The 27 did not just devour their energy.
They devoured their memories.
And for a brief, horrifying moment—
They felt everything the Vash'tari had ever felt.
A billion years of suffering and triumph.
And they laughed.
Because now, they knew how to do it again.
They had evolved.
And the hunger was not finished.
Word of the Vash'tari's extinction spread like wildfire through the remnants of the dying galaxy.
Some civilizations fled.
Some tried to hide.
But some—
Some chose to fight.
The Kor-Thalax War-Forge were not like the Vash'tari.
They did not fight with thoughts.
They fought with steel and fire.
The Kor-Thalax had no homeworld.
No planets.
No concept of peace.
For millions of years, they had drifted through the cosmos in their titanic, country-sized warships, conquering every species they found, stripping entire systems of their resources, forging an empire of pure, unrelenting war.
They did not believe in surrender.
They did not believe in mercy.
And when they saw what had happened to the Vash'tari, they did not hesitate.
They unleashed hell.
The first wave of ships emerged from hyperspace in the thousands—
Great, black monoliths of metal, kilometers long, bristling with weaponry that could crack moons in half.
They swarmed.
The 27 turned—
And the sky burned.
The void screamed.
Not in the way flesh screams.
Not in the way minds break.
This was something deeper—a rupture in the fabric of war itself.
Because the Kor-Thalax War-Forge had arrived.
And they had come to win.
From the dark, the armada emerged.
Colossal battle-stations the size of moons, their hulls blackened with the blood of a thousand conquered races.
Dreadnoughts lined with miles of weaponry, cannons that could rip the cores out of planets.
Nanite swarms, living storms of devouring steel, spreading like locusts over the void.
It was not a fleet.
It was a moving apocalypse.
And it had one target.
The 27.
The War-Forge had conquered everything in its path for millions of years.
This was just another campaign.
Just another invasion.
They had no idea.
The War-Forge attacked first.
A wall of light, brighter than the birth of a star, surged forward—
Beams of reality-cutting energy, slicing through space itself.
Missiles, laced with quantum destabilizers, erupted in tides of annihilation.
Nanite clouds flooded forward, turning planets into rust and dust.
The void itself trembled beneath their fire.
And the 27 took the hit.
For the first time, they felt pain.
Reis moved first.
His form, a shifting abomination of flesh and metal, shot through the fleet like a meteor.
He slammed into the first war-station, his body splitting apart into tendrils that plunged into the ship's hull.
It did not explode.
It did not crack.
It withered.
Metal turned to bone.
Engines became veins, pulsating with something alive.
The crew screamed.
They did not die.
They transformed.
Their armor melted into their skin, their faces stretched into endless howls, their bodies woven into the ship itself.
The war-station became an extension of Reis.
A living, writhing thing.
And then—
He turned it against the fleet.
Amara descended from the dark, her form shifting between shadows and nightmares.
She reached into the ships, into the minds of the War-Forge soldiers, and twisted.
They did not die.
They forgot what they were.
They forgot war.
They forgot their ships.
They forgot their weapons.
And in that perfect, frozen moment of absolute horror—
She gave them back their fear.
The fear they had burned away.
The fear they had long since evolved past.
And the greatest war fleet in the galaxy turned into a panicked, screaming mob.
A mob that tried to run.
There was nowhere to run.
THE BATTLE TURNED INTO A MASSACRE.
Seraph did not consume.
He tore.
His body was a storm of wings, each one the size of a capital ship, razor-sharp and endless.
She sliced through metal like flesh.
Warships, massive enough to cast shadows over entire planets, were ripped apart in seconds.
No explosions.
No fire.
Just silence.
Chunks of twisted metal drifting in the void.
And among them—
The bodies.
Frozen in terror.
The War-Forge had never lost a war.
They had no word for surrender.
Even as the fleet crumbled, even as their war-worlds fell silent, even as the gods they had awakened ripped them apart—
They did not stop.
The last of them gathered around their final station—
A world-sized fortress of pure black metal, hovering over the corpse of a dead star.
It activated.
A final weapon.
The last hope of a dying empire.
A cannon, built from the remains of collapsed dimensions, a weapon designed to erase a god.
It aimed at Reis.
It fired.
AND HE CAUGHT IT.
Not with his hands.
Not with a shield.
Not with any kind of defense.
He opened his mouth.
And he ate the blast.
The last weapon of the Kor-Thalax War-Forge, the thing meant to kill a god,
Was devoured.
And he smiled.
EXTINCTION.
There was no great final battle.
No last-ditch effort.
No glorious sacrifice.
There was only the devouring.
The Kor-Thalax War-Forge had ruled for millions of years.
They had outlasted stars.
They had survived apocalypses.
And now—
They were gone.
Their ships, their planets, their history, their very name—
Erased from existence.
And the 27—
Were still hungry.
The cosmos rumbled.
The Kor-Thalax War-Forge had fallen.
The gods of ruin continued their march.
But this time—
The universe had something greater in store.
Because the true titans had yet to enter the battlefield.
And they were not just warriors.
They were forces of nature themselves.
In the wake of the Kor-Thalax genocide, something stirred in the abyss.
A force far older, far more terrible.
The Va'rax Dominion.
They did not come in ships.
They did not come in armadas.
They were the war.
Each of them a walking apocalypse, towering over the stars, their bodies forged from the dying screams of a thousand galaxies.
Their bones were compressed neutron matter, harder than any material in existence.
Their blood was living plasma, hotter than the cores of supernovas.
Their minds were unshackled consciousness, spread across the very fabric of space.
And they had only one purpose.
To destroy those who defied the cosmic order.
The Va'rax did not waste time.
They arrived like a cosmic plague, their forms bursting into the battlefield like dying suns collapsing upon themselves.
One of them, Tyral-Kar, struck first.
He raised his arm, and a section of reality itself collapsed inward, forming a singularity so powerful that it pulled moons, asteroids, and even the remnants of the Kor-Thalax fleet into its event horizon.
And he hurled it—
Straight at Iris.
She barely shifted in time.
The singularity grazed her, and for the first time—
She screamed.
The wound did not heal.
It continued to collapse inward, eating her flesh, pulling her into an endless void.
A god was bleeding.
And the Va'rax were just getting started.
The battle was not one-sided.
For every Va'rax that struck, the 27 struck back.
Felix tore into one, his limbs shifting into endless blades, his body breaking apart into tendrils of devouring entropy.
He plunged himself into the skull of one of the Va'rax, ripping through layers of impossible density, digging deep until he reached the core of its mind.
And then—
He shattered it.
A cosmic being, a god-killer, collapsed inward like a dying sun, its corpse falling into an eternal gravitational abyss.
But the Va'rax did not stop.
Another one, Zor-Malath, saw Iris.
She was dismantling a titan, her hands rewriting its biology, turning its body against itself.
He moved—
Faster than light itself.
His hand gripped her skull.
And then he crushed.
The void split open with the force of it.
Iris's body shattered into fragments, her very existence rupturing at the seams.
But before she could die—
She reassembled.
Her pieces crawled back together, her flesh bending, twisting, warping—
And when she rose again—
She was angrier.
For hours, for days, for years in the perception of gods, the battle raged.
It had been 4 years and 143 days.
For them.
Fighting and warping casualty on an intense universal level.
Entire galaxies were consumed in the crossfire.
Stars were used as weapons, hurled at enemies like mere artillery shells.
Supermassive black holes were ripped open and thrown like projectiles.
Time itself fractured in places, entire moments being erased and rewritten.
But the Va'rax did not break.
And neither did the 27.
The war had reached its breaking point.
And then—
Something shifted.
A presence stirred.
And the universe itself began to awaken.
The battle had reached its peak.
For days, for centuries in the perception of gods, the 27 monsters and the Va'rax Dominion clashed in the void of dying galaxies.
But something was wrong.
This war should not be happening.
The laws of the cosmos were cracking under the weight of the impossible battle.
And the universe itself was beginning to notice.
Iris ripped through another titan, her body morphing into something unrecognizable, something grotesque, her mind barely holding onto itself.
Felix was losing himself, his body an ever-changing storm of entropy, devouring anything that came close.
Seraph had stopped speaking.
He fought like a machine, like a force of nature, his body torn apart and rebuilt endlessly as he threw himself into the enemies without thought, without fear.
Amara had abandoned all sense of self.
She had become something eldritch, something vast, something that no longer resembled anything human.
And Reis—
Reis had stopped caring.
His face was expressionless, his eyes voids of hunger, his hands now tools of cosmic extinction.
They were winning.
But the cost was themselves.
They were no longer creatures.
They were no longer gods.
They were becoming black holes of consciousness, consuming everything, including their own existence.
But even as they consumed—
The Va'rax still stood.
The Va'rax had never lost a war.
They had fought cosmic parasites, void-beasts, and even the Wrathborn of the Abyss.
But never had they faced this.
Never had they seen monsters that should not exist.
They had no purpose.
They had no reason.
They were not conquerors.
They were not rebels.
They were simply hunger.
And hunger was unstoppable.
The Va'rax Council, the remaining leaders of the species, stood atop the broken husk of a dying quasar.
They were bleeding black holes, their wounds cosmic in scale, their minds barely held together.
But they did not retreat.
Because if they ran—
There would be nothing left to protect.
And so, they spoke.
A final, desperate message, cast out into the void.
A prayer.
Not to gods.
Not to anything living.
But to the universe itself.
"We have held the line. We have fought as we were made to fight. But this is not our war. This is yours."
"If you still exist—"
"If you are still awake—"
"Stop this."
"Before they consume everything."
And the universe heard them.
THE SKY SHATTERS—AND THE UNIVERSE AWAKENS
For the first time in all of existence—
The cosmos itself began to move.
A presence older than time itself stirred from its slumber.
Galaxies froze in place.
Light stopped moving.
The fabric of reality buckled, twisted, screamed.
And then—
A hand emerged from the darkness of infinity.
A hand the size of entire galactic clusters.
A hand made of stars, of black holes, of nebulae and dark matter.
And it descended.
The Va'rax stopped fighting.
The 27 stopped consuming.
Because something greater than them all had arrived.
Something that did not speak.
Something that did not think.
Something that simply was.
The universe had taken form.
And now—
It was angry.
Silence.
For the first time since the beginning of this nightmare, the universe itself had become still.
The stars ceased to burn.
The galaxies froze in their orbits.
The Va'rax did not breathe.
The 27 monsters did not consume.
And then—
A new presence emerged.
It did not come from a distant world.
It did not descend from some unknown realm.
It simply was.
Right there.
Standing between them all.
At first, it was nothing but a formless presence.
Something beyond space, beyond time, beyond even the very concept of existence.
But then, the universe did something it had never done before.
It shaped itself.
A body began to take form.
Not in the heavens, not from collapsed stars, but from the laws of reality itself.
It was not vast.
It was not monstrous.
It was not incomprehensible.
It was simply… a GOD.
A figure, standing amidst false gods and monsters.
He was not made of flesh.
He was made of one percent of the universe's very essence, compressed into something that could walk, speak, and act.
His form was fluid, shifting between a human silhouette and something cosmic, as if reality itself was unsure of what he should be.
His eyes, if they could even be called that, were endless voids filled with the birth and death of galaxies.
But his presence—
It was absolute.
The 27, for the first time in eternity, felt something they had forgotten long ago.
Weakness.
Not because they were inferior.
Not because they were powerless.
But because they had never been meant to stand before this.
Because this was the universe itself.
And it had finally decided to intervene.
The Va'rax Dominion, the strongest species of this cosmos, fell to their knees.
Not out of fear.
Not out of surrender.
But because in that presence, standing felt wrong.
Even they, in all their power, were nothing compared to this being.
Some of the 27 monster's still tried to attack him.
And then—
All of their skin got ripped off and muscles got torn apart just from it's presence.
It spoke.
A voice that was not a voice.
A sound that was not a sound.
It was the rumbling of collapsing galaxies, the hum of infinite particles, the scream of dying universes.
It did not echo.
It did not shake space.
It simply was.
"What have you done?"
The words reached all of them.
They were not spoken in a language.
They were not translated into meaning.
They were simply understood.
Reis, Amara, Seraph, Felix, and Iris—
The five remaining from the original 27—
The other 22, Died in an instant.
"It is a pity, indeed—
that you, mere sovereigns of high civilization of insects,
dared to stir before me, a being who defies the dimensions themselves."
They could not respond.
Because in this moment, for the first time since they had become this,
They felt small.
And they did not know why.
Felix's body twitched uncontrollably.
His mind, which had long abandoned human logic, was now trying to comprehend something it was never meant to.
Iris stared at the being, her infinite vision scanning every possible outcome, every possible future—
And finding nothing.
Seraph, for the first time, did not feel the hunger.
Amara felt something worse than pain.
Something worse than horror.
She felt irrelevance.
Reis, the one who had devoured stars without hesitation, found his hands shaking.
Not from fear.
Not from doubt.
But because he finally understood something.
They had been fighting lesser beings.
They had been consuming, growing, evolving.
But they had never—
Not once—
Faced something equal.
This was not an equal.
This was the source.
The origin.
The thing that had allowed them to exist in the first place.
And it had just decided to stand before them.
The figure took a single step forward.
Not a grand movement.
Not an act of aggression.
Just one step.
And in that moment—
Every fiber of the cosmos shifted in response.
The Va'rax warships crumbled into dust.
The dying stars reignited for a split second—then collapsed forever.
Time skipped.
Reality glitched.
And then he spoke again.
"You have one chance."
The five could barely breathe.
"You will find me."
Their minds tried to make sense of the words, tried to understand—
But they did not need to understand.
Because the message was already inside them.
It had been placed there.
By him.
"Find the fragment."
"Among the 50."
"Location is St. Helios."
"And you will return."
"Or you will remain—"
The figure's head tilted slightly, the way a human might observe an insect.
"—as nothing."