The spinal corridor of the Abyssal Scourge groaned as the ship's artificial gravity generator took a catastrophic direct hit from the Astra-Vanguard’s external torpedo barrage.
With a sickening, metallic screech, the floor fell away from beneath their boots.
Weightlessness seized the corridor in an instant. Hundreds of severed iron plates, drops of boiling black oil, and the armored corpses of the fallen Void-Marauders lifted into the air, drifting like morbid debris across the half-league hallway.
Standing at the far end of the floating wreckage, Void-Admiral Karrus activated his mag-boots, his nine-foot cybernetic frame locking onto the ceiling catwalk.
Half of his face was a polished skull of black soul-steel, his single organic eye glowing with bilious green malice beneath a heavy iron brow. From his mechanical spine sprouted four articulated, steam-hissing servo-arms, each terminating in a spinning, superheated plasma-saw.
"You should have stayed on your dirt clod, Vance!" Karrus sneered, his vocalizer grinding like tectonic plates as he drew an eight-foot Abyssal Pole-Axe crackling with anti-gravity lightning. "In the void, your little sun cannot breathe! You are meat in my butcher shop!"
"I don't need gravity to bury you, Karrus," Kaelen rumbled.
The High Sovereign didn't need magnetic boots. His eighty-foot shadow-wings flared into the three-dimensional zero-gravity space, displacing the drifting debris with a single, thunderous beat of void-matter.
He propelled himself forward like an obsidian missile.
Gloom-Weaver descended upon Karrus in a brutal, weightless execution arc.
The collision of broadsword and anti-gravity pole-axe sent a shockwave of violet and jade lightning rippling across the bulkheads, shearing through the structural support beams of the ceiling.
Karrus retaliated with blinding mechanical fury. His four cybernetic servo-arms whipped forward, the spinning plasma-saws carving through the air toward Kaelen's neck and ribs.
Kaelen parried the main blade with his broadsword while his shadow-wings snapped forward like mantis claws, wrapping around two of the saw-arms and crushing their hydraulic joints with raw, localized gravity.
Meanwhile, forty elite Null-Stalkers—assassins engineered for vacuum combat, wielding monomolecular wire-whips—leaped off the floating catwalks, swarming toward Seraphina from all angles.
Seraphina smiled, her amber eyes burning with fierce, predatory grace.
She had spent months in the trauma bays of Chicago learning to read chaotic, high-pressure environments, and zero-gravity was just another emergency room without a floor.
Her twenty-foot wings of starlight snapped open, creating a spherical vortex of white-gold dawn fire around her body.
Using the thrust of her wings, she spun gracefully through the floating wreckage. A Null-Stalker lunged with a monomolecular whip; Seraphina twisted her torso in midair, letting the wire cleave harmlessly through a drifting iron bulkhead behind her.
In the same fluid motion, she drew her sunstone recurve bow, nocking an arrow infused with the azure storm-resonance of the Heart of Susanoo.
Twang.
The plasma arrow passed through three drifting corpses before impaling the assassin through his chest-core. The electrical discharge chain-reacted through the weightless corridor, jumping from armor plate to armor plate, paralyzing the front rank of stalkers in mid-drift.
Dropping her bow to float on its etheric tether, Seraphina drew her twin daggers.
She vaulted off a floating iron beam, tucking into a tight, spinning dive. Her daggers flashed in dazzling, superheated arcs, severing air-hoses, neural conduits, and throats with surgical elegance.
Within thirty seconds, the corridor was clear of escorts.
Ahead, the duel between sovereigns reached its boiling point.
Kaelen had ripped both of Karrus’s right-side saw-arms clean from the admiral’s chassis, but Karrus had managed to drive the spiked butt of his pole-axe into Kaelen’s left shoulder, cracking the doom-plate and pinning him against the ribbed wall.
"Die, sovereign dog!" Karrus roared, bringing his plasma blade down toward Kaelen’s exposed throat.
"Not today, metal-head," Seraphina’s voice cut through the clash.
Flying upside down along the ceiling corridor, Seraphina loosed a blinding, point-blank sunburst directly into Karrus’s cybernetic face-plate. The five-thousand-degree solar flare melted the optical sensors of his skull in a shower of white-hot slag.
Karrus howled in blind agony, his grip on the pole-axe faltering.
Kaelen didn't waste a heartbeat.
With a feral snarl, Kaelen surged upward in the weightless arc Gloom-Weaver sliced clean through Karrus’s mechanical torso, cleaving the four-mile dreadnought's admiral in half from hip to collarbone.
The shattered halves of the cybernetic butcher drifted apart in the zero-gravity expanse, leaking black oil and sparks.
Kaelen drifted back toward Seraphina, breathing heavily. He caught her by the waist as she floated past, pulling her against his chest. Even in zero-gravity, his grip was possessive, steadying, and intoxicatingly warm.
He leaned down, pressing his lips to hers in a fierce, breathless kiss that tasted of ozone, copper, and triumph.
"Nice shot, my Queen," he murmured against her lips, his silver eyes molten with admiration.
Seraphina smiled, resting her hands against his scarred breastplate.
"The bridge is right ahead," she said, nodding toward the shattered airlock at the end of the corridor. "Let's take this ship's steering wheel before it crashes into the forge."