Reva sat perfectly still. A glass of dark, viscous red liquid sat untouched near her hand. While, her crimson eyes were fixed on the black viewport.

"I am only 22 years old. And I am not his historian," Reva said, her voice like velvet dragged over gravel.

She took a sip of the red liquid, her lips staining slightly. "I know what he is, Kylus. I do not know who he was. If you want the tragedy, ask the wolf in the tank. Lyra carries his humanity. I only carry his kills."

Kylus grunted, unimpressed. "Great. So you are following a ghost with a god complex."

"He pays well," Rin muttered, shoving a spoonful of mash into his mouth. "And he doesn't ask stupid questions." 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

The meal ended in a heavy silence. The tension of the mission, the waiting, and the dying girl in the med-bay hung over them like a shroud.

They moved to the lounge area. Kylus lit a cigarette, ignoring the glare from Vea. Rin went back to sharpening his long, serrated blade.

The blast doors hissed open.

Klatos walked in. He looked better—the med-gel had sealed the worst of his burns—but he still moved with a stiff, unnatural gait. He stopped in the center of the room, wringing his hands.

"The wolf girl," Klatos said, his voice raspy. "Lyra. Is she stabilizing?"

"She's dying," Viola said bluntly, not looking up from her screen. "Her DNA is unraveling. Unless you have a Genesis Sequencer in your back pocket, she's toast."

Klatos licked his dry lips. "I... I might know someone. Here. On Jupiter."

Kylus raised an eyebrow, smoke curling from his lips. "You have contacts in the gas giant? Thought you were a rim-worlder."

"I have friends everywhere," Klatos said quickly. "There's a bio-engineer. An old associate. He deals in... experimental rewriting. He could fix her. But I need the data. The scans, the degradation rates, the blood work. I need to send it to him to see if he can synthesize a stabilizer."

Kylus stared at him for a long moment. Then he sighed, flicking ash onto the floor.

"Fine," Kylus said. "Whatever keeps her alive." He turned to Vea, who was leaning against the wall, checking her nails. "Vea. Go with him. Pull the files from the med-bay server. Encrypt them before you hand them over."

Vea rolled her eyes, pushing herself off the wall. "I'm not an errand girl."

"Just do it, Vea," Kylus muttered, rubbing his temples. "I have a headache."

Vea sighed, smoothing her uniform. "Fine. Come on, scar-face."

She walked toward the corridor. Klatos followed, his head bowed.

Rin watched them go. He stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Something in Klatos's posture—the stiffness, the sweat on his neck—itched at Rin's instincts.

"I'll tag along," Rin said, stepping away from the table. "Make sure he doesn't trip and delete the mainframe."

He took two steps.

"Wait," Klatos said. He stopped in the doorway. He didn't turn around.

Vea stopped a few feet ahead of him. She turned back, looking annoyed. "What now? Did you forget the way?"

"I don't need the files," Klatos whispered.

He reached into his jacket.

It wasn't a datapad. It was a heavy, modified hand-cannon—a rusted, ugly piece of metal designed for one thing only— punching through starship hulls.

He raised the gun and pointed it point-blank at Vea's chest.

"No—" Vea started, her eyes widening.

BOOM.

The sound was deafening in the confined space.

The round caught Vea in the sternum. It didn't just kill her. The explosive payload detonated on impact.

One second, Vea was standing there, looking annoyed. The next, she was a mist of red vapor and wet chunks of meat slapping against the metal walls. Her upper body simply ceased to exist.

Her legs stood for a horrific, impossible second before collapsing into the spreading pool of blood.

Kylus froze. The cigarette fell from his lips.

He stared at the wet smear on the blast door that used to be his assistant. He stared at the legs on the floor.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Then, Kylus screamed.

It was a sound of pure, shattered mind. He scrambled over the table, dishes crashing to the floor, his eyes wide, white, and completely insane.

"VEA!"

He vaulted over the ruined table. He reached for the bloody wreckage on the floor, his hands outstretched, but he never made it. A violently expanding invisible barrier slammed into his chest, throwing him backward into the bulkhead with a bone-rattling crash.

Viola appeared from the shadows directly behind Klatos, twin daggers aimed at the base of the traitor's neck. The blades struck an unseen shield, shattering instantly into a dozen metallic shards. The kinetic backlash sent her skidding across the deck, her boots carving deep grooves into the floor plating.

Rin blurred forward at the same time as Viola. He swung his serrated blade with enough force to cleave a starship hull, aiming directly for the Klatos' torso. But instead, the weapon connected with the invisible wall, sparking violently before repelling him with equal ferocity.

"Why?!" Arlen shouted, drawing her sidearm and firing three rounds into the barrier. The bullets flattened and dropped uselessly to the deck. "We trusted you, Klatos! Xavier trusted you!"

Rin wiped a streak of blood from his chin, his remaining daggers gripped tight. "You sold us out, you bastard. Why?"

Klatos did not answer. He dropped the heavy cannon to the floor, raising both hands to his chest. His fingers twisted into unnatural angles, forming a complex sequence of arcane seals.

The environment inside the room shifted violently. Gravity inverted for a split second, and the lighting strips flickered and died, replaced by a sickly, pulsing violet illumination emanating from his body.

"Authority of the Infernal Abyss," he chanted, his voice overlapping with a chorus of inhuman rasps.

A sphere of black energy exploded outward, rapidly expanding into a fifty-meter domain. It consumed the mess hall, the adjacent corridor, and part of the medical bay observation deck. Everything caught inside the domain lost its color, washed in a dead, monochrome gray.