The silence that gripped the upper stratosphere was unlike any silence the Azure Cloud Realm had ever known.
Across eighty thousand paces height, the leftover thirty-nine million five hundred thousand void locusts and ten thousand three hundred and ninety-nine Void Dreadnoughts hovered in rigid mid-air. Their reality-eroding static, which had earlier hummed with world-ending hunger, stuttered like a dying ember caught in an autumn gale.
For ten billion years, the outer-void swarm had known only one working doctrine: advance, dissolve, delete.
They had unmade crystal-clear star-empires across three hundred galaxies. They had swallowed the nascent souls of ancient gods, unpicked the conceptual laws of divine realms, and reduced thriving star systems to silent expanses of gray empty pocket. Never in their collective memory had an entity intercepted their vanguard, wrapped eight million combat units in a blue picnic blanket. Then they slurped them down like hand-pulled noodles.
To the hive mind, this was not a defeat. It was a deepest cosmological error.
SCREEEEEECH!
A psychic hum of pure, pure panic ripped across the outer-void hive network. The sound was so jarring that star-diviners in their sky observatories three continents away dropped their bronze lenses, their ears ringing with psychic feedback.
