The news that you are about to be vaporized by an exploding sun has a wonderful way of making you re-evaluate your priorities. One moment, the three most powerful fleets in the sector were locked in a deadly, complicated, and very serious battle. The next, they were all facing the same, very simple, and very final problem.

Emma, from the bridge of the "Odyssey," was the first to act. She opened a broadcast channel to all three fleets, a message sent out into the chaos and the fear. Her voice was not the voice of a panicked commander. It was the calm, clear, and deeply reasonable voice of a grand master in a chess game that had just been set on fire.

"Attention, all fleets," she began, her voice cutting through the noise of battle. "This is Acting Commander Emma of the Bastion Alliance vessel 'Odyssey.' I have a brief tactical update for you all."

She paused for a beat, letting her calm, professional tone sink in.

"My sensors indicate that the local star is in the process of a forced, premature, and very energetic supernova. A shared threat has been detected. My analysis indicates that the probability of our mutual and very messy annihilation is… one hundred percent. I would suggest we cease firing at each other, at least until we are no longer about to be turned into radioactive space-dust."

There was a long, tense silence. For a moment, it seemed like no one was going to respond. The idea of a truce, in the middle of all this bad blood and cosmic philosophy, was a hard pill to swallow.

Then, the first reply came. It was a single, clean, and very logical pulse of data from the Syllogist's flagship. It was the giant, pointy space-rock's way of saying:

Statement: The human's logic is sound. Mutual annihilation is a suboptimal outcome. A temporary cessation of hostilities is the most logical course of action.

Then, a second, more reluctant reply. It was the beautiful, bell-like voice of the Luminary. She was a being of deep, ancient pride, and she did not like being told what to do by a messy, chaotic human. But she also did not want to see her new, perfect, crystalline life forms get vaporized before they had even had a chance to be properly, motionlessly perfect.

"Very well," her voice sang, the sound a little bit strained, like a beautiful bell that had just been rung with a wrench. "A truce. For now."

And just like that, the chaotic, three-way battle stopped. The guns fell silent. The fleets, which had been trying to kill each other just a minute ago, now just floated there in the quiet, tense space, all of them staring at the rapidly brightening, and very angry-looking, sun.

A temporary, and deeply, deeply untrustworthy, truce had been formed.

It was time for a meeting.

A shared, holographic bridge was created in the space between the three fleets. On one side stood Ryan and Emma, representing the scrappy, hopeful, and currently very stressed-out Bastion Alliance. On another side stood a perfect, shimmering, holographic avatar of the Syllogist's crystal form, radiating pure, clean logic. And on the third side stood a glowing, beautiful herald of the Luminary, a being of pure starlight who looked deeply annoyed to be in the same room as all this messy chaos.

The tension in the holographic room was so thick you could have used it as a shield. The three of them were mortal enemies, representing three completely different ideas of what the universe should be. And now they had to work together.

Ryan, however, did not treat them as enemies. He did not come to the meeting with anger or accusations. He came to the meeting like it was a very strange, very high-stakes business negotiation. He looked at the two powerful, ancient, god-like beings who had just tried to kill him and his friends, and he treated them like colleagues who were facing a complex, and mutually annoying, problem.

"Alright," he began, his tone calm and professional, as if they were all just engineers trying to fix a broken engine. "The star is going to explode. Our collective power is not enough to stop it. We need a new plan. Syllogist, what are the energy readings on the star's core?"

The Syllogist, a being that was used to being the smartest thing in any room, was slightly taken aback by this direct, no-nonsense approach. It had expected pleas, or threats, or messy, emotional outbursts. It had not expected to be treated like a team member.

The star's core is undergoing a forced, hyper-accelerated fusion cascade, the Syllogist replied, its logical mind automatically answering the question. The event is irreversible.

"Luminary," Ryan continued, turning to the glowing, starlight herald. "Your ships are masters of energy manipulation. Can you create a field that could contain the initial blast?"

The Luminary's herald, also surprised by Ryan's calm, professional tone, found itself answering. "Our power is great, but a supernova… that is the death of a god. We cannot contain such a force."

This strange, unexpected act of treating his god-like rivals as equals, of respecting their power and their knowledge even as he completely disagreed with their life-destroying philosophies, was a unique kind of charisma. It momentarily disarmed them. It forced them to see him not just as a chaotic, messy weed to be pulled from the garden, but as a fellow player in the game, a leader who was, in this one, specific, and very urgent moment, in charge.

They worked together, the three of them, their minds a strange and powerful mix of chaotic human intuition, cold machine logic, and ancient, life-shaping energy. They quickly came to a single, terrible conclusion.

There was no way to stop the supernova.

But Zara, back on the bridge of the "Odyssey," had an idea. It was a crazy, desperate, and probably very stupid idea. In other words, it was exactly their kind of plan.

"We can't stop the explosion," she explained, her voice a rush of excited, scientific brilliance. "But maybe… we can put a box around it."

Her plan was to use the Reality Loom. She proposed that they could use its immense, reality-weaving power to "weave a patch" in spacetime, to create a small, temporary, pocket dimension right around the dying star. The star would still explode, but it would explode inside the box, and the explosion would be contained, at least for a little while.

But there was a catch. The power required to weave a box big enough to hold a supernova was… immense. Astronomical.

"The Loom can do it," Zara said, her voice now a little more grim. "But it will take everything it has. It will completely drain the artifact of all its power. It will be left completely inert, completely vulnerable, for a very long time afterwards."

They would have to sacrifice their greatest weapon, their ultimate strategic advantage, just to survive the next few minutes.

The choice was a terrible one. But it was the only one they had.