The Krodo armada had two objectives upon entering this star system.
The first was obvious: destroy the impossible black hole before it consumed everything.
The second was more delicate—uncover its origin.
The high council of Krodo suspected that the anomaly was not natural at all. They feared it was the result of some civilization's weapon—a catastrophic super-project gone out of control.
That possibility was the only reasonable explanation for why a black hole of such absurd size had appeared without warning, and why its diameter reached over a thousand light-years. It was a violation of every known law.
And like the nations of ancient Earth staring at the first nuclear weapons, Krodo's powers were torn between terror and greed. They feared such destructive might… yet secretly longed to claim it.
Still, philosophy could wait. The immediate threat was the black hole itself. If it continued to grow unchecked, both this star system and Krodo would be lost.
With multiple scout wings dispatched to gather intelligence, Commander Trana pressed the fleet forward. Their FTL and curvature drives were more advanced than even the peak of the Human Federation, and the armada advanced swiftly.
---
Days later, after an eerily unopposed journey, they reached the anomaly's perimeter.
The armada was so vast that Trana had to disperse them across dozens of star systems just to find room.
Inside the flagship, experts clustered around the main display, voices overlapping.
"There's… something at the core," one explained. "But the gravitational field is too intense. None of our quantum probes can return data."
Trana frowned.
'Something inside? The worlds it swallowed?'
He let the experts ramble through technical jargon until his patience ran out.
"Enough theory," he interrupted. "Tell me plainly—do you know how to dismantle it?"
The scientists exchanged uneasy glances, then shook their heads.
A scholar from the Zelaiada civilization, a being of writhing tendrils, finally spoke through low-frequency harmonics:
"Our people have unraveled small black holes before. Many civilizations here share that experience. But this… this is different. Its structure is alien. If we apply old methods, one of two things may happen: either we succeed… or we detonate it. And that would annihilate this system, and the neighboring ones as well. We need more time."
"How much time?" Trana pressed.
The answer was blunt.
"We don't know."
Silence fell. Trana's five hearts thudded in his chest, and even the battle-hardened officers shifted uneasily.
Before he could decide on their next move, his communicator pulsed urgently. The signal source—one of the recon squadrons.
'Please… let it be good news.'
He answered.
The voice on the other side was panicked, near incoherent:
"The black hole—don't go near it! There's something inside! Entire civilizations have sent fleets to destroy it before us, and all were annihilated! Everyone here is abandoning the system! No one dares stay!"
The words hit Trana like a hammer. His hearts skipped, his gaze snapping to the viewscreen where the titanic void loomed.
And then—
Ripples spread across its surface, distorting spacetime like raindrops disturbing a still lake. The readings spiked wildly; its gravitational field surged out of control, climbing higher and higher.
Trana swallowed hard. His instincts screamed.
"Full retreat!" he barked. "Maximum power! Burn the reserves if you have to—get us out!"
The order echoed through the fleet.
Yet many scientists, ignorant of the recon report, clustered around displays in morbid fascination. To them, this was history.
"Remarkable," one murmured. "A black hole emitting light…"
Golden radiance flickered from within the darkness.
"An unprecedented discovery! If only we could—"
The sentence broke off in a strangled gasp.
Because something emerged.
From the event horizon, a colossal arm of gold and crimson slowly pushed outward, wreathed in concentric halos of light. Its sheer scale was unimaginable; stars that once seemed vast now looked like specks of dust against its skin.
In every mind aboard, a name appeared unbidden, carved into thought as if it had always been there:
AEON CRONOS.
They did not know how. They did not need to. They knew.
Terror unlike anything they had ever felt seized them.
And then, the hand closed.
It was not a strike, nor even a deliberate act of violence—merely a casual flex, a gesture.
But with it came infinite gravity.
Entire star systems, dozens of them, spanning light-years, were dragged across space in an instant and compressed into that hand.
To Aeon, they were no more than marbles in a child's palm.
...
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