The void burned white with momentum.

Chunks of asteroid, twisted and blackened by railgun fire, hurtled past the Driftknight's hull. The crew had stopped calling them out, there were too many. One tore across the drive cone, leaving a jagged scar in the plating. Another clipped a sensor array, shearing it clean.

And in their wake came shadows.

Akiko caught the shape of a dragonling flitting behind one of the larger rocks, out of the railguns' line of fire. Another slipped through a cloud of debris, wings folded tight, riding the chaotic vector. The Driftknight couldn't see them. Not until it was too late.

Kara's voice came sharp over the line. "They're using the asteroids as cover. We're losing firing solutions."

"I see them," Akiko hissed, pushing forward on a sputtering arc of foxfire. Her limbs trembled from the Nova's backlash, her core barely stabilized.

Takuto offered no comment, he was diverting everything to support her neural synchronization. No margin for idle thought.

She could feel the pulse of the dragonlings now. Their hunger. Their draw toward the mana-thrumming core of the Driftknight. And she couldn't stop all of them.

Her HUD flared with proximity markers. Four more inbound. Two already too close.

A new alert appeared.

Incoming Mass Signature – Unidentified

Trajectory: Interception Vector

IFF Response: TSDF Sovereign

Akiko blinked. Her heart stuttered.

Before she could speak, the void lit with motion. Sharp contrails of guided ordinance, a staggered barrage of missiles curving in from high angle. Dozens of detonations blossomed across the asteroid field, carving through the cover, scattering the dragonlings caught mid-approach.

The next wave of dragonlings reeled. Fragmented. Several were reduced to spiraling, inert forms drifting without cohesion.

Kara's breath hitched over the line. "What the hell—?"

A new voice broke through on wideband. Calm, clipped, unmistakable.

"This is the TSDF Sovereign. Captain Ward transmitting. Stand down, Driftknight. We're cutting through the approach corridor."

Akiko felt something strange twist in her chest. Relief. Fury. Something closer to nostalgia than she wanted to admit. The Sovereign, her first prison, her first battlefield in this world, cut across the belt like a lance of steel. Its hull gleamed in the flare of the drive plume. Missile bays opened again.

Kara's voice cut across the wideband, sharp and bristling with defiance.

"TSDF Sovereign, this sector is under active reclamation. Your interference risks compromising our salvage operations. Disengage."

A pause.

"Your ship is venting atmosphere from three decks and listing into asteroid traffic," came Ward's response, clipped and cold. "Stand down. This is a military engagement, and you're in over your head."

The channel crackled as Kara keyed in a reply. "We're not the ones who just arrived late to the fight."

Akiko winced at the static-laced tension in her helmet. It was like listening to two apex predators snarl over territory.

Then, another channel flicked open. Quieter, encrypted. The Driftknight's crew-only band.

"Akiko," Kara said. "Slip out. Now."

Akiko blinked. "You want me to—"

"While they're focused on the dragonlings. There's a window. Take it." Kara's voice dropped to a whisper of steel. "The anomaly. Something's changed. You see it, don't you?"

She did. It wasn't just the distant echo of mana. It was gravity. Curling, folding in on itself, a presence like breath held too long. The closer they drifted to the anomaly's edge, the more Akiko could feel it, like it knew her. Like it was waiting.

"You want me to scout it."

"I want to make sure Ward doesn't plant a flag in it before we understand what we're walking into." A pause. "We'll stabilize the Driftknight, make sure no one else gets torn apart. Then we'll catch up. But you're the only one who can move fast enough to get in before they do."

Akiko's hand drifted to the sapphire at her collar, its pulse syncing with the slow rhythm beneath her skin.

"Copy," she said.

Takuto's voice hummed in her ear. "Waypoint marked. Adjusting trajectory for silent thrust."

She broke from her position above the hull, twisting her limbs in the dragonling-drift patterns she'd learned, letting momentum carry her into the void's deeper shadow.

Behind her, the Sovereign's guns thundered. Ahead, the anomaly waited, still and pulsing like the space between thoughts, or the breath before a scream.

The mana was so dense it distorted vision, a shimmer that bent shape and shadow.

Her tail flicked, claws flexing.

"You've got this," she told herself, forcing a grin she didn't feel. "Just another rogue job. Find the treasure. Avoid the traps. Don't get eaten by the dragon."

The void was quiet again, at least in the way space could ever be quiet. The kind of silence that hummed through her bones.

Her foxfire flared behind her in controlled bursts, pulses of blue threading through the black as she propelled herself deeper into the belt, away from the warships and railgun fire. The Driftknight's outline was already fading behind her.

Ahead, the anomaly's heartbeat pulsed louder.

Takuto murmured softly in her ear. "Mana and gravitational irregularities increasing. Pattern coherence breaking down."

She nodded, barely, gaze flicking across the dark canvas in front of her. The asteroid field thickened. Jagged shadows drifted through the black. Too still, too slow.

Then the spike hit.

Akiko's instincts screamed. Her gravitational sense snapped like a tripwire, too late.

An invisible force yanked her sideways, and the stars twisted. Foxfire flared as she overcompensated, but it was like trying to swim in a whirlpool.

She slammed into a rocky surface hard enough to rattle her teeth. The impact stole her breath. She rolled, skidding across the surface, gravity pressing her down like a hand on her back.

Akiko lay still for a moment, blinking up at the sky.

"Status," she rasped.

Takuto's voice was calm, if annoyed. "You are intact. But we are currently pinned to a planetoid-class mass. Radius: 180 meters. Surface gravity: 2.3g. Anomalous."

She grunted, forcing herself up slowly. Every motion was weighted. Her limbs moved like she was submerged in syrup.

"Feels like I faceplanted into a moon."

"You did. A very small one."

The landscape around her was bleak, just gray rock and sharp ridges, but her instincts prickled. This asteroid was out of place. Wrong. Like something had been fed into its center, densified beyond natural formation.

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Akiko shook herself off and tested her footing. The gravity didn't recede. If anything, the pressure felt aware, like the anomaly was watching how she reacted.

She clicked her teeth together and muttered, "Alright. Point taken."

Foxfire gathered around her again, burning brighter against the oppressive gravity as she prepared to launch back into drift. The deeper she went, the stranger it was going to get. And she hadn't even made it past the threshold.

The anomaly deepened around her.

Akiko drifted past slow-turning stones and frostbitten wreckage, further into a space that didn't obey distance. Somewhere behind her, the stars still burned. Somewhere ahead, something older waited.

Then she saw it.

A mountain. It shouldn't have existed here, rootless in the void, but solid, jagged, majestic. Its slopes were carved from planetary stone, wind-scoured and steep, veins of ore glinting beneath the surface like silvered scars. Light curved around it, smeared like oil on water. A corona of warped starlight crowned its peak.

She stared. And the hair on her neck rose.

"Of course it's a mountain," she muttered, tail lashing as the unease returned. "Perfect lair for a space dragon. What's next? A mana moat? A welcome mat that says 'Abandon All Hope'?"

But her sarcasm rang hollow against the scale of the thing.

It was beautiful. It was wrong.

Her foxfire flared as she adjusted her course, slipping into a narrowing corridor between hovering stones. The mana currents thickened. They curled around her, tugging at her, brushing her skin with cold awareness.

Her gravitational sense flared a moment later, a deep ripple through her mind like the pulse of tectonic plates. Eddies. Warps. Absences.

Her HUD blared a fresh alert.

Proximity Warning: Singularity Event Detected.

Akiko froze. Her ears flattened as her breath caught. "Singularity?" she echoed, voice tight. "What the hell—"

The universe changed. Starlight bent into impossible arcs, smeared like oil across glass. The asteroids ahead twisted mid-spin, their outlines pulled thin, into spaghettified shadows of themselves. Her frame of reference broke down. The background stars no longer stayed fixed. They spiraled.

Her gut twisted as she moved forward. Her awareness flared with the pattern of bends and pulls in the invisible field, but without the instincts she'd severed, her responses lagged. A second behind. Half a second. Enough to kill.

She veered. Too late.

The stars smeared. Her sensors fluttered. For a moment, Akiko wasn't here. Or maybe she was always here. The Driftknight's hold shimmered in her periphery... no, her childhood temple... no, something—

No.

She ripped herself free with a snarl, breath ragged in her suit. The distortion left a burn behind her eyes.

"I can't—" she whispered, one hand trembling near the neural cradle. "I'm not fast enough."

She hesitated. And then cursed softly in a tongue no longer spoken.

Her fingers found the interface.

"Takuto. Bring it online."

Silence. A moment's pause.

"…Instincts loading. Confirm?"

"Do it."

There was no sound when the dragonling's mind came back. Just a shift, like gravity leaning in. A hunger threading through her bones. The sense of wrongness vanished.

Suddenly, the maze was a twisting corridor. The singularities became beacons. The eddies, lampposts on a mountain road. Akiko's limbs moved without conscious direction, her body curving into a trajectory only the dragonling knew.

She slipped between folded vectors of space like a bird through branches.

The mountain waited. And something inside her whispered...

Home.

The moment her boots hit stone, the world shifted. It wasn't just the jolt of contact or the gravity that dragged at her limbs that bothered her, it was the air. There was air.

Akiko's breath caught in her throat, her suit's systems confirming what her senses already told her. Pressure. Oxygen. Trace gases. Enough to support life. It was a piece of a world. No simple asteroid or fragment of rock, but a place with rules. Alien ones.

She took a step. Then another. Stone cracked beneath her.

Takuto's voice filtered through her thoughts, distant.

"…Akiko…"

It echoed like a memory. The dragonling instincts still curled around her mind like smoke. Breathing with her, thinking ahead of her. Each motion threaded through with purpose that wasn't hers.

Let go, she told herself.

Her hand found the neural cradle at her neck. With a growl, she shoved the subsidiary mind back into suspension.

The change was immediate. Like surfacing from a deep, black ocean. Cold rushed in behind the instinct's warmth. Her thoughts stumbled over themselves, suddenly her own again.

She dropped to one knee, panting.

Subskill Progress (Cognitive Systems Interface): Priority Manual Disconnect – 77.3% milestone achieved.

It was getting harder. Every time, harder to come back.

She looked up, and the universe was gone. Behind her, past the ledge where she'd landed, the stars had become streaks. The Driftknight's last transmission was a smear of static in her suit's HUD. Time bled across her sensor logs in pulses and gaps. The void behind her bent around invisible mass, warped by the singularities she'd slipped through.

The belt. The fight. The people she'd bled for. All of it felt impossibly far.

The mountain loomed behind her, casting a long shadow across a valley of half-remembered physics. Akiko stood slowly, gaze fixed on the peak.

Her voice came quiet.

"…This place was never meant to be seen."

The passage into the mountain swallowed her.

Stone arched overhead, smooth in places, jagged in others. Less a tunnel and more a throat carved into the world. Her suit's mana signature dimmed to a whisper, Takuto modulating the output in real time.

"Dampening active," he murmured. "Minimal trace."

The deeper she moved, the more the temperature shifted. Neither warm nor cold as if the mountain rejected thermodynamics itself. Time didn't feel right here either. Her internal chronometer lost sync twice.

She stepped lightly, boots muffled by dust.

Then came the signs. Scorched hull plating. Shattered conduits. A Haven frigate's insignia, warped by impact, half-buried in the rock. A broken Asharan survey drone, crystalline sensor arrays fused into slag. And then—

She stopped.

A hull fragment. Not Haven. Not Asharan. Not from the outer colonies.

The metal was…wrong. Too smooth. Reflecting no light, yet never fully in shadow. Glyphs etched into the side shimmered with a syntax that felt more like emotion than language. And beneath it, a banner, partially intact, woven from something that glistened like spider silk suspended in time.

She took another step. More debris.

A walker's leg, too delicate to be Haven tech. A cracked sword, its core still humming with resonance. A ring of carbon-scored stone etched in a pattern she almost, but not quite, recognized. A memory out of place, out of time.

"Some of these aren't from here," she breathed.

"No," Takuto said quietly. "They're not."

The realization settled over her like dust. This was more than a hoard. It was a graveyard of trespassers. Pilgrims. Invaders. Explorers. Others who had crossed the veil as she had. Or had been brought here.

And the dragons had kept what they left behind.

Akiko moved on, slower now, the walls around her thick with silence.

The chamber widened without warning.

One step, and the narrow tunnel opened into a cathedral of stone and void, too large for the mountain's frame, its dimensions false and folded inward, a hollow that should not fit. Light bent as if uncertain, shadows twisting along impossible angles.

And then the breath came.

Akiko froze, her fox ears flicking back instinctively. The pulse of mana around her twisted, drawn inward, pulled into a singular presence.

The pressure was more than mana. A force that wrapped around the bones, bent the air, and rewrote the rhythm of thought. The floor beneath her claws trembled with breathless stillness, and somewhere ahead...

Something moved. A ripple in the air, a dimming of the cavern's glow as if the light itself bowed in retreat.

Then the silhouette emerged. Coiling through the dark, its bulk moved with impossible grace. Fluid as ink, vast as myth. Scales that shimmered like fractured starlight, their angles shifting with a thousand refractions.

With each motion, the air bent. And with each pause, the ground remembered it had weight.

A dragon.

Her breath caught.

The beast settled in a slow, deliberate curl, its limbs folding into the stone as if the mountain itself yielded space. The tremor that followed ran up her legs, into her chest, and stayed there.

Two eyes opened in the dark. More than light, their glow was intent.

Akiko felt her breath slow under the weight of being seen.

Its gaze alone pressed Akiko to the floor of her soul like it had weight. Gravity.

A slow, reverberant thought slid into her skull like a monolith being moved.

You carry the scent of my blood. And yet... not kin. A creature not born of this realm, nor truly belonging to another.

Her throat tightened. She reached for words, but her tongue felt too slow, too mortal.

"I didn't take it willingly," she said, voice dry. "It tried to eat me. I won."

A rumble echoed through the chamber. Laughter?

You are shaped like prey. But something inside you bites.

Its head tilted. The shift cracked the stone beneath it. She could feel its gravity, not just as weight but as history. Dense with age, with hunger, with meanings older than physics.

The dragon exhaled. Her suit screamed warnings. Radiation, heat, pressure. Mana surged in a wave, drawn from every relic in the hoard, flowing toward it in reverence.

Then the dragon leaned closer.

You are an anomaly. And I do not hoard anomalies. They spoil. They rot.

Her heart stuttered.

But you are curious. Unique.

Its tongue flicked out, tasting mana.

You fell into this world. And through you… we entered.

Akiko didn't move. "Wasn't intentional."

No. But it was enough. Magic seeps through the fracture. A vein opened. We were thirsty.

For that, you are afforded a delay in your destruction.

Akiko's mind scrambled for a path, for an angle. No Kaede. No Brom. No one to shield her. Just her.

Tell me, what will you do with your remaining time?

Her instincts screamed to flee. But instinct hadn't gotten her this far. Akiko stood straighter.

"Well," she said, voice steadier than it had any right to be, "I wasn't planning on making a donation today. You'll forgive me if I don't gift-wrap myself."

The dragon's lips curled, rows of teeth catching the ambient glow. A smile, or a warning. Or both.

A sharp tongue. Fitting. But words alone are brittle things.

Maybe. But brittle doesn't mean useless.

She held its gaze. "Words might not save me," she said carefully, "but they might interest you. You called me unique. Maybe there's more use in me alive than inert and collecting dust."

A pause.

Useful. What use can a fleeting thing serve a timeless one?

She didn't blink.

"You said I don't belong. That means I see what others miss. I understand things no one else here can. Mana. Magic. Change. Maybe I can find more for you. Expand your hoard."

The dragon was silent. Its gaze pierced her like an ancient riddle unsolved.

Bold. Prove your worth. And perhaps I will delay your end… again.

The cavern stilled. The dragon's eyes never left her.

Akiko swallowed hard.

She'd bought herself time. Now she had to survive it.

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