The plaza was less of a victory stage and more of a convection oven set to 'Broil.'
Black obsidian radiated a heat that warped the air, turning the horizon into a shimmer of oil and bad intentions. But we didn't care. We were high on the specific, copper-tasting drug of survival. After twenty years of eating dirt and thanking the masters for the privilege, we had finally choked them on it.
We were screaming, hugging, bleeding, a chaotic mosaic of sweat and triumph. We had killed a Warden. One of the high-tier overseers who stood ten feet tall and shot plasma from his eyes. We had ripped him apart with mining tools and stolen weapons. For the first time in centuries, the Solarii weren't just taking orders. We were giving them.
I sat on a pile of rubble, wiping a mixture of grease and blue alien blood off my impact gauntlet. My name is Kael. I was forty-one years old, my left knee clicked every time it rained, and I was pretty sure I had a stress fracture in my ribs. But looking out at the sea of cheering slaves, at the banners of the rebellion snapping in the hot wind, I finally allowed myself to think the one thought that gets soldiers killed.
We made it.
Then, the volume knob just... broke.
The sound didn't fade out naturally. It was amputated. One second, a roar that shook the teeth in your skull; the next, a silence so heavy it felt like the gravity had been cranked up to crush depth.
A figure stood in the center of the plaza.
No sonic boom. No dramatic entrance with lightning and choir music. He was just there, a sudden, silent tear in the reality of our party. He wore silver armor that didn't reflect the brutal sun but seemed to drink it, creating a silhouette that hurt to look at. He was humanoid, but too perfect. Too symmetrical. The air around him didn't smell like victory anymore. It tasted like cold ash and funeral lilies.
I squinted. On his arm, there was a single silver band.
This motherfucker was a Praetor. A low-caste one, too, if the old legends were right. But holy shit, if this was the B-team, I didn't want to see the main event. He stood completely still, radiating a pressure that felt less like fear and more like a biological imperative to stop breathing.
"A deviation from the established cosmic Law has been detected."
His voice wasn't loud. It was intimate. It vibrated in the marrow of your bones, a low frequency hum that bypassed the ears and went straight to the amygdala. It sounded like a cello played by a serial killer.
"A demonstration of consequence is required."
He didn't posture. He didn't monologue about his evil plan. He looked at us, at me, the way a boot looks at an ant. Boring. Inevitable. A chore to be wiped off later.
My instincts, sharpened by decades of guerilla warfare and paranoia, screamed move. I didn't waste time with a witty one-liner. I went for the throat. I was a Grandmaster of Kinetia, the art of kinetic manipulation. I saw the world in vectors and force. While the others were frozen in shock, I was already solving the equation of his death.
I launched myself forward. I aimed a low kick designed to turn a knee joint into powder while simultaneously ripping a jagged obsidian spear from the earth with my mind. It was a perfect, lethal rhythm. The kind of move that ends wars.
It was adorable. That's what it was.
My foot passed through him like he was cigar smoke. The stone spear hit nothing but dead air. He didn't dodge. He didn't block. He just... redacted himself from the space I was striking. He shifted his existence three millimeters to the left in a dimension I couldn't even perceive.
He smirked. It was a tiny, pitying twitch of his lips that hurt more than a punch.
"Inefficient," he murmured.
Then came the pressure. A ripple of unseen force washed past me, cold and clinical. It wasn't an attack. It was an edit.
I turned around.
My sister, Lyra, stood ten feet away. She was the best of us. She was laughing, her hand raised to high-five Jaren. She didn't scream. She didn't have time to register the horror. One moment she was flesh and blood, a fierce grin on her face, and the next, she unspooled.
Her skin, her armor, her history, it all just dissolved. It didn't look like death. It looked like data corruption. She burst into a cloud of shimmering gold dust. She didn't die. She was deleted.
Then Jaren. Then the front line. Then the medics.
Dust. Just shimmering, beautiful, horrific dust settling on the black obsidian.
My brain short-circuited. The grief was so big it couldn't fit inside my head, so it turned into white-hot rage. I didn't think. I detonated. I threw every ounce of kinetic energy I had at him, a storm of raw force that should have leveled a mountain range. I screamed until my throat tore.
He strolled through my apocalypse like it was a mild drizzle.
He closed the distance, stepping inside my guard with a casual boredom that insulted my entire existence. He reached out and tapped my forehead.
Snap.
My nervous system lit up with white-hot agony. It felt like he'd poured molten lead into my spine. My connection to the earth, to Kinetia, was severed instantly. I collapsed, face-first into the dirt, twitching like a crushed insect. I couldn't move. I could only watch through the dust of my family.
"The anomaly is contained," he said to the air, wiping his finger as if I had left a smudge on his glove.
He shot upward, a streak of silver leaving the atmosphere in a heartbeat. Through my blurring vision, I saw the sky darken. He wasn't just leaving. He was filing a report.
The Praetor ascended. He moved with a velocity that mocked physics, a singular instrument of cosmic will, untethered by gravity or morality. He breached the exosphere, leaving the blue jewel of the world behind, and arrived in the cold silence of the void.
There, suspended against the backdrop of infinity, waited his master.
Lord Cephos.
The Celestial was a being of pure, oscillating light. His form was an impossible geometry, a construct of authority so absolute it made the Praetor's power look like a dying ember. Looking at him was painful. It was like staring into the heart of a star that hated you.
The Praetor halted, floating in the vacuum, and executed a perfect, obsequious bow.
"The corrective measure has been applied, Lord Cephos," the Praetor projected, his mental voice devoid of the arrogance he had shown on the surface. "The outlier has been neutralized. The crop is ready for harvest."
The Celestial offered no reply. It did not shift. It did not acknowledge the servant. To the Celestial, the Praetor was just another tool, slightly more expensive than the ones on the planet below.
Lord Cephos raised one hand. It was a gesture that was less flesh and more a cascade of collapsing stars. He looked down at the world, at the trillions of lives, the history, the struggle, the love, and the pain.
And with a terrifying, silent finality, he snapped his fingers.
Back on the ground, I was lying in the dirt, paralyzed, listening to the silence of my dead people. But then, something shifted inside me.
Deep in my gut, where the fear should have been, a spark ignited. It wasn't the kinetic energy I was used to. It was something else. A golden energy. Quiet. Furious. Ancient. It felt like a failsafe triggering in a machine that didn't know it was a bomb.
And then the world ended.
The ground didn't just crack. It screamed. A sound like tearing metal magnified by a billion times ripped through the air. A blinding white light erupted from the fissures, vaporizing the plaza, the city, the horizon. The mountains turned to mist. The oceans boiled into steam in a microsecond.
The sky shattered. It wasn't a metaphor. The blue dome above us cracked like cheap glass hit with a hammer, revealing the hungry, cosmic dark behind it.
Our sun, the thing that gave us life, pulsed once, violently, and then imploded. It collapsed into a singularity, dragging the fragments of the planet into its maw.
I was the only thing left.
I was a tiny, insignificant speck of consciousness floating in a void, surrounded by the golden dust of everyone I had ever loved. The silence was absolute. The cold was absolute. It was the temperature of a dead god.
I should have died. I wanted to die. My lungs were gone. My blood was frozen. But that spark... that golden light in my chest refused to go out. It burned hotter, feeding on my rage, on the sheer, cosmic unfairness of it all. It wrapped around me like a cocoon.
Then, reality retched.
The void turned inside out.
I felt a sickening lurch, a violent, impossible rewind. It wasn't a tunnel of light. It was a blender. I felt the agony of the world's death play out in reverse. I felt my skin knitting itself back together, the atoms of my blood rushing back into place. The pain of un-dying was worse than the pain of death. It was a nausea so profound it made me want to vomit my soul up.
Decades flashed by in the dark. I felt the phantom pain of old wounds opening and closing. The scar on my shoulder from the Mining Riots zipped closed and vanished. The ache in my bad knee, my constant companion for a decade, dissolved. The grey in my beard retracted.
I felt the weight of forty-one years unspooling. The victories. The defeats. The first time I held a weapon. The first time I killed a man. It was all ripped away, layer by layer, until I was raw.
Then, snap.
The motion stopped.
The cosmic darkness vanished, replaced instantly by a humid, sulfurous heat that hit me like a physical slap. The silence was replaced by the wet cough of sick men and the rhythmic clinking of chains.
I gasped, shooting bolt upright on a hard stone slab. My heart was hammering a hole in my ribs, a drum solo of panic. I flailed, reaching for my weapon, for my gauntlets, for anything.
My hands grabbed empty air.
I stared at them. They were shaking. And they were smooth.
The scar on my thumb? Gone. The arthritis in my knuckles? Gone. My skin was pale, unweathered by the surface sun.
The air smelled like unwashed bodies, rot, and ancient desperation. The light was dim, coming from phosphorescent moss on the damp walls. I knew this smell. I knew this light. I had nightmares about this place for twenty years.
I scrambled off the slab, my legs feeling rubbery and strange. I stumbled to a pool of stagnant water in the corner of the cell, dropping to my knees.
A kid stared back at me.
No grey in the beard. No burnout in the eyes. Just raw, unrefined fear and a jawline that hadn't been broken yet.
I wasn't forty-one anymore. I was twenty-one.
I was back in the slave barracks of Sector 4. Back before the war. Back before the victory. Back before I watched my sister turn into confetti.
I sat back on my heels, the damp stone soaking through my thin, ragged tunic. I looked at the ceiling, at the millions of tons of rock and dirt separating me from the sky I had fought so hard to see.
"Oh," I whispered, the sound raw in my young throat. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."