In some remote, uncharted star system within the Spiral Cross Nebula, a girl in a white dress stood atop an asteroid like a celestial maiden, gazing out at the distant stars.
Within her field of vision, the corpses of hundreds of spaceborne energy whales, their life signs long gone, drifted like duckweed through the vast expanse, as though they had become part of an asteroid belt.
"Heh, heh. It's been such a long time! So long that the entire universe seems to have forgotten this is what I'm supposed to do! I stride across the heavens, I traverse the universe, I am the master of the swarm! I bring calamity, I..." She folded her arms and muttered to herself. Though she was in the vacuum of space, where nobody could hear her, she was still in a state of absolute self-satisfaction.
"No, I don't bring calamity... I am the calamity!" The swarm's master stood in place, one hand on her hip and the other pointing toward the distant sun as she proclaimed it loudly.
At that moment, she felt as though she owned the entire universe.
Then, two seconds later, she lowered her head, spat, and covered her face with her hands, murmuring, "Waaah, I've wanted to say a line like that for ages. Why can I only manage it now?"
Just then, a monstrous creature of towering size rose behind the girl, dragging its long body along in defiance of physics. It spread a pair of bony wings as long as its body. It had the triangular head of a crawling predator and the compound eyes of an insect, but sharp bone spikes sprouted where its jaw joined its body, forming a ring of steel around its neck. Its hundred-meter-long body was nearly serpentine, yet immensely thick, covered in