The "Silent King" had been a nightmare, but at least he was a nightmare born of their own world. He had been a padlock on a door that everyone had forgotten existed. When Kaelen shattered that padlock and ascended as a Starlight Entity, he hadn't just liberated the people; he had turned on the lights in a dark room.
And now, the things that lived in the darkness had seen them.
Kaelen stood on the jagged edge of the Great Divide, his boots barely touching the blackened basalt. His body was no longer just flesh and bone. Underneath the translucent, diamond-hard surface of his skin, a galaxy of emerald and orange embers pulsed in time with his heartbeat. This was the Starlight-Steel—the physical manifestation of his perfect synthesis with the dragon Ignis. He felt every vibration in the air, every shift in the tectonic plates below, and most importantly, every scream coming from the sky.
"Kaelen, look at the telemetry!" Pip's voice crackled through the Aura-Link. The gnome was half-buried in a pile of humming Regulator Crystals a few yards back, his fingers moving so fast they were a blur of motion. "These things aren't just falling. They're de-accelerating. They're choosing targets!"
Kaelen looked up. The sky was a bruised purple. The "Mana-Shroud" that had protected Gaea for centuries was gone, leaving a jagged rift in the upper atmosphere. Through that rift, dozens of white-hot streaks were descending. They were the Star-Spires—three-hundred-foot needles of crystalline geometry that hummed with a frequency that made Kaelen's teeth ache.
"Targeting what?" Ria asked, her voice sharp. She was crouched at the edge of the cliff, her Soul-Piercer Spear glowing with a cold, blue light. She was faster now, her reflexes sharpened by the overflow of mana in the atmosphere. "The cities? Oakhaven?"
"Worse," Pip replied, his voice dropping an octave. "They're hitting the Ley-Line nodes. They aren't trying to kill us, Ria. They're trying to plug in. They're siphoning the planet's core."
Suddenly, the air pressure dropped. A shadow larger than a mountain passed over the Great Divide. A Star-Spire, glowing with a sickly violet radiance, screeched through the atmosphere directly above them. The friction of its descent ignited the oxygen in the air, creating a trail of fire that turned the morning into a hellish noon.
"Brace!" Korg roared.
The goliath tank slammed his Aegis of the Divide into the ground. A dome of golden kinetic energy erupted around the company just as the Spire slammed into the valley floor two miles below.
The impact was not a thud; it was a cosmic rupture. The ground didn't just shake—it liquified. A wall of dust, salt, and shattered rock surged upward, hitting Korg's shield with the force of a tidal wave. The company was buried in a mountain of debris for several long seconds until Kaelen raised his hand.
"Spatial... Displacement," Kaelen whispered.
With a flick of his wrist, the thousands of tons of rock pressing against Korg's shield simply ceased to be in that space, reappearing a mile away in a harmless heap.
As the dust cleared, they saw it. The Spire was embedded deep in the earth, standing like a crooked tooth. Its surface was translucent, and through the crystalline walls, Kaelen could see things moving. Thousands of them.
"They're coming out," Sissik hissed, his reptilian eyes slitting. He raised his staff, and the ground around the company began to sprout thick, iron-hard vines. "The trees... they are weeping, Kaelen. These things, they do not belong to the cycle of life."
The side of the Spire didn't open with a door; it simply dissolved into a mist of violet vapor. From within the mist, the Void-Husks emerged. They were terrifyingly tall—seven feet of spindly, elongated limbs wrapped in armor that looked like polished bone. They had no faces, only a single, vertical slit that glowed with a cold, calculating purple light. They didn't walk; they glided, their feet never touching the corrupted soil.
"Is it wrong to be a hero when my soul is a dragon?" Kaelen muttered to himself, the series' core question echoing in his mind as he felt Ignis's hunger rising.
"THEY ARE THIEVES," Ignis growled in his mind. "THEY COME TO STEAL THE CINDER THAT WE BLED FOR. BURN THEM, ECHO. BURN THEM UNTIL THE STARS THEMSELVES BLINK."
Kaelen didn't need further encouragement. He turned to his team.
"Korg, Ria—you're with me on the front. We need to keep them away from the base of the mountain. Pip, Elara, Sissik—stay on the ridge. I need that Planetary Defense Grid online five minutes ago. If more of those Spires land, there won't be a world left to save."
"You heard the man!" Pip squeaked, already jumping back into his pile of crystals. "Elara, I need your mana-flow to stabilize the Regulator! Sissik, keep the vines growing—if those Husks get up here, I'm toast!"
Kaelen leaped.
He didn't use a glider or a spell. He simply stepped off the cliff and folded the space between the peak and the valley floor. In a blink, he was standing in the center of the Void-Husk vanguard.
The aliens reacted with mechanical precision. Six of them raised long, needle-like rifles that fired bolts of pure negative energy.
Kaelen didn't dodge. He stood his ground. As the bolts hit his Starlight-Steel skin, they didn't explode—they were absorbed. His body glowed brighter with every hit, the emerald embers in his chest spinning into a vortex.
"My turn," Kaelen said.
He swung the Scepter of the Unspoken in a wide arc. A wave of spatial distortion rippled outward. The Void-Husks caught in the wave didn't just fall; they were compressed. Their bone-like armor shattered as the gravity around them increased by a thousand percent, pinning them to the ground until they popped like dry wood.
Ria landed beside him a second later, a blur of motion. She moved through the remaining Husks like a ghost, her Soul-Piercer Spear darting in and out of their glowing eye-slits. Because the Husks had no physical organs, a normal blade would have done nothing, but Ria's spear struck the "Essence" itself. Every time she landed a hit, a Husk would stiffen and dissipate into a cloud of ash.
"There are too many!" Ria shouted, ducking under a sweeping blade-arm of a larger Husk. "Kaelen, the Spire is still pumping them out!"
She was right. For every ten they killed, fifty more emerged from the violet mist. And further off in the distance, three more Spires were screaming through the clouds, aimed at the horizon.
Kaelen looked up at the rift in the sky. He could see the Star-Eater Hive-Ship now—a geometric fortress the size of a city, slowly descending into the atmosphere. It looked like a giant, many-angled snowflake made of dark obsidian.
"Pip!" Kaelen roared into the Aura-Link. "Status!"
"The grid is 40% synced!" Pip's voice was frantic. "But I can't bridge the gap between the Relics! The Core is too powerful—it's blowing out the Regulator's circuits! I need a stabilizer!"
Kaelen looked at the Core of the Eternal Spark pulsing in his own chest. He realized then what he had to do. The relics weren't just weapons; they were components. And he was the battery.
"Ria, Korg—fall back to the ridge!" Kaelen ordered.
"What? We're holding them!" Korg yelled, his shield glowing red-hot from the friction of a hundred Void-blades.
"That's an order! I'm going to bridge the gap!"
Kaelen closed his eyes. He stopped fighting the Husks and started listening to the dragon. He let the heat of Ignis flood his veins, pushing past the limits of his human mind. He reached out with his "Lens" vision, seeing the invisible lines of mana connecting the five relics the company had gathered.
He saw the Scepter in his hand, the Regulator on Pip's arm, the Aura in the air, and the Lens in his mind. They were all vibrating, waiting for a conductor.
Kaelen hovered higher, his body becoming a sun. The Void-Husks below stopped attacking, their single eyes tracking him as he rose. They sensed the power—the "Cinder"—and they hungered for it.
"I am the bridge," Kaelen whispered.
He unleashed the full power of the Core. A beam of pure, starlight energy shot out from his chest, hitting the Regulator Crystals on the ridge. From there, the energy refracted, hitting the other relics in a perfect pentagram of light.
The sky groaned. The rift didn't close, but a shimmering, translucent veil began to spread across the atmosphere. It was the Planetary Shield.
As the next three Star-Spires hit the veil, they didn't pierce it. They exploded against the shield like glass against stone, lighting up the sky in a spectacular display of violet and gold.
"It's working!" Pip cheered. "The shield is holding!"
But Kaelen could feel the cost. Every second the shield was active, it drained his very life-force. The "Starlight-Steel" of his skin began to crack, leaking golden smoke.
"CAREFUL, ECHO," Ignis warned, his voice straining. "THE STARS ARE HEAVY. IF YOU HOLD THE SKY ALONE, YOU WILL SHATTER."
"I'm not alone," Kaelen gasped, looking down at his friends who were already moving to defend his hovering, vulnerable body.
The first wave of the siege had been stopped, but as Kaelen looked at the massive Hive-Ship still looming above the shield, he knew this was just the beginning. The Star-Eaters wouldn't leave until the fire was out.
And Kaelen was the brightest fire in the universe.