LORDS OF THE GALAXY: SUPERNOVA CHILD

 Lords of the Galaxy: Supernova Child

Excerpt from To Live and Die on Mars (Vol. LIV)

The wormhole spat them out like bad meat.  

Ari hit the pavement first, rolling hard enough to skin his elbows. Fozi landed like a meteor, cracking concrete. Ren just floated, black eyes already scanning the smog-choked skyline.  

Corona Hills. Home.  

Or close enough. Real or fake, they were back in the time when Super Baroba’s entrails were fresh tracks in the pavement, still steaming from a recent encounter with Super 101.

Lumo’s transmission caught up and caught its breath beside them, glitching at the edges—just a sliver of him, a cobalt ghost with four eyes and a smirk that didn’t reach them.  

"Welcome back to yesterday," he said.  

Ari spat blood. "Could’ve warned us about the landing."  

"Would you have listened?"  

"No."  

Fozi cracked his neck. "Where’s the rest of you?"  

"Elsewhere." Lumo’s image wavered. "Time’s sticky. Hard to stay whole."  

Ren’s telepathic voice slithered into their skulls: “Y el otro?”  

Lumo didn’t answer.  

Then the wormhole convulsed.  

Something came through.  

---  

They weren’t human. Weren’t demons. Just meat in cheap armor, faces hidden behind visors that hissed static. Six of them, weapons already drawn—plasma cutters humming, gut-guns primed.  

Ari grinned. "Oh good. Target practice."  

The first thug lunged. Ari sidestepped, driving a shock-knuckle into his ribs. The man folded like bad code.  

Fozi tore a palm tree from the ground and swung. Two bodies flew.  

Ren didn’t move. Just pulsed. The nearest attacker’s helmet imploded, skull following.  

Lumo’s transmission watched, arms crossed. "You’re rusty."  

Ari kicked a groin, stole a charged gun, shot the owner with it. "Missed us that much, huh?"  

The last thug ran.  

Fozi threw the palm tree. It speared him through the back.  

Silence.  

Then—  

A tremor in the air. The wormhole rippled again.  

Lumo’s eyes narrowed. "Go."  

Ari wiped his nose. "What about you?"  

"Got a nebula to haunt." The transmission flickered, dissolving at the edges. "Keep Pitt off my girl’s statue."  

Ren’s black eyes gleamed. “Siempre.”  

Fozi grunted. "Try not to die out there."  

Lumo laughed. "No promises."  

The last thug gurgled as Fozi adjusted his grip on the man's trachea. "Hey Lumo," the ox-man rumbled. "If we keep one alive, d'you think we could mail him back to the future with a note that says 'Fuck You' written in his own blood?"  

Lumo's flickering hologram winced as the thug's neck snapped. "Tried that in timeline 46-B. They just sent back a bigger asshole with better armor."  

Ari kicked the corpse. "Should've put glitter in the envelope. Nobody expects the glitter."  

Ren floated over the carnage, black eyes reflecting the dying wormhole's glow. "Podríamos enviarles un Pitt."  

Lumo's laugh glitched into static. "Tempting. But the space-time continuum might actually vomit."  

Fozi wiped alien blood off his claws. "So what's the plan, Blue? You gonna keep fracturing yourself across the multiverse until there's a Lumo in every trashcan?"  

"Feels like I'm already there." The transmission flickered—for a second, they could see straight through his chest to where a neon ad for synth-whore casinos pulsed in the smog. "Look, just... try not to die before I figure this out."  

Ari scoffed. "You're one to talk. I've seen rotisserie chickens with better life expectancy."  

Lumo's grin was all teeth. "Yeah, but did those chickens have a 73% plan?"  

The last thug twitched at Fozi’s feet, his visor cracked, leaking pinkish fluid. Ari toed the corpse with his boot, gold chain swinging. "Time-traveling trash. Who sends these guys?"  

Lumo’s transmission flickered, his edges dissolving into static. "People who don’t like loose ends."  

The thug's last breath came out as a wet chuckle, blood bubbling between his lips. "You... you don't know what's coming," he gurgled.  

Ari stomped on his throat. "Yeah, yeah. Apocalypse. Reckoning. Yawn." The cartilage crunched like stale bread. "Wake me when it gets creative."  

Lumo's transmission flickered, his edges bleeding into the smog. For a second, they could see the fractures—glimpses of other timelines where his face was peeled back to the skull, where his eyes were empty sockets weeping liquid data.  

Fozi sniffed. "You look like shit warmed over, Blue."  

"Feel worse." Lumo's voice came through in broken syllables, like a corrupted wave file. "Found one of my corpses near Saturn's rings last week. Still screaming."  

Ren's telepathic voice was uncharacteristically quiet. "¿Cuántos de ti quedan?"  

The hologram shrugged. A piece of its shoulder dissolved into static. "Enough to be a problem. Not enough to matter."  

Ren floated closer, his Grey Martian face unreadable. “¿Y tu cuerpo?”  

A pause. The smog curled between them, thick with the stink of burnt copper.  

Lumo looked down at his fading hands. "Somewhere between Mars and the Horsehead Nebula. Maybe alive. Maybe not."  

Fozi crushed a discarded plasma bomb underfoot. "So you’re just… what? A ghost with a menu?"  

"Something like that."  

Ari spat. "Bullshit. You’re Lumo. You cheat death for breakfast."  

The transmission laughed, a hollow sound. "Even cheaters run out of cards."  

The MARS sign flickered above them, its letters bleeding neon. Somewhere in the city, Karla’s statue was weeping again. Lumo didn’t look.  

Fozi crossed his arms, his burgundy fur matted with alien blood. "We could find you. Bust into that prison nebula, drag your real ass home."  

"Tried that," Lumo said. "Got 37 versions of me killed."  

Ren’s telepathy was a whisper: “¿Entonces qué?”  

Another pause. A hover-car screamed past, its engines drowning out the distant sirens.  

Lumo’s voice was quiet. "Keep the city standing. Keep Mul from turning my kid into a bargaining chip. And if you see KC…"  

Ari’s grin was all teeth. "Tell her you died heroic? Sorry, Blue. She’d know I’m lying."  

"Yeah." Lumo’s image pulsed once, a heartbeat of cobalt light. "Just tell her I’m late."  

The transmission glitched violently. For a moment they saw infinite Lumos in infinite hells, all flipping them off in perfect unison. Then just static.  

Then he was gone.  

The wormhole snapped shut.  

Somewhere in the smog, sirens wailed.  

Ari cracked his knuckles. "Alright, bandits. Let’s go steal a future."  

Above them, the MARS sign flickered.  

And in the static between seconds, if you listened close, you could almost hear the black serpent laughing.  

Fozi sniffed the air. "You smell that?"  

"Despair? Regret? Pitt's cheap cologne?"  

"Nah." The ox-man cracked his knuckles. "Opportunity."  

Ren floated toward the nearest bar. "Primero tragos. Luego salvamos el universo."  

The last of Lumo's signal dissolved into the smog, carrying two final words on a frequency only drunks and Grey Martians could hear:  

"Just late."  

As they walked away, the last thug's corpse twitched. His lips moved, forming words that weren't his own:  

"You're already inside the event horizon."  

Then his eyes burst like overripe fruit.  

---  

The transmission slithered back through the wormhole’s gullet, a frayed ribbon of cobalt data. It passed screaming chrono-storms, slipped between the teeth of half-formed timelines, and dissolved into the waiting veins of a man who wasn’t dead yet.  

Lumo’s eyes snapped open.  

He was very much alive and not one of his thousands of time-hopping transmissions.

No static. No fractures. Just the salt-sting of Aura Beach air and the weight of a tiny fist curled against his bare blue chest.  

His daughter slept on a levitating pillow, her milky half-human skin dappled with sunlight filtering through the canopy. She had KC’s nose. His own mother’s stubborn stare. And, if the med-scans were right, approximately 37% more longevity than her alien father.  

Lumo kissed her forehead, grinning at the way her tiny fingers batted at the air. "Yeah, yeah. You’ll conquer galaxies later."  

The baby yawned.  

Somewhere beyond the villa’s shields, the ocean was singing. Somewhere beyond that, Gizzelda’s empire was crumbling, Mul was plotting, and the black serpent was still laughing.  

Didn’t matter.  

He’d cheated death for breakfast.  

Now he was busy.  

The canopy hovered just above Aura Beach, its repulsor field humming softly against the salt wind. Below, the waves crashed in slow motion, their crests catching the last bloody light of Corona’s sunset. The water wasn’t blue. Never was on Mars. It was the color of rust and lithium, churning under a sky choked with digiton smog.  

Lumo lay sprawled across a floating divan, one arm behind his head, the other tracing idle patterns in the air. His daughter, Nova, balanced on his chest, her tiny fists smacking his chin with the unfocused violence of infancy.  

"You hit like your mother," he muttered.  

Nova gurgled, drooling on his collarbone.  

"Yeah, yeah. Save the speeches for the Senate."  

She shrieked, a sound like a malfunctioning thruster, and grabbed a fistful of his nose.  

Lumo winced. "Okay, definitely your mother’s kid."  

The villa’s AI—a disembodied voice with the cadence of a bored aristocrat—chimed in: "Incoming transmission. Priority override. Would you like to—"  

"No."  

"It’s Governor Amara."  

"Still no."  

Nova yanked his lower lip.  

Lumo sighed. "Fine. Put him through."  

Amara’s hologram materialized beside the divan, his metal-plated skull gleaming under the canopy’s glow. His red cape billowed in a nonexistent wind, the Keri Alu pulsing at his throat like a second heart.  

"You look like shit," Amara observed.  

Lumo didn’t bother sitting up. "Parenthood’s a war crime. What do you want?"  

Amara’s gaze flicked to Nova. For a second, something almost human flickered behind his eyes. Then it was gone. "Mul’s moving. He’s got a buyer for the kid."  

Nova blew a spit bubble.  

Lumo’s fingers twitched. A dozen hidden weapons systems hummed to life around the villa. "Let him try."  

Amara grunted. "It’s not just him. The whole system’s itching for a piece of her. She’s the first hybrid with your code and Karla’s public imprint. You really thought they’d let you keep her?"  

Nova giggled, kicking her chubby legs.  

Lumo caught her foot before it could connect with his ribs. "She’s not a damn commodity."  

"Everything’s a commodity," Amara said. "Especially miracles."  

The wind shifted. The smog parted just enough to reveal the black serpent coiled around Mars’ horizon, its scales glitching in and out of reality.  

Lumo’s four eyes narrowed. "You here to warn me or recruit me?"  

Amara’s grin was all teeth. "Can’t it be both?"  

Nova chose that moment to vomit down Lumo’s chest.  

Amara raised an eyebrow. "She’s got your charm."  

"Fuck off."  

The transmission dissolved, leaving only the scent of ozone and the weight of the unspoken threat.  

Lumo exhaled, wiping baby puke off his sternum. "Alright, supernova. Let’s talk survival strategies."  

Nova blinked up at him, her tiny brow furrowed in concentration. Then she sneezed.  

"Yeah," Lumo muttered. "We’re doomed."  

Outside, the ocean kept singing. Somewhere beyond the waves, the future waited—hungry, inevitable, and already laughing.  

Lumo kissed his daughter’s forehead and grinned.  

"Good thing we cheat."  

---

 

The telepathic wave blared through Lumo’s skull like a siren made of static and bad memories.  

"—breaking confirmation, Governor Amara has just personally murdered a star—"  

Lumo exhaled, adjusting the feed with a twitch of his jaw. Nova slept against his chest, her tiny fingers curled around the chain of his pendant—stolen from a Jovian pleasure barge last cycle. The radio voices kept coming, a chorus of drunks, dockworkers, and shell-shocked starfarers all tripping over themselves to describe the same impossible sight.  

"I was hauling ice near the Phobos ring when I saw it—Amara just floating there in the black, hands out like he was strangling the void itself. Then that damn crown of his—"  

"The Keri Alu," another voice cut in, reverent.  

"—yeah, that freaky snake circlet lit up like it was eating lightning, and then—" A pause. A shaky breath. "Then the whole goddamn star just... aged."  

Lumo smirked. Nova stirred, her half-Xerran skin flushing cobalt at the temples—her tell for bad dreams. He muted the feed with a thought.  

The villa’s balcony overlooked Aura Beach, where the tide rolled in slow, metallic waves under Mars’ smog-choked sky. Normally, the glow of Corona would be the brightest thing up there.  

Not tonight.  

Tonight, Corcoran’s death throes painted the horizon in hues of violet and gold, its supernova light bending unnaturally through the pocket of accelerated spacetime Amara had left behind like a calling card. The entire system was watching. The entire system was glitching.  

Lumo’s Menu pinged—a public alert scrolling across his vision:  

[TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED]  

Phobos Energy Ring discharge detected. Chrono-stress fractures reported in sectors 7-12. Citizens advised to avoid prolonged eye contact with Corcoran remnant.  

He snorted. "Advice comes a little late, doesn’t it?"  

Nova sneezed in her sleep.  

The radio feed crackled back on, another witness clawing for airtime:  

"—never seen anything like it! One second, Corcoran’s burning steady, next—" A sound like someone gulping cheap synth-gin. "Next, it’s wrinkling. Like fruit left in the sun too long. Then—BOOM. Amara just willed a star to die."  

Lumo knew the science. Knew the Keri Alu’s power wasn’t destruction—it was time. Amara hadn’t blown up Corcoran. He’d grabbed it by the throat and fast-forwarded its life until its own death caught up with it.  

And he’d done it live on the system-wide Menu feed.  

No warning. No diplomacy. Just Amara’s face filling every screen in the Corona System, his metal-plated skull gleaming under Deimos’ forge-light, voice like gravel and gunfire:  

"Corcoran’s gravity has been destabilizing our outer colonies for centuries. Their refugee fleets leech our resources. Their politics infect our councils. No more."  

A beat. A smirk.  

"Watch this."  

Then the transmission cut to the void. To Amara floating amid the wreckage of a hundred Corcoran patrol ships, the stolen energy ring around Phobos flaring behind him like a coiled serpent made of pure spacetime. His hands moved—slow, deliberate—as if kneading the fabric of reality itself.  

And Corcoran obeyed.  

Now, hours later, the entire system was drunk on the spectacle. Hover-traffic over Corona Hills had slowed to a crawl as millions craned their necks to watch the sky. Rooftop bars were packed. Grey Martian street vendors sold filtered goggles to gawkers. Even the Sharks and Demons had called a truce to gape at the aftermath.  

Lumo’s private wave channel buzzed. Ari’s voice, slurred with what was definitely not synthetic gin:  

"Yo, Blue. You seeing this shit? Big A just turned a star into a fireworks show."  

Fozi grunted in the background: "Told you he was cheating."  

Ren’s telepathic whisper slithered through: "La energía... no se destruye. Se traslada."  

Lumo didn’t answer. He was too busy watching Nova.  

Her tiny fingers twitched in her sleep.  

And in the air above her, unbidden, a miniature hologram flickered to life—a perfect replay of Corcoran’s death, rendered in baby-blue digitons.  

Lumo went very still.  

"Oh," he muttered. "That’s new."  

The radio voices droned on:  

"—Council has called an emergency session—"  

"—Zemord cult markings found in the supernova’s light patterns—"  

"—tell you, that ain’t no man, that’s something older—"  

Nova cooed, her dream-hologram shifting to show the Phobos ring’s energy discharge in startling detail—the way it had fed the Keri Alu, funneling stolen power into Amara’s hands.  

Lumo’s four eyes narrowed.  

"You’re not just watching, are you?" he whispered. "You’re reading it."  

Nova blinked awake. For a heartbeat, her eyes weren’t a child’s—they were calculating, flickering with the same data-streams Lumo saw when he jacked deep into the Menu.  

Then she sneezed again, and the moment passed.  

The radio hit a new level of hysterics:  

"—REPEAT, CORONA COUNCIL HAS ISSUED A TEMPORAL SANCTION—"  

"—Martian loyalists gathering at Kasei Spire—"  

"—first images of Corcoran’s corpse, and oh fuck, is that a face in the plasma?—"  

Lumo shut it off.  

The balcony door hissed open. Karla stepped out, her Atkan dress rippling between defensive black and warning crimson. She took one look at the supernova glow, then at the fading hologram over Nova’s head.  

"Tell me she didn’t just access the Menu."  

"She didn’t just access the Menu," Lumo lied.  

Karla’s dress turned stormcloud grey.  

Nova chose that moment to vomit.  

It wasn’t milk. It was liquid digitons—a perfect, glowing replica of the Phobos ring, swirling in the air for three seconds before dissolving into the wind.  

Silence.  

Then Karla: "We’re fucked."  

Lumo grinned. "Yeah. But we’ll cheat."  

Outside, the waves kept rolling. The smog pulsed with Corcoran’s dying light. And high above, unnoticed by all but the drunkest astronomers, the black serpents in the sky blinked—  

—as if laughing.

---

The beach canopy rippled in the salt wind, its repulsor field humming against the rust-colored waves of Aura Beach. Lumo sprawled across a floating divan, one arm behind his head, the other dangling a bottle of stolen Jovian gin over the edge. The bottle swayed, catching the smog-filtered sunlight, casting liquid shadows across his bare cobalt chest.  

Behind him, Karla moved through a series of gravity-defying yoga poses, her Atkan dress shifting between liquid gold and warning crimson with each controlled breath. Her instructor? A wiry, ancient Xerran with cracked cranial plates and four milky eyes—Lumo’s father, Veyth, who hadn’t spoken to his son in seventeen Martian years before showing up unannounced last week.  

"Your breathing’s off," Veyth chided, tapping Karla’s spine with a bony finger. "Too much diaphragm, not enough third lung."  

Karla’s dress flickered to Fuck Off Violet. "I don’t have a third lung."  

Veyth smirked. "Weak genetics."  

Lumo took a long swig of gin.  

Nova gurgled in her floating bassinet, tiny fists punching at the holographic mobiles Lumo had coded to look like wanted posters of the Bandits. The baby’s skin—pale blue with Karla’s freckles—glowed faintly, reacting to the digiton smog.  

Lumo pulsed a telepathic wave through his Menu:  

"Ari. Fozi. Ren. 101. Get your asses to Aura Beach. Baby’s doing weird shit again."  

The reply came in jagged fragments:  

Ari: "Define ‘weird.’ Last time you said that, she teleported my gold chain into a Shark Gang member’s colon."  

Fozi: "On our way. Bringing whiskey."  

Ren: "¿Whiskey para el bebé?"  

101’s transmission was pure static, overlaid with the sound of something heavy being dragged.  

Lumo muted the feed just as Nova’s bassinet began to levitate—not the gentle hover of anti-grav tech, but the jerky, unnatural lift of a Grey Martian’s telekinesis. Except Nova wasn’t Grey Martian. And she wasn’t touching the Menu.  

Karla paused mid-pose. "Lumo."  

"I see it."  

The bassinet rotated slowly, its mobiles distorting into fractal patterns. Nova giggled, her tiny fingers plucking at the strings of reality itself. A miniature black hole blinked in and out of existence above her forehead.  

Veyth exhaled sharply. "Ah. The spacetime hiccups. My sister had those."  

Lumo sat up. "You never told me I had an aunt."  

"You never asked."  

Karla’s dress solidified into armor. "Focus. Our child is bending causality."  

Nova burped. The black hole inverted, becoming a tiny white sun that bathed the canopy in sterile light. The bassinet’s sensors screamed.  

Lumo sighed, reaching for his daughter. "Yeah, yeah. Very impressive. Now stop before you rip a hole in the universe."  

Nova grabbed his finger. The white sun winked out.  

Silence.  

Then—  

A sonic boom rattled the coast. The Bandits’ saucer tore through the smog, its engines belching plasma, its sleek dome scorched from what looked like a recent firefight. It banked hard, skimming the waves before slamming onto the beach in a spray of lithium-tinted water.  

The Neptune V exploded outward. Ari staggered out, shirtless, gold chain swinging, dragging 101 by one leg. The android’s head was dented, his screen-face flickering between a cracked smile and emergency glyphs.  

"Your stupid clone friend," Ari slurred, "just tried to marry a vending machine."  

Fozi lumbered after them, cradling a crate of whiskey bottles. "To be fair, it was a really nice vending machine."  

Ren floated above the wreckage, black eyes scanning Nova. "La niña está escribiendo en el aire."  

Lumo followed his gaze. Nova’s free hand was moving, tracing glowing symbols only she could see. The symbols lingered, burning afterimages into reality—Zemord glyphs mixed with Corona Council timestamps and something else. Something older.  

101’s screen flickered. "Analysis: Infantile manipulation of quantum strings. Probability of accidental multiverse creation: 6.9%. Adorable factor: 87.3%."  

Lumo sighed. “Look what they did to my boy.”  

Karla snatched the whiskey from Fozi. "We’re doomed."  

Veyth clapped his hands. "Excellent! My first grandchild is a reality bender. When do we test her range?"  

Lumo’s Menu pinged—an urgent alert from Amara. The preview text pulsed crimson:  

"Mul’s fleet just jumped the Phobos line. They’re coming for me."  

Nova squealed, clapping her hands. The whiskey bottle in Karla’s grip turned into a bouquet of glowing snakes.  

Ari grinned. "Yeah. We’re definitely doomed."  

Outside, the waves rolled on. The smog pulsed with the distant light of a dead star. And high above, unnoticed by all, the black serpents in the sky blinked again—  

—laughing harder this time.  

---  

The jump from Phobos to the Spire should have atomized him.  

Amara rematerialized atop the obsidian peak, his boots cracking the ancient stone as the Keri Alu screamed in his skull. Blood boiled in his veins—not his own, but the star-fed plasma siphoned from Corcoran’s corpse. The crown’s twin serpents coiled around his temples, whispering in a language that predated Mars.  

"Final wish granted," they hissed.  

Amara spat a tooth onto the rooftop. The spire stretched beneath him, its shadow cutting through the digiton smog like a blade. Across the city, the MARS sign flickered—not from glitches, but from the weight of his gaze. He’d butchered a star. Toppled dynasties. Now the Spire hummed beneath his feet, a tuning fork struck by god-killing hands.  

"Final?" Amara growled. "We had a covenant."  

The serpents laughed, their voices fractal. "You are Zemord’s sword, not its master."  

Wind howled through the spire’s jagged architecture. Somewhere below, his advisors were screaming into Menus, scrambling to parse the impossible energy readings. Let them choke on the data.  

Amara flexed his fist. The Keri Alu pulsed, its golden coils tightening around his skull. "I reshaped the fucking sky. You don’t get to walk away."  

For a heartbeat, silence.  

Then the serpents unwound.  

Their metallic bodies slithered free of the crown, spiraling into the air like smoke given sentience. Amara’s vision doubled—suddenly he was staring at himself from above, a metal-plated giant drenched in starlight and hubris. The serpents orbited him once, twice, before dissolving into the smog.  

"We do not walk," their voices echoed. "We ascend."  

The crown clattered to the rooftop, inert.  

Amara scooped it up, his fingers denting the gold. "Cowards."  

Then the sky ripped.  

It started as a glitch—a single frame of wrongness in the smog’s perpetual churn. Then the tear spread, jagged as lightning, revealing the void behind reality. Something moved in the black. Something with too many legs.  

Amara’s Menu shorted out in a burst of static. His last functioning retinal display flashed a single warning:  

[PATTERN RECOGNITION: CRAWLING MOTHER]  

The thing peeled itself through the rift, limb by barbed limb.  

It was all angles and blasphemy, a spider-crab nightmare woven from collapsed starlight. Its carapace shimmered with the same diamond patterns as Mul’s skin, each facet reflecting a different screaming timeline. Eight eyes burned with the cold light of dead quasars, fixing on Amara with something almost like amusement.  

The Crawling Mother settled atop the Spire, its bulk warping the obsidian beneath it. The air stank of ionized fear and something older—the musk of a predator that had hunted civilizations when Mars was still magma.  

Amara bared his teeth. "Mul’s patron."  

The creature’s mandibles flexed. When it spoke, the voice was Mul’s, layered with a chorus of dying stars:  

"Hello, old friend."  

Amara’s grip tightened on the Keri Alu. Useless now. A dead god’s trinket.  

The Crawling Mother scuttled closer, its shadow swallowing the rooftop. One claw-tipped leg tapped the crown in Amara’s hand, the sound like a glacier cracking.  

"You murdered my rival’s children," it mused. "Reduced their constellations to cinders. And for what? A throne?"  

Amara met its gaze. "I don’t kneel."  

The creature’s laugh vibrated through the spire, shaking dust from its peaks. "No. You strike. Like a hammer. Like a child." It leaned in, its breath frosting Amara’s metal plating. "But even hammers break."  

Somewhere below, the city trembled. Sirens wailed. Karla’s statue wept black tears that burned through pavement.  

Amara cracked his neck. "You here to kill me, or just monologue?"  

The Crawling Mother’s eyes gleamed. "I’m here to offer a trade."  

A claw unfolded, revealing a swirling vortex of trapped light. Inside, Amara saw Mul—or what remained of him. His diamond skin had been peeled back, revealing the raw code beneath. His screams were silent, his form reshaped into a living cipher.  

"His fleet for your heir," the Mother purred.  

Amara’s blood went cold. "Nova."  

The vortex shifted, showing the beach villa. The baby floated above her bassinet, giggling as she rearranged the fabric of spacetime with clumsy fingers. The Bandits stood frozen mid-brawl, caught in a time-lock even Ari couldn’t punch through.  

"The first hybrid of your bloodline and Karla’s stardust," the Mother crooned. "A key to every lock. A bomb waiting to detonate."  

Amara’s fist connected with the creature’s nearest eye.  

The impact shattered his knuckles. The Crawling Mother didn’t flinch.  

"Ah," it sighed. "The hammer speaks."  

Then the rooftop collapsed beneath them, and the Spire swallowed its king whole.  

---  

The hammock swayed in the salt breeze, its repulsor field humming softly against the rust-colored waves of Aura Beach. Lumo lay sprawled across it, one arm behind his head, the other cradling Nova against his chest. The baby was—for the moment—not rewriting spacetime, not vomiting liquid digitons, not summoning miniature black holes above her bassinet.  

Progress.  

On the wavecast hovering above them, pundits bickered like seagulls over a corpse.  

"—unprecedented mineral wealth from Corcoran’s supernova remnants! The Corona Star System will feast on stellar nutrients for generations—"  

"Governor Amara didn’t destroy a star, he fertilized the cosmos!"  

"Tell that to the Corcoran refugees whose ships got caught in the gamma-ray burst—"  

Lumo muted the feed with a thought. Nova gurgled, her tiny fingers batting at the air. Her skin—pale blue with Karla’s freckles—glowed faintly under Mars’ smog-choked sunlight.  

"You hearing this garbage?" Lumo murmured. "They’re spinning a genocide into a goddamn economic miracle."  

Nova sneezed. A single digiton spark flickered between her nostrils before fizzling out.  

Lumo grinned. "Yeah, exactly. Bullshit."  

The balcony door hissed open. Karla stepped out, her Atkan dress shifting between liquid gold and warning crimson as she scanned the horizon. The supernova’s afterglow still painted the smog in hues of violet and gold, a cosmic gravestone for a murdered star.  

"They’re calling him a visionary," she said dryly.  

Lumo snorted. "They called Pitt a philanthropist after he donated those orphanages."  

"To be fair, he did donate them."  

"After he burned the originals down."  

Karla smirked, settling onto the hammock’s edge. Nova cooed, reaching for her mother’s hair. The strands shimmered between Karla’s fingers, reacting to the baby’s untrained Menu surges.  

"Still no word from Amara?" Karla asked.  

Lumo’s four eyes flicked to his dormant Menu. "Not since the Spire ate him."  

Nova’s tiny fist closed around a lock of Karla’s hair. The strands turned cobalt where she touched them, then began unraveling into fractal patterns.  

Karla arched an eyebrow. "She’s deconstructing my DNA again."  

Lumo pried Nova’s fingers open. The hair reknit itself. "Just saying hello."  

The wavecast unmuted itself—a glitch, or maybe Nova’s doing. A new voice blared:  

"—breaking update: Mul’s fleet has withdrawn from Phobos! Eyewitnesses report the ships were ‘consumed by shadows’ before vanishing—"  

Lumo and Karla exchanged a glance.  

Then the beach exploded.  

---  

The shockwave hit like a god’s hammer. The hammock’s repulsor field failed, dumping them into the sand. Nova shrieked—not in fear, but delight, her tiny hands clapping as debris rained around them.  

Ari’s voice crackled through Lumo’s Menu: "Hey, Blue. You might wanna look up."  

Lumo did.  

The sky was bleeding.  

A jagged rift tore through the smog, revealing the obsidian underbelly of the Crawling Mother’s domain. Mul’s diamond-armored fleet hung suspended in the void, their hulls half-dissolved into fractal patterns. And at the center of it all—  

Amara.  

Or what was left of him.  

His metal-plated skull gleamed under the dying star’s light, the Keri Alu’s broken coils still fused to his temples. His cape was gone, his armor cracked, his body wreathed in the same black tendrils that had consumed Mul. But his eyes—  

His eyes burned.  

The Crawling Mother’s voice vibrated through the beach, shaking the villa’s foundations:  

"YOU WERE WARNED, LITTLE KING."  

Amara’s grin was all teeth. "And you were stupid."  

He raised his fist. The tendrils convulsed. Then—  

The Crawling Mother screamed.  

---  

The telepathic blade cut through Amara’s skull like a hot wire through ice.  

It came from nowhere—no warning, no ripple in the smog, just sudden white agony as the Zemord Council’s collective will carved into his cortex. His vision split. Blood boiled in his nasal passages. The Keri Alu, still fused to his temples, shrieked in a language older than pain.  

"YOU DISOWNED US."  

Their voices were a chorus of collapsing stars, vibrating through the marrow of his bones.  

Amara spat a mouthful of teeth onto the Spire’s observation deck. The city below flickered—Corona Hills caught mid-glitch, its towers frozen between seconds. He grinned through the blood. "Took you long enough."  

"THE SERPENTS ABANDONED YOU."  

"Yeah." Amara flexed his fist, feeling the Phobos Ring’s energy coil in his knuckles. "Then I killed their kids."  

The next slash came from all directions at once.  

A thousand digiton blades—manifestations of the Council’s fury—ripped through the air. They cut at planetary distances, unbound by physics, each edge honed on the dying screams of a thousand timelines. Amara’s left arm came off at the shoulder. His right knee exploded. The Spire’s obsidian peak liquefied where the blades passed, molten rock raining onto the city below.  

He didn’t scream.  

He laughed.  

"Nice trick." Amara’s remaining hand twitched. "Here’s mine."  

The teleported bombs detonated inside the Council’s chambers.  

---  

Three hundred kilometers above Mars, the Zemord Sanctuary flashed like a newborn star.  

The orbital fortress—a gilded mausoleum of living metal and stolen chronometrics—unfolded in a series of silent, perfect explosions. Councilors died mid-sentence, their diamond-threaded robes vaporizing before their screams could escape. The shockwave rippled outward, distorting the smog over Corona Hills into a grotesque parody of Amara’s face.  

Lumo saw it from the beach, his four eyes reflecting the firestorm. Nova giggled in his arms, clapping as the sky burned.  

"Papa," she cooed.  

Karla’s Atkan dress turned black. "He’s fighting the whole damn Council."  

Ari materialized beside them, reeking of whiskey and plasma burns. "Nah. He’s winning."  

---  

Amara stood in the eye of the storm, his blood painting fractal patterns on the Spire’s broken deck. The Council’s counterattack came in waves—telekinetic slashes that split mountains, digiton pulses that rewrote local gravity, even a few half-assed attempts at temporal paradoxes.  

Pathetic.  

He’d butchered a star. These bureaucrats with their ceremonial blades and committee-approved wrath were nothing.  

The Keri Alu pulsed once—a dying ember of its former power—and Amara seized the nearest Councilor’s mind across three hundred kilometers of vacuum.  

Got you.  

He didn’t bother with finesse. Just reached into the man’s skull and pulled.  

On the Sanctuary’s observation deck, High Prelate Vexus suddenly clutched his head. His eyeballs liquefied first, pouring down his cheeks like molten glass. Then his cranium inverted, the bone folding inward in a wet crunch. His last thought wasn’t fear or prayer—just dull surprise as his brain matter painted the Zemord sigil at his feet.  

Amara tossed the psychic husk aside. "Next."  

---  

Lumo’s Menu pinged—an encrypted wave from Mul’s last known coordinates. The message was pure static, but the timestamp glitched between two impossible dates:  

Yesterday. Tomorrow.  

Nova reached for the flickering glyphs, her tiny fingers passing through the hologram. Where she touched, the static resolved into a single frame—Amara standing atop a mountain of corpses, the black serpent coiled around his throat like a noose.  

Then the image inverted.  

The corpses were alive.  

And they were laughing.  

---  

The battle raged beyond physics, beyond reason.  

Amara teleported a black hole into the Council’s archives. They retaliated by rewriting his personal timeline, briefly aging him into a skeletal wraith before he punched through the temporal lock. He shattered a Prelate’s consciousness across eleven dimensions. They infected his remaining arm with a memetic virus that made his cells forget how to breathe.  

Still, he grinned.  

Still, he killed.  

The Spire trembled beneath him, its foundations groaning under the weight of so much concentrated wrath. Somewhere below, the city burned—not from the fighting, but from the sheer pressure of two unstoppable forces colliding.  

Then—  

A new presence.  

Cold. Hungry. Ancient.  

The Crawling Mother’s voice slithered through the battlefield:  

"ENOUGH."  

Amara’s vision went black.  

The last thing he saw before the void took him was Nova’s face—not here, not now, but somewhere else—smiling as she reached for the stars.  

And pulled.  

ATILA