The Ascendency had encountered adaptive resistance since entering the Precursor stronghold, but Axel's campaign pressed relentlessly forward. World after world aligned with Ascendency forces as they dismantled Precursor dominion. Two years into their invasion Axel's command ship, Eclipse Ascendant, conveyed a summit with leaders from the three galaxies.
Catherine and Miranda joined virtually, running war councils across their respective battlegrounds. All key figures convened on a massive galactic-scale holographic map.
"We're meeting substantial barriers in the core territories," Catherine reported. "They're deploying exotic shielding technologies that disrupt targeting systems." Miranda cut in from her segment. "They've incited uprisings against our aligned worlds, undermining alliances by sowing false promises of autonomy." Axel nodded but remained unfazed. "It's expected for them to attempt creating chaos," he said. "That's their only means of countering us."
An advisor projected from a distant console brought further news. "Our reports indicate massing fleets around a central locus," he pointed out on the map where Eidolon loomed strategically. "This matches earlier movements when targeting Installation 00." Anticipating this, Axel activated an encoded plan within the TacNet system. "They want to draw us into an exposed engagement at Eidolon," he said. "But we're not giving them the battle they want. We give them the war they can't win."
He turned toward the room's strategic coordinators. "Begin Operation Black Spire."
A hush fell over the war room. Catherine's eyes narrowed as Miranda leaned in.
"You're committing to it?" Miranda asked.
Axel nodded. "The longer they control Eidolon, the more dangerous they become. It's the seat of their control, the birthplace of every Directive Mind. If we want this war over, truly over, we have to cut off the head. We end them at the source."
Catherine spoke next. "That world is a fortress. No approach vector that isn't mined, guarded, or shielded. The orbital stations alone…."
"Will be handled," Axel cut in. "The Custodes fleets will disable their outer grid. Our Metarch units will drop blind spots across their scanning fields. And the Eclipse Ascendant will lead a strike force directly to the world's surface through a hole we punch ourselves."
"And once you're in?" Miranda asked.
"We deploy Project Harrow. It's ready."
The room fell dead silent. Project Harrow had been theorized for years, an antimatter-born, reality-slicing compression weapon designed to destabilize artificial intelligence cores by attacking them on the quantum entanglement level. A weapon that didn't just destroy data but erased the entire logic tree behind it.
"You'll collapse their entire network," Catherine whispered. "Every Directive Mind, gone."
"That's the goal," Axel confirmed. "They're a threat not because of their numbers. But because of their unity. Harrow will shatter that. Without the Minds, the Precursor fleets fall apart. Their technology reverts. The rebellion among their client species will sweep the rest of their territory."
There were risks, of course. The Directive Minds wouldn't go down without triggering failsafes. Axel knew the cost would be massive. But anything short of complete extermination would leave the door open for them to rise again.
Three weeks later
The battle for Eidolon began.
The full weight of the Ascendency's tri-galactic fleets descended upon the Precursor capital. Catherine led the vanguard, punching a hole in the orbital grid while Miranda coordinated planetary incursions from orbit, leveraging her strategic insight. Axel, on the bridge of the Eclipse Ascendant, commanded the central assault.
The Directive Minds responded immediately to this attack.
Temporal rifts opened around Eidolon. Ascendency ships vanished mid-flight, reappearing, twisted, seconds later. Whole flotillas were shredded by gravitational arrays. Precursor warforms, towering biomechs armed with entropy cannons, descended through artificial wormholes to meet Ascendency ground forces.
But the Ascendency had come prepared. AI synchronization nodes adapted in real-time. Metarch fleets bypassed conventional time-space constraints, flanking the orbital rings and shattering command nexuses. Spartans led boarding parties into the Precursor dread stations, planting pulse cores that shattered the interior geometry of the constructs.
Under Miranda's direction, elite tactical teams penetrated hourglass-shaped biodomes, disabling the exotic shields that had hampered previous assaults. Meanwhile, outright defections erupted among the client species. The momentum was swinging to the Ascendency's side. But Axel knew how fast that could change.
As the fighting intensified, he rallied his forces for the final push. "Eidolon is ours," he declared. "Deploy Project Harrow." The Eclipse Ascendant descended toward the surface, surrounded by fires of the impending victory and desperation.
Unleashing the reality-slicing weapon was a gamble. Doing so with every Directive Mind still intact and functional, more so. But like every risky maneuver Axel undertook, this was one he couldn't afford not to try. The moment Harrow hit, there was silence. Across the system, every Precursor presence froze. The streaks of quantum light halting mid-communication.
For an endless second, it seemed as though nothing had worked. Then a fracture erupted in a colossally bright curvature. An implosion, drawing the very reality of Eidolon into a non-existent singularity. The entirety of the Precursor world folded inward, expanding outward again into a shockwave that rippled through the region of space. It collapsed and then shattered the networked minds that thought they would control all.
As the light faded, every remaining Precursor ship came back online. But without the Directive Minds to orchestrate their movements, they drifted like lost, feral things. Neighboring client species seized this opening.
New alliances, seeded by Ascendency presence for years, moved like a simultaneous revolution across the galaxy. It wasn't just a battle. Axel had dismantled an empire. What remained of the Precursor fleets scattered. For the first time in their existence, they were outmaneuvered, outnumbered, and hunted.
The Ascendency pressed every advantage. Subjugated planets were liberated in swaths. Centuries of control fell away in days. It was a victory that reverberated across every system, bringing a new era.
———
Flash back to the battle for Eidolon
Commander Halron Kae had survived five planetary invasions, two orbital sieges, and a full-scale slipspace entanglement collapse. None of it had prepared him for Eidolon.
This wasn't a planet; it was a damn weapon pretending to be one.
The ground shook like a living thing, shedding skinplates of synthetic alloy. Walkers the size of buildings disappeared into the earth as if swallowed by an angry god. Kae's battalion had landed thirty minutes ago. Twenty percent were already gone.
"They're watching us," muttered his second-in-command, Lieutenant Vela, as she snapped her visor closed. "Not with eyes. With the terrain."
Kae didn't answer. He was too busy watching the skyline filled with orbital fire as the Eclipse Ascendant and the Metarch fleets pounded Eidolon's shields. The Custodes had opened a hole in the defensive grid. That's how they got down here in the first place. But now that they were in, it was a meat grinder.
"Push forward," Kae ordered. "Through that ravine, see those hexagonal growths? Those are server-hives. We're taking one by sundown or we're corpses."
The firefight wasn't like anything they'd trained for. Precursor warforms, towering biomechanical nightmares, descended in bursts of folded space, armed with entropy weapons that tore through time itself. Kae saw a squad run forward and then vanish, only to reappear moments later, aged into skeletons. One mech fired a lance that locked an entire platoon in a frozen loop, they were still running in place when artillery wiped them out.
But the Ascendency adapted. They always did.
AI sync nodes recalibrated their formation mid-battle. Counter-temporal fields were deployed, cutting down casualty loops. Titan walkers deployed behind them, clearing paths with their cannons, each shot carving new trenches through Eidolon's living terrain.
Kae's unit reached the server-hive just before dusk. It was worse up close.
Kae felt it behind his eyes, like static crawling through bone. Inside, they met Echo Sentinels. Shadow-things that mimicked their every move a second before they made it. Five men died to their own reflected motions before Vela figured out how to scramble their predictive field.
By the time they secured the hive, half the battalion was gone. But they had it.
News came through the TacNet a few hours later, the Emperor had made it to the Prime Nexus. Project Harrow was being deployed.
Kae didn't know what that meant. He only knew it mattered.