The Astra-Vanguard slipped beneath the orbital plane of the Ashen Maw armada like an ancient ghost gliding through the black vacuum.
Commander Vane held the elder-drake skiff in the ventral blind spot of the Abyssal Scourge, matching the four-mile dreadnought’s drift fifty paces below its primary exhaust manifold.
The void of space was utterly silent, yet the etheric hull groaned with the suffocating pressure of a thousand tons of weeping dark-matter plating.
On the open boarding deck, Seraphina and Kaelen adjusted their personal containment envelopes.
Their unified aura—a swirling corona of gold dawn and midnight velvet—sealed them in a breathable, pressurized micro-atmosphere.
"The ventral secondary hangar has a localized magnetic seal," Seraphina said, her amber eyes scanning the jagged hull above through the clear visor of her starlight hood.
"If we punch through the atmospheric barrier, the emergency bulkheads will take forty seconds to clamp down. That gives us our window."
"Then we make every second bleed," Kaelen rumbled beside her.
His molten silver eyes burned with predatory battle-frenzy. His massive shadow-wings flared behind him, coated in a fine layer of pressurized void-plasma, while Gloom-Weaver hummed with eager, destructive resonance.
He reached out, his gauntleted hand wrapping firmly around the nape of her neck, pulling her in until her lips brushed his.
"Stay close, my Queen," he murmured against her mouth, a fierce, protective growl vibrating in his chest. "Let them see the sun pierce their graveyard."
"They won't know what hit them," she answered with a sharp, breathless grin.
They launched.
Leaving the safety of the skiff, they crossed the fifty paces of open space like twin shooting stars—one brilliant white-gold, the other consuming darkness.
Seraphina hit the hangar's translucent violet containment shield first.
Drawing her twin sunstone daggers, she crossed the blades in an 'X' of superheated celestial plasma, slicing a clean rent through the magnetic field. The atmospheric breach shrieked silently into the vacuum as the localized pressure dropped violently.
Kaelen followed a half-second behind, using the kinetic momentum of his gravity-drop to smash boots-first through the weakened shield.
They crashed into the cavernous hangar bay of the Abyssal Scourge.
The deck was an industrial nightmare of black iron, rusted gantries, and boiling vats of necrotic ichor used to refuel the parasite strike-craft.
A hundred Void-Marauders—hulking, biomechanical brutes clad in spiked abyssal plate, their faces concealed behind barbed iron respirators—scrambled toward the breach with heavy plasma-cleavers raised.
Emergency klaxons wailed in harsh, screeching dissonance through the pressurized air.
Clank-clank-clank.
The heavy blast doors at the far end of the hangar bay began to descend.
"Twenty seconds!" Seraphina called out, her twenty-foot wings of starlight snapping open to their full, dazzling glory.
The pure, thermonuclear dawn light illuminated the rust and filth of the hangar, blinding the vanguard of Marauders. Seraphina unslung her sunstone recurve bow, drawing and loosing four plasma bolts in a continuous, fluid rhythm.
Each arrow found the chest-core of a brute, the kinetic dawn-burst vaporizing their iron armor and hurling their shattered husks across the gantry.
Kaelen didn't bother with distance.
He tore through the center ranks like a god of annihilation.
Gloom-Weaver carved a ten-foot horizontal arc of pure dark-matter, shearing through iron shields, breastplates, and flesh with effortless, terrifying brutality.
When three heavy Marauders lunged with spiked chain-hooks, Kaelen caught the middle brute by the throat with his bare left gauntlet, crushing the creature’s windpipe to dust before using the corpse as a battering ram to clear the catwalk.
"Ten seconds!" Seraphina warned, leaping from the gantry with her twin daggers blazing, decapitating two flanking shock-troopers in a spray of boiling black blood.
The primary blast doors were three feet from sealing completely.
Kaelen seized Seraphina around the waist with one arm, his shadow-wings folding into an aerodynamic spearhead. He unleashed a point-blank burst of repulsor gravity behind them, rocketing their combined weight forward across the slick metal deck.
They slid beneath the descending five-foot-thick adamantine door with inches to spare.
SLAM.
The blast doors locked behind them, sealing off the hangar in a cloud of pressurized vapor.
They stood in the grand spinal corridor of the dreadnought, a soaring, vaulted hallway of black ribbed iron that stretched half a league toward the bridge.
Ahead of them, waiting in rigid phalanx formation, stood the elite royal guard of the Ashen Maw—and at the far end of the hall, the towering, cybernetic silhouette of Void-Admiral Karrus himself.
Kaelen set Seraphina gently on her feet, his fingers lingering on her hip, his lips curling into a wicked, lethal grin.
"Welcome to the flagship, little sun," Kaelen purred, leveling his dripping broadsword down the hallway. "Shall we introduce ourselves?"