Chapter 874: Ride the blast

From the bridge of the lead transport, the planet below stopped being a planet.

Nobody spoke for the first several seconds. There wasn’t a sound that fit what they were watching, and the silence that filled the bridge felt less like restraint and more like nobody’s voice had caught up yet to what their eyes were reporting.

It started as a single point of light, impossibly bright even through the reinforced viewport’s auto-dimming filter, somewhere deep beneath the planet’s crust where a reactor the size of a man’s chest had just stopped obeying every law it was built to respect. The light didn’t spread so much as it arrived everywhere at once, the planet’s own curvature lighting up from the inside like something had reached in and switched on a second sun buried in its core.

Then the surface began to lift.

Not explode, not at first. Lift, whole sections of crust peeling upward in slow, impossible arcs, trailing molten rock and shattered stone in long glowing ribbons that caught sunlight and threw it back in colors no planet’s atmosphere should have been capable of producing. The shockwave, when it finally hit, didn’t look like force. It looked like the planet exhaling, one single violent breath that turned its own atmosphere into a ring of compressed, superheated gas expanding outward faster than anything should move through open space.

Within seconds the ring overtook the planet’s own curvature entirely, and what had been a world became, for one suspended, terrible moment, a shape with no name, fire bleeding into vacuum in every direction, the dark rust-colored world that had sat quiet in orbit an hour ago now unrecognizable as anything that had ever held ground beneath anyone’s feet.

Diana’s hand found the viewport glass before her knees gave out.

"No," she said, voice breaking entirely. "No, no—"

Sophie caught her before she hit the deck, arms wrapping tight around her, and neither of them looked away from the window even as Diana’s whole body shook, sobs tearing out of her in a way that had nothing composed left in it at all.

"He’s not," Sophie started, and couldn’t finish the sentence either, because the light kept spreading, and spreading, and there was no part of that expanding wreck of fire and stone that looked survivable to anyone, by any measure a human mind could process.

The bridge stayed locked in that silence a long moment, everyone watching, nobody able to look away from the slow, terrible beauty of a star being born out of something that used to be a world.

Then, buried deep inside that expanding light, something flickered.

A single, impossibly precise burst of green.

It was gone again almost instantly, swallowed back into the chaos, but Sera’s head snapped toward it immediately, wings flaring tense behind her. "There. Did anyone else see that."

"See what," Angel said, voice raw.

"A signal." Sera’s eyes stayed locked on the fading glow. "Technopathic. I know that color."

Nobody dared hope out loud. But Brooks was already moving, fingers flying across the comm console, pulling every frequency Kelvin had ever used, every channel he’d ever hacked into out of pure habit, scanning for anything at all.

A burst of static cracked through the bridge speakers.

Then, thin, distorted, but unmistakable:

"—thia’s going to kill me for the statue thing, actually, she’s definitely going to kill me for the statue thing—"

Diana’s whole body went rigid in Sophie’s arms.

"Kelvin."

"Hey." His voice crackled stronger now, exhausted, giddy, alive. "So, funny story—"

Diana was already shoving away from Sophie, scrambling for the comm console herself, hands shaking too hard to properly work the controls until Brooks gently guided her fingers to the right channel.

"Where are you," Diana demanded. "Where ARE you, I just watched an entire planet—"

"I know, I was there, kind of the whole point." A pause, static crackling. "Escape pod. Jury-rigged in about four seconds flat from a maintenance shuttle I found during the evac, which, for the record, nobody tell Angel I commandeered EDF salvage equipment without authorization. I calculated the blast radius had a narrow enough margin that if I launched at exactly the right vector, timed to the reactor’s own expansion curve, I could actually ride the shockwave’s leading edge out instead of getting caught in it."

"You rode the explosion," Sophie said, disbelieving.

"I rode the explosion," Kelvin confirmed, sounding entirely too pleased with himself for a man who’d just escaped certain death through math alone. "It’s actually a beautiful bit of physics, if you’ve got a second, the differential pressure at the wavefront’s edge actually—"

"Kelvin." Diana’s voice cracked somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Not now. Please. Not now."

"Right. Yeah. Sorry." A pause, softer now. "I’m okay. I’m actually okay. Picking me up would be great, though, this pod’s not exactly built for long-term comfort."

The bridge erupted.

Angel let out a whoop that didn’t sound like anything approaching her usual composure, Sera’s wings snapped open in pure unguarded joy, and Brooks actually laughed, loud and genuine, already barking coordinates to the nearest recovery shuttle.

It took twenty minutes to bring him aboard, and when the shuttle bay doors finally opened, Kelvin stumbled out singed, soot-streaked, grinning like an idiot, and Diana crossed the distance so fast nobody saw her actually move, crashing into him hard enough to nearly knock them both over.

"Never again," she said into his shoulder, voice muffled and furious and relieved all at once. "Never, ever again, do you understand me."

"I make no promises," Kelvin said, and she hit him, not hard, just enough to make the point, before pulling him into another crushing hug.

Across the bay, Lila stood apart from the celebration, arms wrapped loose around herself, watching the reunion unfold without joining it.

Sera noticed first, breaking away from the group to cross the distance, Diana following a moment later once she’d finally loosened her grip on Kelvin enough to let him breathe.

"Are you alright," Sera asked gently.

Lila didn’t answer right away.

"Crazy thing is I used to think about this," she said finally, voice quiet, distant. "When I was a kid. What it would actually feel like, the day it finally happened. I used to imagine it a hundred different ways." She looked past them both, toward the shuttle bay’s small viewport, toward the empty dark where a planet used to be. "I don’t think I ever imagined it like this. I’m convinced that portal got destroyed in that blast and they stuck around because I know them,"

"Lila—"

"I’m not sad they’re gone," she said, and the honesty of it seemed to cost her something to say out loud. "I need you both to understand that. I’m relieved. Genuinely, completely relieved, because they will never hurt anyone else, ever again, and that matters more than anything else I could possibly feel about it." She swallowed hard. "But I watched my parents die today. However I feel about who they were, however much they deserved everything that just happened to them, that’s still true. I watched it happen. There’s a difference between wanting something and actually standing there when it’s finished."

Diana reached out and pulled her into the hug without asking permission, and after a moment, stiff at first, Lila let herself lean into it.

"That makes sense," Diana said quietly. "All of it. You’re allowed both things at once."

Brooks’s voice cut gently through the moment a few minutes later, formal now, the weight of command settling back over her as she opened a wide broadcast channel.

"This is Commander Brooks, Eclipse task force, reporting to all fleet elements and Ark command." Her voice carried clean and steady across every ship in the formation. "Mission status: success. The Purge facility in the Corvane Expanse has been neutralized, its leadership eliminated, and its primary asset destroyed."

A pause, and something almost proud slipped into her voice.

"Ark command, I want this logged properly, because I think it deserves to be. The asset in question was a confirmed five-horn Harbinger, held captive and studied by Purge forces for the last three years." Another pause, longer this time. "It is my honor to inform you that the mystery of Red Hollow has finally been resolved. The threat that vanished from our records three years ago has been found. And it has been ended."

Cheers broke out across the open channel from every ship in the formation, voices overlapping, relief and triumph tangled together into something that sounded, for the first time in longer than most of them could remember, like genuine victory.

Across the bay, soldiers embraced, exhausted faces finally cracking into real smiles, and slowly, ship by ship, the formation began calibrating for the long jump home, navigation systems humming to life, engines spooling toward whatever came after a day like this.

Diana laughed, actually laughed, wiping tears off her cheeks as she watched Kelvin get mobbed by a cluster of task force soldiers wanting to shake his hand, and for a moment, just a moment, the whole bay felt light in a way it hadn’t in longer than she could remember.

Then the forward sensor array screamed.

Every alarm across the bridge triggered at once, red light flooding the room, and through the main viewport, where empty space had sat calm a moment ago, something moved.

A wave.

Not light exactly, not debris, something that bent the stars behind it as it traveled, a visible sphere of distortion expanding outward from the point where the planet used to be, moving fast, faster than anything should move through open vacuum, headed straight for the formation.

Every ship’s defense systems triggered automatically, weapons powering up, shields flaring to life across the entire fleet in a desperate, instinctive response that nobody had actually ordered yet.

Kelvin’s smile died mid-motion, arm still raised from the handshake he’d been in the middle of accepting.

Sophie’s eyes snapped toward the viewport, and the mace’s eye flared bright, blue light bleeding fast up through her hand, her arm, racing toward her own eyes a half second before they caught the same glow.

"No," she whispered.

She stared at the approaching wave, something in her expression collapsing entirely.

"It can’t be."