The Core: The Dark Enemy

36. It's okay

The Defeat of the Hive Mother

"Q'tell, I will be joining you momentarily," Helvlad's voice broke through, pulling Q'tell from her meditative combat trance. She'd been locked in battle with these two foes for what felt like ages, and the creeping certainty of defeat had begun to settle in. Without reinforcements, she knew her side would eventually fall.

"Perfect timing. So, you managed to finish off the Hive Mother?" she asked, relaxing her stance as her internal combat algorithms assumed control, granting her a brief lull. The monstrous thing before her continued to swell unchecked, its grotesque form expanding with every pulse — but that wasn't her concern anymore. Not with Helvlad arriving. Not with overwhelming force about to tip the scales.

"Yes," Helvlad muttered. "Though... she was more troublesome than I anticipated."

The hesitation in his voice made her pause. It was a side of him she'd never heard before. For an instant, it almost sounded like he'd come dangerously close to losing. Such a notion had once been inconceivable to her. But after witnessing the alien opponents that she was forced to face — the strange invulnerable entity commanding battle monoliths and the deathscape outside littered with a growing horror — Q'tell found herself unsurprised. Even the famed Last Engineer wasn't immune to difficulty in this place.

But he'd survived. And that was all that mattered.

A warning flared across Q'tell's vision, halting her mid-command. It was set to trigger only if something beyond her designated focus — the immediate battle — changed.

"You'd better get here fast," she muttered, scanning the cascading readouts. "Something monumental's about to happen."

"Explain."

"The Skism's revealed itself," she replied, sending over a cluster of visual logs. "Its fractal shell has changed... and there's a monster inside it."

She replayed the recordings several times, unable to look away. It was unlike any creature she'd ever encountered — almost without form, a writhing impossibility. Its presence explained so many of the unanswered theories whispered about its nature for ages. The reason one of the Skism fields had ever moved... was because something alive had been inside it all along. The Skism domains, those isolated pockets of warped space, existed because of this entity.

Finally, a face to attach to a myth.

Q'tell's gaze lingered on it before adding, "Seems... interested in this battle. Probably the artifact."

The footage spoke for itself — the ancient entity, no longer a shifting abstraction, now visibly watching the conflict. Thousands of eyes turned in every direction, one of which, she was certain, locked directly onto her.

"And there's more," Q'tell added, sifting through the next data stream. "The LOW are mobilizing. Highways lighting up like a bonfire. Multiple fleets headed this way. I don't have a vessel count, but traffic spiked hard. I'd wager they're coming for the artifact too."

"Troubling, but not a significant setback," Helvlad replied, his voice steady despite the implications. "Depends if they've brought more artifact weapons since our last encounter."

Then Q'tell gasped. The sharp intake of breath made Helvlad's blood chill.

"Report."

"The Skism field," she whispered, her voice tight. "It's dispersing. Something's emerging from it."

"Impossible."

On her screens, the legendary Skism effect — long believed to be a permanent cosmic feature, a prison without end — was unraveling like mist before dawn. Vaporizing into nothing.
And where the Skism field used to be, something moved and flared with power.