The world was red and white and pain.

Akiko knelt in the airlock, eyes half-lidded, vision burned to a blur. Her breath came in dry, rasping gasps. Each one jagged, as if the air were made of knives. Her skin stung with frostbite, her veins slow to remember how to carry warmth. Blood trickled from her nose and ears. Her lungs were still recovering from vacuum.

But she was alive. Somehow.

The neural link rested in her hands like a fragile relic. Its surface was slick with frost and blood, the exposed end scorched where she'd torn it free. Her fingers curled tighter around it, like a child clutching a totem in the dark.

Akiko. Wake.

The words lingered in her skull, clear as breathless whisper. But Takuto was silent. No pulse at the back of her mind. No sense of presence. No connection.

Her lips trembled. "That… wasn't you."

There was no reply.

She tried to move. Her body disagreed.

The memory of it came in flickers. The fight. The dragonling's howl warping space. The link in her hands, and then darkness. Cold. Nothing.

And yet here she was. Air restored. The lock cycled. Her hand clenched around the neural link.

Who brought me back?

The question pulsed like a bruise inside her skull. It should've been impossible. It was impossible. Takuto wasn't connected. The Driftknight hadn't dispatched rescue. Kara would've never risked it.

Except...

A breath caught in her throat.

The memory wasn't a memory. A flicker. A touch. Her face, not her own, hovering in the dark.

Your purpose isn't to fall. You were meant to rise

The entity's voice, cold silk, brushing the inside of her thoughts.

A hand against her cheek. Tender. Terrible.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no—"

The airlock door opened. Light spilled in from the corridor beyond, and with it, a silhouette, arms cradling a medkit, hair drifting in the zero-g like a halo. Raya. Pale and wide-eyed, breath shallow with fear.

She drifted to Akiko like a prayer unspoken.

"Oh stars," she breathed, "Akiko—"

Akiko tried to speak, but only a dry wheeze escaped her lips. She didn't even flinch when Raya's gloved hand touched her face, just winced as her eyes tried to blink and couldn't.

"Your suit…" Raya fumbled for the medkit, her voice rising with panic. "No oxygen field.... your face is... gods—"

"Neural link…" Akiko croaked. "Still out."

Raya's gaze darted to the device in Akiko's hand. She understood.

"No contact yet," Akiko murmured. "Didn't... want to risk... while healing."

Raya froze.

Akiko couldn't see her expression clearly, just a flicker of movement, the hesitation in her breath.

She was shaking. The kind of trembling that came before a leap you couldn't take back.

Akiko knew what was holding Raya back. Her magic was new, untested since Ashara. And here, in this world of science, magic not understood was fear and faith and a list of bad outcomes a mile wide.

"Do it," Akiko whispered. Her voice cracked on the last syllable. "I trust you."

Raya didn't answer.

Akiko felt her fingers brush against her cheek. Gentle. Warm. And then, a pause, like the world itself inhaled.

The air around them shifted.

The frost on her lips began to melt. Her breath eased. The searing sting in her eyes dulled to an ache. Muscles cramped by vacuum began to uncurl.

Akiko's eyes fluttered closed.

"I knew you could," she murmured, not sure if she said it aloud.

And then, for the first time since the dragonling's gravity crushed the void around her, she let herself fall.

When Akiko came to, the Driftknight's medbay ceiling lingered above her in her vision. Angled plating and dim emergency lighting flickered.

For a moment Akiko flinched back from the memory of pain, but she was blessedly free of everything but the ghost of the frost's touch.

Alive.

That counted for something.

She shifted, groaning as her arms scraped against a blanket tucked around her shoulders. Movement to her right. A figure leaned forward into view.

Raya. Hair tousled, face pale, a faint smudge of dried blood across her jaw. Probably not hers.

"Don't move too much," she murmured. "You've been under for a few hours."

Akiko licked her lips. "How bad?"

"Two more dragonlings latched onto the hull. Kara's locked down the Driftknight, and the crew are holding them back in the breached sections. She's planning evac options."

"Of course she is." Akiko pushed herself upright with a hiss. The restraints kept her from floating away with the motion.

Raya didn't stop her.

The blanket slid off her shoulders. Her suit had been peeled halfway down to her waist. The skin along her arms and neck was red and raw, threaded with healing lines where blood vessels had ruptured. A small tray sat on the bench beside the bed. A clean towel. A discarded medgel packet. And, resting at its center...

The neural link. Cleaned. Sanitized.

Akiko reached for it. Her hand paused halfway.

"You cleaned it," she said.

Raya didn't look away. "Figured you'd want it ready."

Akiko nodded once. "Thank you."

She tilted her head forward and pressed the connector to the base of her neck. It clicked into place with a soft hiss. A breath later...

"Reestablishing sync."

Takuto's voice rippled through her thoughts, flat and clinical.

She exhaled. The world fell into sharper focus.

"Neural alignment: complete. Welcome back, Akiko."

She didn't answer right away.

"Check me," she said instead, voice quiet, tight. "Thoroughly."

Takuto paused. "Clarify?"

"After what just happened," Akiko said. "After what I saw out there, what it tried to do, I need to know if anything got in. A thought, a thread. Anything that doesn't belong."

There was a delay. The kind that meant Takuto wasn't rushing.

"During the period of neural disconnection, I lacked the interface necessary to detect external inputs or hostile incursions," Takuto replied. "However, the separation also prevented any remote influence from integrating with your mental architecture."

"Could something have slipped in earlier?" she asked. "Before we built the link? Back when it first touched me?"

"A residual echo is possible," he admitted. "But I find no anomalies when comparing your current neural map to your baseline scan from Haven's medical bay. No foreign threads. No corrupted flags."

Akiko released a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

"Even so," she said. "Build a safeguard. Something passive. A firewall around my core cognition. If something ever does try to rewrite me—"

"—I will isolate and alert you before it succeeds," Takuto finished. "Contingencies are in place. You will not be taken."

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Her lips twitched. Not quite a smile. But close.

"Good," she murmured. "Let's keep it that way."

Subskill Acquisition (Cognitive Systems Interface): Mental Firewall – 32.4% milestone achieved.

She straightened her spine. The medbay lights hummed.

"I need to speak to Kara," she said. "Now."

The Driftknight was under threat. There was no room for anything else.

Raya gave a tense nod and pushed herself to the side, making space.

Muscles trembled, protesting being moved, but Akiko pushed through and unclipped herself from the table and maneuvered herself out of the medbay with light touches.

The corridors of the ship pulsed with red emergency light.

Akiko pulled herself hand over hand along the guide-rails. Her body still ached in places she hadn't yet mapped. But the neural link was warm against her neck again.

Crew drifted past her without a word. Some offered nods. Others looked away. She didn't blame them. If she'd seen someone hauled in half-dead and then walking again an hour later, she wouldn't know what to say either.

She reached a junction where the hall split in three. For a moment she floated there, breath fogging in the airless chill. Then, a flicker.

"Neural integration complete," Takuto said, his voice a calm thread against the silence. "The specimen's cognitive strata have been isolated and sandboxed."

Akiko pushed off a bulkhead, shoulder brushing the cold frame of a maintenance panel.

She grunted softly. "What did we get?"

"The neural architecture is not static. It does not produce exportable knowledge in isolation. For your Skill Layer to process its combat instincts, the dragonling's cognition must be simulated in real-time."

She grimaced. "You mean… I have to run it?"

"Correct. A live simulation. Subsidiary consciousness, isolated. Non-authoritative, but with partial overlap. There will be bleed."

Her fingers flexed. Bleed. Of course there would be.

She passed a shattered viewport, glass webbed with impact lines, repair foam sprayed unevenly along the edges. Her reflection stared back in the haze. Pale. Faint bruising where the vacuum had kissed her too long. A flicker of darker gold behind her eyes.

Akiko floated in silence. She closed her eyes, exhaled through clenched teeth. Just like the entity. Another thing in her head. Another whisper in her skull that wasn't hers. At least this one wasn't wearing her face.

"I already have enough voices in my head," she muttered.

Takuto's response came soft. "It will not be a voice. More… an instinct. A reflex. Predatory logic, interfacing through your own."

Her hand drifted to the neural link cradle behind her neck, where the implant now pulsed with faint heat.

"Start it."

"Initializing."

Skill Layer Initialized.

Category: Gravitational Sensory Adaptation

Status: Novice (0% milestone achieved).

There was no jolt. No seizure. Just a shift, subtle, yet profound. Her sense of motion recalibrated. The tug of microforces against her limbs became readable, almost intimate. She could feel pressure gradients, predict drift, map the pull of the air currents from failing vents.

Subskill Acquisition (Gravitational Sensory Adaptation): Passive Sensory Input – 0.5% milestone achieved.

A low hum stirred behind her thoughts. No words, no thoughts. Instinct. The dragonling's hunger. Its reactive pulse, honed for vacuum and violence.

Akiko blinked. And then smiled faintly, though her face stayed sharp.

She launched herself down the left corridor. Her body aligned, her limbs guided by an awareness that wasn't hers but flowed like it belonged.

She wasn't faster. Not yet. But she was falling with style.

"You're not me," she murmured. "But you're mine now."

Pressure doors sealed behind her with heavy thunks. Akiko floated through each junction with controlled bursts, tapping rails, adjusting her momentum by feel.

The dragonling instincts whispered beneath the surface, charting a mental map of gradients and forces like breath on glass.

Kara was barking orders by the time Akiko reached the central operations bay. The captain's voice snapped across multiple channels, coordinating suit teams, locking down compartments, running evac permutations. Two monitors tracked life signs and breach integrity; a third showed hull telemetry with points marked in angry red.

Kara didn't look up at first. "If you're not here to patch a seal or kill something, get out of my ops room."

Akiko drifted to the deck, boots magnetizing with a thud. "Glad to see you missed me."

Kara's head snapped up.

Her eyes flared with a familiar anger, but it didn't last. Akiko's presence stopped her cold. The scorched edges of her suit, the blood crusted along her jaw, the pallor beneath her kitsune features, Kara registered it all in one breath.

"…You look like hell."

Akiko managed a faint smirk. "Better than dead."

Kara's stance shifted. Still taut, but the fight had left her voice. "You were gone too long. We nearly started the evac sequence."

"That would've been a shame," Akiko said. "Especially with me doing the heavy lifting."

Kara let the jab slide. "Two more dragonlings latched onto the hull. Joran's team's pinned near Cargo Two. Partial depressurization. They're holding, but barely. We're down to one sealed fallback zone if the others breach."

As if summoned, Joran's voice crackled over the comms. "One's moving toward the engine cluster. Can't get a shot through the bulkhead. Crew's in position, but if it cuts deeper, we're venting everything."

Kara responded crisply, "Hold them as long as you can. Reroute non-essential systems and prep fallback to Deck Five."

A beat passed. Then she turned back to Akiko, lower, sharper. "Do you have anything useful to offer? Or did we nearly lose you for nothing?"

Akiko's smile thinned, the flicker of something more feral behind her eyes. "I didn't come back empty-handed."

Kara didn't respond right away. Just looked at her, longer than usual. Measuring.

Akiko tilted her head. "Let me talk to Joran. I can handle this."

Kara hesitated. Then nodded once.

The descent to Cargo Two was chaos wrapped in steel.

Akiko moved through the emergency shafts in zero-g, bypassing sealed bulkheads where standard routes had been cut off. Takuto fed her real-time readings. Pressure gradients, movement vectors, flickers of mana resonance, and the dragonling instincts beneath her thoughts translated it all into a haunting awareness of motion.

Cargo Two had been partially vented, one wall open to the void and patched by emergency shutters. Magnetic clamps sealed crates to the floor, but debris drifted at the edges. Shards of plating, spent cartridges, flecks of frost that had once been air and blood.

Joran's squad had clustered behind repurposed loader frames and hardened cargo pallets, rifles trained on the far end of the hold. A soft thrum vibrated in the metal, more felt than heard.

Then, an impact. The far wall buckled inward with a groan. Something massive slammed it again from the other side.

"Eyes up!" Joran barked over comms. "They're still testing for weak points. Get ready!"

Akiko drifted into view just as the bulkhead gave way.

The dragonling burst through in a twist of motion, graceful and horrifying. Its scales shimmered with refracted light, but its snout locked not on the crew, but on the deck beneath it. It clawed downward, but it didn't seem to be driven by rage. Instead, it moved with purpose.

Another shape moved in the breach behind it. A second dragonling, smaller but just as focused, curled its body toward the same spot.

"They're not attacking us," one of the crew muttered, barely audible on open channel.

Joran scowled. "They're hunting something."

Akiko's breath caught. That pulse, the low rhythmic echo through the plating, through her bones, wasn't structural stress.

It was mana.

Her eyes snapped to the sealed conduits along the far deck. She knew that pulse. She'd built that pulse.

"…The drive core," she whispered.

Joran turned toward her, tense. "You're saying they're not here for us?"

"They're drawn to it," Akiko said. "The mana circuitry that Tanya and I hardwired into the core during the burn to Ashara."

As if hearing her thoughts, the nearer dragonling lifted its snout, and froze. Its head tilted, nostrils flaring. Akiko felt it like a pressure spike, a ping in her skull, its gravitational senses brushing across her, evaluating her mana signature like a sonar echo.

The second followed. Both dragonlings pivoted as one. The air grew heavy.

"Contact," Akiko muttered, eyes narrowing. "They've found something better than the core."

Joran's rifle lifted beside her. "What do you want to do?"

Akiko's hand drifted to the curve of her neck, fingers brushing the neural link.

She smiled. "We pull them away."

The instant she stepped forward, magboots clicking against the deck, the pressure changed.

A wave of crushing force slammed down across the cargo hold, metal groaning, bodies collapsing. Joran and the others were crushed to the deck like puppets with their strings cut, rifles skittering from numbed fingers.

Akiko staggered, knees bent, tail bristling, breath caught in her throat.

Subskill Acquisition(Gravitational Sensory Adaptation): Passive Pressure Manipulation – 3% milestone reached.

Note: Area Dampening Active within personal aura. Gravitic suppression reduced by 22%.

She gritted her teeth, forcing one leg to shift beneath her. She could feel the dragonlings shaping gravity through instinct, not spellform like she did. Like a limb they were born to flex.

But she remained standing. The dragonlings weren't used to that.

They hissed in unison, eyes locking onto her. Their snouts dipped. Another pulse fired through the chamber, and she braced, aura flaring with flickers of foxfire through the hold.

The pressure washed over her again, but it broke at the edges of her presence now, fragmented by the subskill's dampening. Not entirely gone, but weakened.

One of the dragonlings lunged.

Akiko moved. She couldn't fly here, not with their unnatural pressure holding her down, but her footwork held. Her claws lit in a blur of sapphire arcs, foxfire like light trails through the air. The first strike skittered off scales, the second found softer membrane along the wing joint.

The beast shrieked.

The second came from the side. She twisted low, slashing upward in a spiral that lit the dark with a bloom of heat. The confined space limited her. She couldn't channel her larger spellforms, not with the cargo around her or the crew prone at her feet.

So she didn't. She fought. Each strike, each breath was honed from old drills, muscle memory carried across worlds. She wasn't just a duelist. She was a survivor. Her claws were forged in countless scraps. Less than elegant, they were brutal. Arcing across muzzles. Driving toward the eyes. Tearing at the joints.

Foxfire swept out in wide slashes. Broad enough to threaten, narrow enough to avoid igniting the hold.

The dragonlings circled, confused now. Their manipulation of gravity gave them every advantage, but she wasn't moving right. Her balance was off by design, flowing with the pressure instead of resisting it. Letting it curve her steps. Letting the predator's mind behind her thoughts map their responses.

Their snarls sharpened. One dove again.

And Akiko met it mid-lunge, claws out, teeth bared.

The tide turned before she realized it had.

One dragonling crashed against a wall of crates, foxfire seared across its jaw. The other limped, wing half-shorn, arcs of pale blood scattering in zero-g before dissipating into vapor. Akiko pressed forward, step by step, claws held low, breath sharp and rhythmic.

And then, she felt them. Not just the two before her. Beyond the hull. Beyond the void.

A flicker at first. Then a pressure. Then a presence. Dozens, hundreds. Shapes in the dark, minds wrapped around singular purpose. Instincts threaded together like a net of awareness. They were coming.

Because the two dragonlings, wounded and cornered, called to them.

The pulse wasn't audible, but she felt it. A raw broadcast, a deep-frequency mana burst. Primal and resonant, like the memory of a howl in the marrow.

Her heart stuttered. Her mana pulsed in answer.

Subskill Acquisition(Gravitational Sensory Adaptation): Reflexive Aura Synchronization – 5% milestone reached.

Caution: Cognitive bleed detected. Auxiliary thought pattern stabilizing…

Akiko staggered.

The dragonlings' retreating forms no longer looked like enemies. They looked like kin. Their fear echoed in her bones, their cry tangled with her breath.

Her body shifted to follow. No command. Just motion. Like her muscles wanted to chase them. To flee into the black. To fly. To join.

Her hand twitched forward. Fingers curled, claws retracted.

"Akiko."

Takuto's voice. Direct. Flat.

Instinctive Link Severed.

Foreign subroutine isolated. Neural barrier reinstated.

Akiko jolted. Like surfacing from cold water.

Subskill Progress (Cognitive Systems Interface): Subsidiary Isolation Framework – 51.7% milestone achieved.

The dragonlings vanished into the breach.

Only the silence remained. Crew groaning on the deck, Driftknight's hull sealing itself section by section. Akiko stood still in the center of it all, her claws dim, her breath uneven.

The gravitational presence receded.

But a whisper of it lingered at the edges of her thoughts.

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