His heart hammered, a frantic drum against the restraints of his command chair. Outside the panoramic viewport of the ‘Aegis Zero,’ the void itself recoiled, painted with blossoming fire of distant explosions. Each concussion wave vibrated through the Omni-Bastion’s frame, a deep thrum in his bones. The machine groaned, its left arm a mangled ruin of sparking wires and scorched Cerebrium plating—a fresh wound from moments before.

  “TRAITOR!” The comms crackled, Gotes’s voice a distorted roar of fury. His ‘Oblivion,’ a shifting, obsidian nightmare, carved a path through the lesser detonations and smaller asteroid fragments, its single crimson optic burning across the star-dusted abyss.

  "Traitor?" he shot back, yanking the control yokes. "You dare to call me traitor? After all you've done? The only thing betrayed here is humanity itself, and that treachery is yours!" The Aegis Zero, an extension of his will, screamed a thruster-fueled protest, executing a tight barrel-roll behind a jagged asteroid, momentarily breaking Gotes's lock. Dark energy lances, ravenous and swift, impacted the rock, sending superheated debris careening past his viewport. One caught the starboard stabilizer as he boosted clear; the jolt was a physical blow, throwing him against his restraints. Agatha wouldn’t have flinched. The thought, unbidden, tightened his grip. “You defile her memory with every system you conquer!”

  His seven Cerebrium Nodes blazed to life around him, a familiar, comforting pressure against his temples. With a savage mental command, they shot outwards, a chaotic swarm of white-hot energy, their movements wild and unpredictable. They weaved through the drifting ice chunks and smaller rocks, unleashing a barrage of searing laser fire towards the Oblivion’s psycho-jammer array, using the debris to obfuscate the firing angles.

  Gotes’s machine didn’t just dodge; it danced, using larger asteroid fragments as temporary shields, its dark energy repulsors deflecting most shots with an almost contemptuous ease, each deflection a mocking, high-pitched whine that grated on his nerves. “Ideals are the luxury of fools! Agatha chased phantoms when your precious ‘Federation’ was already a corpse! I merely chose to stand with the living! At the end, survival is the only truth!” He fired, and a volley of dark energy vaporized a cluster of smaller asteroids he'd been using for cover, forcing an evasive maneuver.

  “Survival at the cost of your soul is nothing but a slow execution!” he countered, his remaining Nodes converging with blinding speed, their individual forms blurring as they interlocked into a desperate, tessellated emerald energy shield, a complex geometric barrier against the void. It shimmered, then cracked violently as Gotes’s return fire hammered against it, the shots too direct, too powerful to fully evade in the now-cleared patch of space. The impacts were brutal, jarring him, each blow a fresh crack spiderwebbing across his main viewport.

  Gotes charged, a Void-Forged Halberd materializing in his mech’s grip, its massive energy blade crackling with an unholy light, the haft as dark as a starless night. The sound of its activation was a hungry snarl. He blasted through a field of smaller debris, scattering it like shrapnel. “We were forged in the same crucible—two halves of a singular will! Yet you choose the ash heap of history when you could have sculpted the new age, bent it to your will, together with me!” The voice was a venomous parody of past camaraderie.

  “I’d rather be a memory in a just world than a king in your twisted delusions!" he roared, meeting the charge.

  Their mechs collided. KRRRRAAAANG! The impact was a physical violation, a deafening screech of tortured energies and protesting metal. His energy blade met the sweeping arc of the Void-Forged Halberd. They were locked, frame to frame, the strain immense. Sparks, like angry fireflies, erupted from the grinding contact, briefly illuminating the battered, scorched plating of both machines. His arms screamed from the haptic feedback. They pushed against each other, thrusters flaring.

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  “Why defend ghosts?” Gotes snarled, the Oblivion’s superior strength forcing the Aegis Zero back, its energy blade groaning under the pressure of the massive halberd. “Princess Agatha is dust! Your Federation, a forgotten dream! What meaning is there in this?!”

  “Meaning is forged with blood, not handed down by tyrants!” he grit his teeth. The Cerebrium in his mech’s core thrummed, a desperate, resonant counterpoint. He allowed Gotes to push him back, seemingly towards open space. “I fight for what was, and for the ghost of a chance that something worthy can rise from the desolation you’ve sown!” His Nodes became a swarm of angry hornets, zipping around the larger asteroid behind Gotes, peppering the Oblivion with pinpoint laser fire from unexpected angles, seeking the smallest chink in its terrifying armor.

  One Node, a kamikaze, timed its attack perfectly as Gotes dodged another, slamming into the energy emitter at the head of Gotes’s Void-Forged Halberd. A sharp, contained explosion. With a shriek of failing mechanics, the halberd’s dark energy blade flickered violently, then died, leaving only the inert haft.

  Gotes roared, a sound of pure, animalistic frustration, and with a contemptuous motion, jettisoned the now useless polearm while bursting forward. His mech’s other arm lashed out, a clawed hand of dark metal, faster than he could anticipate. It seized the Aegis Zero’s head unit. A horrifying, metallic crunch.

  The main viewport dissolved into a blinding static snowstorm. Alarms screamed, a unified shriek of critical failure. The world outside vanished, replaced by the disorienting, blood-red emergency overlay of his secondary sensors.

  “It’s over!” Gotes’s voice boomed, laced with savage triumph. “Your precious Federation will follow you into darkness! This is the inevitable end of your pathetic idealism! Power is the only arbiter!”

  The pressure on his cockpit intensified, the frame groaning. His vision swam with static and pain. A grimace, tight and bloodless, formed on his lips, unseen in the crimson emergency lighting. His voice, when it came, was a strained whisper into the comms, for Gotes alone. “You’re the fool.”

  With a final, desperate surge of will, he slammed the Aegis Zero’s remaining functional arm and its battered chassis forward, not in an attack, but an embrace. The heavily damaged Omni-Bastion latched onto the Oblivion, metal screaming against alien alloy, thrusters pushing forward desperately to maintain the hold, their combined mass now a single, struggling entity.

  “What is this madness?!” Gotes bellowed, the surprise evident even in his distorted voice as he struggled within the Aegis Zero's death grip.

  Ignoring the proximity alarms and the tearing groans of his own mech, he reached for the emergency eject safety lever. His remaining six Nodes, responding to a pre-set command, shot outwards, then converged again, not around him, but around the two grappling mechs.

  “This is for Agatha! For everyone!” he yelled, the sound raw in his own ears. He slammed the eject button.

  His command chair fired him out into the void with brutal force, tumbling away from the conjoined machines. Through his suit’s visor, he saw the Aegis Zero, his faithful companion through countless battles, still locked onto the struggling Oblivion, both now encased in the shimmering Node-shield in the shape of a triangular prison.

  With a final, silent command of his will, he triggered the Aegis Zero’s self-destruct sequence.

  A beat of silence. Then, the Node-shield flared incandescent white, containing the initial blast before shattering outwards. The Aegis Zero and the Oblivion at its heart vanished in a miniature sun, a silent, breathtaking supernova that briefly outshone the distant stars.

  The shockwave, slammed into him, sending him spinning wildly. His suit’s internal systems shrieked. Pain, sharp and sudden, exploded in his head. He felt a warm trickle from his nose.

  Going to die, he thought, a strange sense of calm washing over him as he drifted, a tiny speck in the vast, star-dusted darkness, the remnants of the explosion a fading nebula before his dimming vision. But we won. We finally won.

  He leaned back into the nothingness, the tension finally ebbing. The final images began to play in his mind's eye, showcasing the aftermath, the galaxy saved, the hard-won peace.

  “Agatha…”