Space didn’t merely break. It yielded.
In the heartbeat before the three-sided execution cage collapsed upon Arthur Vance, the fabric of three-space-folding reality dissolved into a sharp-angled lattice of crystal-clear light.
Xylar, Vorak, and Vreth had timed together their six Gengjin glaives to strike with total flat finality. The violet void pyramid dropped with the weight of an imploding star, sealing every physical escape flight path within forty meters. There was no seam in their formation, no fractional tiny fraction of an inch of delay between their four-armed thrusts. To any standard combat analyst in the solar system, the target had already been liquidated.
Then, Vesper stepped between the seconds.
The Stygian lynx didn’t leap. She didn’t sprint across the charred bedrock.
She simply stepped into the higher flat pipe hub that connected all matter in the universe. In the sense feed of Arthur’s test monocle, time slowed down into an agonizingly slow crawl, each split second stretching into an eternity of suspended dust and static light.
Across that frozen tableau, a single nonstop ribbon of blinding white Gengjin energy traced itself through the air.
It wasn’t three separate attacks. It was a single, unbroken stroke of hyper-space-folding calligraphy.
