Aetherion_Vox

 Steady beeps of a heart monitor.
 The sterile scent of antiseptic.
  The weight of my own weakness pressing down on me.

 My body had failed me.
 My time had run out.

And yet… I still existed.

 The pain of my body—gone.
 The sterile scent of antiseptic—gone.
 The weight of my own weakness—gone.

No… it wasn’t gone.

Rather, this time, it was replaced—not with weakness, but with something else.

 Power.

Not my own.

 Something different. Something unknown. Something I had only just become aware of.

But before I could comprehend it, I was already a target— under attack, with no choice but to defend myself.

Singularity Error: The Black Hole That Shouldn’t Exist

The Nova Reaper froze, as if recalculating the impossible.

For the first time, its movements faltered—not by design, not as a calculated adjustment, but as hesitation. The System had sent it as an executioner, a force beyond resistance. Yet now, it had to adapt.

And I would not give it the chance.

I lunged forward.

It was not movement in the way planets drifted through space, nor the thrust of a ship pushing against the void. I had no mass to propel, no force to exert.

I bent reality itself.

My singularity warped space, distorting the very fabric of the void. I did not move. I pulled space toward me. Where I was became where I willed to be.

A ripple of force spread outward, a wave of gravitational distortion spiraling through the abyss. Dust and debris did not simply fall toward me—they ceased to exist as separate objects, collapsing inward, stretched beyond recognition before vanishing into my core.

The Nova Reaper reacted too late.

It pulsed, its emerald glow intensifying as it attempted to resist, but resistance meant nothing to a singularity.

The distance between us became meaningless.

The pull of my event horizon surged beyond anything I had ever exerted before, not just a gravitational force—but a fundamental shift in reality itself.

It was being dragged in.

The pressure around its form distorted, the perfect symmetry of its existence fracturing as its edges stretched toward me.

And then—something gave way.

A part of the Nova Reaper fractured. Not by its own will, not by a calculated release, but because I had taken it.

I felt it the moment it entered me.

This was not dust, not shattered remnants of a dead world. It was something else.

The Nova Reaper cut itself free.

A violent pulse of energy erupted from it—a controlled detonation, severing the piece of itself that had already passed the event horizon. The rest of its form surged backward, pulling away from my grasp, distance rapidly increasing.

But it had not escaped whole.

Something of the Nova Reaper remained inside me.

It was not mass. It was not light. It was not energy.

It was something deeper.

Something that rejected me.

⚠ [SYSTEM ALERT]

⚠ [EXECUTION UNIT 01: COMPROMISED]

⚠ [ADJUSTING PROTOCOLS…]

⚠ [SYSTEM RETREAT: OVERRIDE ACCEPTED]

Far in the distance, the Nova Reaper's form flickered.

It was withdrawing.

The System had made its decision. This battle was over.

Because something inside me did not belong.

A force unlike hunger, unlike mass, unlike anything I had ever consumed before—it did not submit. It did not dissolve.

For the first time since my existence began…

I felt something inside me refuse to be devoured.

A Stain in the Void