Eighty thousand paces above the Azure Cloud Realm, the vast high-sky ceiling of sapphire jelly remained unbroken.
Hovering near the northern lip of the canopy, directly beneath the bleeding edges of the ten-thousand-mile space-folding sky rift, the last leftovers of the Extradimensional Void Armada were backed into an inescapable corner. Only three thousand jagged void locusts, eighty heavy void cruisers, and twelve damaged Void Dreadnoughts remained of the terrifying vanguard that had blackened the sky high sky just hours ago.
Every exit vector back into deep space was sealed by fifty miles of living, impact-hardening ancient fluid. Every avenue of descent toward the mortal world was blocked by Xiao Long’s world-size water barrier.
Inside the hive mind’s collective mind, the cold algorithms that had calculated the eradication of three hundred star systems broke down into a frenzied, final burst of survival.
They weren’t soldiers capable of surrender. They were living breakdown, born of the primal cold, programmed only to delete matter until nothing remained. Cornered against the elastic sapphire ceiling, the surviving capital vessels and locust swarms linked their spatial power channels.
Sharp-angled runes of dead gray light flared across every black glass hull. From the emitter ports of eighty cruisers, twelve dreadnoughts, and thousands of locust back shells, fifty thousand void total ruin rays began to charge at the same time.
