A blinding light engulfed the whole of Altopereh. To those who watched from afar, it looked like the inevitable end — a catastrophic overload, a core pushed past its limit and collapsing under the weight of its own impossible power. The official report would later confirm it in simple, sterile terms. Core implosion. Total loss. No survivors.
But that was a lie. Or, more accurately, a misunderstanding. Because what happened in that moment was not destruction. It was transition. The light did not explode outward; it folded inward. Every layer of Altopereh — its armor, its systems, its very structure — seemed to dissolve into that single brilliance while the space around it warped and bent as though reality itself had been peeled back. And then it was gone, leaving no debris, no signal and no trace, as if it had never existed at all.
Youri felt none of it. There was no pain, no tearing sensation, no sense of death approaching. Only silence — a deep, endless silence that wrapped around him like a void. And then, a breath.
His eyes opened slowly. At first everything was blurred and his vision swam, unfocused, as though he had woken from a dream too deep to escape. Then something brushed against his skin. Wind — a soft, unfamiliar breeze — and that alone was enough to confuse him. His hand rose by instinct and pressed against his forehead as if to steady himself while his thoughts came back in slow, disjointed fragments. The cockpit. The battle. The cannon—
His eyes opened wider. The cockpit hatch was open. That was impossible. Altopereh's cockpit did not open unless commanded, and certainly not in the vacuum of space. And yet here it stood open, and air was flowing through it.
Youri let out a slow breath and dragged his hand down his face as he forced himself upright. His body answered him, but it felt different — lighter, and somehow heavier at the same time, as if something fundamental had shifted beneath the surface. He stepped forward, and his boots met solid ground. Ground — not metal, not plating, but actual ground — and that realization alone sent a ripple of unease through him. Slowly, almost cautiously, he raised his eyes. And what he saw stopped him completely.
The world in front of him was unlike anything he had ever seen. It stretched endlessly in every direction, vast, untamed, and yet impossibly fractured. To his left an ocean of desert rolled outward, dunes of dark, ash-colored sand rising and falling like frozen waves while the wind carried grains across them in spirals that danced briefly and vanished into the distance. To his right there was fire: massive fissures split the land open and glowed with molten light from deep within the world. Rivers of flame pulsed slowly through the cracks and sent waves of heat into the air that reached him even where he stood and brushed his skin like a living thing. Beyond that rose mountains, towering, jagged, endless, their peaks piercing the sky beneath frost and ice so dense that they shimmered faintly in the dim light. A cold wind came down from those heights and cut sharply through the heat rising off the burning plains.
Two extremes, colliding and existing side by side in a way that defied reason. Youri's eyes moved slowly across the horizon, trying and failing to make sense of it. There were no trees, no signs of life, no movement but the shifting of the elements themselves — only stone, fire and ice, beneath a crimson sky that swallowed it all. It was a world that felt wrong, not because it was hostile, but because it should not have existed at all. No planet could hold such violently opposed environments within the same breath, and no ecosystem could survive that kind of imbalance. And yet it did.
His brow furrowed as a single thought formed in his mind. Where am I?
The question hung there unanswered — until a sound broke the silence. A laugh, low and deep and unmistakably sinister, which echoed across the barren expanse as though the world itself carried it. Youri reacted at once, turning sharply before thought could catch up with instinct, and behind him something stood. No — not something. Someone.
Altopereh had already taken shape — not as the towering mechanical god he had once piloted, but as something else entirely. Something more. Its presence alone bent the air around it and distorted the space it filled. Its body was no longer bound by steel or armor, yet it was not flesh either, but a shifting construct of dark mass and faint, pulsing energy whose shape kept adjusting, as though reality itself were struggling to contain it. Behind it stood the Orbiton, empty now, and where its core had once burned, there lay only a sphere — a perfectly smooth orb of dark metal resting at the machine's center.
Youri faced the entity with narrowed eyes — not in fear, but in recognition. "…You."
It tilted its head slightly, the same twisted amusement still clinging to it. "So you finally woke up."
The voice was familiar, and yet different. It no longer echoed through his mind or through mechanical speakers. It resonated directly, inside him, around him, everywhere at once.
Youri straightened slowly, his gaze unwavering. "What is this place?" he asked, his tone steady in spite of the storm of questions inside him.
Altopereh let out another low chuckle, and moved — not by stepping, but by shifting. One moment it stood several meters away; the next, it was close enough that Youri could feel the weight of its presence pressing against him. "Welcome," it said, with a strange and almost reverent tone, "to my home."
Youri's eyes hardened. "Your home?"
Altopereh turned its gaze outward toward the fractured horizon. "This is not a world as you understand it." A pause. "This is Tartarus."
The name settled heavily in the air. Youri said nothing, but something deep within him reacted, as though the word carried a meaning beyond language. Altopereh slowly extended an arm toward the endless broken landscape. "The realm of the banished."
The wind picked up again and swept across the land as if to underline its words. Youri's jaw tightened. Banished. "Then I'm dead," he said flatly.
Altopereh laughed again, louder and more amused. "Dead? No." It leaned closer. "Far from it."
"Then what am I doing here?"
For the first time, Altopereh's manner changed — not into anger, and not into mockery, but into something darker. Something ancient. "You," it said slowly, "have crossed a threshold few ever reach." The mass at its center pulsed faintly. "This is where things like me come from. And where things like you… are made."
Silence followed, heavy and unsettling. Youri didn't look away and didn't step back, but inside him something had begun to change. Because whatever Tartarus was, and whatever Altopereh truly was, he understood one thing with absolute certainty: he had not escaped death. He had been taken somewhere far worse. And whatever waited for him here would shape everything he would become from this point on.