Across the Earth, people looked up and saw something that had never happened in human history.
The sun didn't set. It dissolved.
A massive curtain of absolute black began to spiral out from the Dyson-Ring. It wasn't smoke or shadow; it was a Data-Void. To the rest of the galaxy, the Sol System was suddenly replaced by a mathematical error. The light of the sun was still there, trapped inside a sphere of bent space-time, providing heat to the Earth, but not a single photon was allowed to escape into the wider universe.
[SYSTEM ALERT: UNIVERSAL HIDE-AND-SEEK INITIATED] [SOL SYSTEM STATUS: "NON-EXISTENT"] [RANK EVOLUTION: KANE - THE HIDDEN GOD (RANK 10 - MID-STAGE)]
The strain on Kane was immense. He was the "Anchor" for the fence. He could feel the weight of the entire solar system pressing against his consciousness. He saw the "Timeline-Echoes" of a billion different futures where the fence failed, and he had to hold them all back with his bare will.
"It's... done," Sully gasped, collapsing from her nexus. "The Hegemony's 'Long-Range Sensors' just swept this sector. They didn't find a planet. They didn't find a star. They just found... nothing."
Kane fell to his knees, his obsidian skin cracked and bleeding violet light. He looked at the viewport. The stars were gone. Outside the "Void-Fence," there was only the black.
"We have time," Kane rasped, his white hair glowing in the dim light of the bridge. "Vance, Doc... start the Grand Ascension. I want every member of the Void-Guard at Rank 7 within the year. We aren't just a resistance anymore."
He looked at his hand, which was shaking with the effort of holding the universe at bay.
"We are the End-Game."