The chaotic, deafening symphony of war raged across the ruined command center of the Apex Spire, but Cassian simply closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cool obsidian wall.
He didn't move. He didn't spark a core. For the first time since the sky broke open, he simply sat in the dust and breathed.
It was a beautiful, hyper-violent distraction. The Ferran mercenaries were a masterclass in mechanized brutality. Without a single drop of internal Aether, they were holding back a cosmic tide. Heavy rotary cannons infused with Tier IV Plasma-Weave cores melted the God-Spine Arachnids into bubbling pools of white ichor, while massive gravity-maces shattered their blackened bone carapaces with concussive shockwaves that rattled Cassian's teeth.
Cassian watched the slaughter with a faint, bloody smile. Let the bounty hunters earn their five million star-metal. His eighty-nine cores were completely dark, his physical body pushed past the brink of mortal endurance. He needed these seconds of rest more than he needed his pride.
But high above the molten crater, observing through the jagged, bleeding tear in the fabric of the universe, the Lieutenants of the Beyond were not amused.
The Citadel had authorized a surgical swarm, a localized hive meant to quietly wrap the exhausted Inquisitor in a dimensional web. Instead, they were watching their vanguard get butchered by a handful of Aether-blind outer-rim mercenaries wielding stolen, mechanized fire.
Through the rift, the chittering, nauseating voice of the Harvest shrieked in genuine anger.
The bruised, oily purple sky above Veldor didn't just rain arachnids anymore; it completely collapsed. The rift was aggressively forced wider by the entities on the other side. The screeching of the descending swarm amplified from a hiss into a planetary roar. Tens of thousands of the massive, bio-mechanical beasts poured through the wound in a single, unyielding tidal wave. They crawled over each other, a waterfall of lethal, mono-molecular blades and glowing white eyes, burying the Spire under the sheer, impossible weight of their numbers.
"Boss!" one of the Ferran mercenaries yelled over the deafening mechanical whine of his overheating rotary cannon. His ablative armor was heavily scored, smoking from the glancing blows of the spider's blades. "The sky is vomiting! We don't have enough thermal output to hold a swarm this dense! They're going to overrun the perimeter!"
The Ferran leader, standing ten feet from Cassian, smashed a leaping arachnid into the floor with a backhand swing of his gravity-mace. He looked up at the descending nightmare, his visor reflecting the endless sea of white eyes.
"Form up on the bounty!" the leader roared, his vocoder cutting through the chaos. "We are not dying on this rock for a paycheck! Prepare the failsafe!"
The leader reached down to a heavily shielded, lead-lined lockbox magnetically clamped to his lower back. He punched in a biometric code, and the thick metal casing hissed open, venting a cloud of freezing, cryogenic vapor.
Cassian, still slumping against the wall, cracked his silver eyes open to see what the mercenary was reaching for.
The Ferran leader pulled out a core.
Cassian's breath hitched in his throat. His silver eyes widened, locking onto the object with an intensity that entirely overrode his exhaustion.
It was a Tier VI Core.
But it was wrong. It didn't possess the jagged, asymmetrical, natural chaos of the True Weapons Vael and Nyx had pulled from their vaults. It didn't look like a chunk of fossilized god-bone or a tear in reality. It was a perfect, flawless geometric sphere of glass and synthetic star-metal, humming with a sickly, pulsing neon-green light. It didn't radiate the ancient weight of the deep null; it radiated the terrifying, sterile hum of a laboratory.
It was a Tier VI Cultivated Core.
Impossible, Cassian thought, his ancient mind reeling.
He remembered walking through the deepest, most restricted sub-levels of the Vanguard Archives centuries ago. He remembered standing beside Grand Inquisitor Salane, reading the redacted reports of rogue alchemists trying to artificially grow Aetheric singularities.
"They are ghost stories, Cassian," Salane's voice echoed in his memory, harsh and dismissive. "A Tier I or Tier II core can be spliced. But you cannot farm the apocalypse. To cultivate a Tier VI concept in a laboratory would require a mastery of cosmic biology that simply does not exist. They are myths."
But Salane had been wrong. Vael and Nyx had proven that the High Council hoarded natural Tier VI cores. And now, standing in the ruins of an outer-rim rock, a completely Aether-blind mercenary was holding a synthetic one.
The myths were real. Someone, somewhere in the fractured Azure Expanse, had figured out how to artificially grow the power of the gods.
A moment ago, Cassian had been quietly waiting for his physical stamina to regenerate just enough to slip into the shadows. He had planned to let the Ferrans distract the swarm, hijack one of their drop-pods, and vanish back into the dark.
But seeing that pulsing, neon-green sphere changed the mathematical equation of the entire universe.
If there was a faction capable of cultivating Tier VI cores and selling them to mercenaries, the Vanguard Remnant didn't stand a chance. Jax didn't stand a chance. Cassian needed to know where it came from. He needed to know who the Craftsman was.
He let his muscles go slack. He wouldn't give them the slip. He would let them take him.
The Ferran leader didn't slot the cultivated core into a weapon chassis. It wasn't designed to be fired. It was designed to be detonated. The mercenary twisted the top hemisphere of the synthetic core, setting a heavy, mechanical timer built directly into its casing.
The neon-green light began to pulse rapidly, emitting a high-frequency whine that made the approaching arachnids screech and recoil in sudden, instinctive terror.
"Failsafe is armed! We have three minutes until this rock is glass!" the leader bellowed, dropping the armed Tier VI Cultivated Nuke directly into the center of the molten crater. "Grab the Inquisitor! We are blowing this rock!"
Two massive Ferran mercenaries broke from the defensive circle. They rushed Cassian, grabbing him roughly by the shoulders and hauling him to his feet. Cassian groaned, letting his legs drag slightly, playing the part of the completely broken prisoner.
One of the mercenaries slammed a pair of heavy, star-metal cuffs around Cassian's wrists. They were lined with Aether-suppressing spikes, designed to short-circuit internal pathways. Cassian almost laughed; his pathways were already locked down, making the cuffs completely redundant, but he offered no resistance.
"Move! Move! Move!"
The mercenaries formed a tight, heavily armored phalanx around Cassian, their infused weapons roaring as they carved a path through the chittering tide of bio-mechanical spiders.
The retreat was a blur of absolute, desperate violence.
The swarm chased them, driven mad by the blinding, radioactive countdown of the Tier VI core ticking behind them. Arachnids threw their massive bodies against the Ferran shields, their mono-molecular blades sparking off the gray ablative armor. The mercenaries fired blindly into the dark, using the raw, concussive force of their gravity-maces to blast holes in the dimensionally anchored webbing that blocked the Spire's exit.
Cassian was dragged through the carnage, his silver eyes fixed on the heavily armored back of the Ferran leader. The purple sky above was completely blotted out by descending horrors, and the air behind them began to warp and superheat as the cultivated nuke prepared to erase Veldor from the star charts.
He was cuffed, exhausted, and a prisoner of the most dangerous bounty hunters in the galaxy.
But as they broke through the final layer of webbing and sprinted toward the waiting exfiltration ship, Cassian's mind was sharper than it had been in a millennium. He was going to find out who grew that core, and when he did, he was going to burn their laboratory to the ground.