The ten-thousand-mile space-folding sky rift hung above the Azure Cloud Realm like an open, bleeding wound across the sky high sky. High above the troposphere, at eighty thousand paces height, the silence was unnatural and total. The bitter cold of deep space leaked through the space-folding tear. He carried neither wind nor storm. But a choking stillness that caused the surrounding spiritual energy of the upper heavens to stagnate into lifeless ice.
Beneath the huge rift, ten thousand four hundred Void Dreadnoughts and four thousand eight hundred Void Sea monsters held their positions in sharp-angled grid formation. Their jagged black glass hulls, forged from stone-hard dwarf stars and unbound negative mass, drank in every photon of sunlight that tried to filter down from the high cosmos.
Around the huge capital vessels buzzed forty-eight million void locusts. Their jagged, sickle-shaped wings hummed at frequencies that physically shook the fabric of reality, stripping the moisture and spiritual essence from the upper air.
Suddenly, every sky-slit along the flanks of the leading dreadnoughts flared with dead, lusterless gray light.
There was no preliminary crack of thunder, no scent of scorched ozone, and no flare of heat burning. From the circular emitter ports of five hundred forward dreadnoughts erupted thick, packed beams of monochromatic gray static. The beams dropped through the stratosphere like shafts of stone-hard ash, cutting toward the mountain ranges of the northern continent.
