had tried to crush the city. The cold, gray wind of the outside world howled through the broken walls. Soft gray ash fell from the sky, landing on the ruined floor. But the floor itself was the most impossible thing of all. Elijah, the King of the Grey, had used the Akashic Mandate to rewrite the room. The black glass floor had turned into a window looking deep into outer space. It was a swirling, beautiful galaxy of burning white stars and pitch-black emptiness. Because of this starry floor, gravity was completely broken. Elijah had declared himself the absolute center of gravity. Trapped in this new, localized gravity field was Barachiel. The Archangel of the Firmament. Barachiel was a m

The massive, terrifying pressure in the throne room suddenly began to drop. Marcus let out a mechanical gasp as the weight on his metal chest lifted. He slowly pushed himself up from the floor, his internal fans spinning wildly to cool his overheated core. Inside the white-hot star, Barachiel began to panic again. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" Barachiel screamed. "WHERE IS MY MASS? WHERE IS MY GRAVITY GOING? YOU ARE EMPTYING ME!""I am showing you the dark, Barachiel," Elijah said coldly. Elijah pushed his starry hand deeper into the shrinking core. He wrapped his fingers around the very center of the Archangel’s soul. He felt it. It was a solid, physical object hidden inside the white-hot light. "Got you," Elijah whispered. He gripped the object tightly. He pulled his arm back with a massive, violent jerk. Elijah ripped his hand out of the white-hot gravity-matter. The moment his hand le

Deep in the absolute darkness of the Void-Bleed, the horror was total. Elijah, the King of the Grey, stood on the floating piece of broken stone. His starry skin pulsed with raw, Kingly power. He had just absorbed the Authority of Weight. He was stronger than he had ever been. But standing across from him was a nightmare. Adam the Plumber, the First Sovereign, had done the impossible. He had not just killed Ares-Prime, the Archon of War. Adam had assimilated him. Adam stood tall. His neat white suit was torn and stained with golden blood. His right arm, which Lyra had ripped off, had grown back. But the new arm was a massive, thick limb of dark red metal and pulsing purple veins, stolen directly from the Archon’s body. He held Ares’s giant, bloody sword in his hand. Adam smiled his handsome, arrogant smile. Golden blood dripped from his chin. He chewed the last piece of the Archon’s magical core and s

As the Spire rose higher into the sky, the glowing gray beams of magic connecting New York to Paris, Rome, Moscow, Tokyo, and London stretched upward. They did not break. They became longer, thicker, and more flexible. They looked like massive, glowing gray umbilical cords, tying the floating city to the surface of the Earth. The Spire rose 100 feet. Then 500 feet. Finally, it stopped. The Obsidian Spire hovered exactly 1,000 feet in the air. It was a flying needle of black death. It hung perfectly still in the gray sky, surrounded by the glowing, protective dome of the Grey Web, which had moved up with the building. Down below, the massive crater where the Spire used to sit was exposed. The chaotic, black ink of the Void-Bleed bubbled at the bottom of the hole, safely far away from the humans. Adam the Plumber was trapped down there, yelling in frustration as the city literally floated out of his reach. Inside the floating Spire,

Elijah blinked hard. "What was that?"He looked down again. It happened again, but this time, it lasted a full second. The solid, shiny black glass of the Spire disappeared. In its place, Elijah saw a totally different building. He saw dirty, gray concrete walls covered in peeling paint. He saw rusty metal bars on the windows. He saw narrow, dark hallways filled with flickering fluorescent lights. The people were not wearing clean white robes. They were wearing dirty gray uniforms with numbers stitched onto the chests. The beautiful, magical Obsidian Spire was overlapping with a dirty, ugly, old-world prison building. "Marcus!" Elijah yelled, spinning around. "Did you see that?""SEE WHAT, SOVEREIGN?" Marcus asked. His gunmetal body was perfectly still. "The Spire," Elijah pointed at the floor. "It just turned into a prison. The walls were concrete."Marcus’s silver eye-slits flared as he ran