Chapter 16 — The Scar of the Star-Tracks

The sick-purple haze shattered against the battered hovercar.

The deeper into the Decay Dead Zone's core, the more bizarre and disordered the physical laws. Great sunken blocks of Tartarus's main-continent hung like inverted death-mountains, suspended silent in the gravity-unbalanced black void. The air teemed with high-density decay particles that, striking the hovercar's radiation armor, made a fine-rain, teeth-aching crackle.

"Warning! Number Three gravity direction-finder fused!"

"Warning! Magnetic deflection past critical — navigation map fully failed!"

On the console, warning reds flashed frantic as mad; Lyra's brow was all cold sweat, her two fingers dancing wild on the holographic rune-board, yet could only watch the locator star-chart become a tangle.

"Damn! The physical constants here are forcibly distorted!" Caleb white-knuckled the hovercar's control-stick; his cybernetic eye's red light stretched urgent. "The gravity field ahead's wound into an eddy — push further and the frame gets wrung to a pretzel!"

"Cut power to manual. Follow my calls to evade."

Elias stepped to the forward viewport.

In this decay dead zone where even precision instruments went dead, Elias felt the Anomaly frequency surging in his blood-deeps, trembling near-instinctively.

No gauges. No star-chart.

In his sense-world, those unseen higher-dimensional gravity-traps and micro-black-holes were like spider-webs brutally torn. He could clearly "see" where the physical law's blind spot lay, where the lethal death-gap was.

"Hard left thirty degrees — clear that floating titanium deck!"

"Dive! Through the gravity-hollow ahead!"

Elias's commands were cold, precise, decisive. Caleb bit down and wrenched the controls; the hovercar, a deft black moth, threaded the cliff-walls and distorted gravity-eddies by a hair, skimming death's fangs again and again.

Seated in the back, Umbra watched silent.

She watched Elias, by pure Anomaly instinct, thread this physical ruin torn open by higher-dimensional divine power. A path no Divine Court computer could calculate — the "off-track anomaly" forever unpredictable under absolute order.

"Not leaning on the Astrolabe, not submitting to cause and effect…" Umbra whispered in her heart. "A mortal, by instinct alone, crossing the death-traps the gods left."

Suddenly, the way opened!

The hovercar burst through a thick sick-purple light-curtain and crashed down into the bottom of a vast underground canyon.

The storm and clamor vanished here, eerie — replaced by a suffocating dead silence.

"We… made it," Lyra's voice held a tremor.

The four filed out of the hovercar.

Before them rose the ruins of a military observation station sunk deep in the cliff-walls. The giant higher-dimensional receiving-antennae had long been melted by high heat into twisted metal slag; and at the ruin's heart, a six-sided device of cold metallic luster lay quiet, embedded in crystallized rock.

The Akashic-grade black box!

But before anyone could gasp at finding it, all eyes were seized by the void behind the black box.

It was a sight grand enough to shatter any mortal's reason.

Behind the black box, in the cliff-void, stood a wound hundreds of meters long that had ripped the whole mountain-ridge!

Not a natural rift from crust-movement, but a vast scar stretched directly across space and dimension! Inside the wound was no rock, no matter — only a dead-light blacker and more absolute than deep space. At its edges lingered wisps of golden holy-light ember and black dark-matter negative energy, two serpents locked jaw-to-jaw, ceaselessly tugging, annihilating, and spewing destructive radiation on the wound of time-space.

The Star-Track Scar!

That was the permanent scar on the universe's physical structure, left when Astra the God of Light arrogantly forced holy light to suture the planet-core, and then Umbra the God of Darkness executed the Silent Strike to shear the star-tracks!

"My god…" Lyra collapsed to the ground, eyes full of unspoken panic and awe. "This… what is this? Some physical law utterly erased!"

Caleb too was rooted by the grandeur and cruelty, his cybernetic eye shuddering under the black dead-light, his weathered face full of dread at the cosmos's ultimate might.

Only Elias stood foremost.

He stared at that vast scar shedding absolute-dark energy, chest heaving. In his palm, the half star-core pendant his sister left suddenly blazed with a heat beyond ever before!

He felt it.

The black dead-light shedding from that scar — identical to the dark that swallowed his sister Aira on Tartarus's destruction night! Same source, same frequency, as the higher-dimensional negative energy flowing in his body!

"Gods… this is your lofty handiwork…" Elias's voice was raw to the limit; each word gnawed from between his teeth like ice-iron.

He crossed the cold rock, step by step, toward the six-sided black box sunk below the scar.

The black box's surface was coated with a thick higher-dimensional crystal barrier; the outer console was long dead. Under the Divine Court's rules, mortals had no clearance to decode such Akashic-grade secrets.

But Elias did not hesitate.

He pressed his palm hard to the black box's core crystal interface, and with his other hand slammed the half star-core remnant onto the interface's edge!

"Open for me!"

Elias clenched his teeth, forcibly driving the higher-dimensional dark energy and Anomaly off-track frequency surging in his blood. That higher-dimensional negative energy raging in his body he turned, by brutally cruel means, into a violent electromagnetic pulse — like a long needle, driven hard through his palm deep into the black box's physical crystal lattice!

He used the higher-dimensional negative energy in his body as the forcibly-overloaded "energy source," and by the star-core remnant's same-frequency resonance, directly jumped the Divine Court console's clearance lock!

Hum——!!!!

On the once-cold dark six-sided device, dense higher-dimensional runes spread like flowing gold under the negative-energy overload! The black box's inner higher-dimensional lattice was forcibly activated; a vast projection-beam shot skyward, straight into the Star-Track Scar in the half-air!

In a breath, the higher-dimensional echo burst like a towering wave, roaring open in the whole canyon's depths!

That was the sound and law-pulse of Tartarus's destruction night, fully recorded by the black box!

Boom—!

The energy back-wave the higher-dimensional echo stirred crashed wild in the narrow canyon.

Standing at the rear, "Vespera's" thin clothes whipped violent in the storm. With the black box's activation and the Star-Track Scar's roar, the secret higher-dimensional dark energy on her body trembled, uncontrollable, with a faint same-frequency quiver!

A wisp of deep, pure, above-mortal dark-matter airflow flickered and was gone at her pale fingertip.

In this moment, Elias whirled around.

The black box's glaring gold-light and the scar's black dead-light wove across his face, lighting the boy's blood-streaked, kill-intent face like a war-god stepped from hell.

His eyes were cold as a frozen dead-sea; his gaze crossed the flying slag and higher-dimensional echo, locking hard onto the woman behind who called herself "Vespera"!

The black box's echo howled.

The star-track's scar spewed.

And in the black box's activated ten-thousand-foot light, the mortal boy's doubt and hatred finally drove, with the higher-dimensional god's truth, to the edge of eruption!