CHAPTER 1
The battle cruiser emerged from the clouds like a kilometer-long metal leviathan, its silhouette outlined against a sky that burned in orange and violet tones, as if the firmament itself was oozing cosmic blood. The ship's hull, riddled with scars from previous battles, intermittently reflected the flashes of artillery roaring far below.
Kilometers away, a battle was taking place.
The air smelled of burnt ozone, blood, and something worse: that sickly sweet, nauseating smell left by the **Vacíos** when they died, like rotten flowers in a swamp of molten metal. Two armies of warriors bled out on a plain split by smoking craters that still emitted wisps of toxic steam. Black armor against golden armor. Energy beams crossing the field like divine whips that hissed as they split the air, leaving behind trails of brilliant particles that rained down on the combatants like deadly stardust. War cries mingling with bestial screams in a symphony of death that knew no silence, no pause, no mercy.
The ground trembled under the weight of thousands of feet, claws, and hooves. Footsteps raised clouds of grayish dust that mixed with the smoke from the fires, creating an artificial fog that enveloped the combatants in a blinding embrace. Occasionally, a gust of hot wind—from some nearby explosion—momentarily cleared the curtain, revealing Dante-esque scenes: bodies split in half, warriors dragging themselves with their own entrails in their hands, beasts devouring the fallen while being devoured in turn.
And among them, among all of them, the **Vacíos**.
Tens of thousands.
Black as the space between stars. Formless abominations that moved with a sickly grace, as if the laws of physics were mere suggestions to them. No two were alike. Some had too many legs—twelve, twenty, a hundred tiny appendages moving in hypnotic waves—others had none, moving through undulations of their gelatinous bodies that defied all logic. Circular mouths with rotating teeth that never stopped, that ground incessantly even when there was nothing between them, like phantom jaws accustomed to perpetual destruction. Tentacles sprouting from where tentacles shouldn't be—from an eye, from a non-existent joint, from a point in emptiness where there was no body. Bodies that deformed as they moved, adopting impossible shapes, as if reality itself couldn't contain them and they constantly struggled to exist in a world that rejected them.
From creatures the size of a dog, fast as the plague, that crawled between the legs of combatants to bite ankles and disappear into the shadows, leaving behind a trail of blood and screams. To colossal beasts of thirty meters and more, flying and terrestrial, with multiple tentacles that mowed down entire ranks with a single blow, their limbs so dense that upon impacting armor they produced a dull, deep sound, like funeral bells of flesh and metal.
And in the sky, always higher up, the kilometer-long silhouettes slowly twisted among the clouds like ancient gods awakening from an eternal sleep, their weightless bodies blocking the sunlight for whole minutes, plunging the battlefield into a premature darkness that terrified the combatants more than anything else.
Three enemies. A single slaughterhouse.
In the sky, above that battlefield, another fight was taking place.
At an altitude where the thin air made breathing difficult for any living being, two warriors flew among the smoke clouds, launching attacks that split the air in two with dry snaps that reminded one of giant fabrics tearing. Their bodies left trails of energy—one golden, one crimson—that remained suspended in the air for several seconds after their passing, like luminous signatures of their fury.
One discharged continuous bursts, a torrent of energy that never ceased, a river of destruction flowing from his palms without interruption, keeping the kilometer-long beasts at bay while seeking his enemy's throat. The constant stream of power illuminated his face from below, revealing a grimace of absolute concentration, of pure hatred, of unbreakable will. Each time the beam impacted against his opponent's shield, the air filled with incandescent particles that fell slowly towards the earth like a snowfall of fire.
The other responded with concentrated rays, thunderclaps that made the ground tremble kilometers away, impacts that left craters in the mountains when they missed their target. His shots weren't continuous, but precise, lethal, each one accompanied by a thunder that boomed in the chests of those who heard it, a sound that wasn't just noise but pressure, a shockwave that compressed lungs and made bones vibrate in their sockets.
Their bodies collided. They separated. They collided again. Metal against metal. **Evergía** against **evergía**. Will against will.
When their fists impacted, the clash generated visible shockwaves, concentric rings of pressure that expanded in all directions, making the nearby **Vacíos** writhe in pain or fury. The two warriors were so fast that sometimes they seemed to be in several places at once, their silhouettes replicating and replicating in the air as if time itself couldn't keep up with them.
And around them, the three-kilometer **Vacíos** coiled like cosmic serpents, attacking both without distinguishing sides. Tentacles the size of skyscrapers fell like whips, so enormous that their movement generated hurricane-force winds that diverted the combatants from their trajectories. Impossible orifices opened in their flanks—holes that led nowhere, that were just doors to nothingness—to launch projectiles of corrupted matter that corroded the air as they passed, leaving trails of torn reality, patches of emptiness where sky used to be.
The warrior with the burned face roared as his skin regenerated over the calcined bone. Second by second. New flesh covering the skull. Muscle weaving over nothing. Blood vessels sprouting like red roots. Without pause. Without surrender. A monster that didn't know how to die. The new skin was paler than the previous one, almost translucent, like that of a newborn, and as it formed, the internal processes could be seen: tendons connecting, nerves finding their paths, blood beginning to flow. It was a spectacle as fascinating as it was horrifying, a mockery of mortality that any soldier on the battlefield would have envied or feared.
The other responded with a war cry that wasn't just voice, but pure power materialized into sound, splitting a **Vacíos** tentacle with a single beam, and returned to the charge with twice the fury, his face contorted into a grimace that mixed pain, hatred, and something akin to pleasure.
Neither of them looked around.
Neither saw the cruiser.
Neither knew that their battle, their war, their life, was about to end.
Inside the cruiser, the atmosphere was as cold and sterile as an autopsy room. White, flickering lights illuminated bare metal corridors, where soldiers in unknown uniforms—gray, without insignia, without names—completed a ritual with the precision of those who have done the same thing hundreds of times. Their boots echoed against the metal floor with a hollow, rhythmic sound, like the beat of a mechanical heart.
A ten-meter-high metal sphere floated in the cargo bay, pulsing with a dying light, like a steel fetus in the belly of the ship. Each pulse emitted a deep hum that vibrated in the chests of those present, a sound not so much heard as felt, a frequency designed to resonate with the most primitive fear of human beings.
"The nest is enormous," said one of the soldiers, without emotion in his voice, his eyes fixed on the monitors showing the surface of the battle. "We're talking about hundreds of thousands of egg **Vacíos**. Will this reaper sphere be enough?"
The officer in charge adjusted his uniform with a slow, almost tired gesture. Thirty years of war had erased any trace of humanity from his gaze. His eyes were two bottomless black pits, empty sockets where there once was hope, fear, love. Now they only reflected the cold light of the monitors.
"It's thirty megatons," he replied, flat, without inflection, as if reading a weather report. "The temperature at the epicenter will reach twenty million degrees. It will vaporize everything within a fifteen-kilometer radius. And if it doesn't kill them, they'll launch another."
The soldier hesitated. For an instant, something human crossed his face. A spark. Then it went out.
"Our people too?"
The officer looked at him. Just that. A look.
The colossal airlock opened.
"Everyone."
He pressed a button.
The reaper sphere fell.
Silence.
For three eternal seconds, nothing happened. The world held its breath. The warriors in the sky stopped their fight, sensing something, a collective chill that ran through every living being within a hundred kilometers. The **Vacíos** froze, their impossible bodies trembling with a vibration that wasn't physical, something deeper, more ancient, the recognition of their own annihilation.
Then, a light that didn't illuminate: it consumed.
It wasn't a flash. It was a presence. The light simply *was*, and where it was, reality ceased to exist. Everything—warriors, **Vacíos**, the nest, the earth, the rocks, the air—disintegrated into fine ashes that shone for an instant before disappearing. There was no pain. There was no time for pain. There was only a ceasing to exist, a transition from "being" to "not being" so instantaneous that not even the fastest mind could process it.
A kilometers-wide shockwave swept away what little remained standing, a sigh of death that erased everything in its path, raising a wall of dust and destruction that advanced in all directions like the hand of an enraged god. Millennial trees bent and snapped. Mountains lost their peaks. Rivers evaporated into clouds of superheated steam that rained down again as contaminated water, like tears from a sky weeping ashes.
The wave reached a destroyed village.
It was already in ruins before the explosion. Burned houses, their wooden beams still smoking. Bodies of elderly and children scattered among the rubble, arms extended in gestures of supplication or protection, mouths open in screams that no one heard. A massacre that had occurred hours before, when the lesser **Vacíos** passed through here, when their countless legs and tentacles and rotating jaws swept through the village like a plague, leaving behind only silence and death.
The shockwave shook the remains. Lifted dust. Moved bodies, making them seem alive for an instant, puppets in a macabre play.
And in the middle of it all, a boy of perhaps twelve years old, with wavy dark blue hair, lying on the ground among the corpses of the villagers, on his back, arms open in a cross, opened his eyes.
Saga.
He blinked. The light was too bright, too white. He coughed. The radioactive dust burned his lungs with each inhalation, an acidic fire that reached his bones, but he didn't know that. He only felt the burning. He only knew it hurt. That everything hurt.
He sat up slowly, pressing his palms into the dusty ground. Around him, only death. Faces he recognized without remembering. Neighbors. Friends. Perhaps family. The old man who gave him bread when his mother wasn't looking. The girl he played with by the river. The woman who sang while washing clothes. Or simply poor strangers like him.
All dead.
Their eyes were open. Their mouths, too. They stared at nothing.
On the horizon, a column of black smoke rose as far as the eye could see, so high it seemed to hold up the sky. A macabre mushroom, dense, that seemed to absorb light rather than emit it, a black hole in slow motion that grew and grew, devouring the firmament. The mark of the end.
Saga stood up.
His legs trembled. His hands, too. But he walked. He walked without direction, navigating silhouettes of dust that had been people. Mothers with children in their arms, their bodies fused in an eternal embrace. Warriors with melted armor, metal mixed with skin, impossible to separate. All turned into statues of ash that crumbled with the wind, which carried away pieces of them—a finger, a lock of hair, a frozen smile—and scattered them across the world like seeds of death.
There were no **Vacíos**.
None.
As if the explosion had erased them from the world. Or as if something worse awaited them elsewhere.
In the distance, a mansion on fire, calling to him. He arrived and something about that poor place seemed familiar to him, even though almost everything was already ashes.
The sound of cybernetic horses—metal spider legs striking the ground with dry, rhythmic thuds, a metallic ticking that reminded one of giant clocks—broke the silence.
Ten riders emerged from among the dunes of ash, their mounts moving with that artificial elegance of machines, their eight articulated legs raising small clouds of gray dust with each step. Armor of the Raish Shield, the simplest, those of the fifth shield. The disposable ones. The gold-plated metal identification tags were dented, patched with lower quality materials, some clearly hastily repaired. They were second-class soldiers from the fifth shield organization. The ones sent to the front when there was no one else left.
At the front, a girl.
She couldn't have been more than thirteen years old. Of the Embrys race. Her skin had a soft purple tone, translucent in some areas, as if she had been carved from living amethyst and someone had breathed life into her interior. Her hair, silver with violet highlights that changed with the light, hung loose over her shoulders, strands moving with a breeze that only they seemed to feel. And her eyes... her eyes looked like miniature galaxies. Points of light swirling in impossible spirals, tiny nebulae being born and dying in the space of a blink. To look into them was to look at the cosmos. To look into them was to get lost.
Galáctica.
One of her men—a giant orc with patched armor and a face crossed by scars—leaned towards her, urgent, his voice barely a raspy whisper:
"Commander, we shouldn't be here. We don't have the rank. We're just fifth shield gold plates. If they catch us snooping around... they'll kill us. All of us. You know how the Trinet Empire's high command is with the curious, and especially with their second-class soldiers, like our organization."
Galáctica didn't respond. Her galactic eyes scrutinized Saga, piercing him, reading him in a way he couldn't understand. The boy was there, standing among the dead, covered in ash, trembling. Alive. The only one alive for kilometers.
"A survivor?"
Saga raised his hands. They trembled.
"I... I didn't do anything."
She dismounted with a graceful leap, almost floating. Her boots barely raised dust when they touched the ground. She approached Saga, slowly, like someone approaching a wounded animal that might flee or attack. She scanned him with a device on her wrist—a metal bracelet that blinked with amber lights. The light flashed red.
"Impossible. Zero radiation. Cells intact and **Evergía** intact although weak. As if he had..." she didn't finish the phrase. She looked at Saga with a new intensity. Something shone in her galactic eyes. Curiosity? Fear? Hope?
"A Neo, no I think he's a Nero, perhaps—"
The soldier insisted, nervous, looking over his shoulder as if expecting to see the high command appear at any moment:
"Commander, the high command is coming. Their ships are already in the stratosphere. If you stay, they'll interrogate him with forced memory methods. He won't last a day. You know what they do to those found in prohibited zones."
Galáctica observed Saga. A peasant. A poor peasant boy who shouldn't be there. His clothes were rags. His feet, bare, were bleeding. His gaze was that of someone who has seen too much, who has lost everything, who just wants the pain to stop.
"Flee north," she said, low, only for him, her voice as soft as the brush of butterfly wings. "There's a valley. The only place the **Vacíos** avoid. Never say you saw us. Never mention this. Forget our faces."
"Commander!" the soldier protested, his voice a mix of fear and frustration.
"He'll die on the way," she cut him off, without looking at him, her eyes still fixed on Saga. "No one survives on foot in this dead land. He's... just a Nero child and his **evergía** is as weak as a Neo's."
She mounted in a leap, agile as a feline.
"Or so I think."
They departed at a gallop, their mechanical mounts raising clouds of ash that swallowed them almost immediately, as if they had never been there.
Saga was left alone, looking at his hands. They still trembled. They were still dirty with blood and dust. But under the grime, under the small cuts and bruises, the skin was intact. Like new.
On the horizon, new lights. Massive warships, colossal kilometer-sized, emerging from the stratosphere like cosmic whales navigating an ocean of clouds. Their hulls reflected the light of the setting sun, flashing with a cold and threatening brilliance. The high command. The ones who "interrogate with forced memory methods."
Saga fled, looking one last time at that mansion that seemed familiar to him.
Days.
Or so it felt. Time became liquid, impossible to measure. He ran across infinite plains of cracked earth, where the ground was a puzzle of dry plates that rose like broken tombstones. No **Vacíos**. Only dead land. Gray sky, covered by a layer of clouds so dense that the sun was never visible, only a diffuse and depressing light that cast no shadows. Silence. A silence so absolute that the sound of his own breathing became deafening, that the beat of his heart seemed like a war drum.
And the flashes, of his blurred memories.
The white space. Suddenly, without warning. The world disappeared and there was only light, an infinite light, without walls, without floor, without ceiling. And the voices. The voices that spoke in his head. The infinite corridor of kilometer-long black monoliths rising towards nowhere, gigantic, imposing, watching him, judging him.
*Why did you abandon us?*
He clenched his teeth and kept running, even though his legs burned, even though his lungs begged for air, even though the tears—of pain, of fear, of confusion—mixed with the sweat and dirt on his face.
Finally, when his legs no longer responded, when each step was agony, when the world began to spin and darken at the edges of his vision, he arrived at a valley.
Green.
Lush vegetation. Trees with leaves—real leaves, green, alive—that whispered in the breeze. Grass underfoot, tender, fresh, that bent with his weight. Flowers of impossible colors—electric blues, passion reds, solar yellows—that dotted the landscape like brushstrokes from a painter god. An unnatural oasis in the midst of death, a bubble of life in a world of ash. The air smelled of wet earth, of sap, of something Saga didn't recognize because he had never smelled it: hope.
Saga fell to his knees. He extended a trembling hand and touched a withered plant, yellow, on the brink of death, its wilted leaves hanging like tired arms.
The plant bloomed.
Red petals, alive, impossible, sprouted from nothing, unfolding like silk fans. The stem straightened. The leaves regained their greenness. In a second. In a heartbeat. In a sigh.
Saga pulled his hand away, terrified, crawling backward through the grass. The flower remained there, real, tangible, swaying in the breeze as if nothing had happened. As if it were the most normal thing in the world.
He looked at his palm. For an instant, a flash of white light ran through his fingers, dancing on his skin like small luminous serpents. Warm. Familiar. Terrifying.
The flower disintegrated.
The petals turned to dust. The stem curled upon itself. The leaves rolled up and fell. Only ash remained. Again. Always ash. Always death.
Saga fell onto his back, looking at the sky that was beginning to cloud over, gray clouds swirling over the valley as if heralding a storm. Something shone on his chest—a geometric symbol that hadn't been there before, a spiral of luminous lines that seemed to move, slowly rotating on his skin—but he could no longer see it. The exhaustion was too deep. Darkness closed in around him.
Sleep overcame him.
And as he fell into darkness, as his consciousness slid towards the abyss of the unconscious, he heard two voices, one feminine and one masculine.
The feminine one, mocking, seductive, her words both caress and threat:
"Come back, Saga. Come back. Accept it."
The masculine one, deep, firm, like a father ordering a son to get up after a fall:
"For them, Saga. For them. Do it for them."
Silence.
Darkness.
The wind blew over the valley, swaying the grass, caressing the motionless body of the boy. The clouds closed completely, and it began to rain. Thick drops, heavy, striking the earth with a dull sound, washing the ash from his face, soaking his clothes.
Saga didn't move.
On his chest, a light of **evergía** continued to shine under the rain, a faint but constant light, like a beacon in the storm, like a promise, like a hope that he was still alive.