The Planetary Shield hummed above them like a vibrating drumhead, a thin veil of gold holding back a purple tide. Kaelen landed hard on the valley floor, his boots cracking the vitrified soil. Golden smoke hissed from the hairline fractures in his skin. He had bridged the gap, but the cost was visible; he was flickering like a dying lamp.
"Kaelen!" Ria was by his side in a heartbeat, her hand hovering over his glowing shoulder, afraid to touch the searing Starlight-Steel. "You're burning out. Let the shield stabilize. We have to move."
"I'm fine," Kaelen lied, his voice sounding like grinding glass. He looked at the Star-Spire. It loomed over them, a jagged tooth of obsidian and violet light. It wasn't just a ship; it felt like a living organ, pulsing with a low-frequency thrum that made the air feel heavy as water. "The shield is a bandage, not a cure. If we don't find a way to shut down the Hive-Ship from the inside, they'll eventually crack the planet like an egg."
"Then we go in," Korg grunted, slamming a fresh mana-cell into his shield. "I'm tired of waiting for things to fall on us. I'd rather hit them where they live."
Pip scrambled down the ridge, his arms loaded with sensors. "Wait! The internal readings are... wrong. The Spire isn't made of matter. It's 'Hard-Light' infused with biological data. If we walk in there, we're not just entering a building—we're entering a digestive system."
"Then we'll give them indigestion," Kaelen said, his eyes flaring with a sudden, sharp emerald light.
They approached the base of the Spire. The violet mist that had birthed the Void-Husks was thinning, revealing a membrane-like door that rippled. As Kaelen touched it, the Lens of the Unseen in his mind shrieked. He didn't see a door; he saw a code. A complex, mathematical sequence of hunger.
"IT RECOGNIZES US," Ignis whispered, his voice vibrating with a mixture of fear and predatory excitement. "IT SMELLS THE CINDER. IT IS OPENING THE THROAT."
The membrane parted.
Inside, the Spire defied all laws of geometry. There were no stairs, only floating platforms of translucent bone. The walls were lined with thousands of "Husk-Pods," each containing a spindly shadow-soldier in a state of growth. The air tasted of copper and ozone.
"Look at the ceiling," Elara whispered, her voice trembling.
Suspended in the center of the spire was a massive, rotating heart of violet crystal. It was connected to the floor and ceiling by "vines" made of pure energy. But it wasn't just energy—Kaelen could see spirits. Thousands of glowing, blue shapes were being pulled through the floor from the Ley-Lines below, stripped of their identity, and compressed into the violet heart.
"They're harvesting the souls of the land," Sissik hissed, his scales standing on end. "The lizardfolk, the animals, the very memory of the earth... they are turning life into fuel."
Suddenly, the Spire groaned. The "throat" behind them closed, sealing them in. The violet heart in the center began to spin faster, and the pods on the walls hissed open simultaneously.
"Pip, get to that heart!" Kaelen roared, his body igniting as he drew the Scepter of the Unspoken. "Ria, Korg—protect the genius! Elara, Sissik—root us down! Don't let the gravity shifts throw you!"
A new kind of enemy stepped out of the largest pod. It wasn't a spindly Void-Husk. It was a Star-Centurion. It stood ten feet tall, its armor made of the same indestructible obsidian as the Hive-Ship, and in its hand, it carried a blade of compressed gravity that distorted the light around it.
The Centurion didn't speak. It pointed its blade at Kaelen.
"Is it wrong to be a hero when my soul is a dragon?" Kaelen whispered the irony to himself as his skin began to turn a deep, molten gold. "Because right now, I'm going to have to be a monster to save us."
Kaelen launched himself at the Centurion, his fist glowing with the power of a collapsing star. As their weapons collided, the shockwave shattered the nearby Husk-pods, and the real battle for Gaea's soul began in the dark heart of the enemy.
Inside the Spire, time worked differently. Minutes felt like hours as Pip frantically tried to interface his Regulator Gauntlets with the alien heart.
"I need a bypass!" Pip screamed over the sound of clashing steel. "Kaelen, I can't hack this—it's not code, it's music! It's a song of hunger! I need a counter-note!"
"Elara! Sissik!" Kaelen shouted, parrying a blow that cracked the floor beneath him. "The Life-Well! Sing the song of the Grove!"
The mage and the druid joined hands, closing their eyes. They ignored the chaos, the shadow-soldiers, and the vibrating walls. They began to hum—a low, resonant frequency of growth, rain, and the stubborn roots of the world.
The violet heart flickered. The two songs—the hunger of the stars and the growth of the earth—clashed. The Spire began to shake violently, tilting on its axis.
"It's working!" Pip yelled, his gauntlets turning white-hot. "The heart is destabilizing! But Kaelen—if this thing goes, it's going to take the whole valley with it!"
Kaelen looked at his team, then up at the spinning heart. He saw the way out, but it required him to do the one thing he feared most: letting Ignis take full control of the Starlight-Steel.
"Get out," Kaelen commanded.
"What? No!" Ria shouted, her spear a blur as she defended Pip.
"The Scepter can fold space for a short-range jump! Pip, use the Regulator to lock onto Korg's shield! I'll stay behind to contain the explosion!"
"Kaelen, you'll be vaporized!" Elara cried.
"WE WILL NOT DIE," Ignis roared, his voice now audible to everyone in the room. "WE WILL EAT THE VOID."
Kaelen's eyes turned entirely orange. He grabbed the violet heart with his bare hands. The spatial distortion began to tear at his arms, but the Starlight-Steel held.
"GO!"
With a roar of effort, Kaelen triggered the Scepter's spatial fold, vanishing his friends from the Spire and leaving him alone with the dying alien heart.
As the Spire began to implode, Kaelen didn't scream. He opened his mouth and did the only thing a dragon knows how to do when faced with a fire.
He swallowed it.