As the players transmatted into freehold, Void watched them move.
He recognised the names of the six that now stood against the Cabal.
Waffles, TheOneWhoKnocks, IEatPaint, Gandalf, BearSpray and Undecided.
He immediately realised that with the players showing up, the battle would undoubtedly have shifting tides. With the players incessantly hammering the Cabal frontlines, the rest of the guardians could take a breather.
But Void noticed their lower levels compared to the Cabal. If anything, even one mistake from the players would mean they would wipe out.
'A raid was never easy in the first place.'
"Holy shit." Shiro-4 chimed in, "What the hell do we feed those bastards?" He fought off a Cabal squad while admiring the players rushing in blindly.
"Those f*ckers are crazy, I told you!" Bandit leapt from a puddle of shadow and plunged a dagger within the eye slit of a Cabal legionnaire.
"Shut it and draw!" Levi took a stance and pulled back his bow, aiming to shoot a Shadowshot into the heart of the raging battle.
"Advance!" Shaxx bellowed, and a tide of Crucible Guardians swept the field. Warlocks conjured their thunder, Titans erected their domes, and the Hunters engulfed their weapons in fire.
A battle of clashing lights erupted.
The Cabal launched their rockets and plasma cannons, only to be met with the unstoppable barrage of golden guns.
The two sides clashed neck and neck, in a frenzy of battle that turned tides with each passing second.
Then Void saw him.
Primus Sha'aull dropped from the skies. The massive Cabal commander descended and shoulder bashed the sands in full plating, flanked by an honour guard of Dust Giants.
His arrival sent a shockwave through the sands.
Void raised a hand to cover his eyes as a dune collapsed into a column of dust and scattered across the crater.
"HAHAHAH", Wei Ning roared and raised her fist to the skies, thunder coiled on her knuckles.
"No!" Void gestured for her to back off.
"WHAT?"
"Let the new lights handle this." He replied
"Are you crazy?"
Void's voice cut through the gruelling gunfire, "We've got bigger fish to fry. I can't let you jump in just yet!"
Wei Ning's eyes darted to the Gate Lord now suspended in the astral prison behind them. An understanding flashed in her eyes. She nodded.
"Charge!" Shaxx Bellowed again, this time leading his forces to hold a line while the players fought off Primus Sha'aull.
"Void!" Taeko-3 called out from behind him. "It's awake!"
Before Void could respond, the aura hit.
It wasn't a blast.
It was a pressure, an oppressive, suffocating weight that rolled across the entire crater. Not heat. Not cold. Something ancient and deeply, fundamentally wrong.
Every soulful being felt it immediately. Their breath caught. The Cabal soldiers froze mid-stride, instinctively recoiling from something they recognised but couldn't name.
Inside the cube at the crater's centre, the Gatelord moved.
Void whipped back, and his eyes widened.
Its corpse shifted violently inside the astral prison. Spectral chains pulled taut. The cube's walls flared with light as the massive form began warping—flickering in and out of space, slamming itself against the containment walls over and over. Each impact sent shockwaves rolling outward.
The ground shook. Stone cracked. Dust fell from the ruins in thick clouds.
"It's trying to escape!" Alemyr grit his teeth as he and The Stoic tightened their command on their magic.
With each slam, they absorbed the impact, their heads snapping back, their feet shifting. The light across the prison's surface splintered into cracks with every collision. They were holding. But barely.
Void clenched his fists.
The Gatelord shrieked, but this time it was different.
It was a frequency—a sound that seemed to bypass the ears entirely and hit somewhere deeper. Behind the eyes. In the teeth. In the bones. Every Guardian in Freehold flinched hard. Legionaries stumbled backwards. Hundreds of War Beasts collapsed and howled.
The ruins of Freehold trembled violently.
Void's comms crackled. Asher Mir's voice came through tight and urgent.
"It's happening. The Vex response in this region just spiked. Hard. They heard it, Void. They're coming. Now!"
Void turned to the Guardians around him. To the Nightstalkers, Praxic Fire, and Crucible squads. With the inevitable at hand, he saw no use in mincing words.
"The Vex insurgency won't be small," he said. "When they arrive, they arrive in force. Whatever happens, we do not let them take the Gatelord. That's the line. Hold it."
"Cabal's probably already reading the Vex signatures," Cory cut in. "They'll send reinforcements."
"Then we fight both, until it's a three-way deadlock", Void said. "Move into position. Now."
The crater's edges exploded.
The sky turned red.
Long, luminous gashes split the perimeter of Freehold one after another, each one bleeding violent light into the atmosphere above the crater. The clouds overhead warped and darkened around the rifts, stained crimson and deep violet, as if the sky itself was recoiling from what was coming through.
A squad of Axis Minds stepped through first.
Massive. Deliberate. Each one the size of a Cabal Tank, their bodies radiating that cold, mechanical certainty that made them more unsettling than anything that bled.
Then the Harpies came in swarms. Hundreds of them poured through the rifts like smoke through a crack, filling the air above Freehold until the red sky was blotted out by their silhouettes.
Wyverns shrieked as they tore into reality, their leg-cannons already charging, screaming across the crater at full speed.
And behind them, shaking the ground before they were even fully through, was a full legion of Minotaurs.
The Gatelord had called.
And the Vex had answered with everything.
The moment they crossed through, they opened fire with no distinction between Cabal and Guardians, their weapons lighting up the burning skyline in streaks of hard white and electric blue against the red.
The crater became a maelstrom.
The balance of the battlefield didn't shift. It shattered.
The Cabal couldn't advance. Every line they'd established was caught between Guardian fire from one direction and Vex suppression from another. The Guardians couldn't consolidate.
The Vex didn't care about either; they came forward with the relentless momentum of an algorithm executing its final command. Three factions, three distinctly different objectives.
It would all start and end in this crater.
Chaos consumed everything.
Void's eyes cut through it all, landing on the players who still fought tooth and nail against Primus Sha'aull.
With the Vex and Cabal in place, it was time to move towards the real mission and trigger the locked Vex space for the Black Garden. Void couldn't let the players be stuck in the battle here. He needed the numbers with him inside the Garden.
He darted towards their position, keeping his eyes on their fight.
The Primus was a storm of fire and fury, his wings flared wide, wreathed in flames, his massive war-blade carving arcs of molten death through the air.
For a single, electric moment, the Primus' eyes flicked toward the tears in the sky. Toward the Vex horde descending like the end of all things.
Then he snapped back.
But that single second had bought all the time Void needed.
What Primus Sha'aull had failed to consider was simple.
He had made a mistake. A fatal one.
His attention had diverted to the endless hordes of the Vex that approached from behind, their Axis Minds and Minotaurs descending like the very end of the world. He watched them come. He gauged their numbers. He calculated the threat.
He had never considered that they were a distraction.
That was his error.
Because Primus Sha'aull had forgotten something, something the Cabal would never forget again. The Vex were not the threat.
There was only one true threat in Freehold.
And he was moving.
Void unsheathed his sword.
Lightning erupted along the sword. Arc energy wrapped the blade, climbing his arm, pulsing with violent energy.
Flickering forward in a burst of speed, lightning trailing behind him like a comet's tail. The distance between the two collapsed in seconds. Void closed on Primus Sha'aull and brought his blade up and across in one clean motion, slamming into the Primus's elemental shield that had shielded him from the player's attacks.
The shield fractured, and light exploded outward.
The impact shunted Primus Sha'aull backwards, his massive figure hurtled to the ground and crashed. He regained his footing fast, looked directly at Void, and slammed his gauntleted fist against his own chest plate.
Void held his ground and looked at the players.
Recognition flashed in their eyes as they realised that now, the Primus was truly vulnerable once more.
-
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