The Tal'darim came in hard and didn't let up.
Executor Nyon's voice broke through on the open channel within the first minute — not directed at anyone in particular, the Protoss equivalent of a battle cry delivered to the landscape itself.
"You desecrate what the gods left behind. There is no negotiation. There is no argument. There is only your removal."
"Copy that," Tychus said into the comm, and fired.
The battle for the plateau ran in waves. The Tal'darim hit, pulled back when the siege tanks engaged, regrouped, and came again from a different angle. Nyon was methodical — not reckless. He was also clearly not using everything he had, which meant he was escalating deliberately. He intended to overwhelm them by degrees rather than expend his force in one push he couldn't sustain.
Jake worked the perimeter, cloaked, moving between positions. His role was the same as it had been on Agria, on Meinhoff, on every engagement before this one: early warning, precision kills on high-value targets, disrupting enemy coordination before it could complete. He took a high templar off the field in the first wave — a long shot through a narrow lane between two structures, the C-10 doing what it was built for. The second wave came without templar support and was less effective because of it.
Behind him, the drill kept going.
The pull from the temple had intensified when the drill started cutting. Not painful — not yet — but insistent, the way a sound at the edge of hearing refuses to let the brain alone. The Protoss trace pulsed in slow rhythm with the drill's frequency, the two reaching toward a synchronization that Jake's conscious mind had no mechanism to prevent.
He noted it. Filed it. Kept moving.
—
Third wave: void rays.
They came in from altitude — three of them, moving in the tight coordinated formation that Tal'darim air units held under fire, each covering the others' approaches. The Vikings from the Hyperion met them high, and the first two minutes of the air engagement played out above the plateau's cloud ceiling, visible only as contrails and weapons fire.
Then one broke formation and dove.
It wasn't targeting the drill. The angle of approach was too specific for coincidence — it was targeting the eastern perimeter, the sightline Jake had been working, the lane from which the templar kill in the first wave had come. Nyon had mapped the precision fire and assigned a counter.
Jake moved. The beam cut across the position he'd just vacated, turning prefab plating into light and vapor. He went left, cover limited, the void ray already adjusting.
He felt its targeting mechanism before the second beam fired — a Tal'darim psionic sweep reading heat and motion and the faint outline that even a Ghost's cloak couldn't fully suppress at close range. It found him.
The beam hit.
What happened next Jake could not fully account for afterward.
At that range, that angle, with no cover between him and the void ray's sustained beam, the physics of the situation were not complicated. He registered the beam connecting with his left shoulder. Registered the heat. The impact that should have spun him off his feet and kept burning.
Instead, two things happened at once. A flicker of Protoss energy at the surface of his body, catching the beam's leading edge. And in the same instant, as if the Zerg side felt the shield beginning to give, a chitinous armor grew across his shoulder from nothing — erupting from the skin in the fraction of a second before the beam fully connected, a brief reactive plate his body had never grown before and would not keep. The two systems talking to each other at a level below conscious thought. Just his body deciding it was not done yet.
He went down hard from the impact force. But the suit was intact. His shoulder ached deep where the heat had tried to get through and hadn't. The chitin was already receding, the Protoss energy already gone, both systems pulling back now that the moment had passed.
But he was conscious. He was on the ground, and his shoulder was a problem he would address, and by the physics of what had just happened he should not have been conscious.
A Viking swept across the void ray's attack line. The Tal'darim craft banked to deal with the intercept. Jake lay on the ground and stared at the sky and ran whatever internal diagnostic he had available.
The Zerg frequency was present, working, spending itself on the burn. The Protoss trace — the quiet threading that had lived in him since Monlyth — was different. Agitated. Vibrating at a pitch he had not felt from it before, the way something vibrates after it has done something sudden and surprising.
He got up. His shoulder screamed. He ignored it.
"Jake." Raynor's voice. "Status."
"Operational." It came out level. "Void ray is off me. Viking support effective."
A beat. "You took a hit."
"I'm standing."
Another beat. "Get back in position."
He did.
—
He didn't tell Raynor what had happened. Not because he was hiding it — he would tell Raynor eventually, when he had language for it — but because he didn't have language for it yet. The Zerg integration, for all its violence and cost, had always made a kind of sense. It was biology. It was evolution. Brutal, but legible.
What had flickered against the void ray beam was not Zerg energy. He was certain of that. He had felt his Zerg-enhanced physiology— knew its textures, its costs, its particular way of moving through him in crisis. This had been different. Structured differently. Cold where the Zerg frequency ran hot. Geometric where the Zerg frequency was fluid.
It had been Protoss energy. His Protoss energy.
He filed it and kept working.
—
The drill broke through the outer temple seal at hour eleven.
The tone changed — the continuous cut dropping to a lower register as the Xel'Naga metal finally gave way. The doors parted along a seam that hadn't been visible until the drill found it, the mechanism inside — still functional after thousands of years — engaging with a deep resonant groan and swinging inward. Ancient dust billowed out from the gap. The sound that followed was the sound of something long sealed finally exhaling.
Nyon's voice on the open channel: "You will not leave this world with what you have taken."
On the ground, his forces surged. Heavy units. Two immortals moving up the center. A void ray breaking off the air battle to support the push.
Raynor turned the drill on the column.
The Drakken's beam, powerful enough to cut through Xel'Naga metal, found the lead immortal and did not stop. The unit's hardened shields held for three seconds — then the beam was through, and the immortal was no longer a concern, and the column behind it was reconsidering its options.
It broke.
Jake was already moving toward the opening in the temple face, rifle slung, the artifact's pull hitting him full in the chest the moment the doors opened — nothing between him and it now, no more barrier. Just the frequency, clear and close and reaching for him like something that had been waiting a very long time.
He walked toward it.