Chapter 15: Black Bloom Sector

The Black Bloom Sector was silent death.

A void garden where ruined planets bloomed like corpse-flowers, each one mutated by eldritch code and timeless war. Shattered moons drifted like broken halos, orbiting nothing. This was the place the gods abandoned—not because they won, but because they lost.

RAID's mech tore through the atmosphere of a dead biosphere, Sovereign Red gliding with blade-wings open. Behind him, the multiversal breach sparked and pulsed like a breathing wound.

Talis hovered beside him. "This place was a war-morgue. Nothing's alive here."

"Not yet," RAID said. "But something's watching."

He raised his weapon as vines of nanosteel rose from the planet below, twisting like serpents. The ground itself was aware—an ancient biomechanical consciousness infecting the sector.

Then came the scream—a shriek that shattered RAID's mech shielding and made Sovereign Red flinch. The Bloom Warden rose.

I. THE FLORAL WARDEN

A biomech horror crowned in petals made from star-metal, arms of bloated flesh and armor. Its face—a decaying helix of masks from fallen pilots. Each one still weeping.

"You killed everything here," RAID said, standing defiant.

The Warden's voice was a gurgling chorus: "I preserved. I became garden. You are rot."

Talis moved to strike, but RAID stopped her.

"No. Let me garden this one."

RAID launched himself in a whirlwind of burning petals and ruptured code. Sovereign Red split its wings and screamed like a falling sun. Every strike he delivered tore through generations of pain, the history of the sector fighting back.

"Tell your dead," RAID snarled as he plunged his blade through the Warden's root core, "they should've stayed buried."

II. THE MIRROR GARDEN

In the aftermath, RAID and Talis entered a sunken temple under the roots—The Mirror Garden, a chamber that revealed alternate selves.

Reflections of RAID shimmered: one where he became a tyrant, another where he died in Arc One, another where he betrayed Talis.

She saw them too.

"They scare you?" she asked.

"I scare them," RAID said, walking through his reflections like fire through shadow.

In the temple's heart lay a seed—pulsing with unstable energy. A God-Core Fragment, buried here since the Multiversal Collapse.

RAID picked it up. His mech shivered.

III. BLOOMFALL

The sky blackened.

Above, something bloomed—an inverted lotus of bone and thunder, from which descended a squadron of infected mech-angels: The Bloomfallen. Elite units once defenders of the gods, now corrupted and rotting with beauty.

They spoke in unison: "RETURN THE SEED."

RAID crushed it instead.

Explosion.

Reality distorted.

A brutal sky-ballet of mech warfare began—Sovereign Red in mid-air duels, blades flashing, countering swarm tactics, mockery unleashed:

"You pretty things ever heard of pruning?"

One by one, he deleted them from existence—burning their divine code, unmaking them with truth-blades forged from betrayal.

Talis covered him, sniper fire cracking open the Bloomfallen ranks.

RAID tore into their leader, the Petal Apostle, and with a final line:

"Go pollinate hell," he sliced through with Sovereign Red's core blade.

IV. ESCAPE VECTOR

The temple collapsed. The planet groaned.

As they escaped, Talis glanced back. "That seed… you crushed it. Why?"

RAID's eyes narrowed. "It was a trap. Just like every promise they ever made."

A wormhole opened above, unstable, torn from the warping event.

"We ride or we rot," RAID said.

They vanished into it as the Black Bloom Sector burned behind them.