The playful glint in Virus's eyes vanished, replaced by a spark of genuine, irritated fury. "Tsk. Those annoying, buzzing pests!" she hissed while straightening her form.

The crimson wings flexed, scattering the residual plasma like droplets of water. Then, the irritation melted away, replaced by a slow, sinister smile that promised unimaginable retribution.

"Mmm~? I have a wonderful idea," Virus purred, her voice dripping with a playful evil.

She raised a single hand, not toward the enemy fleet, but toward the dormant Solar Titan within its stellar prison. Tendrils of her unique crimson energy, like threads of living code, snaked out from her fingertips and plunged into the rift.

They did not attempt to wake the Titan. Instead, they began to hack it, to rewrite the fundamental protocols of its ancient slumber. The fiery giant stirred, not with purpose, but with a system-wide corruption. The red sun's energy, once a stable power source for its rest, now flared violently, feeding a new, malignant directive.

"Let's give their weapons a bigger target to shoot at," Virus whispered, her grin widening into something truly terrifying. "And let's see how their brave little fleet fares when their own salvation becomes their doom."

"What are you doing?" Cleo's voice was a mixture of calmness and horror. "You cannot truly be attempting to hack the Solar Titan. Its core protocols are a labyrinth of ancient code, protected by firewalls that predate our empire. Not even I, with my Empress-class authority, could hope to breach them."

Virus merely offered a wider, more sinister grin, her form effortlessly blurring through the void as she evaded the concentrated fire of the entire enemy fleet.

The lasers and plasma bolts seemed to move in slow motion around her, a trivial nuisance to an entity who had just brushed the lower realms of Tier 7.

"Well, you were always too young to be taught the truly interesting family history, my cute little sister~," Virus said in a soft voice.

"But when our dear father still walked among the stars, there was a rebellion. A brilliant, mad general who thought he could seize the throne by turning our greatest protector against us. He tried to do exactly what I am doing now. And guess what happened?"

She paused, watching the dawning comprehension and dread on Cleo's face. But before Cleo could form a question, the universe answered for her.

Deep within the heart of the red sun, within the silhouette of the Titan, a pair of eyes ignited. They were not merely golden; they were twin supernovae, burning with the fury of a betrayed god.

The mere act of its awakening sent a shockwave through the fabric of spacetime. Space itself fractured like glass, jagged, weeping cracks ripping open across the sector.

These weren't gentle portals; they were violent, chaotic wounds in reality, and anything unfortunate enough to be in their path, be it asteroids, ship debris, or light itself... was instantly sheared away into nothingness.

From the bridge of his flagship, the envoy of the Free Colonies watched his entire armada, his grand and mighty fleet, be outlined against the growing inferno. His face, a mask of arrogance moments before, slackened into pure, unadulterated terror. "...Oh shi—"

His final curse was swallowed whole. From the multitude of space cracks, not void, but concentrated solar flares of impossible intensity erupted.

They were not flames as science understood them, but lashing tendrils of fundamental stellar fury. The entire fleet, every ship, every life, was not just destroyed; it was unmade, vaporized into its constituent atoms in a silent, blinding flash of light and heat.

For the first time since the fall of the Kaelzars, the new races that now scurried across the galaxy witnessed a ghost of its true, terrifying power. The entire sector became a tapestry of fire and broken space, a crimson hell where flames burned in the airless void, fed by a power that defied all known laws.

To the ancient beings and peak powerhouses scattered among the stars, the signature of this event was unmistakable. This was not the work of a Tier 7. This was the might of the theoretical, the legendary, the god-like Tier 8.

The ripple was felt not just locally but across the galactic web. Billions of light-years away, in the deepest abyssal trenches and within the cores of dead stars, dormant leviathans and ancient Titans stirred from their aeons-long slumber.

They felt the psychic scream of the Solar Titan's awakening, the return of a presence that was supposed to have been extinguished with its masters.

Far, far away, in a pristine, silent observatory that floated in a different realm entirely, a lady dressed in immaculate white stood before a panoramic window.

She did not need instruments to feel the tremor in the cosmos. A calm, charming voice, laced with a subtle, knowing amusement, spoke from the shadows behind her.

"Was this also part of your plan, sister?"

The lady in white did not need to turn. She knew the voice as intimately as the silent music of the spheres, a melody she had listened to for eons.

And if that were not proof enough, the very air around her shifted, filling with the profound, verdant scent of ancient forests, rushing rivers, and towering, unyielding mountains... the essence of life itself given a fragrance.

"This was not a variable I had accounted for, you know?" the lady in white said, her tone cool and measured as she finally turned to face her sister.

Before her stood Gaia, the Titan of the humans maternal world, the matriarch whose silver bloodline was the root of humanity, the only known existence in the entire galaxy to have ascended to the mythic Tier 9.

"And you expect me to believe you were ignorant of that machine's existence? The very one that slaughtered four of our kind!?" Gaia's voice, though a scream, was a force of nature.

With her outburst, tendrils of vibrant life energy leaked from her, causing ethereal flowers and creeping vines to bloom across the sterile, grey surface of the moon.

But the lady in white's dominion was absolute; the flora withered as quickly as it appeared, crumbling into cosmic dust, a silent testament to the unbreachable laws that governed even a Tier 9.

"Such accusations are—" the lady in white argued back; her voice was still calm, but she was abruptly cut off.

A spasm of pure, undiluted terror wracked Gaia's form. Her eyes widened, the galaxies swirling within them churning in chaos. Her legs buckled, and the mighty Titan, the protector of worlds, fell to her knees as if her strings had been cut.

"Sister! What is it? What's wrong?" The lady in white's composure shattered. She rushed to Gaia's side, her hands hovering, unsure. Gaia was trembling uncontrollably, her breaths coming in ragged, distorted gasps. It was the raw, helpless fear of a child staring into the absolute dark.

Gaia's terror-filled eyes finally focused on her sister's concerned face. "I... I can feel it..." she stammered, her voice a mere whisper against a coming storm.

"A presence... a hunger from beyond the galactic rim. Something more dangerous than anything we have ever faced is coming! Even I... I won't be able to stop it!" The confession was torn from her, an admission of weakness that was as terrifying as the premonition itself.

A cold knot tightened in the lady in white's stomach. "What is it, sister?" she asked again, her own voice now barely a whisper. The contagion of Gaia's dread began to seep into her, a chill that bypassed all her defenses and calculations.

Gaia clutched at her sister's robes. "The Void... it prepares to invade once more. But this will not be like the skirmish three hundred years ago..."

"The scale... the size of this invasion... it is a tide that will devour everything. It has the power to wipe the current powers from existence, to scour the galaxy clean!"

Meanwhile, far from the unfolding conversation between Gaia and her sister, Rex was lost. The cataclysmic force of the void gem had hurled him away like a leaf torn by a hurricane, and now... and now he drifted in a realm of absolute nothingness.

There was no ground beneath his feet, no sky above his head... only an endless, suffocating dark that pressed in from all sides.

The only light in all that immense black was his own. The dim, steady glow from his power armor illuminated the immediate space around him, a tiny bubble of existence in the infinite.

The soft radiance of his wings cast long, shifting shadows behind him, but they fell upon nothing, swallowed by the abyss before they could even fully form. He was a solitary star in a universe that had forgotten light.

A cold knot of dread tightened in his stomach. "So… just where the hell am I?" His eyes, wide and straining, scanned in every direction.

Left, right, up, down... it was all the same. A seamless, unbroken curtain of the deepest dark he had ever known. Instinctively, his fingers went to the communication device mounted on his forearm, its screen a familiar comfort.

But for the first time in his entire life, the device showed him something he thought was impossible. The screen was utterly blank. No scrolling data, no friendly ping of a network, not even the faintest whisper of a signal. "No signal, huh?" he muttered, the words sounding hollow in the profound silence. "Just where am I, seriously?"

The question hung in the air, unanswered and terrifying.

And then, he saw it. A shift in the darkness, a movement so vast and slow it was almost imperceptible. It was not something he saw with his eyes so much as felt in his bones, a change in the pressure, a stirring in the void. "Mmm?" A low grunt escaped him, his body tensing instantly. "Oh, hell no..."