The outer rings beckoned, a vast, chaotic belt of debris and dwarf planets where the Sun Core's Prime stability frayed. Elara's Helix runner sliced through the asteroid veils, sensors tracking the pulse of the rift-vein like a cancerous heartbeat in the cosmic dark. Her Root Reckoner stage confirmed the truth: the Sovereign's echo was establishing a causal root—a political foundation of dissent among the marginalized Bled Echoes.
Kairo piloted, his Eternal Sovereign Dragons scouting the labyrinth of icy dwarfs. "This belt's thicker than a Coil matriarch's grudges," he quipped, eyes scanning the scopes. Lira, positioned at the sensor station, agreed: "If it's blooming, we're the dentists. Just hope it doesn't bite back with novocaine voids."
They docked on Fracture's Tooth, a dwarf orb where the Bled Wanderers resided. Elara's Veil Sight confirmed the dilemma: the Wanderers showed only 11% flux unease, meaning they were victims of the Sovereign's promise of "freedom," not malicious participants.
The Root's Nexus
The cavernous hollow at the dwarf's heart revealed the vein's root: a throbbing nexus of shadow-quartz, the Sovereign's Serpentile Haze coiling and whispering political poison: "Fringe kin, the light binds; unmake with me—bloom free in the void's garden."
Elara advanced, Forge Reckoning surging. She didn't seek to destroy the Bled, but to isolate the root's political influence. Her Anvil Echo hammered the haze, the sound amplified by the cavern's flux, while Lira's chains exposed the Root's Nexus—the exact point of dissonance in the Sovereign's logic.
The Wanderers joined the fray, their flux harmonies syncing with the triad, using the environment to amplify Elara's strikes. The humor and shared resistance became the final, decisive variable.
The root bucked, yielding to the hammer. Forge Reckoning remade the root—shadow-quartz blooming into neutral light-prisms. Elara absorbed the core, achieving Root Reckoner mastery—gaining the ability to trace and remake these political/causal roots across the realms.
The Serpentile Path
Back on the shuttle, Elara utilized her new power to trace the deeper veins. Root Reckoner whispered warnings: deeper veins coiled in the outer voids, Sovereign's garden plotting full bloom by allying with void outliers and tempting Coil fringes.
The final rift-vein mapped outward, coiling toward the system's edge. The Sovereign's Serpentile Form was half-coiled, not yet a behemoth, but an insidious political agent weaving its Outer Core Empire. The hunt was on to sever the next root before it could establish a self-sustaining foothold.