The stolen moments of peace evaporated like blood in vacuum. The gland cluster's hum shifted—a deeper, purposeful thrumming that vibrated through the crystalline floor. Ryn's head snapped up, her cybernetic eye flickering as it processed the new frequency.
"They're flooding the lower decks with a neural-disruption pulse. Looking for minds that don't belong. Our Reality-Anchor will hold, but not if they bring a focused scanner to bear. We need to move. Now."
They armored up swiftly, the tenderness of minutes before sealed away beneath plates of ceramite and resolve. Echo's wound was closed, a faint pink line under his suit's sealant. Leyla moved without a limp, her muscles warmed and ready. Mira's spatial senses were sharp, clear. Ryn's systems rebooted to 92% efficiency.
They exited the gland cluster into a nightmare of motion. The dreadnought was awake and hunting. Squads of Tier 6 Enforcers—hulking brutes with integrated heavy weapons—clanked down the organic corridors. Swarms of tiny Skitter-Scanners flowed along the walls and ceilings like metallic insects, their sensor-lights painting the air.
"No more stealth," Echo said, his voice low and final. "We go up. Fast and violent. Ryn, find us the most direct vertical path. Leyla, point. Mira, disrupt anything that tries to pin us down. I'll clear the way."
Ryn's eye projected a flickering schematic onto the wet wall. "There. A primary nutrient shunt. It runs like a spinal column straight up to the secondary bridge tier. It'll be a climb, and it'll be defended. But it's the fastest."
They ran. The first squad of Enforcers rounded a corner, their composite eyes glowing. They didn't issue a challenge. They opened fire.
Corrupted plasma, green and sizzling, filled the corridor. Mira threw up a spatial disc—a localized gravity well that bent the streams of fire into the ceiling, where they melted through fleshy conduits that rained steaming fluid. Leyla used the distraction, becoming a silver streak. She didn't aim for the bodies; she aimed for the weapons, severing plasma conduits and detonating power packs. Two Enforcers exploded, bathing the others in shrapnel and fire.
Echo charged through the chaos. His Error-Sight showed him the weak points in their crude armor—the synaptic junctions at the neck. His energy blade, humming with bonded energy, cut through two necks in one fluid arc. Black ichor fountained.
They didn't stop to finish the last one. They left it shrieking behind them and burst into the chamber housing the nutrient shunt.
It was a vertical tunnel, thirty meters across, its walls pulsating with rhythmic contractions. A thick, viscous river of dark, energy-rich fluid surged upward at the center, carried on a powerful current of bio-magnetic force. Racks of cilia and filtering organs lined the walls.
"We ride the current," Ryn yelled over the roar. "Use the structural ribs as handholds. Don't fall into the flow—it'll digest you in seconds."
They leaped onto the first rib, a bony outcrop slick with condensation. The upward force was immense, like standing in a hurricane. They began to climb, leaping from rib to rib, ascending through the beating heart of the ship.
Halfway up, the defense system activated.
The walls bloomed. Bio-cannons extruded like pustules and opened fire, spraying acidic spores. At the same time, the cilia came alive, lashing out like whip-tendrils to snag them.
"Mira!" Echo shouted.
"On it!" She focused, sweat beading on her brow. She couldn't stop the spores, but she could warp the space around the whipping cilia, tangling them together in knots. The limbs thrashed, impotent.
The spores were another matter. Leyla and Echo dodged and weaved, but Ryn was slower, her cybernetics not built for acrobatics. A spore burst on her thigh plate, and the acid began eating through the ceramite with a hiss.
Echo didn't think. He stretched out a hand toward the river of nutrient fluid below. He couldn't command the entire flow, but he could pull a tendril of it. He focused his will, his bloodline flaring. A whip of black fluid snapped up from the current and slashed across the wall of bio-cannons. The concentrated, digesting fluid did to the cannons what they meant to do to his team—it dissolved them into smoking sludge.
The spore barrage ceased.
They climbed faster.
At the top of the shunt, a reinforced iris-door hissed open, revealing not the bridge, but a laboratory level.
The air here was cold and sterile, smelling of antiseptic and ozone. The walls were lined with stasis tanks, and within them…
Echo's blood went cold.
Within the tanks were not Corrupted. They were beings from Ordered worlds—a Zephyrian, a Gravorg, a human, a fox-kin—each in various stages of a horrifying process. Crystalline corruption was being surgically grafted onto their bodies and nervous systems. Tubes fed dark ichor into their veins. Their faces were frozen in silent screams.
"A conversion lab," Ryn breathed, horror in her voice. "They're not just corrupting. They're engineering hybrids. Blending Ordered biology with Corrupted systems to make… something new."
At the far end of the lab, a figure turned from a monitoring console. It wore a stained surgical smock over its Corrupted form. Its hands ended in precise, scalpel-sharp talons. Its four eyes blinked independently.
Tier 8: The Surgeon-General.
"Ah," it hissed, a sound like bone saws. "The test subjects have arrived. Admiral Nox will be pleased. The Sovereign's bloodline data will be most instructive for the Ascension Project."
It gestured, and the stasis tanks along the walls began to open with a hiss of releasing pressure.
The captured, half-converted beings inside opened their eyes.
Their eyes glowed with a confused,痛苦 violet light.
They stepped out of their tanks, moving with jerky, puppeted motions, raising weapons that were fused to their arms.
The Surgeon-General smiled. "Let us see how you fight… when your enemy wears the face of those you are sworn to protect."