"Your old life was a single pixel," the voice said. "We will teach you to paint with galaxies."
The Chronos Lance charged with a sound like a dying star. He aimed not at the Maw of Vengeance , but at the asteroid field behind it. The lance struck a century-old rock. In one second, that rock experienced a billion years. It collapsed into a microscopic black hole, then evaporated in a blast of Hawking radiation that cracked the shields of every pirate ship in a ten-kilometer radius.
Then they found him.
the voice replied, "you learn why you were chosen. There are older things than pirates, Kael-3. And they are waking up."
The screens flickered, zooming out from the sector, then the cluster, then the entire galactic arm. A single red dot was pulsing at the edge of the known universe.
And his real test was only beginning.