The sky was bleeding.
Not with rain or ash—but with strange tears, like wounds in space itself, where the stars flickered wrong. Earth's atmosphere groaned as one of the rifts opened above the Pacific Ocean.
From it, something emerged.
Long. Dark. Whispering.
It wasn't a ship.
It was alive.
---
The First Scorchborn
Bob stood on the Resistance sky-deck, wind howling past his antennae. Even from this distance, he could feel the thing in the sky. Not through eyes or ears—but through the Spark. A pull. A hunger.
Maya stared through binoculars. "What… is that?"
Dev, pale-faced, read incoming data. "Energy readings are off the charts. That thing is absorbing radio waves, sunlight—memory."
Bob squinted. "Wait. It's feeding on memory?"
"Every satellite it passes forgets its own logs," Dev whispered. "Like it's erasing its existence as it goes."
---
The Spark Surges
The orb, now fused into Bob's chest like a glowing gem, burned hot.
Bob collapsed to his knees.
Visions tore through his mind—planets vanishing, stars devoured by shadow, and a single name whispered over and over:
> "Vaskraal."
He gasped. "The Scorchborn has a name."
Maya knelt beside him. "Bob! What is it?"
Bob stood up, eyes glowing blue-white. "It's not just a creature. It's a scout. One of many."
Dev muttered, "Then what happens if we don't stop this one?"
Bob didn't smile. For once, there were no jokes.
"We don't get a second chance."
---
Battle on the Edge
The Resistance scrambled. Fighters launched. Lasers armed. Satellites re-aimed.
The Vaskraal descended.
Missiles hit it—disappeared.
Beams of plasma carved into its hide—then vanished like they'd been forgotten.
Bob watched as memory after memory was erased from their tech.
It wasn't just attacking Earth.
It was erasing its presence from reality.
"I'm going up there," Bob said, loading a Spark Core into his gear.
Maya blocked his path. "You'll die."
"I'm a cockroach. We do the opposite of dying."
---
Into the Rift
Strapped into the makeshift launch pod—a literal trash can converted by Dev—Bob shot into the sky.
The rift above glowed like a scar in the heavens.
And beyond it… he saw them.
Countless shadows.
All waiting.
Watching.
Vaskraal turned to him, a voice like a thousand static screams echoing in Bob's mind.
> "You carry the flame. We carry the void."
"Extinguish."
Bob responded the only way he knew how.
He raised one claw—and flipped the cosmic middle finger.
"Extinguish this."
---
Clash of Spark and Shadow
Bob fired the Spark Core into the beast's heart. The sky exploded in blue light.
For a moment—just one—the Scorchborn remembered.
It saw stars. Life. Cockroach-kind building galaxies.
And it screamed.
The rift closed.
Vaskraal was gone.
Bob plummeted from orbit, shell sizzling.
---
Return to Earth
He crash-landed in a desert crater. Smoking. Blackened. Alive.
Maya and Dev reached him first.
"You insane little bug…" Maya whispered, hugging him.
Bob coughed. "Tell the universe: Earth remembers."
---