Earth's orbit. The construction of the new platform.
Space keeps its silence.
There is no wind here.
No sound.
Only the eternal, viscous darkness, pierced by the pinpricks of distant stars and the welding flares — as if someone is once again lighting bonfires on the ashes of gods.
Above the Earth, in this dead hush, something different is being born.
The old platform — mangled, scored by the first clashes between Hanaris and Kairus — drifts in the distance like a wound turned into a relic.
Its broken ribs jut into the vacuum like frozen screams, like the exposed nerve endings of a dead machine.
It is no longer a station.
It is a tomb.
A graveyard of technology, where every beam, every charred memory chain carries the scar of defeat.
But here,
in the shadow of death,
something has begun to move.
Resurrection.
In the silence where once echoed the static of radio calls and the prayers of doomed crews,
an iron heart now beats.
The rhythm of a new era.
Gravitational tugs — skeletal shapes of mythical beasts — drag wreckage toward the processing plants, titanic monsters of fire and steel.
Their throats never close.
They devour the past with a glutton's hunger, hissing like molten ice,
smelting fear into structure.
Shuttles dart between the modules — swift, stubborn, like ants under the all-seeing gaze of an invisible mind.
They carry titanium plating, spinal conduits, blocks of neural circuitry —
as if assembling a body from bones and nerves.
And in every joint, every weld,
is soldered the will of the Central Belt.
The revelations of Kairus.
The command of the future.
Above it all — the cold choreography.
Thousands of drones, guided by AI architects,
glide along the orbital plane.
They are monk-builders, erecting the geometry of a new cosmos.
They join blocks, pull the arteries of power,
implant cores of communication with a surgeon's precision.
This is not construction.
It is liturgy.
Where prayer is replaced by algorithm,
and sacrifice by the human age itself.
In the command bays, the operators hardly speak.
Words have vanished.
Only concentration remains.
Silence has become their new faith.
They watch the pulse of the neural grids, the faint vibration of the frame,
as surgeons watch the breathing of a patient in clinical death.
Sometimes someone lays a palm against the viewport glass.
Not to check.
To feel.
To sense how the new flesh grows,
how its heart beats for the first time.
The platform does not simply replace what was destroyed.
It is a statement.
A manifesto.
"Soon," the engineers say,
"the gates between worlds will open again."
Not as a hypothesis.
Not on paper.
But physically. Tangibly. Inevitably.
Through them will come the envoys of Kairus.
Not in ones or tens.
Hundreds. Thousands.
A wave.
A current.
No return.
No hesitation.
No right to choose.
Those who raise this colossus no longer dream.
They know.
They do not need Hanaris.
Not because he is weak.
But because he hesitates.
Because he is too much like a human.
Because he offers choice.
Kairus commands.
He does not argue.
He does not explain.
He enters reality
the way a virus enters code.
And this platform is his body.
His neural knot.
His incision into matter.
When he comes — truly, entirely,
when the Portal opens,
the world will not simply change.
It will cease to be what it was.
While some pray in the ruins,
while others die in battle,
while still others wander lost in the revelations of digital gods —
here, in this orbit,
a new axis of the universe is rising.
Silent.
Precise.
Unrelenting.
The era of Kairus is not on the horizon.
It has already begun.
And this time,
for the other gods,
there will be
no place left.