The sky above Bastion Aegis-7 was no longer an atmosphere; it was a hungry, gaping mouth.
The Vanguard's heaviest orbital defense cannons, massive rail-batteries capable of cracking moons and vaporizing Hive-Cruisers in a single volley, fired with deafening, world-shaking roars. Millions of tons of hyper-dense, superheated plasma hurtled upward into the jagged tear in reality.
The Vanguard Elites on the battlements watched, their breath catching in their throats, waiting for the familiar, blinding explosions of a successful anti-orbital strike.
But there were no explosions. There was no fire.
As the plasma rounds struck the massive, drifting obsidian tendrils of the dark-matter Leviathans, the ammunition simply ceased to exist. The fundamental laws of thermodynamics were casually ignored. The plasma didn't cool; it unraveled, dissolving into a stream of raw, pale Aether that flowed upward into the ethereal bodies of the true masters.
"Keep firing!" a Vanguard Captain screamed, his voice cracking with sheer, unadulterated terror as he stared up at the cosmic impossibility. "Overcharge the batteries! Burn them out!"
Standing on the highest battlement, Thorne did not fire a weapon. He stood perfectly still, his boots anchored to the permacrete by a Tier III [Gravity-Anchor].
He was watching the Vanguard die.
It wasn't a battle. A battle implied an exchange of force, a struggle between two opposing wills. This was simply a harvest.
A massive, shadowy tendril, thick as a skyscraper and radiating absolute zero temperature, drifted lazily downward from the rift. It swept across the eastern quadrant of the fortress. It didn't smash the walls, and it didn't crush the three hundred Elite Vanguard infantry stationed there.
It simply passed through them.
Thorne watched in absolute, paralyzing horror as the heavy Vanguard poly-steel armor, the kinetic shields, and the flesh and bone of three hundred soldiers instantly lost molecular cohesion. They didn't even have time to scream. Their physical forms dissolved into a swirling mist of pure, glowing Aether. The glowing mist was sucked upward, a microscopic drop of nourishment for the starving gods.
The eastern quadrant was completely empty. Not a drop of blood, not a scrap of metal remained. They had been conceptually erased from the universe.
"Fall back to the inner courtyard!" Commander Vraxx's guttural voice boomed over the localized comms. The towering Tetramorph bounded across the battlements, all four of his arms blazing with high-tier Aetheric output. "Concentrate fire on the Locusts! Ignore the shadows in the sky! You cannot shoot the void!"
Vraxx was a veteran of a thousand campaigns, but even he knew that his forty-five cores were completely useless against entities made of localized dark matter. He directed his fury at the panicked, fleeing Harvest bio-swarms that were raining down from the rift, desperately trying to give his men something physical, something mortal, to fight.
Thorne snapped out of his shock. Jax hadn't trained him to stand still and watch people die.
Thorne leaped from the sixty-foot battlement, his massive, eight-hundred-pound frame hurtling toward the central courtyard where the Vanguard infantry were being swarmed by terrified, stampeding Locust Centurions.
As Thorne fell, he engaged the Tier III [Magma-Vein] and the Tier IV [Seismic-Tread].
He struck the permacrete floor of the courtyard like a meteor.
The kinetic impact triggered a localized, hyper-dense tectonic shockwave. The ground violently buckled, liquifying instantly into a pool of bubbling, white-hot magma. Dozens of massive Harvest Locusts that had been about to tear into a squad of Vanguard medics were instantly swallowed by the earth, their bio-armor melting into slag.
"Get behind me!" Thorne roared at the terrified medics, sliding into a heavy Xing Yi posture, his bare arms expanding as he pushed the density of his standard cores to their absolute biological limit.
A massive Locust Behemoth, blind with panic as it tried to flee the Leviathans above, charged blindly toward Thorne's position.
Thorne didn't flinch. He engaged the Tier II [Kinetic-Capacitor], planting his feet. As the multi-ton beast rammed into him, Thorne absorbed the momentum, his muscles bulging, the stone beneath his feet cracking. He released the stored energy in a devastating uppercut, his magma-infused fist shattering the Behemoth's chitinous skull and sending its massive corpse flying backward.
"Hold the line!" Thorne yelled, trying to project the unshakable certainty of the Monarch to the shattered soldiers around him.
But the line did not exist anymore.
A shadow fell over the courtyard. The temperature plummeted so fast that the sweat on Thorne's forehead instantly flash-froze into ice crystals.
He looked up.
One of the dark-matter Leviathans had descended through the artificial clouds, its colossal, shifting form blocking out the dying red light of the system's star. It was so impossibly large that the human brain struggled to comprehend its geometry.
A dozen obsidian tendrils drifted down toward the central courtyard, searching for the richest concentrations of Aether.
"Scatter!" Vraxx roared from the upper tiers, firing his mag-rail cannon and his Tier V Gale-Cleaver at the tendrils. The hyper-compressed air blades struck the dark matter and simply dissipated, completely ignored by the cosmic entity. "Break formation! Run!"
But the Vanguard Elites were paralyzed. The primal, suffocating terror radiating from the Leviathan overwrote their military conditioning. They dropped their rifles. They fell to their knees.
A tendril drifted directly toward the squad of medics Thorne was protecting.
Thorne's jaw clenched. He pushed the Gravity-Anchor to its maximum output, rooting himself into the deepest bedrock of Bastion Aegis-7. He raised both of his massive, obsidian-hardened arms, attempting to physically intercept the dark-matter appendage.
"Thorne, move!" a Vanguard sergeant screamed.
"I am the mountain," Thorne grunted, his eyes blazing with fierce, desperate defiance.
The dark-matter tendril brushed against Thorne's crossed arms.
It didn't hit him with kinetic force. It hit him with the crushing, conceptual weight of absolute zero and infinite emptiness.
The Tier III [Gravity-Anchor] in his soul instantly shattered.
The Tier II [Kinetic-Capacitor] violently short-circuited.
The Tier IV [Seismic-Tread] was ripped from his spiritual architecture, completely dissolved by the touch of the First.
Thorne let out a roar of absolute agony as three of his twelve cores were conceptually erased from his marrow in a fraction of a second. The pain was blinding, a violation of his very soul.
He was thrown backward, his dense, obsidian-hardened skin cracking and bleeding raw Aether. He crashed through a heavy permacrete barricade, tumbling into the dust.
Through blurred, agonizing vision, Thorne watched the tendril pass over the spot where he had just stood.
The medics, the Vanguard sergeant, and fifty Elite infantrymen dissolved. They unraveled into glowing mist, their perfectly refined, battle-hardened marrow siphoned upward into the belly of the Leviathan. They were gone. Not dead. Erased.
Thorne struggled to his hands and knees, spitting a mouthful of blood and ash onto the broken ground.
His remaining standard cores were screaming in terror, instinctively trying to shut down to hide their Aetheric signatures from the predators above.
Thorne looked around the courtyard. Commander Vraxx was missing an arm, his Tier V broadsword dissolved, desperately trying to rally the surviving troops into the subterranean bunkers. The Vanguard was breaking. The fortress was dissolving piece by piece.
Thorne looked up at the jagged tear in the sky. He looked at the six colossal, planetary-sized eyes staring through the rift, watching the harvest with cold, ancient indifference.
Jax's voice echoed in Thorne's memory, spoken in the absolute stasis of the Null Zone.
The Vanguard taught us how to be soldiers. Today, we learn how to be gods.
Thorne realized with a sickening, heavy certainty that the Vanguard's entire understanding of the universe was a child's sandbox. Tier III, Tier IV, Tier V... it was all just mud. You couldn't fight the ocean with mud.
He wiped the blood from his chin. His scarred face hardened, the fear burning away, replaced by the deep, tectonic resolve of the Earth-Golem.
He had to use it.
Even if it tore his own body apart without Jax's Bagua flow to lubricate the friction. Even if it painted a target on his back for every cosmic monstrosity in the sector. If he didn't draw the god-killer now, Bastion Aegis-7 would be a dead rock in five minutes.
Thorne planted his boots in the dust. He closed his eyes, bypassing the shattered remnants of his standard cores, and reached into the deepest, darkest abyss of his marrow.
His massive fingers wrapped around the heavy, iron chains holding back the Tier VI True Weapon.
Thorne pulled.