Lev Dementiev stood on the command deck of his mobile erasure-locus, a sterile chamber of cold alloy and silent screens. Before him, on the far shore of the Vitreous Reach, The Dome glowed. It was a perfect sphere of light, an arrogant declaration of memory held against the tide of true peace. It was a tumor of purpose. And beside it, a stain of rust and grit, the core of the Forge-Crawler Perun was lashed to the land, its crude anchor humming a song of defiance. They had joined. The disease of hope had metastasized. His fury was not a fire. It was the perfect, structural cold of the void between stars, a cold that demanded order. The order of nothingness.
He felt the psychic presence of the alliance, a messy, discordant chorus of fear, determination, and misplaced loyalty. It was a flaw in the fabric of the world, a knot of memory that had to be undone. He raised a hand, not to a console, but to the air before him, as if he could physically grasp the threads of their existence. His followers, a thousand men and women in rags and scavenged armor, waited below, their minds empty vessels for his will. The Mnemonic Vultures, his beautiful hounds of dissolution, swirled in the static-choked air, hungry.
— Erase it all, — he whispered, and the command needed no amplification. It was a truth that rippled out from him, a change in the fundamental state of things.
The assault began. A hurricane of fractured light and shadow, hundreds of Mnemonic Vultures, descended upon The Dome. They were not a flock, but a single cutting edge. With them came the squalls, the chaotic storms of raw, cut memory he had harvested from a hundred dead towns and a thousand broken minds. The psychic noise was a physical force, a wave of screaming static and ghost-scents of burnt metal and forgotten bread that battered the defenders’ thoughts.
The Dome’s shield, a monument to the arrogance of preservation, flickered. It was a memory of ‘containment’ made manifest, and Lev’s Vultures pecked at its conceptual foundations. He watched on his main screen, a display of pure data showing the shield’s integrity wavering. It was a beautiful sight, the slow, inevitable surrender of a complex idea to simple, elegant entropy. The light of the shield thinned, its confident hum turning into a strained, high-pitched whine.
His ground forces moved. The cultists of the Seed of Oblivion charged from the shoreline, their target not The Dome itself, but the crude machinery of the alliance. They swarmed the moorings of the Oceanic Clan’s barge and the exposed conduits of the Perun’s core. Their goal was simple: to sever the alliance’s only means of escape, to pin the infection in place so it could be properly sterilized.
Then came the response. From the base of the Perun, Union 9 crews met the charge. They moved with a grim, practiced efficiency, their movements not the panicked flailing of soldiers, but the deliberate actions of workers with a job to do. They laid down suppressing fire and reinforced barricades with scrap metal and emergency welders. Lev watched them with a clinical detachment. Insects shoring up a doomed nest. He saw a piece of their armor, blasted from a fallen crewman, tumble near his observation point. Stamped into the steel was a crude maker’s mark: a gear with three spokes. A symbol of the flawed premise of building.
The shield’s integrity wavered, its power drain accelerating. It would fail in minutes. The outcome was certain. But then, a new energy signature bloomed on his display, an anomaly that did not fit his calculations. It came from the Perun. The crude Mnemonic Anchor, a device designed to reinforce its own reality, was broadcasting. Not in defiance, but in support.
Irina Pavlenko, the engineer, was routing its power outward, weaving its crude, brute-force memory into the elegant, failing lattice of The Dome’s shield. The two disparate technologies, one of grit and iron, the other of light and theory, were working in concert. The shield’s power drain slowed. The flickering stabilized. It was an abomination. A synthesis of oil and starlight, of rust and perfection. It was the disease learning to defend itself.
Lev’s cold fury focused. The synergy was anathema, a violation of the pure, singular nature of the void. It was a messy, collaborative lie fighting against his clean, absolute truth. This could not be permitted. He would not just break the shield; he would shatter the very idea of their unity. He made the choice. He would commit everything to a single point, a final, surgical strike. The price was the expenditure of his entire reserve of gathered oblivion, leaving nothing for a second wave. It would not be needed.
He focused the psychic rage of his followers, the hunger of his Vultures. The chaotic storm of the assault ceased, the noise changing from a hurricane to a focused, high-frequency drill. In his mind’s eye, he saw the ugly three-spoked gear of the Union lock with the arrogant shield-arc of The Dome. A symbol of their flawed synthesis. A symbol he would now erase.
— Focus, — he commanded, his voice a flat line.
The entire swarm of Mnemonic Vultures, hundreds strong, converged. They abandoned their wide assault and formed a single, spinning vortex of non-existence, a spear tip of pure erasure aimed at the weakest point of the reinforced shield. The ground battle fell away into insignificance. This was the true conflict. The singular, focused will of the void against a fragile, patchwork memory of cooperation.
The shield thinned to a film of soap bubble iridescence. The light within The Dome wavered, the artificial sun dimming. The final battle for The Dome, for the very concept of a shared future, had begun.
The air grew still, the psychic noise gone, replaced by an immense and silent pressure. The world held its breath, waiting for the break.
