The sky began its slow, mocking burn—its flicker a prelude to what historians, if any survived, might call the first official clash with the Alliance.

Their first line of defense was a miracle of Morgan’s design: a delicate membrane of interlocked mana particles, so thin it might as well be hope given form.

Across lands, warriors raised their heads, wearing expressions that danced somewhere between reverence and resignation.

Aroche stood before Gawain, voice even. “What did you tell your wife?”

“Nothing. Do we need to?” Gawain replied, tone almost casual.

After all, if they lost, the world wouldn’t be around long enough for regret. There were no corners left to crawl into.

“No,” Aroche said, matter-of-fact. “We don’t.”

Overhead, ships that had the decency to remain invisible until now began peeling into view—Dirk and his band from Silas 277, making an entrance like they’d been waiting for the cue. They halted just beneath the barrier.

One ship was enough for Burn to punch a hole through the void, but apparently, the rest had decided they’d tag along into hell.

Burn had told them this wasn’t their fight. That they could save themselves, go play hero somewhere else, maybe repopulate a quiet moon.

They declined. Heroics were apparently contagious.

“Should I call Galahad and Landevale, Sir?” Gawain asked, every inch the good soldier.

“No,” Aroche answered, eyes never leaving the creeping dread above. “Let them have their moment. There won’t be many left to come, at least for now.”

“You think the loss will be bad?” Gawain ventured, betraying the faintest sliver of worry.

Aroche gave a noncommittal hum. “One false step and we’re all decorative smears. So yes. Possibly.”

But Burn had no intention of letting the world end quietly—not while he was still breathing.

WHOOSH!

His sword shot out of his chamber window with all the grace and subtlety of a war god's RSVP, streaking past the clouds toward some unfortunate point in the heavens.

“It’s beginning.”

And sure enough, a heartbeat later, the old wound in the sky—the one that had been politely splitting reality for the past three years—shivered. Not wider, not deeper, just… irritated.

A ripple passed through the crack like it had just been poked by something sharp and unapologetic.

Dozens of ships, previously lingering just beyond the barrier with the patience of vultures, surged forward. They didn’t hesitate.

They pierced through.

Thus began the Emperor of Nethermere’s first official counterattack.

***

“Open the door.”

“Hey, just so we’re clear—no suit means space is—”

“I’ve been to the moon,” Burn interrupted flatly, “through space, on a dragon. Few times.”

Dirk didn’t argue. He simply gave the signal. His men, already accustomed to Burn’s brand of nonsense that kept working, opened the pressure chamber.

Burn stepped in, turned just before the next door, and mouthed one word without flair: “Return.”

With that, Dirk opened the outer door. Burn walked forward, clenched his hand—frost vanished on cue—and then casually leapt off the platform.

And just like that, he was gone.

“Do we return now, Cap’n?” one of the crew piped up.

“Wait.”

They didn’t have to wait long. From the cockpit window, they watched the Alliance’s fleet begin to combust—ship by ship, popping into flames like someone had gotten tired of their symmetry.

“Alright, let’s go,” Dirk said.

They headed back toward Nethermere, still attached to the rift.

No, they didn’t need to bring him home. He said he’d figure it out. As if casually finding one’s way back from a million light-years away was just a matter of public transport schedules.

This was deep in the belly of nowhere, where the Alliance had parked a temporary space station—temporary in the same sense that a squatter with a tent calls it home. They planned to colonize the world, of course. That’s what intergalactic bureaucracies do.

But how did anyone get here in the first place? How did Burn, or Dirk’s fleet for that matter, casually hop between star systems like it was a long-distance commute?

Dirk’s explanation was deceptively simple—the kind of explanation that makes physicists twitch.

See, crossing the rift wasn’t a matter of willpower or raw magical output. If that were the case, Burn would’ve ripped it apart years ago, grinning the whole time. He had the magic. What he didn’t have—what no one in Nethermere had—was the framework.

Because despite the mythic power of Nethermere, despite magic that could rewrite biology, defy gravity, resurrect legends, and weaponize emotion, the realm was still on the wrong branch of the cosmic tree when it came to this kind of traversal.

It wasn’t about power. It was about precision.

The crack in the sky, for all its grandeur, was a boundary condition in a higher-order topology. Not a portal, not a wound—it was a fold. Well, not in a traditional sense. A stubborn, twisting discontinuity in local spacetime fabric caused by some five hundred years worth of soul energy event.

It connected to a brane layer—a multi-dimensional interface—where causality bent and space stopped caring about velocity.

To traverse that? You needed more than spellcraft.

You needed *****steel.

An alloy that, technically, shouldn’t exist. The raw material could only be extracted from objects ejected by rotating Kerr black holes—those rare, distorted corpses of stars that spun fast enough to throw up debris through their ergospheres.

Some of that debris, when saturated with space bound mana particles over a few billion years and bathed in superheated dark matter, crystallized into a meta-stable material with improbable properties: Zero entropy memory. Adaptive shape fidelity. The uncanny ability to shift its inertial reference frame mid-flight.

Magic alone would’ve shattered at the threshold.

And then there was the AI. Quiet, cold, and unapologetically precise. It didn’t chant incantations. It calculated tensors.

It mapped the crack as a shifting set of Ricci curvature anomalies and gravitational torsion fields, correlating them in real time to the hidden layers of folded space. Think of the rift not as a door, but as a six-dimensional river constantly rearranging its current. The AI didn’t open it—it timed the jump.

In the unlikely event it went offline, there was a fallback: A simplified human-readable version of the rift traversal protocol. 

Mathematically, it looked harmless—just a nested set of higher-dimensional differential equations encoded into geometric… shapes. Some people had to speak it while simultaneously visualizing it. The catch? Most people’s brains leaked out of their ears by the second layer of recursion. Don’t worry. That was just an expression, not literal.

But Burn could probably handle it now.

Now.

Because before, he wasn’t ready. Not in terms of intellect or intent—but in terms of alignment. His magic wasn’t the problem. It was the context in which his magic understood itself.

Nethermere was advanced. Miraculously so. But advancement followed its own logic—philosophies rooted in purpose, meaning, soul-binding, elemental resonance, divine rites. Not wrong. Just... tuned to a different frequency.

Their scholars had mapped the planes, but not yet the flows between planes. They could bind death into a ring and hope into a sword, but they hadn’t yet woven causality into propulsion. The problem wasn’t the absence of theory. It was the absence of synthesis.

Burn hadn’t broken through the rift before—not because it was impossible, but because his world hadn’t yet connected the philosophies of the soul with the physics of the fold. They hadn’t found the thread that turned belief into velocity.

Now? With the Alliance’s ship, *****steel under his feet, and centuries of outsider science strapped to his spine? Now he wasn’t punching through a wall.

He was surfing a structure.

And for the first time, the crack in the sky wasn’t a warning. It was a road.

Well… scratching the surface.

Next, he’d need to learn how to do it with his bare vessel alone.

But the return trip should be able to be done with Mahkato’s descend.

He just had to hitch a ride.

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