At that same time, Dick, the Author, and Airi were already outside—where everything had gone completely to hell.
Houses were burning. A HallMart™ was getting looted in in the fading twilight. Near the spaceport entrance—fights, screaming, people running in every direction like headless animals.
But Dick wasn’t looking at any of that.
He was staring at the sky. At a dark stain slowly spreading across the clouds.
He blinked. Once. Then again.
“WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!
LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE WASN’T ENOUGH?!”
He pointed up.
“NOW WE GOT SPACE BULLSHIT TOO?!”
Dick tilted the drone lens upward, gripping it under his arm, and barked:
“And this… all of this…
this is because of us?!”
He slowly turned toward the Author.
“Sage, you son of a bitch…
don’t tell me that thing’s been watching our stream too.”
The Author froze for a second. Literally froze.
“No, Dick. Doesn’t look like it’s because of you.”
He looked at the sky. Then at the chaos below. Then back at the sky.
And quietly said:
“But I’m afraid…
we really don’t have anywhere left to run.”
Dick stepped forward, grabbed him by the shoulders, and shouted:
“WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN?!
SAGE, YOU KNOW SOMETHING!
WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!”
The Author turned slightly, slipping out of his grip.
“Calm down, Dick.
You already know what it is…”
He paused—but there was relief in his voice instead of fear.
The Author said quietly:
“INĀNE…”
Then his gaze dropped, thoughtful.
“But why? Every step failed… so what triggered it?..”
At the same time, Blindy, Shiori, and Jackie stood at the terminal, trying to understand what had set Phoenix off.
“Rusty, spit it out. What the fuck’s the panic about?!”
And then the holographic terminal lit up—multiple news feeds at once.
The sky over Dumsta should’ve been early evening.
The city was still alive in twilight: glass skyscrapers catching the last streaks of dull light, neon panels flickering lazily, thick industrial smog hanging between towers, glowing faint yellow from the highways below.
But night came early.
Not gradually. Not gently. It dropped.
First, the distant stars went out. Then the upper edge of the sky darkened. And only after that—rising from beyond the horizon—came the black hole.
“Deep Throat.”
Its dark mass lifted over the edge of the planet the way it always did—slow, heavy, carrying that quiet, absolute presence that left no doubt: space wasn’t just watching this world. It was waiting.
The lower half of the black hole was still hidden below the horizon, and above the city rose a massive arc of its silhouette—bottomless, perfectly round, like the open eye of the universe itself.
Inside it, the accretion disk churned.
A thin, blazing ring of madness spun around the singularity. Superheated matter flared in streaks of white, amber, and cold blue light. The disk stretched across the sky like a cosmic river of fire, slowly rotating above the towers of Dumsta, reflecting in the mirrored walls of skyscrapers.
But today—something was wrong.
The light from the disk reached the city dim, weakened.
And hanging over Deep Throat… something appeared.
At first—small.
Uneven.
Like a piece of the sky had been accidentally erased.
Then it began to grow.
Not as a circle.
Not as a sphere.
It was a stain—a shapeless wound in space, a blot so dark that even the black hole beside it looked gray.
It hung directly above the singularity, like an error the universe forgot to fix.
The accretion disk kept spinning, but its light—approaching the stain—vanished. Not absorbed. Not bent. It simply stopped existing, as if someone had subtracted the photon from the equation of reality.
The sky darkened further.
The towers of Dumsta sank into a strange, dead shadow.
Streetlights dimmed.
Neon holograms flickered, like they couldn’t decide if the air around them even still existed.
The stain kept growing—slow, steady.
It had no shape.
No edge.
No geometry could describe it.
It wasn’t a hole.
It wasn’t an object.
It was… a missing place.
A place where space itself no longer wanted to exist.
Soon it covered nearly half of Deep Throat, and the massive black hole beneath it looked like nothing more than a shadow under this new, impossible darkness.
And then it became clear: even space has shades.
And what appeared above Dumsta today
was darker than anything
that had ever existed.
The accretion disk still turned beneath that wound in reality, like a ring of fire around a broken eye of the universe.
But its light no longer belonged to the night.
Because what had appeared above the city wasn’t just darkness.
It was a void carved out of existence.
From the surface of the planet, it looked flat.
The feed switched to orbit—Phoenix changing angles—but no matter the perspective, the stain refused to reveal any depth.
No edges. No shadows. No dimension. Just a plane. Darker than space. Darker than night. Darker than the very idea of light.