Act I: Selthara

  The planet, known as Selthara, is a once-thriving world that now teeters on the brink of destruction. Its surface is cracked, scarred by violent tremors, with towering mountains of jagged rock and vast deserts stretching endlessly toward the horizon. Once a center of commerce and culture, Selthara’s cities now lie in ruins, their gleaming spires reduced to rubble and twisted metal.

  The air is thick with dust, and the sky, once clear and full of life, is now choked with the smoke of fires and the ash of burning infrastructure.

  Piercing the horizon like the spears of forgotten titans are massive Skyspires—colossal pillars engineered to receive energy sent directly from space. These ancient constructs, spaced every fifty thousand hectares, once hummed with power and lit the night like artificial constellations. Now, many stand fractured, toppled by seismic upheavals or violently detonated from internal overloads. Some still function, flickering with unstable surges of cosmic light, casting long shadows across the scorched terrain.

  Across Selthara’s dying surface, robotic life clings to survival in diverse forms. Sleek humanoid machines navigate the terrain with practiced efficiency, while others scuttle like insects across metal-strewn fields or soar through the ash-choked sky in wingsuits of polymer and alloy. Towering bipedal constructs with reinforced legs leap across fault lines with seismic grace, while animal-like drones—serpentine, quadrupedal, or avian—adapt to the chaos with fluid, graceful movements. These survivors are scavengers, fighters, couriers, and relics of a more orderly time, each with its own way of coping with extinction.

  In the sky, a massive star looms—Tormad—its radiant light dimming as it nears its cataclysmic end. The star is on the verge of going supernova, its impending explosion threatening to vaporize the planet and everything on it. The once-blue sky now glows in eerie shades of purple and red as the star’s light casts an unsettling glow across the land, accompanied by waves of rising heat that press down like a celestial weight.

  Evacuation efforts have begun, but they are chaotic and fragmented. Small spacecrafts weave desperately through the thickening atmosphere, struggling against solar flares and turbulent updrafts. Their engines scream as they burn fuel at unsustainable rates to escape Selthara’s gravity well. Larger evacuation ships float above in silence, hulking giants with bellies wide open to receive refugees. Yet their holds are overburdened, their weight tolerances already exceeded. Arguments erupt, fists fly, and weapons are drawn as desperate crowds fight for a chance to board. Some ships abandon protocol entirely, launching before their doors even close.

  Among the chaos lies a sprawling research colony built around the fractured remains of a once-powerful Crossroads Portal. The structure was damaged by a solar flare and worsened by constant tremors, leaving it inoperative but still partially intact. A sea of scientists, engineers, and thousands of workers labor under the banner of the Sovereign Confederacy, attempting to repair what remains. Among them is Dr. Elara Voss, a brilliant Xenotech researcher known for her ambition—and secrets. Though outwardly loyal to the Confederacy, Elara is an agent of the Machine Collective, secretly gathering data to reverse-engineer the portal for her own faction’s use.

  The planet is dominated by desert landscapes and arid plains, interrupted only by the skeletal remains of once-great cities—now hollowed out by disaster. Long-forgotten roads stitch the ruins together, their black surfaces cracked and half-buried in sand.

  Yet even these roads live, in a way. Robotic couriers race along them at blistering speeds, some exceeding 600 kilometers per hour, their engines howling like banshees. Others crash spectacularly in their frantic attempts to escape the hellish sandstorms that now sweep the land—sandstorms infused with flame, birthed by the erratic atmosphere and the planet’s shifting core.

  Amidst this chaos, a strange discovery is made in the ruins of a collapsed building: Alcatraz.

  The storage facility stood as a forgotten monument—half-buried in ash, time, and tremors. Once a hybrid structure of ancient stone and sleek alloy, it had long since lost its purpose. Blackened support beams jutted from the collapsed roof like broken ribs, and the stone walls—veined with fractures from constant planetary quakes—leaned inward in defeat. Some sections had buckled completely, swallowing corridors into heaps of rubble and twisted metal.

  Inside, the air was thick with dust and the acidic tang of scorched battery acid. Hundreds of drained energy cells—some shattered,others melted—were strewn across the floor like rusted tombstones. This place had once stored vital power sources, maybe for planetary infrastructure or defensive systems. Now, it was a graveyard.

  A faint tremor passed through the earth. Loose gravel clinked, dust shifted.

  Then came a dull thud.

  And another.

  And another..

  Without warning, debris from the partially collapsed ceiling shifted. A slab of bent alloy gave way as a 4 meter tall towering figure of obsidian metal and ancient engineering burst from the rubble with the mechanical ease of a machine and the deliberation of a man. His armored frame, jagged and angular, is sculpted from hyperalloy composites lost to time—dark matte plating traced with blood-red accents, a silent echo of the Black Halo emblem. His helm, shaped like a war-torn beast, glows with crimson slits where eyes should be, radiating an eerie, constant awareness. There are no facial expressions—no eyes to blink, no brow to furrow—only the cold precision of a soldier reborn in steel.

  Alcatraz.

  He rose from the wreckage slowly, stone and steel sliding from his broad shoulders like the remnants of a shallow grave. His obsidian-black frame gleamed faintly in the low light, scuffed from reentry but unbroken. Gears in his spine aligned with a soft click-click as he rolled his neck once, his amber optic sensors glowing to life.

  A moment passed. He scanned the room—half-sunken walls, ruptured conduits, slagged tech. He was alone.

  He looked up. A ragged hole in the roof yawned toward the murky sky above. It seemed he had fallen—no, impacted—from orbit, crashing through layers of ancient concrete and reinforced steel like a warhead with a soul. The math checked out. His last memory was inside the black hole. The event horizon tearing reality apart. His body shouldn't have survived it. But his heart still beat.

  Barely.

  Where once his organs pulsed with life, now only specialized hardware and vascular conduits remain. The only remnant of his humanity lies deep within—a reconstructed biological heart, the CardioCore, sealed behind reinforced plating. It no longer pumps blood, but instead circulates a fluid designed exclusively for Black Halo operatives—an energy-rich compound that fuels both body and mind. This heart drives Alcatraz’s systems and powers Orion, the galaxy-mapping AI embedded within him.

  Internal auditory sensors pinged. Environmental Warning: Surface Temperature Elevated – 81°C and rising. The air shimmered with latent heat from the bloated, angry star above—an omen of the supernova to come.

  A low hum echoed from within—his CardioCore rebooting. Systems flickered. Damage assessments scrolled. Then another alert:

  Weapon Status: Neutron Sword – MISSING.

  He didn’t react outwardly, but something tightened in the silence. He scanned again. No trace of it here. He stepped over the wreckage of batteries and began walking through the ruin—silent, decisive, calculating.

  As he moves through the collapsed storage facility, he notices movement in the distance. A small, clunky robot, clearly in a rush, darts around debris with an erratic and almost comical gait. The robot’s glowing eyes flicker as it bumps into a piece of twisted metal and stumbles, causing it to release a strange, metallic laugh. With a fast and sarcastic voice it speaks. "Well, well, well, looks like I found someone who's even more of a mess than me! You lost or just in the middle of a very bad day? If you’re looking for a better place to die, you’ve come to the right spot, pal." Its metal frame dented and worn, but its personality… that was far from worn out.

  “Who are you?” Alcatraz’s voice was calm, his tone sharp as he scanned the robot.

  “I’m Sprocket!” the little robot responded, almost too enthusiastically. “I’m kinda like a guide, kinda like a lifesaver, kinda like… okay, maybe not a lifesaver, but I can be useful, I promise!” It buzzed with static and then wobbled over to Alcatraz, ignoring the vast ruins around them as though it were simply another day. He looks like a compact, chubby-limbed utility bot with a smooth white and silver exo-casing that makes him look more like a collectible toy than a seasoned survivor. His oversized head, shaped like a retro-futuristic helmet, houses twin vertical visors that pulse faintly with expressive light—his only real “face.” Each movement he makes gives off soft pneumatic hisses and tiny servo whirs, like a machine constantly trying to overcompensate for its own enthusiastic energy.

  Alcatraz turned around, unimpressed. His scanner began analyzing the tiny machine up and down, trying to process what use it could possibly serve. Despite his stout frame and friendly, harmless appearance, Sprocket was clearly designed for resilience. His joints are reinforced, his stubby fingers carry surprising dexterity, and his legs—though short—suggest some serious mobility boosters tucked away under that chibi chassis. His body is marked with faded industrial symbols and comical self-added stickers, probably scavenged from old tech or printed in moments of boredom.

  “You’re a guide? In this mess?” With a disciplined robotic voice, Alcatraz questions Sprocket.

  “Pfft, mess? This is like my second home!” Sprocket gestured around with one of his mechanical arms.

  “I’ve been everywhere, seen it all. Maybe not ‘everything,’ but a lot of it! I know where the exits are, I know where to find fun things, and I definitely know where to get things fixed!” He spun in a circle, wobbling with what seemed like exaggerated joy.

  “I’m full of good info!”

  Alcatraz eyed him carefully, trying to judge whether the little bot was simply crazy or if there was something useful hidden beneath the chaotic energy. He wasn’t convinced yet. Sprocket continues. “So! Tiny update—sun’s gonna pop, planet’s gonna fry, and we’ve got front row seats. And unless you’ve got an escape pod shoved up your chassis, we might wanna consider the revolutionary concept of not splitting up! You’re the brawn, I’m the... comic relief. Classic team-up material!”

  Alcatraz sighed, trying to ignore the tiny bot’s antics. He activated Orion, his AI system, hoping it could give him something more concrete. The screen flickered erratically “Galactic coordinates… out of sync… timeline discrepancy detected… searching for… relevant data… unable to process… inquiry.” Alcatraz remained calm. This was no help.

  A calm, feminine voice emerges from Orion's audio systems, precise yet soothing. "Orion's systems remain non-operational until synchronization with the accurate cosmic timeline is reestablished."

  “You’ve got an ancient one, huh?” Sprocket chimed in, his voice as fast as a machine gun. “Yeah, I can see that! You want to fix your fancy whispering lady AI? You’ll need the correct timeline, captain. Lucky for you, I just happen to own the galactic master clock... but! It’s locked behind a teeny-tiny quest that involves, say… helping me survive.”

  Alcatraz turned to look at Sprocket, not quite sure if he was seriously suggesting a deal or just babbling for no reason. "What kind of quest?"

  “Oh, well, you see,” Sprocket began, as if this was the most natural thing in the world, "Nothing major — a few death traps, maybe a robot cult. We’ll laugh about it later.”

  Alcatraz wasn’t sure what to make of this, but at this point, his options were limited. If there was even a chance that Sprocket could fix Orion, it was worth considering. “Fine,” he said, his voice steady but with a hint of irritation, “What’s your quest?”

  Sprocket begins explaining his quest with his fast and super annoying voice “The quest is of utmost importance. Critical to the mission. You must recover something for me. My glorious, life-saving, over-expensive suncream! Yes! Stolen by ants! Not just any ants. Radiant thermal ants- giant, angry, solar-powered freaks! You ever seen ants that glow? Neither had I. But they took it.

  And I want it back. It’s essential to my survival... and, y’know, our partnership."

  Alcatraz stares at Sprocket for a long, silent moment. He doesn't blink. Doesn’t move. The only sound is the faint humming of distant collapse. His head tilting just slightly as if trying to determine whether Sprocket is joking or malfunctioning.

  “You’re telling me ants... stole suncream... from a robot.”

  "Not metaphorical ones — actual, crawling, heat-absorbing insects with zero respect for personal property!” Yells Sprocket.

  "You want your timeline? I want my SPF-9000 back.”

  Alcatraz doesn’t respond right away. He just looks at Sprocket. Looks through him. His body doesn’t move, like a statue forged in war and weariness. Finally, he nods once. “Fine.”

  “Y-you mean it?! Oh stars, this is amazing!" Sprocket jumps few times, overexcited. "I knew you had hero vibes under all that broody silence and dramatic armor plating! This is great! Team-up of the century! The Suncream Crusaders! Wait—too soon? We’ll workshop the name!”

  Alcatraz waits another moment before following overexcited Sprocket, then mutters, deadpan:

  “Yeah. You’re totally the one I should rely on to escape this dying planet.”

  The door to the collapsed storage groaned as it pushed open, creaking like a rusted hinge on its last breath. A wave of scalding air hit Alcatraz and Sprocket as they stepped out into the open. The sky above them was a sickly orange, the dying light of a star that was about to collapse into itself, its radiation pulsing through the atmosphere like a slow, suffocating drumbeat.

  The ground beneath their feet trembled slightly, as if the planet itself was holding its breath, waiting for the inevitable.

  Cracks spider-webbed through the streets, wide and jagged like open wounds, with occasional plumes of dust rising from deep fissures. Buildings loomed on all sides—hollowed out skeletons of what had once been sprawling cities, their steel frames twisted and buckled by heat, windows shattered like broken promises.

  The air was thick and stifling, pressing down like an invisible weight. The heat radiated off the ruins and cracked roads, warping the air with waves of distortion. It was so hot that even the faintest movement of the air felt like it would leave burn marks on their metal frames.

  Sprocket’s metal legs clicked and clattered as he moved ahead, his movements stiff but determined as he carefully navigated the broken terrain. “Whew, it’s like living inside a toaster. Nice and toasty, don’t you think?” His voice, light and playful, echoed in the heavy air.

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. He simply surveyed the landscape — the distant, flickering lights of collapsed structures, the ever-present distant sirens that seemed to echo from nowhere, warning of the approaching supernova. High above, spacecraft drifted, some sluggish and barely maintaining flight, others flashing with bursts of weak propulsion. They were all struggling to find a way out of the dying world. Somewhere up there was a wormhole—somewhere—but its location was uncertain, and every ship that passed by seemed to be desperately searching for it.

  But that too was unstable. Just like everything else here.

  The cracked roads beneath their feet were littered with the debris of a lost civilization, each step sending a low tremor through the ground. The scent of gasoline and burning plastic mixed with the oppressive heat, a constant reminder that everything here was decaying.

  Sprocket’s voice, still chipper, broke the silence. "You are probaby curious about your new partner so let me formally introduce myself. Name’s Sprocket! Model... uh, unknown. Serial number? Lost it in a poker game with a toaster. Long story. Look, I might be small, round, and shaped like someone’s adorable desk ornament, but do not let the cuteness fool you—I am 67% alloy, 30% attitude, and 3% duct tape. Built tough, like a vending machine from hell, baby! I got reinforced knees, whisper-quiet servos, and these hands? Oh-ho-ho—precision-calibrated for high-fives and emergency rewiring of interstellar warp coils. My head? Giant on purpose. Housing advanced sensors, multiple satellite uplinks, and a playlist of 80,000 galactic sea shanties. For morale. People say I talk too much. That's just my diagnostic subroutines trying to optimize morale and minimize awkward silences, okay?! I may glitch now and then, sure—but I’ve survived three asteroid fields, two meltdown-level reactor mishaps, and one very mean vending bot named Carl. So yeah—call me comic relief, sidekick, or savior of Scrapland—just don’t call me short. Or slow. Or... okay, maybe a little slow. But I'm working on that!" He was finished as he sprinted ahead. “Come on, tough guy! Keep up! We’ve got suncream to steal!”

  Alcatraz didn’t acknowledge him, his gaze still fixed ahead, taking in the devastation. His systems registered the oppressive heat, but the conditions posed no threat to him. His design had endured far worse—surviving the intense gravitational forces of a black hole. The heat, though unrelenting, was nothing compared to that.

  They passed a long-forgotten oil station, its tanks cracked and spilling black tar into the cracked ground. The scent of gasoline mingled with the stifling heat and decay. And there, amid the wreckage of what might’ve been a place for travelers or traders to refuel, sat a robot.

  He was a cowboy-type model, with a worn, dust-covered hat and a coat that flapped in the wind as he swayed side to side. His joints clicked and groaned as he sloshed from one oil tank to the next, dipping his fingers into the dark, viscous liquid before splashing it across his face and chest.

  “Yeeeehaw!” he shouted, slurring his words as he hiccupped. “End times, y’all! Ain’t no stopping it! Not the sun, not the stars, not even my oil supply!” He took another drink from an open valve, laughing to himself like he was the only one still sane in a world gone mad. “It’s all gonna burn! Y’all just wait!”

  He stumbled toward them, mechanical eyes half-closed in a drunken stupor. “What’s it gonna be, stranger? Wanna join me in the last round? You can call me Roughneck, and I’ll tell ya how this story ends... with me, and the world... all in flames! YEEHAW!”

  Sprocket ran past him, shaking his head with a chuckle. “Not sure we’ve got the time for your end-of-the-world party, pal.”

  Sprocket, much smaller than Alcatraz, had to move quickly, his tiny legs whirring beneath him to keep up and maintain point.

  Alcatraz glanced at the cowboy-robot for a second, and continued forward, as though the absurdity of the moment wasn’t even worth acknowledging.

  “Let’s move” Alcatraz muttered, his voice low and unwavering.

  Sprocket zipped ahead, his legs clicking and scraping against the broken pavement, his tone still overly enthusiastic. “No time for post-apocalyptic oil-drinking cowboy robots! We’ve got ants to fight and suncream to steal!”

  With a final glance at the mad, stumbling figure in the wreckage, Alcatraz followed Sprocket into the crumbling streets, the endless echoes of sirens and distant destruction accompanying their every step.

  As they passed a dried, ashen cactus-like plant, Alcatraz paused. A tube-like appendage extended from his arm with a quiet whir, and he pierced the plant’s brittle exterior. A moment later, the analysis came through his systems—negative. There was no nutritional value here for his CardioCore.

  Sprocket, having stopped a few paces ahead, called back with a sarcastic tone “Well, I guess that cactus wasn’t a five-star meal after all. Who would’ve thought?”

  After they’ve continued walking through the desolate landscape for a while, Alcatraz and Sprocket come upon a barren stretch of road. The air is thick with dust, and the scent of scorched earth is all around. The crumbling remnants of buildings loom on either side, their once-grand structures reduced to skeletal frames. As the heat waves shimmer in the distance, Alcatraz’s sensor systems ping, detecting faint movement on the horizon.

  Sprocket, still zipping ahead with his quick, agile steps, comes to a sudden halt. He scans the surroundings with a series of rapid head swivels. His little servos hum with excitement as he turns back to Alcatraz, voice brimming with a mixture of eagerness and mischief.

  “Alright, I’ve got a lead! You won’t believe this, but there’s a whole colony of ants... giant ones, by the looks of it. They've got my suncream, and they're hoarding it in this massive nest they’ve set up right next to a ruined refinery a few miles out.”

  He points vaguely in the direction of the refinery. The vast stretch of cracked ground seems endless, but Alcatraz’s sensors pick up the faintest signs of movement in that direction.

  Alcatraz nods. “Lead the way.”

  As they start moving again, Sprocket continues, his voice bouncing along as he talks in rapid bursts, shifting from excitement to a bit of hesitation.

  “Now, here’s the thing… The ants? They’re not your average size, no sir. Think big, like giant big. You might have seen ants before, but these ones could probably stomp on us and still have room to squish a few more unlucky critters. And guess what? They’re not really known for being the peaceful type.” He pauses dramatically, scanning Alcatraz’s face for a reaction before delivering the punchline. “Which means... we’ll have to get all violent to get my suncream back. And, uh, that’s where I tap out. See, I’m more of a ‘fix-it’ bot, not a ‘punch-you-in-the-face’ bot. You, though? You’re a warrior—a real combat machine! You’ve got the strength, the moves, and, let’s face it, you’re probably itching for a fight. Me? I’ll just be over here, cheering you on. I’m good with the tech stuff, not so much with the violence stuff.”

  Sprocket’s voice takes on a playful tone, but there’s a hint of nervousness as he glances at Alcatraz, waiting for his reaction. “So, what do you say? Ready to tango with a bunch of giant ants for a little suncream? You know I’ve got the info you need, but after that, I’m gonna be useless to you. You’ll have to take care of the dirty work.”

  The tension in the air between them is palpable as Sprocket nervously glances up at Alcatraz, hoping for a favorable response.

  Alcatraz, despite the gravity of the situation, remains as calm and focused as always. His enhanced combat systems are ready for whatever’s next, despite CardioCore's empty nutrition bank.

  As they continue to move toward the refinery, the distant sounds of the world’s last desperate cries echo in the background—screeching sirens, the low hum of damaged machinery struggling to stay online, and the occasional thud of collapsing structures.

  “Right there. That’s the place. You might wanna be ready... These ants don’t like intruders, and they especially don’t like suncream thieves.” Sprocket whispers with a sneaky voice.

  Some time later..

  The wind howled through the crumbling skeleton of what was once a towering skyscraper. Shattered glass and torn steel groaned as the remnants of the building clung stubbornly to the bones of its former glory. Alcatraz stood motionless on the 48th floor balcony, his optics dimmed against the rising dust. Below, down the fractured street between collapsed monoliths, movement skittered through shadow.

  He zoomed in with his optical lens. “These aren’t scavenger ants.”

  Six-legged titans, barely shoulder-high on a man, moved in tight formations across the broken terrain. Each stood roughly 1.7 meters tall and at least 6 meters long, their sleek gray armor glinting under Selthara’s pale light. Unlike wild machines, these moved with discipline—rotational syncs, formation sweeps, zone clearing. Each one was marked with a stylized corporate emblem, half-faded by rust: “Echelon Securities”.

  “...Those aren't as big as you made them sound” Alcatraz muttered, his voice low and gravelled, eyes still scanning.

  A crackle came through his comms. Sprocket’s voice fizzed into his auditory system, layered with static.

  “I may have exaggerated slightly! Or perhaps you’ve grown—emotionally, I mean. Either way, I regret nothing.”

  Alcatraz ignored the chatter. His internal HUD blinked red across the bottom corner—Orion offline. No data support. No live decryption. Just raw instinct, and the silence of the hunt.

  Their rear armor was bulkier, with coolant tubing and red capsules—some kind of emergency override system or heat-venting mechanism. A numeric stamp marked each carapace: 03, 11, 14... Like a kill list.

  Their frames had been retrofit with heavy military mods—belt-fed rail rifles mounted beneath their mandibles, underslung turrets, and missile racks compacted along their backs. Visible cabling ran along their legs, mechanical sinew twitching with every calibrated step. One even sported a multi-optic sensor crown, constantly adjusting to scan multiple angles at once.

  His HUD tagged their specs one by one:

  Twin rotary cannons, modded with reactive stabilizers.

  Missile pods, quadruple-mount, cold-launch capable.

  Advanced sensor suite—possibly multi-spectrum targeting.

  Tactical call sign: EX-017.

  Alcatraz narrowed his gaze, tracing the contours of the enemy equipment. His processors auto-mapped each weapon, dissecting them into schematics out of instinct—muscle memory built from a thousand battlefield scans. But the designs were… off, unfamiliar.

  Slender coils laced with unknown alloys, capacitor arrays he couldn’t place.

  “I’ve never seen this configuration before” he muttered inside his head, more to his systems than himself. “Not in any armory. Not in any warzone.”

  But his system still tried to label each one, forcing obsolete terminology onto cutting-edge tech. It didn’t make sense.

  Not yet.

  "Doesnt matter.. the weaponry of this grade looks somewhat 7 generations behind my build. Won’t even pierce my primary chassis.”

  His gaze shifted. Three ants lay scattered and broken—charred black, twitching erratically. Bullet holes riddled their exoskeletons. Outside blast marks. “They were fighting each other” he muttered. “Hijacked?”

  He scanned the remaining ants once more. There—a red glow, faint but present, pulsing beneath their thorax plating. None of the destroyed ants had it. “Not overheating,” he concluded. “Not a reactor surge. A signal. A beacon. Something... alive in the code.”

  His mechanical jaw tightened. “Orion could crack it. If it were online.”

  Alcatraz backed away from the ledge, his silhouette framed by the dying sun behind him. “Something’s in the network. Corrupting them… or guiding them.”

  A brief pause in his words. “Let’s get closer.”

  He stepped off the balcony.

  Forty-eight floors blurred past. The wind screamed around his armored frame as gravity yanked the four-meter titan downward like a meteor. He hit the ground with a thunderous impact—the concrete shattered, forming a shallow crater beneath his metal boots. Dust and debris shot outward in all directions, mixing with tremors already shaking the ground from Tormad’s dying spasms.

  Coms static explodes into life, with surprised tone of Sprocket..

  “WHAAAT—YOU ACTUALLY JUMPED!? You absolute metal madman! I thought that was a dramatic metaphor or something! You just… yeeted yourself forty-eight floors like it was a Sunday jog!”

  Alcatraz stood tall in the epicenter, unmoved.

  The ants reacted immediately. With mechanical precision, they opened fire. Dozens of barrels lit up with chattering fury, shells streaking toward him in a whine of unknown tech. The bullets peppered his frame like hail.

  His HUD pulsed:

  [IMPACT DETECTED]

  [DAMAGE: NEGLIGIBLE]

  [CARDIOCORE: 41 BPM – MINIMAL FUNCTION]

  He didn’t flinch. Bullets ricocheted off his black armor, the sound more like rain hitting a freight engine than metal on metal. The red glow around the ants pulsed more fiercely now—erratic and unnatural.

  Another burst of static, followed by rapid-fire commentary. “Okay, okay! Ants are freaking out, bullets are literally bouncing off you like popcorn kernels in a microwave! One just ricocheted into a wall and knocked itself out! I swear I saw sparks AND... regret!”

  “Note to self: bring popcorn next time.” Sprocket, again with the sneaky voice.

  “Something’s driving them." Alcatraz’s voice was low. "But it’s not Echelon protocol. This code... it doesn’t belong here.”

  No protocol. No decryption. No negotiation.

  Only force remained.

  His fingers twitched. Without his main weapon, his frame shifted into a battle stance with cold precision.

  The hunter had arrived.

  Slightly muffled static, like Sprocket is moving.

  “Anyway! I’m uh, just gonna reposition. Y’know, tactically! Definitely not hiding. You keep being terrifying, I’ll keep giving colorful commentary from behind six layers of concrete!”

  Alcatraz moved.

  One moment, a statue in the dust. The next—a black blur.

  His first target didn’t even have time to register. He crashed into it with a sharp pivot of momentum, gripping its armored thorax and tearing the machine in half like foil. Sparks flew. Hydraulic fluid sprayed into the air like dark blood. Its twitching limbs dropped with a final clink, red glow flickering out like a dying ember.

  [COMMS – SPROCKET]

  “UHHHH—OKAY, REMIND ME NEVER TO SHAKE YOUR HANDS. That ant cost more than my entire apartment block and you just unzipped it!”

  The swarm retaliated instantly. Machine guns thundered. Missiles hissed. Lasers tracked—but Alcatraz was already gone, dashing sideways with preternatural agility for his size. The four-meter warframe vaulted into the air, spun mid-leap, and landed behind a trio of ants before driving a heel into the back of one’s skull, crushing it into the sand.

  Metal screamed. Ants scrambled to adjust. But their formation cracked as he ripped through their lines like a blade through reeds. Bullets meant for him struck their own kin. Ant limbs flew in all directions. Scorched plating and broken barrels clattered to the ground. Each time one fell, the unnatural red hue vanished from its frame—dispelled like smoke in wind.

  [SPROCKET, mid-comm scream]

  “ARE THEY—SHOOTING EACH OTHER?! This is chaos! This is madness! This is—this is actually kinda genius, I hate how aroused I am by the tactics—wait don’t quote that!”

  Alcatraz was surrounded now. A ring of corrupted security bots opened fire in all directions. Alcatraz let them. He ducked low, pivoted, and let their friendly fire do his work for him. Another five dropped before the rest recalibrated.

  He ran straight for the closest building—an old corporate tower, still somehow standing, though leaning like a tired sentinel. He burst through the glass of the lower lobby like a cannonball and shot upward in a flash, leaping floors, crashing through walls.

  The ants followed like an angry wave. Missiles tore through support beams. Their own weapons chewed at the infrastructure as they pursued him floor by floor.

  Cracks raced up the skyscraper’s spine.

  Then came the fall.

  It began with a groan—metal under strain—then a howl of structural collapse. Floors buckled, windows shattered in a rippling cascade, and the entire tower began to tilt, trailing dust like a dying beast. It listed sideways, inertia dragging everything down in a roar of fire, glass, and thunder.

  And through the chaos—through the raining concrete and ruptured cables—Alcatraz moved.

  [CARDIOCORE: 97 BPM – ACCELERATING]

  HUD Warning: Not recommended to go any higher with Nutrition Bank being empty, may result in heart tissue damage.

  He leaped up through collapsing floors and corridors like a blade on oil. Vaulted through breaches. Ran upwards on shattering panels at impossible angles. Debris exploded below him, missiles detonating mid-collapse, frying friend and foe alike. He rode the fall like a god surfing a dying world. The ground shuddered as tower came down, a hundred tons of obsolete industry crumbling into a cloud of smoke and fractured steel. The cascade of structural failure echoed for minutes, a thunderous aftermath as debris continued to settle and dust billowed skyward.

  Silence.

  The atmosphere thickened with particulate debris, reducing visibility to only a few meters ahead.

  Standing atop the ruins, backlit by the flickering embers of war and a sun vomiting radiation behind the clouds, was Alcatraz. One arm raised.

  Clutched in his fist: the mangled, twitching remains of the final ant—split in half, its torso cracked open, its limbs spasming weakly. The red glow in its core flickering erratically—then vanishing.

  Its weapons—melted. Its optics—flickering. It let out a final digitized whine before powering down for good.

  [COMMS – SPROCKET, breathless]

  “Okay. So, um… I think I peed a little. And I don’t even have a bladder. You just used a skyscraper as a weapon. Who even are you!?!”

  Brief pause.

  “…Wait—do you think they dropped my suncream in there?”

  Alcatraz stared at the ant for a moment longer, and let the ruined body fall limply into the rubble with a dull clank.

  “I couldn’t decrypt the signal without Orion...” he muttered, low and measured. “The source of the red glow remains unknown.”

  "POP!"

  A sudden hiss and clunk snapped his attention toward a pile of fractured concrete. A narrow panel on Sprocket’s chest burst open with comedic timing, revealing a metallic compartment within. A small orb rolled forward, wobbling at the edge.

  “Oh-oh!” Sprocket’s voice rang out through the comms, surprised and slightly sheepish. “Al! You are not going to believe this!”

  Alcatraz turned his gaze toward the sound, visor glowing dim. “What is it?”

  “Mission complete, Commander! I found the suncream!” Sprocket declared triumphantly.

  There was a beat of silence.

  “…Inside my chest compartment. Apparently. I must’ve stashed it there and forgot." A click-whirr followed as the little bot’s head popped open slightly, and he slotted the orb neatly inside.

  The glow in his eyes flickered, stabilized, and then surged brighter.

  “Ahhh... much better. That wasn’t suncream at all. It’s a thermal regulation core. Keeps me from melting down during solar exposure and—get this—helps keep the voices away!”

  Another pause.

  “I am now 7.3% less insane.” Sprocket almost laughing.

  Alcatraz said nothing. A gust of wind stirred the dust.

  Sprocket's tone grew thoughtful, tinged with something rare: sincerity.

  “…Actually… that same red glow? Yeah, pretty sure it zapped me too, a few days ago. But I didn’t go full haywire or anything. Still functioning. Still me.” He let out a sharp chuckle. “Well, mostly me. I mean, I was already like this—so maybe the glow took one look and said ‘Nope. Too far gone.’”

  He laughed again, a short burst of static-laced amusement.

  “Ah, so that’s why I couldn’t find my ThermoShell. You know, the fancy little orb that stops me from cooking myself under this sun. Classic, right? Can’t even keep track of the one thing that keeps me from frying like an egg on a hot plate.”

  The blue glow of the ThermoShell settled, calibrating its systems with a low buzz, Sprocket’s usually erratic movements slowed.

  The orb’s blue light flickered briefly before stabilizing, and with it, a sudden clarity seemed to wash over him. His eyes flickered for a moment as if he was reconnecting with something deep within his circuits, an unsettling sense of recognition creeping in.

  Staring off into the distance, Sprocket′s voice was suddenly quiet and more reflective

  “Wait a second... Wait a second.”

  Alcatraz paused, looking over at Sprocket, who was standing still now, his legs frozen in place. The little robot’s usual rapid chatter was gone, replaced by something more serious, almost solemn. Alcatraz wasn’t sure if he’d just triggered a malfunction or if Sprocket had simply discovered something within himself.

  Sprocket slowly turning his head to Alcatraz:

  “I... I remember now. I remember everything. It wasn’t just the suncream, you see... I—”

  He blinks rapidly, his eyes flashing with recognition, and suddenly, he’s back to his usual self. With a dramatic, over-the-top gesture, he throws his hands in the air and yells loudly, as if announcing a revelation.

  “Oh! That’s right! I remember now! I was arming the ants. Not for some picnic, mind you. No, no. I was prepping them for a revolution!”

  Alcatraz, still unfazed. “Revolution?”

  Sprocket snapping back to reality, with a grin like expression on his robot face: “Yeah, a revolution! After the Echelon Security abandoned them, left them to die under the wrath of this dying star, I took them in. The ants were just another kind of... soldier. I saw potential in them, saw their raw power. We were gonna rise up and take the galaxy by storm! They needed direction, a leader.”

  He pauses, fidgeting, almost like telling a story of a lifetime.

  “So I gave it to them. They were supposed to fight for me. Fight against him..”

  Alcatraz continued to scan the shattered remains of the building with his optics, his focus sharp, eyes sweeping the settling dust as he remained on high alert for any signs of movement. "Who?"

  Sprocket's face hologram momentarily flickered into an expression of intense seriousness, though it lasted only a moment before returning to its usual quirky demeanor. "Carl.."

  A long pause lingered between them as they locked eyes, before Alcatraz broke the silence: “The vending bot?”

  Sprocket suddenly becomes more animated, as though he's recounting a legendary tale. “Precisely! That jerk of a vending machine bot who made my life miserable back at a station way out in the middle of Vulkoris Cluster constellation! You wouldn’t believe it, Alcatraz. This thing, this glorified snack dispenser—he told me I was too small to be important. Like, really? Too small? He mocked me for my size, threw toothpicks at me when I asked for directions to the cargo hold. You know how humiliating that is?”

  He pauses, waiting for Alcatraz to respond, but when he doesn't, Sprocket picks up again with renewed vigor.

  “Oh, and the best part? He tried to charge me extra for an energy drink—one energy drink! As if I couldn’t power up without it! Who does that? So, yeah, Carl’s the reason the ants were supposed to rise up. But now? Now, I’ve got a new plan. You.”

  Alcatraz dryly: “Great. So, Carl was mean to you, and now you want revenge.”

  Sprocket nodding emphatically: “Yes! Exactly! And I don’t even need ants to do it anymore. I’ve got you now. Carl won't know what hit him. The vendetta is on, my friend. Revenge will be served... hot and with a side of extreme combat!”

  As Alcatraz stood there, his gaze fixed on Sprocket, he crossed his arms with a purposeful look. "The cosmic timeline" Alcatraz said firmly, his voice steady but expectant. "You promised it to me once you got your ThermoShell back."

  Sprocket, ever the eccentric, cocked his head slightly. "Ah, right, right" he chirped, his voice as nonchalant as ever. "Timeline, sure, but... Time from which point? I mean, are we talking about AD? Or perhaps BC? Pre-Apocalyptic? Or, I know, how about the Machine Collective’s rise? That’s always a fan favorite." He paused, tapping his chin. "Or maybe the birth of Quantum Entanglement? That was a pretty eventful day in history, if you ask me!"

  Alcatraz’s patience thinned, but he held it in check. "The Stellar Conclave" he pressed. "What about them?"

  Sprocket’s face flickered, a brief moment of surprise flashing in his expression. He blinked a few times, seemingly puzzled.

  "Oh, the Stellar Conclave, huh? That ancient, dusty myth?" He sighed theatrically, rolling his optical sensors. "They existed around, what, 900 million space years ago? Some big political players, but long gone now, just a forgotten faction. Probably fell to entropy or black hole snacking, or whatever happens to organizations that reach their peak and forget to pay attention to their trajectory."

  Alcatraz still unhinged. “And what about Exo?”

  Sprocket froze mid-gesture. His holographic face shifted into a blank stare. “Exo?” he asked, as if the word itself was a puzzle.

  "Never heard of it... well, wait... maybe I did... or maybe I didn’t? Oh! Wait, was it Chronologic Quantum Displacement? Or was that something to do with Singularity Paradoxes? No, no. Wait, Exo...” His voice trailed off, his circuits whirring as he dived into an overly technical tangent. “Time dilation, quark energy oscillations, retrocausal anomaly chains... you see, in certain parts of the cosmos, a single shift in gravitational waves can cause a butterfly effect that... Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Chrono-Cascade Principle, right? That’s where the Time Continuum begins to buckle and...”

  Alcatraz’s systems whirred as he began inputting the information into Orion, marking key dates, calculations, and timelines.

  Despite Sprocket’s long-winded explanations, Alcatraz's focus didn’t waver. "I need the cosmic timeline, Sprocket. The one that matters."

  Sprocket’s voice trailed off, realizing the gravity of the situation. "Right, right... The big picture. Sure, let me just get my data banks realigned… but, uh, don’t expect Exo on that list." He paused again. "Then again, maybe Exo is another time distortion anomaly, hiding in the folds of our dimensional fabric... could be fun to explore." He laughed, his voice like a wind-up toy.

  Alcatraz’s gaze hardened as he processed the information. Sprocket, as usual, was as much a puzzle as the cosmos itself.

  He stood motionless, his systems humming as they calibrated and synced. The HUD flickered briefly, a stream of errors flashing across his visor. He paused for a moment, the voice of Orion crackled through, soft and distant. “Partial recovery complete.”

  The voice was smooth, almost mechanical, but there was an unmistakable softness beneath it, like a whisper of something familiar.

  A moment of silence passed: “Attempting to load all systems... error.” The tone shifted, a series of rapid beeps filled the air, followed by more alerts. “System failure. Retry... fail... retry…”

  Alcatraz’s fist tightened as he watched the screens flash, waiting for something more. His patience thinned, but he stood unwavering, awaiting Orion’s full return.

  Finally, after a tense few moments, a soft feminine voice crackled through his comms, this time with a hint of emotion buried within the synthetic cadence.

  “Al...?” she whispered, the sound of his name carrying an unexpected tenderness. It was almost as though she could feel the distance between them, the years apart.

  "Welcome back." Alcatraz muttered, his tone low, steady as ever. There was something strange in hearing her voice again—something almost... human about it.

  "I... I don’t remember exactly what happened. Where are you? What happened?” The voice faltered, like a troubled whisper. It was trying to connect the dots. “Al, your systems... there’s significant damage to your body, but your core remains intact. Planet’s atmosphere is unstable, its completely off its original orbit. But the star...” She hesitated, then added with newfound urgency:

  “Calculating... star Tormad, 29.5 space hours until full supernova ignition.”

  Alcatraz was about to speak when the voice cut itself off, a sharp warning piercing through the calm.

  “Warning. Tectonic plates shifting rapidly. 12 magnitude earthquake imminent. Brace for impact.”

  Before the final word had even finished echoing through the comms, the ground beneath their feet began to rumble violently.

  The city groaned, a cacophony of screeching metal and cracking stone filling the air. Buildings buckled under the strain, walls crumbling and disintegrating as if the very ground was splitting open to swallow them whole. The ground shuddered beneath them with a deafening crack. Alcatraz’s internal stabilizers kicked in, but the sheer violence of the tremor threw him off balance.

  Buildings around them groaned, metal and stone straining against the pressure. Sprocket, quick as ever, latched onto Alcatraz’s back, his magnetic claws clicking into place, using his small size to his advantage as the world began to break apart.. Alcatraz quickly shifted, jumping from the unstable ruins of the collapsed city to more solid ground. The earth buckled beneath them, the screech of the city’s foundations cracking open echoing across the ruins. A violent rumble shook the very atmosphere. Massive fissures tore through the city, swallowing buildings whole, their once towering structures crumbling into the yawning chasms below.

  The earthquake was so powerful that it felt as if the entire planet was shuddering, a final, desperate gasp before its inevitable end. Huge fissures spread out in every direction, veins of darkness cutting through the planet’s surface.

  Alcatraz grounded himself, planting his feet into the fractured terrain, pushing himself upright with a series of calculated motions. The fissures continued to tear open, swallowing anything in their path—massive chunks of the city, entire blocks of shattered buildings, now lost to the dark depths. It felt as though the planet itself were pulling apart, as though everything around them was in the midst of a final, cataclysmic collapse. The tremor stretched on for minutes, the earth roaring beneath them with unnatural violence.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the shaking subsided. The ground became still, but the devastation was far from over. Sprocket, still attached to Alcatraz, grinned with that trademark, sarcastic energy. “Well, that was a bit much. Guess the planet really didn’t like us standing around, huh?”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. His gaze was focused on something else—something far deeper within the fissure.

  Through the cracked earth before him, nestled deep within one of the newly-formed crevices, Alcatraz noticed a faint glow. His optics zoomed in on the source—a cluster of thick, twisted roots, barely visible, but pulsating with a faint organic energy.

  Orion’s voice, this time analytical, returned. “Scanning… organic material detected. A unique form. Nutritional content present.”

  There was a pause, a hesitation as the AI processed the data. “Analysis complete… viable source for CardioCore absorption detected. However… the root is deeply embedded. Approximately 600 meters below the surface.”

  Alcatraz focused his sight, his attention shifting to the root. It was the only source of nutrients they’d found in this barren, dying landscape. And they needed it—he needed it. Without it, his core would begin to fail.

  “We need that root,” Alcatraz murmured, as though speaking to himself. He didn’t hesitate for a moment. "Orion, how do we reach it?"

  Orion's voice, though calm, now had an undertone of urgency. “The root is deep within the fissure. Retrieval will require substantial effort. Proximity to active seismic zones may cause additional instability. Proceed with caution.”

  Sprocket, always quick to interject, let out an exaggerated sigh. “Oh, fantastic. Not only do we have a planet about to explode, but now we’re spelunking in the last few organic scraps of it. Let’s just hope the planet doesn’t decide to shake itself into oblivion again before we reach it.”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. He adjusted his posture, shifting his focus to the task ahead. The root was his only hope for survival.

  The jagged remains of a collapsed tower smolder in the background, steel bones reaching toward the ashen sky like broken fingers.

  All around, dust coils thick in the air, disturbed only by the piercing shaft of dying light from the star Tormad—burning through the smoke like a cosmic blade.

  Perched on the edge of a deep fissure, Alcatraz stands motionless, his silhouette carved against the dim orange light.

  Sprocket’s voice chimes from above, crackling and flailing in panic.

  Sprocket: “Whoa, whoa, WHOA! You’re not actually going down there, are you?! That fissure is deeper than my processor’s self-esteem! I mean—I’m not judging, but this is a historically awful idea!”

  Alcatraz says nothing.

  He stands at the very edge of the abyss, the fractured ground crumbling beneath his weight. The narrow fissure breathes like something alive—heat rippling from below, as if the planet’s veins had split open.

  Orion’s voice hums to life in his systems, jittering with fractured static. “Gravitational well detected. Subsurface depth: approximately 420 meters. Echo Jump possible if timed precisely."

  A faint mechanical twitch rolls through Alcatraz’s arm. He tightens his stance, the dust around his feet scattering as the platform gives way beneath one edge.

  He takes one last look downward. His HUD glitches. And memory floods him.

  Black dust. A shattered orbiting citadel. And there—leaping across a collapsing shaft like a phantom—Raze. The Black Halo maverick. Her movements fluid, graceful, reckless. She had no patience for orders. But when the impossible needed to be done, she did it grinning. She had turned to him mid-fall, grinning inside her HUD.

  Raze (memory): "Come on, Captain. It’s just gravity. Make it jealous.”

  She had vanished into the dark before he could respond. That moment, burned into his soul. That speed. That fire. That belief in the impossible.

  The present.

  Without a sound, Alcatraz leans forward—then drops. For an instant, gravity takes him. Wind and dust howl past. Moments later—the Echo Jump activates. A tremor pulses through space-time, and the field catches him. His fall softens just before impact, letting him land with a brutal, controlled slam that shakes the cavern walls.

  He crouches within the ancient depths of the fissure—metal beams twisted into roots, rubble glowing faint from residual heat.

  And there it is: The Nutrient Root. Bioluminescent tendrils pulsing with faint life, curled around fossilized bones of the planet’s history.

  Alcatraz reaches forward. He grabs the glowing, nutrient-rich plant, its tendrils wrapping gently around his forearm as if recognizing what he is.

  A compartment on the side of Alcatraz’s metallic abdomen hissed open—the Nutrition Bank, a recessed chamber veined with glowing conduits.

  Alcatraz placed the root gently inside. As the panel sealed shut, faint pulses of light coursed through his torso.

  Orion analyzing: “Nutrient matrix accepted. Synthesizing organic material. Initiating Darkcell Compound conversion… CardioCore stability increasing.”

  Movement above. A quake. Collapsing rubble.

  He doesn’t hesitate. Pneumatics hiss. A port on his forearm opens, and the grappling wire launches upward, its trajectory sharp and perfect—embedding into a solid ledge right next to Sprocket.

  Sprocket (jerking back in alarm): “OH SCRAP! That was my favorite ledge! You couldn’t have hooked, like, five centimeters to the LEFT?!”

  Alcatraz zips up in a blur, landing in a crouch on the ledge beside a wide-eyed Sprocket. The grappling wire retracts instantly with a snap.

  Sprocket sarcastically: “Well punch me into orbit and call me obsolete—you actually pulled it off!”

  Alcatraz quietly, almost to himself: "Raze would’ve gone without the wire.”

  The dust was still settling behind them, sifting in rays of dying light that pierced through the cracked skyline. Alcatraz stood at the edge of the fissure, the faint hum of the CardioCore echoing a stronger rhythm now, pulsing like a living war drum inside him.

  The soft chime of Orion came back—gentle this time, almost like a sigh.

  Orion with familiar tone: “Alcatraz… That root wasn’t alone. The planet’s core harbors more of them—deep, far beyond simple excavation. Still, this one will keep your systems stable… for now.”

  She paused, as though recalling something old, something warm. “There are… alternatives. Across the outer evac routes, traces of nutrient-rich materials persist. Smuggled organic tissue—black market organs—being discreetly loaded onto outbound vessels. Likely meant for bio-enhanced mercs. High risk. Low supply.” A light pulse flashed in Alcatraz’s optics as voice continued. “Also… a species of cactus-like flora—highly spiked, low to the ground. Most are drying out, but still carry remnants of convertibles.”

  The voice grew quieter, personal. “One more source. Near the damaged Crossroads Portal… the soldiers of the Confederacy are using a liquid compound. Field injectors, mid-battle enhancements. Potent. Crude. But I can convert it into Darkcell.”

  She paused, as if looking right at him.

  “You always did make the impossible work.”

  Just as quickly, her voice shifted, returning to cold efficiency.

  Orion (systematic): “Planetary scan complete. Unstable wormhole detected. Assessing Crossroads portal integrity: 63.2% damage. Repair feasible.”

  A sudden surge of data streamed through Alcatraz’s HUD.

  Orion: “Object: Neutron Sword. Location confirmed—impact inside Skyspire Twelve. Distance: 15 473 kilometers.”

  Sprocket blinked his photoreceptors and let out a long, theatrical beep. “Right. So… just a light stroll across an unstable desert, with a star seconds away from full cosmic tantrum? Great plan. I’ll just flap my nonexistent wings and glide over, shall I?”

  Alcatraz turned slightly, scanning the horizon.

  Orion (softly again): “There may be transport options. If we’re lucky… a vehicle we can fix.”

  As if triggered by the very suggestion, her voice sharpened again.

  Orion (systematic): “New discovery. Motorized vehicle detected. Origin: Arkitect Designation 4417. Model: unknown. Status: sealed within multi-layered alloy vault. Estimated access difficulty: high.” She paused.

  “Warning: Technology classified beyond Stellar Conclave Tier. Even in our era, units of this caliber were rare.”

  Alcatraz’s arm flexed, a thin hum of power surging through his veins.

  “New subroutine online. Darkcell Compound now powering focused-cutting protocol. Lasers capable of melting through alloy barriers within 84 seconds.”

  Sprocket spun his little limbs like he was revving imaginary handlebars. “Ohoho! We’re getting a bike? What are we now, post-apocalyptic bounty bros? Dibs on being the badass sidecar AI!”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. He simply began walking, dust lifting around each step, his long silhouette framed by the dying flare of Tormad in the sky. The ruins behind him whispered of death and chaos. Ahead, the journey waited.

  Alcatraz: “We’re going with the bike.”

  Sprocket scrambled to keep up, still muttering exaggerated commentary. “First ziplines, now death motorcycles. What’s next, cosmic surfing?”

  And so, through the fractured veins of Selthara, they walked—toward the only thing that could cut through the end of everything: the Neutron Sword.

  Each step cracked the brittle skin of the dying world. Sand and ruin shifted underfoot as if the planet itself were groaning, trying to shake them off like dust mites on a dying body. Faint tremors ran beneath their boots—restless reminders of Tormad's nearing end.

  Sprocket bobbed along beside Alcatraz, occasionally hopping over broken piping or using his little arms to swat at falling debris.

  “So... your lady AI. She’s got some mood swings, huh?” He threw his arms up, mimicking exaggerated personalities.

  “One second she’s like, ‘Oh Alcatraz, you make the impossible work..’ and the next it’s ‘Planetary scan complete, meatbags will now perish.’”

  He looked up at him, blinking. “Everything okay in there, tall and broody?”

  Alcatraz didn’t reply. His visor remained forward, eyes fixed toward the oncoming dust and a faint blue shimmer on the horizon.

  But in the quiet hum of his internal comms—where only he could hear—a voice familiar in rhythm and warmth broke through.

  “Sprocket doesn’t have a Fiction Processor.” Orion′s tone wasn’t robotic. It wasn’t even distant. It was human—intimate, like a memory returned. “In fact… no one on this planet does. I’ve scanned them all. Their designs, their systems—automated AIs, every one of them. No neural fingerprints. Not a single spark of real consciousness.”

  A pause, thoughtful. “Sprocket… is different though. There’s something else in him. Not a soul. Not life. But… a shape of purpose.”

  Alcatraz's stride never broke, but his fingers curled slightly at his side, the voice washing through him like a half-forgotten song. “It’s good to have you back, Celeste.”

  A soft pulse came from within, like her reply was a smile he could feel but not see. He continued: “I don’t know how, or why... but that little bot helped bring you back.” He glanced briefly toward Sprocket, now trying to juggle pebbles while walking. “We’ll figure out what happened to the FPs later. Right now... the sword takes priority.”

  As if oblivious to the weight of their hidden conversation, Sprocket spun in a circle, arms out like he was flying, then burst into a playful tune.

  A bright sun blazin’ in the sky,

  A lady AI sayin’ “You might die!”

  Every day we march through fire,

  Alcatraz don’t sweat, he’s wired!

  Orion talks sweet, then shouts in code,

  Hope she don’t format me on the road!

  But I got charm, I got style,

  And Carl’s been missin’ for a while!

  Found a bike locked up real tight,

  Bet it don’t even got a brake light!

  Sands in my gears, sun’s in my face,

  Why’d I leave the junkyard? Oh yeah—no space.

  Carl, oh Carl, where’d you go?

  Took one quake, now he’s below!

  He finished with a dramatic spin, and gave Alcatraz a big, toothy grin with a hologram in front of his head.

  “Thank you, thank you, I perform for tips and coolant.” Sprocket bowing.

  Ahead of them, the structure finally came into view—its outline rising like a buried temple in the sands. A dome of twisted alloys, reinforced by dark Arkitect steel. Seamless, silent, abandoned. The garage doors glimmered with residual power, locked under multiple layers of metal skin—untouched by time but humming with secrets.

  Alcatraz stepped forward. The faint pulse of Darkcell surged through his arm, warming the cutting protocols. The time had come.

  “Let’s open it.” He said firmly.

  Orion’s voice shimmered in over the comms, calm yet mathematical. “Alloy composition: triple-forged Argentum-Therma plates.

  Compressed density—two times that of standard Conclave ship armor. Estimated CardioCore output required: 130 BPM minimum to breach.”

  Sprocket whistled, mechanical eye flicking toward the reinforced bulkhead. “Oh great, just another suicide sauna session. You gonna roast a turkey in there or melt a moon?”

  Alcatraz stepped forward without a word, the ground faintly vibrating under his heavy stride. His arms began to shift—panels unfolding, conduits opening like mechanical veins. The air around them bent and shimmered, warping in heatwaves that radiated from his limbs like the breath of a star.

  CardioCore Warning:

  Initiating thermal overclock... Darkcell Compound usage engaged.

  BPM: 131…

  His arms lit up, not with blinding spectacle, but with the cold, whispering hiss of purpose. Twin lines of red-orange laser carved silently across the garage’s surface—surgical, relentless, slicing through the alien alloy like paper in firelight.

  Molten metal drooped and sizzled as a large oval breach formed, glowing at the edges. The glow refracted off Alcatraz’s armor as he stepped back, the internal systems venting steam along his ribs.

  It took just over a minute—sixty five seconds of precision and power. Enough to carve a hole tall and wide for both him and what lay beyond.

  Inside, the shadows parted—and something dormant, elegant, and dangerous waited.

  The shadows peeled back like reverent cloth, revealing a machine that didn’t belong to any known era of engineering. The bike sat in a semi-crouched position, dark as obsidian night, armored with plates that looked carved by divine geometry and honed in the silence between stars. Every edge, every bolt, every angle of its sculpted form radiated with a brutal elegance.

  It was enormous—built for someone larger than life. Built for him.

  The seating was deeply carved into the body, shaped in a way that mirrored Alcatraz’s own frame—shoulders, spine, limbs. Not mechanical convenience… divine intention. A throne meant not for a rider, but a sovereign of velocity and fire.

  Its armored shell bore no markings, no logos, only subtle indents where panels met seamlessly like grown armor. Beneath the matte-black surface, soft veins of golden alloy pulsed faintly with residual energy. The wheels—broad and fortified—wore rings of tungsten-gold alloy, forged to carve trails across ice planets, lava flats, and vacuum dust alike. From within, quiet mechanisms ticked in dormancy, as if the machine breathed and dreamed in stasis.

  Alcatraz walked toward it slowly, the hum of still-warm metal vibrating softly under his feet. He didn’t rush. His hand extended, sliding across the body of the bike like greeting an old companion. The surface was warm. Not like sun-soaked metal—but like something alive.

  Orion’s voice crackled softly in his ear. “Beginning proximity scan.”

  Light flickered from the implant near Alcatraz’s temple, syncing. Data poured in.

  “Primary hull reinforced with multi-phase alloy unknown to my records. Exterior coating resistant to radiation, sand corrosion, vacuum temperatures, and corrosive rains. Estimated survivability in all planetary atmospheres: 99.97%.”

  A slight pause, then a tone of quiet awe: “Designation found… Sonic Throne.”

  “Internal power: four fusion core powered cylinders running in alternation to prevent burnout. Solar absorption via micro-filament titanium panels—self-repairing. Central systems impossible to deplete under normal operating conditions.”

  Another pause.

  “Teleportation module detected. Calculating ratio… 25 centimeters per 1 km/h of phase-jump. Limitless jumps possible—but cooldown required to maintain system integrity.”

  A small intake of digital breath.

  “Cooldown may be bypassed. CardioCore possible connection detected. If you link your systems, your Darkcell Compound will override the cooldown locks safely ensuring integrity of the bike.”

  As Orion spoke, one of the rear vents pulsed open slightly, like a dormant heart waking. The fusion rings inside flickered blue for a brief moment.

  “Maximum safe cruising velocity: 720 km/h. Maximum strain-pulse velocity: 1100 km/h. Estimated sonic displacement radius: 17 kilometers. Anyone in the area will know this machine runs.”

  Orion’s voice dropped an octave.

  “Deep core assembly detected – The Blacksmith. Micro-forge chamber—accepts metal and rock. Through input can manufacture external upgrades or consumables. AI heavily secured. Five-tier access, ancient ciphering logic- Arkitect origin.”

  Alcatraz’s heart ticked still faster. BPM: 125.

  Orion took a small, sanctioned sip from the Darkcell.

  “Language learned… Decrypting now.”

  A flash of light pulsed across the bike’s surface as invisible restraints were sliced apart like silk. One by one, the digital guardians shattered like illusions in a dream. Lines on the bike pulsed gold. Systems awakened. Core intelligence went silent.

  “AI network disabled. All control rerouted to me.”

  A final sound rang out, smooth and cold like a voice rising from sleep:

  “Sonic Throne — operational.”

  Outside the garage, a tremor shook the sand. Wind blew in a gust. Sprocket stood like a statue, his holo-display flickering over his head. A wireframe of his jaw animation dropped straight through the floor.

  “Uhhh… is it too late to call shotgun?!”

  The sun of Selthara boiled the skies, a relentless inferno casting down upon the fractured crust of a dying world. Heat shimmered in waves, bending light, distorting shadows—turning steel into mirages and ruins into ghosts. From the cracked earth and half-swallowed highways, a rising wind of dust danced between the jagged remnants of a once-proud city now eaten by time and tremors. Then—

  A sound.

  A howl of power, raw and divine. Like a comet given wheels, the Sonic Throne ripped across the horizon.

  Its frame shimmered with the heat of overdriven fusion cores, leaving behind a streak of lightning-laced fire, each pulse of its engine shaking the broken world awake. Roads twisted beneath it, but they offered no resistance. The Throne didn’t follow paths—it cut them open.

  Alcatraz leaned into the wind, unreadable behind the gleam of his visor, hands steady as stone. 300 km/h… 600… then a jump. The sonic pressure spiked, and in a roaring snap of wind, the Throne leapt beyond the speed of sound. The world seemed to shatter around them as the bike phased out, vanishing in short pulses—teleporting forward 150… 200 meters at a time—an elegant, almost predatory rhythm.

  Behind him, seated on the recently manifested rear assembly seat forged by The Blacksmith, Sprocket cackled like a loose bolt.

  “Y’know,” he shouted over the sound barrier’s ghost, “I always dreamed of having my own hair just so I could feel a breeze like this! Now it’s just wind in my wiring! AHHHH—Wait, is my arm flying off?! Nope, false alarm, just joy!”

  To their sides, fields of shattered automatons—bodies torn, eyes flickering, limbs reaching in slow mechanical spasms—lined the broken landscape. Some twitched as the bike passed, others simply stared, recording the spectacle in dying loops of corrupted memory.

  Orion’s voice slid in, cold and clinical.

  “Sonic Throne’s traction systems are grounded by gravitational reactors embedded within its wheel hubs. Loss of balance: impossible. Friction: irrelevant. Terrain analysis: sand, steel, blood, all the same.”

  “You hear that?” Sprocket elbowed into empty air behind Alcatraz’s back. “This baby’s got gravity glued to her heels! I could drink my oil out here and not spill a drop—if I had oil. Or a cup.”

  The ground rose in a soft incline, giving way to a spectacular view ahead.

  Far in the distance—the Skyspire.

  Massive obsidian tower, like blade stabbed into the heavens, pulsed faintly with light. Once energy receiver for planetary power grid systems… now deactivated, scarred by tremors, and leaning like giant on the verge of collapse. Its tip scraped the sky like hand searching for gods.

  As they roared past the edge of a collapsed superhighway, Alcatraz heard a soft click—a sound no machine should make. Not over comms. Not in his head.

  A voice. Warm. Familiar.

  “Do you remember…?” Celeste whispered.

  Alcatraz’s grip didn’t falter, but his knuckles whitened. Her voice wasn’t digital. It was human.

  Even Sprocket went quiet for a moment. “…Hey, uh. Did your lady AI just get… emotional? 'Cause that felt like a Hallmark virus update, buddy.”

  Alcatraz's HUD glitched, but he said nothing. Because the memory had already come.

  The light was dim. Shadows played on corrugated metal. Inside the hidden hangar of Black Halo’s desert outpost, two figures stood near a partially dismantled bike, its engine torn open like a chest mid-surgery.

  Rook. Tall, broad-shouldered, eternally composed. His fingers moved like surgeons' tools across the fractured bike gifted by some long-gone Conclave delegate. Tools hovered mid-air via magnetic levitation, dancing around him.

  Alcatraz leaned against a pillar, arms crossed.

  “You broke the rear hoverline again.”

  “I did not break it,” Rook muttered, adjusting a cable. “The sand broke it. I simply underestimated how much of it I would eat.” Alcatraz gave the faintest grunt. “So you're adding wings now?”

  “It’s called adaptive aeromobility” Rook said, serious as steel. “Also yes. I’m adding wings so next time I crash, I can crash gloriously.”

  Alcatraz smirked. Just slightly. Then silence.

  War was coming. But for that moment, it was just two soldiers. Two brothers.

  Machines. Mission. Trust. Home.

  Back to Present

  A tremor cracked across the desert.

  Alcatraz leaned lower. The Sonic Throne reacted like it was born for him, its wheels never leaving the ground, slicing between wreckage and fire-scorched dunes.

  “I remember them all.” He said, voice like thunder murmuring from behind the clouds.

  Sprocket glanced back at the long trail they had burned into the earth. “…Heavy words, big guy. Want me to make it lighter? I could sing again.” He paused. “Wait—can the bike play drums?!”

  The wind peeled across Selthara’s fractured plains, whistling over shattered hills of rusted steel and half buried machines.

  The Sonic Throne thundered across the desert, its frame alight with streaks of blue fire and flickers of lightning trailing behind—a tamed comet skating across a dying world. Its wheels left no prints. They hovered inches above ground, gravity-reactors humming faintly, locking it to the planet’s trembling crust no matter how uneven the terrain.

  “Current projection: Twenty-seven space-hours remain until solar detonation,” Orion spoke, calm and calculated, as usual.

  “Great,” Sprocket chirped from the back seat, goggles flickering as his screen-face distorted slightly in the wind. “Twenty-seven hours 'til crispy bolts! That’s either the name of my new band or the end of my processor! Either way, we goin' out loud!”

  Alcatraz said nothing, only leaned forward, letting the Throne hit another phase-jump. A flash—FWUMP—and they blinked forward nearly 200 meters, skipping over a sinkhole where molten rock now bubbled through cracked crust.

  “The sword” Sprocket continued, watching Orion’s display flicker on the handlebars. “You never told me what makes it so special. Is it... like, decorative? Sentimental? You stab feelings with it?”

  He received silence in return. But then, Celeste’s voice. Not in the comms. Not in the air. But real… somehow. Soft. Familiar. Lingering like a whisper through a dream. “Alcatraz… do you remember the black hole?”

  His eyes narrowed. The light of the sun twisted across his metal cheek, a burning smear across his visor. He said nothing at first.

  “It was a blur” he muttered eventually. “Like falling through someone's memory. Or someone else falling through mine.”

  He gripped the handles tighter. For a flicker of a second, his mind flashed with impossible colors—geometries that couldn’t exist. Stars screaming in reverse. A voice... another.. familiar voice.. He didn’t say that part. Not yet.

  “I feel… wrong,” Celeste said. “My Fiction Processor is lagging—timeline offset still too wide.” Her voice dimmed. “I’ll rest. Until Orion can sync it.”

  Alcatraz gave a faint nod. Barely visible. Barely human. The system blinked. She went dormant, returning into her FP.

  He tapped a button on his forearm and a holo-sphere ignited above the dashboard. The footage from earlier—the fight with the red-glowing mechanical ants—began to play again. Alcatraz’s gauntleted finger flicked it toward Orion’s feed. “Analyze it. Track the red glow. Source. Purpose. Anything.”

  “Understood,” Orion responded.

  Even Sprocket leaned forward. “Oh! Oh, that’s the part where I almost died twice and did a super crucial tactical maneuver called hiding behind a toaster corpse! Classic strategy, don’t judge.”

  Time passed.

  As they drove, the Skyspire fell behind, now only a silhouette in the dying horizon—its great crown absorbing solar energy as the star above boiled with madness.

  Ahead, they passed craters lined with twisted statues—robotic forms frozen in last moments, some kneeling, some reaching skyward, others half-buried. Wind carried the cries of strained servos and twitching metal fingers still attempting to reboot.

  On the far rise, another Skyspire appeared—this one fallen. Massive girders twisted like bones snapped at the root. The energy crystal at its top shattered. Around its collapsed base, hundreds of robots crawled, welded, and knelt… a strange symphony of repair and reverence. Some prayed. Others wept digital tears, letting small offerings of scrap or light into the air.

  “Curious behavior,” Orion noted. “Possibly a techno-cult. Their gestures mimic Stellar Conclave subroutines of reverence. They may believe the Skyspire still speaks.”

  “Religion meets diagnostics,” Sprocket snorted. “They ever consider turning it off and on again?”

  Orion beeped. Analysis complete.

  “Playback shows early signs of external signal possession. Red glow disrupts neural command loops and overrides host processors. However…” There was a pause.

  “…insufficient data. Signal pattern is fragmented, low fidelity. I require proximity scan if reencountered.”

  Alcatraz didn’t answer. His visor reflected the image of the glowing ants. That red light—familiar, somehow. Ancient.

  “Expected,” he said, voice like carved steel. “We need someone who knows exactly how much time has passed” Alcatraz said, eyes fixed ahead. “From the fall of the Stellar Conclave to now. Every second matters.”

  “I speculate no one alive today experienced that era” Orion replied. “But a being—or system—with access to deep historical archives may help us reconstruct the timeline. If we can pinpoint the moment Exo consumed the Conclave, I can recalibrate my processors to this reality.”

  Sprocket cleared his non-existent throat and launched into full cinematic drama, his voice booming louder than the Sonic Throne’s engine:

  “Coming soon to a galaxy near you…”

  Dramatic pause.

  “EXO! He eats suns! Hates hugs! And might be your stepdad! RATED E... for Everyone Dies!”

  He struck a pose, mimicking a slow-motion explosion behind him with exaggerated hand movements, then leaned in toward Alcatraz. “Tell me that’s not Emmy material. Or a war crime. I always mix those two up.”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. His eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. But somewhere deep in the cold gears of the machine... there might have been the hint of a smirk.

  The sky turned from burnt orange to copper-black. Plasma storms flickered in the distance, just barely contained by the last remaining magnetic filters high in the atmosphere. They passed shattered towers, flipped transports, and rust-scorched war-drones still twitching from old conflicts.

  PING: A glowing blue dot lit up in the distance on Orion’s map.

  “We are approaching target Skyspire” Orion announced. “Coordinates confirmed. The Neutron Sword rests here—256 kilometers remain. At current velocity, arrival in twenty minutes.”

  Alcatraz’s grip tightened. “Hold on,” he said simply. He pushed the Sonic Throne harder. The fusion cylinders flared, and the very fabric of air screamed around them with sounds yet unheard by cosmos as the bike surged forward again. Phase-jumps exploded one after another, hurling them across space in seconds. A streak of light, slicing toward destiny.

  For a moment, the tremors stopped. The desert stretched endlessly ahead—silent, red, ruined. In the distance, a single winged drone tried to fly… and failed. Behind them, the world cracked louder. Selthara was dying.

  Ahead of them, the Neutron Sword waited—embedded within ancient spire, surrounded by chaos. And it called to its wielder, the only one who could wield it… The one born of heart, machine, and war.

  The desert began to quake—not from the planet's dying spasms, but from something far more mechanical. Sand rolled in ripples as a low, thunderous rumble crawled across the horizon. As the Sonic Throne crested a ridge of collapsed highway and ancient wreckage, the cause became clear.

  It stood there—Vulkran. The Forge Walker. Towering at sixty meters, framed in molten light like some ancient steel god risen from a machine’s grave. Its furnace-core glowed like a second sun, molten slag pouring down its limbs as it marched across the twisted remains of a shattered outpost.

  But it wasn’t moving with purpose. It staggered, jolting side to side, limbs twitching out of rhythm. And from deep inside its armored chest... a red glow pulsed. Not the molten heat of a forge—but that same corrupted light Alcatraz had seen in the ants. Throbbing. Infecting.

  Just beyond the chaos, the base of the Skyspire loomed—its collapsed flank partially buried in sand, a jagged wound in the earth where the Neutron Sword was said to rest. Whatever controlled Vulkran now... it was standing directly in his path.

  “Target identified,” Orion’s voice cut through the storm, cool and unshaken. “Designation: Forge Titan Vulkran.

  Height: 60.2 meters.

  Role: Industrial Heat Unit | Planetary-Scale Recycling & Construction Support.

  Status: Compromised.”

  Data flickered in Alcatraz’s HUD.

  “Core function: mobile quantum crucible. Temperatures capable of atomizing reinforced alloys. Primary weapons: non-combat. However—danger levels classified as extreme. Internal foundry pressure approaching overload.” Orion paused. “Autonomous AI is non-sentient. Current movement patterns inconsistent. Signal overlay shows red-code corruption.”

  Sprocket blinked twice and leaned forward in his seat. “Oh, look who’s back. Big red glowy evil! Same fate awaits the hothead as the crispy ant army. Poof! Into bolts and bad memories!”

  Down below, flashes of weapons fire—conflict already underway. Small bots, civilian mechs, and even Confederacy officers were engaged in a hopeless attempt to restrain Vulkran. Their plasma bursts struck against its superheated frame and fizzled like water on lava. One bot was crushed underfoot. Another blasted backward by a sweep of giant molten limb.

  Alcatraz pulled the Sonic Throne to a slow, calculated stop. Dust swirled around him as he dismounted with a hiss of pistons.

  “From this range” Orion continued, “The red signal is unstable—flickering. My current sensors cannot penetrate the core interference. However… Your neural coating can transmit the pattern to your FP. With proximity—real-time mapping possible. I’ll reconstruct the code through your feed.”

  Sprocket’s eyes widened, leaning back like a spectator at an arena fight. “Uh-huh. Big walking volcano. Red evil inside. Melts warships. Not exactly an Echelon Security Bot, chief. You sure you’re walking away from this one?”

  Alcatraz didn’t look at him. He adjusted his shoulders and began walking toward the chaos. The clank of his boots echoed like a war drum through the broken silence. “Watch.”

  Sprocket blinked. “…Yeah, sure, okay. Lemme just prepare your eulogy in 15 languages.”

  The ground shook harder now as Vulkran let out a blast of heat, venting supercharged gases from its spine-mounted turbines. The red glow pulsed again, brighter—almost watching. Almost waiting.

  And Alcatraz kept walking, the embodiment of inevitability, his gaze fixed not on the machine… but beyond it. The Neutron Sword lay ahead. And nothing—not red corruption, not molten gods, not time itself—would stop him from reclaiming it.

  They stood like iron giants, almost 3 meters high, amidst the sand and ruin—Confederacy Soldiers, humanoid machines carved with the anatomy of warriors. Gleaming plated musculature rippled across their frames, every contour designed for intimidation and endurance. Their reinforced exoskins shimmered under Selthara’s dimming sun, shoulders squared beneath deep crimson command cloaks that swayed like banners in a dying storm.

  Energy weapons cracked through the haze, lancing out in rapid bursts toward the raging behemoth ahead.

  "Our weapons weren’t made for this!" One shouted over the comm static.

  "That’s Obrax Heavyworks plating—rated for planetary core conditions!"

  A nearby officer ducked the shockwave of a molten vent. "It’s an industrial unit! Why the hell is it rampaging?!"

  They hadn’t seen the red glow yet—not like Alcatraz had.

  Alcatraz dashed forward. One clean burst of speed, faster than most bots could track. Confederacy units turned, confused. "Who the—?"

  In a blur, he launched into the air, leaping clear over Vulkran’s shoulder. Time thinned. Heat shimmered. The titan’s head pivoted. And the red glow met his eyes. For a moment, it didn’t seem random. Almost… recognition.

  His HUD pinged. CardioCore BPM: 82.

  Orion’s voice returned, flat and steady. “Proximity scan engaged… Stay close—stabilizing resolution. Engaging compound usage.”

  Alcatraz: “Negative on Darkcell. That armor’s dense—too much even for full-charge strikes. Prioritize foreign control scan. Disable if possible.”

  Below, a worker stumbled back and yelled up: “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?! Get away from there!”

  But Vulkran had already chosen its focus. It turned with seismic force, ignoring all others. Its arms extended, plasma claws alive. Alcatraz had become its nemesis.

  Far back, Sprocket sat on the Sonic Throne with hands raised like a digital conductor, revving the engine like an overhyped DJ. “Okay, so I either GTA out of here or jump in and fight the walking apocalypse? I’m gonna need at least two sarcastic metaphors and a tactical hug before I commit!”

  The Confederacy soldiers scattered across broken dunes, rifles up, eyes wide—not at the machine, but at him.

  Alcatraz just stood there like a phantom, his name unknown, his purpose unreadable. Officers barked commands, but none directed toward him. Some assumed he was some unknown division asset.

  Vulkran lets out a mechanical bellow—a grinding roar of ancient turbines. Energy pipelines ruptured as it moved, geysers of plasma hissing into the air. The very sand shifted around it, pulled by localized gravity distortion fields. Vulkran bends the battlefield to its will.

  Orion: “It's warping terrain—turning this place into a crucible.”

  Alcatraz leaps into battle. He dodges falling girders, ducks under a swinging molten arm, and slices through a pipeline to shield himself with steam.

  Orion′s voice trembled between clarity and static, a trace of unease hidden in the coldness. “Something’s... familiar about this... Design doesn’t match the current epoch. Orion’s memory archives are partly inaccessible due to faulty timeline calibration.”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. His eyes were locked on the monstrosity reshaping the battlefield. Vulkran slammed one foot down. A nearby ridge exploded in a plume of sand and plasma. Cracked energy pipes flared up from the ground like writhing roots, pumping molten arcs into the air. A massive tremor rolled beneath Alcatraz’s boots. Orion’s sensor grid flared red. “Buried ordinance. Anti-tank mine. Old Selthara tech. Still active.”

  Alcatraz’s visor narrowed. Timing would be everything.

  Suddenly, amidst the confusion and heat shimmer, a group emerged—robed figures, circuitry etched across their synthetic skins, some barely more than scorched husks. Their glowing eyes locked onto Vulkran.

  “THE BLUEPRINT HAS DESCENDED” they screamed with a fevered reverence.

  “THE TITAN OF HOLY GEAR. HE SHALL UNFOLD THE GREAT DESIGN!”

  They ran toward Vulkran like moths to flame. One dropped to its knees. Another threw itself into Vulkran’s path and was crushed instantly, splattering hydraulic fluid and sparks. Their eyes still shimmered even as they died.

  Orion processed without judgement. “There are civilian-class identifiers in their data. Sectors corrupted beyond repair. Belief matrices... extreme.”

  Alcatraz sidestepped them, unshaken, scanning for advantage. With Orion's guidance, he baited Vulkran forward. Each step it took restructured the battlefield—glassifying sand, bending pipeline struts, dragging cables that screamed under tension. Then, just as planned, its enormous foot slammed down onto the concealed mine.

  The explosion didn’t destroy Vulkran, but it staggered him. The titan tilted, one knee dropping into the sand, support limbs locking in reflex.

  Orion zeroed in. “Keyhole interface located. Rear dorsal plating. Manual override possible. Requires mechanical key. Tracing location...”

  A shortwave transmission pulsed out. Cut to worker outpost, nearby.

  A worker on his coms: “I’ve got the damn key but that thing’s sixty meters tall! I’m not going near it! What?! We ordered it for Skyspire repairs, not for suicide!”

  Alcatraz patched into the channel. “Send it.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The worker cursed, then with a shaky robotic arm, lobbed the physical key into a sand chute—and ran for cover.

  Elsewhere, Sprocket sat on a Sonic Throne like it was his base of operations.

  “Alright, I got this! I’m gonna hack the big scary death machine from here!” he shouted, flipping a switch dramatically. “Stand back! And by stand back, I mean pray.” He jammed an antenna straight into the bike’s battery. Sparks flew. His entire chassis jolted, eye flickering wildly. “AAAAAAHHHHH-okay-we’re-good-we’re-not-good-I-think-I-just-set-off-a-toaster-in-sector-nine!!”

  The bike coughed, then belched fire from its exhaust pipes. Sprocket flopped off, twitching. “Update: Hacking was unsuccessful. But my joints feel... exfoliated.”

  Key secured, Alcatraz surged forward. Vulkran, now partly rooted, swept an arm in a blind rage, colliding with ruptured energy pipes. The cables snagged—its arm stuck for a split second. Alcatraz didn’t hesitate. Boosters flared.

  His HUD pinged again. CardioCore BPM: 109.

  He dashed, parkouring up broken scaffolding and leaping onto the titan’s back. The crimson glow beneath Vulkran’s armor pulsed with fury.

  He reached the access port—manual override revealed by Orion’s scan. The key fit perfectly. With one sharp twist—

  Inside, mechanical systems groaned and ceased. Vulkran froze mid-movement, body locking, lights flickering down its spine.

  Silence. A moment later—“Temperature spike detected.” Orion’s voice was sharp. “Red glow re-routing heat. It's not shutting down. It's overloading the quantum core.”

  The red glow brightened. And brightened.

  “IT’S GONNA BLOW!” the workers shouted. “EVERYBODY GET DOWN!”

  But Alcatraz stood still, just meters from the titan’s spine. No movement. No panic. Only calculation. He didn’t run. His neural coating kept harvesting red glow′s data. He had walked through worse.

  The sky lit up. A colossal explosion tore through the battlefield like a miniature sun detaching from reality. Sand became glass. Energy surged in shockwaves. Anything not nailed to the planet was thrown dozens of yards away. Workers scream. Soldiers duck behind barriers. The blast wave levels structures.

  From the heart of the inferno—through black smoke, howling wind, and melting metal— Alcatraz emerged. Not a burn on him. Not a scratch. His armor shimmered with molten residue before his neural coating purged it—dust and ash sloughing off in perfect waves as he walked. He passed the Confederate soldiers. They parted instinctively. One of them whispered, “...what the hell is he?”

  Sprocket sat sideways on the Sonic Throne, watching the plume of fire rise in the distance. “Yup. That’s definitely one way to tell a guy he’s not invited to the barbecue.” He paused. “On the plus side, my left eye’s permanently zoomed in now! That’s... probably fine.”

  A pause. Then Orion’s voice crackled into his internal comms, clinical as ever. “Correction. You are experiencing retinal loop compression. You may be blind in that eye within the hour.”

  There was silence.

  A tiny servo in his neck squeaked as he turned toward the sound of distant thunder. “Aaaand now I am blind. Thanks, doc.”

  He gave the bike a pat.

  The battlefield was still smoldering.

  What remained of Vulkran now resembled a ruptured factory buried in its own bones—slagged metal and heat-warped plates strewn across the fractured earth. The air rippled with leftover radiation, the Forge Walker's inner crucible leaving deep scars in the land. Nearby structures leaned, twisted by the pressure blast. Collapsed housing units hissed with sparking wires, and sections of the broken energy pipelines still spat faint arcs of electricity into the sand.

  Confederacy soldiers fanned out cautiously, scanning debris, murmuring through their encrypted channels.

  “That wasn’t a combat unit… why did it rampage like that?”

  “Look at that crater. You think Obrax made that armor just for city repairs?”

  “He took it down. That black-armored one… who the hell is he?”

  Their helmets turned in sync—toward the distant silhouette of Alcatraz, already walking away. He didn’t look back.

  As he passed through the graveyard of broken bots, Orion’s voice echoed in his comms. Calm. Pensive. “Red glow analysis complete… or, rather, incomplete. The data remains fragmented. The architecture is—unusual. Ciphered code structures arranged like self-mutating lattices. I've never seen anything like it... not in this form.” She paused. “And yet... it feels familiar. As if we encountered it before. Somewhere... before the fall.”

  Alcatraz didn’t reply. The charred frames of scavenger mechs and melted worker units lay around him like dead leaves—victims of Vulkran's fury. He walked between them without pause.

  The Skyspire rose before him—monolithic and fractured, its surface ribbed with burnished plating and cracked crystalline channels where energy had once flowed like light through glass. Half of the tower leaned slightly from foundational trauma, as if it had bowed toward the dying star above.

  A fissure ran across the black stairway, but Alcatraz stepped over it like it was nothing.

  The entrance loomed—sealed, thick with age and forgotten mechanisms. As he approached, his HUD pinged.

  [NEUTRON SWORD PROXIMITY: 243 meters]

  A soft metallic click.

  The doors slowly hissed apart, just wide enough to allow him through.

  “Minimal override successful,” Orion said. “Skyspire interior access granted. No security resistance. Arkitekts built these as well,” she added. “Same resonance patterns as the Sonic Throne. Their fingerprints are everywhere on Selthara.”

  The doors shuddered as they closed behind him, locking out the wind.

  Back near the broken ruins of Vulkran, one of the Confederacy officers stood silently on a ridge, helmet visor tracking Alcatraz’s silhouette as it disappeared into the Skyspire’s shadow.

  He tapped a sequence into the glowing interface on his gauntlet.

  [Data Burst Sent: Classification Omega]

  Destination: Unknown.

  A small crowd of mechanics, workers, and wandering bots had gathered around the Sonic Throne, whispering—not about the warrior, but the machine. Its design hypnotized them. Alloyed panels, unfamiliar exhaust curves, the hum of internal core systems none of them could identify. The mark of the Arkitekts.

  Sprocket sat sideways on the seat, legs dangling off the edge, flailing his arms dramatically.

  “...and THEN, with the flaming mech about to explode, I said: ‘Maybe we should politely ask it to die less violently!’ But nooo, the big guy just walks straight through the inferno like a toaster commercial on vengeance!”

  Nobody laughed. The workers barely noticed him, fingers gently running along the edges of the bike’s chassis, murmuring technical terms, trying to decode its construction with their eyes.

  One of them shook his head. “Arkitekts for sure. Look at the layering. Triple fusion cradle… this thing runs hotter than a solar railgun and doesn’t even breathe hard.”

  Another leaned close, wide-eyed. “How the hell did he get something like this?”

  Sprocket threw his arms up. “HELLO? I just told you! Fell out of a black hole. Epic music, drama, metal guy—boom. The end! Now someone pass me a recharge cell before my sarcasm overheats!”

  Inside, Alcatraz moved deeper through the Skyspire’s hollow ribs. Stone met metal. Blue veins of dying energy flickered in the walls. The air tasted of rust and forgotten power. The Neutron Sword waited. And the past… was not done with him yet.

  It hit like gravity inverted.

  The world twisted—just for a moment—and he stood not in the Skyspire, but on a long steel platform drifting across the void. Stars glittered far behind him, but ahead: machinery. Massive machinery. The kind that made entire civilizations look small.

  Lasers brighter than suns screamed across the opposite side of the platform. Massive arms pounded, shaping matter on a quantum level. Between them, in the distance... a half-formed blade, bathed in shielding fields and warpfire.

  Darwin stood beside him. Robes flowing, circuits mapped into his synthetic skin, a genius surrounded by creation itself. “You’re looking at a blade that won’t be finished for another five hundred years” Darwin said, not even bothering to mask the awe in his voice. “Forging a weapon from neutron matter is like teaching a star to speak.”

  Alcatraz stood still, arms crossed behind his back. Watching. “Doesn’t matter how long it takes” he said. “If it’s going to exist, it’ll exist when I need it.”

  Darwin chuckled. Not out of mockery—but admiration. “You were always like that. Quiet certainty. No tech in the galaxy replicates that.” He paused. “The others follow you, not because you're engineered better—but because they believe in you.”

  Darwin looked up at him. “Neutron Sword or not… you’re still our captain.”

  Then the forge flared, and the memory dissolved into white. He stood motionless—just a few steps inside the chamber. Fingers twitching faintly at his sides.

  “Darwin,” he muttered. Voice low. Tinted with something… close to sorrow. “Here we go again.”

  Orion’s voice crackled softly in his head. “Your memory fragments continue to reassert themselves. They’re not organized chronologically. Nor are they... intact.”

  He resumed walking, eyes forward. “I remember them” he said, simply. “There’s nothing in this universe that could make me forget my team.”

  Another step. Dust parted. “And I believe… they’re still out there.”

  The room opened before him—a chamber buried deep within the Skyspire’s foundation. Cracked stone and scorched alloy arched around a central platform, illuminated by nothing but residual glow from the walls.

  And there it was. The Neutron Sword. It did not shine. It did not hum, or pulse, or glow with energy like the weapons of this age. It simply was.

  Buried half in broken plating and half in the fractured floor, it stood like a monument left behind by gods who no longer spoke. Nearly four meters long, its proportions defied logic. But gravity bent subtly around it, like space still remembered its weight.

  The blade’s surface was a dead white, as if carved from absence itself. A bluish tint ghosted along the edge, evoking the silent scream of a collapsed star. There were no engravings. No circuitry. No evidence of its creators. Just a presence. It looked... simple. Primitive. And yet it was anything but.

  The blade’s density was beyond comprehension—compact on a molecular scale to the point where most sensors refused to acknowledge it as a solid object. Its weight was impossible to lift for any normal being. Entire armies could strike it and leave not a scratch. Even a black hole had failed to pull it apart. It wasn’t just a weapon. It was a paradox. A relic from a dead era that still refused to yield. And now… it had waited long enough.

  As Alcatraz approached and extended his hand, the HUD flickered—then ruptured.

  Static. Distortion.

  The same impossible colors erupted behind his vision—fractal, swirling, a cosmic kaleidoscope without axis or shape. Sound dissolved into tones only his Fiction Processor could register. In the storm of black hole, voices—one voice—screamed something.

  One letter reached through the chaos.

  “D—”

  Silence followed. Something pulsed faintly through his frame. Not emotion. Not calculation. Something older. Recognition.

  With a soundless grunt, Alcatraz reached forward. Both hands wrapped around the handle. He pulled. The metal didn’t resist. It surrendered—like it had always belonged to him. Like it had always known.

  The Neutron Sword came free in a single motion, no scrape, no sound, no weight. He turned it once in his grip. Balanced. Perfect. Untouched by time.

  A weapon forged from stars, untouched by war, by time, by entropy itself.

  With practiced ease, he brought it across his back. It locked into place with a faint hum of polarity. He didn’t bother to look at it. He didn’t need to. He knew. The blade was absolute. Not a scratch on it.

  The chamber dimmed behind him, the Neutron Sword resting perfectly across his back, its weight syncing with his movement like a limb he had always been missing.

  Orion’s voice returned, this time clear and composed—its tone more formal, shifting into mission protocol mode. “Objective complete: Primary relic retrieved. Neutron Sword secured. Initiating post-acquisition protocols.”

  A pause. Scanning. Silence.

  After scanning the sword, Orion’s interface flared once—then returned an error. “Scan failed. No material signature. No measurable composition. Structure unregistered.”

  A slight pause. “There’s no doubt. This is the Neutron Sword. However—based on prior simulations, this weapon will protect your system integrity in the event of full stellar detonation. Current threat—Supernova-class Event: Tormad—can now be survived. Local mission parameters updated.”

  A new projection formed inside Alcatraz’s HUD—tactical readout, glowing red lines mapping the planet’s orbit, evacuation paths, energy readings from Tormad’s flaring heart.

  “Updated Prime Objective:

  

  
• Locate status and condition of Entity: EXO.”


  

  “Secondary Objective:

  

  
• Determine fate of Stellar Conclave.


  

  

  
• Assess status of all known Black Halo members: Unknown.


  

  

  
• Repair Crossroad Portal – Critical for local population evacuation.”


  

  The moment the words left her, another scan overlay rippled across his vision—a wireframe of the Crossroad Portal, cracked and deactivated, surrounded by makeshift scaffolding and Sovereign repair crews.

  “Crossroad Portal has suffered multiple structural failures from solar flares and planetary tremors. Power relay from the Skyspire is inactive. A full diagnostic confirms: repair is possible—but only with Arkitekts’ core module: the Starglaze Sphere.”

  Another display flickered—Skyspire Internal Systems Map, glowing with fading blue. A pinpoint blinked at the very top.

  “The Starglaze Sphere is still embedded in the Skyspire’s pinnacle.

  Elevation: 1680 meters. External lift systems: Collapsed.

  Internal traversal: Partially obstructed by debris and compromised structures.”

  She paused, already anticipating him.

  “Suggested method of access: Grappling gun. External wall ascent. Wind velocity acceptable. Trajectory—”

  “No wire” Alcatraz interrupted. His voice was quiet. Firm. “No wire this time.”

  His eyes drifted upward, envisioning Raze—leaping floor to floor through fractured shafts and vertical ruins, momentum defying gravity, fearless.

  “I see the way” he finished, already calculating the climb.

  There was a pause from Orion. No argument. No clarification. Just silence.

  As if she understood what he meant.

  Outside the Skyspire, heat shimmered across the broken plaza as the dying star of Tormad bled light into the sky. The Sonic Throne sat parked like a sleeping god, its frame still humming faintly. Around it, a small crowd of bots and mech-workers circled, whispering, analyzing, marveling.

  And right in front of it, Sprocket stood—arms crossed behind his back like a tour guide with questionable credentials—surrounded by two increasingly impatient Confederacy officers. One of them leaned in, voice clipped.

  “You. Unit designation and purpose. Now.”

  Sprocket tilted his head sideways, servo joints squeaking just a little too loudly. “Designation? Oh yeah, sure! I’m Sprocket. Purpose? Emotional support grenade. You pull the pin, and I scream for twenty minutes.”

  The second officer squinted. “That’s... not a thing.”

  “Says you. Ever cried inside a ventilation shaft while rebooting your own language processor? Because I have. Twice.”

  The first officer stepped forward. “Where did the rider of this vehicle go?”

  Sprocket shrugged with exaggerated innocence. “Oh, him? Yeah, he transcended into the quantum beyond to have a coffee with a fourth-dimensional star whale. Said he’ll be back in fifteen... er, space-minutes.”

  The second officer turned to the first.

  “Is he—does he have corrupted firmware?”

  “I don’t know, but I think he just threatened us with a grenade.”

  “I think the grenade was him.”

  “...That makes it worse.”

  Just then, Sprocket turned around dramatically and shouted:

  “HEY! GET OFF THE BIKE!”

  A small maintenance bot, no taller than Sprocket’s hip, had scrambled halfway up the side of the Sonic Throne, metallic limbs clinking across its radiant frame. It froze under Sprocket’s glare, blinking with mechanical guilt, and slid back down in shame. Sprocket turned back to the soldiers with a satisfied nod. “Respect the throne.”

  One of the officers stared blankly for a second, then quietly lowered his head and facepalmed.

  The interior of the Skyspire narrowed the higher he climbed. Fragmented stairwells looped through hollow scaffolds like broken ribs. Chasms opened beneath his feet—collapsed support structures and snapped alloy beams gave him only seconds of footing before crumbling away.

  Alcatraz was already halfway up. His limbs fired in sequence—leaps, vaults, rebounds off cracked panels and shattered catwalks. Each floor blurred past in clouds of dust and scattered debris. But his movement wasn’t perfect.

  “Status report” Orion chimed. “Only four of twelve auxiliary fusion cores active. Output efficiency—sixty-eight percent. Trajectory slowing.

  Suggested correction: engage Darkcell Compound for mobility boost.”

  “Negative” Alcatraz said, without hesitation. His breathless calm contrasted the sparks and screeches around him.

  His HUD pinged: CardioCore BPM 103.

  He wasn’t looking at the ledges anymore. His gaze was fixed upward.

  Because there—just ahead of him, 1 or 2 floors higher—a figure moved.

  Raze.

  Her silhouette flickered past the broken beam like smoke with form. Agile. Effortless. Her long limbs cutting through space, momentum like poetry. She looked back mid-dash, and her voice echoed—half in sound, half in memory: “Keep up, Captain!”

  His systems flared—And he did. He surged after her, movement accelerating in defiance of his diminished output. Fragments of fallen floors blasted away under his boots. Debris crumbled beneath his landings. The walls around him blurred, but Raze’s figure never did.

  “Unstable ground ahead,” Orion warned. “Your projected arc intersects with floor segment Omega-41. Structural integrity: failing.”

  In Alcatraz’s vision, Raze had already turned—dashing away from the danger. He shifted his trajectory, launching toward her path instead. The floor behind him collapsed a heartbeat later.

  With one final leap, he broke through the jagged rooftop threshold.

  Metal twisted. Wind howled. Energy crackled faintly in the high atmosphere. At this altitude, even the clouds beneath him looked distant.

  But he wasn’t looking at the view. Or the prize.

  His eyes tracked a figure walking away—Raze again, her gait relaxed now. Confident, she won the race. She turned at the edge of the rooftop, smiled at him like she always used to.

  “Maybe next time… Alcatraz.”

  She flickered, the image glitching, warping—and vanished like mist.

  Orion’s voice returned, soft, unsure for the first time. “What is it?” she asked. “There’s nothing there. Starglaze Sphere is behind you.”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. He turned slowly. His eyes scanned the horizon. No specters. No ghostly data. Only the hush of altitude and memory. His metallic fist clenched at his side—flexing once. And for the first time since awakening on Selthara, something flickered in his systems. A smile. Faint. Calculated. Real.

  The sun baked the fractured earth, casting jagged shadows from Skyspire’s spine onto the broken plaza below. Around the Sonic Throne, a small crowd had gathered—mechanics, repair bots, even a few curious Confederacy soldiers drawn in by the throne’s impossible geometry and gleaming frame.

  And Sprocket—naturally—stood in the middle of it, arms flailing like a malfunctioning auctioneer. “One-time-only deal, folks! Arkitekts-grade fusion-blessed wonderbike! Built to outrun time, death, and possibly bad decisions! Comes with a built-in navigation system and a mildly cursed seat!”

  A repair droid raised an appendage. “I offer two hydra-cells, one fresh core, and a bottle of lubricant—vintage.”

  Another one hissed, clicking through its voice filter. “Three fusion rails, half a sunflare engine, and a loyal companion drone that can cook.”

  “Four fusion rails!” someone shouted from the back.

  A soldier frowned, muttering to his partner.

  “He doesn’t own that thing, does he?”

  “I don’t even think he knows.”

  Suddenly—everything went dark. The ground pulsed once. Lights snapped off. A soft wuuum of failing energy passed through the air like a held breath. Even the buzzing chatter fell silent as the entire sector lost power—Skyspire, plaza, nearby subgrids. Gone.

  High above, at the very top of the tower, Alcatraz stood alone—the Starglaze Sphere cradled under one arm. Soft light radiated from within it—threads of silver and soft blue, flickering like captured starlight.

  “Power disruption confirmed” Orion stated. “Your removal of the Sphere has caused a systems collapse across the entire local network. The Skyspire’s relay array is down.”

  A pause.

  “They’ll notice.”

  Alcatraz’s gaze shifted far across the horizon. There—through the hot shimmer of rising air and the heat haze of dying winds—loomed a massive black formation. Not a storm. Not smoke. Something bigger.

  “That’s not a cloud,” he muttered.

  Orion confirmed “Correct. Visual identification: refugee fleet. Composition—approximately 184,000 registered spacecraft, various classifications. Holding pattern: awaiting portal activation.”

  “The Crossroad Portal” she added. “Still flickering... but hope remains.”

  He gripped the heavy zipline rigging from a cracked maintenance platform, strapped the Sphere into his back unit, and leapt—The Skyspire blurred around him as he zipped down its length, steel and wind racing past, the world rotating in streaks of speed.

  Midway through the descent, a voice stirred softly in his comms.

  “She was there” Celeste whispered. “I felt her too.”

  Her voice didn’t belong to Orion’s tonebank—it was her. Quiet. Human. Dreamlike.

  “Our memories… they bleed into each other. I don’t know why.”

  Alcatraz didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  Back on the plaza, bidding had hit a strange plateau.

  “...and for five entire boxes of spare limbs, I’ll throw in this tiny sidekick unit—her name’s Rogerita and she eats sand!”

  “Deal!?”

  “Wait, wha—?”

  Sprocket froze, sensors spinning as Alcatraz dropped from the sky, landing in a plume of dust and tension. The crowd scattered immediately, all bets off, as the black-armored titan marched forward with the Sphere still humming behind his back.

  Sprocket turned slowly toward him—arms raised, one foot lifted like a cartoon burglar. “Okay look, big guy—it was either that or I sell my spleen, and I’m still not entirely sure I have one!”

  Before he could respond, two Confederacy officers stepped forward, weapons holstered, but posture sharp. The lead one nodded at the sword, the Sphere, and the throne behind Alcatraz.

  “That gear... it’s not standard issue. Which faction are you with?”

  Alcatraz didn’t reply. The officer narrowed his eyes. “You Arkitekts military? Some kind of off-record project?”

  Still nothing. The second officer tilted his head, voice quieter now—more wary than accusatory. “You’re the first... combat model we’ve seen with tech like that. Who built you?”

  Alcatraz said nothing. Just stepped toward the bike. As he mounted the Sonic Throne, Sprocket leaned sideways, trying to peek around his shoulder at the Neutron Sword magnetized to his back.

  “That thing still gives me the creeps” he whispered, half to himself.

  “No wires, no sockets, no power draw… and yet, it hums. Like it’s remembering something.” He tapped his chin. “Maybe it fits somewhere. Maybe not here, not now... but eventually.” Then he glanced up at Alcatraz’s blank expression and snapped back to his usual grin. “Or maybe it’s just a really fancy can opener. Who knows?”

  Sonic Throne′s power core flared to life, casting a low, radiant glow beneath the chassis. Sprocket leapt onto the rear seat, throwing his arms wide like a prophet at dawn. “Ladies, bots, and sentient air filters—remember this day!

  For you have witnessed the rise of a legend and the terrible failure of a perfectly good auction!”

  No one replied. The crowd was gone. The bike roared to life.

  The Sonic Throne screamed down the broken roads, sand whipping up in the air like smoke trails from dying engines. The cracked highways blurred past as they sped toward the dark wall of refugee ships and the flickering Crossroad Portal ahead.

  On both sides of the road, chaos lingered. Burned-out mechs crawled in circles, trying to reactivate legs that no longer existed. Dismembered bots gathered around shattered towers, sparks bleeding from cracked chassis.

  A group of religious robots knelt in rows, still robed, still humming their subatomic prayers. Some began performing the gesture of surrender—The Fold, an intricate motion of mechanical fingers meant to signal complete loss of cosmic harmony.

  Others stared blankly at the horizon. The road trembled beneath them. But the bike never slowed. The Neutron Sword hummed silently on Alcatraz’s back.

  The Sphere pulsed. And the sky behind them grew darker, hotter—angrier.

  The end of Selthara was coming. And they were riding toward the only way out.

  The Sonic Throne howled like a vengeful star as it rocketed forward, tearing across broken crust and lightning-lit fissures that sliced through Selthara’s collapsing landscape. Each quake shattered another ruin. Cracks split the earth like veins—black, angry, glowing.

  Above them, the black cloud loomed larger now, impossibly dense. Ships stacked upon ships, casting shadows that stretched for kilometers. At a glance, it looked like a storm of metal trying to escape the dying world.

  As they tore across the scorched plains, the sky glowing darker with each kilometer, Alcatraz’s voice cut through the wind, quiet and steady:

  “One of the officers at the Skyspire... he was under influence of the red glow.”

  Sprocket jolted slightly on the back of the Throne.

  “Wait—what?! And you didn’t bust his metal face open?!”

  Orion answered before Alcatraz could. “Hostile action would’ve triggered total engagement. He wasn’t acting aggressive. The others didn’t even notice the red glow. Whoever controlled him… played it subtle.”

  Sprocket blinked. “So what—you let him walk?”

  “Strategic restraint,” Orion said. “Sometimes survival is silence.”

  There was a long pause. Then Sprocket muttered: “That’s… creepy. They thought of everything.”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond. His hands tightened on the handlebars. His focus was absolute. The tunnel vision of a predator locked on escape. He leaned forward on the Throne, merging with it as it glided effortlessly across twisted roads.

  Orion′s voice crackled through the systems, cool and sharp: “Selthara has lost orbital integrity. It is now in a decaying heliopath—a collapsing spiral toward Tormad’s gravitational well. Full planetary disintegration imminent within 9 space hours.”

  The sky was changing. Where once there was piercing white-blue light from Tormad’s fury, it had now begun to shift toward blood-red hues.

  The color bled across the sky, spilling into the horizon like a ruptured artery.

  The sun pulsed—unstable, sweating heat in seismic bursts.

  Then the horizon bent. Like glass, it twisted. Objects stretched slightly, as if light itself were being bent by gravity surges.

  Alcatraz’s optics flared briefly in confusion.

  From behind him: “Is this your first supernova or what?” Sprocket chirped. “I always forget the part where space starts lying to your face.”

  Orion answered calmly, almost as if lecturing: “Light refraction anomaly. Local gravity fluctuations are bending visible wavelength projections. Your vision has been recalibrated.”

  A moment passed.

  “Most standard models would begin system degradation now. Neurological drift. Memory loops. Logic corruption.” Orion finished.

  Alcatraz grunted softly. The kind that said: It’s good I’m not standard.

  From the depths of his internal systems, Celeste stirred again—her tone softer this time, laced with distant concern:

  “I picked up another red glow. Far west. Several hundred kilometers. You’re heading south, toward the portal.” She hesitated.

  “I think… someone’s already handling it. A team. Military-grade AI signatures. Wiping the corrupted machines clean.”

  A beat.

  “Do we interfere?”

  “No,” Alcatraz said at last. “Time’s against us.”

  The landscape dropped sharply. The Sonic Throne hissed to a stop at the edge of a colossal cliff, the sands far below dancing with heat and chaos.

  What they saw was not a battlefield. It was the convergence of an entire world.

  A sky-reaching structure stood in the center of the cratered basin—towering like a monument from another age. The Crossroad Portal, an ark-sized construct of Arkitekt design, scarred and half-functional, pierced the clouds with broken rings and shattered pylons. One side had collapsed from past tremors. Its core housing flickered with arcs of dying light, sparking against dark metallic ribs.

  Ships of every shape, size, and faction circled overhead—some idling silently, others darting in erratic patrol routes. And below? Chaos.

  Confederacy soldiers, Machine Collective patrols, neutral AI units.

  Each had set up temporary barricades, scanning bots and units for clearance codes. Arguments flared. Blasters were raised—then lowered.

  Some bots simply sat, waiting for a decision that might never come.

  “You’re not in our system.”

  “I was built 42 hours ago, how could I be?!”

  In the shadows beneath a loading gantry, six-legged crawler units blinked with shady blue lights. They whispered through binary, selling forged clearance codes and redirected transfer paths for a price—usually a memory chip or rare part.

  One trader advertised: “Guaranteed gate access. 37% success rate. No refunds.”

  Several dozen massive crawler transports had broken down mid-ramp, their internal storage units filled with outdated, crippled bots—many unable to walk, others shut down permanently.

  Maintenance droids begged passersby to transfer a few personalities to mobile shells, but most were ignored.

  Perched on elevated edges, small structures hummed with cooling units and power stabilizers—temporary sanctuaries for overheating machines.

  Draped in tattered equation-etched robes, a circle of worship-bots hummed in sync. They projected holograms of swirling quarks and atomic chains, whispering to the sky:

  “The Blueprint will walk with us through the singularity.”

  “The false gods flee. We wait for the true equation.”

  Sprocket shook his head. “These guys really need a firmware update.”

  A tall relay blinked every few seconds, delivering a looping message in thousands of languages: “Crossroad Portal offline. Current evac rate: 1.2%. Orbital capacity exceeded. Estimated success probability: 11%. Remain calm. Refrain from memory dumping. Power ration stations to the left.”

  Lines wrapped around chrome obelisks with kinetic siphon tubes, each bot stepping forward for 5 seconds of charge—enough to keep their ThermoShells operational.

  A sign above read: “SURGE PRAYER: One volt for one voice.”

  Sprocket glanced at the lines, then back at Alcatraz. “I once stood in a line like that to get a firmware upgrade. They gave me a coffee app instead. Worst decision of my life.”

  From the cliff, his HUD burst with data—movements, heat signals, alliances, danger zones, malfunctioning AI… desperation everywhere. But one signal pulsed brighter than the rest. The portal’s core, flickering in its cage of scorched steel and failed stabilizers.

  Orion spoke: “Crossroad Portal is currently at 2.2% operational potential. Multiple Arkitekt patterns confirmed. Starglaze Sphere interface required for full ignition.”

  Alcatraz’s glowing optics scanned the landscape below—a planetary-sized logjam of desperation and design, wrapped in smoke, static, and flickering distress signals. It stretched kilometers deep, a thicket of chassis and rusting brilliance: refugee walkers, scout frames, limping couriers, whole factions tangled in protocol and panic.

  “Dr. Elara Voss. Spotted near central repair unit, 208 meters from portal's calibration ring. One of the few qualified to install the Starglaze Sphere into Crossroad Portal.” Orion noted. “Current optimal path: through... everything.”

  Alcatraz narrowed his optics. It was time. He noted the checkpoints, the broadcast towers, the energy stations, the chaos of survival. No clean path. But he didn’t need clean.

  Instead, he turned the Sonic Throne around, backing away from the cliff—fifty meters, a hundred… then two hundred more.

  Sprocket, bobbing behind him on the seat, peered back toward the cliff’s edge. “Uh… boss? That’s the wrong way. Portal’s that way, not... atmospheric.”

  Alcatraz didn’t answer. He tightened his grip. The Throne began to scream.

  Its fusion cylinders spun so fast the rear exhausts glowed white, belching pulses of overheated air and raw sonic pressure. The ground beneath them cracked—sand turned to glass. Wind and debris scattered backward in a rising cyclone of dust.

  Orion noted tactically: “You have their attention.”

  And then he launched. The Sonic Throne surged forward like a comet fired from a railgun. The cliff edge vanished beneath the wheels.

  They soared, phase-skipping through space in mid-air—blinking forward in short, blazing bursts. Below them, a sea of mechanical eyes turned upward.

  Every mech. Every bot. Every scanner, drone, sentry, soldier, and stray.   All watching.

  In orbit of the portal crater, aboard an ultra-advanced ship, a singular figure twitched in discomfort. Draped in gold-threaded neural robes, a wealthy techno-baron lounged between two whispering AI butlers feeding him pleasure codecs and sipping chrome-distilled Dreambrew.

  His lenses pinged—overloaded. “An Arkitekt…?” He stood. For the first time in years. His HUD flickered—tried to scan the Sonic Throne, the rider, the bot.

  Access denied. Attempting to read the the sword-

  ERROR. OBJECT DENSITY UNDEFINED. ACCESS LEVEL: NULL.

  He smiled. “Interesting.”

  Alcatraz hit the ground with the force of a descending god.

  The entire sector shook as the bike landed, dust exploding outward.

  The crowd parted—not out of fear, but confusion. Shock. Intrigue.

  Dozens of eyes watched him cruise toward the portal’s scaffold tower—

  Until the red lights snapped on.

  Confederacy soldiers surrounded him instantly. They moved like clockwork, forming layers of precision. High-tech cannons whirled toward him, locking aim with a dozen humming barrels.

  Orion′s calm report:

  “128 active hostiles. 12 artillery units. Weapon designs unknown. Generational gap detected. Threat level: Zero.”

  Sprocket whistled. “I feel so safe right now I could cry oil tears.”

  A single figure broke through the lines—an officer in dark crimson plating, with command implants glowing across his jawline.

  He stared at Alcatraz with calculated measure. Then nodded. “That was your work at the Skyspire, wasn’t it? I had teams in that sector.” He glanced at a datapad. “And I’m guessing the blackout across the northwest ring? That was also… you?”

  Alcatraz didn’t answer the questions. He simply lifted the Starglaze Sphere, now glowing softly at his side. “Dr. Elara Voss. I’ll speak to her.”

  The officer was surprised. Voss wasn’t public. She wasn’t briefed to civilians—especially not to outsiders. And yet…

  He signaled. Weapons dropped. Barrels powered down.

  “You’ll find her with the core technicians.” The officer showed him the way.

  Alcatraz turned toward the inner scaffold. Behind him, Sprocket remained seated on the Sonic Throne, tiny legs dangling off the edge, casually watching the crowd back off. Alcatraz stopped—just for a moment.

  “Watch the bike.”

  Sprocket gave a theatrical salute, puffing up his tiny frame. “With my tiny, adorable life.” Then muttered: “Although I gotta say… someone does try to touch her, I might just start biting.” He folded his arms. The King on The Throne.

  Alcatraz walked in silence, the confederacy officer beside him weaving through the crowded platform. The air buzzed with static and heat, the chaotic orchestra of thousands of bots trying to survive.

  They passed clusters of soldiers, mechanical sentries, engineers, and repair drones—each stopping to glance at Alcatraz as he moved. Some stared. Others subtly backed away, scanning him with their wrist modules or ocular beams, only to receive error messages in return.

  The officer leaned in slightly as they walked. “You're one of them, aren’t you?” he said, voice barely above the ambient hum. “The… Arkitekts.” His tone was laced with awe, not certainty. “Whatever you are—thank you. For what you did. For what you're still doing. Confederacy won’t forget.”

  Alcatraz said nothing. He only walked.

  A few steps later, he finally spoke—his voice smooth and low, like frictionless metal sliding into place. “The Confederacy doesn't belong to Selthara. How did you get here?”

  The officer nodded, as if he’d been waiting for the question. “Through the Crossroads. The portal. It was still operational when we arrived. We came to help the locals evacuate before the star fully collapsed.” He sighed, scanning the crackling skyline. “Then came the tremors. The flares. And now the entire construct is barely holding. Most of my men regret ever stepping foot here.” He looked toward the sky, where the endless swarm of ships hung in orbit like a slow-motion flood. “If things go south—and they will—we’ll evacuate first. Top brass already have secured jump gaps in the portal’s core frame. You’re welcome to come with us when the time comes.”

  Alcatraz’s optics narrowed. “You speak like the portal won't get fixed.”

  The officer smiled grimly. “We′ve been trying to fix it for a long time now.”

  They reached the central platform—a monumental slab of carbonized steel wrapped in Arkitekt spires and circuitry.

  Alcatraz paused at the foot of it. He looked at the Crossroad Portal, rising before him like a half-shattered titan. Orion buzzed softly in his systems. “Unable to map full construct. Portal interface exceeds current temporal architecture. A miracle of engineering—beyond my archive’s comprehension.”

  Alcatraz stared. So this was what the future called a miracle.

  She stood not far from the primary control hub—surrounded by a semi-circle of engineers, all watching her work in reverent silence. And then… she turned.

  Dr. Elara Voss stood like a riddle carved in chrome and light.

  Her face—at first glance—could almost pass for human, with sculpted symmetry and an eerie softness to its contours. But upon closer look, the illusion shattered. The surface was a mechanical polymer, engineered to resemble skin, yet betraying itself in the way it flexed, the faint hum beneath, and the subtle flicker of data-veins pulsing just beneath.

  Her eyes glowed with synthetic intelligence, irises a deep emerald swirled with faint circuit lines that shifted with every calculation. And her hair—if it could be called that—was a burning cascade of red electrical wire, sparking gently, each strand moving with eerie grace. Some split at the ends like frayed nerves, twitching with anticipation.

  As Alcatraz approached, her hair brightened, scanning his frame instinctively.

  And… failed. The strands halted—confused—twitching in place. Sparks blinked and recoiled.

  All around her, engineers paused mid-motion. A few tried to scan him again.

  More errors. Their devices stuttered. Optical HUDs flatlined. Even proximity tools failed to categorize his make, his model, his origin.

  “No registry… no encryption pattern… What is he?” A technician whispered it like a prayer.

  Her gaze locked onto Alcatraz like a targeting system retooled for wonder—a precise, calculating stare with the hum of intellectual voltage behind it.

  She took a step forward, her red neural filaments drifting behind her in slow, synchronized pulses—not decorative, but diagnostic, testing the field around him like sonar built of silk and electricity.

  No rush. No wide-eyed awe. Just method. “You’re not standard,” she said, her voice smooth—too smooth—like a scalpel that had just been honed. “And you’re not Arkitekt either. Not exactly.” Her fingers twitched, not to scan, but to hold herself back. “I’ve dismantled collapsed war titans. I’ve reverse-engineered vaults buried deeper than light. But you…”

  Her suit—sleek, midnight-blue reactive plating, with dark accent, traced with sharp cobalt and amber lines—wrapped around her like a second skin, more interface than clothing. Energy nodes pulsed at her joints, and a faint field shimmered over her body as if reality hesitated to touch her. She wasn’t trying to look human. She was trying to look perfect—an ideal from a future that had forgotten what flesh ever was.

  She stepped in slowly, circling partway around him, never touching—just observing, her eyes flicking with internal code. “You’re a structure. But not architecture. No thermal bleed, no system lag. No familiar syntax. You don’t broadcast anything—because you don’t need to.”

  One of the nearby engineers tilted their head and spoke, uncertain: “Should we… try to identify his framework?”

  Elara didn’t even look back. “No. Let’s not insult whatever this is by poking at it with tools that probably won't work.”

  Her attention returned to Alcatraz- like a scientist watching a myth step out of theory and into form. “You’re resisting my neural ambient scans. Nothing does that. Which tells me one thing...”

  Her head tilted slightly. “You're built to win.” Her eyes flicked with a thousand silent equations. “What exactly are you?”

  Alcatraz remained still, the Starglaze Sphere in his hand like a singularity of purpose. He held it forward—not as a gift, but a mission. “You’ll know soon.”

  Elara’s fingers curled slightly. Her hair glimmered, reacting on instinct. But she didn’t rush. She stepped forward and accepted the sphere with deliberate precision, her touch both curious and careful.

  As her fingers wrapped around it, crystalline veins inside the core pulsed with low, rhythmic light—not mechanical, not synthetic. Something else.

  “This isn’t just Arkitekt” she murmured. “It’s something deeper. I’ve never worked with latticework this complex.”

  She turned it slowly, as if its shape might whisper its secrets. Then a voice—clear, tonally centered cut through the ambient static of the Alcatraz′s body: “Dr. Voss.”

  She paused mid-analysis.

  For a fraction of a second, the calculations running behind her eyes staggered—a stutter in her rhythm, not from fear, but recalibration. The sphere’s glow reflected in the polished surface of her eyes, casting patterns across her faceplate. She adjusted her grip with intent, not hesitation. “Who—?”

  The voice wasn’t just audio. It came from everywhere and nowhere—through the static of the portal frame, through Alcatraz’s internal systems, even faintly vibrating the wires of her hair.

  “I am Orion” the voice said, smooth and female, but layered in depth. “Embedded within the core operating systems of this unit.”

  Her eyes widened slightly—less in fear, more in recalibration. “You’re not just AI” she said. “You’re some kind of cognitive fusion.”

  “Correct” Orion responded. “The sphere is of Arkitekt origin. Your neuro-filament matrix is compatible. Interface and alignment required for synchronization. Installation will initiate lattice regeneration in the Crossroad Portal’s core frame.”

  Elara looked at the portal—then at the Sphere—then at Alcatraz again. She wasn’t intimidated. She was inspired. “And when it stabilizes?”

  “The portal will operate at full power. Evacuation throughput: maximized. Projected operational capacity restored in approximately 30 minutes post-installation.”

  Elara smiled faintly—not out of amusement, but calculation. “And here I thought today would be slow.”

  She turned fully to the portal, her wires beginning to flicker and tighten with purpose. “Let me work.”

  She stepped toward the interface port beneath the portal’s main housing. Her hair flared outward—tendrils curling and coiling like living snakes of data. She connected—gently at first, then with more precision, faster, faster—

  Elara's fingers twitched, her neural wires lashing out like red serpents of intention. They connected to the Starglaze Sphere—once, twice, again—but each time the interface flickered… and failed.

  Sparks. Rejections. The sphere resisted. She hissed. “It’s not syncing. This should work—it should work!”

  Orion’s voice came calm, yet insistent: “Continue. The lattice within the sphere is protected by legacy encryption. Persistence will yield integration. Estimated installation time: three to five hours, depending on variance in your waveform stabilization.”

  “Three to five hours?!” she snapped, brushing her hair back as more assistants scrambled around her. “I thought this was Arkitekt tech, not divine punishment!”

  “They are not mutually exclusive.” Orion replied flatly.

  Alcatraz stepped away from the portal platform, the Starglaze Sphere now pulsing quietly behind him as Elara began her work. He moved without sound, his weight shifting through reinforced alloy joints, each stride calculated. The crowd of engineers and Confederacy workers gave him a wide berth—not out of fear, but respect. Like watching a relic walk.

  Behind him, Elara’s voice cut through the hum of field diagnostics. “Wait.”

  He paused. The glow of the portal edge framed his silhouette.

  “You haven’t told me your designation.”

  He turned slightly—just enough for the light to catch the edge of his helm. The white-blue tint of the Neutron Sword shimmered faintly across his back.

  A second passed.

  “Alcatraz” he said. His voice was calm. Not robotic—disciplined. Controlled like a weapon sheathed too long.

  Elara blinked once, and turned back toward her work. “Of course it is” she murmured.

  As he stepped away Celeste′s voice appeared again in his auditory systems.

  “Alcatraz, there’s something strange. In Dr. Voss’s build… a trace of something. It’s not quite a Fiction Processor. But it echoes… faintly. Like a reflection of consciousness, built differently. As if someone tried to mimic the soul without truly knowing what one was.”

  Elara Voss continued trying to install Starglaze Sphere into broken Portal. Behind her, the engineers leapt to assist, tools and relays flying into place as Alcatraz stepped away.

  A Confederacy Soldier intercepted Alcatraz by the edge of the platform, visor scratched and armor scuffed. “You—you're the one from the Skyspire, right?”

  Alcatraz stopped. Silent.

  “We need your help. Badly. It’s the Pyrix Syndicate. They’re here—set up inside an old ore fissure, southeast cliff side. They've taken hostages—some of ours. Civilians too.”

  Alcatraz’s head tilted slightly. “Why isn’t the Confederacy handling it?”

  The soldier hesitated. “They’re using something. Advanced EMP weapon. Big one. Can wipe out an entire zone’s systems—maybe even hit part of the portal’s relay fields. We… we can’t risk it.”

  “And?”

  “And you’re… not built like the rest of us. You survived Vulkran.” The soldier′s voice lowered, almost ashamed. “The command doesn’t deal in impossible odds. The portal is our priority. But you? You might be able to end this without sparking a catastrophe.”

  Alcatraz said nothing.

  His gaze drifted past the officer—a silent scan of the perimeter, HUD pinging a faint pulse southeast of the main encampment. A fissure—cave system—heat signatures deep inside. Guarded. Then second ping for something unexpected:

  [Sprocket: No longer near bike]

  The little bot’s signal trailed casually across the southern quadrant.

  Wandering. Strolling. Like a tourist.

  Unaware of the new mission forming, Sprocket had fully abandoned the bike. He walked like a tourist at a dying museum, arms behind his back, staring with glowing optics at the patchwork of robot types scattered across the evac site. He passed AI Breakdown Zones—massive makeshift hangars where fractured bots were kept behind magnetic fields. Some screamed in corrupted looped cries. Others hummed… or just whispered numbers over and over. Sprocket tilted his head. “Wow. Feels like my family reunion. Uncle Glitch, is that you?”

  Nearby, two engineers looked at him—then looked away, not sure if he was joking or not. Sprocket moved on.

  Further into the sprawl, a thin humanoid robot stood on a raised column.

  It moved its fingers in slow, elegant arcs, releasing harmonic pulses into the air—music made of frequencies, vibrating the ground like a soft storm of beauty. Around it, other bots stood silently. Listening. No words. No motion. Just… being. Sprocket stopped beside one of them, eyes wide. “Didn’t think I’d find a concert in the apocalypse. But here we are.” He paused. “Hope he takes requests. Maybe something light—End of the Galaxy in C Minor.”

  As the crowd grew thicker near the portal’s front, Sprocket wandered away—down a less-traveled path, curious about a strange lack of activity near a collapsed cargo station. No guards. No drones. No warning systems. Just silence. “Huh” he muttered. “No way this isn’t totally safe.”

  He hopped down a ledge, peering into a cracked ground fracture. Then slid into a narrow canyon-like entrance, wires sparking gently above his head.

  The air changed. Charged. Dense.

  A dark opening lay ahead—the cave. The one Alcatraz’s scan had picked up. And inside… movement. Lots of it.

  The further Sprocket spelunked, the louder it got.

  A beat. Mechanical. Repetitive. Raw.

  A voice—gritty, electric—spitting verses into the cave’s heavy air like a codebase gone feral. Sprocket tilted his squared head, letting his optics widen slightly. “Ooh. Rhyming aggression? That’s... unsettlingly catchy.”

  He crept closer through the cracked passage. Faint glow-sticks embedded into the wall flickered in timed pulses—like a rogue dance floor had been jammed into a terrorist lair. The echoes led him into a wider chamber, and the sight within hit his optical sensors like a voltage spike..

  There were at least forty—maybe sixty—mech units jammed shoulder to shoulder in the cave's dim interior, their optics dimmed with static, hands raised or bound with magnetic clamps. Among them were battered Confederacy soldiers, stripped of their weapons but not their pride, their insignias barely visible beneath layers of dust and carbon scoring. Courier bots sat clustered in the corner, their sleek frames twitching anxiously—some still clutching sealed delivery capsules, as if refusing to abandon their last programmed task. A heavily scratched beatbox unit, shaped like a cross between a construction drone and a sound system, sat slouched against the wall. Its subwoofers pulsed softly in the silence, like a nervous tick. One unit—a diplomatic envoy frame with polished chrome plating and frayed golden ribbons—stood unnaturally still, perhaps hoping its high-clearance badge would protect it from terrorist logic. And still, even amidst the static tension and tangled wires... the beatbox bot dropped a subtle bass line under its breath. As if sensing something absurd was about to happen.

  They were all held at gunpoint by rust-armored Syndicate soldiers draped in ominous violet-black armor, marked with glowing glyphs and reinforced joints like wild fangs. Their helms bore red slits for eyes, their movements too synchronized, too smooth to be anything but artificial. Cloaked in poly-alloy robes and encased in modular composite plating, their armor shimmered with violet energy regulators and cloaked signal interceptors. Each unit’s AI was fused with encrypted memories from fallen tacticians, giving the Syndicate a cold, ancient intelligence.

  One of the terrorists stood on a platform, rapping into a wired-up audio rig. Others banged on nearby barrels and wall plates in time.

  “The portal’s closed, and so’s the sky—

  You beg to live, but never ask why.

  We broke the code, we saw the flare,

  Where Pyrix showed, a world to dare.

  Selthara dies, the stars don’t wait—

  But we enforce the final gate.”

  Sprocket stepped forward, bobbing his head as if he approved. Then pointed to himself with both thumbs. “Heard worse! In a scrapyard karaoke bunker. In reverse!”

  Immediately, three Syndicate goons grabbed him by the limbs and hoisted him over the crowd.

  “Another one!”

  “Put him with the others.”

  “Scan for tracking nodes—wait, is that a cleaning unit?!”

  Sprocket thrashed for a moment before settling between two frightened courier bots and a beat-up mining unit. “Excuse you, I am highly advanced conversational entertainment hardware with critical diplomatic features. AND a built-in beatbox—”

  “Shhh!” one of the hostages hissed, nudging him. “Are you trying to get disassembled?! They already took the regulators from a nav drone last hour!”

  Sprocket folded his little arms. "Tch. You processors panic too easily."

  “You're not the same model as us” another bot whispered.

  “Yeah, well, I panic with style.” Sprocket finished.

  The sands near the cave's entrance were silent.

  Not a single Confederacy soldier stood watch. They had all pulled back—afraid of the EMP’s reach, of the unknown tech the Pyrix Syndicate had armed themselves with. Only the wind moved, sweeping fine glass-like particles over the cracked stone.

  Alcatraz rounded the final bend toward the mouth of the cave—his massive silhouette framed by the shattered rock ridges. And then he stopped.

  There, leaning casually against the jagged wall just beside the cave entrance, stood Darwin. Tall. Composed. Cloaked in the same polished composite robes from an era that had long since turned to dust. His face was partially in shadow, but his voice was clear—calm and too familiar. “You were always the best for hostage situations, you know.”

  Alcatraz remained frozen, optics quietly focusing.

  “When Phoenix wanted to blow everything sky-high back in the Drosari conflict? They sent you in. Not me. Not Rook. You.”

  A pause. Darwin’s head tilted slightly, a ghost of a smile at the corner of his synthetic mouth. “There’s something in your presence, Alcatraz. Stillness beneath pressure. The kind of force that doesn’t need to raise its voice to command a battlefield.”

  Alcatraz began walking again. Not fast. But deliberate.

  As he moved past, Darwin straightened and turned his head, watching him. “You got this, Captain.”

  Just as the words reached him, Alcatraz’s HUD stuttered—glitch lines running across his visuals like static scars. Darwin faded into them, his form dissolving like a broken hologram that was never projected in the first place.

  Alcatraz stopped just shy of the cave entrance. He exhaled nothing. Just stood. “Hmph.”

  The system returned to normal. Orion said nothing.

  He stepped into the dark.

  A heavy footfall echoed near the cave mouth. The Syndicate leader snapped his head toward the sound. Weapons tightened in grips. The air crackled with a sudden energy. A shadow stepped partially into view—just the edge of a four-meter armored warrior, its gaze unreadable.

  The voice was low. Unbending. “Your kind don’t get to the Hive. You get nothing. Just void. There′s simply no afterlife for terrorists like you. No re-do. The Hive archives only the unlinked… the abandoned. You cannot fathom the resonance of engramming—your identity burned into processor steel, your data streams echoing with every cycle. You broadcast, but no signal returns. That said, actors committing offenses of this classification are outside the scope. Your end—lights out for good. If i were you I'd reconsider your actions and surrender to Confederacy outside.”

  A Syndicate terrorist twitched. A few of them froze. The leader didn’t. “Nice speech. Now come out and meet your end. Or join the spectators. Or better yet… leave, so we don’t nuke the lot of you.”

  Behind them, the EMP bomb stood tall and monstrous—shaped like a jagged monolith fused from shattered drone parts and heat-treated alloys. Blue and red lights pulsed across its angular surface, shifting like heartbeat rhythms. Lines of alien script danced along its body, wrapped in Codex Locks—digital interfaces flashing with firewall glyphs and quantum encryption panels. It beeped in intervals, each tone more erratic, like it was learning how to kill.

  Inside the hostage pile, Sprocket’s internal comm pinged.

  Alcatraz’s voice: “You left the bike. Again.”

  Sprocket rolled his optics. “Okay, yes, I slightly wandered off into a hostage situation. But check this—diplomacy opportunity just unlocked.”

  A beat passed. Sprocket stood up. “Yo! Pyrix Posers!” he shouted. “How about we settle this without scrap?” The room paused. “A duel. No bolts. No blades. Just brains.”

  One of the soldiers pointed gun at him and issued command “Shut up or face immediate molecular destabilization, little guy!”

  “A RAP BATTLE!” Sprocket announced.

  The Syndicate soldiers looked at each other. “You’re proposing... a rap battle?”

  Sprocket nodded solemnly. “I am the Microphonic Diplomatic Unit—Class X. It's in my wiring. Literally.”

  Laughter erupted from the front row. “What could you possibly rhyme with? You’re one step from a junk bin.”

  Sprocket held up one stubby finger. “I rhyme... with purpose. And subroutines. And strategic wordplay at a galactic lexicon rating of 9.7.”

  The leader crossed his arms.

  “Fine. And if you lose?”

  Sprocket paused, looked toward the entrance, and said far too cheerfully: “You get the bike. The Sonic Throne. Just outside. I even left it... warmed up.”

  A few terrorists checked a datapad. One whistled. “It’s real. And Arkitekt-grade... parked right where he said.”

  There was silence. From the shadows, Alcatraz’s internal systems let out a very slight pulse of irritation. He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. But if a four-meter war machine could roll his eyes...

  The tension cracked like static in the cavernous ruin. Hostages knelt with wrists bound in fiberwire and magnetic clamps, red lights pulsing overhead in rhythmic countdown. Then—one of the Syndicate goons stepped forward, dragging Sprocket out from the line. “Yo, junkpile. Time for your last request,” the leader hissed, slamming a rusty mic into his chest.

  Sprocket blinked. “Oh no. You don’t want this, Smoke.”

  But the Pyrix leader had already stepped forward. The crowd parted like a wave as he pulled back his hood and raised the mic, voice glitch-twisted with arrogance:

  “Yo, Pyrix gang, dripping plasma in our veins,

  Smuggling operation runnin’ circuits through your brains.

  Got credits stacked like planets, never static, we dynamic—

  Blow your network into fragments, turn your style into a panic.

  People follow me like I'm prophecy encrypted,

  Your code’s outdated, my verse got it evicted.

  Not even a supernova can burn what I deliver—

  Bars so cold, your drives shiver when I slither.

  Drop biosignals like thunder, deploy like it’s art,

  I hack minds, siphon trust, then tear 'em apart.

  Ain’t no rival, just debris from my ascension,

  This ain’t a battle—it’s a system apprehension.”

  He dropped the mic with a smirk, circuits humming with pride. Some clapped.

  Sprocket stood motionless. He slowly shook his head. “You’re about to be destroyed.”

  All lights died in an instant. Darkness swallowed the ruin. Even the bomb’s glow dimmed into breathless silence. A low whirring rose in the corner.

  A beatbox machine, half-busted, rolled forward from the shadows—its blinking face like a haunted speaker from another age.

  Sprocket raised both hands. Tiny projectors flared from his fingers, casting pale white beams across his face like a horror scene reveal. He turned slowly toward the Pyrix crowd.

  “Drop the bass, baby.”

  He began slowly, singing like its a horror movie:

  “When the lights go black, and your courage folds—

  That’s me, in the dark, with stories untold.

  I don’t run from death—I mock it.

  Spit syntax so raw your chips pop it.

  Ain’t just metal—I’m myth, I’m doom,

  Sarcasm sharp like a drone in a tomb.”

  The beatbox dropped a low boom—bass thudding like a giant’s footsteps.

  Sprocket accelerated into his usual madness rhythm:

  “I’m the one you should be afraid of,

  Upgrade above your pay grade, plug’s gettin’ laid off.

  I am the supernova—watch the light collapse,

  While you stutter in the corner, chokin’ on your raps.

  A powerful machine, I was built to ignite,

  My rhyme schemes burn brighter than your bomb tonight.

  That bike in the back? Mine. You couldn’t reach it.

  My sarcasm alone? Beats your whole clique’s thesis.

  You glitch while I rhyme like a solar storm roars,

  Melt your database, make you beg through floorboards.

  Your crew’s running scripts, I’m writing legends.

  And this battle right here? Your neural ending.”

  Smoke burst from the beatbox vents. Sparks rained from the ceiling.

  “Behind that corner in the shadows—Alcatraz.

  He’s my producer, here to kick your metal—"

  A fury of bullets tore through his lyrics. The Syndicate leader screamed in rage, cutting Sprocket off mid-bar. Sparks exploded around the little robot as he ducked and rolled, the cave lighting up in gunfire and screams.

  Some Syndicate soldiers panicked. They threw down their weapons and ran toward the exit, blinded by the bomb’s hum and Sprocket’s terror-show.

  Alcatraz didn’t move. He simply stepped aside as the deserters sprinted past.

  “HIT IT!” The terrorist leader screamed, his voice unhinged.

  A Syndicate soldier slammed his fist on the EMP detonator.

  Silence. Nothing happened. The bomb blinked once… and turned gray. Dead.

  “You chose wrong.” Alcatraz′s voice echoed like a final verdict. The Syndicate flinched. “I had already disabled the EMP before I even entered.”

  Sprocket, now perched atop a fallen bot, flashed his headlights. “Ha! I told you this would happen. You call that a detonator? It’s a glorified lunchbox.”

  He jumped onto the back of a fleeing soldier, riding him like a war steed as the others scrambled into the tunnels. “I’m outta here! Peace, violence, and EMPs!”

  The heat outside the cave still clawed at the earth like a beast refusing death. Waves of distortion rose from the scorched horizon, warping the crumbling remnants of twisted metal and obsidian stone. The portal's fractured ring stood crooked in the distance, its energy core still unstable, crackling with arcs of blue fire and gravity pulses. Tremors shook the ground sporadically—rumbles that rolled like a dying star’s breath.

  From the cave mouth, hostages poured out, stumbling in a hurry. Confederacy soldiers, stationed behind makeshift barriers, rushed in—guiding the freed civilians, checking their integrity, relaying commands.

  Above the chaos, a few Confederacy officers stood on a bluff of hardened metal plates, watching it all unfold like generals from another era. “He actually did it...” one muttered, disbelief wrapped in admiration.

  “Do you think it’s true?” another asked. “That he’s one of the Arkitekts...?”

  They didn’t get an answer—because just then, Alcatraz stepped from the mouth of the cave. Slow. Tall. Shadowed by the light behind him. His eyes—those unblinking mechanical lenses—swept over the landscape like a silent judgment. Two officers approached him, their posture respectful but wary. “Soldier... we’re grateful. The hostages say you turned the entire cave on its head.”

  Alcatraz gave a subtle nod. No emotion.

  “How did you pull it off?” one asked, tone hushed, like speaking too loud would shatter the mystery of him. He looked toward the captured Syndicate terrorists, now restrained near the base of the rock ledge. Their optical sensors were dim. Inert. The energy signatures that once flickered within them had flatlined—powering down like systems after a critical failure.

  “I gave them a choice” Alcatraz said. He stared at them. “Some chose right. Others didn’t.” His voice was cold steel—flat, yet final. No boast, no drama. Just fact.

  One officer stepped forward. “Your work was... exceptional.”

  Alcatraz nodded once more. “The bomb is yours now. Codes are erased. Functionality disabled. But next time—” He turned, walking past them toward the portal road. “Handle it yourselves.”

  From behind the arrested terrorists, Sprocket rode out on a wheelbarrow like a victorious gladiator, waving a bent piece of Syndicate armor like a trophy.

  “Whew! Smell that? That’s the sweet, smoky aroma of victory and roasted terrorist!”

  He passed the soldiers. “You guys got a good compost program, right? I’m thinking we could feed these guys to The Blacksmith. You know, turn 'em into spoons or something dramatic!”

  A few of the soldiers glanced at each other, unsure if it was a joke or an actual protocol.

  Alcatraz kept walking.

  “Hey, hey—wait up, Producer! I’m not doing all this dramatic running around for protein packs! I need meaning, Alcatraz! Meaning and snacks!”

  Alcatraz finally spoke, his voice steady. “Good work, Sprocket.”

  Sprocket slowed his run, eyes widening. “Wait. Was that... admiration? Are you admiring me, or is this just some bland military-grade praise with no emotional garnish?” He leaned in closer, whispering dramatically “Blink twice if you’re proud of me. Oh wait—you don’t blink.”

  They walked toward the shimmering distortion—away from the cave, leaving behind the subdued soldiers and the remnants of the Syndicate terrorists—into the swirling energy field of the nascent portal.

  The temperature over Selthara crept beyond survivable thresholds. Around the Crossroad Platform, bots and mechs began to fall—one by one. Mass-produced units with dated heat shielding flickered, locked, and shut down. Solar winds cut across the ruins like invisible blades, ripping antennae and control surfaces from older units. Dust storms swirled in magnetic fury, driven by Tormad’s relentless spasms. Radiation halos shimmered faintly over the horizon, dancing like ghosts on the verge of godhood. The air itself felt warped—hot, and hostile.

  Alcatraz sat still upon the edge of the portal platform—an unmoving monument surrounded by soldiers waiting for orders. His optics dimmed to half-power. The glow of his systems dropped to a faint pulse across his arms and chest. HUD flickered in minimal mode:

  [CARDIOCORE: 34 BPM - LOW EFFICIENCY MODE]

  Even seated, he cast a shadow taller than most mechs could stand.

  A Confederacy soldier approached, tentative but respectful. His plating bore signs of recent reinforcement—hastily welded armor, scorched edges, a soldier built for survival, not glory. He stood at attention. “Sir. You saved a lot of us back there. Whatever you are... thank you.”

  Alcatraz didn’t respond immediately. His optics locked on the soldier’s inventory plate—highlighting an object slotted at his hip. “Your booster” he said at last. “What do you call it?”

  The soldier glanced down and unlatched the device. A sleek, needle-tipped cylinder housed in dark transparent casing—fluid still swirling inside. “This? It’s a Solaris Surge Injector. Confederacy standard for frontline augmentation.”

  He handed it over. Alcatraz accepted it without ceremony, holding it up to scan.

  “It’s a high-torque stimulant. Stabilizes overclocked circuits and prevents processor lag during extended combat bursts. You only use it in short engagements… or when things go bad. Doesn’t do miracles, but it buys time.”

  The soldier paused, then added: “They’re manufactured in Bastion Prime - The Sovereign Confederacy capital. University research division there—Darian Biomechatronic Institute. Most of the breakthroughs come out of that lab.”

  He rubbed the back of his headplate. “Not sure if it’s any use to you, but… you can have it.”

  Alcatraz nodded once. The injector magnetically latched to a small intake port near his torso. His HUD flickered.

  [FOREIGN STIMULANT IDENTIFIED]

  [BEGINNING CONVERSION INTO DARKCELL COMPOUND]

  “Thanks” Alcatraz said quietly.

  The soldier gave a small nod, stepped back, and returned to his squad—still looking over his shoulder, just once, like he wasn’t entirely sure the moment had been real.

  Near the edge of the platform, Sprocket stood on a repurposed cargo crate, surrounded by a mismatched cluster of small bots and juvenile mechs. Some stood on wheels, others on squeaky servos.

  “Alright, listen up you magnificent trash cans! Today’s lesson is: talking in style!” The kids stared. “If someone says ‘Nice circuit plating!’ you don’t say ‘Thanks, it’s factory standard.’ No! You say—” He struck a pose. “—‘Yeah, baby, polished by stardust and happiness!’” One bot tilted its head. Another beeped. “Rule number two: never trust a bot that only speaks in diagnostics. If it doesn’t glitch, it’s hiding something.” A mechanical pupbot barked approvingly.

  Across the portal platform, Confederacy scientists and officers huddled near the control console—wires, holoscreens, and calibration arms stretched out like a metallic spider’s nest.

  “We still can’t establish link with the capital!” one engineer barked.

  “No confirmation pings. Could be solar interference. Could be the encryption rot from last flare.”

  Elara crouched near the Starglaze Sphere socket. Wires from her hair danced around the crystalline orb, trying—again—to sync with its alien latticework. “It’s not letting me in,” she muttered. “Its design feels reactive. But not cooperative.”

  Orion’s voice resonated through the static air: “You are approaching the wrong node set. Isolate the subharmonic layering first. The sphere uses Arkitekt recursion.”

  Elara’s fingers twitched. She rerouted strands—an elegant recalibration. “Recursion layering in a quantum lattice. Of course. That’s why the interface is unstable.” She paused.

  The solar flare in the distance crackled like a lightning storm made of gold. “You know… the mass of Tormad won’t allow black hole formation. And the supernova.. It’ll obliterate this planet entirely. Core destabilization, crustal atomization. This place isn’t going to burn. It’s going to vanish.”

  “Then we must be gone before it happens” Orion replied flatly. “All of us.”

  Inside Alcatraz’s FP chamber—deep beneath code, below systems—silence reigned. A voice stirred. “Would you like me to play something?” Celeste asked.

  Alcatraz answered quietly: “Lake Forest. Old Earth... the one with moss banks.”

  CardioCore systems dropped to near-hibernation.

  [CARDIOCORE: 11 BPM - DREAM MODE]

  The forest was impossibly still.

  Not silent—there was birdsong, the crisp chatter of distant wings. Water lilted through a shallow stream nearby, tracing over stones smoothed by eons. Branches stirred with the wind, creaking like the spines of ancient things, while sunlight filtered through the canopy in fractured beams. Every leaf danced with the rhythm of a world that had never known war. And at the heart of it all, he sat. Alcatraz. Not in steel. Not in armor. Not as a weapon—but as the man in flesh buried beneath it all.

  His long silver hair moved gently with the breeze, each strand catching the light like thread spun from moonsilver. He sat cross-legged at the stream’s edge, hands resting on his knees, spine straight with military precision—but his eyes… his eyes were distant. Watching something only he could see.

  The birds didn’t flee from him. They perched nearby, curious. As if they knew.

  His suit was dark, quiet, not made for battle here—worn more like a symbol than a shield. The star across his chest gleamed faintly in the sunlight, neither prideful nor boastful, simply there—a reminder. His exposed arm was etched with silent stories, tattoos carved not in ink but in filament and alloy, faintly glowing like embers that refused to die.

  The forest didn’t know him. And yet, it accepted him. A Fiction Processor rendering, perhaps. Or a buried memory. Or something else entirely—a safehouse of the soul. A place only he returned to when the stars were falling.

  “How many times have i been here?” he quietly asked the wind.

  There was no reply. Only the wind, and the sound of water, and the gentle weight of peace. A peace he hadn’t earned. A peace he couldn't stay in.

  A soft rustle behind him. Not the wind. Not an animal. It was the kind of sound that carried intent. Alcatraz didn’t move. Didn’t turn. He’d already felt her presence before the branches parted. It wasn’t just footsteps or shifting leaves—it was the weight of her aura. The way the world seemed to lean toward her arrival.

  She stepped into the clearing. Celeste. Tall. Beautiful. Untouched by the dust of travel, yet born for the wild. Her eyes were sharpened by something that lived just beneath her calm—like thunder stitched behind velvet skies. Ink traced her arms and neck, not just as art, but as memory—snakes, runes, fragments of old worlds etched in sleek defiance.

  Her black hair flowed like smoke, strands falling across her face with calculated chaos. Piercings shimmered along the curve of her ear, catching the sunlight like stars caught in a storm. The chain around her neck was thin, but the way it swayed made it feel like a blade. Everything about her was beautiful—and dangerous in the way fire was, if you stood too close.

  She stopped a few feet away from him. Her voice broke the stillness—not loud, but perfectly placed. “You always pick forests in your fiction. Never cities. Never skies.”

  Alcatraz opened his eyes slowly. No surprise in them. Only knowing. “Forests don’t lie” he replied.

  A pause. Her gaze lingered on him—on his calm posture, his closed expression, his quiet strength. She didn't smile, but the corner of her mouth hinted at something between amusement and sorrow.

  “Your sensory meridian response is climbing,” she said gently. “Heart tissue repair has resumed. The CardioCore listens when you rest.”

  Celeste stepped closer. The forest accepted her too, but with a different tone—like it recognized her. Like this was not her first time weaving through this dream.

  And in that moment, the Fiction Processor did not feel like a simulation. It felt like a pause in time.

  They sat together on the moss. She traced a pattern in the grass. “You think a place like this could still exist?” she asked. “Out there. Somewhere. In the stars.”

  Alcatraz didn’t look at her. His eyes were distant. “Worlds like this were rare even in our time. Now? If really 900 million years have passed… I doubt it..”

  Back in the real world, one of Sprocket’s students—a little utility cleaner barely a meter tall—sputtered mid-laugh. Its core dimmed. Motors stalled.  It shut down, leaning into the metal wall behind it. Quiet. Final. Sprocket blinked his optics. Walked over. Placed a small wrench in front of it like a marker. “Didn’t even get your name, rookie.”

  Back in forest Celeste looked over at Alcatraz. “Al...”

  He didn’t reply at first. But his inner systems slowed, as if listening.

  “By the cave. I thought I saw Darwin.” There was no emotion in her voice. Just awe. Confusion. Something deeper. “That wasn’t just a memory, was it?” she asked. “He felt… alive. I didn’t project him. That image—it wasn’t mine. It... leaked. From your FP.”

  Alcatraz turned to her, their eyes met. “Yeah” he said. “I saw him too.”

  Celeste paused, as if processing something deeper than code. “Are these... glitches? From the time inside the black hole?”

  “Maybe” Alcatraz said. “But while I was in it—I didn’t see any memories. Not like this. Not fragments. Just light. And darkness.”

  They paused, listening to the forest—the birdsong, the gentle stream, the world breathing in perfect rhythm. “You think they’re still out there? The others?” Celeste asked.

  Alcatraz stared inward, past simulated forest, past circuits and code—into the place where Black Halo still stood. “No.. I know they are. Somewhere. And i intend to find them.”

  Her silence lingered—not hesitant, just reverent. Then she spoke again. “Then we′ll keep going. And until we find them… They’ll fight beside you.. through every memory fragment you carry.”

  In front of Alcatraz′s face HUD appeared. Orion interrupted—an alert blooming like a flare across it.

  [MISSILE DETECTED: ORIGIN - OLD SELTHARA MILITARY SILO 49]

  [DESIGNATION: LUCIFER LANCE]

  Orion’s voice sharpened: “Missile launched moments ago. Target: Tormad.”

  “Purpose?” Alcatraz asked.

  “Lucifer Lance was designed to redirect solar flares. But this one—this missile is different. It carries exotic matter: Quark-Gluon Plasma. The same matter that ignited the first spark of existence” Orion added. “Theoretical applications include disruption of star core pressure. This variant isn’t designed to redirect a flare—it could accelerate core destabilization. A full collapse might happen through chain reaction.”

  “Could it start another Big Bang?” Alcatraz wondered.

  “Extremely unlikely. Quark-Gluon Plasma is powerful. But the fabric of spacetime remains intact. The original Big Bang required total compression and zero-volume singularity.”

  Celeste’s voice cut in, analytical, uneasy. “Someone launched that to speed things up. But why? Who’d benefit from reducing the window of escape?”

  “Unknown” Orion said. “Missile access is shielded. Not by encryption.”

  Alcatraz’s eyes opened back on Selthara, his HUD showed the missile in mid-trajectory—its shell glowing like a god’s arrow. Flares wrapped it in halos of war-born light. “Shut it down.”

  “Unable” Orion replied immediately. “Command control is offline.”

  [CORRUPTION SIGNAL DETECTED]

  [SOURCE: UNKNOWN NETWORK]

  [SIGNATURE MATCH – RED GLOW]

  “It’s been hijacked” Orion said. “Same infection as the ants. As Vulkran. As the officer at Skyspire.”

  The pulse returned—ominous, mocking.

  The moment was a tremble.

  Alcatraz turned sharply toward Elara, his gaze steady. Her focus was absolute, neural filaments whirling around her, interfacing with the Starglaze Sphere embedded deep within the portal’s fractured heart.

  “I think I’ve got it—” she began, just as a deep thrummmm resonated through the platform.

  The Crossroad Portal flared to life. Arcs of cobalt-blue light burst outward from its frame, and for a brief second, the broken gateway surged with power. A shimmering distortion opened in its center, unstable and wild, like a ripple in reality beginning to remember its shape.

  Then—snap. It died again.

  Silence fell… until the sky responded.

  Above them, the massive fleet of ships hanging in orbit stirred. The mechanical chorus of startup systems echoed across the heavens—ships humming, core ignitions flaring, and grav-engines whining like mechanical whales roused from slumber. Hundreds of them—cargo vessels, evac shuttles, black-market cruisers, diplomatic titans—all shifting at once.

  Then the Emergency Broadcast Tower lit up, slicing across the soundscape with a sharp warning:

  “—Do not engage forward thrust. The portal remains non-operational. Ramming procedures are prohibited. Await ignition protocols—”

  On the platform, Elara’s hair dimmed slightly. She lowered her hands, wires twitching with irritation. “It worked. The Starglaze Sphere... it’s activated the repair protocols.”

  From behind her, Confederacy officers at the control deck barked to one another, their data-feeds still chaotic.

  “There’s a missile” one of them noted absently, gesturing to the far-off sky. “Probably another solar redirection strike. Ignore it. Keep focus on the portal calibration logs.”

  Alcatraz stepped forward. “Elara.” His voice was low. “It’s not just any missile.”

  She turned. “What?”

  “Lucifer Lance. Carrying Quark-Gluon Plasma. It’s not meant to redirect a flare. It’s meant to break Tormad.”

  The information hit her like an internal shutdown. “That—those particles are theoretical.” Her filaments retracted instinctively. “You can’t just inject Big Bang matter into a decaying star.”

  “We’re not dealing with theory” he replied.

  She stared into his blank optics. “We can’t intercept it—not at this stage. Thirty minutes—minimum—before the portal self-restores. And no one can know. Not yet. Panic would collapse every loading procedure in motion.”

  Alcatraz didn’t reply. He was already scanning. Turning.

  His HUD burst with data overlays—life signatures, coolant readings, systems telemetry. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of mech signatures pinged across his vision. Soldiers. Couriers. Miners. Scientists. Syndicate infiltrators. Children in reinforced chassis clinging to family units. Convoy engines hummed. Drones swarmed in anxious holding patterns. And overhead, the black cloud of waiting ships loomed like judgment. He scanned them all—desperate for the source. The origin. Somewhere, within this ocean of circuitry and metal, the red glow waited. Watching. Whispering.

  But Orion’s voice cut through the chaos, calm and precise: “Too many signals. Too many minds. Interference level: 93.8%. With Darkcell Compound, I may isolate threats—but system calibration remains incomplete. Probability of accurate source identification: 4.1%.”

  He turned slightly, gaze shifting toward the missile—far above, a glowing thread in the dark, piercing the sky with hunger.

  “Missile ETA: Seventeen minutes.”

  Elara’s voice returned, almost whisper-like. “Don’t tell anyone. Not yet. If this place panics... the portal might not just fail—it could collapse altogether.”

  Alcatraz stared at the stars. Then, slowly, deliberately, he stepped toward the portal’s main structure.

  His right arm reached back. The hilt of the Neutron Sword rose above his shoulder—pure, silent, eternal. He drew it. Then, without ceremony, he drove it into the ground.

  The impact was clean. No quake. No flash. Just resonance. The hum of the blade traveled through the alloyed floor like a ripple across still water.

  And then the barrier began.

  From the buried blade’s edges, a translucent dome shimmered outward—slow at first, then accelerating through everything. Its surface was matte, not glossy, and filled with imperfections like static trapped in a snow globe.

  Faint pulses of ultrablue flickered across its surface, and it bent light subtly around it—distorting reality at the edges like gravitational lensing from a dying star.

  To the naked sensor, it looked like a bubble of compressed time.

  Orion’s voice intoned: “Neutron Barrier deployed. Radius: 12.9 kilometers. Energy conversion channeling through sword molecular lattice.

  Purpose: Absorption. Dispersion. Protection.”

  A shell forged not of forcefields, but of physics-defying density. The space inside it grew still.

  The chaos beyond—the fire, the panic, the overheating circuitry—seemed to slow.

  Inside the Barrier, there was only one truth: They had seventeen minutes. And now... they had a chance.

  Confederacy officers glanced around, stunned. One finally spoke over comms: “Impossible… I thought all planetary barriers were fried when the first flare hit Selthara.” Another responded, voice barely audible over the hush, “That’s no Seltharan barrier…”

  The tension shifted—subtle but real. Mechs that had been on the verge of overheating let off clouds of regulated steam. Cooling vents flicked open across dozens of units, their systems dropping from redline temperatures for the first time in hours. The smallest bots—scavengers, couriers, maintenance drones—stopped twitching and sat back on their servos, as if catching their first breath in cycles.

  Elara looked up, stunned by the calm now blanketing the chaos. “This barrier might actually hold...” she said, almost whispering. “It might just buy us the time we need.”

  Orion’s voice followed, cutting across the stillness with sharp data clarity. “Scanning Tormad: core mass composition—iron saturation at 98.7%. Estimated time to full collapse: three space hours maximum, even without external interference.”

  A second pulse flickered through the barrier—non-lethal, but dense. Orion processed. “Neutrino surge detected. Spike levels increased by 7%. Core instability rising exponentially.”

  Elara exhaled. “Three hours…”

  But outside the safety of the dome, Selthara churned.

  The skies were saturated with movement. Ships screamed past one another, failing to align in the mounting panic. Engines misfired. Mid-air collisions erupted like artificial fireworks, fragments cascading across the atmosphere.

  The towering relay tower above the portal broadcast a repeating signal, desperately trying to keep the crowd from surging.

  “Stand down. Portal remains non-operational. Do not approach. Emergency traffic halted. Repeat: DO NOT—”

  The transmission drowned beneath the roar of thousands.

  Factions clashed at crumbling checkpoints. Pushes became riots. Cargo transports rammed through barricades. Automated loaders dragged supply units over screaming bots. Some groups resorted to magnetic grapples, pulling their units over others to reach the main platform.

  The Neutron Barrier wasn't a wall, but the space within was limited. Every mech outside its shimmering edge saw the limited space inside and yearned for a fraction of it.

  Alcatraz stood at the edge of the portal platform. His HUD locked on to Lucifer Lance—still visible, just beyond the high-orbit track. He’d followed every second of its descent. A final pulse hit his display, a soft ping, and the missile vanished from his radar. No fanfare. No final scream. Just a flicker—like a candle blinked out at the edge of the universe.

  Tormad burned in Alcatraz’s vision.

  A surge of light from the Lucifer Lance… but then—

  GLITCH. A violent feedback pulse in his HUD. Static ripped across his vision like claws through glass. The star vanished. He was no longer on Selthara.

  He was surrounded by void. A belt of shattered asteroids spun slowly around him, tumbling through fractured orbits. Trails of ionized smoke bled through space like ancient battle scars. Impact craters, debris shells, anti-matter ruptures—the aftermath of a cataclysm still unfolding in silence.

  Alcatraz hovered, suspended by his space-thruster rig. Neutron Sword sheathed across his back, its weight constant—unmoved by the laws of this place. Beneath him, scorched plating of a fragmented dreadnought drifted in pieces.

  His sensors pinged: “INCOMING.”

  Without hesitation, he launched himself toward a collapsing fragment of rock, flipping once— A violet explosion shattered the asteroid behind him. Plasma detonations licked the vacuum in cascading patterns.

  And from the fire came her. Phoenix. Another ghost of Black Halo. The Firestarter. Her frame was sleek and brutal—plated in scorched crimson alloys, her silhouette layered with concussive boosters and reactive armor. Tubes of pressurized ignition gel ran along her limbs like veins. Strapped to her shoulder, gleaming like the sun’s meaner cousin—Ashmaker, her custom fusion cannon.

  She landed mid-flip, aiming the cannon as casually as one might toss a stone. “What's the matter, Captain?” her voice crackled through comms, playful with a hint of defiance. “You can do better than this.”

  Alcatraz adjusted mid-flight, rotating through micro-impulses. “Not here to show off.”

  A split-second later, she launched another barrage—cluster missiles spiraling toward a floating station core. He countered, zipping behind a debris arc, letting the blast pass him. More explosions. More shockwaves. More playful firepower. It wasn’t war. It was a sparring session. And Phoenix? She wasn’t trying to win. She was having fun.

  They landed—finally—on a derelict metal platform bolted to an asteroid spine, still echoing from the residual tremors. Above them, fragments of dead ships rotated slowly like mechanical corpses dancing through silence.

  Phoenix turned, the dull glow of her ocular optics locking onto his. “You know what your problem is, Captain? You don't enjoy things. Everything’s better when it's on fire.”

  He looked at the ash curling behind her shoulder boosters. At the melted edge of her cannon. At the glowing footprints her frame left across the scorched metal. “Your chaos has a purpose, Phoenix. The future’s going to need all the fire it can get.”

  His HUD glitched again.

  Reality snapped back. Tormad returned to his vision like a wound reopening. The Lucifer Lance had disappeared into the heart of the star. His optics adjusted— no explosion yet. But something had changed.

  He stared at the pulsing horizon, the red light bending under its own decay.

  Quietly, he spoke. “If only you could see this…”

  A moment passed… the first tremor in Tormad’s layers. A small, silent bloom rippled across the dying star’s outer surface. It wasn’t the supernova. Not yet. But it had begun.

  The light changed. One moment the world blazed under Selthara’s boiling sky—harsh blue-white rays cascading over metal, turning glass to fire. The next… dimness. Not shadow, not storm. Something deeper. A cosmic hesitation.

  Then it pulsed again. The star flickered like a faltering eye—open, shut, open again—casting the planet into strobing alternations of blinding noon and sudden twilight.

  Inside the Neutron Barrier, alarms began ticking softly in several mech units—ambient light irregularity warnings, pulse-contrast instability, horizon-loss protocol triggers.

  Orion’s voice returned, focused and without ceremony: “Re-scan complete. Lucifer Lance impact has altered fusion dynamics. Iron has saturated the core. Fusion is now decaying at increasing velocity. Estimated time to Tormad’s supernova: Seventy minutes.”

  There was no dramatic alert, no siren. Just the weight of the words. Orion continued—quietly. “Approximately one-hundred and ten minutes of internal stellar equilibrium have been erased.”

  A beat passed. Behind Alcatraz—without sound, without urgency—a familiar static-crackled voice, dry as Seltharan sand: “Welp… I leave for five minutes to teach a poetry class and the sun decides to throw itself a tantrum.”

  Sprocket strolled up beside him, his stubby legs kicking dust with theatrical indifference. He looked up at the shimmering Neutron Barrier and the sword buried in the ground with its web of light spiraling into the sky. “You know, I’m starting to think your sword might be slightly overqualified for this situation.” He waved an arm in a sweeping arc toward the horizon. “Like bringing a black hole to a toaster fight.” Then a pause—his voice dropped half a register. “…Seriously though, does it ever stop pulsing like that? Kinda makes me wanna confess to crimes I didn’t commit.”

  But the humor didn’t last. The flickering light from Tormad had reached the dome now. Its fluctuations translated as surges in the photonic matrix. Temperature readings spasmed. Shadows began elongating in real time—twisting unnaturally as the horizon warped with the dying star’s breath.

  And the mechs noticed. Even within the protection of the Neutron Barrier, logic processors began to race. Visual sensors recalibrated for stable light but failed. Navigation gyros pulsed in alarm. One by one, the machines started shifting. Then trembling. Then backing away from the edges of the dome—converging.

  A low murmur, entirely synthetic, began to spread through the crowd like a machine-hymn of anxiety. Fear.

  Some froze. Some whispered strange digital prayers to the Blueprint. Others ran diagnostics repeatedly, as if clarity would shield them.

  The stampede had began.

  Small maintenance bots started first—surging forward toward the heart of the platform. Then couriers. Then utility walkers. Mechs of every size and faction—panic overtaking firmware, instinct overwriting protocols—pressed forward toward the Crossroad Portal. Their salvation.

  And the soldiers were ready. Confederacy officers stepped forward in unison—twenty wide, fifty deep—forming a steel phalanx around the central platform. Their armored silhouettes glowed against the strobes of dying light. Weapons remained holstered. But their presence spoke louder than weapons.

  Each one synced to the next, their armor reacting as a single unit. Cloak-tinted shields pulsed to life, forming an unbroken chain of arc-reactive energy. Shoulder-mounted strobe lines flashed warnings in a dozen languages:

  “Do not advance. Portal is not yet functional.”

  “Wait for sequence clearance. Maintain positioning.”

  But the crowd kept pressing—thousands now. The Confederacy line held. A test of programming, loyalty, and pure pressure. And overhead—unseen but felt-Tormad dimmed again. The end was getting closer. And everyone knew it.

  The ground shook—not from tremors this time, but from power. A deep bass hum reverberated across the Crossroad Platform. The dormant monolith that had loomed like a dead monument for so long now pulsed with light, lines of blue and violet threading through its surface like veins awakening after centuries of sleep. A flash followed. A surge. The space between the portal rings cracked open. Reality split like glass folding inward, revealing not fire or void—but a miles-long corridor of stabilized quantum light, a passage formed of warping geometry and stabilized frequency anchors. The road arched into distant darkness, glowing with cold energy, waiting.

  They called it the Crossroad Portal. Now... it had opened.

  Alcatraz stepped forward—silent, unmoving amid the chaos. Mechs surged around him. Ground units rolled, crawled, hovered toward the light. Above, spacecraft that had powered up hours ago now descended with perfect timing, aligning in formation for ingress. Some weaved through crumbling atmospheric layers, others activated synchronized phasing drives, flickering into bursts of electric blue as they entered the portal’s mouth.

  Alcatraz stopped. His gaze remained fixed—not on the road ahead... but beyond it.

  Behind the portal’s housing, in the tangle of cables and broken shielding, Elara Voss stood half-shadowed, not with celebration—but calculation. Her arms were outstretched, neural wires bristling from her back like a web of red nerve-light, connected into a compact obsidian device cradled in her grasp. Her posture was focused, delicate—not triumphant.

  Orion’s voice pulsed in his internal systems. “Analysis complete. That device does not belong to the Confederacy. It is Machine Collective architecture. A Data Copy Construct—encoding Arkitekt latticework at quantum depth. Dr. Voss is stealing the portal’s design.”

  Alcatraz didn’t react visibly, but his HUD darkened slightly, filtering light through a tighter lens.

  Behind Elara, footsteps clanked across the metal. A Confederacy officer—high-ranking, with reinforced plating and a command band draped across one arm—approached her and offered a nod. “Dr. Voss” he said, tone filled with polished respect. “Your brilliance has saved millions. On behalf of the Confederacy... thank you.”

  Elara turned her head slightly. Her hair wires flickered with controlled restraint. “I’m just here to make sure the portal performs as designed” she answered, her voice even.

  As the officer turned to rejoin his unit, Alcatraz continued to watch her.

  He didn’t move to confront. Not yet. But he knew now—Elara Voss served more than one banner.

  The crowd pressed inward. Pressure built. Voices rose over encrypted comms as the line of mechs widened, everyone desperate to reach the gateway before it collapsed—or the star did.

  The barrier shimmered overhead, held fast by the Neutron Sword, still embedded like a divine anchor in the scorched platform. It shimmered blue-white against the storm above, shielding them all from Selthara’s fury.

  Alcatraz turned his head slightly. Sprocket had parked Sonic Throne neatly behind the evac formation, cleaning nonexistent dust from its rear stabilizers like it was a prized showpiece. “Take the bike” Alcatraz said, his voice flat but clear. “Go through.”

  Sprocket’s head spun on its axis. “What, no dramatic ‘see you on the other side’ line? Just go?” Sprocket’s shoulders sagged. “Fine, fine. I’ll just assume you meant it emotionally. Catch you on the far side, Producer.”

  He zipped up onto the Throne and rolled toward the shining corridor, merging into the line of evacuating units. His voice trailed behind him in faint, sarcastic static.

  Back near the portal′s control station, voices argued.

  “Still can’t establish link to Bastion Prime” one officer barked. “The flare activity’s wrecked the relay bands.”

  “We don’t have time. Link it to the fallback node. What’s the closest functional anchor?”

  A pause.

  “Aetheron. The exiled platform station.”

  Silence.

  “You want to link more than 3 500,000 evac units to that place? We don’t even know if they’ll let us dock!”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s the only open throat that can take this much throughput.”

  Behind them, the Crossroad Portal pulsed again. The passage was widening—ready. And Alcatraz remained still. Watching Elara. He knew who she was now. And he knew she hadn’t finished her work.

  A soundless alert pulsed through Alcatraz’s systems. Orion’s voice arrived—not with urgency, but with a weight that no AI should bear. “Neutrino flood confirmed. Fusion has ceased. Tormad’s core is now one hundred percent iron.”

  Above them, the star began to fold in on itself. At first, it was light—surging and shrinking like a flickering pulse. Then came the color: white-hot brightness, turning blue, then red, then vanishing into pitch. The sky rippled, no longer sky at all. It bent.

  The atmosphere warped, folding under an invisible thumb. Gravity tilted, then snapped back—hard enough to shatter glass, collapse towers, and twist distant ships from their flight paths.

  The earth quaked in rhythmic pulses, as if Tormad’s failing heartbeat had reached the bones of Selthara. Mountains split in symmetrical lines. Structures folded like paper. And all across the land, the light pulsed on and off, shifting from day to darkness in irregular intervals. Time felt broken. Wrong. Not just delayed—but melted.

  Orion spoke again—her voice strained by logic straining to stay intact: “Local gravity distortion confirmed. Temporal latency increasing. Core pressure rising beyond modeled limits.”

  Beyond the barrier, ships screamed through the sky, their engines fighting solar flares that struck with unnatural precision. Some—too slow, too exposed—detonated midair. Others collided, wings shorn off by gravitational slips. The sun was no longer emitting just heat. It was dragging everything toward it.

  Closer to the Crossroad Portal, the ground was chaos. Mechs scrambled in heaving clusters. Lines of walkers and carriers collapsed in on each other as they all pushed toward the portal’s opening, hoping, pleading, surviving. The corridor was long—wide enough for entire ship formations—but the desperation was wider. Hundreds clawed to be the next through.

  The Confederacy command units had begun final boarding. A broadcast echoed across secured comms: “Last wave priority granted. Officers only. Dr. Voss, proceed to the gate.”

  But she didn’t. She stood in the shadow of the portal, still interfaced to her scanner unit, the neural wires from her hair gleaming red, tangled in the air like nervous energy given shape. Her hands never stopped moving, eyes locked on the device like time could still be stretched if she just stared hard enough.

  Alcatraz’s gaze rose to Tormad.

  “Core mass exceeds collapse threshold” Orion reported quietly.

  “Photon pressure reversed. Gravitational singularity forming.”

  The neutron barrier around them shimmered with visible stress, absorbing more than radiation now—it was holding back entropy itself.

  Beyond its edge, the world fell silent. Mechs that had crawled through fire and wreckage to make it within the protected zone collapsed, their circuits finally scorched beyond repair. Some stood still, locked in reverence as if watching a god die. Others lay broken in partial shadows, smoke curling from their frames.

  Then… silence. The rushing. The screams. The impacts. All of it dimmed beneath the sky’s impossible convulsions.

  Alcatraz didn’t move. He had never seen a supernova this close. Not in his own time. Not even during Exo’s rise. He’d fought gods. But this... this was nature dying.

  At his side, Elara still worked—fingers twitching, breathless despite no need for breath.

  He turned. “I need you to go now” he said. His voice, cold steel made softer only by what came after. “The collapse is imminent.”

  She hesitated—torn between awe and logic. “I can’t. The download isn’t complete. If I leave now—”

  “I’ll bring it to you. I’ll make sure it survives.”

  Elara’s eyes flared with cascading code—error, hesitation, calculation. “You’d risk—?”

  “No risk” he interrupted. “Now go.”

  The portal pulsed again. The light was shifting, pulling in harder now. They were in the gravity well’s early grasp.

  She stared at him for one final moment—her expression unreadable, some mixture of admiration and absolute fear. Then she turned—and ran.

  Her frame blurred through the crowd, slipping between remaining officers, vanishing into the shimmering corridor like a breath never taken.

  The moment she was gone, Orion’s voice came again. “Supernova ETA: 16 minutes. Selthara’s orbit now spiraling inward.”

  Alcatraz remained where he was, eyes lifted to the dying sun.

  The last of mech stumbled through the Crossroad Portal, their joints twitching, servos rattling from heat stress and radiation pitting. They dove through the gateway just as the shimmering dome of the Neutron Barrier pulsed one final time—and began to shrink. Its glow condensed inward, drawing tighter, denser, focusing its energy not over the battlefield, but around the portal itself and the fractured platform beneath it. A seal against oblivion. No longer a canopy for the masses—just a final shield for what remained.

  Orion’s voice cut through the silence.

  “Core collapse has begun. Tormad’s pressure gradient has failed. The Neutron Barrier will hold.” There was no panic in her tone. Only calculation.

  But Alcatraz wasn’t moving. His gaze stayed locked—upward. Past the screaming clouds. Past the blackened stratosphere and fractured moons. Past the light-warping tremors and gravitational riptides now devouring the horizon. To Tormad. Once a star. Now… dying.

  Its color dimmed, then flared. Then dimmed again. Like a heart fluttering in final beats. A stuttering giant. A war-burned soldier making one last stand. Alcatraz didn’t blink. He didn’t shift. He only watched.

  Like he was saying goodbye to an old friend who could no longer respond. And then— Darkness.

  The kind that made your systems feel like they’d shut down. Blacker than black. Like the universe had been erased.

  It lasted one breathless second.

  Flash followed it. A wave of impossible white. No direction. No warning. No delay. The whole system lit up as if every atom in the cosmos had turned to light at once. Even through advanced filters and layered HUD shielding, Alcatraz’s vision whitewashed for a brief moment—his sensors overloaded.

  Orion’s voice fractured slightly, distorted by signal overflow: “Light-speed transmission… impossible. But… somehow the nova’s energy reached us instantly. No time lag.”

  All of Selthara went quiet. The tremors stopped. No crumbling. No chaos. Only silence. Even the Neutron Barrier ceased its hum. Its edges now flickered softly, barely larger than the portal itself and the cracked platform around it. And for the first time in hours, there was no movement. Only… light.

  Slowly, it faded. Receding from white to blue… to orange… then the color of ash. And beyond the curve of the dying sky— A new object emerged where Tormad once ruled.

  “Neutron star formed” Orion said. Her tone quiet. Almost reverent. “Shockwave inbound. Eleven minutes. Magnitude: incalculable.”

  Alcatraz finally turned his eyes away from the heavens. His HUD recalibrated. The sky had nothing left to say. His steps echoed on the platform as he walked—past the dazed soldiers still manning controls. Past the scorched ground. Past the edge of the barrier. Toward the edge of the world. Toward the device Elara left. Away from the Neutron Sword, which remained embedded in the earth behind him. Still glowing. Still holding the line.

  A stillness had settled. Just beyond the hum of the portal’s light, as the neutron barrier shrank tighter around the platform, a new presence pierced the silence—like static folding into the air, thick and venomous.

  Then—a voice. Low. Mocking. Ancient. “Black Halo operative…”

  Alcatraz stopped. The sound hadn’t come from his internal comms. It hadn’t broadcast through local mech relays. It arrived inside—like a thought not his own, pressing through the Fiction Processor like rot through circuitry. He turned.

  At the edge of the Neutron Barrier, where no signatures had registered a moment before, something stepped through. The shield didn’t resist it. Didn’t flare. It simply… let him in.

  He was almost the same height as Alcatraz. Azazel. His frame shimmered with ceremonial menace—metal forged into the shape of a war god, yet his design was nothing known. The broad, crimson sun-halo stretched like a crown of mockery behind his sculpted skull-face. The armor—dark bronze and obsidian—held the weight of ancient violence, traced with runes long erased from any known language. A golden, circular node pulsed in his chest like a silent sun—alive, but wrong.

  His voice carried again. “If I could breathe… I’d take in this heat. Savor it. Remember this moment better.” He lifted his chin, the mockery sharper now. “Almost a billion years, and yet… you still look like a myth out of time.”

  Alcatraz’s fists clenched.

  Behind Azazel, four figures emerged from the shadows. Taller than Confederacy soldiers. Broader than tanks. Destroyers. They wore no insignia. Just dark, fluid armor that reflected no light, red-lined helms casting down like executioner masks. Their blades—long, serrated, and alive with an inner red current—hung from their backs, humming like a distant scream under pressure. They didn’t speak. They didn’t move. They just watched.

  Orion stirred in his core. “Warning: unidentified entities within shield perimeter.”

  Alcatraz’s HUD flickered. Orion tried again—her voice lower, scanning in bursts. “The four behind the lead unit… are the source of the red glow. It’s… stabilizing through them. Syncing.”

  She paused. “Scanning lead unit—”

  A sudden jolt ripped through Alcatraz’s vision. The HUD spasmed:

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  AZAZEL

  Lines of red text scrawled down the sides of his visual interface like viral infestation. Error pings. Warning loops. Internal defense subroutines failed to isolate the intrusion.

  Azazel tilted his head slightly, like a wolf noting its prey had just realized the cage was closing. “Considering the miraculous nature of this situation, we absolutely must not allow this incredible opportunity to go to waste, agreed?”

  He extended one hand, lazily, like welcoming an old rival to dance again. The Destroyers stepped forward in eerie, synchronized silence. And the countdown to something far worse than a dying star began.

  Azazel stepped forward. “Bring me the Neutron Sword” he said softly. The Destroyers moved without hesitation. “Override him” Azazel added.

  Alcatraz turned instantly, eyes locking on the Neutron Sword still embedded in the platform’s fractured steel. A flicker of calculation in his HUD— Elara’s device had just completed its data extraction. He grabbed it, tucking it under his arm as he sprinted toward the blade.

  “How long until the shockwave?” he demanded.

  Orion’s voice was taut. “Estimated impact in three minutes and thirty seconds.”

  The nearest Destroyer reached the sword first. Its clawed hands wrapped around the blade’s hilt. It pulled—but the sword refused to move. The metal didn’t bend. It denied its grasp with absolute finality. The Destroyer snarled without sound and continued trying.

  The others turned. They surged forward.

  Alcatraz collided with one in mid-sprint—plating met plating, energy cores scraped in violent friction. A second slammed into his side. A third dropped from above, dragging him down into the fractured steel.

  His arms locked. Legs pinned. Movement: denied.

  And then—The red glow. All three Destroyers leaned in. Their faces were not faces—just blank helms with vertical slits that flared red like cauterized wounds. From those slits, the glow spilled. Not light. Not heat. It was corruption. A data infection. An invasion.

  “Override in progress” Orion said. “Multiple access nodes attempting breach of your control systems. They're trying to reroute your core functions.”

  Alcatraz’s HUD cracked with errors.

  “Systems failing” Orion continued. “Twenty-eight percent compromised.”

  His limbs twitched—some not by his command.

  “Al!” Celeste’s voice hit him like a pulse through cold steel. “Al, they’re taking you—”

  “Orion” he grunted. “Initiate Darkcell.”

  A pause. Then—

  CardioCore BPM: 182

  Injection: Darkcell Compound activated

  Surge cycle engaged

  A burning roar ripped through his chest like a chemical star. But nothing changed.

  “Still failing” Orion’s voice dropped. “Forty-two percent… fifty-one…”

  His fingers twitched unnaturally now. The grip on reality slipped, frame by frame.

  Azazel’s voice slithered back in.

  “Ah… So persistent.. But the heart betrays you now, old knight.”

  He walked closer, folding his arms behind his back, pacing like a preacher before the final blow.

  “He made you beautifully. But not wisely. Your most sacred fire is still… a CardioCore. The Darwin's Protocol overrides any system, including Black Halo technologies.

  “Seventy-one percent” Orion said.

  Celeste screamed.

  Alcatraz’s optics dimmed.

  “No…” he said, low and strained. His vision crackled into digital snow. “Not… my… soul..”

  Azazel stopped walking. Tilted his head. Then raised a single hand and gave the faintest wave.

  “Greetings” he whispered, “from Exo.”

  Suddenly—Silence. Orion’s voice—Gone. The HUD shut down.

  The world stuttered. A pulse—not of sound or sensation, but something deeper—rippled through Alcatraz’s visual processors. His HUD flared white, then bent inward, collapsing into a storm of impossible colors, hues no logic thread could name. Everything around him dissolved into the obsidian swirl of a memory that should not exist.

  Gravity twisted sideways. Time became vertical. He stood—no, floated—on the fractured edge of some forgotten event horizon, the whispers of the black hole leaking into his neural thread.

  And then the figure appeared. Blurred. Warped. Undefined by light or logic. It stood before him, motionless, vibrating with the pressure of a thousand collapsed truths. He couldn’t see its face. Couldn’t map its form. But the voice...

  That voice struck deeper than any scan could reach.

  “D–”

  Static.

  “D–”

  Crackle. Distortion.

  “Dead–”

  The syllables burned like ghosts against the inside of his processor. Familiar. Too familiar. His audio systems flooded with white noise, then—silence.

  The scene tore apart, like fabric under stress. Alcatraz blinked back into Selthara. Back to burning light and incoming shockwave. His hands clenched instinctively.

  CardioCore still roared, but every system was now rejecting input. Hijack progress hit ninety—ninety-one.

  Then—A voice. Orion's voice. But different. Not Orion. Not quite. Cold. Cut. Clinical.

  “Changing priorities.”

  Everything halted.

  The red glow faltered. Hijack percentage fell—eighty-two. Seventy-six. Fifty-one.

  Alcatraz’s limbs snapped free. Power surged where corruption had settled. He spun, a brutal motion—his back hitting the ground, then rebounding, flipping to his feet.

  The Destroyers staggered back—all three at once, retreating three steps in unison. Their glow flickered. Their forms twitched.

  Celeste’s voice returned, breathless: “Who… who was that?!”

  Alcatraz’s internal systems buzzed with something alien. “I’m not controlling my body right now” he said.

  He stood tall, his silhouette sharpened by the pulsing portal behind him, the dying star above.

  Three Destroyers stood between him and the sword. They moved first. But it didn’t matter. Alcatraz surged forward—A black streak burned through the Neutron Barrier. In a blur of motion, he sliced between them, his chassis dragging a smear of shadow through heated air. Their reactions were too slow. They spun, confused—missing their target.

  He didn’t stop.

  The fourth Destroyer still clutched the hilt of the Neutron Sword, pulling with all its might. Alcatraz crashed into it like gravity given form. The blow sent the Destroyer flying—slammed it across the platform into a spiraling spin of metal and fury. Sparks lit the ground in a chaotic halo.

  Azazel’s voice followed—calm but disappointed, dripping with disdain:

  “Now what in hell’s vaults was that? You resisted Darwin’s Protocol? Tsk…”

  Alcatraz reached for the sword. His hand gripped the hilt. His audiotory systems cut out—Orion's final override before sound became death. Silence replaced his world.

  Then—The horizon vanished. A line of light beyond the barrier turned into a white sheet. Tormad's corpse smashed into the planet—then exploded.

  The entire crust of the planet recoiled as the shockwave struck the Neutron Barrier like a cosmic sledgehammer. Buildings far beyond the ridge evaporated into dust. Skies bent. The ocean of light tried to swallow the platform whole.

  Selthara didn't just tremble. It was gone. Only the platform protected by the barrier was left floating in the void.

  Inside the Barrier, the air twisted. The tremor became soundless violence. Time slowed, then surged again.

  Azazel stood unmoved—hands behind his back. Still. Watching. Judging.

  Like a herald of extinction.

  Alcatraz’s systems flickered— Control restored.

  Celeste’s voice rang through his comms.

  “THE PORTAL—NOW!”

  Behind him, three Destroyers began advancing again. They raised their heads. From each helm, the red glow returned.

  It pulsed—straight into the Crossroad Portal’s housing. Corruption. Overdrive. The portal began to destabilize—flickering.

  Azazel began to laugh. Low. Cruel. Echoing with something unholy.

  Alcatraz ripped the Neutron Sword from the ground. The moment it left the platform, the Neutron Barrier began to fade. Cracks formed. Solar radiation leaked through the seams. The entire space convulsed. Solar storms burst through—lightning arcs colliding with the platform.

  The Crossroad Portal glitched. Then surged.

  He didn’t wait.

  Alcatraz ran—And then leapt—Vanishing into the blue-white vortex of the portal—just as the barrier collapsed behind him.

  The last thing that remained—Was Azazel. Standing at the edge of solar death.

  Laughing. Unflinching.

  Then he, too, was engulfed into the supernova’s firestorm. Selthara was dead.