The backlash of the psychic wave hit him like a freight train on a downhill slope, steamrolling his mind to the point it was almost a miracle that he didn't crash into anything. Losing momentary control of the jet, Adam spun in a listless rotation to one side just as the two other jets, Wicked and Mad Dog, floated off from his six in opposite directions, spinning like so many discarded pieces of trash in a gentle breeze.

Already silent, the battlefield took a few moments of stillness as everyone's brain went through the brief process of rebooting.

And that was only the backlash.

Adam could only imagine what a full on assault would have felt like. In his life he had been attacked telepathically on a number of occasions, the starborn Queens and the leviathan having the biggest and most powerful psychic presence.

Neither of them held a candle to this.

The figure, humanoid in nature, floated at the epicenter of the chaos. As close as he was, Adam could make out the shape highlighted in green, thanks to the Fealty AI, back turned to Adam and facing the void. The figure had its arms outstretched to either side in a gesture that was less an invitation to an embrace and more a gesture Moses might have used to part the red sea. Those ships unlucky enough to be caught in the direct path of that psychic wave, had gone dark and begun listing heavily to one side or the other.

Completely decommissioned.

Whoever the Maker was, Adam was glad to have him on their side, a sentiment he would reiterate only moments later when the figure before him geared up for act two.

Adam was just beginning to regain control over his body enough to start moving again when, the figure rolled its shoulders as if in preparation to lift something heavy and then raised its hands slowly. Some of the ships further along the line were just beginning to regain their senses, eager to use the moment and pick off those that were slow to recover.

They never got their chance as the figure flexed their hands.

And unmade the ships.

WIth just the curl of their fingers that single maker bent the fabric of reality to their will/. All of the the void ships, spread from horizon to horizon on the visible side of the Necritorium planet, went nuclear, warp cores simultaneously going critical and then imploding in a series of devastating eruptions that tore into the glowing orange shield to rip it apart like so much tissue paper.Had there been a shock wave it would have been lethal for tens of thousands of miles in any direction, but as it was, space remained silent.

Adam, given no time to sit there without his mouth hanging open like he wished to, was forced to perform a series of rapid, evasive maneuvers to dodge what remained of the void ships that had protected this horizon of the planet.

He bobbed, and rolled and turned and yawed cutting like a knife between two charred pieces of metal shooting rapidly in the opposite direction. He was, however, unable to avoid the cloud of dust particulate that spattered against his shield, which flared briefly with a burst of golden light before dying away.

Even so, he felt a sudden depletion of his energy, knowing that, the dust, moving as fast as it was would have torn his jet to pieces had there been no shield to protect him.

Had he known it would be this easy, he wouldn't have worried so much.

He was unprepared for the next moment, where he would be forced to eat those words.

The power displayed by that single maker had been terrible, unfathomable and completely unfair. TO have such a being on their side would have guaranteed them an easy win. Adam had briefly wondered why this maker didn't simply blow the planet to hell.

And maybe the maker might have been ready to do just that.

But it seemed this sudden use of power had not gone unnoticed

Before the maker could stretch out his hand again and make done of the void's plans, massive black tendrils erupted from the space around them, engulfing them as Apollyon himself joined the frey.

His sudden appearance was shocking, terrible, sending a shockwave of shedded psychic fear that had Adam's hands trembling on the joystick as he maneuvered them in the opposite direction.

Suddenly, all around them tendrils rose up from simple blackness and shadow.

Adam heard a series of screams over the com, but the sound was cut off as soon as it came. A black tendril snapped around towards his ship forcing him into a sharp roll that brought him cutting through the center of the tendril just before it could close around him.

He dove downward before it could regain its bearings, but was faced with another eruption of tentacles, emerging from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

One swung at him from the left. He cut high right flipping the jet over onto its back, and cutting in a hard arc over another tendril that shot straight towards him. The Tendril tried to curve up after him, but he arced down, flipping back over to cut under the tendril this time, firing the engines and shooting down its length as it struggled to follow.

"Mad dog, wicked, do you copy!" Adam shouted.

No one answered.

All around him, little green figures, highlighted by fealty began to go black, snuffed out one by one.

Adam shot straight up through a wall of closing blackness, and out over a filed of carnage.

Maker ships hung suspended, crushed and pulled apart by tendrils. Bodies lay wide eyed in space,

The makers themselves had simply vanished.

Another tendril snapped at him from below, but he rolled right, and burned engines straight up and away from the tentacles.

Above him Avex's imperial cruiser came into line of sight, somehow having managed to avoid being ripped apart, only for Adam to see why a moment later. A massive tentacle erupted out of nowhere headed straight for Avex's ship, but the little battle hungry bastard was ready, firing all his weapons all at once, evaporating the tentacle with the same world-killing beam his father had once used to destroy a planet.

A tactic he seemed intent on using against the necrotherium as he fought forward towards the ragged hole that had been torn in the glowing orange shield, which Adam was only now coming to realize, was beginning to knit itself back together.

As if knowing what his intentions were, more tentacles erupted from the blackness performing a full assault on the ship to the point Avex was forced to take more evasive maneuvers, Driving him away from the necritorium.

Several tendrils erupted upwards after Adam,He cut to one side, but they followed, chasing him like heat seeking missiles as he tried to shake them.

Then

A blast.

The tendrils blew apart as a MAC round tore through it.

Adam rolled his ship onto its back angling upwards just in time to see the omen descending towards him.

"Thanks for the assist, Simon." He said

"Any tim-"

She never finished her sentence, as out of nowhere, a massive black tendril, spiked down from above shattering the Omen's shields with one terrible punch, and spearing her straight through the middle.

Adam screamed in shock and horror as his old ship, Simon's ship, was impaled, and then shredded as the one single tendril became many smaller tendrils, blending her into pisces.

Below him, the glowing funnel of the necitorium pulsed brighter.

Muscle memory saved him from his own shock, diving down to avoid the Omen's shredded corpse as the very shadows of space roiled around him. His mind wanted to go into shock, but he knew now was not the time for that.

Simon was dead.

The crew of the omen was dead.

No!

FOCUS.

Apollyon had re-leveled the playing field, The shield around the necritorium had almost knit itself back together.

Adam fired forward aiming for the hole that remained even as Apollyon tried to stop him.

But these were gods they were playing against

Did he really stand a chance.

A wall of tendrils rose up before him, like a spiked forest, all waiting to collapse in around him, smother him.

He prepared for Evasive maneuvers.

And then.

Light shafts of it began to appear from within the mist of waving black tendrils charing them and causing them to shy away. First one and then a second, until thousands of beams of blinding white light were emanating from a singularity somewhere within the midst of the great blackness.

And then.

An explosion of light, dozens of the smaller tendrils evaporated, while the larger ones writhed in agony.

The light continued to grow as the tendrils writhed.

And as Adam looked, he saw.

The Architect.

He rose from the darkness like a Poseidon stepping from a sea of shadow, growing with every moment until he was larger than the ships, larger than the planet even. His form glowed with incomprehensible light simultaneously impossible to look at but also comprehensible.

The moment was clear.

Apollyon and the Architect had both taken their free shots at the other's army.

But now this was personal.

At the height of his size, the architect bent and then fractured, shattering into a thousand figures, each in a different shape. Sentient beings, Tesraki, Drev, Humans, Gromm, Celex, but also non sentient beings as well, wolves, eagles, kinlits, moss strider's, jeffrey snakes, all conceivable forms of life glowing with golden light and battling against apollyon's writhing tendrils.

Equally matched, the two of them struggled against each other, neither gaining the upper hand for long.

The message was clear.

He had torn them an opening when he could.

And now they needed to use it.