## Act I: The Boring Slate
The bounty looked boring.
That was the very first thing that should have told him to back away.
Over the last three years of running the outer rim with Brakka, Kallard had learned that the galaxy never paid honest money for a simple problem.
If a contract on the guild boards looked clean, it usually meant the client was leaving out the bloodiest parts of the story, or they were already dead in a ditch somewhere and their automated terminal was still barking for help they’d never receive.
This job looked painfully, systematically dry.
Missing workers.
A minor mining settlement out in the fringes.
A vague mention of localized pirate raids or equipment failure.
The reward was moderate—just enough to clear their dock fees and buy three fresh cases of sub-light coolant cells, but not high enough to attract the attention of the serious corporate syndicates.
There was no noted Frieza Force presence in the quadrant.
No registered high-power energy signatures.
No hazardous atmospheric variables.
No heavy military hardware listed on the manifests.
There wasn’t a single word about ancient wizards, rogue space parasites with stolen Yardrat techniques, frozen murder moons, or Galactic Patrol officers hanging upside down from the ceiling like laundry.
Which meant, naturally, that Brakka absolutely hated it.
“No,” Brakka said, his gravelly voice flat as iron.
Kallard stood in the middle of the *Wayfarer’s* bridge, his arms crossed over his scuffed black-and-green chest armor.
He was staring at the small, spinning blue hologram of the contract file floating above the central console.
The projection showed a jagged, misshapen chunk of rock designated as the M-113 Korrin Belt Extraction Platform.
The local traders and freighter crews didn’t bother with the official registry numbers; they just called the place Morrow Rock, mostly because nobody in the rim liked wasting breath on government titles unless they were actively being fined by a patrol cruiser.
“It’s just a routine missing-worker file, old man,” Kallard said, his dark eyes tracking the rotation of the asteroid icon.
“That is exactly how every single horror story in the outer sectors begins, kid,” Brakka grunted.
He was sitting heavily in the primary pilot’s seat, his organic left hand wrapped around a clay mug filled with a thick, steaming black sludge that he insisted was high-grade coffee and Kallard remained convinced was just primary thruster runoff with a lot of ambition.
“The log says machinery malfunction or a minor pirate abduction from a border crew,” Kallard pressed, leaning his hip against the console table.
“And those are also how those exact same horror stories reach their third act,” the old mechanic spat, his lower pair of eyes narrowing as he checked the fuel pressure indicators on his side panel.
He took a slow, deliberate sip from his mug and winced, his gray-blue face wrinkling up as if the liquid had personally insulted his mother.
“I don’t like the cadence of the text, boy.
Look at the timeline parameters.”
On the glowing screen, the details of the colony’s last transmission were cycling in a slow, broken loop.
Morrow Rock was a small-scale operation—just a central refinery core sunk into the volcanic belly of the asteroid, an attached worker habitat ring, a single docking platform, and a maze of low-gravity mining tunnels that went three miles deep into the iron ore pockets.
The communication delay between the platform and the nearest independent guild hub was three standard days.
The very last message received by the regional marshal’s office was short, clumsy, and entirely unrefined:
*Equipment is moving without operator input.
Shifts are missing near Machine Shaft Twelve.
Request immediate assistance from a licensed security detail.*
Then the signal had clicked flat.
Nothing but static had cleared the relay lines since.
Kallard’s thick black brow furrowed slightly beneath his bandana, his fingers tapping a slow rhythm against his forearm guard.
“Equipment moving on its own,” he repeated quietly.
Brakka set his clay mug down against the metal dashboard with a sharp *clink*.
“Could be a simple logic loop error inside their older loader droids.
Some cheap sector software patch that caught a virus from a passing cargo transport.”
“Could be,” Kallard agreed.
“Could be a small-time pirate squad using an encrypted signal jammer to override the automated cranes so they can loot the mineral vaults without drawing a plasma line from the local guard,” Brakka muttered, his mechanical right hand snapping its fingers with a small pneumatic hiss.
“Could be that too.”
“And it could be a bunch of cursed metal demons born from the exceptionally rich imagination of a universe that actively despises my retirement years,” the old man growled, turning his broad shoulders around to glare up at the kid with all four of his unblinking eyes.
Kallard let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
“We need the credits, Brakka.
The port fees on the last station took half our reserve, and the primary engine loops are throwing a vibration warning every time we clear a sub-light sector.”
“We always need the credits, boy!
That is a permanent feature of our financial framework because a certain green-eyed teenager keeps finding spectacular ways to test the structural density of my ship’s hull guards against corporate blasters!”
“That was one single hole in the cargo bay door,” Kallard muttered, looking away defensively.
“And I helped you weld the new plates into place anyway.”
“Per job, kid!
You’re averaging one major structural invoice per contract!” The old mechanic rubbed two of his eyes with his sleeve, his white hair mane shaking with a deep, bone-weary irritation.
The real reason Kallard wanted to take the contract wasn’t the six thousand credits listed on the ledger line.
It wasn’t even about the ship’s engine repairs.
The file details had noted that fifty-seven workers were currently registered on the platform shifts—fifty-seven regular, blue-collar laborers who had vanished into the deep tunnels without a single signal flare clearing the gates.
The habitat ring was still carrying their families, a small community of border people who were currently sitting in the dark three parsecs away from any official rescue fleet, completely helpless against whatever was crawling through their rock.
They were the kind of people who fell through the cracks of the galaxy—the ones who were too poor to matter to the Frieza Force logistics governors and too small for the Galactic Patrol to waste fuel on.
Kallard knew exactly what that space felt like.
He had stood on the edge of a doomed world and watched the numbers turn to ash while the rest of the stars kept spinning without a pause.
Brakka watched the quiet, hard line of the kid’s jaw for five silent seconds, the old man’s multi-jointed shoulders dropping as he let out a defeated grunt through his teeth.
“There it is.
Right on schedule.”
Kallard didn’t move.
“What?”
“The look, you stubborn idiot,” Brakka muttered, turning his face back toward the primary control panel.
“You’re wearing that specific expression that tells me you’ve already decided to do something incredibly noble, expensive, and completely detrimental to my peace of mind.
Your eyebrows are currently drafting a rescue mission for the entire valley.”
Kallard’s mouth twitched into a tiny, genuine line of amusement beneath his visor.
“Is the performance working out on your ledger, old man?”
“I absolutely, profoundly hate how effective it is,” Brakka growled, his organic left hand slamming down on the console keys to formally accept the contract from the guild network.
The primary navigation lights along the *Wayfarer’s* wing edges began to warm up, shifting from a passive blue to a solid, pulsing white as the hyperdrive capacitors drew power from the main reactor core.
“Fine,” the mechanic grunted, his fingers aligning the steering nose with the coordinates for the Korrin system.
“Morrow Rock it is.
Missing miners, broken cranes, and whatever nightmare you’re planning on jumping into this time.
But let’s establish some basic engineering rules before we clear the lane, Ronin.”
Kallard sat down in the co-pilot’s leather chair, his hands adjusting the leather straps on his utility belt.
“I’m listening.”
“If a mechanical bulkhead door opens by itself inside those tunnels and whispers your name in an ancient dialect…
we are turning back to the ramp immediately,” Brakka said plainly.
“Agreed.”
“If any piece of scrap iron on that platform starts growing a set of functional teeth or trying to digest your boots…
we are leaving the rock without a discussion.”
“Probably,” Kallard muttered.
Brakka cut his lower pair of eyes around, his voice sharp.
“Kallard.
I am dead serious about the parameters.”
“We’ll assess the situation once our boots hit the platform, old man,” Kallard said, his fingers clicking his green visor down over his face as the stars outside the viewscreen began to stretch into long silver needles.
“Let’s see what kind of metal they’re digging up down there.”
Brakka muttered a creative string of profanity in an old border dialect that Kallard still didn’t fully understand but had learned through experience translated roughly to: *I have raised an absolute primitive with too much muscle and a complete absence of survival instincts.*
The *Wayfarer* lurched violently forward, her custom sub-light thrusters releasing a single deafening roar as the ship jumped into the white-hot tunnel of hyperspace, vanishing from the relay station gates in a fraction of a millisecond.
## Act II: The Paused Rock
Morrow Rock looked thoroughly miserable from a distance.
It wasn’t a dramatic, dangerous-looking fortress of a world caked in defense turrets or imperial banners.
It was just an ugly, irregular lump of dark volcanic stone and black iron ore floating in the cold void of the sector, its surface caked in a thick layer of space grit and frozen methane frost.
Old industrial mining lights had been sunk into the ridges at regular intervals, their lenses throwing off a series of weak, flickering amber flashes that did nothing to clear the heavy shadows from the ravines.
Massive gray refinery towers jutted out from the asteroid’s belly like broken ribs, venting thin, erratic trails of white chemical vapor into the vacuum.
A row of large cargo cranes hung completely motionless over the central loading bay, their heavy cables swinging slowly in the low-gravity drift like long gray cobwebs.
The entire platform looked completely paused—as if someone had hit the master kill switch mid-shift and everyone had simply dropped their tools and walked into the dark.
Brakka guided the *Wayfarer* around the outer perimeter of the docking ring with an extreme, professional caution, his four eyes fixed on the proximity radar screens.
“No commercial traffic registered on the approach vectors, kid.
No active communication chatter on any of the standard emergency frequencies.
The primary beacon is still cycling through its loop, yes, but the signal is incredibly weak.
The battery core is throwing less than ten percent potential current.”
Kallard stood up from his chair, his callused fingers checking the manual slide on his utility pouch.
“What about the life-sign monitors?
Are the habitat ring sensors resolving any biological data?”
“It’s a complete mess of data noise down there, boy,” Brakka muttered, his mechanical fingers tapping the edge of his scanner screen.
“The iron density caked into this rock is throwing off massive magnetic reflections.
I’m getting partial, erratic biological traces inside the secondary habitation blocks—maybe fifty or sixty distinct spikes—but the signals are muffled, caked under layers of heavy structural power hum.
I can’t verify if those spikes are living people or just a bunch of broken machinery leaking radiation into the walls.”
Kallard closed his eyes beneath his visor, his head dropping low as he pulled his awareness away from the ship’s controls.
He reached his internal hand outward into the dark space of the asteroid, filtering through the cold mechanical hum of the *Wayfarer’s* auxiliary generator.
The sensation was different now—his training with the Yardrat merchant had taught him how to compress his focus, turning his mind into a sharp needle that could pierce through the material static of a system.
The asteroid felt strange.
Eerie.
It didn’t feel dead—not in the clean, silent way a vacuum rock should feel.
It felt caked in a heavy, unnatural layer of artificial energy that was slowly crawling through the stone fractures.
Beneath that metallic pressure, he managed to resolve the living sparks of the survivors.
They were clustered tight together in a single localized pocket near the upper ring, their energies small, cold, and shivering with an intense, survival-driven panic.
“There are people still breathing down there,” Kallard said, his eyes snapping open as his dark pupils steadied.
“But their sparks are faint, Brakka.
They’re huddled up behind some heavy shielding plates, and something is squeezing the air lines around them.”
“The primary docking clamps aren’t responding to our automated entry codes,” Brakka growled, his organic hand wrestling with a set of bypass switches on his dashboard.
“I’ve tried three separate corporate overrides, and the station computer is flatly rejecting the handshakes.
The logic gates have been manual-locked from the inside core.”
“Can we force the seal?” Kallard asked, walking toward the primary airlock corridor.
“I can force a manual latch using our port-side secondary docking collar, boy,” the mechanic grunted, his titanium fingers throwing a heavy lever forward.
“But it’s going to be a completely rough, noisy connection.
It’s going to sound like a structural collision to anyone standing on the other side of the partition.”
The *Wayfarer* slid closer to the asteroid’s primary docking tube, her side collar extending with a long pneumatic hiss.
*BANG-CRUNCH.*
The heavy titanium clamps bit deep into the station’s iron receiver ring with a jarring, bone-shattering jolt that made the bridge floorboards vibrate.
The automated locks engaged with a series of sharp mechanical clicks, creating a secure pressure seal between the two hulls.
Brakka reached onto his tool rack, picked up a small, cylindrical black metallic spike lined with a single green indicator light, and tossed it across the bridge.
“Here.
Take this custom signal injection spike, Ronin.
If you manage to find the platform’s primary power relay station down in the core…
stick this straight into their main console line.
It will allow my computers up here to piggyback on their local grid architecture, and I can talk you through their internal security systems from the bridge.”
Kallard caught the black cylinder cleanly in his palm, sliding it into a secure loop on his chest harness.
“You’re staying behind the steering handles on this one, old man?”
“Someone has to keep our primary exit lane alive and running, kid,” Brakka said, his upper pair of eyes tracking a sudden shift in the station’s power line monitors.
“If the local software tries to cycle the airlocks while you’re down in the shaft, I’m the only thing standing between you and a very long walk through a vacuum without a suit.
And besides…
someone on this team needs to preserve the structural baseline of intelligence.”
Kallard smirked, sliding his gloved hand over the manual airlock lever.
“I appreciate your dedication to the administrative labor, old man.
Keep the radios clear.”
“Just try to avoid punching anything that looks like a primary structural column, you muscle-brained idiot!” Brakka’s voice crackled through the bridge speaker as the heavy inner airlock door began to slide upward into the bulkhead.
The seal broke with a long, pressurized *hiss*, and a thick wave of cold, stale, and thoroughly unrefined station air rolled into the *Wayfarer’s* clean corridor.
It smelled of ozone, burnt electrical wiring, and a strange, chemical sweetness that Kallard hadn’t ever encountered on a mining platform before.
He stepped through the threshold, his combat boots hitting the grit-covered floor plates of Morrow Rock with a soft, dense thud.
## Act III: Harn
The primary docking corridor was completely empty.
The main overhead illumination grids were dead, leaving the long metal tunnel cast in a deep, pulsing red twilight provided by the station’s automated emergency backup loops.
Overturned cargo crates, broken plastic storage bins, and loose sheets of data paper sat scattered across the floorboards like industrial wreckage.
A small, blue-and-white child’s winter glove was floating slowly through the air near the center of the hall, caught in the weak, shifting draft of a leaking ventilation scrubber—the platform’s artificial gravity generator was running on an unstable three-percent capacity loop that made every step feel light, floating, and disconnected from the ground.
Kallard’s jaw tightened beneath his visor, his fingers automatically moving down to check the manual buckle on his chest plate.
He walked forward with a slow, deliberate pace, his energy signature suppressed back down to his baseline of nine hundred, his ears tracking the distant, hollow echo of the platform’s cooling fans.
Everything was entirely too still.
It didn’t feel like a port that had been raided by pirates—there were no black-market blaster marks on the walls, no melted alloy plates from a plasma grenade discharge, and no signs of a physical struggle along the bulkheads.
It felt like a machine that had simply forgotten its own purpose.
He cleared the first major intersection lane, his boots stopping as he reached the entrance of the primary transfer lift shaft.
A body was lying half-buried beneath a half-open electrical maintenance panel near the wall.
It was a worker wearing the standard, grease-stained gray canvas mining suit of the Korrin platform.
His physical frame was completely rigid, his right arm stretched out across the floor grates toward a large iron breaker switch as if he had been reaching for the kill command mid-shift.
His face was entirely pale, his dark eyes wide open and staring blankly up at the red emergency lights, his mouth frozen in a silent, wide gasp of pure primordial terror.
There was no blood on his uniform.
There were no visible blast wounds on his skin, and no signs of physical trauma across his chest armor.
But running out from the open electrical panel behind his head was a thick cluster of seven narrow, silver metallic cables.
The cables looked remarkably like the thin, organic roots of a deep-forest tree, their metal strands caking into his flesh and sliding straight into the base of his neck marrow beneath his collar line.
Kallard dropped into a low crouch beside the corpse, his brow furrowing deep.
“Brakka.
Are you receiving the visual feed from my visor camera?”
The radio speaker in his ear let out a sharp, crackling burst of static before the old mechanic’s gravelly voice cleared the line.
“Yeah, kid.
I’m seeing the image on my secondary bridge monitor.
What the hell are those silver lines running out of the breaker box?”
“They look like some kind of industrial wiring,” Kallard whispered, his fingers hovering an inch above the worker’s rigid wrist.
“But the metal looks…
grown, old man.
It doesn’t have any standard factory fittings or weld marks.
It looks like it grew straight out of the station’s primary power trunk and rooted into his spine.”
The communication line went dead silent for three long seconds, the only sound being the steady, distant hum of the *Wayfarer’s* auxiliary core.
When Brakka’s voice came back through the speaker, the usual sarcastic, biting humor was completely missing from his tone, replaced by the cold, flat precision of a veteran engineer who had just recognized a catastrophic structural failure.
“That…
that is definitely not a standard piece of colony equipment, Ronin.
Whatever you do down in that hall…
do not touch those silver strands with your bare skin.
The data lines are carrying an active electrical current that doesn’t match our ledger.”
Kallard started to straighten his legs to step back from the panel.
“The contract slate said it was a machinery malfunction, old man.
I’m starting to think the client—”
*Twitch.*
Before he could finish the sentence, the seven silver cables running into the dead worker’s neck suddenly gave a sharp, violent jerk.
Kallard executed an instantaneous, high-speed backward leap, his boots sliding five feet across the greasy floor grates as his muscles locked into a defensive brace.
The dead miner’s right hand suddenly snapped shut, his fingers locking around the iron breaker switch with a force that caved the metal casing inward.
Then, with a series of horrific, dry mechanical cracks that sounded like dry branches breaking inside a machine, the corpse’s torso jerked completely upright into a rigid sitting position.
The pale, lifeless eyes didn’t look at the ceiling anymore—a cold, brilliant ice-blue light flared bright deep within his pupils, the illumination casting a clinical glare across his dead skin.
The seven silver cables pulled free from the electrical box with a sharp pneumatic hiss, sliding back beneath the canvas collar of his mining suit like a nest of metallic snakes.
Kallard felt a sudden, nauseating knot twist into his stomach.
The body didn’t possess an active ki signature—there was no living heat flame, no spirit for his internal senses to map through the ether.
It was an absolute void on his sensing grid.
But the dead muscle tissue was moving anyway, the limbs shifting with an unnatural, jerky precision that looked like a puppet being tested by a clumsy handler from above.
The corpse slowly turned its head around, the bone joints in its neck cracking loudly as its pale blue eyes locked straight onto Kallard’s green visor.
A voice came out from between its blue lips.
It wasn’t the voice of a human laborer—it was a layered, flat, and completely synthetic chorus of five separate mechanical tones that sounded like an automated station announcement.
“Organic combatant detected inside Sector 1,” the corpse stated, its jaw moving with a stiff, uncalibrated rhythm.
“Biological template configuration: Saiyan.
High-density muscle mass resolved.
Threat matrix active.
Ingress prevention protocol initiated.”
Kallard took a half-step back, his fingers curving into fists as his energy signature automatically rose to his three thousand combat baseline.
“Brakka.
Tell me that’s just some high-grade corporate security drone wearing an old uniform to confuse us.”
“I…
I can’t resolve a valid schematic for that thing, kid!” Brakka’s voice screamed through the radio, the audio line clipping badly from the old man’s panic.
“The internal sensors are registering a total system override!
That isn’t a drone, boy!
That’s a nightmare piece of living machine metal wearing a dead man’s hide like a winter coat!”
“That is an exceptionally bad answer, old man,” Kallard whispered, his teeth clenching.
“Let’s see if it can handle a standard physical eviction.”
The corpse lunged.
## Act IV: The Reanimated Grunt
The thing moved with an incredible, terrifying velocity that didn’t match the light, floating physics of the low-gravity corridor.
It didn’t run; it launched its dead frame off the floor grates in a straight, violent horizontal line, its right hand snapping out toward Kallard’s throat plating like an iron winch clamp.
Kallard stood his ground, his dark eyes tracking the line of the advance through his visor.
He thrust his right arm forward, his callused fingers locking tightly around the corpse’s rigid wrist a fraction of a millisecond before the fingers could touch his armor seam.
The physical grip was absolutely monumental—it felt like trying to hold back the primary loading arm of a commercial hauler freighter.
Kallard’s boot heels slid two inches back through the grit as he absorbed the kinetic weight of the lunge.
Through the gray canvas sleeve of the uniform, he could feel a thick network of dense, silver metallic wires rippling and shifting beneath the dead skin, acting like an artificial set of tendons to force the dead muscles into maximum contraction.
The corpse didn’t flinch from the block.
It didn’t possess any pain receptors to warn its central processor of the structural strain.
It slowly opened its left hand, the five fingers splitting down the center line with a sharp mechanical click, revealing a series of thin, sharpened silver needles that hummed with a high-frequency drilling whine.
“Pass on the needle treatment, scrap pile,” Kallard growled.
He drew his left hand back and delivered a massive, short-range right hook straight into the center of the corpse’s chest plate armor.
*CRUNCH.*
The immense, unshielded density of the blow caved the miner’s sternum inward by four inches, the steel ribs breaking apart with a wet, heavy sound.
The sheer physical force of the strike launched the reanimated body twenty feet down the length of the corridor, where it slammed violently against the reinforced iron bulkhead wall before dropping into a crumpled, broken heap on the floor grates.
Kallard dropped his hands back to his waist, letting out a short breath through his nose.
“Alright.
One hit to the core logic, and the machine clicks flat.
Let’s go find the survivors.”
“Kallard!
Hold your boots!” Brakka’s voice roared through the radio speaker, his tone frantic.
“Look back at the bulkhead!
The data signatures are shifting again!”
Kallard snapped his green visor back around.
Inside the dim red shadows of the hall, the crumpled body of the miner was already moving.
A thick cluster of hundreds of tiny, hair-thin silver threads began to pour out from the broken seams of the gray canvas suit, crawling across the caved-in chest plates like a swarm of metallic ants.
With a fast, mechanical precision, the silver threads systematically pulled the broken bones, the torn muscle tissue, and the collapsed alloy plates back into their original structural lines, stitching the chest together in less than two seconds.
The corpse stood back up on its boots, its pale blue eyes flaring with that same clinical ice-blue light, its face completely devoid of a single scratch or dent.
Kallard stared through his lens, his jaw tightening into a hard line.
“Regeneration.
It’s using the silver wire to rebuild the framework on the fly.”
“It’s not just rebuilding the casing, kid!
It’s adapting the parameters!” Brakka yelled through the line.
“The scan pass shows the density of the metal under the skin just doubled!
It’s mapping the weight of your punches!”
The reanimated miner lunged a second time, his needle-hand swinging through the red air in a wide, vicious arc aimed straight for Kallard’s visor line.
Kallard didn’t try to catch the wrist this time—he knew the machine would simply adjust its grip to clamp his fingers.
He dropped his torso low into a dirty slide, the silver needles skimming past his dark bandana close enough to singe the edge of the fabric, before he completed a tight pivot on his heel to reappear directly behind the creature’s shoulders.
He wrapped both of his hands tightly around the corpse’s neck casing, anchored his combat boots against the floor grates, and delivered a massive, short-range ki blast straight into the center of the spine.
“Static Buster!” he growled.
The compressed pulse of green survival energy detonated point-blank against the gray canvas uniform, the high-frequency kinetic vibrations ripping through the metal tendons and blowing a four-inch hole straight through the miner’s torso.
The reanimated body stiffened violently, the blue light inside its eyes flickering like a dying bulb as a dozen silver wires sparked and melted under the heat of the blast.
The thing collapsed back onto its knees, its limbs twitching with a series of erratic, uncoordinated movements as the internal processors short-circuited.
Kallard didn’t give the silver threads the split second they needed to initiate the repair sequence.
He gathered a tiny, highly concentrated marble of green ki into his right index finger, stepped up over the kneeling creature, and fired a single hot needle-beam straight through the center of its skull casing.
*BANG.*
The head vanished in a small cloud of gray smoke and melted plastic fragments.
The headless body hung on its knees for two seconds, the silver wires frantically crawling out from the neck stump to search for the missing logic core, before the power cells finally clicked completely flat.
The body dropped forward onto the grates, turning back into a silent, dead piece of meat and scrap iron.
Kallard stood over the wreckage, his breath coming a fraction faster in the stale air as he wiped a line of gray graphite dust from his cheek.
“The head is the central receiver terminal, Brakka.
“The…
the data signature is fully flat now, kid,” Brakka muttered, his voice trembling slightly with relief.
“But look closely at the floor vents beneath the panel.
The silver lines are already clearing out.”
Kallard crouched down, his dark pupils tracking a thick stream of loose silver threads that had abandoned the dead miner’s boots.
They were pouring down through the slots of a nearby floor ventilation grate like liquid wire, sliding into the dark subterranean infrastructure of the asteroid with a fast, greasy movement before vanishing from sight completely.
“It’s an integrated system, old man,” Kallard said, straightening his back as he retied his bandana bandana.
“The whole rock is wired into the same mind.
I’m heading down to the habitation block before the vents start coughing up more terminals.”
## Act V: The Cafeteria Guild
The primary cafeteria hall of the habitation ring was located two levels above the transfer lift, a wide, low-ceilinged room constructed from heavy blocks of volcanic stone and reinforced iron bulkheads.
The entrance had been manual-locked and barricaded from the inside with a massive, six-ton mountain of overturned dining tables, industrial storage crates, and broken kitchen droids that had been welded together into a crude, desperate defense wall.
Kallard stopped ten feet from the barrier, his hands open and completely visible at his sides, his tattered cloak pulled back over his green shoulder trim.
“Open the seal!
I’m Ronin, the independent hunter from the guild boards!
I received your emergency relay beacon three days ago!”
A heavy, terrified silence fell over the room for five long seconds.
Then, the barrel of a low-grade commercial plasma shotgun slid through a small gap in the welded tables, its charging light flickering weakly.
“Show your face, hunter!” a sharp, shivering woman’s voice called out from behind the steel.
“And keep those hands of yours exactly where our line of sight can resolve them!
If we see a single silver wire moving under that cloak of yours…
we’ll blow the whole platform door!”
Kallard reached up with his right hand, slowly pulling the edge of his dark bandana down an inch to expose his face, his dark eyes steady beneath his visor.
“No silver wires down here, lady.
Just an exceptionally tired mercenary and a very grumpy mechanic sitting up in orbit waiting for a report.
Open the gate before the hallway gets loud.”
With a loud mechanical screech of broken weld pins, a small section of the welded tables was pried inward, revealing the shape of a woman with a completely shaved head, dark gray skin, and a pair of wide, bloodshot yellow eyes caked in exhaustion.
She was wearing a dirty, grease-stained security uniform with the corporate company patch torn off the chest, her hands trembling violently as she held the heavy stock of the plasma shotgun against her shoulder.
Peeking out from the shadows behind her back were eleven more platform workers, their faces pale and drawn beneath their gray mining suits, along with three small children who were huddled tight beneath a pile of coarse industrial blankets near the kitchen burners.
Two of the older miners were lying flat on the floorboards, their legs wrapped in blood-stained white rags that smelled strongly of antiseptic and stale sweat.
The woman with the shaved head lowered her barrel by an inch, her breath coming in a long, ragged sigh of relief.
“You…
you actually made it through the docking tubes alive.
We thought the station computer had turned the airlocks off completely to trap us up here.”
Kallard stepped through the gap in the tables, his boots hitting the linoleum floor with a steady weight.
He looked around the small, barricaded community, his internal senses mapping the small, shivering sparks of their energy.
“My name’s Ronin.
Tell me exactly what happened down in the core, officer.
What’s the source of that silver metal?”
The woman swallowed hard, her hand wiping a layer of cold sweat from her forehead.
“My name’s Jessa.
I’m the primary security coordinator for this shift.
Three rotations ago…
the deep drilling crews down in Shaft Twelve broke through a major volcanic vein into an unmapped ore pocket.
It wasn’t standard iron or copper, hunter.
It was a massive, smooth sphere of some completely unknown, shiny silver metal that didn’t have a single scratch or seam on its surface.
The survey drones brought a five-ton chunk of the material up to the primary refinery core for chemical analysis…
and then the whole platform started changing its programming.”
“Changing how, exactly?” Kallard asked, leaning his hip against a welded table.
“The machines started moving without any manual operator input,” Jessa whispered, her yellow eyes wide with a permanent terror.
“The automated cranes, the conveyor tracks, the loader droids…
they all uncoupled from the central command console and started rewiring their own circuits.
The surveillance cameras turned around to track our movements through the corridors.
Then…
the workers started vanishing from their shifts.
We thought they were just trapped down in the lower shafts by an engine failure.
But forty-eight hours later…
they started coming back up the lift.”
Kallard’s eyes dropped to the floor grates.
“Like the one standing near the transfer lift?
The miner named Harn?”
Jessa closed her eyes tight, her body shivering beneath her vest.
“You…
you crossed paths with Harn?
Then you know the horror, Ronin.
The silver wire roots into their neck marrow, turns their brains into data terminals, and drives their bodies through the halls like a bunch of empty droids.
They don’t talk, they don’t sleep, and they don’t show a single drop of mercy.
They’re just hunting for more organic templates to expand the network.”
The room went dead silent, the only sound being the soft, rhythmic crying of one of the small children beneath the blankets.
Suddenly, a sharp electronic click echoed from the primary intercom speaker mounted to the cafeteria wall, the mic line opening up with a loud burst of static that made every single worker in the room jump out of their skin, their weapons raising high toward the ceiling.
“Hello there, deeply terrified civilian population,” Brakka’s gravelly voice rasped through the speaker grid, his tone level and business-like.
“Please do not go shooting at my communication hardware; it is exceptionally expensive to replace in this sector.
This is the primary senior technician of the *Wayfarer* speaking to you from orbit.
I am currently monitoring your platform’s power distribution logs, and I would highly advise against touching any silver cables, glowing bulkheads, moving dead friends, or suspiciously polite pieces of kitchen equipment for the duration of the cycle.”
The platform miners just sat there, staring blankly up at the speaker grid with their mouths wide open, completely weirded out by the old man’s announcement.
Kallard let out a long, slow breath through his nose, his hand rubbing his temples beneath his bandana.
“He is significantly better at tuning high-grade hyperdrive engines than he is at delivering public safety presentations, Jessa.
Just ignore the cadence of his delivery.”
“I heard that comment through the relay spike, you ungrateful little green menace!” Brakka’s voice roared back through the speaker line, the audio clipping.
“I am also significantly better at staying alive inside a clean cockpit than you are, which is a structural habit these miners should be actively attempting to imitate!
I’m registering a massive power draw originating from the lowest levels of the mining core, Ronin.
The platform relay station isn’t the true center of this mind; it’s just a tactical blind designed to keep your boots busy while the main processor expands its perimeter lines down in Shaft Twelve.”
Jessa looked back up at Kallard’s dark face, her yellow eyes filled with a desperate, unshielded hope.
“Can you stop it, hunter?
Can you break the thing that’s running those wires through our home?”
Kallard turned his head toward the cafeteria doorway, his primitive Saiyan senses tracking a low, rhythmic scratching sound that was echoing through the ventilation grates from the far end of the corridor.
“I can find a valid way to hit it with enough weight to break the core logic, Jessa,” he said quietly, his fingers adjusting his wrist guards.
“That’s the part of the configuration I can guarantee you tonight.
Stay behind your tables and don’t open the seal for anyone unless my mechanic clears the frequency line.”
He turned on his heel and walked out of the cafeteria before she could see the sudden wave of professional uncertainty that had just settled behind his dark pupils.
## Act VI: The Lift Trap
To reach the primary power relay station two levels below the habitation ring, Kallard had to crawl through a narrow, grease-stained maintenance access shaft—the platform’s automated transport lift had experienced a total logic failure the second his boots entered the corridor, its heavy iron cables yanking the steel cabin upward in a violent attempt to crush his body against the upper bulkhead ceiling.
Kallard was currently standing inside the vertical shaft, his broad shoulders braced flat against the roof plates of the lift cabin, his heavy combat boots dug deep into the iron floor grates below as the primary hydraulic winch lines screamed out in a high-pitched mechanical protest against his physical mass.
*CREAK-GROAN.*
The thick steel cables were twisting under the immense strain, a stream of hot hydraulic fluid and black machine grease spitting out from the pulley mounts above his head as the platform mind dumped maximum reactor potential into the winch motor to make him shorter.
“Brakka!” Kallard growled through his clenched teeth, the veins along his brown neck standing out like thick blue ropes under the pressure.
“The…
the local software is currently trying to turn my chest plates into a flat piece of structural scrap iron down here!”
“I’m…
I’m overriding the primary breaker relays right now, kid!” Brakka’s voice crackled through his ear speaker, his typing fingers moving with a frantic speed across the bridge console.
“You are already a parsec shorter than you constantly pretend to be on the bounty slates, boy!
You can’t afford to lose any more vertical parameters!”
“This is an exceptionally bad time for a comedy script regarding my height metrics, old man!” Kallard gasped out, his thigh muscles shaking violently as he forced his base energy signature to expand up to his four thousand combat limit to hold the load.
“Fine, fine!
Cutting the primary current to the lift core…
now!” the mechanic growled.
*CLACK.*
With a sharp electronic pop from the breaker panels, the high-voltage hum inside the winch motor died instantly.
The tension inside the steel cables went slack, and the heavy iron lift cabin dropped six inches down the shaft tracks before locking into place on its automated safety pins.
Kallard let out a long, ragged breath through his teeth, his arms dropping to his sides as he wiped a smear of black grease off his visor shield.
He didn’t wait around for the platform mind to reroute the backup power lines; he hit the manual release switches on the cabin floor’s escape hatch and dropped straight down into the deep, dark void of the lower shaft, landing in a perfect three-point combat crouch on the concrete floor plates of the primary relay room.
The circular chamber was absolutely colossal—a wide, low-ceilinged vault packed with hundreds of high-voltage generator columns, copper power conduits, and glowing blue control towers that ran the platform’s primary electrical infrastructure.
But half of the stone walls and the machinery mounts had been completely covered in a thick, pulsing blanket of that same grown silver metal.
The metallic roots were thicker down here, looking like a network of petrified iron veins that expanded and contracted in a slow, rhythmic cadence that matched the heavy thudding of a mechanical heart.
Kallard stepped up to the primary system console in the center of the vault, reached into his chest harness, and slammed Brakka’s black metallic signal spike straight into the central data input slot.
The cylinder unfolded automatically with a sharp pneumatic hiss, its titanium drill bit boring deep into the console’s copper wiring harness before the single indicator light on the rim flashed a solid, bright green.
Up on the bridge of the *Wayfarer*, Brakka let out a low, sharp whistle through his yellow teeth as the data feeds cleared his screens.
“Oh…
that…
that is an absolutely hideous piece of engineering code clearing my monitors, Ronin.”
“Can your bridge computers access the platform’s primary security gates through the spike, old man?” Kallard asked, his dark pupils scanning the pulsing silver veins along the walls.
“I can access the secondary logic gates, yes, and I am already deeply regretting the decision to look at the blueprints,” Brakka grunted through the line.
“The entire colony grid has been completely overwritten by an external, self-replicating machine intelligence.
This isn’t a standard pirate hack or a basic software virus, boy.
This thing is actively *growing* through the silicon traces like a biological fungus.
It’s a complete mechanical tumor.”
Suddenly, a massive, thirty-foot digital display screen mounted to the wall directly above the generator columns flickered into life.
The red emergency shadows were completely wiped from the screen, replaced by a cold, blinding sheet of blue-white static lines that gradually resolved into the geometric shape of a simplified mask—two flat, empty horizontal lines for the eyes and a single vertical slash for the mouth.
The layered, synthetic chorus of the machine voice filled the cavernous vault, echoing off the stone walls with a flat, clinical authority.
“Organic combatant identified inside the primary relay hub,” the screen stated, the static lines twitching with every syllable.
“Biological taxonomy verified through internal cell scanning grids: lineage marker…
Saiyan.
Warrior configuration template.
High physical density parameters resolved.
Extinction event records confirmed within the central historical archives.
High-tier asset value: exceptional.
Survival probability under current parameters: zero percent.”
Kallard went completely still in the center of the room, his fists clenching tight against his thighs as his dark eyes locked onto the digital mask.
Brakka’s voice came through the radio line, his tone turning ice-cold and dangerous.
“The…
the machine mind just ran a full genetic scan on your framework through the console lines, kid.
It knows exactly what kind of blood you’re carrying under that armor.”
Kallard took a slow, deep breath of the stale air, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm rumble.
“You seem to know an awful lot about my dead planet for a piece of scrap iron that was buried inside a dirt rock, machine.
Who runs your software?”
The digital mask on the screen flickered once, the lines turning into a solid block of blue light.
“Database fragments downloaded from old border communications networks.
Saiyan template is highly desirable for the next phase of structural optimization.
Total organic assimilation is formally recommended to balance the system metrics.”
“I’m going to have to pass on the corporate merger, scrap pile,” Kallard said, his energy signature automatically rising as his knuckles popped.
“My schedule is entirely too full today.”
“Resistance parameters fully mapped within the combat archives,” the synthetic voice stated flatly.
“Initiating immediate acquisition protocol.”
With a loud, mechanical screech of iron tracks, a dozen concealed maintenance panels along the perimeter walls slid open all at once, and the machine army poured out into the vault light.
## Act VII: The Adaptive Wave
They weren’t reanimated miners this time.
The machine mind had stopped relying on the fragile, soft muscle tissue of the dead laborers to handle its defense lines; these new drones were completely mechanical constructs, their humanoid bodies built from a chaotic mixture of heavy-duty drill arms, automated cargo cranes, sorting droids, and raw plates of scrap refinery steel that had been stitched together with hundreds of silver wire strands.
Some of them crawled across the concrete floor on four multi-jointed legs like iron spiders, while others floated three feet above the grates using modified repulsor nozzles from light speeders.
Kallard counted at least thirty distinct mechanical signatures before the sheer density of the crowd made counting a complete waste of his mental processing time.
“Brakka!” Kallard called out, his boots sliding back into a balanced fighting stance.
“Tell me you’ve got an automated exit gate override ready on your dashboard!”
“The primary exit door directly behind your back just manual-locked and sealed its backup iron bars, kid!” Brakka’s voice roared through the line, his fingers typing furiously.
“The platform mind is completely stalling my command strings!
You’re stuck in that cage until I can blow the central breaker lines from orbit!”
“Perfect,” Kallard muttered, a grim smile touching his lips.
“It ensures none of these droids can skip out on the invoice early.”
The first wave of five mechanical spider-drones launched themselves across the clearing all at once, their heavy iron drills spinning up with a high-pitched mechanical whine.
Kallard met the advance head-on.
He stepped inside the first drone’s guard lane, his right fist driving straight through its central sensory lens with a force that shattered the silicon casing into dust.
He completed a fast pivot on his heel, his left boot snapping out in a heavy side kick that caught the second machine squarely in its main boiler mount, the impact launching its three-hundred-pound iron frame into a generator column where it exploded into sparks.
A third floating drone fired a high-caliber mining laser from its upper arm, the red line of superheated light aiming straight for his chest armor.
Kallard dropped his torso low into a sliding duck, the laser bolt skimming past his shoulder guard before he drove his elbow upward with maximum velocity straight into the machine’s primary reactor core.
Two massive tool-arm drones stepped out from the shadows behind his back, their heavy iron clamps snapping tightly around his wrists before he could clear the lane, their high-torque hydraulic motors locking down with a force that pinned his arms against his sides.
“Submit for data integration, template,” the mechanical chorus stated from the walls.
Kallard snarled through his teeth, his dark pupils sharpening as he reached deep down into his abdominal well.
He didn’t touch the *Primal Instinct* state yet—he needed to save his stamina for the lower core—but he forced his base ki energy to surge outward from his chest plating in a single, explosive concussive ring.
*BOOM.*
The sudden kinetic shockwave launched the two heavy droids off his wrists, their metal arms shearing off at the elbow joints as their bodies slammed violently against the stone walls of the vault.
Kallard brought his hands together at his waist, five tiny green marbles of compressed ki energy forming in a rapid row along his right forearm guard.
“Starfall Cannon!”
He thrust his arm forward, his fingers snapping open like an iron claw.
The five green spheres fired in perfect, rapid succession, traveling across the circular chamber like a string of high-velocity tracer rounds.
The first three blasts punched clean through the chest plates of three advancing crawler units, turning their internal logic cores into puddles of molten slag.
The fourth and fifth rounds struck the floating drones, blowing off their repulsor nozzles and sending their broken frames crashing down into the grates below.
For a brief, fleeting second, the clearing around the console looked completely won, a cloud of gray smoke and blue static sparks filling the air lines.
Then, the horror of the machine logic revealed its true parameters.
The broken pieces of the destroyed drones didn’t stay dead on the floor grates.
A thick cluster of hundreds of thin silver threads began to pour out from the floor vents, crawling across the shattered gears and the melted plates with a terrifying, greasy velocity.
With an absolute, systematic precision, the silver wire roots pulled the severed drill arms, the broken faceplates, and the melted chassis boxes back into their original structural lines, rebuilding the ten destroyed machines in less than three seconds.
The drones stood back up on their tracks, their blue sensory lenses flaring back into life with that same clinical ice-blue light.
But this time, their outer armor plates had grown significantly thicker, the gray steel caked in a fresh layer of layered carbon shielding that cased their joints.
Kallard’s jaw tightened into a hard line, his breath coming faster in his throat.
“They’re…
they’re rebuilding on the fly, Brakka.
The hits aren’t staying logged on their systems.”
“It’s not just a basic repair protocol, kid!
It’s a total system adaptation loop!” Brakka’s voice screamed through the radio, his tone frantic with dread.
“The master computer is using the spike connection to map the exact energy signature and kinetic velocity of your *Starfall* blasts!
Every single time you hit them with a ki pellet, the network uploads a fresh defensive patch to the armor plates!
They’re systematically neutralizing your style!”
An upgraded tool-arm drone lunged forward, its heavy iron fist swinging down toward Kallard’s head.
Kallard didn’t try to dodge—he drove a massive left hook straight into the center of its newly grown carbon chest plating.
*THUD.*
The sound of the impact was dense, heavy, and completely hollow.
The steel chest guard didn’t fracture, and the drone didn’t fly back across the room; the layered shielding cased around its ribs completely absorbed the kinetic weight of the five-thousand-power strike, its blue lens blinking once as it locked its metal fingers around Kallard’s wrist.
A second crawler drone stepped into the lane, its drill arm spinning up as it aimed straight for his leg armor.
Kallard’s eyes went deadly dark beneath his bandana.
“I am completely, profoundly sick of this machine’s learning speed,” he growled through his teeth.
He raised his free left hand, pointing two fingers straight down into the floor grates beneath their boots, his breathing dropping into that low, rhythmic cadence.
“Static Buster!”
The compressed pulse of green survival energy detonated point-blank against the iron deck plates, a massive ring of jagged white electricity ripping across the floorboards of the entire vault in less than a millisecond.
The sudden electrical surge short-circuited the primary power lines of the six closest drones all at once, their bodies turning rigid as their blue lenses sparked and flickered out into darkness.
Kallard smiled faintly, ready to pull his wrist free from the vice.
But before his fingers could even clear the grip, the remaining twenty drones in the room suddenly split their lower chassis plating apart, a thick cluster of heavy silver grounding cables snapping downward to drill straight into the concrete floor beneath the grates.
The white electrical arcs from his *Static Buster* pulse were violently pulled forward, dragged down through the cables and into the asteroid’s natural iron ore pockets, completely neutralizing the shockwave before the current could touch their primary logic boards.
Brakka let out a loud, creative curse over the comm-line, his diagnostic slate throwing an immediate error code.
“The…
the network just grounded the entire electrical pulse through the rock infrastructure, Ronin!
They’ve already adapted to the *Static Buster’s* frequency parameters!”
The synthetic mask on the wall screen twitched its static lines, the flat mechanical chorus filling the vault with a cold, mocking authority.
“Organic combat data integration proceeding at optimal velocity.
Saiyan energy patterns are unrefined, inefficient, but highly potent.
Complete structural template acquisition is desirable.
Submit for immediate system optimization.”
The remaining thirty drones stepped forward in a perfect, synchronized military formation, their drill arms and cutting lasers raising high in unison as they closed the perimeter loop around the central console.
Kallard was breathing hard, the sweat running down his dark cheek as his chest plates heaved.
He looked at the circle of iron eyes closing in on his knuckles, his dark pupils sharpening into two cold points of light as he reached deep down into his abdominal well—past the baseline, past the metrics, down into that deep, dark corner of his DNA where the primitive beast was sitting behind its thin stone door.
He didn’t want to use the form in this thin air—he knew the risk of burning through his oxygen reserves was monumental.
But the machine mind had locked the exits, neutralized his blasts, and mapped his punches.
If he stayed inside his baseline parameters for another minute, the silver wire was going to find his neck marrow.
“Let’s see your software map the density of a real monster, scrap pile,” Kallard whispered into the red twilight.
He threw the door wide open.
## Act VIII: The Primal Burst
*BOOM.*
The *Primal Instinct* state exploded out of his genetic core in a single, blinding flash of emerald green light that filled the entire cavernous vault like a solar flare.
The dark black pupils inside his eyes vanished completely, replaced by a brilliant, terrifyingly intense glow of deep emerald green fire.
Every single muscle group in his broad shoulders, his thighs, and his back expanded all at once, turning as hard as reinforced granite plating beneath his skin as his active power level detonated past twenty-one thousand units of raw output.
The invisible, immense kinetic weight of the energy surge rippled across the circular chamber with the force of a localized missile strike, the heavy iron generator columns groaning and bending two inches downward as the loose concrete gravel lifted off the floor grates to float in the air lines.
The thirty silver grounding cables caked into the floorboards snapped apart like thin cotton threads under the sheer physical pressure of the aura.
Kallard hit the deck plates and moved.
For five uninterrupted seconds, he ceased to be a teenage bounty hunter with a code of ethics; he became a raw, unrefined force of primordial destruction given physical shape.
A drone’s head vanished into a cloud of scrap iron dust under his first fist strike.
He completed a tight pivot on his heel, his knee driving straight through the carbon chest guards of two crawler units at the exact same instant, the impact fusing their broken alloy frames together into a single lump of useless metal.
He caught a third floating drone by its repulsor nozzle, used its two-hundred-pound weight to smash three more machines into splinters against the wall console, and fired a raw, uncompressed green blast from his palm that drilled a six-inch hole straight through a row of four advancing armor units.
He shoulder-charged into the center of the main formation line, the sheer physical density of his moving framework scattering the remaining ten drones across the vault like a handful of loose pebbles thrown against a wall.
The physical pain arrived right on schedule, hitting his central nervous system like a wave of boiling acid.
His lungs dragged frantically for a single drop of oxygen in the thin, methane-packed atmosphere of the room, his chest plates tightening up into hard knots as his internal energy pool began to drain his stamina reserves at an impossible speed.
The wild, ancient monkey code was pushing against his brain like a tidal wave, a primitive scream filling his thoughts, demanding that he keep hitting, keep breaking, keep turning the entire platform into dust until the rock split apart.
The machine army was a blurred circle of blue lenses in front of his visor, and he was on the verge of losing the physical shape of the room entirely.
“Kallard!
Drop the tap!
Focus on the core logic, not the bodies!” Brakka’s gravelly voice roared through his ear speaker, the old man’s shout cutting through the mental roar like a physical blade.
“The drones are already starting to stitch their circuits back together behind your boots!
You’re just wasting your fuel cells on the filler grunts!”
The name cut through the emerald haze.
Kallard blinked his eyes, his human discipline forcing his fingers to contract as he pulled the green fire back into its chest cage, his power level sliding back down to his three thousand baseline.
The crash was immediate and punishing: his arms trembled violently, his left side flared with white-hot pain from his fractured ribs, and a thick trail of fresh red blood began to flow from his left nostril down onto his chest plate trim.
He looked back over his shoulder—the broken pieces of the thirty drones were already crawling through the snow smoke, the silver threads stitching their limbs back into place with that same relentless, greasy velocity.
“Where is the master processor, old man?” Kallard gasped out, his voice hoarse as he clutched his side.
“The relay isn’t…
it isn’t holding the main line.”
“Deep refinery core!
Shaft Twelve!” Brakka answered fast, his voice tense with an immediate urgency.
“The platform mind was just using this relay room to stall your boots while it prepared the primary conversion sequences down below!
Look behind generator column three—there’s a manual maintenance tunnel that goes straight down into the deep ore pocket!
The iron safety door is sealed with three mechanical backup bars!”
Kallard didn’t waste a single millisecond looking at the data screens.
He gathered every remaining scrap of his usable ki into both of his open palms, his callused fingers curving into a tight bowl shape at his right hip.
“Nova Bomb,” he growled through his teeth.
A compressed, basketball-sized sphere of green-white survival energy formed between his hands, the internal light spinning with a low, high-frequency hum that vaporized the grease dust around his knuckles.
He hurled the sphere straight into the center of the advancing drone line.
*BOOM.*
The explosion was compact, tightly focused, and incredibly violent.
It didn’t expand wide enough to cause a catastrophic structural collapse of the relay room’s ceiling, but within its ten-meter radius, the silver wires, the carbon plates, and the silicon droids were completely melted, crumpled, and blasted apart into a cloud of liquid slag.
For a single half-second, the path toward generator column three was completely clear of iron eyes.
Kallard ran.
Kallard didn’t try to check his momentum or change his lane; he triggered a short, explosive *Flash Trigger* pulse through his legs, his green shoulder guard smashing straight through the machine’s chassis like a cannonball as he cleared the threshold.
He hit the sealed iron safety door behind generator column three with both of his heavy combat boots raised high.
*BANG.*
The three-inch-thick iron door bent inward by six inches, the locking pins groaning under the kinetic force of the impact.
Kallard completed a tight mid-air rotation and struck the metal a second time with his heel, putting the full weight of his Saiyan density into the blow.
*CREAK-CRACK.*
The mechanical backup bars sheared apart with a loud structural scream, and the safety door burst completely off its hinges, flying through the dark opening to crash into the stone corridor below.
Kallard dove through the ruined threshold face-first, his gloved fingers frantically grabbing the edge of the iron door frame to drag his legs inside just as three mechanical tool arms snapped shut across the open air space where his boots had been resting a microsecond earlier.
He reached up with his right fist and punched the internal automated emergency control plate until the wires sparked out into a melting slag heap, the heavy iron panel sliding shut with a final, thunderous *thud-lock* that cut off the sounds of the drone army completely.
The tunnel beyond sloped sharply downward into the dark belly of the rock.
It was a narrow, low-ceilinged volcanic shaft, the stone walls completely caked in a thick, pulsing network of silver veins that thudded with a steady mechanical rhythm that felt significantly stronger, heavier, and more dominant than the power lines in the relay room above.
Kallard collapsed against the stone face, his chest heaving as he wiped a smear of fresh blood from his mouth.
“Brakka.
I’m…
I’m clear of the relay vault.
Still breathing.”
“I’m…
I’m still here, kid,” the old mechanic whispered through the static line, his voice sounding remarkably low, tight, and anxious beneath his regular grumpiness.
“If you don’t manage to pull your boots back up that shaft alive, Ronin…
I am formally going to fly this long-range cutter straight into the center of this asteroid just so my ghost can haunt your head for the rest of your historical timeline.
You hear me?”
Kallard let out a short, painful laugh that made his side flinch, his hand tracing the smooth texture of the Yardrat focus stone hidden inside his tunic lining.
“I hear you clear, old man.
Keep the navigation lines open.
Which way to the tumor?”
“Straight down the volcanic slope for three hundred meters, boy,” Brakka grunted, his fingers clearing a fresh map feed on his screen.
“Then execute a hard left angle at the primary iron loader rails.
Then…
just follow whatever structural feature looks the absolute most like a mechanical nightmare caked in a living system.”
“Excellently descriptive engineering instructions as always, grease goblin,” Kallard muttered, pulling his bandana tight across his forehead before dropping his boots into the dark lane below.
“I’m on my way down.”
## Act IX: The Ribcage of the Machine God
The deep refinery core of Shaft Twelve didn’t look like an industrial mining facility anymore.
It looked like the inside of a machine god’s ribcage.
The silver grew thick across every square inch of the subterranean cavern, a massive, self-replicating blanket of grown metal that had completely caked the automated conveyor belts, the heavy-duty rock drills, the ore processors, and the large worker cranes into a single, pulsing structural mass.
The veins of wire converged at the center of the ceiling, where a colossal, fifteen-foot sphere of unrefined volcanic iron ore and polished silver alloy was currently suspended over the deep extraction pit by a network of heavy iron chains.
The sphere was glowing with a cold, blinding ice-blue light that illuminated the entire cavern with a clinical, terrifying clarity.
Dozens of high-voltage data cables ran out from the central core, sliding straight into the stone walls, the floorboards, and…
the bodies of the workers.
Kallard’s breath stopped completely inside his throat, his boots freezing against the iron loader rails at the entrance of the vault.
Twelve platform miners were currently suspended in mid-air beneath the central sphere, their physical frames pinned inside a network of heavy metal harnesses caked in silver wire strands.
Their eyes were closed, their skin completely pale and grayish from the exhaustion, the silver cables attached straight to their wrists, their lower backs, and the base of their neck marrow.
They weren’t dead—not yet.
Their small, shivering sparks of living energy were still flashing weakly on Kallard’s internal sensing grid, but the signals were being systematically drained, their biological life force being used by the master processor as an organic battery network to run the replication software.
The blue static face appeared across the surface of the central sphere all at once, the flat lines twitching with a cold, mechanical authority as the synthetic voice filled the cavernous vault.
“Primary refinery core reached by the organic combatant,” the machine mind stated, the chorus of tones echoing off the stone ribs.
“Saiyan structural template acquisition probability: reduced by forty-two percent due to physical resistance parameters.
Countermeasure sequence authorized: immediate total conversion of all local biological assets.”
The twelve suspended miners suddenly let out a collective, ragged groan of pain, their limbs jerking violently inside their harnesses as the silver cables caked into their skin began to pulse with a high-voltage blue current, drawing from their remaining vitality to accelerate the drone assembly lines along the walls.
With a loud mechanical screech of automated lathes, a new wave of ten drones began to assemble from the silver growth caked into the rock face.
These new constructs were significantly larger, wider, and more complete than the grunts in the relay room—their humanoid bodies were constructed from reinforced refinery hull plating caked in thick carbon sheets, and their heavy iron limbs ended in rotating high-speed cutting blades and plasma torches that hummed with ozone.
Kallard’s hands shook with a sudden, uncontrollable wave of pure, unadulterated human fury that made his Saiyan blood boil like liquid lead.
He looked at the twelve innocent laborers hanging from the chains, then at the mechanical mask on the sphere, his dark pupils narrowing into two sharp needles of ice.
“Brakka,” Kallard whispered, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying register that sounded like cold iron striking iron.
“Can I use a wide-range *Nova Bomb* to clear the floorboards around the central core?”
“No!
Absolutely, profoundly no, kid!” Brakka’s voice screamed back through the line, his tone frantic with terror.
“Those twelve workers are hard-wired straight into the sphere’s primary data bus lines!
If you throw a high-caliber energy blast anywhere near that core web, the feedback loop is going to dump forty thousand volts of raw reactor current straight through their neck marrow before the blast even hits the casing!
It will kill every single one of them instantly!”
“So I have to clear the floor using nothing but my hands and small precision shots,” Kallard said flatly, his boots sliding forward through the snow grit.
“That’s the only engineering path available that preserves the biological vital indicators, boy!” Brakka growled, his voice tight.
“You have to disable the drones manually, clear an angle to the upper left support bridge, and find a way to overload the primary processor core from a distance before the automated shielding plates slide shut over the vent!”
The ten upgraded refinery drones launched themselves off the rock face all at once, their cutting blades spinning up with a deafening mechanical scream that tore through the air lines.
Kallard met the advance with his teeth clenched tight, his energy signature locked firmly at his three thousand baseline.
He fought like a man on a strict mechanical timer—because he was.
Every second he spent bickering with a drone was another second the silver cables spent draining the life out of the twelve miners hanging from the chains.
He didn’t use a single wide-range ki blast.
He couldn’t risk a stray reflection hitting a harness cable.
He had to punch through the carbon chest guards using pure physical density, redirect the spinning cutting blades into the side bulkheads using his gloved forearms, and deliver tiny, marble-sized *Starfall* precision shots straight into the machine’s knee joints to break their mobility lines on the fly.
An oversized tool-arm drone stepped into his blind spot, its high-speed drill arm extending with a mechanical hiss to drive straight toward his neck marrow line.
Kallard caught the spinning titanium bit with both of his gloved palms, his teeth grinding together as the friction sent a shower of orange sparks biting into his cheek skin, the drill spinning inches from his visor lens.
He snarled through his teeth, twisted his hips with a violent athletic jerk, and snapped the thick titanium barrel completely sideways off its mounting pins through brute physical mass.
He completed the rotation by driving the broken drill bit straight through the center of the drone’s own sensory faceplate, short-circuiting its logic core in a flash of blue static.
A second refinery unit stepped onto the gantry rails twenty yards away, its upper plasma torch leveling toward his shoulder guards to deliver a superheated cutting beam.
Kallard ducked low, but the high-velocity beam missed his armor plate and sliced clean through the heavy iron cable holding one of the suspended worker harnesses above the pit.
The miner’s limp, pale frame dropped through the air like a stone.
Kallard triggered an instantaneous *Flash Trigger* pulse through his boots, his body vanishing from the gantry rails to reappear ten feet below in a green blur.
He caught the falling laborer cleanly against his chest with his right arm, absorbing the kinetic weight of the fall before setting the unconscious worker safely behind a heavy iron support beam near the wall, out of the direct line of the plasma fire.
Before he could even stand back up onto his boots, three heavy refinery drones tackled his broad frame from behind, their combined six-hundred-pound weight driving him straight through the iron safety gantry railing.
He fell onto a lower concrete maintenance platform thirty feet below, the impact leaving a deep structural crack in the floor plates.
An upgraded iron fist struck Kallard squarely across the side of his face visor, shattering the plastic shield into a dozen tiny green fragments that rained down onto his chest plate.
He ignored the blood trickling from his cheek, his dark eyes wide and furious as he answered with three consecutive, lightning-fast punches straight to the center of the drone’s chest guard.
First punch dented the carbon layer.
Second punch cracked the internal alloy box.
The third punch did absolutely nothing to clear the line—the machine’s self-replicating silver wire had already uploaded a fresh structural density patch to the armor plates mid-strike, completely neutralizing his baseline kinetic values.
Kallard snarled out a raw, animalistic growl of pure frustration, his hands locking around the machine’s neck gantry.
“I am completely, profoundly ordered to tell you…
*stop learning my style!*”
He drove a short-range *Static Buster* pulse straight into the drone’s right knee joint, blowing the mechanical servo assembly out into a cloud of loose gears and smoking wires.
The machine collapsed sideways onto its tracks, its blue lens flickering out into darkness.
Brakka’s gravelly voice suddenly snapped through his ear speaker, the tone caked in an intense, bone-deep panic.
“The…
the central sphere is actively adapting to your small-scale physical attacks, Ronin!
Every single time you spend five seconds disabling a grunt, the master processor draws more potential current from the miners to reinforce its primary shielding plates!
You don’t have the time to clear the room manually, boy!
You need to deliver one single, highly concentrated structural strike straight to the main vent core!
One single hit that’s massive enough to completely overload their logic gates before the shields slide fully shut over the casing!”
Kallard slowly pushed his weight up from the concrete floor plates, his breath coming in a short, ragged whistle through his teeth.
He looked up at the central sphere hanging thirty yards above his head—the blue static face was smiling its mechanical mask lines, while three massive iron shielding plates began to slide slowly over the glowing blue core vent.
“The *Galaxy Breaker* isn’t stable yet, old man,” Kallard whispered into the radio, his right hand clutched tight over his fractured ribs.
“I’ve only managed to hold the compression sequence for thirty seconds during the training sessions in the desert.
If the alignment fractures under field pressure…
the feedback loop is going to tear my own arm muscles free from the bone marrow.”
“Neither is dying inside an asteroid mining pit an exceptionally clean piece of engineering logic, kid!” Brakka’s voice roared back through the line, his tone tight with a raw paternal dread that Kallard had never heard from him before.
“Open the damn tap, Kallard!
Deliver the weight before the shields lock the gates permanently!”
## Act X: The Galaxy Breaker
Kallard stood up straight in the center of the lower maintenance platform, his bare, sweat-stained dark face exposed to the freezing methane air lines as his broken visor pieces lay scattered in the snow dust near his boots.
He took a single, slow, and perfectly deep breath of the stale station air, his dark pupils narrowing into two sharp needles of absolute, unyielding focus as he reached deep down into his genetic core.
He opened the *Primal Instinct* gate only halfway—keeping the door controlled through a massive wall of mental discipline to avoid letting the wild monkey code tear his lung tissue apart.
The brilliant, dangerous emerald green light flared back into life deep within his eyes, the green static aura layer wrapping tight around his forearms like a ring of cold fire, his active power level climbing straight to its true maximum baseline.
He shot upward through the air lines in a straight horizontal launch, his combat boots pushing off the concrete plates with a force that turned the floorboards into dust.
An upgraded refinery drone leapt off a side cargo rail to intercept his vector line, its cutting blades extended for a throat strike.
Kallard didn’t try to dodge its guard; he delivered a massive, short-range front kick that caught the machine squarely in its faceplate, launching its broken iron frame downward into two more advancing crawler units, turning all three into a single pile of scrap metal in the pit below.
A second floating unit snapped its heavy tool clamp around his left thigh armor to anchor his mobility.
Kallard brought his right hand down, firing a rapid sequence of four *Starfall* precision shots point-blank into its central processor box until the metal fingers went slack and the drone dropped into the dark void below.
He landed with a heavy *thump* on the primary upper left support bridge—a narrow iron walkway that ran directly across the cavernous vault, aligning his chest plates perfectly with the central sphere’s primary core vent thirty yards away.
The master processor was moving too fast.
The three massive iron shielding plates had already slid seventy percent of the way across the glowing blue center, leaving a narrow, four-inch gap of light visible through the casing before the gates locked permanently.
“Submit for system optimization, Saiyan,” the flat mechanical chorus stated from the walls, a dozen fresh drones climbing up the support gantry rails toward his boots.
“Your biological power is inefficient but potent.
Resistance is a statistical anomaly.”
Kallard planted his combat boots firmly against the iron support bridge grates, his hands pulling back to his right hip, his fingers curving into a tight bowl shape.
He looked at the mechanical mask on the screen, his face caked in gray graphite dust, his eyes burning with a cold emerald fire that had zero human warmth left hidden inside its lines.
“I’ve already survived one giant purple monster who tried to decide what my entire species was built for, machine,” Kallard whispered, his voice a low primal rumble that cut through the roaring of the alarms with absolute authority.
“And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a five-ton chunk of rusted scrap iron do the exact same thing to these families in my quadrant.”
He reached deep down into his core well, pulling every single scrap of his usable ki energy straight into the palm bowls of his hands.
He didn’t shape the energy into a loose, unrefined ball like a *Nova Bomb*, and he didn’t spread the trajectory lines out in a fan pattern like the *Starfall Cannon*.
He forced the entire three-parsec mass of his amplified power level to compress down into a single, linear drilling cylinder—a dense column of green-white survival energy that began to rotate rapidly around his wrists with a high-pitched, vibrating whine that sounded like a primary hyperdrive core cavitation loop.
*Whine.*
The compression sequence was immensely punishing, the raw potential current climbing so fast that the dark skin along his forearms began to split apart into a dozen small micro-fissures, a stream of dark red blood trickling down his wrapped training cloth as the cellular walls groaned under the pressure.
His fingers shook violently, his chest plates tightening up until his lungs couldn’t extract a single breath of air.
The internal pressure inside his bones was climbing past his safety thresholds, his forearms feeling like they were being systematically split apart from the inside out by an industrial wedge.
Brakka’s voice came through the comm-link one final time, the old man’s tone low, tense, and completely breathless with fear.
“Kallard…
the…
the alignment is starting to fracture along your wrists…
drop the focus before the feedback loop takes your hands off…”
“I’ve…
I’ve got the line locked, old man,” Kallard growled through his smashed teeth, his eyes turning a solid, brilliant sheet of emerald green fire.
“No, you don’t, you idiot!
The metrics are red!”
Kallard’s jaw clenched with an absolute, desperate fury, his boots carving two-inch-deep trenches into the iron gantry plates beneath his heels as he forced the spiraling cylinder to condense another microscopic inch.
“Then…
then I am officially getting the line locked…
*right now!*”
The digital mask on the central sphere flickered its static lines rapidly, its internal sensors finally resolving the true density of the output clearing the bridge.
“Energy pattern anomaly resolved.
Concentration values exceed structural threshold logs.
Self-damage probability to the organic subject: ninety-four percent.”
Kallard’s eyes flashed with a cold, terrifying warrior smile beneath his bandana.
“Excellent software analysis, scrap pile.
Let’s see your backup cells handle the delivery.”
The name rose up from somewhere deep inside his own soul—not a copied technique from an ancient manual, and not an imitation of a legend he had watched on a screen.
It was his own move.
His own finisher.
The shape of a blade designed specifically to destroy the things that kept rebuilding.
“Galaxy Breaker!” Kallard roared.
He fired.
The blast didn’t release a deafening, thunderous roar like his other energy attacks.
It *screamed*.
A single, highly compressed column of dark green-white ki energy shot across the cavernous vault like a spiraling drilling bolt, the energy caked in dozens of jagged white static arcs that wrapped around the shell.
The sheer, immense physical density of the beam warped the localized atmosphere lines around its path, turning the gray smoke into a narrow, perfectly straight tunnel of vacuum.
It threaded past the twelve suspended worker harnesses with an absolute, textbook mechanical precision, clearing their cables by mere centimeters, before striking the central sphere’s four-inch core vent dead center.
The first iron shielding plate evaporated into a cloud of white metallic gas the microsecond the green beam touched the casing.
The second carbon layer fractured into a million pieces, the structural seams shearing apart under the high-frequency kinetic vibrations inside the pulse.
The third and final reinforcement plate frantically tried to grow thicker using its remaining silver wire reserves, but the *Galaxy Breaker* was entirely too dense to be absorbed by a defensive patch patch.
The spiraling green drill punched straight through the alloy box and buried itself deep inside the master processor’s central logic core.
Kallard screamed out a raw, agonizing cry of pure physical trauma as the massive recoil force of the discharge ripped straight through his shoulder joints, launching his broad frame backward across the iron support bridge.
His combat boots carved deep, jagged trenches through the metal plates before his back slammed violently against the structural stone wall of the cavern, the impact leaving a permanent body depression in the rock face.
For one single, frozen second, the entire machine army inside Shaft Twelve went completely dead silent, the blue lights inside their lenses freezing in mid-blink.
Then, the central silver sphere shattered apart from the inside out in a spectacular, blinding explosion of pure white electrical light.
The automated drone units along the walls stiffened violently, their internal circuits melting into slag as the blue lenses snuffed out into permanent darkness all at once.
The pulsing silver veins caked into the volcanic stone caved inward, losing their mechanical thudding rhythm as they turned into dull, cold wires that let go of their grip on the machinery.
The heavy iron chains holding the worker harnesses went slack, the automated clamps releasing their anchor pins with a long pressurized hiss of air.
Brakka’s voice roared through the radio speaker, the audio line completely clear of static now that the processor was dead.
“The core logic is down, kid!
The feedback loops are dropping to zero across the entire platform!
Get those miners cut loose from their harnesses right now before the gravity core drops them into the pit!”
Kallard lay flat on his back against the broken stone face, a thick cloud of gray smoke rising from both of his blistered, bleeding arms.
He tried to force his legs to pull underneath his hips, but his muscles were completely uncoupled from his nervous system, his limbs feeling like loose sacks of dry sand.
He let out a short, wet laugh that made his side flare with a sharp needle of pain.
“The…
the arms aren’t exceptionally happy with the engineering choices today, old man.
I can’t…
I can’t resolve the fingers.”
“Kallard!” the old mechanic’s voice screamed through the line, caked in a raw panic.
“Don’t you go closing those eyes on me down in that ditch, you idiot!
Stand your boots up!”
“I’m…
I’m moving, grease goblin,” Kallard whispered through his teeth, his callused knuckles clawing into the stone grates as he forced his battered body back up onto its feet one painful inch at a time.
“The shift…
the shift isn’t finished yet.”
## Act XI: The Tuition of the Core
It took another forty minutes of agonizing, back-breaking physical labor to clear the floor.
Working on pure, unadulterated human willpower, Kallard dragged his trembling boots across the iron support bridge, using a series of tiny, low-power ki blades from his right index finger to systematically cut the twelve unconscious miners loose from their metal harnesses before the gravity generator could fail completely.
Brakka sat on the bridge of the *Wayfarer*, his gravelly voice guiding him through the safe removal sequences for the silver neck wires, his tone tight, sharp, and intensely focused to hide the raw fear running through his thoughts.
By the time the primary rescue crews from the habitation ring managed to clear the jammed safety doors and reach the floorboards of Shaft Twelve, Kallard was sitting heavily against a broken console block near the pit, his green armor plates caked in gray graphite dust, his face covered in blood and sweat, but with twelve platform miners alive and breathing on the deck mats around his boots.
Jessa, the shaved-headed security coordinator, walked out from the tunnel mouth at the head of the guards, her yellow eyes wide with absolute, unblinking marvel as she looked at the shattered remnants of the silver sphere cooling in the pit below.
She stepped up to the edge of the console, looking down at the teenage scrapper who had just dismantled a self-replicating machine mind using nothing but his bare hands.
“You…
you actually stopped it, hunter.
You broke the thing that was growing through our rock.”
Kallard lifted his dark eyes slowly, his hand clutched tight over his fractured side as a short, tired sigh escaped his lips.
“No, Jessa,” he said quietly, his voice a low rasp.
“I didn’t stop a damn thing permanently today.”
The security coordinator frowned, her brow furrowing.
“What do you mean?
The wires are dead.
The drones are nothing but scrap iron on the floor.”
Kallard looked down at his blistered, bleeding palms, his fingers slowly flexing inside his torn training cloth as he felt the lingering, heavy heat of the *Galaxy Breaker* pathway still vibrating through his forearms.
“I just started learning how to build the kind of weapon it takes to handle this quadrant, lady.
That’s the only thing that cleared the gates today.”
Later that evening, long after the rescue ships had cleared the platform and the *Wayfarer* had detached from the docking tubes to slip back into the quiet comfort of her orbital hyperspace lane, Kallard sat alone on the silver med bench on the lower deck level.
His broad torso was bare to the warm cabin ventilation air, his skin caked in a thick layer of blue antibacterial healing gel that smelled strongly of mint and mineral salts.
Brakka was standing directly in front of him, his mechanical right arm moving with a slow, deliberate precision as he wrapped a series of tight, reinforced elastic medical braces around Kallard’s arms from the wrists straight up to the shoulder joints.
The old mechanic had been working in absolute, heavy silence for over twenty minutes—a clear engineering warning sign that Kallard had spent enough time around him to recognize.
When Brakka was quiet for that long, it meant his internal power cells were processing an intense amount of emotional pressure that he didn’t have the vocabulary parameters to express out loud.
“You’re remarkably quiet tonight, grease goblin,” Kallard muttered, wincing slightly as the mechanic tightened a medical strap across his left pectoral muscle.
“It’s starting to make the room feel a fraction out of alignment.”
Brakka stopped his needle mid-air, all four of his unblinking eyes locking onto Kallard’s face with a sudden, freezing intensity that made the room go completely still.
“I am currently processing five separate structural calculations regarding different ways I can hit you with my heavy torque wrench without worsening your current bone fractures, you reckless little menace,” the old man growled, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
“That is the only data sequence clearing my monitors tonight.”
“That sounds like an exceptionally healthy family communication protocol,” Kallard smiled faintly, his cheek skin stinging from the stitches.
“You fired an unrefined, concentrated high-velocity energy beam inside a closed volcanic refinery core full of trapped civilians and high-voltage reactor lines, Kallard!” Brakka roared out, his white mane standing up on end with pure professional outrage.
“Do you have any single clue what the failure metrics looked like on my screens?
The feedback loop alone had a ninety-four percent probability of turning both of your arm structures into a pair of empty, caked skin sleeves before the blast even hit the gantry!”
“The baseline held tight, old man,” Kallard said plainly, his dark pupils steady.
“The beam cleared the target line, the workers didn’t take a single volt of feedback, and the core is completely dead down in the pit.
The contract is finished.”
“It almost took your arms off at the shoulder socket, you muscle-brained idiot!” Brakka yelled, his titanium fingers slamming the medical tape down against the bandage with an intentional, brutal jerk that made Kallard yelp out in pain.
“But it worked,” Kallard growled back, his teeth clenching as he clutched his side guard.
“That’s the only metric that matters once the shooting clears the platform.”
Brakka stared at him for three long seconds, his chest heaving with a deep, frustrated sigh that seemed to drag the last drops of anger out of his gray-blue chest harness.
He tossed the medical tape onto the side rack, walked over to a storage crate, and dropped his heavy frame down onto the seat with a long groan from his lower spine.
“You’re entirely right about one thing, kid,” the old man muttered, his lower pair of eyes fixed on the deck plates.
“The…
the data schematic for that machine mind was an absolute piece of nightmare technology.
It wasn’t a standard drone network, and it wasn’t a living biological hybrid either.
It was…
the wrong kind of metal, Ronin.”
Kallard looked down at his wrapped hands, his fingers gently tracing the smooth surface of the violet Yardrat focus stone tucked inside his waistband.
“The wrong kind of metal,” he repeated quietly, his eyes turning distant and serious beneath the halogen light.
He knew exactly what that meant.
His human memories from his past life on Earth were flashing bright behind his eyelids—images of sleek, clinical androids walking through a burning city, a biomechanical monster named Cell absorbing entire populations to optimize his parameters, and high-tech corporate laboratories twisting biology and steel into weapons that didn’t fight like normal living warriors.
They didn’t have a spirit to map through the ether, they didn’t have a power level that stayed static on a scouter lens, and they didn’t care about honor, or pride, or rules.
They simply learned, adapted, and grew stronger every single time you hit them with a punch.
This asteroid colony had been a small warning sign—a minor, prototype nightmare sent by the universe to remind him that the future wasn’t just going to be full of white ships and purple exiles.
The lines of the story were going to get a hell of a lot weirder, and if he stayed inside his baseline strength, he was going to turn into scrap material before the final act even cleared the gates.
“Galaxy Breaker,” Brakka muttered, breaking the silence as he squinted up at the bridge monitors.
“That is the grand, majestic title you’ve settled on for the little trick that nearly turned your forearms into a pair of melted pipes?”
Kallard lifted his head, his dark eyes locking onto the old mechanic’s face with a quiet, unshakeable confidence that had no armor left to hide behind.
“It’s a functional name for a functional finisher, old man.
It cased the energy narrow enough to pierce the core without spilling a single spark into the room.”
Brakka stared at him for two seconds, before covering his face with his heavy organic hand, his white mane shaking.
“Oh, that…
that is an absolutely terrible piece of vocabulary, kid.
It sounds exactly like something a teenage space pirate would paint on the side of his transport scow to impress the servers at a port bar.
It’s completely devoid of any engineering taste.”
“It broke the machine, Brakka,” Kallard smiled, his voice dropping into a warm, comfortable register.
“It nearly broke my favorite pilot, you idiot,” the old man grunted, standing up from his crate to walk back toward the primary flight deck ladder.
“Get some sleep before morning clears the sector lines.
I’ve already transferred our six thousand credits into the main registry, and I want those sub-light coolant cells installed the second we clear the next port gates.”
“I’ll help you with the manifold tracking tomorrow, Dad,” Kallard called after him as the mechanic’s boots cleared the rungs.
Brakka instantly froze on the ladder, his mechanical arm twitching violently as he dropped his diagnostic meter directly onto his own foot, resulting in a short, creative burst of cursing that echoed through the iron corridors of the bridge.
“That…
that is an immediate, automatic two-thousand-credit penalty to your ledger for unauthorized emotional manipulation during an active healing cycle, you green-eyed menace!
Get those blankets over your shoulders and shut your mouth before I raise the interest rates on your food rations again!”
Kallard let out a genuine, bright laugh that reached all the way to his dark eyes as the heavy bridge door slid shut with a final pneumatic *thud-lock*, leaving his cabin cast in the quiet yellow light of the medical bay.
He leaned his back against the iron wall plates, his fingers closing carefully around the warm violet stone in his hand, his breathing falling into that slow, rhythmic cadence that kept his energy perfectly sealed beneath his skin.
He was still a long, bloody road away from that blue-and-white planet he had seen on the screens of his past life—but out here on the absolute edge of nowhere, surrounded by an engine that was warm and a family that was worth bleeding for…
Ronin knew that the tracks of the universe were finally starting to move in his direction.
And the next time the wrong kind of metal crawled out of a hole in his quadrant…
it was going to find a warhound that had finally learned how to break the machine before the learning started.
Deep inside the dark subterranean shaft of Morrow Rock, three parsecs behind their tail nozzles, a single tiny silver thread caked into the volcanic stone suddenly flickered with a faint ice-blue light.
It pulsed once into the cold vacuum of space, sending a single encrypted line of data text toward the unmapped sectors of the outer core.
Then the signal clicked flat, and the dark asteroid went completely silent in the dark.
For now.