Fate, however, was rarely a straight line. It was a jagged trajectory filled with unforeseen debris.
In his previous life, Silas's "accidental" death had been the catalyst for a decade of misery. Vance had learned too late that the greasy old man wasn't just a veteran miner; he was a distant relative of the Blackstone Barony's Mineral Overseer.
In a backwater colony like Planet KQ-03, blood ties were the only currency that truly mattered. To the Overseer, Silas's life was worth little, but the prestige of the family was worth everything.
The subsequent fallout had been a slow-motion car crash. Silas's sons, backed by the Overseer's private security, had bled Vance dry with "reparations" and legal sabotage. Every anomalous success Vance had—every heavy haul or rare find—was scrutinized under a magnifying glass.
His attempts at secrecy back then had been laughably amateur. To the powerful, a lucky commoner is a curiosity; an "unusually lucky" commoner is a resource to be seized and stripped.
Vance wouldn't make that mistake again.
Revenge was a cold dish, but a messy execution was a poisonous one. The Vance of today understood that a master perpetrator doesn't just pull the trigger; they control the ripple effect.
If I kill him now, the butterfly flaps its wings, and the storm might wash away my Destiny Event in ten days, Vance thought, his gaze fixed on the sensor ghosts.
He had dozen ways to sabotage Silas's life support or breach his hull, but he chose a more surgical approach: Psychological Annihilation.
He would crush Silas's spirit until the man's pride was replaced by a visceral, bone-deep fear. He would make himself so superior, so untouchable, that Silas would convince himself that following Vance was a death sentence.
Behind him, Silas was beginning to feel the weight of his own inadequacy.
The gap between them wasn't just a distance on a radar screen; it was an abyss of pure talent. Vance's Ore-Tyrant MK-II was moving with a predatory elegance that defied its clunky, industrial design.
"How is he doing that?" Silas snarled, his knuckles white as he slammed his flight sticks to the limit. "That rig is a hundred years old! It shouldn't be able to pull those Gs!"
Silas watched in horror as Vance's ship executed a "Barrel-Roll Pivot"—a maneuver that required perfect synchronization of all eight attitude thrusters. Vance slipped through a shifting gap between two colliding asteroids with barely inches to spare.
In less than ten minutes, Vance's signal flickered and vanished into the "Red Zone"—the deepest, most lethal part of the asteroid belt.
Silas stared at his HUD. His sensor map was a chaotic storm of flashing red warnings. The Red Zone was a graveyard of ships and shattered dreams, where gravitational shears could rip a hull apart like wet cardboard.
To Silas, entering the Red Zone was a suicide mission.
To Vance, it was a playground.
The realization hit Silas like a physical blow to the stomach. He finally "understood." Or rather, he had been successfully misled into the conclusion Vance wanted him to reach.
He realized why Vance always returned with a full hold of high-grade ore. It wasn't a secret map or a hidden glitch. It was sheer, terrifying, monster-level piloting skill.
Vance was fishing in a private ocean of wealth while everyone else was fighting over the scraps in the mud.
In his original life, Vance's skill had been at the top of the [Veteran] tier. Respectable, but reachable.
But now, after decades of surviving the meat-grinder of the deep void, his muscle memory had ascended.
[Pilot Grade: Peak Elite]
He was an entire league above Silas. The maneuver he had just performed wasn't just a flight path; it was a statement of absolute dominance.
Vance had planted the "Seed of Despair" in Silas's mind. Greed is a powerful motivator, but fear of the unknown—fear of the Red Zone—was stronger. Silas would back off, convinced that Vance's luck was simply the byproduct of a madman's skill.
Vance put the old man out of his mind. He had more pressing matters. He hadn't dived into the Red Zone just to show off; he was hunting for the fuel of legends.
[Objective: Energy Crystals]
In the interstellar era, Energy Crystals were the condensed lifeblood of high technology. They were pure, crystalline monads of compressed power, forged in the crushing gravitational hearts of massive asteroids over millions of years.
They were rare, elusive, and worth a king's ransom.
Vance's Auxiliary System was a hungry god. While the [Scan] function only cost him physical stamina, the more advanced modules—the evolution engines, the combat overlays—required raw, high-density energy.
In his past life, when he had finally obtained his legendary warship, he had been humiliated. He had the most powerful weapon in the sector, but he couldn't even power its primary shields because he had no crystals. He had been a king with a dry well.
Not this time, Vance thought, his eyes glowing with the azure light of the system as he scanned the core of a massive, spinning obsidian rock.
This time, when the legend begins in ten days, the engines will already be screaming for blood.
"Scan initiated," Vance whispered.
[System: Scanning... High-density energy signature detected.]
[Location: 1,400 feet inside the asteroid core.]
Vance's smirk widened. The hunt had truly begun.