The Veyron estate was a fortress of silence, but for Arin, the silence was the loudest part of the night.
He lay in the grand master suite, his breathing rhythmic, but his mind was elsewhere. In the deep hours when the Core's artificial suns were dimmed to a soft violet, Arin's consciousness drifted. He was no longer the Senior Professor or the overseer of the Veyron industry. He was a soldier again, back at the edge of the Universal Membrane, where the fabric of reality was as thin as wet paper.
The Nightmare
In the dream, the sky wasn't blue. It was a bleeding, bruised purple, torn open by a Level 500+ Breach.
Astra's alarm—not the household version, but the high-frequency war-siren—shrieked through his neural link. Beside him, in the cockpit of her own Interstellar Scout, Lyra's voice was a steady stream of mathematical constants, cold and sharp.
"Resonance at 98%," she whispered across the void. "Arin, the Entity is decompressing the sector. If we don't anchor now, the star system collapses."
The Entity was a horror of unstructured Ribbon. It was a mass of shifting, impossible geometries that defied the human eye—a being that had "Fragmented" and survived. It loomed over the Universal Node like a god made of static and shadow, its presence literally unraveling the physics of the ships nearby.
"Convergence Protocol: Dual-Resonance!" Arin roared.
Their two ships—mere frigates in the face of the void—spiraled toward each other. Normally, two Loom-phase ships could only merge into a temporary Destroyer-class warform. But Arin, then at Level 390, and Lyra, at Level 350, possessed a synergy that broke every UCC manual. Their Ribbon colors—his void-black and her regal purple—didn't just mix; they braided into a terrifying obsidian-violet lattice.
The transformation was violent. The two scouts were stripped to their cores and rebuilt in mid-air by their combined Ribbon pressure.
They didn't just form a Destroyer. They formed a Super-Destroyer, a ship whose structural density and resonance output rivaled a Space Fortress.
The Battle of the Breach
Inside the command center of the merged ship, the roles were split with lethal efficiency.
Lyra was the brain. From her seat, her mind expanded into a Weave-network, taking control of every remaining UDC troop and drone in the sector. She wasn't just piloting; she was calculating the probability of every particle of light, turning the disorganized retreat into a synchronized slaughter. Under her command, the smaller ships moved like a single, multi-headed beast.
"Arin," she gasped, her brow bleeding from the mental strain of coordinating ten thousand units, "I've cleared the lane. He is yours."
Arin didn't use a screen. He felt the ship as his own body. He pushed the engines into Over-Compression, using the Veyron gift to pack the energy until the ship's hull groaned.
He struck the Entity head-on.
The void-black Ribbon of his inheritance acted as a spear. He didn't fire lasers; he fired compressed reality. Every strike he landed was a "Correction" to the Entity's unstructured form, forcing the chaos to become order until it cracked.
The Entity shrieked—a sound that vibrated through the Ribbon and rattled the soul. Arin felt the Entity's power—a raw, Level 500 pressure—trying to crush his skull. He held on through sheer Veyron stubbornness.
With one final surge of Black-Compression, Arin drove the ship's prow through the Entity's core.
The explosion was silent. A shockwave of pure Ribbon energy leveled every asteroid in a ten-light-minute radius.
The Awakening
Arin bolted upright in bed, his chest heaving. His skin was slick with cold sweat.
The room was quiet. The Core was stable. Beside him, Lyra stirred but didn't wake, her face peaceful in the dim light of the estate. Arin stayed still, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking.
He knew the truth that the UCC kept from the history books. They called it a "Victory." They said the Entity was destroyed.
But Arin had felt it. In that final moment of contact, he hadn't felt the Entity die. He had felt it recoil. It was heavily injured, its geometry shattered, but it was still out there, drifting in the dark "Mesh" between universes, slowly knitting itself back together. And it wasn't the only one; the void was teeming with things that hated the order of the Ribbon.
This was the real reason they had retreated from the dimensional frontlines. The public believed the Veyron's had simply retired to lead the Academy and the industry.
The truth was far more strategic.
During that battle, the Entity had sensed them—not just their power, but their potential. It had felt the resonance of a bloodline that could harmonize brute-force compression with fortress-scale computation. The being was afraid of them, but it was more afraid of what they would create.
They had returned to the Core Sector—the most stable dimensional region in the universe—to raise the next generation heir. They were hiding Kaelen in plain sight, protecting him while his brain and Ribbon lattice developed.
Arin looked at the door to his son's room. He knew that Kaelen was the Entity's greatest fear: a child who could one day wield the combined, optimized power of the Black and the Purple.
"We're running out of time," Arin whispered to the dark.
He didn't go back to sleep. He stayed on guard, a Silent Pillar watching for a shadow that he knew was coming back for his son.