The static began to clear. The lullaby fractured into silence. He saw the inside of his own eyelids again—a blessing. The needles withdrew, one by one, each extraction a small mercy.
He was falling through a void made of sound. A child’s lullaby twisted into a dirge. His mother’s voice, but speaking Synthari binary. He tried to scream, but his lungs were full of static. The needles came—ten thousand of them, sewing his eyelids shut, stitching his lips together, threading his nerves into a knot of pure agony. navarch ability cooldown 17.6 seconds degree 100
The Navarch ’s interface pulsed a soft amber in the periphery of Kaelen’s vision. . The number was a heartbeat, a metronome, a death sentence counting backward. The static began to clear
He reached out with his will and commanded the Synthari dreadnought’s reactor to yawn open at the weld seam. He commanded the Indomitable ’s remaining point-defense cannons to fire not at the incoming missiles, but at a specific cloud of debris that would, in three seconds, form a perfect kinetic shield. He commanded the enemy admiral’s left hand to spasm on his command console, initiating an emergency purge of their forward weapon banks. The needles withdrew, one by one, each extraction
But that was a problem for another . For now, he was the Navarch. And the Navarch’s work was never done.
He saw everything . The Indomitable ’s own failing shield generator. The escape pod that would be crushed in twelve seconds if he did nothing. The trajectory of a single piece of shrapnel from the destroyed frigate that would, in nine minutes, pierce the visor of a marine named Orisi on the hangar deck.
1.0 seconds.