The severance of the three deep-space void channels didn’t merely wound the Continental Eclipse Sun-Eater. It stripped the ancient parasite of its cosmic lifeline. It drove the huge entity into a state of blind, world-ending frenzy.
Across five thousand two hundred miles of the solar chromosphere, the titan’s jagged, matte-black back shell heaved upward like a land-wide plate fracturing in an earthquake. Forty thousand main drain tube roots thrashed wildly within the heat-rising granules of the sun, creating titanic solar tsunamis that surged hundreds of thousands of miles into the black void. The star’s local magnetic field lines screamed. They were twisted and snapped by the titan’s thrashing agony. That set off a nonstop barrage of magnetic pulses that blinded satellite observatories all the way to Earth’s high orbit.
And then, the seven land-wide eyes opened to their total, total limit.
The six-sided eye pits, each spanning four hundred and fifty miles across, ceased their rhythmic drain tube contractions. The faceted violet cold-matter crystals lining their rims began to spin in timed together, counter-rotating rings, generating an unnatural, light-devouring vortex that drew millions of tons of surrounding solar star-fire into their centers, super-compressing the energy into total-zero dark matter.
“Energy readings off the scale!” Kira screamed from the flight console, her voice nearly lost beneath the terrifying shriek of the ship’s gravimetric alarms. “The seven eye pits are converging on a single focal point! Arthur, it’s not a nearby drain tube—it’s an Endothermic Extinction Ray! A beam of tightly packed…
