Alarms shrieked through the Nyxwing's bridge, a sharp, panicked counterpoint to the deep, groaning stress of the ship's hull.
On the main viewport, the six Star-Seeker scout ships—dark, angular, and predatory as hunting birds—moved into a flawless containment formation, sealing off any escape.
Below them, the unseen gravity well pulled with relentless, invisible force.
"It's a funnel, Bolt!" Eva yelled, her knuckles white as she fought the controls. The ship shuddered violently, resisting her commands.
"They're not just trapping us; they're using the anomaly to pull us into a kill box!"
The Star-Seekers opened fire. It wasn't the overwhelming barrage Krell's flagship had unleashed, but a series of precise, surgical energy pulses.
They weren't aiming for the bridge, but for their remaining starboard engine and maneuvering thrusters. Their intent was chillingly clear: cripple, don't kill. Valerius wanted them alive.
Bolt felt the minds of the Canid pilots through the Focusing Sphere. They were a strange mixture of fanatical devotion to their cause and a serene, almost meditative focus on their task.
This was not the chaotic anger of Krell's forces; it was the cold, focused certainty of true believers.
The terror tactic he had used on the Felids would be useless here, and the thought of inflicting it on fellow Canids felt like a violation of the Ahna'sara itself.
He remembered Coria's lesson: harmony in the face of discord. But how could he project harmony against a force so certain of its own righteous path?
Instead, he chose a different way. He didn't project peace or terror.
He opened a channel, a tiny conduit of his own empathic senses, and projected a single, pure, unadulterated echo of what he had felt from the Heart of Orion: its profound, ancient sorrow and the chilling, life-devouring emptiness of the void-corruption.
It wasn't an attack. It was a question, posed in the silent language of the soul.
Is this the cosmic dominion you seek? This agony? This emptiness?
The effect on the psychically-attuned Star-Seekers was immediate and disruptive. Their serene focus shattered as the raw, unfiltered grief of a wounded cosmic entity washed over their minds.
Their disciplined formations wavered as pilots momentarily flinched from the sheer, unexpected despair of it. Their precise, coordinated fire became erratic.
It was a window of only a few seconds, but for a pilot like Eva Rostova, a few seconds was an eternity.
"Bolt, whatever you're doing, keep doing it!" she shouted, a wild, brilliant idea flaring in her mind. "Hold on!"
Instead of fighting the gravity well's pull, she did the unthinkable. She angled the Nyxwing's nose downwards and hit the thrusters, accelerating directly into the heart of the snare.
To the Star-Seekers, it was a suicidal plunge. Their brief hesitation to follow, their confusion over this new tactic, was all the time Eva needed. She wasn't diving to their doom; she was using their trap as a weapon.
The gravitational forces were immense. The Nyxwing groaned, its Aethelgardian hull glowing under the strain as Eva navigated through the most intense part of the anomaly.
For a moment, Bolt felt his consciousness distort, the universe outside becoming a smeared canvas of ghostly light.
Then, with perfect timing born of a thousand desperate flights, Eva fired a side-thruster, using the well's own immense gravity to whip the ship around its center.
It was a gravitational slingshot of impossible precision. The Nyxwing was flung out of the trap on a new, high-velocity vector, leaving the confused Star-Seeker scouts behind them, still trying to correct their formation.
A triumphant, breathless laugh escaped Eva's lips. "That'll teach them to play with gravity!"
But their relief was brutally short-lived.
As they cleared the main gravitational distortion, their path forward was suddenly filled by a new, much larger shadow that decloaked from the ghostly mists.
It was a Star-Seeker cruiser, ten times the size of the scout ships, its hull adorned with the same ancient, complex sigils Bolt had seen in his vision of Valerius's ritual.
It had been waiting, silent and patient, for the scouts to herd their prey.
They had escaped the snare, only to fly directly into the jaws of the hunter itself.