General Vorn was gone, but his shadow remained.
His body lay on the floor of the extraction hub, a broken husk of a man who had tried to weaponize the soul and been crushed by its weight. But the silence he had left behind was short-lived.
The ceiling groaned. Dust and debris rained down on the exhausted prisoners, who were still huddled in the pens, their throats raw from the scream that had saved them.
"They're not just landing," Jian said, looking at the monitor that showed the external feed. "They're swarming."
The sky above The Bastion was black with ships. The Devourer fleet, drawn by the massive psionic flare of the prisoners' collective scream, had abandoned all pretense of observation. They were descending like a plague of locusts.
The lead ship, a behemoth that dwarfed the others, hovered directly over the central spire of the fortress. It didn't need to fire. Its mere presence was a weapon, a gravitational anchor that made the very air feel heavy.
