Some time ago.
"You have grown splendidly," Henriech said, hovering above the corridor with his fingers already crackling. "I swear I could have blown you to smithereens if you had been that weak, manipulated child of Marcaella."
He fired. Explosive lasers streaked downward in a tight spread.
Cale swung his spear and deflected every one of them, the impacts ringing up through the shaft and into his arms.
'His Yaicraft is explosions, both at close and long range his destructive nature makes it hard to approach him. But I do have a solution for it, though it needs a special condition to work.'
However Henriech's onslaught gave him no chance at all. Explosive bombs flew toward him one after another and he evaded, moving constantly, cutting through what he could reach with his spear.
But he could not get close to Henriech.
And getting close was the only thing that mattered.
Henriech kept up his relentless attacks but made sure not to break the walls, giving Cale no advantages from the debris. He slid backwards looking completely unruffled, though he shot occasional inquisitive glances at Cale, who continued to dodge and deflect his assault.
"How strange," Henriech said. "I have not once even sparred with you, yet somehow you seem familiar with how I fight."
Cale didn't answer with words. Multiple red chains flew toward Henriech, faster than the bombs.
Midway the chains and bombs clashed, erupting into a series of explosions. But some of the chains came out unaffected and reached Henriech.
'These are normal chains infused with Yai. Surely he knows they pose no threat to me.'
Still, Henriech decided to use one of his stronger techniques.
'I am Ascension 2, Stage 7 and he is keeping up with me. I assume he is around the same, but lower than mine.'
"Skill: Paradazia."
He clasped his hands together and in an instant transformed into more than a hundred destructive bombs, shooting at ferociously high speed toward Cale.
But seeing Paradazia activate, the corner of Cale's mouth curled up.
'He has fallen into the trap.'
Cale made a gesture with his hand.
"Chainez: Sentient Bind."
His lower body transformed into hundreds of red chains and flew outward, spreading and weaving rapidly until they formed a wide net in the air between them.
The bombs struck it all at once, the middle bulging deep and straining under the sheer force of the impact, and then the net folded inward and wrapped around them completely, pulling tight like a fist closing.
The explosions happened inside.
The force was tremendous, the kind that would have leveled a wall or caved in a reinforced floor without much complaint. But it never broke through.
Every time the blast reached the inner walls of the net it simply vanished, like it had transported elsewhere, redirected clean, and the outside of the net as did not so much as tremble.
'Impossible. This is not a skill at Ascension 2 level. My bombs can blast away buildings.'
Henriech was shocked. More than shocked, he was genuinely agitated, and that was not a feeling he was accustomed to.
Standing at the pinnacle of Ascension 2 he understood its limits better than almost anyone alive. He had spent years mapping those limits, testing them, finding every edge and working right up to it.
What he had just watched did not belong anywhere inside them.
But his surprise had not ended yet.
"Chainez: Antarlya Eskinoz."
Cale lurched forward, spear leveled, closing the distance in an instant.
At the same moment the chains binding Henriech tightened all at once, coiling harder and forcing him back into his human form with no room to resist it.
Henriech frowned and drove his Yai against the bind, and felt his musces straining but the chains held without any sign of giving, and the spear drove forward and impaled him, piercing clean through his heart.
Henriech looked down at it. Then up at his son.
"Kids these days," he said, his voice carrying the same easy tone as he had always expected something like this from Mracaella's son. "Welcoming their father with a spear through the heart."
"You are no father of mine." Cale's voice was flat and without heat, which somehow made it worse. "You are not worthy to carry the name of Artem, traitor."
Henriech fell to the floor, still impaled, still chained, and on top of him holding the spear steady was his son, standing over him without any particular expression on his face.
"Honor this, honor that." Henriech spat blood onto the floor beside him. "Do you know how corrupt the roots of the great family trees are. They are the furthest thing from righteous."
"You must understand why I haven't killed you yet," Cale said. He pressed and twisted the spear. "Now tell me how many of you are here."
'It's no use. My Yaicraft has been completely nullified by this spear. I will die at this rate.'
Henriech however still managed a smirk despite being on death's door.
"Don't you get it. I am just a decoy." His eyes drifted sideways. "Look around. Where is that little wife of yours."
Cale's face paled.
It might be one of his tricks to get out of the situation, one of his many shenanigans.
That was precisely why he had used a spear made by his family, designed specifically to kill Henriech. He had planned for this.
He took the risk and dragged Henriech along with him as he began moving through the ruined corridors, calling Shilial's name, eyes sweeping every corner.
"What do you want with her?"
Henriech thought about it for a moment with the casual expression of someone who had all the time in the world.
"Good question. I don't know."
"Don't give me that crap. A decoy, did you come disguised among the delegates, then..."
But just then he heard it. The chirping of wings, the dry buzzing of insects coming from around the curved part of the hallway.
'Hmm.'
A swarm of butterflies poured into view and he squashed them all instinctively with his chains before they could spread.
"Let's make a deal," Henriech said. "I will tell you where your wife is, but eventually you will have to leave me. You have no time to spend on me right now. Your wife is one of their objectives."
Cale stayed silent.
Things lined up beautifully and disturbingly at that moment. But a question remained. Who had the power to take Shilial without any noticeable fuss. She was a prominent Ascension 2, Stage 4 Yai user. That was not someone you moved quietly.
Meanwhile.
"Who are you."
Shilial had been teleported into a place where nothing existed but a flat white plane stretching endlessly in every direction. A young boy stood in front of her. Her gaze fell immediately to a distinguishing feature of the boy.
He had no genitals.
"Who you ask! Does it matter! Who I am going to be, that's what matters."
The boy said it with a smile.
"What roundabout and boring words for a fake child to say."
Shilial said it plainly, though she already understood her situation. There was someone else present among them, hidden, and that someone was at least Ascension 3. The gap between the peak of Ascension 2 and the initial stage of Ascension 3 was tremendously large. Ascension 3 marked the beginning of what people called transcendentals.
She took a step back.
"Let me answer myself then. Who I am going to be is that unborn child of yours, and the one who will scorch all the great families." The boy's smile didn't waver. "For I am the Golden King."
Shilial gasped. Not at the threat itself but at the name he had just called himself.
The Golden King.
Cale left Henriech where he lay and moved directly toward the lab.
On his way he passed casualties but kept moving. Shilial and Correl came first right now, everything else could wait.
The octagonal gate was locked when he arrived. He rummaged through his pockets, pulled out a card, and slotted it into the panel. The gate hissed open.
And the spatial explosion caught him the moment he stepped through, without giving him so much as a fraction of a second to process what was happening.
"Shilial!"
He shouted her name blindly into the white.
****
He floated in a void where nothing existed to pull him back. No up, no down, no floor to find with his feet or ceiling to press against with his hands. His body drifted slow and weightless while his mind stayed sharp enough to panic about it.
The void wasn't black. That was the part that bothered him most.
It was everything and nothing at once, dimensions layering over each other like transparencies slightly out of alignment, producing a shimmer at the edges of his vision he couldn't quite look at directly.
"Babe," he whispered into it.
His voice went nowhere.
"Fuck." He exhaled slowly. "I should not have listened to the professor."
He thrashed anyway, arms swinging wide, reaching for Zelaine's hand or her shoulder or even just the sound of her breathing.
The void swallowed the motion and gave nothing back.
*What is happening.*
The voice arrived inside his skull rather than through his ears. It sounded like his own voice but not quite. Same pitch, same cadence, but older and colder underneath, layered with echoes that didn't belong to him.
"Foreigner. Why thee seek to enter our hell."
It didn't sound like a threat. It sounded genuinely puzzled, the way someone sounds when they open their front door and find a stranger standing there in the rain with no explanation.
Atiya went completely still.
*What hell. Who the fuck are you.*
The voice went quiet for a moment. Then:
"You do not know," the voice murmured, turning the words over. "Then perhaps the time hath come."
"Welcome, foreigner. Give us your judgement. To our forsaken hell. To the beautiful land called Ellejort."
The void shifted.
The overlapping dimensions began to separate and resolve, each one pulling back until only one remained, sharpening into focus, swallowing the rest.
"Judge us, foreigner."
Atiya's jaw tightened. His mind turned everything over at once without resolving any of it. Zelaine slumped against the railing. Correl's message. Nongban's small polite smile right before everything went white.
He opened his mouth.
No sound came out.
****
On the 49th Belt, Zextire's warship screamed out of warp with its hull glowing red from emergency deceleration, engines flaring hard as it braked above the station's outer ring.
The sight that met them was destruction.
The debris belt, normally a slow and orderly rotation of shattered asteroids and derelict hulls, had been thrown into complete chaos. Massive chunks spun wildly and collided in slow grinding carnage.
The station's outer barrier flickered erratically, entire sections simply gone, violet cracks spiderwebbing across what remained like fractures in old glass.
The main docking arms had been sheared off entirely. Hangar bays vented atmosphere in long glittering plumes that caught the distant starlight and scattered it.
And at the station's core, where the restricted labs had stood, there was nothing. A perfect crater of warped metal and empty space. No signals. Nothing that suggested anything had ever been there at all.
The lab, the cylinder, the box, and everyone inside had vanished. Atiya, Zelaine, Correl, Nongban, Cale Artem, Shilial Kaslana Artem.
Gone, all of them, on the same quiet afternoon.
Zextire stood at the main viewport and stared at it for a long time. Then he reached for the secure line.
"My lady."
Inteja's voice came through cold and flat. "Report."
"The branch core is gone. The labs are missing. Atiya and Zelaine were inside when the explosion occurred." He paused.
"No traces. No signals. Nothing."
The silence that followed was the kind that came from someone deciding something rather than processing it.
Then Inteja's voice, quiet and final.
"Find them."
Zextire swallowed. "Yes, my lady."