Chapter 47
The Unblinking Eye
The mess hall of the Pioneer's Dawn was a bubble of controlled normality, filled with the low hum of conversation and the smell of synthesized coffee. Kaelen sat with his now-familiar crew, the imaginary ache from Renly's Lightning Lunge a faint echo in his muscles.
"I'm telling you," Jax said, waving a forkful of rehydrated eggs, "my first act on Elysian is finding the biggest, juiciest, real steak this side of the galactic core. I don't care if it's from a six-horned, poison-spitting mega-cow. I will defeat it with my bare hands and then with gravy."
Roric chewed his own protein paste with a stoic expression. "A foolish waste of energy. Nutrient paste is efficient."
"Efficient? Roric, my friend, it tastes like despair and cardboard had a baby," Jax retorted, eliciting a chuckle from Luna.
Elara, sitting quietly, smiled. "He's radiating such a pure, greasy joy at the thought. It's… refreshing."
Their banter was cut short by a gentle chime, followed by the calm, synthesized voice of the ship's comm. "All passengers, this is a routine navigation update. Please continue your activities."
The normality lasted precisely ten more seconds.
Then, the lights flickered. A different, sharper alarm blared—a sound they had only heard in drills. The main viewports in the mess hall polarized to a deep, emergency amber.
"Red Alert. Red Alert. Unidentified hostile contacts at the fleet perimeter. All passengers proceed to designated secure zones. This is not a drill."
A frozen silence fell, then shattered into a wave of panicked murmurs. Chairs scraped. Someone dropped a tray with a loud clatter.
"Pirates? Now?" Jax said, his bravado momentarily replaced by disbelief.
From the viewports, they could see the distant, graceful warships of their escort fleet turning with lethal purpose. Pinpricks of light flared as fighters launched. Then, the real show began. Beams of concentrated energy, brilliant blue and white, lanced out from the FGN vessels, cutting through the void. In response, the lead pirate ship, a jagged, beetle-like vessel identified on the tactical display as the Death's Center, seemed to warp space around it. Incoming plasma cannons and laser fire bent away harmlessly, deflected by an invisible, gravitational field.
"A Gravity Esper," Cedric stated, his cybernetic eye whirring as he processed the public tactical feed. "High-order. Estimated 5th Tier. A significant threat."
On the bridge of the FSS Stellar Pride, Commander Valerius watched the display, her face a mask of cold marble. Her assistant, a young man with a sheen of sweat on his brow, gestured frantically at a holoscreen. "Commander, their displacement field is too strong for our standard batteries! They're creating gravitational lensing, bending our shots into empty space!"
Valerius's eyes didn't waver from the pirat flagship. "They are a pest. And pests require… specific extermination. Authorize Pulse Ion Cannon charge."
"Ma'am? The power drain… the cost…"
"Is irrelevant compared to the message we will send," she cut him off, her voice like ice. "Gravity cannot easily displace a concentrated, phased ionic burst. It is too coherent. One hit will achieve annihilation."
Aboard the Death's Center, the mood was turning from triumphant to terrified. Samuel, a man with wild hair and eyes wide with manic energy, gripped his command console as the massive barrel of the Stellar Pride's primary weapon glowed with a terrifying, gathering purple-white light.
"They're firing a PPC!" a crewman screamed.
Samuel gritted his teeth, his knuckles white. "They're supposed to be here! Did they break the contract? Have we been forsaken?" he muttered to himself, a prayer to a dark god.
The Pulse Ion Cannon fired. A spear of pure, destructive force, so bright it left afterimages on retinas, shot across the void. It was death, inevitable and final.
And then, the impossible happened.
Just before the beam could strike the Death's Center, the space in front of the pirate ship ripped. A patch of void became a perfect, absolute blackness, a hole into nothing. The Pulse Ion Beam hit the darkness and was swallowed whole, without a sound. A moment later, the hole seemed to… burp, releasing a faint, dissipating cloud of distorted energy.
From this tear in reality, a ship slid out. It was bone-white and utterly silent, its shape unnerving and asymmetrical. On its hull was a single, stark symbol: a triangle with an eye at its center. And standing on the hull, as if in the vacuum of space itself, was a man. He had pale white skin, hair the color of snow, and one eye that was a solid, featureless white orb. The other was covered by a simple black patch. He wore the stark, formal robes of a clergyman, his hands clasped peacefully behind his back.
Behind his ship, the darkness coalesced further, forming a creature of such profound blackness it seemed to absorb the very light from the stars around it. It had no discernible features, only a sense of immense, patient hunger.
On the Stellar Pride, the assistant's face drained of all color. "By the Founders… Commander, that's… that's Calvin Merut. The Saint of the One Eye. A 6th Order Pact-Maker. What is he doing here?"
Commander Valerius's composure finally cracked, a flicker of intense tension around her eyes. "He is not the problem," she said, her voice low and tight. "The problem is what is behind him."
The assistant's panic escalated to pure terror. "A 7th Order being… a One-Eye Beyonder… Commander, should we… should we scuttle the Pride? Take it with us?"
"Do not panic," Valerius snapped, her mind racing. "A being crossing dimensions directly is suppressed here. I doubt it can maintain its full 7th Order power in our reality for long. But we cannot wait." She straightened, her voice becoming a whip-crack of command. "All ships, Red Alert! Form defensive screen Delta! Target the Beyonder with all Aether-Photon beams! Even a creature of darkness must contend with pure, conceptual light! Fire!"
The fleet responded. Lances of brilliant, white-gold light, woven with Aetheric energy, shot from the military vessels, aiming for the swirling darkness of the Beyonder. The creature reacted, swatting at the beams with limbs of shadow, each impact sending violent ripples through spacetime.
Inside the Pioneer's Dawn, the view was apocalyptic. Passengers watched, huddled together, as titans clashed. The Cult ship hung silently, a malevolent observer, while the Stellar Pride and its battlegroup unleashed hell upon a fragment of a dark dimension.
Jax was uncharacteristically quiet, his face pale. Roric stood like a granite statue, his fists clenched. Luna had a hand over her mouth, and Elara was trembling, her eyes wide with horror. "So much… fear," she whispered. "It's so cold. And from that… thing… there's nothing. Just an endless, hungry void."
Kaelen watched, his mind reeling. This was power on a scale he couldn't comprehend. A man who bargained with entities from beyond reality. A cult that could summon nightmares. This was the true face of the galaxy—not just stars and worlds, but a cosmos filled with ancient, terrifying secrets and powers that could snuff out fleets on a whim. The safe, predictable journey was over. They were now witnesses to a war that spanned dimensions, and their fragile lives hung in the balance of a battle between light and a darkness that consumed both.