"LIBRARY"

The portal rippled open like a wound in space—its edges crackling with purple-green ion light, bending the air around it as though reality itself were exhaling. Beelzebub stepped through first, his wasp-like silhouette cutting a jagged shape against the gentle horizon of Aries. Emily followed, her boots touching the grass with a softness that contrasted the ring of metal armor that surrounded us.

Even in victory, Bogn remained what it had always been: a dying world of basalt cliffs, jagged industrial towers, and a sky thick with choking furnace-smog. But something new moved across its decaying bones—a pulse of rebellion, the first in centuries.

The gray world of Bogn stretched endlessly under a dead sky, a place where the horizon seemed carved from ash and sorrow. The air was thick with metallic dust, swirling between fractured towers of once-impressive cities now reduced to jagged skeletons. Every surface was coated in a quiet film of age, decay, and long-abandoned despair—yet all of it was overshadowed by the living presence of the Troll soldiers who belonged to Maladrie.

The atmosphere of the underground metropolis was thick with age — the scent of rusted metal, alien residue, and faint ozone still hanging from millennia of dormant machinery.

The cold winds of Skogheim howled across the frostbitten plains, sweeping through the towering pines that framed the fortified Rus Viking settlement. The sky was a bleak hue of silver-blue, its light refracted through the frozen mist that hung in the air like the breath of sleeping giants. As we approached the massive gates of the city, escorted by the enigmatic Samuel Kin, the sound of machinery and the distant rhythm of forges echoed through the mountain valley.

Serenity and Beelzebub trudged through the wheat field, the air still thick with the residual haze from the explosion that had consumed Maladrie’s fortress. The orange hue of the sky shimmered faintly above them, filtered through clouds of dust and drifting ash. Between them, Haj Tooth’s weight pressed heavy, her armor slick with dark, coagulated blood that shimmered like oil in the dim light. Each step was labored, her breaths uneven and shallow.

On Haj Prime, the afternoon sun burned low across the horizon, turning the green grass land into waves of molten gold. Serenity stood on the ridge of an ancient plateau overlooking the valley below, her white leather jumpsuit reflecting the glow like liquid fire. The tight fit of the outfit shimmered faintly as the wind tugged at her long black hair, whipping it across her shoulders and the elegant curve of her elven ears.

Drifting among the broken remains of Abraxas, our bodies floated weightlessly, half-lucid in the cold void. The shattered fragments of the planet still glimmered faintly in the darkness like dying embers scattered across an endless black ocean. Emily’s hand brushed against mine, weightless, fragile, but her eyes were closed — not in peace, but in exhaustion. Around us, Anisia, Hanna, Cole, Pete, Mathew, Rick, Jimmy, Elizabeth, and even Droid L-84 drifted like ghosts in an int

The black ash fields stretched before us like a cursed plain, swallowing sound and light alike. Each step crunched as though we marched on brittle bones. The air was a bit cold, but it was not the kind of cold that cleansed—it was the kind that lingered in the marrow, as if the land itself resented our presence. Ahead, the mining city loomed like a scar on the world, its jagged spires clawing upward, its walls lined with smoke and strange light.

The makeshift briefing room smelled faintly of dust and mildew, the air stagnant from years of abandonment. The chalkboards were cracked, their surfaces still bearing faint ghostly marks of equations scrawled by long-gone teachers. Broken desks lined the corners, and faded motivational posters clung to the walls by sheer will, their colors dulled to sepia. A projector hung from the ceiling by a single bolt, swaying slightly every time the wind rattled through the broken windo

In the fertile lands of Brimwald, morning sunlight stretched golden across rolling plains. The wheat swayed in a steady rhythm, tall stalks shimmering like rivers of amber under the sun. Irrigation canals cut neat lines through the farmland, their waters glinting in the light, and the distant silhouettes of grain silos loomed like quiet guardians over the colony.

Valrra’s voice came across the ship’s intercom, calm but unmistakably edged with intent. It was short, clipped, a command rather than a request: she wanted Emily and me in the training room. No explanation, no softened tone, just the weight she always carried when something gnawed at her mind.