Dimensional Descent

The moment the small ship was locked onto by several behemoths, as though a rock out of a slingshot, its acceleration suddenly doubled.

Sparks and explosions rang through the quickly thinning atmosphere, and yet they only seemed to propel the small ship faster as it squirted out of their encirclement.

The lights were so bright and the ship was so tiny in proportion to everything else that it was immediately assumed that the operation was successful. But, if it was so easy to fool such high tech, why would the Guild have ever invested however many billions they had to build them?

However, what left the siblings at a loss for words was that the moment the ship used the momentum around it to shoot by the last thinning layers of the atmosphere, runic patterns exuding a magnificent aura bloomed like a halo.

At first, the runes were etched right onto its sleek, silver surface. But in the next, they became animated, wiggling about as though life had been breathed into them.

They rose from the surface, forming a protective disk of flickering silver the grew brighter and brighter until it rivaled even the second barrage of beams headed right for its small frame.

Tobyn's eyes widened.

"RETREAT! EXECUTE EVASIVE MANEUVERS, NOW!"

Very few seemed to understand the purpose behind Tobyn's orders, but their job wasn't to understood. Even though some of the Guild Head's children saw themselves as less than, any one of them that was known to have such a connection wouldn't be easily crossed. On top of this, Tobyn wasn't like them, he was born from the Head's legitimate wife. His orders were even less likely to be ignored.

It wouldn't be long, though, before they realized that Tobyn had saved all their lives.

The rippling silver runes reached an unspeakable peak, touching upon a level of brightness that seemed to rival the sun in the distance.

then, everything

Reality. The orbit of the planet was shaken, tilted off its axis. The moons in the distance were warped, threatening to be slinged into the ether as they trembled to maintain the path they had followed for

the ships were

the twisting space. What once

through the air. Whether by irony or simply as a display of the cruelty of this world, the latter

a bit luckier, but the result

The end was devastating.

painting what looked like beautiful swirls of white, green and blue from the outside with

the depths of space with off kilter propulsion that

three ships that crashed headlong into one another. The resulting devastation was even more furious than that of the ships that had been too close. At least in the latter case, it ended as soon as it started. But, in this one, it seemed to continue into infinity. Whenever the explosions had seemingly come to a stop, another

the kind one could enjoy on a national Independence Day. Rather, it was the kind that made one's ears bleed, one's gaze dazed, and

the Milky Way Guild had suffered such devastating losses targeting a ship that didn't even

fact… the ship wasn't related to their target

…

space to a location unknown, one could find three

her throat. And the last was in a daze, blanky staring at something on her wrist without a word. In fact, from her

be if

quite an irony that an action Leonel could very well abhor with all his

realized, though, was that half a day later, it wasn't only a small ship that covertly slipped through the cracks left by the Guild's defenses. There was another protected vessel

need to use almost all of the trump cards he had planned. Had

As for the second…