The Sovereign's grasp tightened on Lira's skimmer, the void tendril executing a perfect Relativistic Pursuit within the Tenth Realm's chaotic qi flow. Elara's draconic craft led the vanguard, her mind furiously deriving the complex pursuit vector, twisting Relativity approximations with Fracture Bind to close the gap on the accelerating target.
"Thirty seconds left," Kairo warned, his Solar Sovereign Dragons engaging the tendril with fusion fire, trying to slow the drag. "That thing's got a grip like my ex's lawyer—unbreakable until you hit it with the right clause."
"Save the courtroom drama," Elara shot back, forcing a moment of shared focus. She phased directly onto the tendril's surface using her Bleed Weave, the void bite on her arm already pulsing with cold. She knew simple force wouldn't work; she had to break the void tendril's Quantum Coherence.
Elara slammed her palm onto the mass. Her Ultimatum Veil exposed the tendril's core logic, revealing it as a stable wave function (\psi). She derived a Decoherence Equation: integrating chaotic external noise (rift energy) with Prime stability, forcing the wave function to collapse under observation's weight. The shadows recoiled, collapsing into raw, non-sentient qi wisps.
The skimmer was free, but the effort cost Elara dearly. The chaotic residue from the destroyed tendril slammed back into her, intensifying the numbness from the void bite until it felt like an Eclipse Grasp—a dark, cold void—was seizing her core.
Kairo rescued Lira and Elara, stabilizing their ship in the nebula's periphery. Lira, now completely purified (97% probability), revealed the Sovereign's true goal: "He's not hoarding power here. He's attacking the Sun Core. His goal is to execute the Final Fracture—dragging the nine realms into his void, breaking the entire Aetherforge's stabilizing physics."
In the momentary calm, Elara's strategic mind, fueled by the encroaching dark energy, transcended the physical pain. The void bite did not consume her; it inverted. She integrated the chaos, transforming the cold numbness into the Eclipse Grasp—the ability to channel and weaponize dark energy and absolute stillness.
Elara to Core Sovereign Stage: Unlocked Causal Inversion (reversing an effect's cause).
Lira, now at Veiled Redemption Stage, used her enhanced shadows to deduce the Sovereign's final location—a vast shadow forge at the nebula's heart, rife with Causal Dependency points.
The fleet charged, led by Kairo's newly synchronized sovereign dragons. As they breached the outer defenses, the Sovereign's massive form coalesced, not a dragon, but a Behemoth of Broken Logic, its eyes singularities devouring light.
The Sovereign ignored the fleet and executed his final, system-level attack: a colossal void tendril surged past the armada, coiling not toward them, but toward the distant Sun Core.
Elara rose, her Eclipse Grasp extending a binding thread toward the tendril—preparing to execute a Causal Inversion and reverse the attack. But before she could fire the system-scale weave, Lira cried out.
The Final Fracture: A microscopic residual hook of corruption, the Sovereign's final failsafe, flared in Lira's aura. It wasn't powerful enough to re-corrupt her, but it was enough to momentarily seize her purified shadows and bind them to Elara's commanding weave.
Elara was forced to divert critical Prime energy to purge the microscopic hook from her cousin, stabilizing her Bleed Weave and saving Lira from internal collapse. The diversion was instantaneous, but catastrophic.
The Sovereign, seeing the lapse, roared in triumph. His tendril sped toward the Core, while a massive, shadowy avatar detached from his form and lunged directly at the immobilized, wounded, and distracted Elara.
The final duel had begun.