> In the myth, God is Force. Until the creation of Eidolons, we did not understand those words. The discovery of Psions, the harnessing of Callandium, the forging of the first Eidolons; all of it brought us closer to the comprehension of the Myth. We believed ourselves masters of war, architects of our own ascension. But now, we have seen it with our own eyes—made manifest in one man. And so we must ask the question we fear most of all: was the knowledge worth the cost?

There had been thirty of them when the battle began.

Thirty knights of Pendragon, piloting the most advanced war machines the Grand Imperium had ever wrought. Eidolons, each one an example built from the genius of the pinnacle of human society’s engineering; each one a metaphor for the intersection of war and divinity. Each machine was the size of a multi-storeyed building, standing between twenty and twenty-five meters tall.

They had come here to kill a traitor.

They had come here to kill a mistake.

They had come here to kill a man who should never have existed.

And yet, they were the ones dying.

The battlefield at the Plains of Hadrian had been a perfect choice. Flat and open ground, no terrain to use as cover, and nowhere for a lone enemy to hide or maneuver. It had been painstakingly scouted and observed, with careful attention given to any rogue elements or possible oversights in the planning. They had proceeded with supreme confidence, after confirming nothing existed that would impede their plan.

Their foe would be cut off from reinforcements. He would be surrounded on all sides. There would be no escape.

It was planned to be a massacre.

And it was. Gods above and Devils below, it was.

Just not the way they had expected.

“He’s coming again!” a voice he recognized as Rael’s shouted over the comms.

“How is he so fucking fast?! I can’t track—No! NO! N—!”

Another link went dead, and the massacre continued.

Galahad Velius’ cockpit vibrated violently in the middle of the storm, his Eidolon’s servos screaming as it struggled to compensate for the sheer force of its evasive maneuvers. His HUD flashed red with critical warnings while he drew in a pained breath and tried to ignore the cracked ribs he’d suffered from the last impact to his hardlight barriers.

His Battle Intelligence put his situation into grim perspective a moment later, its voice a feminine chime of worry and warning melded as one.

“Shields are at 9%, my lord, and your chassis has sustained critical damage. None of the kinetic energy or hardlight weapons are operational, and your monomolecular blade has been destroyed.”

Galahad barked a bitter laugh.

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“You can still flee.” she said solemnly. “In fact, I would strongly recommend it.”

Galahad might have snarled at Corein for such words at any other moment.

However, given what they were facing, he could not fault her for them.

The black Eidolon was still coming.

It moved like nothing Galahad had ever seen before.

He had fought Aces before, in honor duels or small disputes between Core powers. They were a common thing, and the Imperator tolerated them so long as they did not harm the greater unity of the Grand Imperium. Galahad had seen knights wield their machines like extensions of their own bodies, like exoskeletal limbs moved at the behest of their natural counterparts.

But this? This was different.

This thing did not dodge gunfire—it was just gone when the hyper-velocity rounds tore through the air it had occupied and obliterated stone and earth instead.

It did not counter attacks—it was simply not there to be struck.

It did not fight to survive.

It fought to win.

And the worst part?

The thing that truly made Galahad feel fear?

It was thriving.

Somewhere, within that black Eidolon, whoever piloted it was not fighting for their life.

They were enjoying this.

"Regroup! We need to regroup—!"

Rael Lysander’s voice snapped over the comms, but Galahad knew it was already too late. The words were as hollow as the available options of his armament. His Eidolon had been built to stand toe-to-toe with the finest the Core of the Humanosphere had to offer, and now it was little more than an extremely costly prosthetic.

They were broken. Their faith, their pride, their hopes: all broken.

All their formations, their carefully orchestrated assault patterns—gone.

Their perfect plan had been shattered the moment he engaged them.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy, but theirs had been atomised.

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Galahad gritted his teeth, hands tight on the controls. His Eidolon was one of the finest war machines ever built. Its targeting systems were perfect, its predictive algorithms refined over generations of warfare. It should have been enough.

And yet, despite all those advantages, despite overwhelming numbers, despite the power at his fingertips and those of his allies, it had meant nothing.

The black Eidolon was still standing.

“Why?” he demanded with copper-stained lips. “What makes you so special?!”

He got his answer a moment later.

A knight to his left—Sir Tristan of House Mael—roared forward in a last-ditch charge, his towering white Eidolon, Durandal, brandishing its twin hardlight lances as the golden construct spears hummed with kinetic force.

Tristan was one of their best duelists. He had won the laurel crown in Sol itself.

He was a prodigy among their generation.

Galahad did not dare to blink. Not that it mattered.

Tristan never even had the chance to strike.

The black Eidolon moved, and Tristan’s machine was suddenly bisected, cleaved from shoulder to hip in a scream of metal and a detonation of its emergency-safed reactor that washed Galahad’s vision in white fire.

“This isn’t possible.” he breathed in bloodied disbelief. “This can’t be real.”

But reality cared little for his entreaties to reassert a more conceivable truth.

The battlefield around him shuddered beneath Galahad’s ravaged machine as more knights fell, and combat frames designed for galactic conquest—designed to bring entire human nations to heel—were reduced to burning wreckage and bloodied junk.

All the while, like the Grim Reaper, the black Eidolon simply continued forward.

“FOCUS FIRE! ALL UNITS, FOCUS FIRE!”

Galahad looked up at the sound of atmospheric engines screaming as they warped gravity to propel Eidolons forward in their bipedal assault phase, and snapped his eyes to their macabre obsidian foe as the affirmations were desperately given over the communication line.

With no weapons of his own, he was powerless to do more than evade backward and watch.

For the first time in the battle, a fact that was not lost on Galahad in how insane it was, every surviving knight was able to fire at once.

Railguns, coilguns, hardlight spears, dark matter flechettes—every single weapon system converged upon a single target. It was a storm of death, a wave of destruction that would end even a Core power supercarrier if it impacted a single point. Not even the most powerful of distortion fields or hardlight projectors could withstand that much output.

And Eidolons were far more fragile than Supercarriers.

Galahad felt a spark of hope ignite within him. Could they—?

“The enemy is still advancing.” Corein reported softly.

Galahad felt the embers of hope gutter out in his soul.

The black Eidolon would not be denied.

Warp fields bled around its form, kinetic barriers flaring as hyper-velocity rounds curved away from it; bending under the impossible gravity distortions its machine generated. Hardlight spears shattered on impact, their energy dispersing against shields that should not have been able to react in time. Power diffusion radiated across its body in distinct lines of angry crimson, showing the insane speed at which each system was harnessed; like a conductor guiding a symphony of energy with a speed and precision that defied logic.

The enemy advanced without hesitation.

Galahad’s fingers tightened around the neuralink control orbs of his machine.

“You aren’t human.” he rasped toward the looming specter of death. “You’re a fucking abomination!”

His sensors screamed with a warning—something unnatural, something wrong.

“Gravity Shock detected!” Corein cried out in warning.

The black Eidolon disappeared.

Not moved.

Not dashed.

It simply ceased to exist.

A spatial compression wave detonated outward, the ground beneath it cracking as gravity momentarily distorted and warped. Earth, stone, and bedrock were torn asunder; destroyed Eidolons ripped to further pieces, and even Galahad’s remaining shields were dropped by a full 1% just from the discharge wave alone.

If it had occurred near a city, the force wake would have killed millions.

“What the hell happened? Is he fucking mad?!”

A moment later Galahad had his answer when the black Eidolon reappeared.

Directly behind Rael Lysander’s machine.

“The Myth—!”

Galahad barely had time to process their leader’s awed, terrified words.

The black Eidolon’s warblade flashed once.

The Cyranthe, widely considered one of the greatest Eidolons ever made by House Lysander, fell apart.

Not in chunks.

Not in pieces.

It was bisected with surgical precision.

Rael Lysander never even had time to scream.

“Zero Shift confirmed.” Corein reported in a voice that showed even the battle intelligence was shaken, if that was possible.

It was a technique known, but said to be impossible to harness by all but the most powerful of Psionics.

To perform it, a pilot needed to compress localized space behind the point of their origin abutting their machine, hold that compression while simultaneously shaping it to avoid obliterating their own chassis, and then release it all at once to instantly traverse the battlefield at near-relativistic speeds to one of the positions from which the compressed space’s furthest boundary originated.

Any miscalculation—even the tiniest error—would cause instant brain death from the sheer feedback of the spatial distortion, not to mention the obliteration of the Eidolon being piloted. In most cases, nothing bigger than a finger could even be located after an unsuccessful attempt.

Even high-ranking Aces across the Core wouldn’t attempt it.

Yet their enemy was using it effortlessly.

He was using it like it was breathing.

Galahad felt something twist in his chest.

This wasn’t just skill.

This was something beyond skill.

“God is Force.” he whispered hoarsely, realizing Rael’s final words.

The black Eidolon turned toward him next.

Galahad tried to run on instinct alone.

His graviton drive ratcheted to maximum, his machine roaring backward, every single escape vector mapped out—and then he stopped with a dull boom that echoed through his mind, down to the core of his soul.

“Gravity Shock detected!”

He had already been caught.

A screech of metal heralded the first strike of his enemy’s blade, eviscerating the reinforced metal shielding his cockpit in his Eidolon’s torso.

Galahad hadn’t even seen his enemy move.

Hadn’t even registered the approach.

The black Eidolon had him.

“Drives offline. Shields offline. Reactor levels dropping rapidly.” Corein reported in a resigned voice.

Something shifted, a powerful grip took hold of his machine, and suddenly Galahad’s Eidolon was weightless.

He was hoisted into the air like a broken puppet.

Galahad's vision blurred as his systems flashed red.

Corein was imploring him to object, to run, to save himself—as was her duty.

But he couldn’t move.

The black Eidolon’s crimson eyes flashed as it stared at him through the sundered hole that had been meter-thick reinforced adamantium.

“In the Myth,” he uttered softly, “God is Force.”

A scream of metal announced the finishing thrust of his enemy’s blade.

Galahad Velius died in silence, crushed beneath the weight of his enemy’s potential, and entombed in blood and steel.