Chapter 3 — The Amputation of Fate

In the deep underbelly of the Tartarus mines, alarms howled like vengeful ghosts.

Red emergency lights flickered wildly through the dim, close air of the tunnels. Heat past a thousand degrees spewed from fissures in the rock, scorching the heavy steel supports until they groaned, warped, and bent.

"Disaster! The core pressure has breached the warning line!"

At the furnace console, old Barnaby was bloodied, his wrench shuddering in his grip. Staring at the despairing red figures spiking on the main display, he roared hoarsely: "How is this possible?! Half an hour ago the core was still failing — why has some terrifying higher-dimensional energy suddenly been forced straight into it?!"

That energy was the golden holy light Astra, out of salvation and mercy, had forced down from the highest Sanctum.

Yet to this wasteland world, already fragile to the breaking point, that vast holy energy was no nourishing rain — it was an overdose of poison that could burst a heart in an instant.

The forcibly poured light did not heal the collapsing core. Instead, like a spark flung into a pile of tinder, it ignited the unstable dark matter that had accumulated in the core over tens of thousands of years. The core's temperature exploded dozens of times over within seconds; a monstrous surge of energy-overpressure, like a rabid beast, slammed again and again against Tartarus's fragile crust.

RUMBLE—!

The ground began to heave. The entire wasteland camp fell into chaos and panic such as it had never known.

Sheds toppled. Heavy high-voltage cables snapped in midair, spitting blinding sparks. Mortals screamed and fled; mothers clutched wailing infants; workers frantically tried to dam the heat-spewing cracks with sandbags.

In the lee of a toppling shed, Elias pinned his sister Aira against his chest, taking the falling steel fragments on his own back.

"Brother! It's so hot… the ground is so hot!" Aira sobbed, her small hands fisting the hem of Elias's coat.

Elias clenched his teeth. His back smoked where a flying shard of hot iron had seared it; the agony nearly drove him to black out. He tilted his head back, bloodshot eyes glaring through the rising smoke and black dust, up at the sky.

Above the wasteland, bright golden halos had appeared sometime without his noticing. They looked so sacred, so warm — yet what they brought this world was the cataclysm that tore its crust apart entire.

---

At the same moment, in the highest Sanctum of the LinBoo Astrolabe.

On the Astrolabe's central dial, the region marking Tartarus had already flared a horrifying blood-red alarm.

"Warning! Gravitational-field overpressure at 400%!"

"Physical collapse reaction spreading to adjacent star-realms! LinBoo Aegis, Third Defense Line — 12% degradation!"

The higher-dimensional warnings echoed urgently through the hall.

Astra watched the scene spinning out of control before her and collapsed utterly to the floor. Her hands shook violently; the golden threads in her palms snapped apart. Infinite regret and anguish welled in her golden eyes:

"Why… why did this happen… I only wanted to save them… I only wanted to give them a little light, a little hope!"

"Because you are a fool, Astra."

On the far side of the Astrolabe, Umbra's voice was cold as the grave.

In her night-black eyes flickered the absolute, rational chill of physical law. Without hesitation, she raised her hands, elegant and merciless.

Higher-dimensional dark law condensed at her fingertips into countless black law-threads woven in absolute geometric arcs.

"To keep this rotten world from dragging down the entire Third Defense Line in its self-gravitational explosion; to preserve the survival of the Astrolabe's other three thousand star-realms…"

Umbra rose slowly into the air; her black gown spread through the void like a curtain of night. She uttered the decree, cold and final:

"The Silent Strike must be executed."

It was no bombing by nuclear warhead, no bombardment by starship.

It was a god's "amputation of fate" upon the lower-dimensional physical world.

Umbra swept down her hands.

A black radiance beyond the power of human language to name raced along the very bedrock of physical law at a speed ten million times light — and drove straight into the roots of Tartarus.

That black radiance was like a perfectly keen black-hole scalpel, severing Tartarus with absolute precision from the LinBoo Astrolabe's ledger of causality, from the interlocking web of time and space — roots and all.

Deep underground, old Barnaby had not even the time to utter his final curse. Together with the roaring furnace, within a thousandth of a second of touching the black radiance, he was silently reduced to primal atomic dust.

Aboveground — the toppled barracks, the shrieking storm, the crying mortals, the spare rations hanging to dry in a corner, and the row of crooked five-pointed stars Aira had drawn on the wall…

All matter, all sound, all memory and love and hate — at that moment, were silently erased by that absolute black law of amputation.

No roar of explosion. No pillar of fire.

Only a near-cruel, absolute quiet. As if someone had gently closed a heavy book of history — and the hundreds of billions of struggling, breathing mortals within its pages all stopped their hearts at once.

In the final instant the black shadow fell, Elias felt only an indescribable, leaden weight press into his chest. Then all light and sound in heaven and earth were swallowed whole by that all-annihilating darkness.