Akiko didn't waste time waiting for the weight in her chest to settle. There was too much to do, and she'd long since learned how to shove fear and worry aside in favor of motion.

Alannah barely paused, already shifting into the next crisis. "Take her to the geothermal plant. Let Foreman Sten know she's coming."

The aide, a soot-streaked young man, his uniform stitched and re-stitched at the seams, gave a sharp nod. "This way."

Akiko moved to follow, but a gentle tug on her sleeve stopped her short. Raya's gloved hand lingered, thumb brushing over the edge of Akiko's suit.

"I'll stay here," Raya said, her voice low, steady despite the faint tremor in her aura that only Akiko could feel. "Alannah needs help managing triage. If more wounded come in, I want to be with them."

Akiko hesitated. "You sure?"

Raya gave her a small, tired smile. "I've got this. You've got heat to wrangle."

That earned the faintest huff of breath from Akiko. Too dry to be a laugh, but close enough.

"Be careful," she murmured.

"You too."

Then they parted.

The walk through the Hold's lower levels was quiet. The aide led her through maintenance corridors and access shafts threaded between layers of old infrastructure.

This far down, the walls were bare steel reinforced with concrete ribs, humming faintly with the residual pressure of redirected power. Most of the shops and secondary foundries along the way were dark, likely shuttered during the worst of the collapse to conserve energy.

"Normally this route's busy with carts and haulers," the aide said over his shoulder. "Today it's just ghosts and engineers. We kept the plant staffed. Bare minimum to keep the core from going unstable. Foreman's holding things together, but it's tight."

Akiko nodded, her ears twitching slightly as they passed a hot conduit venting steam.

The silence gave her too much space to think. She focused on the rhythm of her boots instead, on the low pulse of her suit systems, on Takuto's ever-present awareness curled somewhere behind her thoughts.

Down one final flight of stairs, and the corridor opened into a reinforced access chamber. Beyond it, she could hear the rumble of turbines. Voices. The sharp clang of metal tools against failing machines.

Akiko stepped inside, and stopped.

The place was a mess. Half-lit, heat-warped, alive with panic. Sparks flashed across a blown junction. Cables hung like veins. The whole system felt one surge away from tearing itself apart.

In the middle of it all, a wiry man in a scorched engineering suit barked orders like he expected the whole room to catch fire if he blinked.

"No, no, NO! That's the bypass relay! You route pressure through the secondary manifold! Not choke it off!"

A technician froze mid-move. The man snarled, shoved him aside, and dove headfirst into the piping like the metal might listen to him if no one else would.

Akiko hesitated. Glanced at the technician, who looked relieved and humiliated all at once.

In another world, she thought, he could've been a Dwarven forge-mage. Barking at apprentices, elbow-deep in runes and slag. The kind of craftsman whose gruffness was just a second skin over a burning need to keep things working.

No dwarves here. No runes. Just scorched steel and desperation.

She cleared her throat. "Hello?"

The man emerged just enough to glare. His face was sharp, jaw lined with old burn scars. His eyes flicked over her armor. Paused at the tail.

"Great," he muttered, ducking back into the mess. "Some fancy-suited brat here who thinks she can wave a magic wand and fix everything. Just what I needed."

Akiko's tail snapped behind her.

"I'm here to help," she said, forcing her voice to stay level.

"Sure. Let me guess, you skimmed a manual and now you think you're an expert."

She bit back a sharper reply. It wasn't exactly wrong, was it? If you counted Takuto as a manual, then yes, she was the kind of person who skimmed and improvised the rest. That was how she survived. That was how she always survived.

Takuto whispered calmly in her ear. Temperature spikes, pressure deltas, thermal coupling status.

She inhaled slowly, swallowing her frustration. She was tired of pretending, tired of proving herself over and over again to people who saw only ears and tail and assumed incompetence or privilege.

"Your regulator manifold's not the issue," she said. "It's upstream. Thermal coupling's decayed. The pressure buildup's a symptom."

The man froze. Head tilted. "What?"

Akiko crouched, then paused. A thought, sharp and focused, disengaged the mining laser. She slid her arm free from the socket with a soft hiss as the pressure equalized. She set it aside carefully, giving a pointed glance to the nearby technicians that it wasn't to be touched.

Now free, she braced both hands on the deck and leaned closer, pointing with one claw.

"Looks like you've patched it half a dozen times. But it's gone again. You need to reroute through the auxiliary bypass and shut down the primary feed for a clean rework. That buys time."

The moment stretched like a line under tension.

Then: "Fine," he grumbled. "Show me."

They worked. The facility groaned with every adjustment. Pipes rattled. Valves fought back. Steam burst from cracked seals like the whole system wanted to tear itself apart rather than be saved.

Hours into the effort, Akiko crouched beside a leaking pipe junction and opened the kit. The tools were old, worn to the bone, but familiar. More familiar than she wanted to admit. Her armor hissed softly as she adjusted her knee, the support weave compensating just enough for her balance to hold.

Her fingers brushed the metal, and her hand trembled. Strength mismatched again. Her Essence Layer had made her thirty percent stronger, which sounded great in theory, except she hadn't had a real workout in weeks outside of life-and-death struggles, not with gravity.

Behind her, someone whispered, "Think she even knows what a torque wrench is?"

"She's just here to look pretty and break something," came another.

Sten didn't answer. Just glowered and continued with his work.

Akiko exhaled slowly. Let the commentary drift past. Let them think she was soft. Let them assume her tail meant privilege. The truth wasn't so generous. She'd slept in gutters before she'd ever seen a starship. Spent nights weaving rope out of vine just to barter for food. In her old world, you either learned how to live on the streets, or you died cold and alone.

She reached into the toolkit. Selected a six-gauge compression wrench, because the pipe had the scars of previous mishandling, not because it looked fancy. The wrong torque would shear the mount.

"Left-hand threads," she murmured. "So reverse it."

The valve hissed as it gave. A steady stream of hot air blasted into her face, but the pressure normalized. A nearby warning light faded from orange to green.

Sten glanced over. Grunted. "Well, you didn't strip it."

A pause. Just long enough to register something between surprise and approval. Then he turned back to the junction.

A few minutes passed like that. Just heat, metal, tension. Then another panel hissed as a feed line cracked under the strain. Akiko reached to brace the mount. Too fast. Her grip overcompensated. The bracket bent.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

She flinched.

"Strength variance exceeds current calibration. Recommend pulse discharge through suit lattice."

"Not now," she hissed.

Sten turned. Saw the warped bracket. Snorted.

"If you're gonna throw your whole damn weight into it, at least warn me next time."

Akiko gritted her teeth. "Sorry."

But he didn't follow it up with a rebuke. Just tossed her a new mount. "Try again. And don't screw this one up."

She caught it one-handed. Adjusted her posture.

Tailored suit. Mythic magic. System integration. And still, all they see is someone they think has never held a wrench.

Her jaw set.

Fine. Let them think that. I'll earn it. One bolt at a time.

By the end of the day, the last of the alarms had faded to a quiet, simmering hum.

Akiko leaned against the wall beside the junction node, half-slumped, the edge of her gauntlet smudged with dried coolant and fine ash. Her back ached in ways that made her question her entire spinal column, and her tail was dragging like a limp banner behind her.

She'd expected her Skill Layer to chime in by now. Some flicker of a prompt, a neural overlay, anything to ease the endless hours of thermal tuning and emergency patchwork. Instead… nothing.

She sent a pointed thought down the link into her System. A nudge.

What she got back felt like a shrug. There was no error notification, no functional refusal, just a vague… indifference.

Which was weird. Her System didn't shrug. It categorized, calculated, responded with mechanical certainty.

But that was a problem for another day. Right now, she was too damn tired to untangle mysteries she couldn't fix with a wrench.

Her thoughts snapped back to the moment when Takuto's voice buzzed quietly in her ear.

"Core temperature elevated. Hydration recommended."

"No kidding."

Footsteps echoed down the service corridor, brisk but familiar.

Raya turned the corner, helmet tucked under one arm, a beat-up canteen in the other. Her cheeks were flushed, hair still mussed from the seal line of her pressure suit. She smiled when she saw Akiko.

"Figured you'd still be buried in the pipes."

Akiko blinked at her, then accepted the canteen like it was sacred.

Of course it was Raya.

Even with all the chaos, the smoke, the alarms, she still managed to look like salvation.

And gods, Akiko loved her for that.

She lifted the canteen and drank. The first sip was cold and metallic, but it was perfect.

"Anything still on fire?" Raya asked.

"Not anymore. We got the main exchanger back under threshold. Stabilized output to the western lines. Might even hold through the night."

"Sten seemed impressed," Raya said, nudging her with an elbow.

"He said, 'You didn't strip it,'" Akiko replied flatly. "Which is practically affection."

Raya laughed, then tilted her head. "Come on. I've got news."

Akiko stooped to pick up the mining laser where she'd set it aside. It settled awkwardly in her arms, heavy and still faintly warm. Her eyes flicked around the room one last time. None of the techs dared so much as glance at it now. Satisfied, she fell in step beside Raya.

Her legs protested every step.

"We've got a place," Raya said. "An actual room. Kind of. The housing coordinator owed Alannah a favor, and I traded a couple hours helping with triage to get us a slot."

Akiko raised a brow. "How bad?"

"It's tiny. Like… sleep-on-top-of-each-other tiny."

She hesitated, just long enough for the implication to settle. Akiko's ears twitched.

Raya smirked. "But it's warm. And it has a shower."

Akiko made a soft, reverent noise.

"I mean, I could use one too," Raya added. "But you… you've been sealed in that suit for a week. And now today…"

She trailed off. Gaze softening.

Akiko didn't argue. She could feel the sweat trapped under her weave. The grime that clung to her tail, her neck, the backs of her knees. The subtle throb behind her eyes. It was the sort of exhaustion that settled in the bones, not from one day, but from too many strung together with no breath in between.

"Lead the way," she said quietly.

They turned down the corridor together, shoulder to shoulder, Akiko's ears twitching at every groan of metal or distant hiss of steam.

The industrial veins of Isvann wrapped around them as they walked. Pipes lined the walls in tangled knots, rattling with the slow pulse of circulating coolant. Overhead conduits dripped condensation in irregular patterns, splattering against the scarred metal flooring.

They passed clusters of weary workers, hushed voices and wary eyes following them. Every so often, a faint tremor rolled through the corridor. Akiko caught herself scanning the walls for hairline fractures out of habit.

Finally, Raya led them through a narrower side passage, the walls closer here, the lighting harsher. A cluster of doors waited at the end, old Haven surplus by the look of them, more functional than welcoming.

Raya keyed in a short sequence on a panel.

"This is us," she said, voice low.

The door hissed open, just slightly off-seal. A flicker of green along the panel confirmed atmosphere stability, but the place itself didn't inspire confidence.

Akiko stepped inside. One glance was enough.

It wasn't much, just four walls of corrugated composite, a single bed squeezed beside a low utility bench, and a crate doubling as a table in the corner. Two folding chairs leaned haphazardly against the wall. One bulkhead-mounted heater ticked quietly, valiantly holding the room above freezing.

It was cramped, spartan, and smelled faintly of recycled filters and coolant dust.

She loved it.

No wind. No frost biting at her seams. No alarms. Just quiet.

Raya slipped in behind her, ducking low as she brushed past the doorframe. "Told you it wasn't much."

Akiko turned, the faintest of smiles pulling at her lips. "It's perfect."

She set the mining laser carefully against the nearest wall, propped where she could keep it in sight. It hummed low, regulators still cycling in quiet intervals. Then she reached up to the base of her neck. A brief twitch of thought, and the suit responded.

The weave shimmered, lines of energy rippling outward from the neural interface as the armor folded back on itself. Seamless plates retracted into their anchor nodes, shoulders, spine, hips, dissolving into coiled arcs of light before vanishing entirely into the device at her nape.

Left in only a thin undershirt and shorts, Akiko exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours.

Akiko's nose wrinkled. Gods, she could smell herself now, stripped down past the suit's filters. It was sharp, sour, days of stress ground into her skin. She tried not to breathe too deep, tail flicking low with strain.

Raya watched her with quiet reverence. Then, quietly, "You look like you've been through hell."

Akiko met her eyes. "I feel like I dragged it with me."

Raya stepped forward, brushing a loose strand of hair from Akiko's cheek. "Shower's yours first," she said, voice light. Too light, like she knew something Akiko didn't.

Akiko grimaced, fighting the urge to hide her face, then nodded and peeled away the last layers. The fabric clung, damp with sweat and time, but she didn't hesitate. Not anymore.

She stepped toward the far corner, where a narrow sliding door marked the washroom.

She closed the door behind her with a soft click, shoulders finally sagging.

Alone. At last.

Steam began to gather around her ankles. The water hissed as it warmed. She reached out, twisting the valve.

The small shower stall loomed ahead, metal walls faintly cool under her fingertips. She reached out and twisted the valve. It stuttered, rattling in the pipes, then hot water burst forth in a sharp rush.

Steam gathered around her ankles, curling up in slow, lazy tendrils. The first drops struck her skin too hot, biting at raw nerves, then settled into a heavy warmth that nearly stole her breath.

Akiko stepped forward, palms braced against the slick wall, head bowed under the torrent.

Water poured over her, dragging sweat, grime, fear, all of it swirling away.

She let out a low, shuddering breath. The heat sank in, deeper and deeper, until it felt like it reached her bones.

She let her eyes fall shut. Didn't hear the door slide open. Didn't hear the second set of footsteps, quiet on the misted floor.

Only felt a familiar hand snake around her waist, and a quiet whisper at her ear.

"You didn't really think I was going to let you have this all to yourself… did you?"

Warm skin pressed to her back. A familiar heartbeat against her shoulder blade. Fingers splayed low over her stomach, steady and certain. Akiko exhaled, a tremble catching in her chest.

"I should've locked the door," she murmured, not lifting her head.

"You didn't want to," Raya whispered.

Silence settled between them. Thick, dense, but soft-edged.

Then a kiss at the base of Akiko's neck. Another along the ridge of her shoulder.

The next breath Akiko took felt deeper. Steadier.

"You don't have to…" she began, but the protest melted before it could take shape.

Raya was already moving, hands skimming up her sides with reverence, finding the bottle nestled into the corner shelf. She poured slowly, warmed the soap between her palms, then ran them down Akiko's back with a gentleness that threatened to undo her completely.

"You've been carrying too much," Raya said, her voice pitched low.

Akiko closed her eyes.

The lather worked into her muscles, easing tension where guilt had taken root. And when Raya reached her hips and slowed, Akiko didn't flinch. She didn't pull away when Raya's hands dipped lower, only leaned back into her touch, letting the steam cloak her shame, her exhaustion, her pride.

Then fingers grazed the base of her tail.

Akiko stilled. For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then Raya knelt. Her hands slid down the length of the tail, patient and unhurried, working in soft circles as she massaged the suds through. She took care not to tug, not to pull, just coaxed out the knots and grit with a touch so intimate it left Akiko's knees weak.

"You don't have to do that," Akiko whispered again, breath trembling.

"I want to," Raya answered, still focused, still quiet. "This is part of you. And I love all of you."

The words weren't new. But something in the way she said them, like a promise, not a reassurance, cut through Akiko's last defenses.

A soft, shuddering breath left her lips. Her head tipped back. And when Raya rose again, hands sliding around her waist, Akiko turned and pressed herself into her arms, water streaming between them.

Raya kissed her temple.

The water slowed, then stopped with a soft hiss.

Akiko let out a long breath, arms still wrapped around Raya as the last of the steam curled toward the vent.

Neither of them moved right away. When they finally stepped apart, it was with quiet touches, fingers trailing down arms, palms lingering on skin.

Raya reached for a towel, draped it gently over Akiko's shoulders before grabbing one for herself. The air was cooler now, but not cold. Not with the warmth still lingering between them.

Akiko ran the cloth down her arms, then paused as Raya stepped in close and wordlessly took the towel from her hands.

This time, Akiko didn't protest.

She stood still as Raya dried her, soft and unhurried, as if she wanted to memorize every line of her. The tension in her shoulders unraveled one knot at a time.

They dressed in silence. Loose clothes. Clean skin. Damp hair.

Akiko's cheeks were flushed for reasons only partially related to the heat.

Raya slipped into the bed first, tugging the blanket aside with a lazy smile that flickered like foxfire in the dark. "Bed's a little small," she murmured. "Hope you don't mind sharing."

Akiko didn't answer. She just crossed the room and slid in beside her, tail curling instinctively to one side.

Raya's arms found her in the dark.

The last thought Akiko had before the lights dimmed wasn't about mana flow or geothermal pressure or looming crises.

For the first time in weeks, she felt warm. Safe. Wanted.

Sleep took her before guilt could follow.

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