The Apex Spire wasn't a building; it was a chained constellation.The peak lay in the absolute center of the Upper Realm's Neutral Zone and consisted of a huge continent of polished neutron-star cores, bound together by gravity tethers. It did not circle a sun, for the Neutral Zone was a true, dead vacuum, one area where no one empire could get a home-field advantage by having any ambient cosmic Qi.I didn't take the dreadnought. The hijacking of a warship in front of a diplomatic meeting was a clear sign of insecurity.I folded space from the First Citadel, creating a momentary gap in space in the vacuum, and walked onto the landing concourse of the Spire. To my right, Ghost appeared, his deep violet shadows undisturbed by the ambient energy. Elara stepped to my left, and her black hard-light wing was folded snugly under a freshly sewn cloak of woven celestial silk.We didn't need to wait for an escort. I walked past the multi-armed, towering celestial honor guards, my boots firing g

For three months, I didn't see the violet auroras of the Upper Realm. I saw only the blinding, super-heated plasma of my own accretion disk.I was standing in the middle of the bottom engineering space of the dreadnought, my feet stuck to the obsidian deck by my own weight. Each time I inhaled, it was like I was breathing ozone and liquid metal. The Twentieth Form: Accretion Forge was a miracle for a little while, but for a whole 90 days without a break was a form of spiritual torture.Crack.Another stream of hyper-dense, super-heated Zenith platinum flash frosted at my exhale under the star light and fell to the deck as a pitch-black, perfectly balanced Event Horizon spear.Exhausted but triumphant, Maya's voice crackled over the intercom, "That's one hundred thousand. She was in a control booth behind a large sheet of void-glass, her Tier 7 tech-meridians vibrating. Vanguard infantry is fully armed, heavy artillery plating is reinforced, Boss... cut the forge, you need to breathe.

The Celestial Emperor didn't wait for my opening strike. He lunged.The blade of pure Zenith logic didn't cut into the air, it was an air already cut. He swung it at a speed that had no respect for the laws of gravity, and landed right at the seam of my pitch-black Event Horizon collar.I didn't try to parry. I lifted my left arm, knowing that the armor, compressed and accretion forging, would do its job.CLANG.The sound of the impact was like a death knell. The Zenith logic crashed into the Event Horizon alloy and ignited with a ferocious fire. My localized black hole was hyper-dense and subatomic, resisting the divine algorithm of the Emperor's sword trying to overwrite it. A huge shock wave of repulsive physics erupted outward and vaporized a hundred yards of the solar-fire deck all around us in an instant.The eyes of the Emperor were like a perfect mirror. The unblemished blade didn't even mar the matte-black metal.I barked, "I told you," as I stepped into his guard and swung t

The Gravity Fleet did not sail through the Zenith Gate; we eclipsed it.The golden light of the Heavens was so bright that it was blotted out by the sheer crushing mass of the black, pitch-billed, moon-sized leviathans that rose through the three hundred mile wide dimensional rift. I was wearing the Event Horizon armor and drinking in the ambient radiation as we passed the last barrier into the Zenith Stratum.We were not met by any defensive perimeters. The Emperor had sunk his entire fleet down to the First Stratum and it was gone.The Zenith Stratum was a terrifyingly quiet place. It wasn't a planet. It was an endlessly extended absolute geometry construct. Between floating continents of flawlessly smooth, white-gold marble, oceans of liquid starlight flowed. There was no weather, no wind, no decay. It was a land of cold, rational beauty.It was quiet," Ghost whispered, coming up to my side. Here his violet shadows only trembled in the face of this immense, unyielding order. "Too q

The physical universe was reduced to the agonizing, crushing weight of the Zenith Throne pressing against my spine, but I wasn't blind.In the absolute silver of our soul-bond, my consciousness flew with Aria. Unable to move my limbs, I felt the dead cold vacuum of the Neutral Zone as the Alpha Leviathan broke realspace above the Apex Spire.I saw the huge, floating continent of polished neutron-star cores through Aria's eyes.She didn't wait for docking clearance. The Alpha Leviathan loomed directly over the center amphitheater of the Spire, casting a moon-sized shadow over the god-kings and cosmic bureaucrats gathered there. Aria was standing on the open edge of the empty belly of the beast. Violet shadows filled the vacuum to her right, belonging to Ghost. Elara's black hard-light wing was stiff to her left.Ten thousand Eclipse Dynasty infantry stood behind them in pitch-black Event Horizon armor. They didn't make a sound. They simply absorbed the ambient light of the Heavens, a s