Mars was first.
It was a barren rock, but that didn't matter.
Felix—or what had once been Felix—moved toward it.
His body had no defined shape anymore, only an endless vortex of shifting colors, his voice a hum that stretched across dimensions.
Mars did not explode.
It imploded.
Crushed into pure energy, reduced to nothingness, sucked into his form.
One by one, the other planets followed.
Venus, boiling away in an instant.
Jupiter, its gas ripped into streams of liquid fire, its Great Red Spot snuffed out like a candle.
Saturn's rings shattering, scattering into deep space, the planet itself shrinking, becoming a speck of dust in Reis's hand before he crushed it to nothing.
Neptune and Uranus vanished in silence, and Mercury was already gone before anyone noticed.
There was only one thing left.
The Moon.
Seraph stood before it.
Or floated.
His body was light now, his eyes twin supernovae, his voice no longer human.
He reached out.
And the Moon shook.
Not just its surface.
Its core.
For a moment, it looked like it was trying to resist.
Like it was alive.
Like it knew what was coming.
But there was no mercy left in the 27.
With one final breath, Seraph pulled it apart.
The Moon shattered.
The pieces did not fall to Earth.
There was no Earth left to fall to.
The planet that had once held life, cities, oceans, forests—
Was now nothing.
And the 27 turned their gaze to the rest of the stars.
This was only the beginning.
There was no longer an Earth.
No longer a Mars.
No planets, no moons, no remnants of what once was a solar system—only dust, radiation, and the silence of space.
The 27 drifted in the void, their bodies no longer bound by the limits of flesh.
Once, they were human.
Now, they were something else.
Their forms had grown—vast, shifting masses of writhing energy, limbs extending and retracting without logic, faces that formed and melted away into the dark.
Their minds were no longer separate.
They were one hunger.
And the hunger had not stopped.
It had evolved.
Their gazes—if they could even be called that—turned toward the Milky Way Galaxy.
It called to them.
They were starving.
The first star died in silence.
It blinked out, not in explosion, not in collapse—just ceased to be.
Felix had consumed it.
His form stretched across light-years, a writhing void against the infinite black. The star's nuclear fire curled around him for a moment, swirling like a hurricane of dying light—
And then it was gone.
The second followed.
Then the third.
Then an entire cluster.
They were not selective.
They did not stop to see if life had formed around the systems they consumed.
They did not wonder if entire civilizations were looking up at their vanishing suns in horror.
They only fed.
Amara moved next.
Her body, a shifting, grotesque amalgamation of tendrils and shapes that no longer adhered to reason, expanded outward, wrapping around entire planetary systems like a vast, cosmic serpent.
She breathed in the light.
The raw, unfiltered power of stars flooded into her form, and she shuddered as her body expanded even further.
They were getting bigger.
With every system they devoured, their forms stretched.
No longer the size of mere planets—
They were becoming as large as suns.
And still, it was not enough.
The galaxy was dim now.
What once was a brilliant ocean of stars was now a void, expanding rapidly from the center outward.
A great, festering wound in the cosmos.
And at the center of it?
Them.
They moved in eerie synchronization, a slow, methodical consumption.
One after another, the stars winked out, their energy stripped, their existence erased as if they had never been.
Reis reached out a hand—if it could even be called that anymore—and tore open a nebula.
The swirling gas and dust screamed as it collapsed into his form, its million-year dance through space ending in an instant.
Seraph consumed the remnants of a dying supernova, his vast, shadowed form drinking in the collapsing waves of radiation.
Iris, the largest of them all now, swallowed the heart of a pulsar.
Its neutron-star core, dense beyond comprehension, crumbled like sand between her fingers.
They did not just feed.
They grew.
And with that growth came change.
Somewhere in the vastness of what remained of the Milky Way, an ancient species watched in silence.
They did not speak.
They did not pray.
Because what was left to say to something like this?
They had seen death before.
Had fought in wars that shattered planets, had survived events that wiped out entire civilizations—
But never this.
Never something that fed on the very bones of existence itself.
And as they watched the galaxy darken, one thought passed between their minds, their consciousnesses linked through technology older than Earth itself.
"We are witnessing the end."
They had no words for what the 27 had become.
No name for the hunger.
But they would.
They would have to.
Because before this was over, the whole universe would know their names.
And by then, it would be too late.
They grew bigger with every star they consumed, their forms stretching across galaxies, their minds slipping further into pure, cosmic madness.
Alien civilizations watched in horror. Entire species, millions of years old, fell silent as they saw the devourers in the sky as they absorbed the energy from everything that came in their way. They sent ships, weapons, and gods of their own. It did not matter.
Nothing mattered anymore.
The nightmare was just beginning.
Around and across them formed the warp drive.
Their madness travelled faster than the speed of light.
They felt like gods of destruction.
And gods do not go unchallenged.
For the first time since their descent into madness, since they had shed the last remnants of their humanity and become monstrous, cosmic entities, the void trembled not with their hunger—
But with resistance.
The first species to strike back came from the Vash'tari Dominion.
A civilization that had ruled over the spiral arms of the galaxy for over a billion years.
Their technology was beyond human comprehension.
Their weapons were not material.
Not bombs. Not lasers. Not fleets of warships.
They fought with thought.
The Vash'tari were a species of pure psionic energy, long since evolved beyond the need for flesh.
They existed as sentient fields of consciousness, their minds stretching across entire star systems, linked in a great, neural web.
They had survived galactic apocalypses, had fought entities that had devoured planets—
But nothing like this.
And yet, they would not kneel.
A billion minds turned toward the 27.
And then, they struck.
There was no warning.
No visible attack, no fleet surging from hyperspace.
Instead—
A wave of pure, incomprehensible thought exploded outward from the Vash'tari Core Worlds.
It surged across space, bending light, distorting reality, warping the very fabric of existence itself.
The 27 twitched.
For the first time, their endless, gluttonous expansion paused.
It was a thing that had never happened before.
A thing that should have been impossible.
And yet, here they were—staggering.
Because the Vash'tari were not attacking their bodies.
They were attacking their minds.
A billion voices screamed into their consciousness at once—
An ocean of memories, nightmares, unfiltered agony.
They felt a trillion deaths at once, entire civilizations falling, the weight of suffering flooding into their fractured psyches.
They had thought they were beyond pain.
But this?
This was worse than pain.
The 27 convulsed.
Reis shrieked, his form writhing, great spires of burning flesh rupturing out of him like tumors.
Amara shattered, her body dissolving into a sea of screaming, shifting faces, all of them begging to be freed from the torment.
Felix clawed at his own skull, his thoughts unraveling into madness—
Until, suddenly—
They adjusted.
And they learned how to consume minds.
It was slow at first.
A single Vash'tari consciousness was devoured.
Then another.
And another.
And then—
All of them.
The billion voices went from a deafening storm to silence.
The Vash'tari were no more.
Their entire species, their entire history, their entire existence—
Erased.