The death of a hive mind is not marked by an explosion, but by a profound, echoing silence.
With the Gravity Overseer shattered and the Singularity Core erased from reality, the invisible tethers binding the Harvester armada together simply dissolved. Across the stabilized orbital zone, the bleeding purple glow of a thousand gravity engines flickered once, sputtered, and died.
Without their central command matrix, the surviving asteroid dreadnoughts ceased to be warships. They reverted to what they had always been beneath the pre-war armor: cold, dead fragments of planetary rock and rusted iron, drifting aimlessly through the void.
The Ascendant cut smoothly through the drifting wreckage.
