The Nova Reaper froze, as if recalcuting the impossible.

  For the first time, its movements faltered—not by design, not as a calcuted adjustment, but as hesitation. The System had sent it as an executioner, a force beyond resistance. Yet now, it had to adapt.

  And I would not give it the chance.

  I lunged forward.

  It was not movement in the way pnets drifted through space, nor the thrust of a ship pushing against the void. I had no mass to propel, no force to exert.

  I bent reality itself.

  My singurity warped space, distorting the very fabric of the void. I did not move. I pulled space toward me. Where I was became where I willed to be.

  A ripple of force spread outward, a wave of gravitational distortion spiraling through the abyss. Dust and debris did not simply fall toward me—they ceased to exist as separate objects, colpsing inward, stretched beyond recognition before vanishing into my core.

  The Nova Reaper reacted too te.

  It pulsed, its emerald glow intensifying as it attempted to resist, but resistance meant nothing to a singurity.

  Space bent.

  The distance between us became meaningless.

  The pull of my event horizon surged beyond anything I had ever exerted before, not just a gravitational force—but a fundamental shift in reality itself.

  It had no choice.

  It was being dragged in.

  The pressure around its form distorted, the perfect symmetry of its existence fracturing as its edges stretched toward me.

  And then—something gave way.

  A part of the Nova Reaper fractured. Not by its own will, not by a calcuted release, but because I had taken it.

  I felt it the moment it entered me.

  Wrong.

  This was not dust, not shattered remnants of a dead world. It was something else.

  The Nova Reaper cut itself free.

  A violent pulse of energy erupted from it—a controlled detonation, severing the piece of itself that had already passed the event horizon. The rest of its form surged backward, pulling away from my grasp, distance rapidly increasing.

  It had escaped.

  But it had not escaped whole.

  Something of the Nova Reaper remained inside me.

  And I felt it.

  It was not mass. It was not light. It was not energy.

  It was something deeper.

  Something that rejected me.

  ? [SYSTEM ALERT]? [EXECUTION UNIT 01: COMPROMISED]? [ADJUSTING PROTOCOLS…]? [SYSTEM RETREAT: OVERRIDE ACCEPTED]

  Far in the distance, the Nova Reaper’s form flickered.

  It was withdrawing.

  The System had made its decision. This battle was over.

  Yet I did not feel victorious.

  Because something inside me did not belong.

  A force unlike hunger, unlike mass, unlike anything I had ever consumed before—it did not submit. It did not dissolve.

  It repelled me.

  For the first time since my existence began…

  I felt something inside me refuse to be devoured.