Circuit Of The Hollow (2025)

Beyond the deadlight systems of the Thasari Span, beyond even the old charted trade-routes that spiral like torn threads through the void, there hangs an orbital carcass—forgotten, drifting, and undesignated by any modern registry. Dram Vorthuun, they called it, in the time before the Signal Wars, when the sky still bled secrets in infrared. No known origin. No remaining power grid. And yet, from within its metallic belly, there pulses something impossible: a frequency older than flesh, older than code. It is not a broadcast. It is a summoning. What remains of the Blast Rangers now act not as enforcers but as hunters. You, Kaelis Drayven, are one such hunter—a ghost-wrought thing of war, bone, and titanium. For twelve years you have survived the back corridors of collapsing empires and scavenger-thick salvage moons. Now you seek Aetherion Protocol ZK-9, the lost codex of the Godmind Construct, a weapon of logic and light once so powerful it could think galaxies into ruin or peace. Legends say it was scattered when its creators vanished, torn apart across systems like puzzle pieces meant never to be reassembled. But someone is trying. Rumors speak of cultists, of technopaths driven mad by whispering hard-drives, of worlds where machinery prays and gears cry blood. They say the Protocol's core was hidden on Dram Vorthuun—locked in a reliquary behind living code, protected by machine-rites so arcane even the Voth Aesthema dared not breach them. You are not here for legend. You are here to take the Protocol. To own it. Or to die trying. The race is not yours alone. Others move in the dark. Some seek the Protocol for power. Others, to destroy it. But all must pass through the whispering halls of Dram Vorthuun… and the things that sleep there do not wake gently.