Passing through mountains of mechanical wreckage and the still-smoldering bodies of his own warriors, treading across metal flooring pitted by energy weapons and soaked in cooling hydraulic oil and unidentified organic lubricants, Company Captain Aerion finally reached the end of the blood-soaked passage.
Ahead, the passage opened wide.
According to the three-dimensional map generated by Servo-skull scans and now projected along the edge of his Tactical Lens, this was the absolute geometric center of the vast underground structure of the Vash'ul Forge.
It was an enormous, almost perfect spherical chamber.
Its diameter might have exceeded five hundred meters. Its curved walls and ceiling formed a seamless whole, made from some light-absorbing, matte-black alloy. There were no seams, rivets, or decorations on its surface. Its smoothness was unsettling.
There were no visible lighting fixtures within the chamber, yet a uniform, cold, gray-white glow of unknown origin seeped from either the walls themselves or the air. It was enough to make everything visible, yet stripped everything of vivid color and shadow, leaving only a deathly still, specimen-like clarity.
At the absolute center of this spherical chamber, suspended roughly a meter above the smooth floor, floated an object.
It was a sphere.
Roughly three meters in diameter, its material was impossible to identify. It was neither metal nor stone, but something more like solidified darkness that absorbed all light.
It hovered there silently, reflecting none of the faint illumination. Instead, like a miniature black hole, it slightly distorted and swallowed the surrounding gray-white light, creating a barely perceptible ring of visual distortion across its surface.
It had no propulsion mechanism, no energy fluctuations, and not even any apparent mass—at least, that was what Aerion's conventional Sensors reported.
It simply existed there, silent and ancient, carrying a sense of something beyond time.
Aerion's mechanical