Boots scuffed on deck plating as Blake stumbled into the beacon chamber, his left arm hanging useless. Fire bloomed in his shoulder with every heartbeat. Patches of his bodysuit were scorched black, stinking of ozone, and the bandage on his calf was soaked through with blood.

He leaned against the cold metal of the doorframe and took a breath. One brutal, practiced motion. He slammed his shoulder into the unyielding surface.

A wet pop, sickeningly loud in the small room. He sucked in a ragged breath as the joint ground back into place. A wave of sickness washed over him, but his fingers, though trembling, could move.

One problem down.

He shoved himself off the frame and limped into the room. It was basically just a large closet, built for a single purpose: housing the console he needed to get at. The air was thick, greasy with a static charge that prickled his skin. The stench was a layered poison: ozone, the ghost of burnt plastic, and a deeper, metallic rot like spoiled blood. Under it all, a dissonant hum vibrated in his teeth—a wet, submerged electronic whine married to a high-frequency squeal.

At the center of the cramped space, a drab and utilitarian console made of metal and plastic wrapped around a single, crystalline pillar. The Leviathan's sub-core—one of many, Blake was learning. It should have pulsed with a clean, living light. Instead, it was choked with veins of a sickly crimson that pulsed with a cancerous rhythm. Diseased. Dying.

He dragged himself to the console, his good hand tracing the grime-slicked controls. The display was a mess of corrupted data, a waterfall of garbled text and fractured symbols. He ignored it, focusing instead on the crystal.

It felt like staring into an open wound. The red filaments inside were alien growths, tissue grafted onto the soul of the machine. They throbbed with a malevolent life, a parasite feasting on the Leviathan's dying heart.

A surge of anger, cold and sharp, cut through the pain in his body. This was not a natural death. This was murder. A slow, deliberate violation.

He reached out, his fingers hovering over the crystal's surface. The air around it was frigid, a pocket of absolute cold in the suffocating heat of the room. He could feel the wrongness of it, a vibration that went deeper than sound, resonating in the marrow of his bones.

Just something else to kill.

Based on everything Kitt had told him, this part should be relatively straightforward. All he had to do was flood the sub-core with Warp-aspected mana to flood out the ambient corruption. The Leviathan would be able to do the rest, homing in on the familiar Warp mana and wresting back control remotely.

Activating [Warden's Insight] he focused on the corruption. The alien presence clinging to the crystal was a chaotic shriek of a frequency, all jagged edges and discordant harmonics. His own Warp mana, the energy churning in his core, definitely felt different.

Blake placed his good hand flat against the corrupted crystal. Its surface was unnaturally warm, slick with a feverish humidity that felt like touching diseased tissue. But the heat was a lie. A deeper cold bled through it, a spiritual chill that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the feeling of a void, the absence of life and meaning, a silent, parasitic hunger. The dissonance was nauseating, and his fingers stiffened, ready to recoil.

Blake pushed his disgust aside and focused his Intent. Eland had drilled into him the importance of visualization, so he closed his eyes and tried to envision what his mana looked like when in its Warp aspect. Conceptually, despite the potentially confusing name, he understood that Warp mana could be best understood as a type of "movement" or "travel" mana, but tied tightly to the concept of warping through space.

Blake thought of a few expressions of that sort of thing: warp speed in Star Trek, the Hyperspace of Star Wars, but neither felt right as a method to visualize his mana. All at once it came to him: Stargate. The shimmering liquid that could have been water, or more fittingly, mercury. The explosion of energy bursting from the gate on activation, destroying everything in its wake by the simple expediency of simply separating the molecules of anything it touched... Blake liked this visual metaphor for his mana, and decided to lean into it and make it his own.

Blake pictured his Warp mana as a hidden reservoir deep within his chest, a perfectly still lagoon of liquid starlight that seemed to exist in a space between spaces. The surface remained mirror-smooth, reflecting not his surroundings but glimpses of distant places—fractured images of elsewhere that shifted and blurred like half-remembered dreams. Occasionally, without any external stimulus, a single ripple disturbed the surface, spreading outward in concentric circles that seemed to whisper of journeys not yet taken. The light itself had weight and substance, denser than water but flowing like mercury made of compressed moonbeams, holding within its depths the potential for infinite distance.

Then he imagined it in violent action: The placid pool didn't merely ripple; it convulsed like a living thing suddenly awakened. The surface broke catastrophically, and his Warp mana didn't flow—it erupted.

Blake pictured the liquid light as a geyser of molten space, blasting upward through his core with enough force to shatter mountains. The luminous torrent crashed against the boundaries of reality itself, creating not gentle pathways but violent ruptures—tears in the fabric of distance that hungered to devour the space between Blake and his target.

In this state, his mana felt like barely contained fury, like trying to hold back an avalanche of liquid stars with his bare hands. The visualization showed him space folding violently inward on itself, compressed and twisted until distance screamed in protest before finally snapping like an overstretched rubber band. Where tendrils caressed, plumes assaulted—battering through obstacles both physical and mystical with the inexorable force of a cosmic hurricane that refused to be denied.

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Now properly visualizing his Warp mana, Blake channeled it into the crystal.

The energy flowed from his core, and it felt... right. Natural. Incredibly familiar. In that instant, it clicked. This wasn't some new power he'd just unlocked; it was the same energy he'd been instinctively using all along to power his most advanced abilities—Unfettered Stride, Kinetic Detonation, the Singularity Shot.

The liquid starlight poured from his palm into the corrupted crystal, and the effect was immediate. The red veins recoiled like living things exposed to acid. They writhed and twisted, trying to escape the flood of silver-blue energy that Blake was pouring into the sub-core. The alien filaments began to smoke, then dissolve entirely, leaving behind only clean crystal and the healthy glow of the Leviathan's own energy.

But something else happened too. As his Warp mana made contact with the crystal, Blake felt a sudden, violent expansion of awareness. His consciousness exploded outward, racing through the ship's neural pathways like lightning through a conductor. For a split second, he was everywhere at once—in every corridor, every room, every twisted space where the Outsider had left its mark.

And in that moment, he found himself in direct contact with the Leviathan. It wasn't anything like Kitt. It was older, deeper, more real in a way that Blake couldn't hope to identify.

The problem, of course, was that Kitt had been engineered in a lab to be able to speak directly to her host.

The Leviathan, in contrast, was... loud.

Loud like standing too close to a jet engine during takeoff. Loud like a mounted M240C that somehow never stopped firing. The force of the Leviathan's direct mental contact slammed into Blake's consciousness with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the skull.

His vision exploded into white-hot agony. Every thought shattered into fragments. The crystal room vanished, replaced by a howling void of pure sensation—alien emotions, vast and ancient, crashing through his mind like tsunamis through a paper house. Gratitude the size of solar systems. Pain that had endured for years on end. Relief so profound it threatened to drown him.

When consciousness crawled back, Blake found himself sprawled on the cold deck, a small pool of blood beneath him. His head felt like someone had taken a chainsaw to his brain stem. Every heartbeat sent fresh spikes of agony through his skull.

But the Leviathan's presence had withdrawn, leaving behind something very comfortable in its wake.

"Shit, Blake, are you okay?" Kitt asked. "You're not totally scrambled, are you?"

***

A rough sound scraped out of Blake's throat. Metal chilled the skin along his cheekbone, the deck plating unforgiving and slick with sweat. He pressed his palms to the floor and levered himself up; the world rolled sideways, angles shifting like a battered trawler in a storm. Pressure throbbed through his skull—first a sharp, splitting crack, then dull percussion pounding at bone and brain, each pulse a reminder of impact.

"Not scrambled," Blake said. Each word slogged out slow, heavy as wet cement. He lifted a hand, touched his face, and saw the blood painting red streaks across the glove. "Just took a beating, is all."

"Well, that would be comforting if you weren't responding to a question I asked you over three minutes ago," Kitt replied. "Take it slow, Blake."

Blake considered listening, but instead forced himself to his feet, using the now-cool console for support. The crystal hummed quietly beneath his palm, no longer the angry red of corruption but a steady, clean blue-white that cast gentle light across the room.

That's when he truly registered the changes.

The first thing he felt was an absence. His ears felt strange, like he had been wearing earplugs for hours and just taken them out. Something that had been there was now gone. It took him a second, but he figured it out: he couldn't hear the strange resonance that he associated with the Outsider. That feverish, teeth-grinding hum—needlepoint static chewing at his ears from the moment he'd stepped outside the core chamber—it was gone.

The air had changed too. The greasy, rotten smell that had clung to everything was gone, replaced by something neutral and clean. He drew a deep breath and didn't taste decay.

But it was the light that really drove it home. The angry red glow of emergency lighting that had painted everything in shades of infection and madness had been replaced entirely. The sub-core pulsed with calm bioluminescence, and even the walls seemed to breathe easier.

"Blake, I'm so sorry! We should have thought to put up some guardrails. The Leviathan—its really only supposed to do something like that with its Pilot."

"Yeah. I figured that one out." Blake gave a slow, weary shake of his head, wiping the last of the blood from under his nose with the back of his glove.

Blake's gaze dropped to his calf. Blood oozed sluggishly through the ragged tear above the boot—sloppy work. He'd left a trail from the last two corridors, and now that the noise had faded, he could feel every inch of the mess he'd become. His shirt stuck to his side where a jagged cut burned, sweat and blood soaking through.

"Kitt," he rasped, voice rough as gravel. "Pop the cache."

She hesitated just long enough for him to notice.

"You've really gotten creative with new ways to wreck yourself, haven't you?" She sounded as flippant as ever, but Blake could feel the concern radiating off of her like heat from an open flame.

"Wouldn't want anyone watching getting bored." The cache shimmered to life, and one of the Skaeldrin first-aid kits dropped into his hand, followed by two ration bars and a dented flask.

"I just don't know how you did all that in, what, fifteen minutes? Twenty?"

Blake sat heavily on the deck and tore open the kit. "It's been nearly two hours since I left the Core, Kitt."

"Oh." A pause. "Time must move differently when you're tangled in all this psychic wiring. Felt like barely any time at all." Something sheepish colored Kitt's tone.

"You missed some fun," Blake replied, shaking his head. "But nothing serious. I'm mostly intact."

"Hrm, well, fine," she groused. "So tell me, how bad did you miss me?"

"Me? Miss you?" Blake said, chuckling. "Get over yourself."

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