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The instant Kaelen's fingers closed around both shards, the chamber detonated with light.
It wasn't brightness—it was annihilation. Every atom screamed. The glyphs burned into his skin, searing down to his bones, knowledge flooding him in rivers of fire. Equations, coordinates, star-maps, fragments of alien memory—too much, too fast. His mind stretched to breaking.
Kaelen dropped to his knees, choking out a strangled cry. The shards fused in his hands, warping into a single jagged blade of obsidian, veins of violet fire pulsing through it.
The cloaked figure staggered, its form glitching, unraveling like smoke in wind. The voice that had commanded them roared in fury:
"Two threads cannot carry what was meant for one. You defy the design. You corrupt the trial!"
Lyra caught Kaelen before he collapsed, slinging his arm over her shoulder. His body convulsed, the alien script burning across his veins like molten tattoos. She bared her teeth, shouting into the storm:
"Then maybe your design is flawed!"
The floor split wide, chunks of the chamber falling into a swirling abyss of stars. The sphere itself seemed to recoil, reality twisting violently around them.
Kaelen clutched the blade, his breath ragged. "Lyra… I can feel it. The Sphere… it's not just testing us. It's studying us. Learning what we'll do if we refuse to obey."
Lyra tightened her grip on him, eyes scanning the collapsing chamber. "Then let's give it a lesson it won't forget."
The void surged, shadows clawing up from the abyss, twisting into monstrous forms—humanoid, but stretched, distorted, their faces blank hollows. They hissed as they climbed, hundreds of them, their claws dripping starlight like venom.
Kaelen tried to rise, but his legs buckled. The relic had drained him nearly to breaking.
Lyra planted herself in front of him, blaster raised, stance unshakable. "Stay down, Doctor. You're not dying here."
The first shadow leapt. Lyra's bolt ripped through it, scattering it into ash. She pivoted, firing again, again, holding the line as more clawed their way upward.
Kaelen forced himself up, clutching the blade with trembling hands. The obsidian edge throbbed, alive, resonating with the monsters. He didn't understand how—only that it belonged in his grip.
He raised it, swung.
A ripple tore through the chamber, scattering three shadows at once like broken glass.
Kaelen's lips twisted in a grim smile. "Not bad… for a first swing."
Lyra grinned savagely, blasting another shadow to ash. "About time you pulled your weight."
Back to back, soldier and scientist, they fought as the chamber crumbled around them—two threads refusing to break, even as the Sphere screamed in rage.
And in the chaos, Kaelen felt it. A flicker of something deeper inside the Sphere. A presence vast and ancient… watching. Waiting.
Not the voice. Not the cloaked figure.
Something else.
Something that had been waiting for them all along.
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