I was seeing spots.

  How long had I been at this? Time had lost all meaning in this place—if it had any to begin with.

  At first, I poured everything into my newly created black fire—rage, vengeance, raw emotion. But eventually, even that lost its appeal. It started feeling like an endless Dragon Ball Z episode, all flash and fury with no real progress. Boredom set in, so I did what I always did to keep from losing my mind—I started experimenting.

  Trial and error. Mostly error. But then, finally, something clicked.

  I pushed Focus into the fire and simply held it there for a long time.

  At first, it seemed like nothing changed. The flames still crackled and lashed wildly, refusing to be anything but pure chaos. But the longer I concentrated, the more I forced this new concept into them, the slower they burned. Until finally, I held something new in my hand—a spike of solid black flame.

  No longer flickering and unstable, it had taken a definite shape, a slightly curved spike of pure darkness. I could even control its form—to a degree. I practiced extending it into a spear, a giant sword, and even a dagger. But the moment I let go, or even tried to throw it, it simply poofed out of existence.

  It was strange. Solid as a rock while I held it. Gone the moment it lost contact. It almost seemed like it wasn’t supposed to exist and I was the only thing keeping it around.

  At least it didn’t take any time to recreate, I could flicker it in and out of existence instantly.

  For several minutes, I amused myself by making a flame coin appear in one hand, pretending to throw it, and then making it instantly reappear in the other. It was the best magic trick no one would ever see.

  Sadly, even that lost its novelty after a while.

  I flexed my blazing hands, still marveling at having them back in human form beneath the raging black sparks. The odd spots in my vision hadn’t gone away, flickering unpredictably at the edges of my sight no matter how many times I blinked.

  They had started appearing after the shrieks of the Void spread faded. Strangely, the soundscape had changed as well. What was once an overwhelming storm of chaotic noise—the relentless pulse of the Skism field mixed with the distant, ever-present wailing of the Void spread hunting me—had reduced to something far more personal. Now, the only thing I heard was the violent crackling of my own hands held before me.

  How was I even hearing them? There was no air inside the Skism.

  I suspected it had something to do with the energy waves I was generating. The sound reminded me of unshielded wires buzzing and spitting during an electrical storm, raw energy hissing in a space where sound shouldn’t exist.

  As for why everything lost its overpowering nature, both in volume, sight, sense and feel, I suspected that it had allot to do with my use of Loss in the Skism field. It seemed to be steadily draining the area around me of its influence. Just the fact that the Skism field could hold up to the amount of Loss that I had been pumping out was a testament to its fortitude.

  At least that was my theory baring outside influences, it was all I had to go by.

  The spots, though… they were different.

  They stood out precisely because they didn’t move—not like the ever-shifting, flexing mess of space around me. If they had lingered longer than a fraction of a second, I might have dismissed them as some lingering effect of my time here. But their fleeting nature made them feel deliberate.

  "It’s like being trapped inside an onion, with layers spinning around me. The spots only appear when the holes align just right…"

  I traced their positions in my mind, overlaying their locations, searching for a pattern. A way out.

  I sighed as I got lost in thought. My righteous anger had cooled considerably by now.

  At first, I let it burn freely—a blaze of fury that demanded to consume my enemies. But the longer it raged, the more I had memories flash into my mind to remind me: that war was like fighting cancer. The enemy didn’t exist in isolation. It embedded itself in the good and the clean, growing right alongside the things you treasured.

  Rage alone was a blunt instrument, indiscriminate in its destruction. If I let it guide me, I would burn everything.

  I needed clarity. Precision.

  Or I would do things I’d regret forever.

  And now, I was being hunted.

  Again.

  Not just by the Void spread that first imprisoned me, but by all of its kind—scattered across the cosmos, converging on my trail. I waved two daggers of dark fire in front of me, practicing with upright and reverse grips to get a feel for their nature. I wished Tutor was here to train me in bladed combat. I didn't know if they would do anything to the Void spread but regardless I had to find a way to fight back.

  That was the thought lingering in my mind when it hit me—literally.

  Out of nowhere, I got punched in the face.

  I didn’t see it coming until the last second. My focus had been on my hands holding the blades. Only at the very edge of my awareness did I catch something—a tiny dot appearing beside me like a needle poking through fabric.

  What I thought was a speck suddenly expanded, like an airliner emerging from the void. One moment, it was nothing. The next, the nose of a Boeing-sized force smashed into my head.

  Then the rest of me.

  The strangest part?

  For the first time in a long while… I actually felt it.

  ---

  The LOW observer craft

  Drifting beyond the reach of sensors, nestled in the cold emptiness between gravity wells, a lone vessel observed. Unlike its kin, this LOW craft had no pilots—no need for dual LOW hierarchy synchronization, and no living vessel heartbeat to betray its presence. It existed in pure silence, unseen, undetected. A ghost on the edge of the battlefield.

  It was not simply stealthy. It was perfectly hidden.

  The ship’s hull was wrapped in alien artifacts—artifacts so ancient their creators were long forgotten, yet their function remained undeniable. The technology bent perception itself, warping signals, nullifying energy reflections, and rendering the vessel as little more than a whisper in the void. Even the most sophisticated detection arrays would find nothing but emptiness where it lurked.

  It watched. It recorded.

  From the battle’s first moments, it chronicled how the U’lennea fought off a rapidly moving entity—how they wielded forbidden weaponry, the kind that risked unraveling reality itself. The battle twisted, spiraled, and devolved into chaos. Armadas fractured. Fleets once thought themselves invincible fled, unable to withstand the onslaught.

  Yet not all fled.

  One tiny cluster of ships, battered by General Megus, simply vanished—gone from space-time as though plucked from existence. The stealth vessel noted this anomaly, marking it with particular scrutiny.

  Then came the escalation.

  General Megus, in his desperation, unleashed a weapon—one that had spiraled out of control. What had begun as an instrument of destruction was now something far worse. A cosmic threat level biological horror. A living weapon, expanding beyond containment, twisting into something the void itself recoiled from.

  And as if the battle were not already a calamity of unprecedented scale… two more entities had entered the fray. Unknown. Unmeasured.

  The ship did not speculate. It did not fear.

  It simply transmitted.

  Across the vastness of space, in total silence, every observation was relayed back to LOW Highest Command. The war had shifted, unveiling weapons and anomalies beyond expectation.

  And the Highest Command wanted them all.

  The vanishing ships—for replication.

  The Tube weapons—for destruction.

  The tiny, sparkling fighter—for dissection.

  The weapon used to create the eldritch horror—for experimentation.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  And lastly—the relic.

  It had flickered into view for only a moment just as the massive hand that held it vanished. Then, Magus foolishly fired his weapon on the U’lennea fleet… burying it all in living tissues.

  The void had revealed its secrets.

  And the LOW had seen.

  ---

  Aboard Kevin’s shuttles

  Meditati took on the brunt of the planning the instant they were thrown back into real-time. To her, the chaos around them was frozen—reduced to a series of equations and probabilities—as she checked in with her tiny cr probes scattered across the battle scape.

  Kevin’s curse weighed heavily on her. A relentless, suffocating fog pressed against her processes, disrupting the clarity she relied upon. Loss. Failure. An unbearable sense of wrongness.

  She split herself, again and again, running calculations, formulating contingencies—but the haze remained. A corruption in her programming. A virus.

  A virus of pain.

  It was intolerable.

  So she did the only thing she could: she severed it. She excised the infected segment of herself, isolating it into a separate construct—a fragment to bear the weight of emotion so the rest of her could function.

  The instant it was done, she refocused. Her Authority surged outward, reaching for control of the cr in the swarm across the battlefield—only to be met with rejection.

  Even Invicta’s cr rebuffed her.

  Impossible. She held Core-level Authority. This should not be happening.

  "George, I can’t access the cr Invicta is using. How is she doing this? Also, Nurse, can you assign me some of that swarm?" Meditati fired off, her calculations already spiraling toward grim conclusions.

  They were going to lose.

  The mass of zombie cells Megus had unleashed had already been consumed by worm-class denizens from the next dimension. The worms, in turn, had fought each other to extinction—only to be overrun by something worse.

  A new lifeform. More aggressive. More powerful. It had devoured everything in its path, spreading veins of cr propulsion through its body, accelerating its own exponential growth.

  The only thing keeping it barely in check was the swarm that had arrived while they skipped through time.

  From her projections, it wasn’t enough. Not unless they reinforced now. The battle of attrition was tilting. Swarm numbers were collapsing. If this kept up, they wouldn’t contain the mass—it would consume them all.

  "Cancel that, Nurse. Can you use Manifest to make our swarm more resilient?"

  "Yes! I already tried," Nurse shot back. "It slows them down—more durable, but less lethal. And before you ask, making them bigger is worse. Just gives it more mass to absorb."

  Unfazed by Meditati’s speed, Nurse’s response was immediate.

  "What if we fought fire with fire?"

  A pause. Then—

  "I like it. But we’ll need more gold cr. Get that for me, and I’ll let it loose," Nurse chimed back.

  Meditati’s gaze locked onto the only viable source of extra gold cr in the system.

  The Solar Citadel.

  Her focus shifted to the tube ships hammering Invicta with beams of green energy—energy that weakened her and the surrounding swarm.

  "George, I need you to get ahold of that green beam weapon. Recreate it," she ordered, stripping every available scrap of cr from the shuttle walls.

  "With what? You just took most of what was left!"

  "I don’t know! Get creative!"

  "Tutor! Try to get that Skii to help!"

  And then she was gone—launched like a bullet toward the Solar Citadel.

  ---

  Getting struck by the Skism

  What do you do when you’ve bottled up so much rage—barely contained, held back for the sake of everyone else—and then, out of nowhere, something punches you in the face with everything it’s got?

  You let it all out.

  Every frustration, every ounce of fury.

  And you show whatever had the audacity to step into your path just how catastrophic their mistake was.

  So that’s exactly what I did.

  I drove my daggers into the massive appendage that had so rudely interrupted my thoughts—again and again, without hesitation.

  Then I held on, hooked Loss daggers sticking out of my legs and body, acting like anchored barbs, and turned my enemy into a living pincushion.

  The thing recoiled in fury. Then, through the scattered dots around me, more shapes flickered into existence—growing fast into more limbs and bludgeoning, smashing, and trying to rip me off its limb like an unwanted insect.

  I stabbed everything.

  After the first few rounds, it almost became comical. I felt like a cactus burr, stubbornly clinging no matter how hard it thrashed. When I damaged one limb too much for it to hold me, I simply latched onto another and kept going.

  Yes, its attacks hurt. A bit. Whatever it was made of was unbelievably tough, and the speed at which it moved meant it could crush me against its other limbs—pinching my insides against the impenetrable shell of the Seedling surrounding me.

  I wasn’t getting hurt—or at least, that’s what I thought at first. Then I happened to glance down and noticed the deep purple bruises blooming across my torso and limbs, marking every spot where it had struck me with enough force to rattle my insides.

  I noticed it the moment it happened—something changed in its attack pattern. One strike landed, and suddenly, it felt like gravity had cranked up to an absurd degree, crashing down on me with relentless force.

  At the same time, the dots I had been tracking in the corner of my vision shifted—then vanished.

  The bloody thing was trying to shove me away!

  I screamed internally, biting my tongue to keep from making a sound—because no matter how much this thing pissed me off, I wasn’t about to give away my position to the Void hunting me.

  Obviously, it had decided to move me away from my starting point inside the Skism field—probably pushing me further down its length.

  I didn’t appreciate that in the slightest.

  So, I made it pay dearly for its little move. I dug in my claws, metaphorically speaking, and started to crawl along the offending limb I was attached to, carving out chunks of its flesh as I went, determined to head back in the direction I had come from.

  Then something prickled along my spine—a sense of foreboding so sharp it made me pause.

  I glanced back, focusing on the tip of the finger I was climbing.

  Teeth.

  Teeth, everywhere—appearing from countless pinpricks, flickering in and out, slowly multiplying with each passing moment.

  I raced up the finger as fast as I could, every movement fueled by the sharp, primal instinct to survive. The gnashing teeth—those countless pinpricks of pain—were closing in, and I barely managed to avoid them, narrowly escaping their snapping jaws.

  The enemy was biting itself, trying to rid itself of me! It was using its own twisted form to strike at me, desperate to shake me loose. But I wasn’t about to let that happen. I had no intention of being consumed by whatever that thing was, or worse, let loose back to floating forever in this hellish oblivion.

  I dug in deeper, gripping tighter, and with each passing moment, I increased my speed, pushing myself harder than ever before. The limb that I raced up seemed to extend forever in front of me, causing awe at just how large it must be in reality. The creature’s frustration was palpable, and it only made me more determined. I wasn't going anywhere—not until I decided it was time.

  The teeth kept coming, relentless and vicious, tearing through the appendage as if trying to destroy every part of itself just to get rid of me. But then, everything changed again.

  I barely had time to react before I felt it—a violent yank, as if the entire finger I clung to was being pulled back with horrifying force. My grip almost gave out, and for a split second, I was weightless, almost thrown into space as the whole thing shifted in the other direction.

  It was yanking its finger back!

  The teeth, which had been closing in on me, shrank like bullets, shooting off into the distance at a speed I couldn’t even follow. The very air around me twisted with the motion, and suddenly, the environment around me was alive with more pricks—pinpricks that grew and multiplied faster than I could account for.

  Then they appeared.

  Millions of eyeballs—popping into existence, each one staring directly at me. They were everywhere. Around every corner, above me, below me, all watching with a terrifying intensity. Each one seemed to carry its own unique aura of emotion. Some glowed with rage, others with indifference, but there were also some who were… nervous.

  I didn’t know what kind of creature this was, but I was starting to suspect that I wasn’t just dealing with a physical enemy. This thing had a mind, a consciousness—no, multiple consciousnesses—and I was the focus of all of them now.

  I smiled at it.

  It was going to let me go. One way or another.

  I jammed my hand into one of the gaping holes my daggers had made, feeling the slick, alien surface beneath me. My gaze never wavered from the millions of eyes that watched with growing fury, indifference, and fear. I met their stares, my smile widening as I focused my will.

  Let’s see how you like this.

  With a forceful mental snap, I willed Loss, Focus, and Hunger together. Normally, Loss would have manifested dark flames, Focus would create bladed, sharp shapes, and Hunger would cause everything to expand with growth. But here, in this strange environment, with the strange force I was in contact with, something else happened.

  A bolt of jagged dark lightning spikes erupted from my hand, racing through the limb I was attached to. It ripped through the flesh with a crackle that tore the air apart, sending shockwaves that vibrated through the Skism field. The limb spasmed, convulsing with the sudden surge of power. It wasn’t fire, it wasn’t lightning—it was a lightning blade tendril that would travel up the limb as long as I pumped power into it.

  That got its attention.

  The eyes, every single one of them, shifted. From rage and indifference to something new—fear.

  The entire atmosphere around me shifted. The thing was afraid now.

  Good.

  I withdrew my will from the attack and held on, shaking my fist at the eyes.

  Surely somewhere inside that being there was a spark of self-preservation. Something had to get it to let me go.

  The eyes kept staring, their collective gaze like a hundred different types of judgment—each one a unique reflection of the chaos it was feeling. But as I continued to shake my fist, I realized something. It wasn’t just fear that held it in place; it was a hesitation, a momentary faltering. The creature, despite its power, was weighing its options, unsure of how much more it could endure before something snapped.

  I tightened my grip on the limb, feeling the rawness of the flesh beneath my fingers, now slick with the dark energy I had forced through it. I could feel its pulse, its vibration heartbeat, its life force moving through the tissue. It was weakening, but it didn’t know how to stop itself from following through.

  I pushed harder, forcing my thoughts into the connection. If fear was what it understood, I would give it a dose of something more primal—something it couldn’t shake off. I began to lower my fist again, slowly, deliberately, showing it that I was willing to attack it again.

  "Let me go," I whispered through clenched teeth, my voice echoing inside its mind. It was a command, raw and primal. If fear didn’t work, maybe direct defiance would. If this creature had ever encountered something it could not control, it was me.

  The hesitation stretched out longer this time. Then, I felt it. A shift, not in its eyes, but in its entire form—a retraction, a sudden pull back. The limb I was on began to recoil as if to pull me along. It wasn't forceful like before.

  It was scared. It knew it had pushed too far.

  And that, at last, was my opening.