[Black Garden]
The rifts tore wider, and from within it stepped out three figures, drenched in the Heart's viridian flames.
The flames that clung to their chassis burned without consuming them. Deep green light crawled across the strange geometric scripture etched into their bodies, illuminating each rune as they advanced and took their positions in a wide triangle before the Heart.
"Looks like the boss is here." TheOneWhoKnocks took in a sharp breath.
"Damn, but like, aren't three too much?" Gandalf cursed.
Waffles raised a brow, "I thought the heart was the boss?"
With a shriek, the three figures asserted themselves. These three were hybrid Vex Axis Minds, created by utilising the dark, solely to protect the black heart.
The players immediately saw three tags float above their heads.
[The Primaeval Mind], [The Eschaton Mind], [The Imminent Mind]
With the appearance of the Axis Minds, the Black Heart's pulse changed.
Void's instincts screamed.
'Something's wrong.'
"Get behind me!" He immediately flared his light in an attempt to shield the players.
The heart's slow rhythmic draw had been bleeding the players' light bars down, quickened.
The interval between pulses collapsed, each draw coming faster than the last, and what it pulled was no longer just the ambient light of the clearing.
The Heart reached further. The air around the altar thickened as it drew inward, the sourceless violet light that saturated the Garden pulling toward the membrane's core from every direction at once, the clearing dimming as though the Garden itself was being drained.
The players again felt it hit their frames simultaneously.
Light bars dropped a full segment in one movement.
Their HUDs blinked.
Warning: Light suppression active. Abilities severely restricted.
"What the hell—" TheOneWhoKnocks checked his bar. Another notch gone.
Void felt it too. His light was being slowly but surely pulled away from him; his reserves were dropping. His face darkened. Without Zamyr to shield him, he had no way to restore what the Heart was taking.
With no way to recover his light in the Vex Dimension, every ability he spent here was gone. If he burned through his light fighting a battle of attrition against three Axis Minds and the Heart itself, he would have nothing left for what came after.
He couldn't get through this fight on his own.
But Void had already considered that. His eyes drifted to the players. Just because he couldn't, didn't mean that the players were limited in the same way.
"Don't focus on the Heart," he said immediately. "Put everything on the Minds. Without them, the Heart is powerless."
"On it," Waffles confirmed.
With the final battle of the raid at hand, the players were itching to jump into action.
IEatPaint instantly took out his shotgun.
The players opened fire. Yet every round, every beam, every ability the players threw at the nearest Axis Mind deflected off a surface that wasn't visible. The Minds didn't react. Didn't move. Stood exactly where they had positioned themselves and simply observed the battle.
With the players still shelling out a storm of bullets, the Axis Minds replied in kind, using their plasma lasers and energy rifles to wreak havoc.
"F*ck? They're immune!" BearSpray darted back as a plasma round barely grazed him.
"All three?" IEatPaint fired twice more at the Eschaton Mind on the far side of the altar, but nothing changed.
"All three," Gandalf confirmed and jumped behind a pillar of the altar.
Void flickered, jumping above the pillar, and the gears in his mind turned.
There was simply no way that all the Axis minds were invulnerable permanently. If the Heart could do such a thing, would it not just make itself invulnerable?
Before Void could contemplate any further, the Garden itself gave him the answer.
His thoughts spiralled. This place existed outside of time. Not adjacent to it, not insulated from it, but genuinely disconnected, a space through which every timeline cycled without any single one taking hold.
The Garden had seen every version of every moment that had ever occurred or ever would. It didn't exist in the past, the present or the future.
It existed in all three simultaneously.
'Three Minds. Three timeframes.' Void's eyes lit up.
"The invulnerability will wear off," Void said aloud.
"What?" Waffles turned.
"Each Mind represents a point in time. Past, present, future. The Garden moves through them. When the cycle aligns with the right moment, the corresponding Mind becomes vulnerable. We can't force it. We need to wait for it."
"Wait?" Undecided rushed to cover and repeated hesitantly. "While those things are shooting at us?"
"Yes."
The raid team felt their minds go numb. The altar wasn't that wide; the space given was probably just a few hundred feet. There was simply no way they could easily wait out the Vex shields without getting hit.
"F*cking Lovely," BearSpray said, and began recording again.
The Heart pulsed.
Dark energy erupted from the altar's base in a wide churning tide, rolling outward across the clearing's floor in both directions simultaneously, travelling the full circumference of the altar's outer ring. The tide was dense and fast, carrying a pressure that was immediately, physically apparent.
"What the actual-" TheOneWhoKnocks's eyes widened.
"Move! Now!" Void bellowed.
The players broke into a run along the altar's outer edge, racing clockwise as a dark energy swept behind them, hugging the altar's circumference, and where it passed, the stone floor cracked and blackened. The three Sol Progeny stood unmoved at the altar's centre, their chassis unaffected, watching the Guardians run the ring.
Throughout all this, the Minds hadn't stopped firing.
Within an instant, the altar was thrown into chaos. The players ran frantically, dodging with their lives on the line, as dark bolts rained from all three directions simultaneously, while they raced an inevitable tide that threatened to catch up to them.
They had no time to stop; the moment they did, the tide would catch up. However, the tides weren't monodirectional. The moment the players got too comfortable with the rhythm, the heart would pulse again and abruptly change directions, forcing the players to pivot again.
"It's slowing," Waffles hurriedly pointed to one of the axis minds.
The Primaeval Mind's movement had changed, its chassis shifting weight fractionally, its eye dimming by the smallest possible degree.
As they had expected, the cycle within the Garden was aligning.
"Primaeval Mind," Void said just as the Vex Shields around the mind disappeared. "It's opening. Hit it now."
He reached for his own heavy weapon, slipping out the rocket launcher from his inventory.
Three rockets struck the Primaeval Mind square in its chassis, and the mind staggered back a half-step.
The players converged everything they had on it simultaneously. Void kept his heavy weapon firing in controlled bursts, pacing his remaining ammo while the players burned their cooldowns, dumped their ammunition, pushed every available resource into the window while it was open.
The Primaeval Mind absorbed the punishment and fought back harder, the more damage it took, dark energy erupting from it in expanding rings that the players stepped through or vaulted without fully stopping their fire.
Then the window closed.
The Primaeval Mind's invulnerability returned, and its brightened back to full luminance. Invulnerable again.
"Keep moving!" Void called out
The players didn't lose track as the dark tide resumed its circuit. The three Minds repositioned slightly, the triangle formation rotating a few degrees as the cycle moved to its next phase.
Then the Heart changed.
The pulse that had been driving the tides simply stopped. The dark energy dissipated across the floor without completing its arc. Void's instincts snapped once more.
"Get behind the pillars. Now. Move!"
He was already running for the nearest one before the last word left his mouth.
IEatPaint, Undecided and Waffles raced, scattering to the tall stone pillars that lined the clearing's outer edge. Void pressed his back against the nearest one.
The Heart drew in a breath so deep that the air pressure changed.
Just before the last seconds, BearSpray and TheOneWhoKnocks slid behind the opposite pillar.
Then the Heart exhaled.
The shockwave came outward from the membrane in a single total eruption, a wall of force that crossed the clearing in a fraction of a second and hit everything that wasn't behind stone.
Loose debris tore from the clearing's floor and scattered into the horizon. The altar's surface cracked in a ring pattern outward from the membrane's base. The viridian flames that had been burning across the Sol Progeny's chassis extinguished in the blast.
The three Axis Minds went to one knee and became immune to the force.
Void pressed hard against the pillar as the shockwave rolled past it, the stone shuddering under the impact but holding. Around the clearing, the players stayed tucked behind their own cover, the blast passing over and around them, the noise of it fading into the violet expanse beyond the island's edge.
"Holy shit, we're safe!" Waffles cried out, watching the eruption fade.
Then the Heart breathed in again, steadying itself, the viridian flames climbing back across the Sol Progeny's chassis as they rose from their kneel and returned to their positions.
The dark tide reformed at the altar's base.
And began to move. With the return of the tide, the players had no time to rest. They immediately fell back into motion around the altar, reading the tide's direction, spreading their spacing, settling back into the rhythm of the fight.
"Wait! Where's Gandalf!" BearSpray whipped around, but only saw the five of them running from the dark tide.
"What!"
"This motherfu-"
Waffles's eyes widened as she saw a mote of light floating at the edge of the altar, indicating his dead body. "HOW!"
"I PANICKED", Gandalf cried out on the voice chat, unable to stay quiet.
"F*CK, I'll get the revive, don't stop moving!" Undecided grit his teeth and saw the tide wash over Gandalf's revive point; there was simply no way of moving back.