The planet groaned as it was slowly devoured. Whole continents sagged under the weight of the creeping black sludge, and the Tartarusios cut through the murky sky with her searchlights stabbing downward, searching for whatever was left of the Titans. Beneath her spread what had been the Basin of Trass, now a churning mire of darkness swallowing the ground meter by meter, and as the ship passed over the drowned plains, the scout feed flickered across half-sunken silhouettes of broken Orbiton frames sticking up out of the mire like the bones of drowned giants.
Then the spotlight caught something massive. It was Marek's Titan. Half its body had already disappeared beneath the sludge, and only its chest, its left shoulder and its head were still visible. Black fluid pulsed around the cockpit housing and crept steadily up toward the crown of its skull.
"Get the retrieval shuttle down there!" Oscar barked, gripping the railing. "Now — go!"
The odds were almost nonexistent. No one stayed alive inside a drowning Titan; the sludge seeped through everything, ate everything, suffocated everything. But when the shuttle reached him and the rescue frame cracked open Marek's cockpit, the kid coughed. He was alive — barely, soaked in coolant and sweat, drifting in and out of consciousness — because his cockpit seal had held just long enough, its pressure locks jamming shut before the sludge could get in. It was a miracle in a graveyard.
Sergio had not been so lucky. His Titan lay shattered across a jagged spire of rock like a broken doll, its limbs torn away, its torso split open, its cockpit crushed beneath fallen debris. When they reached him, there was nothing left to save. It was a gruesome end, but one rooted in courage and defiance. Preston and Alex were gone too. Their Titans no longer existed as machines at all, only as two faint, fading signals swallowed long ago beneath the black tide, and how their last moments had gone, no one would ever know. They were just two more young pilots who had reached too far for glory. Tom, somehow, was clinging to life inside a Titan that was little more than a skeleton of cables and exposed servos, nearly devoured but refusing to fall apart, kept alive by failing emergency systems while he hung unconscious in his harness.
Three boys gone in a single strike. Three bright sparks smothered.
Oscar stared at the display with his chest tight and his jaw trembling. These were his crew. They had been his responsibility. With a heavy heart, he turned to the open channel, and every soul aboard the Tartarusios heard his voice. "My friends, we are going to get out of this. I promise you — on the souls of everyone who died today." And with that vow, the Tartarusios angled her bow upward and climbed out of the dying sky.
Above the planet, the battle raged like a war between dying stars. Altopereh's shadow stretched across the whole of the orbit, its form swelling, cracking, pulsing with dark pressure. Perciosa was nearly crushed, pinned inside a tightening cocoon of black sludge while her frame groaned as though her bones were snapping. Anemone's breathing had grown shallow, her vision blurring. Perciosa's voice echoed faintly through the cockpit. Anemone. Stay awake.
Then a blinding beam erupted out of the clouds below — a lance of pure energy that sliced the darkness apart and slammed into Altopereh's side, blowing the sludge away and freeing Perciosa in a violent burst that shook the whole orbit. Perciosa drifted, broken, her armor plates dangling, her wings half melted, her circuits exposed and sparking. Inside her, Anemone let out a shaky breath, her skin pale and blood running down her neck.
"I see," she whispered hoarsely. "Alright, then. Go crazy. And don't you dare lose." Her hand slipped from the controls.
Something answered her. Perciosa's core twisted. Matter cracked, folded and rearranged itself as bones materialized out of thin air and erupted outward like white-hot spines. A ribcage snapped into shape around the core. Her torso stretched unnaturally, her joints elongated and her limbs thinned until they looked like talons. Tendrils spilled from her back like writhing shadows, and horns grew from her head like branching antlers, sharp and chaotic. Perciosa's true form had awakened — the ancient monster that powered the machine, unbound at last. Across from her, Sirius materialized in a shimmer of blue distortion to join the standoff.
Three monsters. Three gods.
Altopereh threw back its head and laughed, a hollow, resonant sound that set metal vibrating. "At last. Now the real fun begins." It spread its arms. Hundreds of black bubbles of condensed sludge formed around it all at once and shot out like artillery shells. Perciosa did not even flinch. A pulse of subsonic force rippled out from her chest, so sharp that the bubbles liquefied in midair and evaporated into mist. Sirius raised one hand and let inertia ripple out around him until the rest of them froze, slowed and collapsed under their own halted momentum.
Sirius smirked. "Still a loose cannon, aren't you? You shouldn't have killed my vessel. Plenty of him was still usable — at least until you punched through him."
Altopereh sneered. "You call that weakling a vessel? I would rather rot in my core for a thousand years than live in flesh that pathetic."
It lunged, claws out, tendrils whipping, the stars themselves warping in its wake. Sirius blurred aside and hurled hundreds of torn-up asteroid fragments and dead satellites into it from every direction, and the barrage struck like a meteor storm and ripped great chunks out of its body. Every hole healed instantly. Altopereh twisted to strike back, but Perciosa materialized directly in front of it with her claws drawn back for a killing blow. Its tendrils snapped out and wrapped around her arm and swallowed it whole before she could make contact. Perciosa recoiled with her arm gone. But before the stump could even drip, new bone sprouted from it. Flesh knitted, metal and sinew wove together, until the limb had grown back entirely in a matter of seconds.
Altopereh laughed again. "Come on. How low have you fallen, taking orders from mortals? Join me. Let's take this world back the way we did in the old days."
Perciosa hissed. "You fool. You can't hold this form for long. Once your vessel dies, you'll collapse back into your core. Those old days are gone. Blame the Sacros for that."
"For what it's worth," Sirius added dryly, "I liked my vessel. So I'll be killing yours as payback."
Sirius lunged. His turquoise veins blazed brighter and brighter until an enormous sphere of energy had formed in front of his chest. He fired it as a column of annihilation tearing across the void. Altopereh darted upward just in time, and the beam only grazed its torso, but before it could strike back, Perciosa was already above it with her wings flared. She unleashed a supersonic wave that hit it like a fist of thunder. The Vanisher tumbled down toward the planet and stopped itself with a violent jerk just before it broke the atmosphere. Then it rose again and hung in front of them, cracking its neck with a slow, confident tilt.
"Do you remember why they called me the Vanisher?" Sirius and Perciosa went tense. Altopereh raised a single finger. "You know what my body is made of. Antimatter itself. And this world is already drenched in it. I made things vanish by swallowing them — and you are already inside my field."
The space around them fractured like glass, and a curtain of white void came pouring down. The fabric of space itself began to descend on Sirius and Perciosa like a slow tidal wave. Further out, the Rozasar fleet screamed through its comms as the antimatter tide reached it. Ships dissolved one by one, warping, bending, collapsing inward in silence, until fewer than twenty remained. The number kept falling. Leonora pushed her engines to their limit, her hull plates shaking as she brought her fleet in to join the fight. Everything felt moments away from extinction.
And then the antimatter stopped. All of it. The sludge choking the fleet froze in place. The tide around Sirius and Perciosa halted, and Altopereh shuddered. Pieces of its body began to crumble away, dissolving and evaporating to reveal the metal beneath, the black shell peeling off it like burning paper running in reverse. Altopereh looked down at itself in confusion, then over at Sirius and Perciosa. Then it laughed, low and fading.
"Better luck next time, I guess."
The last of the antimatter shell evaporated, and the ancient Orbiton Altopereh hung there before the two monsters, revealed in full — and still.