For a single, awkward moment after the Luminary's big, villainous speech, nobody moved. The three most powerful fleets in the sector—the scrappy Bastion Alliance, the pointy Syllogist ships, and the pretty Luminary vessels—just sort of floated there, staring at each other across the void. In the middle of it all, the Gardener's Avatar continued its quiet, creepy work of turning a planet into a giant, dead crystal.
"Well," Scarlett's voice muttered over the comms, breaking the tense silence. "This is an awkward party."
Then, the Syllogist, being the logical and proactive type, officially started the fight.
A wave of… nothing… erupted from its crystalline ships. It wasn't an explosion. It was a ripple of pure, cold logic that washed over the Gardener's Avatar. It was a field designed to tell a thing that it wasn't real, and to its credit, the Gardener's ship flickered for a second, as if it was considering the argument.
