Reborn With A Technology System In A Fantasy World-Chapter 300: Lights Out!

Light-years away from the catastrophe in the Space Tunnel, the battle for the edge of the Heartland was reaching its crescendo.

The Queen of Silence was losing.

She floated in the void, a spec of darkness against a binary star of overwhelming power. Arbiter Barius had turned the surrounding sector into a hellscape of superheated plasma. His armor glowed white-hot, radiating a temperature that had boiled the blood of the Shadow pilots inside their ships.

To her left, Arbiter Zek moved like a refracted nightmare. She was everywhere at once, a million shards of hard-light striking the Queen’s defenses from every angle.

"Yield," Barius roared. He raised a massive, magma-encrusted fist. "You have fought well, shadow-spawn. But a candle cannot outlast a sun."

The Queen panted, her dress of shadows tattered. She had held them off for long, but their sheer, inexhaustible mana was not something she could manage. They were infinite. She was finite.

Barius began to charge his final attack. A sphere of concentrated solar fury, large enough to vaporize the entire Shadow fleet, formed between his hands. The light was blinding. And the Queen could do nothing but watch.

"Burn," Barius commanded.

He thrust his hands forward.

And then, the universe blinked.

It wasn’t a fade. It was a severance.

The sphere of solar fire instead of launching was unspooled. The cohesive magnetic fields holding the plasma together simply evaporated. The attack dissolved into harmless, drifting gas.

"What?" Barius gasped.

The golden aura surrounding his armor flickered once, twice, and died. The terrifying heat radiating from him vanished, leaving him cold in the vacuum.

To the left, Arbiter Zek screamed. Her crystalline form, usually hard as diamond, suddenly turned brittle. She fell out of her light-speed dash, crashing into the hull of a drifting fighter, her body now dull.

"The energy..." Barius clutched his chest, his eyes wide with a terror he hadn’t felt. "It’s... silent."

Across the entire front line, the Concordat fleet died.

Shields dropped. Engines stalled. The majestic Dreadnought stopped moving. The lights on a million decks went black.

The Queen stood in the dark, untouched.

She felt it. The shift. The moment Zero’s chant had completed. The energy that fueled the Concordat was gone, replaced by a suffocating, heavy blanket of entropy.

She opened her eyes. In the darkness, they glowed with renewed, terrifying power.

"You speak of suns and candles," the Queen whispered, her voice amplified by the sudden silence of the void.

She raised her hand. The shadows that had been retreating from Barius’s light now surged forward, hungry and unopposed.

"But you forget... when the sun sets, the night claims everything."

She clenched her fist.

"Feast."

The Shadow fleet, powered by the void itself, roared to life. They descended upon the powerless Concordat ships like wolves on a flock of paralyzed sheep.

***

In the Heartland, the panic was felt immediately.

One moment, the Council was watching the battle map. The next, the map vanished. The lights overhead cut out.

"The power!" The Aquatic representative shrieked as his anti-gravity sphere failed. It splashed to the floor, spilling water and a very indignant diplomat onto the cold tiles.

"Backup generators!" Nado bellowed, trying to project his psychic voice, but finding his range limited to mere meters. "Engage the backups!"

"They aren’t working!" a technician screamed from the side. "The reactions aren’t starting! It’s like the fuel is inert!"

The darkness in the room was absolute, save for the emergency chemical glow-sticks some of the guards cracked open. The eerie green light cast long, dancing shadows against the walls.

But then, the shadows detached themselves from the walls.

From the floor of the chamber, directly in front of the empty podium, space began to tear. It wasn’t a normal rift; it was a wound bleeding smoke.

A claw, slick with darkness, gripped the edge of the tear.

Then another. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"What... what is that?" a Highborn whispered.

A Void Entity pulled itself into the Council Chamber. It was a horror; a mass of eyes, teeth, and shifting limbs that defied sanity. It was followed by another. And another.

They attacked immediately.

The massacre began in the dark. The Councilors, stripped of their powers were nothing more than meat. Screams echoed through the opulent halls of the Palace as the administrative heads of the galaxy was severed.

***

Nyra stood by the window of her penthouse when Lunu appeared beside her.

"Nyra!" she grabbed Nyra’s arm in panic. "The Councilors... they’re all gone. What is happening?"

Nyra couldn’t answer. Her voice died in her throat as she looked past Lunu, out into the city below.

The apocalypse was unfurling in real-time.

The Transit Hub, usually a blinding jewel of neon commerce and antigravity marvels, was dead. The sky had turned into a graveyard.

Vehicles lost power mid-flight, plummeting like stones into the streets below. Explosions blossomed behind the glass, fires erupting in the districts where suppression systems failed to trigger.

It was as if the heart of the galaxy had simply stopped beating.

"I was there," Lunu recounted. "And a beast came, the lights died but no one was able to do anything about it. It was like their powers faded away. I was surprised when I managed to come here with no problems."

Nyra gripped the railing, her mind racing to process the impossibility of a galactic shutdown.

But then, amidst the sea of darkness swallowing the horizon, her eyes caught something.

"Lunu, look."

She pointed not at the destruction, but at their immediate surroundings.

The Sparkborn Tower was still alive! The lights in the office were bright. The holographic map on the table was still spinning. And looking down into the ruined city, pockets of blue light also alive. Healing Centers using Sparkborn generators, homes powered by Universal Cells, streetlamps retrofitted with their tech.

While the rest of the world had gone black, the Sparkborn legacy was burning bright blue.

"We’re still on," Lunu realized.

But they weren’t given time to strategize.

Above the reinforced glass ceiling of the penthouse, the fabric of space tore open with a sound like tearing wet canvas. A rift, bleeding black smoke and violet lightning, spiraled into existence.

From the abyss, a creature of vantablack scales and razor-sharp limbs leaped out, shattering the glass and descending upon them.