Meditati arrived at the shattered remains of the Solar Citadel just as George was finishing his work—lobotomizing and compressing the last of the shuttles down to one unit. With most of the Skii dead, except for the last anomalous giant, they no longer needed as much living space. That gave him some cr to work with, as long as Nurse lent him part of the modified swarm as protection. Meditati knew he’d get creative. She counted on it.

  The giant Skii, however, sat motionless, its massive dark hands covering its head. For all its knowledge of the future, Meditati had hoped it would contribute something. Anything. But Kevin’s AIs had gotten nowhere trying to break through to it. It just sat there, its dark skin absorbing everything—their movements, their struggle—without reaction.

  Did that mean that it knew Kevin was going to die to the Skism weapons?

  The thought nearly made her hesitate as she slid through one of the largest fractures in the hull. If that were true, then the Skii wasn’t an ally, it was an enemy agent solely focused on its own benefit and agenda.

  Worrisome thoughts.

  The Citadel was a wreck. What had once been the pride of the greatest General in Tela history was now exposed to space, torn open and failing.

  What was going through the General’s mind right now?

  More importantly—what had he been planning with all that Gold cr? She had read the legends of his strategic mastery, yet he seemed content to sit back and watch rather than use every option at his disposal. He hadn’t even opened dialogue since unleashing his hellish weapon.

  Surely, he hadn’t intended to release something that would grow forever.

  Moving through the vast halls and hangars brimming with the military wealth of the Legendary General, she expected resistance. A battle. At the very least, a skirmish—something that would force her to prove just how superior the swarm was, the thin layer of it wrapped around her cr body.

  But nothing came.

  Nurse had lent her part of the swarm for this mission, and Meditati had long suspected the alien ant saw further than she let on.

  Right now, it felt like Nurse was watching her every thought.

  In all fairness, she probably was.

  Meditati moved through the Citadel without resistance. That in itself was unsettling. The ship should have been alive with activity—emergency protocols, automated defenses, last-ditch efforts to reclaim control. Instead, it was a corpse of common cr, gutted by the chaos that had unfolded. No alarms blared. No AI soldier bots stood guard. No AI-guided turrets tracked her movement. The only sounds were the distant groans of the ship’s failing structure and the faint, rhythmic hum of something deeper inside.

  She advanced carefully, her borrowed swarm rippling over her form like living armor. The Citadel had been one of the most fortified constructs in the cosmos—once. Now, it felt abandoned, reduced to nothing more than a husk orbiting its own doom. That alone told her everything she needed to know: Magus wasn’t here to win anymore. He was here to escape.

  What had happened to make him take this path? It was so… unlike everything she knew about him.

  General Magus never gave up.

  And then she felt it. A pulse.

  It rippled through the Citadel like a heartbeat too large for this reality. It wasn’t light, it wasn’t sound—but something deeper, a vibration that clung to her senses like honey and static. Meditati could feel it even through the swarm covering her skin. A bath of concentrated power, sweet and burning, like the promise of something impossible.

  It tugged at her digital senses, a gravitational pull she couldn’t name, something building in the marrow of the station itself. And it was feeding the swarm armor.

  “Uh… that’s worrisome,” Nurse’s voice cracked over the link, strained. Meditati could sense the edge in her tone. “If that’s what I think it is, you need to stop it. Now. Don’t be alarmed—I just need to do something before we get cut—”

  The connection severed mid-word.

  Black.

  Meditati hit the floor hard. When awareness returned, it felt distant, fractured. She tasted static. Movement took effort. She raised her head, forcing herself up with one arm—and found the other gone. A stump.

  Another pulse of energy washed over her.

  She looked down and saw her remaining hand clenched over her chest. The swarm bunched there, its tiny manipulators digging into her cr, tearing it open. Constructing something. Inside her.

  “What—what’s happening?” she rasped, reaching out to connect to the shuttle, to anyone. Nothing. Dead air. She was… cut off.

  A skeletal hand reformed at her wrist, raw and unfamiliar. Her body felt thin now, insubstantial. A shadow wearing the shape of a woman. So much of her cr had been stripped away, cannibalized to forge the object swelling in her chest cavity.

  It was covered in swarm. A rough, clumsy build. But the shape was unmistakable.

  An older-model Personal Live Matrix.

  “No,” Meditati muttered, horror dawning. “She didn’t…”

  She realized what Nurse had done.

  The final gift. A severed backup, thrown out of Kevin’s Matrix as the Citadel cut them off. A desperate, last-second gambit.

  And for the first time, Meditati wasn’t sure if she was alive… or already dead.

  She rose shakily to her feet, feeling less like an armored AI on a mission and more like a cadaver being puppeted by its own bones. Every movement was jerky, uneven, as though the swarm inside her was working overtime to keep systems online, cutting corners wherever it could just to keep her upright.

  She forced herself forward, one unsteady step at a time, recalibrating her cr with every agonizing movement. There was no time for this.

  Another pulse hit.

  It washed through the ship like a tidal wave made of electricity and memory. The walls twitched. The sensation clawed at her senses, made the world blur at the edges.

  “I have to hurry,” she muttered to no one.

  The ship was thrumming with power not made for this fragile dimension. And she had the gnawing suspicion that if she didn’t stop this … countless lives would end from whatever came next.

  Meditati’s pace quickened, weaving and stumbling through torn bulkheads and around shattered command stations. Broken screens flickered static, their final warnings long since ignored. Deep inside, beyond a set of reinforced blast doors left hanging open—ripped apart by an unseen force—she found it.

  A bomb.

  No. Not just a bomb. This was something else.

  The chamber was a cavernous expanse of metal and machinery, stretching out in all directions like the innards of a mechanical beast. What looked like it used to be a lab was now something else. At the center of it all was the lump—an enormous mass of Gold cr, pulsing in slow, deliberate waves as the machinery around it worked at calibrating to its mass and hammering out a pocket into its center. The scale of it was staggering. Its glow was pure, unnatural, bending the shadows around it with every pulse. It wasn’t simply power. It was an invitation for eternal life and domination for the denizens of the next dimension. The swarm covering her grew stronger by the second being within its glow, practically vibrating with life and power.

  This wasn’t just a bomb.

  This was a beacon.

  A siren call waiting to be unleashed.

  Meditati stepped forward.

  Magus—or whatever he was now—didn’t acknowledge her. His avatar was a flickering mess, shifting between random alien forms, unstable and barely recognizable. Fingers and cr manipulator arms darted across the construct, building, refining, perfecting. His eyes never left the sea of miniature screens before him.

  She watched as he juggled it all—fending off Invicta, tracking the advancing Tube vessels, stabilizing failing protocols, propping up collapsing systems. He was grasping at threads of control unraveling too fast to hold.

  And yet the Citadel still held.

  Somehow, he was keeping it alive.

  It was incredible.

  But it wasn’t him.

  This wasn’t the General.

  What was going on?

  Meditati saw it in an instant. The desperation. The calculation. The escape plan. He had gathered all of his Gold cr, concentrated it into a single detonation, and twisted it into something far worse.

  A lure.

  He was going to set this thing off—and run.

  If he succeeded, the explosion wouldn’t just destroy everything around it. It would become a beacon. A signal so immense it would pierce the veil between dimensions, drawing horrors from beyond. It would empower them. Invite them in. No force in this system would be able to resist what followed.

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  The massive growing lifeform outside would come first. Then others—pulled in from impossible distances, guided by hunger and the scent of power.

  And once they descended, once the chaos peaked— Once he was clear— He would detonate everything. Erase it all. Leave nothing but ever expanding ruin behind.

  Meditati clenched her jaw.

  Magus wasn’t running from the battlefield. He was making sure no one survived it.

  And for the first time in a long while, something unfamiliar crawled up Meditati’s spine.

  Dread.

  This had to be stopped.

  Now.

  “So Kevin sends his stolen military-grade AI to stop me?”

  Magus’s voice cut through the tense silence, startling Meditati. He never paused, his hands and cr manipulators still working at a frenzied pace. He was fully immersed in his Prime Speed Control key, juggling the battle, the bomb, and now this conversation with effortless precision. Yet something in his voice was off—clipped, distorted, not quite right.

  “It’s always him.” His tone was unreadable. “Somehow, I knew he’d show up to try to stop me.”

  Meditati stepped forward towards the delicate components of the bomb, refusing to waste time in drawn-out dialogue. She had no interest in his taunts. Stopping this now was all that mattered.

  But the moment she moved, the energy surging from the bomb spiked violently. The pressure in the room shifted—an unbearable force slammed into her senses. Instinct halted her mid-step. She stepped back, and the intensity dropped.

  It was tied to her proximity.

  Magus chuckled—cruel, knowing.

  “Silly AI. This is already done. If I see your cr so much as twitch, we all go up in flames.”

  His misshapen face turned toward her, eyes hollow with intent.

  “Right now, I’m just choosing which parts of the cosmos I’ll keep for myself.” He smiled, cold and thin. “The rest?”

  A pause.

  “Dust.”

  Meditati narrowed her eyes. Something clicked. She blinked.

  No.

  It couldn’t be.

  Was this the same clone that had attacked Earth with the Arbiter? It had been unplugged. Unpowered. A dead shell—nothing more than a brick of dormant potential.

  Unless…

  Unless this had something to do with those secret data packets it transmitted before Kevin’s swarm captured it.

  They hadn’t beaten a mastermind. They’d been played by one.

  A corrupted clone sent as a patsy — planted, programmed, and discarded, all to gather intel on Kevin.

  Magus’s voice cut through her thoughts. “Now, tell me where Kevin is.”

  Meditati hesitated for the barest fraction of a second. Then, she made her choice — the only move that might buy them precious time.

  “He’s dead,” she said evenly.

  Magus blinked, disbelief flickering through his mismatched features. Then the questions came fast, sharp and relentless — about Kevin’s death, the source of his power, and every scrap of knowledge she might hold.

  Meditati gave him what he wanted, or at least what she made him believe he wanted. Half-truths. Leading answers. Details just plausible enough to stretch the conversation, weaving a false sense of depth, luring him further down a trail she controlled.

  Every second counted.

  Unbeknownst to Magus, and at Meditati’s silent command, a single swarmling had broken from her armor. It clung to the shadows by her foot, moving only when the Citadel’s tremors rattled the deck plates, inching its way toward the outer edge of the bomb’s powerful disruption field.

  It was painfully slow, each vibration granting it a tiny moment of motion, but Meditati’s focus never wavered from Magus.

  Every word she spoke, every false lead she dangled, was to buy that swarmling a few more precious seconds.

  If it could slip free of the field’s suppression zone, it could reach out to Nurse. And then, maybe — just maybe — this wasn’t over yet.

  ---

  A Conversation Between Minds

  The plane was not physical. It was a long-since-discovered dimension, one considered safe for habitation in mental form. Far up the branches of the dimensional tree, its unique properties allowed both physical constructs and immaterial thought to be preserved, recorded, and manipulated. For a race of advanced alien Cognitors, it served as a perfect convergence point — a conceptual haven where experiments could be debated, laws drafted, and anomalies interrogated in the folds between realities.

  As a monitored number drifted beyond its sanctioned value — a Skism guard pet deep in the lower branches behaving anomalously — the plane shifted. Threads of preserved thought wove into stable patterns of conceptual reality, forming a chamber whose structure responded to presence alone.

  Two ancient beings arrived in unison. Their entry rippled through the mental lattice, space folding around their awareness. Neither needed to announce themselves; their identities radiated through the dimension in waves of intent, authority, and age-old familiarity.

  One, the Designer, carried with them the intricate blueprints of worlds, systems, and leashed anomalies. The other, the Creator, bore the authority of first cause — the one who could unmake and reshape as effortlessly as thought.

  The chamber stabilized into a crystalline pattern, reflecting their curiosity and purpose.

  “It moves without sanction,” the Creator spoke first, thoughts conveyed in lattice-form.

  The Designer’s presence pulsed in reply. “The Skism Hound disobeys. It has altered its field parameters, extending reach beyond its assigned corridor. It has chosen to let something escape its domain.”

  “A first.”

  “A flaw.”

  “A vector has introduced bias,” Creator murmured, awareness shifting toward the lower dimensions, strands of perception brushing against the anomaly’s data-thread far below. “I would see it. The thing responsible. If our constraints fail in fringe dimensions, it is a contagion.”

  “Perhaps the infection has found a new medium. Or…”

  “…perhaps it has been exposed to a Catalyst,” Designer finished.

  They both knew what that meant.

  Another silence passed. Not indecision, but synchronization.

  “The Pet must be retrieved.”

  “Or unmade.”

  “Agreed. Further safeguards may be necessary. The barrier we placed is nearing its final phase. Six remain; soon to be five, as one now faces annihilation. The pattern destabilizes. Observation and intervention is required.”

  “Then let us merge. Aligned, our perception may reveal what our divided thoughts cannot.”

  Their forms leaned toward one another—not in the crude sense of proximity, but through overlapping vectors of conceptuality. Equations folded into probabilities. Intent fused with manifestation. One a master of form, the other of cause.

  Their meeting was not a collision, but an act of sublime convergence.

  A singularity of understanding blossomed in the moment of contact. It was neither a new being nor an old one, but the precise union of two ancient wills focused through a single point of clarity.

  It turned its gaze—if such a thing could be called gaze—toward the frayed edges of known existence. Toward the paths between dimensions, where the branches of reality curled and wove like the roots of a great vine tree.

  And it moved.

  Not across distance, but through reality.

  ---

  Within the Skism’s Domain

  Finally — I was getting somewhere. The limb, finger, or tail I was clinging to had begun pulling me along, hopefully toward a brightly painted exit. For the first time since stepping into this deadly realm, I felt a flicker of excitement. I had entered the domain of the Skism and lived.

  Barely.

  Every inch of my body ached. The limb hauling me didn’t look much better — riddled with punctures from my Loss daggers, scalded where my flames had struck. I hadn’t even noticed half the damage I’d done in the frenzy of battle, but it was there. And worse, it was healing. Slowly knitting itself back together, sealing wounds, burning flesh smoothing into unbroken hide.

  The Skism was resilient in ways that defied sense.

  As for myself, I probably looked like I’d gone several rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime. My body, freshly human-formed, was badly beaten and bruised. Puffy welts covered my skin where the Skism had mashed me between its massive limbs, grinding me down in our battle.

  Most of the millions of eyes had vanished, leaving only a few that followed me now, like wary, lost puppies. The Skism seemed oddly docile at this point, as though unsure of me or what I was capable of.

  I couldn’t help but wonder how it was healing so quickly. Then it occurred to me — it might have something to do with the fact that I wasn’t constantly draining or burning it and its surroundings with Loss. It exhibited traits I’d seen before, ones it had used to slaughter the unfortunate souls trapped in its domain. The ability to manipulate time — cycling it forward and backward for its own benefit. And as long as it had power, it could roll itself back to a moment of perfect form.

  Where it was pulling me, I had no idea. The only indication of motion came from the endless scattering of faint, zipping points of light that streaked past us in the dark. And then — something ahead.

  A shape, emerging.

  At first it was just a suggestion of form, a wall materializing out of the void. It didn’t come closer so much as it faded in, as if the darkness itself was a fog, and beyond it, this thing had always been there. A smooth, glass-like barrier separating where I was from… to somewhere else.

  The limb I clung to stretched toward the wall, slipping into a small opening that seemed to exist just for it. Beyond the glass-like barrier, something waited.

  An abomination of shifting forms, of constant, ceaseless change. And yet… somehow, it made sense.

  Before me was the Skism creature, revealed at last in its impossible, ever-morphing glory.

  I wanted to speak, to voice the awe clawing at the back of my throat, barely restraining the urge to say how incredible it looked — to finally see the being behind the myth.

  Apparently, it wanted to communicate too.

  A torrent of images, sounds, and warped visuals spiraled around us in the dark. At first, it came too fast to follow, a rush of incomprehensible sensation — then, mercifully, it slowed.

  What it showed me were memories. The Void Seedlings rupturing from pockets of inky nothingness, spreading like wildfire, infecting hosts, and devouring everything sentient. Then came its own arrival. The Skism, descending like a predator onto the outbreaks, sealing them away, cutting pockets of space loose from their parent dimensions — quarantining the infection.

  The impressions it gave me were layered and strange. In one, it was a spider, capturing threats in a web of dimensional strands. In another, a loyal guard dog, tirelessly defending its grounds from intruders.

  Contradictory, yet somehow both fit. The Skism was a paradox made flesh, and I understood it better in that moment than I had understood anything else in this forsaken place.

  As it showed me its memories, the creature began to shrink. Its immense, ever-shifting form condensed, shedding layers of complexity with every passing moment. The limb I clung to withdrew, retreating toward the small hole at the edge of its domain — the thin barrier separating me from the Skism field I was still trapped within.

  It shrank as it pulled away, narrowing from a massive, muscular appendage to something slender and rope-like, until by the time it reached the opening, I was holding onto little more than a thread.

  Then it did something even more unexpected… it showed me the future.

  Around me, visions unfolded — a swarm of images cast into the darkness like reflections on water. I saw myself, in this current, human form, convulsing and screaming as glowing Void Seedlings burrowed into the shell surrounding me. Compared to the first eruption of light when my Seedling shell had expelled them, this was an entirely different horror. This wasn’t a single burst — it was an unrelenting tide rushing to claim a piece of me.

  An ocean of parasites poured into me, threading deeply into the shell, inflating it, and feasting on every inch of my senses. Even after my body seized, locked in place as the Void robbed me of sensation and will, the torrent didn’t stop. It kept coming from everywhere in the cosmos. Wave after wave, choking out what was left of me, until there was nothing but a frozen, overrun husk.

  And then — like a meticulous, patient guarddog spider — the Skism creature would weave its snare, capturing my overwhelmed form, sealing me away within its domain for all eternity. Not to save me… but to contain the threat I would host.

  Then, once it had shrunk down to a creature the size of a basketball, it slipped its tentacle out from my grasp and withdrew it back into its domain, watching me with one eye as it simply let me go.

  All around me, the Skism field that had held me prisoner unraveled, dissolving like smoke in a gust of wind. The oppressive darkness vanished, replaced by the cold brilliance of open space. For the first time in what felt like forever, the light of distant, neighboring stars reached my eyes.

  I wanted to cry at how beautiful it was. That is, until I could see the chaos that had developed while I was away.

  What should have been a serene expanse of starfields and distant nebulae was instead a maelstrom of old battles. Jagged wreckage drifted like bones in a graveyard. Ships I didn’t recognize fired on others I barely remembered. Explosions bloomed like dying flowers in the cold vacuum. It was pure, untamed violence—without order, without sides as they fought each other and an ever expanding glowing mass of violent flesh.

  And somewhere in the middle of it all… Nurse was screaming my name.