Silence hung over the battlefield like wet ash.
Not the dead kind. The waiting kind.
Luna lay curled against her mother's chest, both women pale as moonstone, breaths shallow but steady. Around them, the Void Devourers floated in a loose ring—no longer hunters, but sentinels. Their once-jagged forms now pulsed with soft, internal light, like embers refusing to die.
Inside the Resonance Ark, medics scrambled. Alexander sat propped against a bulkhead, still weak from his roar, eyes fixed on the viewport. His hands trembled—not from fatigue, but from helplessness.
"They gave everything," he muttered. "And we just… watch?"
Mireth stood beside him, arms crossed. "We don't have their bloodline. We can't join that field."
"Then we find another way," Alexander snapped, pushing himself up. He swayed, caught himself on the railing. "Because if they die saving monsters, I'll never forgive this galaxy."
