The silence after the explosion was not the silence of peace — it was the silence of something holding its breath before it kills.
Arin staggered forward, half-blind from the flash, the acrid taste of burnt ozone in his mouth. Around him, the remains of the relay station groaned under the weight of the vacuum-ward shielding struggling to hold. Chunks of shattered alloy drifted in the low-gravity atmosphere, rotating slowly, as if reluctant to fall.
"Vakya…" Arin whispered, and the system's glyphs bloomed in his vision like molten gold.
Directive: Reality thread compromised in Zone-Delta-Three. Probability of enemy surge: 82%.
The voice was calm, infuriatingly calm. But Arin's pulse wasn't. He could feel it in his throat, hammering. Something was coming.
From the far end of the wreckage, a shadow pulled itself upright — not human, not entirely. A Construct Knight, one of the Dominion's elite enforcers, its armor etched with script-lines that hummed with dimensional resonance. Each step it took cracked the ground, as if rejecting the reality it walked on.
"You have… spoken the forbidden syllables," the Knight's voice grated through a modulator. "Now you will be undone."
Arin's fingers curled tighter around the hilt of the plasma-sabers, but he didn't ignite them yet. This wasn't just a fight — this was a test of language, of power.
Vakya's glyphs swirled faster, forming a lattice in his mind. The Construct's armor was covered in counter-scripts. A wrong word here could feed its strength instead of breaking it.
"Vakya," Arin thought, his mental voice sharp. "Give me a thread-map."
Thread-map initiated. Weakness Node: Syllable fracture at Prime Sigil Ϟ — requires dual-linguistic strike.
The problem was clear. He couldn't just say the right word; he had to weave it into an attack that broke through the armor's resonance.
The Knight lunged — faster than anything its size had the right to be — and Arin sidestepped, narrowly avoiding a blade made of condensed refracted light. It wasn't heat that the blade carried. It was annihilation.
Every move was a countdown. The relay station's shields wouldn't hold for long. If they failed, the void would tear them both apart — and Vakya's threads with them.
He spun, bringing one saber to life, and let the syllable roll off his tongue. "Jhairat." The air bent. The Knight's stride faltered for half a heartbeat.
It was enough. Arin surged forward, chaining a second word into the strike — a word Vakya had only just unearthed from a half-dead archive in the Karthan Ruins. "Veyth."
The impact was like a bell being struck in the heart of the universe. The Knight's chest plate split down the center, molten light spilling out like liquid dawn.
But the victory wasn't clean.
The Knight didn't fall. Instead, its helmet turned, slow and deliberate, and its voice came quieter now. "You speak… as if you have walked before. You are not from this thread alone, are you?"
Arin's jaw clenched. He didn't answer.
The Knight's body crumbled into ash, the resonance fading. But its words remained — not just as sound, but as a question that clawed at his mind.
Vakya's glyphs pulsed once, and the system's voice was lower than usual.
Your truth is leaking, Arin.
He didn't have time to ask what that meant. From the breach in the far wall, a tide of shadow spilled in — the Vanguard. The Dominion's vanguard. And this time, there were more than words between them and him.