A cage is only built to hold something the jailer is too afraid to kill.The Chimera Star-Fortress was a stealthy ship that cruised the Seventh Continuum's dead, gray static. In the far distance, millions of miles ahead, the enormous Dimensional Prison loomed like a black jagged monolith, holding the corrupted reality tight. There were no windows or docks; it was completely smooth and had a sickly green energy that was necrotic; it was suppressing the very concept of free will.Inside, Nova was scanning with her fingers flying across the assimilated bridge console. The hull is made of hyper-dense abyssal alloy, and it's absorbing our radar, but I can still see the signatures, and there are exactly forty-two Tier-9 Creator Cores trapped inside.Jax broke his metal-colored knuckles. Do we blow out the doors, King?“No,” I said, my Tier-9 white-gold aura lighting up the bridge. Do not knock on a prison door; take it off the hinges.I didn't have to wait for the Vanguard Fleet to get into

Loyalty is a currency that many claim to possess, but few can actually afford when the stakes are infinite.The Nexus went into an apocalyptic frenzy of color and sound. The Abyssal Armada engaged the thousand Chimera dreadnoughts below us, with Jax in the fray. It was a free-for-all in space; no one had to hold back from getting so close to each other that their hands were touching. A Vanguard ship would fire a dark-matter beam, which would then bend back and destroy the escort ship. The necrotic mouths of zombified Leviathans ripped through silver alloy as they tore through the dimensional static."Hold formation!" On the telepathic frequency, Jax's voice was distorted by battle rage. "Nova, power to forward thrusters! Ram those bastards!"In the midst of the chaos, I spotted Jax's flagship head-on with a zombie Leviathan that was the size of a city. The explosion temporarily left the scanners of the Star Fortress temporarily stunned, but the battle continued.The actual war started

The death of a god should leave a profound, universal silence. But the Abyssal Council didn’t leave silence. They left a scream that threatened to tear reality in half.I drifted in the frenzied, kaleidoscopic emptiness of the Nexus. The center elder was totally destroyed, reduced to trillions of harmless black pixels. Forty-one Vanguard Kings surrounded me, their white-gold auras blazing in absolute victory. We had won. We had killed the predators of the multiverse.But when it came to a prize of fire, victory didn't matter.Below us, the huge, jagged wormhole ripped through the Nexus, like a bleeding wound above my perfect, utopian Earth. A cosmic waterfall of raw, corrupted dimensional static started pouring through the rift, a slurry of dead timelines and crushing anti-gravity."Kaelen!" I heard Nova's voice screaming through my comms with the sound of absolute panic. The static is impacting the Earth's atmosphere! Not burning it, it is deleting it! The obsidian spires in the nort

The ocean is the universe's ultimate hiding place. When you fill it with the raw, chaotic static of a dimensional tear, it becomes a graveyard for gods.I was standing at the reinforced glass viewport of a sleek dark-matter Chimera submarine, diving quickly into the deepest unexplored trench of our newly created Nexus Earth. The water outside was not blue; it was a swirling, toxic, dimensional fluid and crushing pressure.I glanced in the mirror. Even though I had to hike up the heavy, compressed Chimera tactical dive suit, my basic facial structure was absolutely intact and stubborn. I was still Kaelen Vance. I would not be changed by God or the crushing ocean of a mutated ocean.From the pilot's seat, Jax roared, "Passing twenty thousand leagues. Jax growled from the pilot's seat, "Passing twenty thousand leagues. Hull integrity is good, but the ambient pressure out there is crazy. If we break, we'll be crushed into diamonds in a microsecond.Maya was beside the sonar terminal, but

When you discover the gods that tormented your species are just defective lines of code, you don't pray to them. You debug them.I covered the seven white-gold fragments on the obsidian pedestal with my bare hands.No resistance was found. The fragments knew their true master. They melted immediately into a stream of pure, unalloyed creation code, up my arms and into my chest. There was no pain, but a vast, speeding clarity that opened my mind up to the multiverse.The two pieces of shards that were already within me violently magnetized to the other seven. My Tier-9 core, which was broken, had to be repaired and became completely intact, but that wasn't the end of it. The man with the silver hair was a first algorithm being; his absolute white light came out of him and filled my body, combining the ancient Progenitor Failsafe with my fully restored Creator Core.Creators Core Fully Restored d. 9 of 9 Shards Synchronized.][Integrating the First Algorithm. Bypassing Artificial Limiter