The simulated sky tore open like wet cloth.
Jargal grounded his posture within the digital void, driving his virtual heels through the splintering grid-floor. In this phantom realm built on mathematical calculations and psychic links, the instructors thought flesh had no meaning. Fools. All forms followed thought, and true intent commanded both.
He pulled his dantians tight. The Night-Viper Qi flared, not as an ethereal glow, but as a silent, black blade carving outward through his meridians. He struck. His palm slammed flat against the synthetic cockpit seal of the paralyzed Iron Valkyrie.
*Crack.*
The conceptual firewall of the Star Network cracked beyond bending; it shattered into jagged lines of raw machine code. The shrieking alien frequency recoiled, sliced down its resonant spine by ancient murder-craft. With a vicious wrench, Jargal seized the projection of Valkha’s consciousness, gripping the collar of her flight suit, and dragged her through the violent tear in the simulation.
The world violently righted itself.
Jargal lunged forward, coughing into the padded rim of his sensory couch. The harsh copper tang of hot fluid filled his mouth. He gagged, vomiting thick, clotted black blood onto the pristine white tiles of the duel auditorium. Every muscle felt stripped to the sinew. His lungs whistled like punctured bellows.
Beside him, the canopy of Valkha Tyrenni’s high-grade neural cradle blew open with a pneumatic hiss. She scrambled out on trembling knees, her aristocratic composure entirely undone. Sweat pasted silver hair to her pale cheeks. She spared no glance for the shouting instructors or the medics scrambling down the amphitheater steps toward convulsing cadets. Her gaze locked solely onto Jargal.
He heaved again, another spatter of black bile and spoiled blood striking the floor between his boots. The psychic backlash of the hive-mind virus had tried to dissolve his brain stem; only the venom-eating discipline of his past incarnation had crushed the foreign signal before it could fester.
Soft linen pressed against his chin.
Jargal’s hand shot up out of instinct, fingers curling into an iron claw aimed at her throat, stopping a fraction of an inch from her windpipe. Valkha never flinched. Her gray eyes held no mockery, no cold superiority—only a raw, hollowed disorientation.
"You're bleeding," she whispered. Her fingers shook as she held her monogrammed uniform handkerchief against his mouth, dabbing away the dark sludge. "You tore through a grade-four neural lattice with bare hands. That's... impossible. Dead-Minds lack synaptic pressure."
"Stop talking," Jargal rasped, swatting her hand away with far less force than he intended. The fire in his veins slowly sank back into his marrow. "Your precious machine almost digested you alive."
"It wasn't the rig," she said, staring at her blood-stained cloth. The haughty prodigy of Kozlov-Tarn had vanished, replaced by an unsettling fragility. "That frequency... it was inside the local buffer. Someone injected it from within the orbital complex itself. Someone wanted us both lobotomized."
A chime pinged from Jargal’s pocket comm-link. He pressed the receiver, Tarkhan’s frantic, anxious voice bursting through the tiny speaker.
"Jargal! Valkha! Merciful stars, are you two alive? The whole lower monitoring hub is going dark! I ran a trace on that crawler that escaped from the finger—it routed deep into Sector Nine. Sub-deck forty!"
Jargal wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm. Tarkhan had risked his neck digging through the data streams while the duel raged. That boy’s loyalty was absolute, and Jargal would tear the throat out of anyone who threatened it.
"Stay in the barracks, Tarkhan," Jargal ordered, rising on wobbly legs. "Lock your hatch."
"No, wait!" Tarkhan pleaded. "The internal feeds are being wiped behind the signal! If you fail to go right now, whatever bypassed the VR firewall will scrub its own tracks. I’m patching you the route through the auxiliary ducting. Just... don't die, Jargal! Please!"
The call cut out, replaced by a blinking, jagged blueprint on the pad's dim screen.
"Sector Nine is decommissioned," Valkha murmured, her voice steadying as the soldier in her reasserted itself. "Only automated scrap-haulers and condemned filtration vents operate down there. Why would the signal trace to an abandoned hull?"
"Because dead men leave their secrets where no one bothers to sweep," Jargal said, grabbing her by the shoulder. "You want to see why they tried to cook your brain? Come with me. Or stay here and let the medics drug you into silence."
Valkha glanced once at the approaching academy medical officers, then reached down, unholstering a small sidearm from her pilot harness. "Lead the way, Dead-Mind."
They slipped into the service corridors before the security guards could cordon the arena. The gleaming obsidian and chrome architecture of the upper rings rapidly decayed as they descended. Polished composite yielded to pitted steel plates, weeping condensation and hydraulic oil. The air grew thick, stagnant, tasting of ozone, rusted metal, and old rot.
Tarkhan’s guiding voice whispered through their earpieces, directing them past dead surveillance cameras and jammed bulkheads. His directions were flawless, navigating them through a labyrinth of forgotten pipe networks.
"Two more corridors, Jargal," Tarkhan's hushed transmission crackled. "The access hatch is marked with an obsolete maintenance rune. Be careful. The atmosphere scrubbers down there failed decades ago."
They reached a sealed, corroded titanium door. Stamped into its center was a faded white chevron, slashed through with an oxidized red diagonal—the exact symbol from the rusted letter that had landed in Jargal’s quarters.
Jargal stepped forward. Rather than attempting to bypass the fried electronic lock, he sank his weight into his hips, coiled the Night-Viper Qi through his core, and drove the heel of his boot into the seam beside the hydraulic latch. Metal shrieked. Rivets popped like gunshots. The massive slab groaned inward, breaking its seal and swinging open into pitch-black stillness.
A vile stench rolled out.
It wasn't the smell of damp machinery. It was sweet, chemical, and distinctly biological. Valkha flicked on her shoulder lamp, the harsh white beam cutting through clouds of drifting spore-dust.
Inside lay an illicit, cavernous assembly bay. Massive chains dangled from the ceiling, supporting stripped chassis frames that clearly belonged to the Tyrenni family’s patented vanguard mecha series. But these were no ordinary prototypes.
"No," Valkha gasped, stumbling forward into the dim light. "No, this is wrong. This is impossible."
The beam illuminated a dissected Dread-Mecha pinned against the rear wall. The titanium-carbide armor had been peeled back like an orange rind. Inside the structural chest cavity, instead of the crystalline neural-transmitters her bloodline claimed to have invented, sat a tangled, pulsing cluster of blackened alien musculature.
Nethervari flesh. Living, synthetic bio-sinew was threaded directly into the mecha’s spinal control column. Nutrient tubes bubbled with dark amniotic fluid, keeping the monstrous, dismembered organs throbbing in grotesque rhythm.
"The Tyrenni lineage..." Valkha fell to her knees, her hands clutching her head as her whole reality unraveled before her eyes. "We never mastered psychic synchronization through noble breeding. We’ve been... we’ve been grafting abominations into the engines. We're piloting corpses."
Jargal knelt beside a bloodstained worktable near the bay's central terminal. Carved deeply into the rust was a cadet identification number—the exact digits of the prior occupant whose body he now inhabited. His predecessor hadn't failed out. He hadn't died of an overdose in the lower decks. He had discovered this abattoir and had his throat cut for it.
"They feed the cadets' minds to these things," Jargal said, his voice flat with rising, venomous wrath. "To bridge the gap. Your family builds slaughterhouses, girl."
Before Valkha could answer, a loud metallic crash boomed behind them.
The service hatch was blown off its hinges by a high-explosive breaching charge. Smoke and blinding red strobe lights flooded the rusted bay.
Six figures clad in heavy, void-sealed composite armor advanced through the breach, their magnetized assault rifles leveled with lethal discipline. Academy Enforcers. Their faceless, mirrored visors reflected the pulsating alien bio-rig behind Valkha.
The lead squad leader raised his weapon, his voice amplified by external speakers into a cold, mechanical rasp.
"Cadet Jargal. Cadet Tyrenni. You have breached restricted imperial quarantine zone Alpha-Zero. Execution order confirmed. Neutralize the traitors."