Two fingers found the leaning spire before she'd even cleared the doorway, Dramatos already mid-correction by the time she reached it. She let him finish. Eighteen years had taught her exactly how long that would take, and her report was already sorted in her head, ready the way she always kept it.
The spire tipped back the moment he let go, some flaw in the base he'd never bothered to check. He set it right again, unhurried, as if the fifth attempt might land where the first four hadn't.
She'd catalogued this one years ago. Small objects, precise corrections, repeated well past the point of use. It meant a problem sat somewhere he couldn't reach with two fingers, and he was correcting what he could reach instead.
His head came up before his hand left the spire, catching her reflection in the mirrored wall before he ever turned to look at her outright. Whatever held his attention on the model city let go the instant he found her there.
He straightened his coat, unhurried, and turned to face her.
"Report."
One word, and the room reset itself as if the last several minutes hadn't happened. She'd learned a long time ago not to mention that they had.
She crossed to where he stood, boots quiet against the marble, and led with the part that would actually interest him.
"The bearer took down Vox Lacerans. Alone."
His head tilted, exactly the angle that meant he wanted the rest before he decided what to feel about it.
"Alone. The same day you landed."
"Same day. I hadn't even finished my first pass over the area before the resonance spiked and went quiet again, fast enough I almost wrote it off as a sensor fault." The speed of it still needled more than she liked to admit. "Turns out the bearer had already bonded, and just hadn't worked out yet what they were carrying."
He didn't press her on the timeline again. He'd gone quiet in that other way, the internal one, elbows loose at his sides instead of gesturing through the air like he usually did while he thought.
"Describe it. All of it."
She started with the part that usually mattered least to him.
"He's trained. Real discipline, something with years behind it, not improvised. But nothing built for this. The footwork adapted mid-fight anyway, reactive counters that had no business working against something Vox Lacerans's size, and they didn't stop working."
Something caught in her chest on that detail before she could stop it, some flicker she didn't have a name ready for. She filed it away the way she filed everything she didn't have room to examine, and kept going before the silence could ask her about it.
"The mane strikes should have ended the fight twice over. Neither one did."
His eyes hadn't moved off her since he'd asked. She held hers on the middle distance instead, on the report, because that was the version of this conversation she knew how to survive.
The stillness broke the moment she reached the part about the lance answering on its own. Delight cracked over his face, fast and total, and the internal version of him vanished just like that, replaced by the one who wanted the whole thing narrated back to him blow by blow.
"How did they move. What rhythm."
Two questions, no gap between them for her to actually answer the first before he wanted the second.
She gave him the terrain reads, the bearer using a collapsed archway for cover on instinct rather than any plan. She gave him the lance next, how it had answered commands before the bearer seemed to know they were giving any.
"A puzzle. Finally, a puzzle worth solving."
She didn't wait for him to ask why the report ended without a body count.
"I let them go. I could've finished it and didn't. A retrieval ship pulled them out before I closed the gap. That's on me, not the ship."
He didn't answer right away, and for a second she braced for this to be the one that finally cost her something.
Then his mouth curved, slow, the expression she'd learned meant a loss had just turned into material for him instead of a problem.
"You lost my monster and let something more interesting walk away instead. Do you understand how rare that is? Someone hands me a mystery instead of a body, and you're standing here apologizing for it."
It read like a compliment, which somehow made it worse.
"It's still a failure."
"It's still a failure." He agreed with her so easily it barely felt like agreement at all. "Which means it still gets answered for. Interesting doesn't buy you a pass, Nyxara. It just means I get to enjoy deciding what the answer costs."
"So here's what it costs." He turned back toward the model city, though his attention had already moved past it. "You don't run this one from a comm channel. You go to Verdanis yourself."
That would've read as a promotion to anyone else in the empire. She knew better than to hear it that way.
He tapped the model city's base out of habit, though the model in front of him had nothing to do with Verdanis at all. "There's something else down there, or there might be. An old lead's been sitting on my desk for six years, pulled off intercepted Coalition traffic nobody bothered decoding properly at the time. Unconfirmed, more hunch than fact, but enough to make me suspect that farm world's sitting on something worth more than its crops."
"You never mentioned that to me."
"A hunch doesn't get resources. This does." He turned toward the mirror, tracing the same line along the glass she'd watched him trace a hundred times before. "You're not observing the bearer from a safe distance this time. You're going down there yourself, and you're not coming back until you've found out whether that lead was ever worth anything. Consider that the cost."
She inclined her head, the closest thing to relief she let herself show where he could actually see it.
"Understood." A beat passed before the rest. "Thank you."
He didn't dwell on it, which was its own kind of mercy. He crossed to a recessed panel set into the wall instead, and it split open at his palm without a sound.
"Take Iuba Volvens with you. Let it tear that ground up looking for what nobody's ever actually gone looking for. If it dies clearing the way, that's one less Beast to house. If the bearer follows it down, you collect two answers for the price of one deployment." He reached inside and lifted out a single black cube, dull red light tracing slow lines beneath the surface, like something breathing behind glass. "And take this."
She crossed the last few steps and took it with both hands, the weight of it settling into her palms before she found anything to say.
"Iuba Volvens hasn't earned an Ascension Core. Not on record."
"Competence should get rewarded before it's proven, not after." He held her eyes a beat longer than the sentence needed. "Give it to him once he's shown you he's worth the investment. If it breaks, it breaks. I'll have another made."
Her thumb found the seam along the cube's edge and pressed once, an old habit reaching for something to straighten that didn't need straightening.
"Understood."
He didn't dismiss her so much as stop needing her there. His attention had already drifted back toward the model city, one hand finding a different tilted rooftop she hadn't noticed until just now.
"Go on, then."
Two words, and the audience was over.
She didn't wait around to see if he meant to add anything else. She turned, the cube cool and solid in one hand, and crossed the black marble toward the door.
The corridor beyond it ran quiet and empty in both directions. She let her spine settle half an inch, the only version of relaxing she allowed herself between one order and the next, and started toward the launch bay.
* * *
Hikaru woke slowly. The ceiling above him was unfamiliar for one disoriented second before the last two days caught up all at once, the monster, the transformation, the journey to this station, the way Zaria had put him flat on the mat, the team he'd somehow ended up joining. His whole body still ached from it. Something rustled near his bed. He stayed still, alert despite the exhaustion, and let his eyes open the rest of the way.
The room snapped into focus. Three women moved through a morning routine with the casual ease of people who'd done this every day for years, in a space that barely fit its four beds. Nobody had knocked, and he hadn't gotten so much as a warning. The whole room sounded like people who'd shared quarters for two years and forgotten privacy was even a concept worth keeping.
Zaria's back faced him first, crimson scale patterns catching what little light the viewport let in. She reached for her jacket without hesitation, muscle memory doing the work.
Senna moved like she had nowhere to be, unhurried, humming something under her breath as she pulled her wrap top into place, in no rush at all to fix how it settled.
Lyra bounced, no other word fit as well, pink hair flying as she hopped on one foot reaching for her clothes, humming a tune he didn't recognize. She caught his reflection in the mirror across the room and winked at him before his brain had even caught up to what his eyes were doing.
Holy shit.
His face burned. Both hands flew up to cover his eyes, a half second too late to matter.
"Morning! Enjoying the view, Hikaru?"
Lyra padded across the cold deck, unbothered, a smile spreading across her face like he was the single most interesting thing in the room. He looked away fast, breath short. She only laughed, bright and easy.
Senna turned toward him with a slow blink, something in her amber eyes that made him distrust whatever she was about to say.
"You're staring pretty hard, Hikaru."
He kept both hands right where they were. "I didn't mean to look."
Zaria's scales darkened, a flush climbing her neck that had nothing to do with exertion. She grabbed the pillow off her own bed in one sharp motion and hurled it at him with the same precision she brought to a broadsword swing. It caught him square in the chest, hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs, and he went straight over the edge of the bunk. His hip hit the deck.
Why is this my fault?
He pushed himself up onto one elbow, hair falling across his eyes, the room settling back into focus around him. Lyra was laughing somewhere behind him. Senna watched with that same infuriating calm. Zaria stood rigid, arms crossed, refusing to look anywhere near him.
I woke up. That's all I did.
He pulled himself upright and followed the others toward the training deck, the kumihimo cord still knotted loosely around his wrist.
The chamber opened up past the corridor, a massive cylindrical space ringed with equipment that had no business existing in any gym he'd ever set foot in. Force-field generators hummed at measured intervals, and overhead, holographic target arrays floated in midair, shifting through attack patterns with no physical projectiles involved at all. Instead of plates, the weight machines ran on gravity manipulation, resistance fields showing as a faint shimmer in the air.
Right. I'm definitely not on Earth anymore.
On a gravity track, Lyra ran intervals, pink hair streaming behind her. Senna flowed through a kata on a floating platform, unhurried as always.
Zaria walked to the center of the mat and crossed her arms.
"Star Maidens train every single day. There are no exceptions. The Key amplifies what you already have, but it doesn't replace the actual work. You either maintain peak condition or the resonance starts to degrade."
"Haah?! I don't need you telling me to train."
He cracked his neck.
"I've been up before dawn every single day since I was twelve. Rain, sickness, none of it matters. I show up anyway." His gaze dropped to the floor, his mouth flattening into a line. "But thanks for yesterday. It showed me exactly where the gaps are."
Zaria's scales lightened, the crimson fading toward a warmer bronze at her temples.
"Good attitude. We'll see if it actually holds."
He walked over to a gravity-resistance station, its control panel a lattice of floating glyphs. Senna appeared beside him.
"Tap the center ring three times, then say the resistance you want out loud."
He followed her instructions. The field engaged, a shimmering column of force rising up from the floor plates. He gripped the handles and pulled. The resistance bit clean and instant, no jerk, no slack anywhere in it, the field adjusting itself to his output curve exactly.
This is finally it. Exactly what I've been missing this whole time.
"Add twenty more kilos to that."
The glyphs flickered, a small amber icon blinking once before the field adjusted. Senna's ears flattened, her mouth pulling into a pout.
"You're really no fun at all, you know that?"
"What was that light?"
"Safety flag. Anything past your calibrated baseline asks for a manual override the first few times." She waved a hand, and the icon vanished before he could get a good look at it. "Standard for anyone new to the equipment."
"Standard for everyone, or just new guys nobody's bothered calibrating for yet?"
Senna's mouth twitched, caught somewhere between amused and annoyed at getting caught out. "The second one, if you're going to make me say it out loud. The system's cautious around unknowns, and you happen to be its only one of this particular kind."
"Great. Even the equipment's coddling me."
"It adjusts. Give it a month of data and it'll stop asking."
He finished wrapping his hands and moved to a gravity treadmill next. He tapped the control ring.
"Set it to eight kilometers an hour."
Zaria stepped onto the machine right beside him without looking over. Her fingers moved through the glyphs, and the display read twelve.
He shot her a look and bumped it up to fourteen.
She matched it immediately, then pushed to sixteen.
He pushed to eighteen, breath coming harder now.
"You'll burn out before the finish line."
She didn't blink once.
"Dragonkin physiology processes lactic acid completely differently. Human muscle fails a lot faster than mine does."
"Like hell it does."
He drove the pace up to twenty, legs pistoning, sweat streaking down his face.
"I decide when I'm actually done here."
She held his gaze steady, crimson pulsing once through her scales.
"You're stubborn. I'll give you that much."
"I'll take that as a compliment, coming from you."
Senna leaned against the rail, watching the two treadmills.
"Those two are intensely competitive, Lyra."
Lyra bounced on her heels, pink hair swaying.
"They're getting along, though. That's what actually matters here."
Hikaru's legs burned, Zaria's breath ragged beside him. They stepped off together, chests heaving, sweat soaking through their borrowed sleepwear.
He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
"Not bad at all."
Her shoulders relaxed, just slightly.
"You did all right too."
Neither one looked away first. The rivalry settled between them, quiet and mutual, and neither one was willing to name it out loud.
Lyra bounded over with a towel draped across her shoulders.
"Breakfast? I'm actually starving."
Senna didn't look up. "The mess hall opens in ten minutes."
Hikaru grabbed his duffel off the floor.
"Fine. But tomorrow I'm adding twenty more kilos."
Zaria's mouth quirked at the corner.
"I'll be waiting."