The Sovereign was a ship of whispers.
In the mess halls, over nutrient-paste, crew members spoke in hushed, excited tones.
"You're lying. A Cruiser Wing was dispatched. Sector command confirmed it." "It was dispatched. It never got there. It was recalled." "What do you mean, recalled?" "I mean, the Prince—the new one, the 'Heir'—handled it." "Handled what? Twenty-five pirate ships?" "He handled all of them." The first crewman leaned in, his eyes wide. "My cousin is on the Stiletto bridge crew. She was there. She said they were dead. Surrounded. The Baron 'Korr' was laughing, fired his main cannon... and the Prince just... pointed." "Pointed?" "Pointed. The shell, a molten slug the size of a shuttle, vanished. The cannon that fired it? Unmade. Dissolved. Just... gone. Wiped from reality." A third listener, who had been quiet, finally spoke, his voice trembling with a forgotten awe. "The Unmaker. That's what they called his father. The Unmaker's Heir. I thought it was just a title. A legend." "It's not a legend," the first crewman whispered. "It's back."
In the cold, white, sterile hell of the Crucible, Jararu was watching a recording.
It was the gun-cam footage from the Stiletto. He watched the Alkahest Lance—that beautiful, perfect spear of black-purple nothing—erupt from the viewport. He watched the cannon dissolve. He watched the fleet of jackals turn and burn space to flee from a single, unarmed ship.
General Kaelen stood nearby, his arms crossed, his face a mask of profound, stoic pride.
"His CTL is... developing, Instructor," Kaelen stated, his voice a deep rumble. "He is unconventional. But he is... effective."
Jararu didn't respond. He just replayed the clip. The lance. The dissolution. The silence.
A sound, dry and thin, cracked the silence of the training deck. It started as a low chuckle, a rattling in the old man's chest.
Then, Jararu threw his head back and laughed.
It was not a sound of humor. It was a sound of pure, unrestrained, terrifying vindication. It was a loud, barking, maniacal laugh that echoed off the hard-light plates. Kaelen took an involuntary step back.
"Hah! Hahahahaha! 'Sloppy!' 'Pathetic!' 'Abysmal!'" Jararu cackled, pointing at the frozen image of the dissolved cannon. "That's what I told him! Every day! I told him he was a waste!"
He spun to face Kaelen, his welding-arc eyes blazing with a wild, triumphant fire.
"And look!" he roared, jabbing a finger at the screen. "Look at the instinct! Look at the purity of that cast! He didn't just push, he unmade! You were worried, General. You saw a mouse! You saw a 'scary cat' who needed his wife to hold his hand while he faced a council!"
Jararu was practically vibrating, a live wire of ecstatic energy. "But I saw the blood! I saw the truth!"
He slammed his frail hand on the console. "You can dress a lion's cub in sheep's wool! You can raise it in a pen, tell it that it's nothing, beat it, and starve it! But the moment," he hissed, his voice dropping, "the moment it tastes blood... it remembers."
He turned back to the screen, his laughter fading into a predator's smile. "Genes always stay true, Kaelen. He is an Alkahest. And he is just now remembering how to hunt."
Mali sat on the edge of his cold, impossibly large bed, rubbing his sternum. He was exhausted.
That single Alkahest Lance had felt like it had been torn from his soul. It had drained over half of his EP, which had taken two full sleep cycles to regenerate. The System, in its infinite cruelty, had informed him that using that much power in his "untrained" state had caused "micro-fractures in his spiritual matrix." It had hurt.
He was staring at his STATUS screen.
[TITLE: THE UNMAKER'S HEIR (ACTIVE)]
"The Unmaker." It felt like a lie. It was a title for his father. It was a title for a dragon.
He'd gotten lucky. He'd gotten angry. The Baron had threatened Anya, and he had... snapped. But it wasn't a sustainable victory. It was a panic button. And it had nearly broken him.
He was still just a boy in a costume. The whispers he now heard in the hallways when he walked to the Crucible—the awe, the fear—they made his skin crawl. They were all wrong. He was a fraud.
[DEBUFF: Imposter Syndrome ... -20 penalty]
It was weaker. The whispers of the crew were a faint, dissonant chorus against the System's doubt. But the doubt was still there. 'You can't do that again. You'll miss. You'll drain yourself and be left helpless. You're a one-shot-wonder, Mali. A fluke.'
The door to his quarters chimed.
"Enter," he said, his voice hoarse.
Anya walked in. She wasn't in her formal regalia, but in a simple, practical blue uniform. She was holding a data-slate, and she was failing to hide a smile.
"You're famous," she said, her voice light.
Mali just grunted, not looking up from the floor. "The 'Unmaker.' I've heard."
"The entire ship has heard," she corrected, walking over. "The Sovereign is a gossip-mill. 'The Heir's Vengeance.' 'The Black Lance.' They're saying you stared down twenty-five pirate ships and unmade the flagship with a look. They're saying Kaelen didn't even have to raise his shields."
"It wasn't like that," Mali mumbled. "I got mad. It was one shot. It drained half my EP. I... I couldn't have fired a second one. If they'd called my bluff, I'd..."
"But it was the shot, Mali," Anya said, her voice turning serious. She sat next to him on the bed, her warmth a stark contrast to the cold room. "You did what a whole Cruiser Wing would have done with a barrage that would have taken an hour. You did it in a second. You didn't win with force. You won with authority. That's the difference. That's what they're all talking about."
She saw the doubt still clouding his face, the way he was rubbing his chest. She sighed, her 'Strategist' mask softening into the 'Wife' mask, the one that was just... her.
"You're still the 'scary cat' in your own head, aren't you?" she asked gently.
He finally met her gaze. "He's loud. And he's... he's not wrong. It did almost break me, Anya."
"Maybe," she conceded. "But he's not the only one in there anymore, is he?" She took his hand. It was calloused from the training deck, but it was steady. "Good. Because you're going to need the 'dragon' part. More than ever."
A new kind of anxiety, cold and sharp, cut through his exhaustion. "Why? What's next? More pirates?"
Anya's expression became somber, full of a new, profound weight. She gestured to the massive viewport, which was currently a blur of shimmering, indigo light as the ship tore through spacetime.
"Kaelen and Vorlag are in agreement. Your... 'demonstration'... has accelerated the timeline. Drastically."
"Accelerated what?"
"We're not just 'retrieving' you anymore. We're not 'training' you in a void. We are presenting you. The fold-jump completes in eight hours."
She stood up and walked to the window, staring out at the unreal light. "We're going to the heart of the Imperium. The throneworld. The capital of House Alkahest, a place that hasn't seen an Emperor in a generation."
She turned back to him, her green eyes full of a fire he'd never seen before.
"We're going to your home cluster, Mali. We're going to Sanctum."