The six players surged forward the moment Sha'aull's shields shattered, their supers unleashing in a chorus of devastating light.
Golden guns blazed and Nova bombs detonated against the Primus's chest plate.
IEatPaint triggered his thundercrash, striking the Primus's chest with a cataclysmic force that sent the Cabal to the ground.
For the first time, Primus Sha'aull bled.
He staggered. Took a knee. His war-blade slammed into the sand to anchor him as the players hammered him relentlessly, driving him back inch by inch.
Void continued to watch from the sidelines as IEatPaint pivoted wide using his shotgun to pepper Sha'aull's armour. Waffles punished the staggering Cabal by chucking a few void grenades, whereas TheOneWhoKnocks and BearSpray both used their snipers to deliver critical headshots.
Undecided and Gandalf reloaded their heavy weapons, aiming at Sha'aul's collapsed form; their rockets fired.
Sha'aull roared and threw himself upright just in time.
Then everything changed.
The Primus's wings exploded outward, not spreading but detonating. The massive mechanical structures tore themselves apart at the joints, each segment breaking away and igniting in a cascade of fire and chemical propellant.
They were no longer wings, but missiles, programmed to strike the nearest enemy.
"Get DOWN!"
IEatPaint was already moving. A barricade erupted from his fist, a wall of Titan-forged light slamming into the earth just as the first volley screamed toward them.
But it was too late.
The rockets hit, and the world turned white. The shockwave hit like a freight train.
When the dust cleared, three Guardians were down. Waffles. TheOneWhoKnocks. BearSpray had been reduced to dust; only motes of light remained, indicating their bodies.
Gandalf broke for the nearest revive, racing to get them back to their feet.
Above them, Primus Sha'aull had leapt into the sky again. He was Wingless, but far from finished. His greaves had mechanically transitioned into thrusters, allowing him to hover in the air. The launchers on his back cycled for another volley, missiles rotating into position with cold, mechanical patience. He had turned himself into an artillery platform.
Void let out a sharp breath.
'The players are on their last legs. With no chance to defend, the probability that they wipe here is too high.'
His hand rested on his blade.
'I can't let that happen.'
Sha'aull fired.
Hundreds of rockets rained down on them, buzzing like fireflies lighting up the dark horizon.
Void flickered ahead with lethal speed. Jumping into the air, he read the arc of the first rocket as it launched and sprinted straight at it. The missile shrieked past, and he leapt — planted both feet against its chassis mid-flight, the lightning across his blade erupting down his legs in the fraction of a second of contact, letting him launch himself off it like a stone from a sling.
The second rocket came. Then the third.
Each one was a simple step that he used to ascend upwards, darting from rocket to rocket, like a thunderbolt that struck the skies.
Sha'aull turned.
Void cleared the last rocket and drove upward with everything he had, blade raised, lightning screaming along its edge. He hit the Primus from below and cut cleanly through the mount joints on Sha'aull's back where the launchers had anchored.
A thunderbolt split across Freehold and struck the ground.
Sha'aull screamed. The launchers tore free, trailing sparks and flame. Without them, without anything to hold him aloft, the Cabal commander hung in the sky for one weightless, terrible second.
Then he fell, hitting the crater floor with a concussive crash that sent tremors rolling through the stone, a plume of sand and debris billowing outward. His war-blade skidded wide. His shoulder plating cracked apart.
He did not rise quickly this time.
Void landed nearby and looked toward the players.
Gandalf had the three back on their feet. Six pairs of eyes turned toward the Primus. Then to Void.
They moved.
What followed wasn't a fight. It was an execution. The players converged on Sha'aull with everything they had left, supers, abilities, rifles blazing at point-blank range into exposed plating. The Primus fought back, dragging himself upright, throwing wild punches that cratered the earth. But the numbers gave him nothing. No gaps. No air.
Primus Sha'aull, Warlord of the Blind Legion, died on his feet.
His armour went dark. His body folded.
For a moment, the crater was quiet around the space where he fell.
Then a murder of Harpies shrieked overhead, and the noise of war flooded back.
"Move. Let's go!" Void called out, Sparrow already summoned beneath him. "Follow me. Don't stop."
Six Sparrows materialised as Void tore forward across the crater floor. The battle had metastasised. Guardians and Cabal clashing to the left, Vex Minotaurs bearing down from the right, Wyverns screaming low overhead. Explosions stitched the ground in every direction. The air tasted like ozone and burning sand.
Void wove through it all without slowing.
He knew where he was going.
The northern ruins. He knew where the conflux was the moment they'd arrived. A pale geometric structure half-buried in collapsed masonry, its Vex lattices still cycling with that cold, rhythmic light that never fully died.
The players and Void cut through a pocket of Legionaries. Blew past a Minotaur standoff that hadn't noticed them yet.
Then Void braked hard, skidding to a halt beside a small rock.
The conflux rose from the ruins intact, its geometric frame undamaged despite everything collapsing around it. Pale light pulsed through its lattice in slow, even intervals. Like a heartbeat that had forgotten how to stop.
Void stepped off his Sparrow. Signalling the players to follow. But as he stepped closer to the conflux.
His instincts flared.
He turned.
Space folded, and a burst of snow scattered across.
Elsie stood beside him. Her coat was worn at the edges. Her rifle slung across her back. Her pale photoreceptor eyes caught the light of the conflux and held it, without blinking.
"Looks like I'm late," she said.
"Right on time," Void replied. "For once."
Behind him, he felt the players' attention shift toward her. The players had no idea who she was. They were naturally curious. But Void didn't have the luxury of introductions. That wasn't what he was here for.
"Obsidian." Void didn't turn. "Trigger it."
Obsidian materialised above the conflux, quiet and precise. A single pulse passed between them. The conflux responded, and its lattice brightened, the cycling accelerated, the geometric frame beginning to rotate at its apex.
Then the air split.
It didn't open like a door. It tore. A rift peeled itself into existence ahead of the conflux, expanding outward in one slow, inevitable pulse.
Its edges shimmered with deep purple light; it wasn't violent, nor explosive, but deeply, fundamentally wrong in the way it pressed against reality. The space beyond it reflected nothing recognisable.
The players saw their HUDs blink, and their objectives updated.
-
Enter the Heart of Darkness.
-
Void opened his comms.
"We've found the Vex Conflux and triggered the gate. Entering now." His voice was level. "The rift is unstable. Don't let anything near it."
"Understood." Shaxx, clipped and solid.
"Cory, Taeko — push the Vex back from the northern ruins."
"Already on it," Cory replied.
Void looked to Elsie.
She was already unslinging her rifle.
"I'll do what I can," she said, steady and certain, the way someone spoke when they'd already seen how this ended. "Go."
Void locked eyes with her. There was a certain emotion behind them that he could neither recognise nor recall.
But there was no time for deliberations. He was a step away from finishing what he'd started. He couldn't stop now.
"Void." Elsie spoke again, "Trust me."
Void snapped out of his thoughts. He looked up again, this time, his eyes drifted towards the rift that continued to expand overhead. His brows furrowed.
"I told you before, didn't I? There's no choice but to trust you." Void walked towards the rift and spoke over his shoulder.
As he inched closer.
The rift swallowed him without resistance, as if the world behind him ceased to exist and something else began. He felt the players cross through one by one at his back.
Then the crossing took hold.
The ground stopped being ground. Space unmade itself in slow, deliberate segments, folding inward on geometries that had no names before unfolding into something else entirely. Light fractured in directions that didn't exist. It wasn't darkness. It was the complete absence of the familiar.
They fell without falling.
And then they arrived.
Void's feet found solid stone.
He looked up.
The sky was neither dark nor light but a deep bruised violet that stretched in every direction without a sun or horizon to fix it.
Below and around them, mountains rose from nothing. These massive stone formations were suspended in the violet expanse with no ground beneath them, tethered to each other by thick fibrous vines that ran between the islands like the rigging of a ship no hand had ever built.
The islands were alive.
Dense jungle clung to every surface. It was dark green and impossibly lush, the kind of growth that came from something other than sunlight. Moss blanketed the stone in thick, rolling carpets. Enormous trees rose from the island edges and curved inward, their canopies knitting together into living ceilings above narrow stone paths. The vines between islands swayed gently.
There was no wind.
At the centre of it all, the largest formation rose. An island-mountain that dwarfed everything around it, its peak swallowed somewhere in the violet above. Its flanks were buried in jungle so dense it seemed less like terrain and more like something breathing.
Besides it all, there was silence.
Not the silence that Void knew. No, it was something older. As if the silence was of a place that had never known noise at all.
Void stood at the edge of the landing point and looked out across it all. He realised that the garden was beyond time and space. Where he was, nothing had been, and nothing would be.
As such, the silence was of one before existence itself.
It was deafening, and terrifying, yet hollow and brittle. Like a scream that couldn't be heard, but only felt through one's bones.
He exhaled slowly and looked at the players behind him.
"Stay close."
-
A/N: Thank you for reading! Spam stones, and please leave a review if you haven't!
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