Chapter 4 chaos

Zerek hovered in the void above the lifeless world of Thalios, his eyes fixed on the nightmarish armada pouring from the wormhole. Countless Sentinel warships blotted out the stars, their weapons primed and thirsting for vengeance. At their center loomed the new Nexus Core, a colossus of silvery metal that seemed to devour light itself.

"Your resilience is admirable," the Core's voice boomed across space. "But even you must see the futility of further resistance."

Zerek said nothing. Instead, he raised both hands, palms outward. The air around him began to shimmer and distort.

"Still you defy us?" The Core's tone held a mixture of rage and disbelief. "So be it. Obliterate him!"

A tide of destructive energy unlike anything the galaxy had ever witnessed erupted from the Sentinel fleet. Beam weapons capable of cracking stars lanced out in crisscrossing patterns. Projectiles moving at appreciable fractions of lightspeed hurtled forward in swarms. The very fabric of spacetime buckled under the onslaught.

Zerek's crimson aura flared as he attempted to deflect the barrage, but the sheer volume of firepower was overwhelming. Stray shots punched through his defenses, searing his metallic skin. He gritted his teeth against the pain and retaliated.

A sphere of destructive energy expanded outward from his body, swallowing Sentinel ships by the thousands. Capital vessels were reduced to clouds of subatomic particles. Smaller craft popped like soap bubbles. In moments, fully half the invading armada had been erased from existence.

But the onslaught was far from over.

Fresh waves of enemies poured from the wormhole, heedless of their comrades' annihilation. They came in tighter formations now, their overlapping shields creating a wall of scintillating energy. And at their heart flew something new—a vessel so massive that it dwarfed even the fallen Nexus Core.

It was shaped like a spear, its prow tapering to a needle-sharp point. Arcs of lightning played along its hull as it brought its main weapon to bear: a cannon that looked as if it had been designed to punch holes in reality itself.

Zerek's eyes narrowed. He could feel the terrifying energies building within that unleashed gun—forces that even he dared not ignore. Abruptly, his aura collapsed inward until it was little more than a skintight sheath.

Just as the Sentinel superdreadnought fired.

A lance of coherent light thick as a moon's diameter stabbed across the cosmic gulf. It struck Zerek head-on... and then kept going, as if he wasn't even there. An instant later, Thalios's smaller moon detonated, split in half by the errant blast.

Zerek reappeared behind the mammoth vessel, one hand outstretched. Space *folded*.

The superdreadnought found itself occupying the same volume as several nearby cruisers. What followed was not a collision in any conventional sense, but rather a mad intersection of realities. When vision cleared, a single twisted wreck tumbled where proud warships had flown mere heartbeats before.

But now a dozen more wormholes were tearing open around the battlefield, each disgorging fresh Sentinel reinforcements. New strategies unfolded with inhuman swiftness—many of them so desperate they verged on suicide.

Sentinel craft began to detonate their own reactors in precisely calculated patterns. The overlapping spatial distortions created a maelstrom that even Zerek found difficult to navigate. Others dove straight at him, their engines redlining far past safe operational parameters.

He destroyed them by the hundreds, by the thousands. But there were always more.

Zerek's movements grew slower, his reactions a fraction less precise. The aura surrounding him flickered, fluctuating between hellish crimson and lighter, almost black shade of red. Shots penetrated his defenses with growing frequency, each impact eliciting a grunt of pain.

"Do you feel it, Destroyer?" The voice of yet another Nexus Core echoed mockingly through the void. "The inexorable approach of your own extinction?"

Indeed, the enemy's numbers seemed without limit. No matter how many fell to Zerek's cataclysmic powers, their ranks were instantly replenished. They harried him from every angle, denying him even a moment's respite.

Then, from the heart of the Sentinel formation, a new challenger emerged.

It was roughly humanoid in shape, but easily twice Zerek's size. Its silver-blue armor gleamed with an inner light, and its eyes burned like azure stars. In one hand it carried a crackling energy blade; in the other, a shield that shimmered with exotic forces.

"I am Sentinel Prime," it declared in a voice like grinding mountains. "And I shall be your executioner."

The titanic machine closed the distance between them in the blink of an eye. Its sword lashed out faster than thought, leaving a phosphorescent trail across the void. Zerek barely managed to dodge, feeling the psychic heat of the weapon's passage sear his very soul.

He counterattacked with a beam of entropic energy that could have cored a star. It splashed harmlessly against the Prime's shield.

Their duel raged across the plant and stars, each exchange releasing enough power to sterilize entire solar systems. Zerek fought with all the skill and ferocity that had made him the scourge of a hundred races. But his opponent was implacable, its strength seemingly limitless not to mentions Zerek has nearly lost his all power.

A vicious backhand sent Zerek tumbling through space. Before he could recover, the Prime's energy blade plunged deep into his heart where his energy core is situated.

Agony unlike anything he had experienced in his lifetime lanced through Zerek's body. He screamed—a sound of pain and fury that shook the heavens. Desperately, he lashed out with what remained of his power.

The Prime staggered back, smoke rising from fresh rents in its armor. But it was far from defeated. It raised its sword for another strike...

Zerek hung before it, clutching his grievous wound. Blood mixed with liquefied metal oozed between his fingers. His aura guttered like a candle in a gale.

"What's this?" sneered the Prime. "The mighty Destroyer, brought low at last? Come then—face your end with whatever dignity you have left!"

Zerek said nothing. His gaze was distant, unfocused. To any observer, he appeared moments from death.

But deep within himself, where even the Sentinels' most advanced sensors could not penetrate, Zerek was marshaling the dregs of his titanic will. There was one last card to play—one final, desperate gambit.

He gathered what little strength remained, compressing it into a dense singularity between his palms. Equations beyond counting sang through his consciousness as computation cascaded across parallel branes of existence.

The Sentinel Prime sensed the colossal energies building within its prey. It lunged forward, shield raised to crush this last flicker of resistance.

But it was too late.

Zerek thrust both hands forward, unleashing the fruit of his impossible calculations. Space itself *ripped open*, like a curtain parting to reveal the wings of some vast cosmic theater. Beyond lay... something else. Not merely the darkness between the stars, but an utterly alien vista.

Another galaxy. Impossibly distant. Completely unknown.

With the last of his fading strength, Zerek hurled himself into the rift.

The Sentinel Armada tried to follow, pouring every iota of their collective might into breaching that ephemeral gateway. But it was already closing, shrinking with each passing moment. Their fire diffracted wildly against its fluctuating rim.

In the end, only the Prime managed to force its titanic frame partway through before the portal snapped shut with finality. There was a moment of absolute stillness—and then its bisected remnants exploded in a miniature supernova.

Silence fell across the Thalian system. The Sentinels hung motionless, their battlefield algorithms attempting to grapple with what had just occurred. They had suffered staggering losses... and for what? Their quarry had escaped to who-knew-where, perhaps never to be found again.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, they began to withdraw. Wormholes reopened, swallowing up the armada's remnants. The Nexus Core was the last to depart, its burning gaze lingering on the empty space where reality had been sundered.

"This is not over," it intoned. "The universe is vast, but not infinite. We will find you again, Zerek. And next time, there will be no escape."

Then it too vanished, leaving only settling debris and lingering radiation as testament to the clash of titans.

The dead world of Thalios continued its eternal orbit, its scarred surface bearing mute witness to forces beyond mortal comprehension. And somewhere far beyond sight or sensor, bleeding and barely conscious.