The air in the conclave was not air, but a solidified silence that had lasted for eons. It was broken by a voice like a grinding stone.
"Is her light extinguished so soon?"
A seat formed from promises, a construct of woven starlight and cosmic debt, groaned as a figure settled into it. "By what means?"
Cantar's form, draped in a coat of swirling solar plasma, did not move. Her tap on the table of obsidian nebula was a sound that ended worlds. "She spent her final breath shielding a speck of rock. A planet."
A wave of dismissive energy rippled through the assembled beings. "And you convened us for this? If you coveted that world, Cantar, you should have simply taken it."
Slowly, Cantar drew back her hood. Her eyes were twin supernovae, burning with a fury that made the void between stars seem warm. "You misunderstand." Her voice dropped to a whisper that scorched the soul. "She did not just protect it. She bound her essence to it. Her power… her legacy… it is there now. It is all there."
The solidified silence returned, thicker and heavier than before. The truth settled among them, a cold and terrifying star. To claim the planet was to claim a piece of one of their own.
"That…?" Tinhzak's murmur was a low tremor, the grinding of tectonic plates. "Can it be?"
The marksman was already in motion. He circled the grand table, his footsteps silent but his presence a piercing needle of focus in the room's diffuse power. "She did not merely protect it. She immolated her essence to create a shield. A permanent, celestial ward." He stopped, his sharp gaze sweeping the conclave. "She would only pay such a price if that world contained something infinitely more valuable. Something… worthy of a god's suicide."
"Tch. You have grown soft in your cycles, Vektis," the Madam drawled, swirling a glass of liquid void that swallowed the light around it. "Sentimentality is a parasite that rots even the oldest of us."
"Sentiment?" Vektis's laugh was a short, sharp report, like a sniper's shot. "This is not sentiment. It is calculus. The only asset that could possibly outweigh a primordial essence is…" He let the silence hang, heavy and dread-filled.
Another being, all shifting geometric shapes, whispered the answer for him. "The Catalyst."
The word seemed to suck the sound from the room.
It was then that Ichos screamed.
It was not a scream of fear, but of ecstatic, terrifying joy. A single, loud, and violently muted chord, as if the universe itself had been struck and stifled, accompanied his outburst.
"ISN'T IT WONDERFUL?!" His vocals were not a sound but a physical pressure, a psychic shriek that vibrated through their very cores, fraying the edges of reality within the conference chamber. "The hunt… is on!"
...
The air in the command center was thick with recycled oxygen and simmering tension.
"Are the revolts contained?" The Supreme Marshal's voice was low, gravelly with lack of sleep.
His aide didn't look up from the holographic report flickering before him. "Contained, no, sir. They're consolidating. Every Luddite cell, every traditionalist militia. They're uniting under one banner for the first time in forty years. Their sole objective is to halt the Project."
A muscle twitched in the Marshal's jaw. "I see."
The reinforced blast doors hissed open, cutting his thought short. A junior officer, his uniform smudged with soot and his chest heaving, stumbled inside, saluting sharply. "Sir! The Shield, it's operational! The final calibration is complete!"
Right behind him, a lead researcher, her lab coat stark white against the grim interior, clutched a data-slate to her chest. "The resonance is stable, Supreme Marshal. The prototype is holding. It's ready."
The Marshal shot to his feet. His forgotten coffee mug tipped, shattering on the polished floor. The sound was like a gunshot in the tense room. "Finally. Take me to the vault. Now."
…
Deep within the mountain fortress, the Marshal loomed over the central strategic table, its surface a chaotic sprawl of topographical maps and energy-readout schematics.
"Marco," the Marshal said, his voice echoing in the sterile chamber. "The details. Leave nothing out."
"Yes, Supreme Marshal." Marco, the project director, nervously tapped his data-slate. A complex holographic schematic of the planet, laced with pulsing energy vectors, materialized above the table. "The activation sequence will require a massive initial draw. Projections indicate it will consume approximately seventy-five percent of the residual essence of Rhya, the power that fused with Earth's core upon her death."
He swallowed hard, the next words hanging heavy in the air. "Once activated, the Shield will sustain itself, but the cost is absolute. It will exhaust the vast majority of our planet's natural magical reserves. Permanently."
The Marshal stroked his graying mustache, his steely eyes fixed on the hologram. "And the window? How long until our… uninvited guests… arrive?"
Marco's gaze didn't waver. "No more than a week, sir. The emission signature will be unmistakable."
"Damn it." The Marshal turned away, his boots clicking sharply on the floor as he paced. "Hesitation is a luxury we incinerated decades ago. How long until full deployment?"
"Five days for a global rollout. However, with the Candidate's direct assistance, we could increase synchronization efficiency. We might shave off nearly a day."
The Marshal stopped pacing. He turned, and with a sudden, violent motion, slammed his fist onto the table. The hologram flickered. "Then what are you waiting for? An engraved invitation? Mobilize every asset. Deploy our masterpiece. I want the Shield active before those Luddite martyrs can even think about their next prayer."
...
The wind screamed across the Ordovian steppe, a flat, gray expanse under a sky the color of a dead monitor. This was not a place of nature, but of endings. The soil was permanently frozen, scoured clean by chemical winds that smelled of ozone and rust.
And rising from it, like a mountain range of pure ideology, was the Technofaiz military complex.
It was not a base; it was a monolith. A brutalist nightmare rendered in sci-fi scale. Vast, featureless ferro-concrete walls, pockmarked by age and ordnance, sloped inward for kilometers. From them, gargantuan gun emplacements and sensor arrays bristled. The air hummed with the oppressive, sub-audible drone of a localized shield generator.
This was the Urbanon Complex. A city-sized fortress. A statement of power.
Before its main gate, a slab of polished chroma-steel two hundred meters high, a protest looked less like a rally and more like a bloodstain on concrete.
The crowd was a stark contrast to the complex's inhuman scale. They were clad in heavy, worn greatcoats of gray and brown, their faces pale, sharp, and grim, etched with the shared hardship of a people forged in relentless austerity.
Their signs were not painted. They were welded. Scraps of rusted plating, stamped with stark, angry lettering using industrial presses.
"A SHIELD WITHOUT
A SOUL IS A PRISON
WE ARE NOT FUEL
ORDOVIA REFUSES"
There was no chanting. There was only the wind and the low, collective murmur of resolve. They stood in disciplined, silent rows.
At their front stood Flora Gems. Twenty-six years of Ordovian life had already etched a permanent severity into her posture. She stood with a straight-backed defiance that seemed to push back against the weight of the fortress itself.
Her ash-colored hair was pulled into a ruthlessly practical ponytail, the kind that stayed out of the way during long shifts in the factories or out on the steppe. It was a common style, but on her it looked like a statement, every strand perfectly contained, a small but fierce act of control in a world that offered little.
Her face, too young for the cold resolve that hardened her features, was set like stone. She wore the standard, durable gear of an Ordovian laborer, but hers was impeccably maintained, the fabric faded but clean, the boots scarred but solid. It was worn not with resignation, but with an air of absolute defiance.
An amplified voice, metallic and devoid of emotion, boomed from a hidden speaker on the wall."YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF SECTOR 7-ORD DECREE. DISPERSE. RETURN TO YOUR DESIGNATED SECTORS. THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING."
Flora didn't flinch. She took a single, deliberate step forward, her boot crunching on the permafrost. She didn't need a bullhorn; her voice, sharp and clear, carried over the wind with the piercing quality of youth that refuses to be ignored.
"Your decrees are worthless!" she shouted, her words striking the vast wall. "You, who would trade our world's breath for your coward's shield!"
She jabbed a finger toward the monstrous complex, her gesture as precise and sharp as her tone.
"You hide in your concrete tomb and call it strength! You think your walls mean you own the sky? You are wrong."
She let the words hang in the frigid air, a challenge thrown down by someone who had nothing left to lose but her future.
"We have built your war machine with our own hands. We know its weakness. We know its cost. And we will not be the fuel for its final, pathetic flicker."
From the crowd, a woman stepped forward. She held a data-slate high, displaying the Technofaiz Ultimatum for all to see. With a look of pure contempt, she dashed it to the ground and stomped, her heavy boot cracking the screen, grinding the decree into the grit and ice.
It was a small, defiant act against immense power.
Flora watched, her expression unchanging, the wind whipping the end of her ponytail like a battle standard. This was not a plea. It was a statement. Delivered not with a riot, but with a grim, Ordovian refusal.
The silence that followed was heavier than any threat. It was the silence of a people, and one twenty-six-year-old woman whose defiance was as sharp and precise as a blade, who would rather break than bow.
...
The silence did not last.
Far from the Ordovian steppe, the war was already grinding.
Artillery thundered across the Dorshan front, its cadence steady and merciless, a drumbeat that shook the sky. Fire blossomed along the ridgelines in mechanical intervals, each detonation sending shockwaves through the fractured earth. The once-green valleys had become a lattice of trenches, charred bunkers, and scorched steel skeletons jutting from the ground like the bones of fallen titans.
Columns of smoke rose high enough to stain the horizon, where fleets of drones traced cold patterns in the upper air. Their formations moved like migrating birds, precise and uncaring, black silhouettes against a horizon that glowed faintly red.
Inside the trenches, men and women pressed against the mud-slick walls as barrages screamed overhead. Their uniforms, once crisp, were indistinguishable beneath layers of grime and ash. The Shield's hum was distant here, an omnipresent vibration running through the ground like a buried engine, reminding them of the world-eating cost of its awakening.
Above them, the sky was no longer theirs.
Not storm, not night, not even fire—
It was occupied, possessed, reshaped by war.
And yet, even in the noise, the silence remained in another form: the silence between barrages, the silence after the blast, where all that filled the air was the ringing in the skull and the knowledge that the next shell was already on its way.
That silence was the war's true voice.
The time came, not with a warning siren, but with a note.
It was a single, perfect, violently muted chord that tore across the sky. It was the sound of the Shield's activation emission, the very signal Marco had warned would be a beacon, being caught, amplified, and played back to them by a force that treated physics as its instrument.
Every pane of glass on the planet shattered in unison.
"Aren't you all excited for my concert?!"
Ichos's voice was the shockwave, his presence an otherworldly tide that bent the air itself. He drank in the world below, every hue exaggerated, every joy amplified. "Oh, Rhya… why didn't you die sooner? Why did you hide such a whimsical world from me?"
Ordovia's command center descended into chaos. Alarms that had just begun to blare were silenced as systems overloaded.
"Marco… what does this mean?!" The Supreme Marshal's voice tore through the room like a war horn. He slammed his fist onto the table, the wood groaning before splitting clean in two. "You promised we had enough time! Enough time to deploy our creation!" His chest heaved, eyes blazing with fury. "Y-you… useless fool!"
"Sir, we've already accelerated the deployment by two days!" Marco's voice was tight, his face pale in the frantic light of the holograms. "It's just… the emission… it didn't just announce us. It invited them in. They're not just coming... they're here."
Before the Marshal could respond, the main viewer flickered, displaying a global map. Across continents, impossible geometries bloomed, crystalline forests, cities of black ice, zones of perpetual twilight. Each one pulsed with a different, alien energy signature.
"Domes…" Marco whispered, horror dawning on his face. "They've appeared across the globe. The Outer Gods… they're not invading. They're simply… claiming their domains."
The Marshal's blood ran cold. Rhya's words had been right all along. She had foreseen it all: the shield would be a target, not a protection.
And then, the voices began. Not from the speakers, but in the mind, in the soul, beautiful and poisoned.
"I am your savior. Join my grace, and you shall be kept safe from the wrath of others."
The offer was made to every human on Earth at once. With the Shield an incomplete husk and gods walking the earth, fear became a pandemic. Betrayal became a contagion, spreading faster than fire in dry grass. Brothers turned against brothers, kings abandoned kingdoms, and every oath dissolved in the shadow of the Gods' "grace."
The world, once fertile and vibrant, now writhed under the ceaseless turns of human treachery. Humanity did not merely fall, it crumbled, atom by atom, until the remnants of hope were nothing more than dust on a wind that carried the whispers of the Gods.
And all the while, the Gods watched, patient, silent, their eyes on the shattered world they had promised to "save."
In the ashes of the promised salvation, the two sides of humanity's failed equation stared across the void at one another. The Technofaiz, entombed in their mountain fortress, watched their grand design, the Shield built on the consumed soul of a world and a goddess, become a monument to futile sacrifice.
The Luddites on the frozen steppe, their defiance vindicated in the most horrific way possible, found no solace in being right, only the bitter chill of a future they had feared but failed to prevent. The Shield's inert husk was a tombstone for both their dreams.
Who was truly at fault for all this? The Technofaiz, for draining Earth's lifeblood in pursuit of their machine, or the Luddites, for refusing to let its sacrifice mean anything?