The first sign they were being hunted was not a warning.
It was absence.
The Stellar Nymph slipped out of drift near the fringe of a dead system—no stars worth naming, no traffic, no reason for anyone to be there—and found the long-range scanners strangely quiet. Too quiet. Background radiation flattened. Debris fields that should've been screaming with noise lay eerily still.
Jimmy felt it before Sparky said anything.
The hum he'd grown used to—the constant low murmur of power flowing through the ship—shifted pitch, like a nervous animal scenting something on the wind.
"Vex," Jimmy said slowly. "I think the universe is holding its breath again."
"That's never the comforting prelude you think it is," she replied, eyes narrowing at the sensor readouts.
Sparky rotated, projecting a fractured star map that refused to finish rendering. "I am detecting intent without signature," the drone said. "Which is rude. Things should either exist or not exist. This is doing both."
Vex exhaled through her nose. "Hunters."
Jimmy frowned. "Collectors?"
"No," she said. "Worse."
She tapped a control, pulling up an old Xylosian data shard—royal archives, half-corrupted and deliberately buried. Symbols scrolled past, ancient and predatory.
"They don't come themselves," Vex continued. "They send people."
The display resolved into silhouettes.
Not uniform. Not mechanical. Not even consistent.
Mercenaries wrapped in adaptive void-cloaks. Bio-augmented zealots whose bones had been hollowed out and replaced with signal relays. Scholars who had traded empathy for probability engines grafted into their skulls. Beings who had once been something else—and had chosen not to be anymore.
"The Collectors don't recruit," Vex said quietly. "They curate talent. Anyone desperate enough, broken enough, or ambitious enough to want a place in the archive instead of oblivion."
Jimmy stared at the figures. "So… fan club."
"A cult with a benefits package," Sparky added. "Dental unclear. Mortality optional."
Vex's tattoos glowed dimly as she scrolled. "They're called Acquirers. Field specialists. Retrieval experts. Each one customized for a specific anomaly type."
Her finger paused on a symbol shaped like a hooked spiral.
"These," she said, voice tightening, "are Ingestive Suppression Units."
Jimmy's stomach rolled. Not hunger. Instinct.
"They're built to starve you," Vex continued. "Energy dampeners, null fields, bait designed to trigger overconsumption. They don't kill anomalies like you."
"They make you eat yourself," Jimmy finished softly.
Silence settled between them.
Outside the viewport, space warped—just slightly. A distortion too smooth to be natural. Then another. And another.
Sparky's voice dropped an octave. "Multiple vectors. No drive signatures. They are… unfolding."
Figures emerged from the dark—not ships at first, but shapes, resolving into vessels grown from bone-white alloys and stitched light. Each one carried a different rhythm, a different wrongness.
Jimmy felt his pulse spike.
These weren't soldiers.
They were solutions.
Vex rested a hand on his arm without looking at him. The contact grounded him, steadying the surge before it could crest.
"They'll test you," she said. "Prod you. Learn how you respond."
Jimmy swallowed, eyes locked on the incoming shapes. "And when they're done learning?"
Vex met his gaze, fierce and unflinching.
"They'll try to take you."
Jimmy's lips twitched despite the fear crawling up his spine. "Yeah," he said. "About that."
Power stirred, subtle but ready—routes aligning, systems already bending toward him like they'd made up their minds.
"I don't fit in boxes very well."
Deep in space, the hunters closed in.
And for the first time, the people sent to collect an anomaly began to realize—
They were about to be studied right back.
Just then, the silence ended.
A single impact rang through the Stellar Nymph's hull—sharp, metallic, final—like the universe knocking with a weaponized fist. The ship shuddered, lights flickering as alarms snapped to life in overlapping shrieks.
"Contact," Vex said calmly, already moving.
Jimmy barely had time to grab a railing before a second удар slammed into the port side, the deck tilting hard enough to send loose tools skidding across the floor. Outside the viewport, space twisted as hunter vessels unfolded from nothing—sleek, bone-white shapes extruding limbs, weapons, and intent.
"Okay," Jimmy muttered, power stirring in his gut, "so much for the quiet part."
Boarding tethers punched into the hull, vibrating through his teeth. Sparky spun frantically, projecting threat vectors that refused to stay still. "Multiple Acquirers incoming," the drone chirped. "They appear motivated. Possibly emotionally."
Vex vaulted over a console as a breach charge detonated, smoke and debris blasting into the corridor. Her tattoos ignited in bright, flowing patterns, light rippling across her skin as she drew her blades.
The first hunter emerged from the smoke—tall, wrapped in a cloak of stuttering static. Jimmy felt the thing before he saw it, a pressure like swallowing something sharp.
"Don't let them touch you," Vex warned.
"Wasn't planning on it."
Jimmy reached out, instinctively rerouting power from the ship. Energy snapped into alignment, the Stellar Nymph leaning into him as if relieved. A concussive pulse blasted from his hands, slamming the hunter into the far wall in a shower of sparks.
Vex flashed him a quick grin. "Nice."
Then his vision betrayed him.
The world peeled open—layers of metal, circuitry, and energy unraveling all at once. The ship became a skeleton of glowing pathways.
And Vex—
Oh.
Her armor faded into heat signatures and luminous tattoos flowing over her body—across her chest, down her sides, curling along hips and thighs like living constellations.
Jimmy stopped dead.
"Jimmy!" Vex shouted. "Move!"
A hunter lunged. Jimmy fired too late, the blast scorching the ceiling instead.
Vex twisted, slicing the attacker in half before rounding on him. "Why did you miss?"
Jimmy stared very intently at the wall. "New power problem."
Her eyes narrowed. "Explain. Quickly."
"I can see through metal now," he said, words tumbling out. "Which is great! Except your suit apparently doesn't count! And I am very much seeing things I should not be seeing during a firefight!"
Her tattoos flared violently.
"You are what?"
"I'm not trying to!" he protested, eyes squeezed shut as he fired blindly—somehow vaporizing another hunter. "It's automatic! Like scanning! Very unsexy scanning!"
Vex's face flushed a deep, glowing violet as she decapitated a third attacker. "If you describe even one detail—"
"Great bone structure!" he blurted.
The blade stopped inches from his throat.
"…I meant anatomically," he added weakly.
"Survive this," Vex hissed, shoving him aside as the corridor filled with enemies, "and we are having a very long conversation."
Despite everything—the chaos, the hunters, the wildly inappropriate timing—Jimmy felt the ship surge through him again, power aligning as if it had made a choice.
They fought back to back, flawed and furious and undeniably in sync.
And somewhere between blaster fire and glowing tattoos, Jimmy realized two things:
He was becoming something dangerous.
And Vex was making that danger much harder to control.
The fight did not politely end when it should have.
It devolved.
Smoke clung to the corridors in lazy spirals, alarms cycled through increasingly judgmental tones, and somewhere in the ship something vital kept clanging like it was auditioning for a percussion solo. The hunters kept coming in uneven bursts—probing attacks now, testing reactions.
Which would have been fine.
If Jimmy's brain wasn't actively sabotaging him.
"Left!" Vex shouted.
"I got it!" Jimmy said, swinging around—
—and immediately flinching.
"WHY did you flinch," Vex demanded, kicking an Acquirer back through a half-melted bulkhead.
"Your tattoos just pulsed," he blurted, eyes snapping shut again.
"That is not tactical information!"
"They did it aggressively!"
A hunter lunged. Jimmy fired blind, the beam clipping the ceiling, ricocheting, and—somehow—dropping the enemy in a crackling heap.
Sparky hovered between them, rotating slowly. "Observation: Jimmy's combat effectiveness increases by thirty percent when not actively panicking about Vex."
"That number feels fake," Jimmy muttered.
"It is rounded," Sparky replied proudly.
Vex spun, blades flashing, tattoos flaring in sharp emotional bursts—anger, focus, adrenaline. Unfortunately, Jimmy's new vision interpreted those emotions in high resolution.
"Stop glowing like that!" Jimmy yelped.
"I am literally fighting for our lives!"
"Yes, and you're doing it very well, I just—wow, okay, that's a lot of light—"
Another hunter crashed through a side door. Jimmy reflexively reached out, drawing power from the ship. The Stellar Nymph responded eagerly, cannons charging as energy surged through him.
Unfortunately, his focus slipped.
For half a second, his vision cut deeper than intended.
"Oh come on," he groaned. "That should not be visible under any interpretation of physics."
Vex froze mid-swing.
"…Jimmy."
"Yes?"
"You are not speaking again until this wave is over."
"That seems fair."
They moved again, smoother now—Vex covering his blind spots, Jimmy acting like a living conduit, power snapping through him into shields, cannons, doors slamming shut at exactly the wrong time for the hunters.
One Acquirer tried to grapple him. Jimmy absorbed its dampening field mid-contact, the thing screaming electronically as it collapsed into inert scrap.
"Okay," Jimmy said, panting, "that part was awesome."
Vex shot him a look. "Focus."
"I am focusing! I'm just also… seeing."
Her tattoos pulsed a dangerous shade.
"If this power doesn't stabilize soon," she said tightly, "I am going to make you wear a helmet. Permanently."
Jimmy managed a grin despite everything. "Worth it?"
She didn't answer.
But she didn't move away from him either.
The hunters fell back at last, retreating into the warped silence they'd come from. The ship sagged, lights dimming as systems tried to remember how to be normal.
Jimmy leaned against the wall, exhausted. "I think I need… training. Or blinders. Or a vow of silence."
Vex deactivated her blades, tattoos slowly dimming as she faced him.
"You will learn control," she said. "Or this power will ruin you."
Then, after a beat—
"And you will absolutely stop looking."
Jimmy raised his hands. "Scout's honor."
She snorted despite herself.
And just like that, amid wreckage and fading danger, the tension lingered—charged, unresolved, and glowing faintly between them.
Jimmy wasn't just learning how to fight anymore.
He was learning how not to look at the wrong thing—
At the wrong time—
While the universe tried very hard to kill them both.