Chapter 293: Against The Concordat (7)

Adrian recognized each of them immediately. He tried to fight the combined weight of their aura as he spoke up."Yield? I didn’t come this far to take orders from the Emperor’s lapdogs."

He didn’t wait for a response. He knew the Reality Anchor was at critical disruption. He needed seconds, but the Hexad would only give him milliseconds.

He triggered the technique that had deleted Valdis, but this time, he pushed himself into a suicidal overclock, burning his own life force as fuel.

"Void Distortion: Event Horizon!"

The vacuum around Adrian didn’t just swirl; it imploded. He converted the entirety of his remaining mana and a portion of his own biological mass into a gravitational singularity. This wasn’t just a ball of energy; it was a localized tear in the fabric of the universe, a hungry mouth screaming to consume the six gods surrounding him.

The violet event horizon expanded instantly, seeking to swallow Barius first.

But they weren’t Valdis. They fought as a single organism, a flawless machine of destruction. They were the Hexad.

"Primitive calculation," Arbiter Voss, the construct of living metal, hummed. His voice was a thousand overlapping binary streams. He didn’t attack; he tapped the air with a metallic finger.

A wall of translucent, geometric logic materialized in front of the singularity. Voss wasn’t fighting the gravity; he was solving it. He injected a counter-equation into the fabric of space, neutralizing the mathematical constants of the Void.

The singularity shuddered, turned grey, and dissolved into harmless static.

To Adrian’s left, the crystalline woman, Arbiter Zek, raised her faceted hand. "Refract."

The starlight from the neutron star outside, leaking through the tunnel’s tears, was caught in her body and shattered into six trillion microscopic needles of light.

They didn’t hit Adrian’s defenses; they passed through them by vibrating at a frequency that ignored matter.

Adrian screamed. It was a sound that tore his throat raw. He felt six trillion stings as his body convulsed. It felt as though every nerve ending had been dipped in liquid nitrogen and set on fire simultaneously.

His skin charred and regenerated in a sickening cycle of agony, misting the area with blood that vaporized instantly.

He was being dismantled.

"Submit," Barius commanded, stepping closer. The heat radiating from his armor began to boil the blood inside Adrian’s veins. "You are a child playing with fire. We are the inferno."

"Then burn with me!" Adrian roared.

He realized he couldn’t win a contest of power. They were too strong and too coordinated. But he was in his element. This was the Space Tunnel. It was chaos incarnate, and they were trying to force order upon it.

Adrian slammed his bloody hands together, interlacing his fingers. He didn’t target the Arbiters; he targeted the tunnel itself. He channeled the Spatial Resonance through his own bones, turning his body into a tuning fork for entropy.

"Invert!"

The Space Tunnel’s chaotic shards, previously frozen by the Arbiters’ authority, suddenly regained their momentum; but in reverse.

Adrian forced the subspace currents to spiral inward, creating a Dimensional Maelstrom. The floor of the tunnel heaved, throwing the Arbiters off balance for a fraction of a second.

It was enough.

The biological horror, Arbiter Thraxx, screeched as a shard of solidified subspace whipped around and severed three of his tentacles. The distraction broke the perfect hexagonal containment field.

Adrian moved. He was a blur of blue light, dashing not away, but straight toward Arbiter Nyx, the shadow being.

Nyx merged with the darkness of the maelstrom. She appeared in Adrian’s shadow, her blade; a sliver of an extinct moon that radiated absolute cold piercing through his chest.

The blade exited his back.

But Adrian didn’t stop. He clamped his hand over the blade, trapping it inside his own body. He looked into the featureless void of Nyx’s face and unleashed a point-blank blast of pure Void energy from his chest.

Nyx shrieked, a sound of tearing velvet, and dissolved into mist to escape the corruption.

Adrian fell to his knees, the hole in his chest steaming. He was dying. Again. But the chaos he had caused had bought him the one thing he needed.

[REALITY ANCHOR: DISRUPTED.]

[DIMENSIONAL LOCK: LIFTED.]

The invisible cage around the dimension snapped. The oppressive weight that had blocked his connection to the Factory vanished.

’Now!’ Adrian screamed internally.

He didn’t fight anymore. He willed himself into the Factory, but it didn’t happen instantly like it was supposed to.

Instead Adrian felt like a small rift was struggling to pull him in. It was working, but he knew it wasn’t viable.

’Factory! Now!’

Adrian grunted as he tried to help the process. If he could just step through, he would be gone. He would have the Core’s coordinates, and he would be safe.

"He runs," Arbiter Juro noted. The being of sound opened his mouth.

He didn’t scream. He hummed a single, low note. It was the Note of Stillness.

The sound wave traveled faster than thought. It hit Adrian just as his form almost vanished.

The world turned grey.

Adrian’s momentum died. He wasn’t paralyzed; he was paused. The kinetic energy in his body was nullified instantly. He hung in mid-air with his hand outstretched, his face twisted in a mask of desperate hope.

"The Emperor said alive," Arbiter Voss calculated, appearing mid-air with a device made of shifting geometry. "But he did not say whole."

Six hands reached out from the void. They didn’t grab Adrian; they grabbed the space-time coordinates he occupied.

"No... NO!" Adrian fought. His mind screamed commands to the System, to the Tech Core, to the Void.

[Translocate]!

Space warped around him. He tried to tear himself out of their grip, his body flickering like a bad hologram. He felt his skin tearing as he tried to occupy two places at once.

"Do not struggle," Barius said, his hand closing over Adrian’s head. "You are being archived."

The Arbiters began to rotate. The hexagonal formation turned into a centrifuge of conceptual power. They were compressing the space around him.

Adrian’s vision began to fade into digital static. He felt his consciousness being pulled out of his biological frame, categorized, and encrypted.

He saw the Galactic Core one last time. No one could see it except him. But Adrian knew that won’t last for long... All the struggle in the Space Tunnel was beginning to make the Core’s presence leaked slowly.

"I... will... kill...you," Adrian gasped to buy time. But it was of no use, as he was unable to do anything. His voice distorted, slowing down, stretching into infinity.

The red giant clenched his fist and the Space Tunnel fell silent. The violet lightning vanished. The chaotic shards settled into a perfect, sterile grid.

Adrian was gone.

[System Alert: User Connection Lost.]