The light of the Primordial Data Center didn’t warm the skin.
It tasted of raw ozone and pure, uncompiled mathematics.
The Void Breaker drifted within fifty miles of the continent-sized sapphire monolith. Then, the silence of the void was suddenly ripped apart by an ear-splitting, ringing drone that rang directly inside the skulls of every living soul aboard the vessel.
Across the crystal-clear outside of the installation, thirty thousand eight-sided pylons flared with blinding cerulean fire.
The self-running outer edge defense array of Epoch Zero—dormant for ten million years—had registered an incoming payload.
*
From the crystal towers, four huge entities condensed from the surrounding starlight.
They didn’t look like flesh-and-blood fighters, nor like the void static ghouls. They were multi-winged seraphim twenty miles tall, their forms forged from razor-sharp lines of pure, compiled sharp-angled logic.
