The void between stars was not empty.
It listened.
And somewhere in the black stillness between systems, aboard a cathedral-ship of bone and iron, the Hound of Ashur Varn stirred from his cryo-chamber.
He emerged not with a gasp, but with a low, static-coated growl. His breath smoked in the freezing air. His skin was laced with silver threads and Viora-script, each marking a binding—a punishment, a blessing, a weapon.
The Binders called him Executor Rhel Varas.
But among the Kruger command elite, he was whispered as the Graveblade—the Empire's hound for hunting failed gods and wayward anomalies.
And something on Gaeth-9 had just screamed loud enough to wake the dead.
"Core signature decrypted," the Binders reported from their alcoves, suspended in meditation. "Confirmed: shard activity. Blood-aligned. Sync rate: accelerating. Core structure—unstable, but reforming."
"Divine resonance?" Rhel's voice sounded like grinding iron and wet stone.
"Residual only. Like... echoes. But it's not just the Blood God's memory. Something else is moving beneath it."
Rhel stood at the viewing platform, his arms folded behind him. The stars reflected in his pale eyes, but his gaze was fixed inward—on instinct, on scent, on the feel of the Hunt.
"I want everything the archives have on Voidling incursions."
The room fell silent.
One of the Binders—young, unscarred, still afraid—whispered, "Voidlings are myth, sir."
Rhel turned. Slowly.
"I've seen myth tear through a strike cruiser's hull like parchment. Myth leaves claw marks on time. Don't mistake classification for safety."
The Binder bowed low, corrected.
Rhel walked to the war table as the 3D projection of Gaeth-9 bloomed above it, flickering with energy anomalies. The forested southern continent glowed with faint red threads—blood resonance, system radiation, something far too old to explain.
He tapped the center with one clawed gauntlet.
"There."
The system had flared here. The old war ruins. The cave complex no one had entered in centuries. Something had fed—and evolved.
Rhel's expression didn't change, but a faint heat pulsed from his body, activating the Viora within. His skin shimmered briefly, traced by glowing fractal paths of raw battle-energy.
Viora: the weapon born of body and spirit. The ancient martial flame passed down before the Empire was even flesh.
Only a few still mastered it.
Rhel was its last executioner.
Meanwhile, on Gaeth-9, the wind howled through shattered stone. Kiro stood before a circular gate, overgrown with moss and fossilized vines.
He hadn't found it—he'd been drawn to it. Something in his core, in the slow pulse of the System, had pulled him here.
"Blood remembers blood.""The path opens only to the marked."
The circular gate hissed with dormant runes. Blood Venom pulsed once in his hand, and the old language across the arch glowed crimson.
Kiro stepped through.
The chamber beyond was not of any modern design. It wasn't built. It was grown. Carved from the inner bone of a forgotten titan. The floor was soft, not with dirt, but with flesh fossilized into stone.
And in its center—an altar.
Upon it rested another shard.
Not a weapon.
A heart.
Old. Frozen. Still pulsing with a rhythm too deep for time.
The Blood God's core.
A fragment untouched.
And it knew him.
"The others are coming," the System whispered. "And so are the ones who devoured me."
Kiro approached the altar.
Outside, the sky darkened.
Far above, the Hound of Ashur Varn entered Gaeth-9's orbit.
The next chapter of the hunt was about to begin.