"You will not break me."

"Won't I?'

Kazna stood on a smooth black surface, cool black liquid lapped at her toes, and beneath that.... Stone maybe? Or volcanic glass. The room around her was neither cold nor warm, and in all directions there was nothing but black. Only the scene before her was lit, or something similar. There was no light, no source of light, and she couldn't really see.

It was more like she could sense, and her brain interpreted that as seeing.

And right now she was sensing, or sensing, a man kneeling in the blackness. He knelt with both knees on the floor, back and neck bent as if he was being pressed down under a great weight. Every inch of his body trembled with strain, but he kept his kneeling position.

She stepped forward crouching down to look the man in the eye.

He lifted his head slowly, and when he did, his true, inhuman nature shone through. The eyes weren't human.

She laughed, "I like this shape you have taken, dear emperor. Does it make you feel strong? it help you pretend you aren't as powerless as you truly are?"

The man looked up at her and his eyes flashed: they were an odd color, a shade no human eyes had ever been, pink around the irises fading to orange and then to yellow around the pupils, and without a word he spit at her, causing her to flinch back.

The man cackled, "Yes, it does all of that and more."

She clenched her fist.

"You will not break me." Emperor Celex repeated, lifting his chin in defiance.

Kazna paused to stare at hm. Here inside the void, with no physical body of his own, and powered by his anima, Lord Celex had found himself able to take shape into new forms, it was a mostly pointless exercise, but this particular ability caused them no end of trouble.

He had taken this particular shape not long after they had collected his anima, and the shape reflected his mental preparation for them.

Humans.

The hardest creatures to break.

The shape that the emperor had taken was that if an older man approaching his fifties. He was tall, and well built with wide shoulders and a slim waist. His skin was a dark olive, and weathered by deep lines that creased the forehead. From what she knew of humans it was a handsome face, with neatly styled hair and a closely trimmed beard and mustache, which he had opted to keep in the bright colors he had been in life, a choice that clashed only a little with the rest of his appearance.

He looked the way a general or a king should, no longer bound inside the small fuzzy shape of his construct. He was a strong will, and now he had a body to match it. Their attempts to break him were proving annoyingly fruitless.

But no matter, they still had time.

"I would take issue with your behavior, but today I have more important matters to attend. I think you might like to watch."

Lord Celex raised an eyebrow, an expression he seemed to have become annoyingly fond of, "Perhaps I would rather stay here and take a nap. I find your machinations boring and stupid."

"As articulate as ever." She sighed

"Ill show you articulate, you cock goblin, shi-"

Kazna snapped her fingers and his form dissolved, compressing suddenly into a small ball of light which pulsed and hummed angrily as she approached.

The anima DID shine chasing back the shadows in the strange space, and giving her a strange sense of vertigo as the illusion of a room was broken, and she found herself standing, or floating, in a waste of nothingness.

The anima pulsed again, and she couldn't help but marvel at how soemthing so small and inconsequential could have so much power. If harnessed, the anima could produce enough power to equal that of a super nova, or at east this particular soul could.

Not every anima was created equal.

Kazna waved a hand, plucking her void spear from thin air, as pulsing black armor coalesced around her body.

When she moved the void moved with her undulating over her limbs.

It was a hard thing to acclimatize herself to as the armor had no weight, and no heat. It was hard to remember she was even wearing it. The spear itself had a little more weight, but was surprisingly light and fast for its size, the tip so sharp she had to be careful where she rested the spear as it could cut through stone just by resting against it.

She took a deep breath.

It was time.

Around her the void seemed to stir, and she felt suddenly as if there were a thousand eyes upon her, though she knew that was not the case.

The void didn't have eyes.

She reached out with her spear, and the blade forked open into a diamond shape with two prongs allowing for space between the two blades which she used to capture the anima. Her spear hummed with incredible and unfathomable power.

She slammed the butt of the spear into the stone, and the portal opened up before her.

Kazna stepped through with one swift motion, catching the small group of humans completely off guard. Before they knew what was happening, she had speared two of them, and the third only had time to squeak in shock before she too fell dead, her neck snapped cleanly by a single powerful blow.

The three human corpses slumped to the ground, blood pooling in great circles around them, saturating the fabric of their uniforms.

She stood before a large metal doorway.

A strip of bright yellow and black caution tape marked off a safe distance from the hatch.

A sign on the doorway read.

DANGER: RADIATION

She ignored the sign, stepping over the caution tape and forcing the door open.

Sparks cascaded onto the floor as the broken door sparked.

Overhead warning lights began to flash and blink.

WARNING NUCLEAR CORE BREACH.

She continued to ignore the warnings, stopping before a massive metal hatch door closed by an iron wheel one might expect to find on a bank vault.

DANGER: FISSION CORE

The station that they stood in was old, so old that it had not yet been converted to fusion energy, though neither of those things were of particular importance, she had something better in mind. Kazna stepped forward and grabbed the wheel. It should have been far to heavy for her to turn on her own, but she forced it out with barely a grunt of exertion. The lights and sirens overhead began to scream and she stepped inside.

Heat washed over her skin as radioactive decay bombarded her from all sides.

She ignored it, stepping forward and dislodging the housing that held the strange silver ball.

There was a bright flash of blue light as the ball dislodged from its housing at hit the floor.

Heat continued to pound against her skin as radioactive decay attempted to rip her DNA apar, but she wasn't worried.

Below her feet the silver ball began to sizzle and degenerate into a liquid, which quickly began to eat its way through the floor, superheated and heavy enough to consume metal.

But in comparison to the power source she now held, the nuclear elements were piddling and pathetic, barely worth noticing.

It was only a mild inconvenience when the chamber was suddenly flooded with liquid.

Suspended in the water, Kazna reached forward, gently coaxing the ball of pulsing light into the slot which had once held the silver ball.

The housings had been turned off, but that was no matter, she would change that in a moment.

Overhead sirens still flashed through her ears were full of water.

She waved her spear, and a portal appeared spilling her and gallons of eradiated water into the station's command hub.

The humans around her leapt to their feet in shock.

Water splashed over a man sitting to her left, and he screamed as the superheated liquid instantly boiled his skin from his bones.

He was dead within moments.

The command deck erupted into chaos

The commander leaped for communications, and she let him get off his urgent SOS as she took care of the rest of his crew. She batted aside the first weapon that was raised, and skewered the man through the chest with impunity.

His weak human bod slumped to the side as bullets ricochet off her void armor. She turned and clobbered her assailant in the head hard enough to cave in his skull. He slumped to the ground blood oozing from his ears.

She took care of the rest of the room with efficient calmness leaving all but the commander dead on the floor.

His skin was beginning to blister even as she watched, choking out a desperate call to the rest of the UNSC fleet, a horrible accident, a core breach, something on the bridge. He had ordered an evacuation.

They would be too late.

Kazna stepped forward, grabbing the man by the shoulder and tossing him aside.

He landed in the puddle of cooling water hands trembling body thrashing as she took her seat.

They were being hailed from multiple ships surrounding the blackout zone, but she ignored them, reaching forward instead to unflood the core chamber and power the station back u. It didn't take more than a few seconds.

CORE DETECTED PLEASE ENGAGE OVERRIDE

She did as prompted.

And in that moment the station was flooded with power.

Power to the point of overloading.

Lights all over the ship popped and burned out, water was flash heated to evaporation causing pipeline explosions all over the ship. Anything plugged into a charging port was immediately fried, their communications were completely cut.

The only system that was not immediately cut off was forward gun on the main weapons deck.

The most powerful weapon the UNSC had been able to make after an attempt to reverse engineer from weapons schematics that had been lifted from the Omen.

This was Celzex technology designed to fit a human system, and hidden away here on this old space station, which guarded the black void.

Which guarded behemoth.

WEAPONS SYSTEM CHARGING OUTPUT CAPACITY 3,000% AND RISING

"it's time to wake up." Kazna said to herself, reaching out for the joystick

10,000% APPROACHING CRITCAL FAILURE.

This should do it.

Poke the bear until it wakes up.

She depressed the trigger.

The flash of power and light that followed, was blinding, permeating every corner of the station even as metal was flash incinerated. Ten square miles of metal gone in an instant, 15,921 crew vaporized. Ten nearby ships had their outer hulls incinerated evacuating another 10,000 bodies into space. The blackness of the void was burned off as the cloud of dust evaporated, revealing for an instant, the thing that lived at its center.

Just in time for the shot to hit, striking the creature dead center.

***

It happened in seconds, first the mother station, the hub of activity surrounding the black void's protection detail experienced a catastrophic core meltdown, though the chamber was immediately flooded, command deck crew was able to send out an SOS to the remaining fleet describing an attack on the bridge. Moments later distant ships watched as the station was annihilated. The flash of light was so blinding that it overloaded camera systems. 900 people were instantly blinded beyond recovery as they were unlucky enough to be observing the phenomena out observation windows.

They would never recover their sight.

They were lucky.

There was no time to react for the three ships nearest the stations as their outer hulls were removed, and all of the inhabitants were sucked into space.

In the fifteen seconds it took before death, those people vented into space got to share in the horror as the void blackness was burned away.

To reveal behemoth.

The eldritch abomination not meant for this universe or any other, a creature so horrific, so diabolical, so impossible in its construction that 5,000 of the ten vented into space died immediately as a result of heart failure, stroke or aneurism.

They were lucky.

The last 5,000 went to their graves raving mad.

Those who had been blinded earlier were spared from the sight, but their companions were not.

Twenty ships were taken by what could only have been mass hysteria in acceleration....

So many years ago, the infamous incident under the hand of god nebula, where an entire civilian transport had been stranded in space and turned to cannibalism, was nothing compared to what happened aboard those ships in the next ten minutes.

Those reports will never be declassified

In fact they were ruined by a cybersecurity analyst, who couldn't take what he saw, and created a virus so malignant, the entire UNSC system had to be shut down.

Sixty one percent of the investigators who responded to the scene were later committed for psychiatric disturbance.

Forty one percent of those who read the reports were treated for PTSD.

There were only five survivors.

All of them completely blind, all of them deaf.

One woman permanently restrained to avoid committing autocanibalism on herself.

The other four were able to speak.

Two were declared insane.

One refused to speak

The last person remaining, a woman and mother of five in her late forties was the only one to remain coherent. Her hearing was recovered by way of implantation, but even with new eyes, she never regained her sight.

She refused to tell them what she had seen, not because she didn't want to, but because she physically could not, as soon as she tried to speak the words all that came from her lips was gibberish, a phenomena that stopped when she went back to speaking about anything else.

The void itself?

Gone

And no one knew to where