The rain in Sector 4 didn't wash anything away; it just smeared the neon grime across the pavement. I sat in my hover-car, the engine idling with a low, rhythmic thrum that matched the pounding in my skull. I had a cigarette between my lips and a void in my chest where a soul used to be.

The Devourer was coming. Everyone knew it. The news-feeds called it a 'Celestial Event'. I called it a cosmic eviction notice.

"You're still here, Jax," a voice crackled over the comms. It was Miller, a man who had sold his own kidneys to buy a ticket to a lunar colony that didn't exist. "Most of the city has already checked out. The 'Sleepers' are in their pods, dreaming of a paradise that's just a line of code."

"I like the view," I replied, watching a holographic geisha flicker and die on a nearby billboard.

I had spent the last week watching the 'Saviors'—those delusional bastards who thought they could bargain with a gravity well. They had a plan. A 'Seed Project'. They were feeding the planet's last biological assets to a colony of genetically modified ants, hoping that some spark of humanity would survive the digestion.

I thought about the ants. I thought about the way they marched in perfect, mindless lines, oblivious to the fact that they were just the appetizer for a god-sized tire.

When the sky finally broke, it didn't happen with a bang. It happened with a silence so heavy it felt like being buried alive. The Devourer's ring descended, blotting out the stars, turning the world into a grayscale photograph.

I didn't run for the pods. I didn't pray. I just watched as the gravity began to peel the city apart, building by building, memory by memory. I saw the 'Seed Project' facility collapse in a single, elegant fold of steel.

As the darkness closed in, I felt a sudden, sharp irony. All that striving, all that 'hope' for the ants... it was just another way of lying to ourselves. The universe wasn't a garden; it was a slaughterhouse. And we were just the meat that had finally run out of time.

I took one last drag of my cigarette, flicked the butt into the void, and waited for the lights to go out.

--- **Objective Tensor Code**: OTMES_v2: [M1:10, M3:7.0, N2:0.9, K1:0.4, I:1.0, R:0.0, theta:210°, TI:88.1]