Before Velan had even finished his final sentence, cheering and applause had sprung up throughout the entire ship, the crew's fear having been transmuted into courage through one of the most formidable weapons available to a good leader: powerful words. Velan was able to speak honestly to his crew; despite the misgivings of his cynical mind, his naive heart was confident in the chances of a good outcome — his encouraging tone, infused with sincerity, was even more impactful than it would normally be. Nevertheless, as excitation and energy flooded him, Velan could not help but feel as if the universe would find a way to pay him back for his ignorant bravery.
Half a minute later, the order to breach into the Light's End system was given, and Velan ordered Terxah to obey it an instant after that. Within seconds the ship began shaking, convulsing, and straining, as it struggled to complete an inordinately difficult breach back into normal space — a difficult breach made even more strenuous by the fact that an immense amount of power was being diverted to the Nemesis's gravity nullifiers in anticipation of the deadly black hole on the other side. As the Nemesis continued to battle with the arcane forces of the Remnant, Velan's mind was forced to weather a seemingly endless tide of panicked textcomms from other ships in the fleet; the breach into normal space was proving troublesome, and dangerous, for all of them too. Many warships suffered minor damage to much of the expeditionary force as their armor warped or fractured under the weight of the Remnant's assault; these struggles were as unprecedented as they were utterly terrifying.
As Terilan, the prime admiral, had ordered all vessels to enter into normal space at the same time, rather than adopting the standard strategy of entering into a system in waves, none in the fleet had any information on what lay within the increasingly hostile system that awaited them. Evidently, Terilan wanted to bring overwhelming force against whatever lay within Light's End as quickly as possible, preventing his force from potentially being destroyed in groups by whatever possibly occupied the system, but having not even scouted the system first seemed to endanger the entire expeditionary force; Velan usually trusted the judgement of his superiors, but now, even he had his doubts. Worse still, this strategy meant that the smaller ships which had finished opening a breach first would have to wait until every last vessel in the expeditionary force had done so as well — an appalling reality when, in these strange circumstances, opening and maintaining a Remnant breach had the potential to cause damage to one's own ship. Velan realized that the fleet he was a part of stood to suffer devastating casualties from doing something as simple as entering the system they were investigating, but nevertheless, he had orders to follow.
Because of these orders, once the Nemesis had forced open a rupture back into normal space, Velan had no choice but to wait for another minute, allowing the larger vessels to complete their own breaches, all while the unimaginable forces of the Remnant threatened to tear his helpless ship apart; once the order to finally enter into his ship's breach was given, a relieved Velan immediately ordered Terxah to comply with the command. Within seconds the Nemesis, travelling at one-quarter of FSA, or Fastest Safe Acceleration — the maximum acceleration that a vessel could undertake before its crew was adversely affected — slipped through the breach back into normal space. Once the Nemesis had passed through the breach, however, it was not confronted with the comforting blackness of space, but rather, Velan was quickly surrounded by a brutal inferno — an inferno fuelled by Terilan's fleet, as the Empire's ships burned and detonated around it.
Falling through the ether and lightly striking Velan's ship across the bow was a flaming, burning cruiser, with a frigate lodged in its rear: the two warships had been forcefully and unexpectedly merged, and this was not an uncommon sight. All around Velan, there was fire, shattered metal, and the space-borne corpses of the unlucky; the expeditionary fleet was being torn apart. A flurry of desperate textcomms flew between what remained of the confused fleet's vessels as they attempted to decipher what was happening; Velan, more concerned with staying alive than finding out why his life was threatened, ordered Terxah to find a path through the carnage before him. This was a carnage that only seemed to grow as more ships made their way into normal space, appearing in unexpected and entirely dangerous places amidst the bloodbath, and sometimes even appearing inside other human ships. Velan, kept in his chair only by the multitude of deployable restraints that had wrapped themselves around him, could do nothing but watch as hundreds of thousands of human ships were annihilated in a metal blizzard — the result of ships appearing either inside or too close to each other, whose resulting disarray made warships slam into their allies by the thousands. Where there should have been the glorious entrance of the human navy, there was a rampant inferno, a dark cloud of shattered steel, and a few million desperate ships trapped within a nightmare forged from the wrecks of their allies. As wrecked or damaged ships flew in all directions, navigation through the catastrophe became more and more difficult with each passing second, even for a pilot as skilled as Terxah; while clouds of debris rattled the hull of the Nemesis, many turrets or weaker systems were damaged or disabled entirely despite the attempts at evasion and the vessel's thick armor. Velan saw events unfold, and he commanded his ship through its evasion, but the terrible majesty of what was occurring overwhelmed; he found it difficult to do anything but watch, and cower in fear, despite the MECS coursing through his veins. After nearly a minute of desperate flight at FSA through the rapidly-unfolding catastrophe, weaving through disintegrating formations of warships and shooting through clouds of debris, Terxah, her face saturated with beads of sweat, told Velan via textcomm, "The ship is trapped, and there is no possible path around the ships surrounding us. The debris nearby will crush the ship in less than a minute. Requesting instructions."
Velan, alert as ever thanks to a potent cocktail of adrenaline and MECS, hastily scanned the area surrounding his ship with said vessel's sensors, and was justifiably alarmed when he confirmed Terxah's findings: the Nemesis, as well as a few other unfortunate ships, was entirely surrounded by impassable debris, wrecks, and crippled vessels incapable of serious movement. As the deadly detritus around him, as if animated by the cruel hand of fate, began to close in on his luckless ship, Velan, seeing only one way out of his predicament, warned all vessels around the Nemesis of his new, ruthless course of action, before ordering Yelazar, the Nemesis's Chief Gunnery Officer, to carry it out.
The following moment, the Nemesis's remaining nuclear turrets turned on the sparsest region of impassible debris, and, attempting to be precise, they used the force of repeated nuclear detonations to push aside — or annihilate — the destroyed vessels in Velan's way. Great spheres of atomic flame seemed to illuminate the blackness of space itself, outshining even the fires of failing human warships nearby as they obliterated or relocated the wrecks that had trapped the Nemesis, and others like it, disregarding the fact that any number of them might have harbored survivors, for the sake of the greater good. With each semi-intact wreck that came apart under his nuclear barrage, Velan's mind strained, and his soul tore just a bit more; making decisions, and sacrificing lives, were things any commander in a desperate situation had to do, but not even this knowledge made such acts palatable. Before Light's End, the loss of even a single ship, with all of its thousands of crew members, would be a tragedy in the Empire; Velan was now watching as millions suffered and perished in a calamity whose source he didn't even understand, but still had to survive regardless of his ignorance. MECS stemming the tide of tears which yearned to break free from his eyes, and his veins pulsing with fear as the debris around his ship advanced inexorably, Velan ordered the intensity of his bombardment to increase. The mild nuclear inferno Velan had created easily incinerated the clouds of metal debris — among which was no small number of flash-frozen corpses — that stood between the Nemesis, those ships around it, and survival; this debris would have impeded or damaged any vessels passing through them, but now that they were ash, they were harmless. Any larger wrecks were either destroyed or pushed aside by the atomic assault. Not wasting an instant, or even waiting for an order, Terxah then flew the Nemesis through the violence-born breach in the anarchic carnage, and after a few tense moments of soaring past debris and immolated warships, the Nemesis, its hull scorched and tinted black by the flames of its dying comrades earlier, was now greeted by millions of kilometers of mostly-empty space, occupied only by the battered survivors of the catastrophe behind them. A few hundred human vessels escaped their demise through the breach Velan had created, though the carnage behind them was intense enough that this trickle of survivors soon slowed, and then stopped; any laggards were callously crushed by debris. Hundreds of thousands of additional human craft were making their way out of the debris-field through other gaps in the catastrophe, and though the human fleet had been ravaged like it never could have imagined as it merely arrived at its destination, the majority of its ships were still functional and ready for whatever the black hole threw at it next. At least, they thought they were.
As the appearance of safety returned to those within the Nemesis, sighs of relief could be heard across the bridge and most other parts of the damaged vessel, though no one was joyful, for while they and many others had survived, millions of people were being wiped out in the madness just a few thousand kilometers away. Worse still, it was unknowable as to whether any rescue attempts could be made: the gargantuan figure of Light's End, a blackened orb true to its name, loomed threateningly before them, demanding attention and promising death. The black hole's eyeless, enigmatic glare strained the already weakened wills of those who witnessed it, while its depths promised to be the harbinger of a galactic crisis the likes of which humans could not even imagine. Those shivering few who confronted the most unnatural part of nature felt all their grief be replaced by fear; the human warships were but shimmering specks of dust, illuminated by the sparks of their dying comrades behind them, as they cowered before a mountain of malice. Indeed, it was difficult to do anything else when confronted with something so ominously powerful, so seemingly malevolent, and so utterly mysterious. Though Light's End had been estimated to have only a few thousand solar masses, its sheer scale seemed to be almost equal to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way; why the human fleet had not been consumed by it yet, no one could guess, nor were they brave enough to try. That monstrous black hole had devoured the cosmos since long before humanity had entered into existence, and something told the humans that it would do so for a long time after humanity had been erased from the face of the universe.
While Velan struggled to come to terms with what had just happened to the fleet, and why, Terxah, who had been running diagnostics on the black hole at the center of the system, reported via textcomm a discovery as alarming as it was interesting: Light's End, which was thought to be a black hole of intermediate size with a mass thousands of times that of Earth's sun, somehow produced less gravity than a small planet. The moment a puzzled Velan relayed this information to Falmenec, the man, aided by MECS, was pulled out of his shocked state and quickly began analyzing the phenomena; he did so with all the desperate fervor one could expect from someone passionate about their work, who was also trying to escape powerful emotions of loss. Naturally, Terxah was not the only one to make this observation — as the discovery was made and shared throughout the entire fleet, the already shaken expedition was filled with an even greater dread of the unchanging and unknowable celestial body before them.
The Admiral Terilan, who had made it out of the carnage more or less unscathed, ordered what remained of his fleet — less than three-quarters of the initial force, though it still comprised millions of warships — to form a dense three-dimensional combat formation that faced Light's End itself. Limited rescue efforts, aimed at saving the surviving crews which remained trapped within the mass-grave by the site of the fleet's entry, were undertaken by those ships best capable of doing so, though few paid attention to this operation — all human eyes were affixed on the looming stellar monstrosity that Light's End was. All of the human warships were ordered to deploy their 'microbial shields' — a defensive measure that involved stimulating the rapid growth of microbes on the hull and even the turrets of a ship, microbes that were genetically engineered to be resistant to most forms of weaponry, and to harden on command so as to present a regenerative first layer of translucent armor to any potential foe. Much of the fleet had not yet deployed this countermeasure, as it required a fair amount of power and resources to sustain, and its effectiveness in defending ships against ramming maneuvers — or ships appearing inside each other — was limited; nevertheless, Terilan, seemingly anticipating something more sinister, ordered the shields deployed regardless.
Similar types of shields, though they were less heavy, more flexible, and sacrificed durability, did exist for the average infantry soldier across the Empire, but as maintaining these for prolonged periods of time was difficult, the soldiers across the expeditionary fleet, not sensing an immediate battle, had not yet activated this specific defence. Such countermeasures could reliably stop individual pistol rounds at close range, and when overstimulated, they could block a few rifle rounds at the cost of mobility and suit power; however, no threat seemed immediately apparent over Light's End. Only time could tell if not activating these shields at that moment was an error, and Velan, his rational mind reeling from the catastrophic amount of death and loss he had just witnessed, believed that it was.
A few minutes passed — the human ships, bulwarks of gilded and armed metal, whose diverse crews, unique designs, and vast reserves of weaponry were unified in a single fleet and singular purpose, collectively held Light's End in their sights as they waited for it to act. Nearly a hundred thousand vessels, still trapped behind them, darted and weaved through the sepulchral cloud of wreckage and death; Velan would have thought that Terilan would wait for these ships to rejoin the main armada before ordering any fleet-wide maneuver, but he was soon proven wrong. Seemingly becoming impatient, or perhaps merely worried, Terilan, after instructing his fleet to deploy their fighter craft in a defensive formation, ordered that a contingent of his fleet's science ships move closer to Light's End, and probe the menacing object, to get some answers. As a force of ten scientific vessels, none larger than a cruiser, set out towards the mysterious black hole — if it was indeed a black hole at all — a tide of hundreds of thousands of fighters darted out in support. Most of these fighters were flown by an onboard pilot, as this is what the Imperatorial Navy, and most planets' local navies — besides Tehkria — preferred for their warships, though a number were controlled remotely. Remotely piloted fighters were advantageous in that they did not place their pilots in direct danger, but were hindered in that they could not be used in the Remnant, and that if their carrier was destroyed, all of the fighters would fail as well, when all of their pilots perished; for this reason, remote fighters were the exception in the fleet, and not the rule. Still, Velan, watching the cloud of human fighters advance on the terrifying lightless sphere before them, pitied those poor fools manually flying a fighter, who had only a few feet of armor and a few inches of shielding to protect themselves.
Being among those nervously staring at the intrepid scientists through his own vessel's telescopic external cameras, Velan was unfortunate enough to have looked at Light's End itself when he were suddenly blinded; the entire black hole of Light's End shifted its color, from a pitch-black, to a blazing, searing, sickly golden hue, one that was not dissimilar from the maddening shade of the Remnant. The human fleet fearfully basked in the baneful refulgence of the celestial body, not suffering any damage, for now, yet remaining utterly powerless compared to it; space itself seemed to shine, as Light's End spat on both the known laws of physics, and its now-inaccurate name.
As the now-golden orb hung in the sky, its dazzling visage outstripping all the sights Velan had ever witnessed in pure, terrifying magnificence, a forceful wave of particles — the same kind that had alerted the Military Council to Light's End's inexplicable behavior — crashed over the already-damaged human fleet. The tempestuous assault of preternatural particles quickly overwhelmed the sensors of any ship present, while the surge was so powerful that it scorched the microbial shields of all vessels in its path as it hurtled out into interstellar space, flitting in and out of the Remnant like its relatively mild predecessor had. A few tense moments later, and with another blinding burst of golden light, the now conflictingly-named Light's End's golden appearance faded back to one of near-complete blackness, through which countless stars, and even galaxies, became visible. Somehow, these unrecognizable stars and galaxies seemed to exude malignance across interstellar distances; Velan placed his warship's weapons on standby, and as he looked on, his mind was simultaneously dominated by a repulsive combination of wonder and fear. Velan overheard an amazed Falmenec mumble, "Is that... a wormhole?"
What Falmenec said, however, was mostly obscured by the shocked gasps and fearful curses that dominated the ambience of the Nemesis's bridge. Velan had no idea what manner of anomaly lay before him, and Falmenec's tone suggested that he didn't either; whatever Light's End was, it was unnatural, it was unprecedented, and it filled any human or Tekran heart that beheld it with dread and mystification. When confronted with something so utterly massive and so totally inexplicable, this reaction was not surprising; terror was the only natural recourse in the face of the monstrously enigmatic.
The next moment, while the fleet was still reeling from the unexpected light-show, slinking forth from the ineffable depths of Light's End, a loose formation of perfectly identical, pitch-black, conical shapes, each slightly smaller than a human cruiser, slowly emerged from Light's End, gliding through the ether, towards the human fleet. As the stream of objects fully exited their abyssal origin, it became clear that they numbered just over three hundred thousand.
All of these objects were intricately engraved in incomprehensible patterns, bore what could only be described as strangely-shaped turrets across their seemingly artificial surfaces, and, for now, they failed to respond to any stimulus the humans offered. The only color on the things' surfaces was a lurid golden flame emanating from their rear, akin to what advanced thrusters would look like, though even these engines of movement were terrifying to the awestruck humans. The ominous objects, appearing a malefic shadow against the light of the unknowable stars shining through Light's End behind them, crept through the void with terrifying precision and purpose. Those in the human fleet found the things to be oddly familiar, similar not to any human structure or vessel, but to the impenetrable alien devices that had given the Remnant its name. Nevertheless, the fact that these objects were similar to the inexplicable structures within a strange realm of space did nothing to answer the humans' endless, fearful questions. The crew of the Nemesis — and every other human ship present — had been shocked into silence; the interiors of the fleet's warships would have been as silent as the depths of space, were it not for the steady hum of power surging through the veins of the vessels towards their weapons. As Velan beheld the seemingly artificial collection of almost identical objects, he couldn't help but think that they bore a striking resemblance to warships.
The following instant, Velan's thoughts were dashed as his mind was pummelled by an urgent order from Terilan, one directed to the entire human fleet: the order instructed them all to open fire. Velan's mind, barely coping with the situation despite the amount of MECS surging through it, attempted to relay the order to his officers, yet before he could act, the unfathomable objects acted first.