Chapter 64: Cathedrals of Light Piercing Heaven — A Beam Between Birth and Betrayal
The final week of our passage through the psionic gullets of interstellar space was far more eventful than anticipated. Between Kimchi’s jealous outbursts, Onyx’s theatrical provocations, and Sapphire’s majestic lard-powered zoomies, the days blurred into a chaotic cocktail of affection, posturing, and kinetic drama. But now, things were quieter—montarily. I stood alone at the rear of the Hive vessel, bathed in bioluminescent shadows, preparing for what I’d long craved: my very first spacewalk.
I was clad in a matte-black void suit, elegant and aggressive in design, with matte latches and complex straps snaking around the torso like dormant serpents. It was custom-forged by the Hive long ago—integrated to rge with my power armor like an exoskeletal layercake—but I’d never actually used it. Not since the day I outgrew fear of vacuum exposure. That was back before Crystal began upgrading like a prized flesh toy.
Still, this suit was more than aesthetic. It whispered of utility. It was the ritual garb for a man about to fling himself into the void with a hard-on for microgravity.
The ship, a living leviathan of psionic chitin and respiration vents, had just breached the last ripple of the psionic tendril—that dinsional artery we’d traveled through—and erged into what the locals call the Elysian Galaxy. As the Hive vessel exited, its internal inertia bled away like a sigh. We slowed to a sub-crawl, no longer punching through dinsions, but coasting into familiar stars.
Perfect.
With manic glee and deeply irresponsible excitent, I reached for a specially grown tether—a semi-organic tendril shaped just for , affectionately called Irvine’s Idiocy Strap by the Hive’s internal systems. I locked it to my suit’s dorsal anchor and double-checked that its other end was still fused to the wall’s flesh-seam. Secure.
Behind , a thick mbrane wall had surged upward from the floor, its surface jellied and glimring like transparent muscle tissue, sealing off the docking chamber from the rest of the ship’s precious oxygen. Then, with an almost ceremonial groan, the drone hatch opened: a port normally used for wing rippers and smaller ships to launch from the Hive’s belly.
All air was sucked from the room with a glorious howl.
Beyond the mbrane stood Kimchi, arms folded tightly across her armored torso, worry dripping from her in thick, humid waves. She knew I’d be fine—logically—but the Hive had only greenlit this after a full day of negotiation and overengineering, which was code for "everyone wanted to pad the experience in safety pillows so I wouldn’t stub my fucking toe in vacuum."
I turned to her, gave a cocky thumbs-up, and mid blowing a kiss—right from the center of my glossy black visor.
Then I turned and leapt.
---
I had no thrusters. No control system. Nothing but a tether and raw nerve.
Space swallowed like I was a snack-sized fuckwit.
For a mont, everything dropped away. I floated—untethered except for the single psionic cord connecting to the Hive’s backside like a sentient umbilical. I rembered just in ti not to "orient" myself. There’s no up in space. No down. Only vectors, void, and the profound knowledge that you are an irrelevant sack of organs spinning through an infinite graveyard of silent fire.
The Hive ship—now fully visible in its whole horrific glory—lood behind like a celestial manta ray forged from nightmare carapace and motherly instinct. Biolights pulsed across its hide, organic turrets twitching in idle patterns.
I floated further.
And the stars... oh gods, the stars. Impossible gradients of light danced across my visor. I turned slowly, breath caught in my throat.
Then sothing moved.
A blur, a flicker, just on the edge of my vision.
I craned my neck.
A wing ripper—one of the Hive’s elegant bastards with four-ter wingspans—was gliding around , circling slowly, its motion cautious. Likely a guardian escort, just in case I had a "whoops, forgot oxygen" mont. But the sight gave an idea so dumb it had to be perfect.
I projected a simple psionic signal: Hey buddy, co closer.
The creature complied with majestic grace, flapping slowly through the vacuum, adjusting its trajectory until it hovered just beneath .
I reached down, fingers brushing along its smooth dorsal spine, and pulled myself atop it with childish glee. Straddling the living bioweapon like it was so kind of space-glider skateboard-horse, I issued the only command that mattered:
"Three... two... one—LET IT RIP!"
And rip it fucking did.
We shot forward, slicing the void in a symphony of curved motion and wild cackling. I rode the bastard like I was reenacting psionic rodeo—looping, spinning, barrel-rolling, carving trails of bioluminescent wake through silent space. We soared between dorsal spines of nearby Hive ships, dipped through gravity wells like cosmic surfers on acid, and I could feel the wing ripper’s pleasure at my lunacy.
An hour passed before I realized I was panting with laughter.
Eventually, we turned back.
The ripper guided gently to the external hatch, and I swung in with a bit too much force—slamd through the vacuum mbrane, and once gravity reasserted itself, I dropped the last three ters like a sack of at bricks.
But I landed on my feet. Hell yeah. Cool point achieved.
With the hatch resealed and atmosphere flooding back, I pressed a finger into the nape slot at the back of my helt. The suit obeyed, lting the visor seamlessly into the armor like liquid tal vanishing into flesh.
Monts later, the mbrane retracted—and Kimchi charged.
She collided into like a rocket-propelled girlfriend, arms tight around my chest, her body trembling just enough to tell how badly she wanted to yell at for risking my life.
I hugged her back.
Onyx had slipped into Mindspace hours ago, probably to snoop on my inner monologues. Sapphire, naturally, had declared nap-ti because being a thousand-kilo cat was exhausting.
And so, it was just us.
The Hive fleet began moving again, back to full speed, slicing toward our next destination like a blade through fabric.
I walked to a viewing mbrane.
And stared.
---
Below us was my birthplace.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The once-mountainous, once-human world now looked like it had been planed flat by gods with sandpaper palms. The crust was bare—every tal, mineral, and monunt stripped. The once-beautiful spiral cities of colonist architecture were gone. Not ruined. Erased. No sign of life. Not even ruin to mourn.
The Hive hadn’t invaded this world.
It had devoured it.
And yet... deep below the surface, I knew the Hive had built sothing new. According to data fragnts I’d half-read, this planet had been reshaped into a forward nest world—a smaller, tightly-contained version of Howorld’s endless Hive. A staging ground.
So sliver of my old self—so wrinkled, guilt-soaked shard of humanity—tried to weep.
This was your planet, it whispered. You should have protected it. You were born here.
I snorted and shoved that voice off a ntal cliff.
I was abandoned here. Left to rot by the ones who fucked into existence. I hadn’t thought of them in eighteen years. Why start now?
The Hive was my ho. Crystal was my mother. Kimchi, my wrathful glue-stick girlfriend. Sapphire, my oversized emotional support murdercat. The rest? Just at ghosts.
I continued to watch the planet’s slow spin.
And then—sothing new erged.
Four massive spires, each the width of mountains and the height of blasphemy, erupted into view. They pierced straight through the atmosphere, pushing beyond the planetary shell and into orbit. They hadn’t been visible monts ago, cloaked in psionic misdirection or phased just outside my perception.
"Kimchi," I asked, eyes wide, "what the fuck are those?"
"I... I don’t know, my love. Let —" Her words cut off.
The spires began to glow.
Blue. Brighter. Brighter.
I felt the vibrations in my teeth even through the Hive hull.
The towers began to thrum with harmonic resonance, like tuning forks played by angry gods. Then, from deep in the void, a colossal beam of psionic energy shot downward from orbit—striking the space between the four spires.
Wait—what?
I’d expected sothing to shoot out of the towers, not into them.
The beam was massive. Ocean-thick. Radiant with swirling matrices of telepathic structure. I could see runic helixes dancing in the energy, circuits of command buried in the stream like hidden software. And then—silence.
The beam ended after ten seconds.
The planet did not explode.
No ripple. No quake.
Just... nothing.
I turned, slowly, to my designated lore-explainer.
"Kimchi. I swear to all that is psionic and obscene—what the fuck was that?"
She panicked. Just for a heartbeat. Then she blinked, face going slack.
The Hive had answered.
She frowned. Then smiled.
"My love has no need to worry. The enormous psionic laser that appeared to penetrate his birth world was entirely preditated. It is... part of a surprise for Irvine-love. I have been told I cannot say more."
I groaned so hard my soul developed stretch marks.
"Of course. Cryptic Hive bullshit. They really get off on this, don’t they?"
Kimchi twitched.
I smirked and thought at her: "If I finger her right now, I bet I can tease the secret out of her. She’s a terrible liar and a worse tease."
She flinched.
She hadn’t realized her link was still open.
I didn’t press. She was torn between relief and arousal.
I stepped into the void swimr, now docked and waiting, clad once more in my full power armor. The blue laser of doom might be harmless, but I didn’t trust anything that big and that glowy. No risks. No regrets.
The swimr humd to life.
We descended toward the altered bones of my birthplace.
And beneath us, the towers waited.
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