The shattered airlock gave way with a screech of tortured metal as Kaelen kicked the five-foot blast hatch clean into the command bridge.
Stepping through the breach, their mag-boots engaged with the deck plates as the ship's backup life-support systems flickered back to life, restoring a crushing half-gravity to the forward superstructure.
The bridge of the Abyssal Scourge was a colossal, cathedral-sized chamber of black ribbed iron, jutting out from the dreadnought’s bow like the prow of a sunken battleship.
A sweeping three-story panorama of reinforced void-glass looked out over the black vacuum of lunar orbit. Directly ahead, filling the viewport with suffocating scale, loomed the skeletal ring of the Star-Forge of Aethelgard, its dying red giant core casting long, bloody shadows across the metal consoles.
The bridge crew was in full panic.
Dozens of cybernetic void-operators and abyssal navigators were frantically attempting to purge their data terminals as the two sovereigns entered.
At the center of the raised command dais stood the Navigational Spire—a massive column of weeping obsidian crystal connected directly into the dreadnought's neural engine.
Surrounding the spire were twelve heavily armored Praetorians of the Maw, their heavy siege-cannons already turning to level point-blank fire at the entrance.
"Fire on the breach!" the sub-commander screamed.
"Get down!" Seraphina shouted, reacting with pure paramedic instinct.
She lunged forward, her twenty-foot wings of starlight snapping closed around Kaelen and herself like a cocoon of diamond-hard celestial feathers.
A barrage of heavy plasma shells slammed into her wing-shield, exploding in deafening concussive bursts that shook the deck plates and sent boiling shrapnel clattering across the iron floor. The heat was staggering, but her awakened Sunblood held the barrier firm, absorbing the kinetic shock into her dimensional reservoir.
"My turn," Kaelen growled through gritted teeth.
Seraphina snapped her wings open in a blinding flash of golden dawn, providing the distraction he needed.
Kaelen surged out from behind her, a blur of obsidian armor and sovereign wrath.
He didn't swing Gloom-Weaver at the guards; he drove the pommel of his broadsword straight into the metal decking beneath their boots.
A directional gravity singularity erupted across the floor.
The heavy iron plates buckled upward, throwing the twelve Praetorians into the air like ragdolls. In midair, their heavy siege-cannons were torn from their hands by the gravitational pull, imploding into dense metal spheres before Kaelen swept his blade in a horizontal scythe of void-matter, cleaving the entire guard squad in a single, devastating stroke.
Seraphina moved past the fallen guards, sprinting up the steps of the command dais toward the Navigational Spire.
Her amber eyes widened as she read the holographic telemetry floating above the console.
"Kaelen, look at the helm!" she called out, her fingers flying across the glowing control runes.
"The ship’s automated thrusters are locked on full burn! Karrus didn't just plan to breach the forge—he locked the Abyssal Scourge on a ramming trajectory! The four-mile dreadnought will strike the containment sphere in four minutes!"
Kaelen vaulted onto the dais beside her, his silver eyes narrowing as he gripped the manual steering yoke.
The controls were welded shut with corrupting void-slag; the primary steering conduits had been severed from within to ensure the collision was irreversible.
"The thrusters won't disengage through the helm," Kaelen said, his jaw tightening into lethal stone. "The neural core has overridden the physical relays."
"Then we cut the heart out of the beast," Seraphina said, her voice dropping into the cool, surgical focus of a trauma surgeon preparing for open-heart surgery.
She turned to the central crystal spire, seeing the black, oily pulse of the ship's neural core beating inside the obsidian shell.
"If I overload the spire with the Solar Dynamo of Ra, I can burn out the ship's primary reactor before we hit the station. But I need you to hold the containment field, or the blowback will vent the bridge into space."
Kaelen turned his gaze to her, his expression a mix of fierce pride and protective hunger.
He laid his large, scarred hand over hers on the console, his thumb brushing the golden crescent mark burning at her wrist.
"Burn the heart, little sun," Kaelen murmured, his voice rich with absolute, unyielding trust. "I will hold the stars back from you."
Seraphina smiled, stepping up to the pulsing obsidian spire.
She laid both palms flat against the dark crystal, her eyes igniting into an inferno of pure, unfiltered dawn.