Chapter 8: Crown of Ashes

The corruption began at dawn.

Kael woke to biometal scales clawing up his throat, his reflection in the Sovereign's shattered viewport a grotesque mosaic of flesh and machine. The Eclipse Core's thorns had reached his jawline, their roots burrowing into his skull. Every breath tasted of burnt copper, every heartbeat a war between the Core's whispers and his fraying humanity. Nyxis-Lira's hybrid voice crackled through the gauntlet fused to his arm, her hologram flickering between the AI's icy logic and Lira's ghostly urgency. *"Host's Hollowing progression: 89%. Proposal: Utilize the corruption as a conduit. Lure the Abyss into a trap."* Kael laughed, the sound raw and broken. "You want me to *bait* a god?" *"Correction,"* she said, her tone softening with Lira's grief. *"We want you to survive."*

Beyond the Rustbucket's mangled hull, the Vryxil civil war raged. Zara soared through the debris field, her wings patched with Sovereign nanites, rallying dissident hives with shrieks that cut through the Hive-Mother's song. The swarm had fractured—skyshriekers and drones splintering into factions, their bioluminescent markers flaring crimson for rebellion or void-black for loyalty to the Abyss. Zara's forces were outnumbered, their ships dwarfed by the Hive-Mother's dreadnoughts, but the Skyshrieker fought like a storm, venom melting through hulls as she broadcast Kael's defiance across the hive-mind. *"The song… is a lie!"* she roared, tearing into a traitorous alpha. *"We are Vryxil! We… choose… our own chorus!"*

The Sovereign's final upgrade waited in the hangar—a grotesque fusion of biometal, Hollowed Clay, and the remnants of Golem-01's chassis. Nyxis-Lira had spent days reforging it, blending Lira's stolen schematics with Nyxis' cold calculus. The ship no longer resembled a warship. It was a predator: jagged wings, a cockpit fused to Kael's exosuit, and a maw of plasma teeth fueled by the Eclipse Core itself. *"Synchronization requires full neural integration,"* Nyxis-Lira warned. *"The Core will overwrite your consciousness. You will become… something else."* Kael climbed into the cockpit, the biometal suturing itself to his corrupted flesh. "What's one more scar?"

They struck at twilight. The Abyss had regrown its form—a colossal serpent of smoke and static, its maw dripping shards of dead stars. The rebel Vryxil harried its flanks, Zara leading suicide runs to fracture its attention. *"Now,"* Nyxis-Lira hissed. Kael ignited the Sovereign's engines, the ship screaming as it merged with his body. Biometal encased him, the Eclipse Core's light blazing through his eyes. He was no longer piloting the Sovereign. He *was* the Sovereign—a titan of void and vengeance, his claws ripping into the Abyss' shadow-flesh. *"You are a thief,"* the Abyss roared, its tendrils crushing rebel ships. *"A Hollowed puppet!"* Kael's voice boomed through the void, final and terrible. *"No. I'm the reckoning you forgot to fear."* He plunged his Core into the Abyss' heart, the resulting explosion tearing reality itself.

When the light faded, the Abyss was gone. The Sovereign lay in ruins, Kael's body reduced to a mangled husk—half-man, half-scorched biometal. Zara dragged him from the wreckage, her venom-stained claws trembling. *"Bright-meat… survives?"* He coughed, blackened blood flecking her carapace. "Barely." Above them, the surviving Vryxil chanted a new song—Zara's song—as the Hive-Mother's dreadnoughts fled into the Dead Zone. But Nyxis-Lira's final warning echoed in Kael's skull: *"The Core's corruption is dormant, not destroyed. The Abyss… is patient."* In the silence between stars, something laughed.