The cargo bay was quiet now, save for the hiss of venting steam and the low whine of cooling systems. Scorched claw-marks marred the walls, and the floor still crackled with dying sparks.

Akiko stood motionless in the silence they left behind, foxfire claws flickering at her sides, breath shallow.

Joran groaned from where he was pinned under a crushed container, but she didn't move to help yet.

A crackle came over the Driftknight's comms. Kara's voice, terse. "We've got movement in the belt. A lot of it. Visual confirms: more dragonlings. Swarm-size. They're inbound to the Driftknight."

Akiko's heart froze for a moment. She turned slowly, watching the crew struggle to recover, the gravity manipulation finally ebbing as the dragonlings' influence faded.

"Time to break cover," Kara continued. "Railguns spinning up. Defense pattern Theta-Six. We hold here or we don't hold at all."

Akiko nodded to no one, already moving toward the hatch. "Copy. I'll intercept whatever breaks through."

"You're our last line. Make it count."

The comms cut. Silence rushed in, too loud.

Akiko reached for the lingering thread of sensation in her mind, the awareness that had gained from the analysis of the dragonling's essence. It was still there. Her Skill Layer hadn't collapsed.

She could feel the gravitational pulses of the distant swarm like pressure tides through a cracked hull.

But without the instincts to frame it, without the predatory logic guiding her reflexes, it twisted. Her vision throbbed. Her stomach flipped. And behind her eyes bloomed a spike of pain, pressure and static, coiling into a migraine that nearly dropped her to her knees.

It was like hearing a language she'd once spoken in a dream. Recognizable, but wrong. Fractured.

She braced a hand on the bulkhead, eyes squeezed shut. "Takuto," she hissed through clenched teeth.

"I am here," he said softly. "The subroutine was isolated for your safety. But the interface persists."

"I noticed."

"Would you like me to disable the Skill Layer?"

She grit her teeth, riding the wave of nausea until it passed. "No. I need it."

"Then I suggest adaptation. Fast."

She exhaled, steadied herself, and began to walk. The pain didn't vanish, but she could move.

The swarm was coming.

The corridor to the airlock was lit by warning strips and amber pulses, casting jagged shadows along the bulkheads. Akiko's breath was steady, her steps light despite the pressure building behind her eyes.

She turned the final corner.

Raya was waiting for her. Arms crossed. Shoulders squared. Anger simmering just beneath the surface.

Akiko slowed, startled for a heartbeat, and then set her expression back into something unreadable. "You shouldn't be here."

"No," Raya said flatly. "I should. Because you're about to do something suicidal. Again."

Akiko kept walking. "This is different."

"Is it?" Raya stepped into her path. "Because the last time you said that, I had to scrub your blood off that neural link."

Akiko flinched. Just slightly. But enough.

"This is my role," she said quietly. "You know that."

"And what is mine?" Raya's voice trembled, anger or something beneath it. "To watch you throw yourself away and call it duty? You nearly died out there. You think any of us are okay with that?"

Akiko's gaze didn't meet hers. "You're a part of this crew. So am I. Everyone has a role. This is mine. I fight the things no one else can."

"And who fights for you?"

That stopped her. Not physically, she kept moving, but something behind her eyes faltered.

"You're part of this family too, Akiko," Raya said, stepping after her. "And family doesn't fight alone."

Muffled thuds vibrated through the hull in a steady cadence as the Driftknight's railguns began to fire.

The airlock door hissed. Outside, through the pressure-glass, the void pulsed with distant flashes.

Akiko looked back once, eyes shadowed. "Not this time," she said.

Then she stepped into the airlock.

The airlock cycled behind her with a hiss and a click, sealing away the last pocket of warmth. Akiko stepped into the void.

The Driftknight loomed behind her, its armored hull glinting in the strobes of railgun fire. Each shot roared like muted thunder through her boots, bright lances of kinetic energy tearing into the starfield beyond. Her HUD filtered the flare, but she still blinked against it.

Beyond, the asteroid belt seethed.

Dragonlings spiraled through fractured stone and black shadow, bodies slick and serpentine, riding gravitational flows invisible to the eye. They danced between the slugs the Driftknight hurled, slipping sideways in space without any visible propulsion. Even from this distance, she could feel their presence, pressure rippling at the edge of her awareness.

Takuto's voice ghosted across the neural line, cool and clinical.

"Railgun effectiveness: compromised. Gravitational lensing scattering impact trajectories. Current kill ratio per volley: 43%. Driftknight targeting algorithms adapting. Pattern convergence in effect."

"Not enough," Akiko murmured. She anchored herself with her suit's magboots and crouched low, eyes sweeping the void.

"Correct."

Kara's voice snapped in next, harsh on the comms.

"Akiko. Don't stray. I need you tight to the hull, forward port quadrant. If one of them gets past, you intercept. No solo charges. You are not expendable."

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Akiko said nothing. Her breath fogged faintly inside her suit's filtration veil, dispersing before it could touch the ambient vacuum.

She didn't need to stray far. She could already feel them coming.

The first wave breached the firing screen. Three dragonlings, sleek and small, darting under the arcs of converging slugs. One took a round to the hindquarters and spun, trailing frozen ichor. The others slipped through clean.

Their gravity fields pulsed hard and erratic. She felt it before she saw them, her Gravitational Sensory Adaptation triggering a cascade of warnings in her HUD:

Subskill Acquisition: Gravitational Sensory Adaptation – 8% Milestone Achieved

Ability Unlocked: Proximal Predictive Arc Mapping (Passive)

The world slowed.

She could see it: subtle tension in the void, the pressure wake of a dragonling's mass displacing invisible paths. She shifted a fraction, and the dragonling overshot her by a meter.

Akiko moved like lightning.

Foxfire flared along her gloves. She twisted in zero-g, anchored only by instinct and foxfire micropulses, and raked her claws across the dragonling's belly as it twisted back toward the hull.

Ichor bloomed into space.

The second dragonling barreled toward her, but her stance was set, the Driftknight's hull behind her, her claws outstretched. It opened its maw, gravity warping around its jaws like a miniature singularity.

Akiko ducked under the cone of distortion, pivoted inside the dragonling's arc, and buried her claws into the soft tissue at the base of its neck.

The corpse twitched once. Then floated, inert.

Kara's voice crackled again, terser this time.

"Railgun batteries recalibrating. Akiko—status?"

"Standing," Akiko said, flexing her fingers. "Still not faster than them. But I can see what they're doing now."

The third dragonling hesitated. It hovered in the debris field, its tail flicking, testing.

Akiko smiled. "Come on, then."

A distant tremor ran through the hull beneath her boots.

Akiko pivoted, catching the glint of something wrong in the curve of the Driftknight's silhouette.

The drive cone.

Takuto's voice confirmed it a heartbeat later.

"Multiple gravitational signatures converging on aft section. Mana distortion detected near the primary core. Pattern consistent with resonance attraction. Estimated vector: drive augmentations."

The one remaining dragonling before her flinched. She carved through its wing joint with a flick of her claws, sending it tumbling into the dark. No time to finish it. She was already moving. Twisting, orienting with a pulse of microjets, launching herself back along the hull.

The Driftknight's rails thundered again, but the tone had changed. Fire no longer measured, but desperate. The void bloomed with shrapnel and vapor trails.

Then Kara's voice tore through the comms, sharp and immediate:

"Flash burn! Flash burn! All exterior crew brace!"

Akiko caught the warning a second before her HUD flared red.

The Driftknight's engines ignited in a blinding pulse.

The sudden bloom of light behind her cast jagged shadows along the hull, and even with her filters dimmed, Akiko had to squint. Heat surged outward. Not lethal at this range, but enough to sizzle the exposed limbs of the dragonlings swarming the cone. She caught sight of three, maybe four, boiling off into ash as the flare caught them mid-turn.

But more were coming.

She slammed a hand against the hull, letting the suit's magnetics engage, anchoring herself as the shockwave passed.

Kara was still on comms, rapid and fierce:

"We bought seconds, maybe. You've got a window. Keep them off the core,."

"Understood." Akiko launched herself again.

As she neared the aft flank, dragonlings resolved from the shadow. Five, maybe more, clustering in the drive cone's exposed girders, tendrils of gravity warping the glow of the core like oil on water.

Akiko bared her claws.

"Back off!"

And hurled herself into the storm.

The dragonlings broke formation like a hunting pack, fanning through the belt's jagged corridors. Each one bent the space around it, their gravity wells tugging and slamming in sync, overlapping into impossible waveforms that sent Akiko lurching with every shift.

Takuto's voice was calm but clipped. "Warning: compound gravitational distortion is exceeding baseline compensation. Suggest disengagement."

She ignored him.

The Driftknight's silhouette loomed behind her. Too far to fall back, too close to risk stray fire. Already, its railguns had fallen quiet in this quadrant, unwilling to risk a friendly strike while she was embedded with the swarm.

Another tug. Sharp this time, vertical. She twisted, foxfire bursting from her palms and heels to kill her spin before it could fully unwind her. She shot sideways, riding the vented burn toward an outcropping asteroid, using the rock as cover for a split-second reset.

The dragonlings didn't hesitate. They curved toward her with predatory elegance, spiral patterns tightening in from different vectors.

Akiko ducked left, then cut hard right with a pulse of foxfire from her shoulder. Her claws carved twin arcs through the void, sweeping out to catch the flank of one dragonling as it tried to box her in.

Her blow landed, but shallow. The scale resisted, just enough to glance her strike off. The creature recoiled, but didn't fall.

"They're learning," she muttered, teeth clenched. "They're tracking my rhythms."

Takuto confirmed. "Observed micro-adjustments in their interception vectors. They are not predicting, merely adapting."

Great. That meant she couldn't rely on reflexes alone. She needed unpredictability.

So she gave them chaos. She pushed herself into a dive, weaving through an asteroid cluster with short, staccato bursts of foxfire. Her silhouette blurred, trails of fading blue fire corkscrewing behind her as she flipped momentum and angle faster.

One of them broke off its spiral, diving low.

She caught it too late.

Its ripple slammed her with a focused gravitational shear, throwing her against a tumbling rock. Her shoulder cracked into the surface, hard enough that her foxfire flare sputtered for half a breath.

And that's all it took.

Another dragonling surged in, jaws yawning open. For a blink, its gravity latched onto her, enveloping her. But it didn't feel like a weapon. It felt like a handshake.

Something passed between them. Heat. Memory. Hunger not her own. A sense of direction. A call.

Akiko's vision blanked white. A shape loomed. A dragon, scaled in continent-sized plates, wings folded across the silence of the outer dark.

The Alpha.

"DISCONNECTING," Takuto barked.

The neural link surged with fire.

The contact severed.

Subskill Acquisition (Cognitive Systems Interface): Autonomous Emergency Disconnect – 65.7% milestone achieved.

Akiko gasped, curling into herself as her thoughts reassembled around her identity. Her breath ragged. Her grip trembling.

"You are not them," Takuto whispered in the static. "You are not theirs."

Akiko opened her eyes, the afterimage of that monstrous presence still stamped into her skull.

And above her, the remaining dragonlings regrouped. Circling slower now, more wary.

They knew. So did she. This wasn't over. Not even close.

The Driftknight's guns were still thundering behind her, but Akiko could hear the change. Fewer shots, longer pauses between bursts. A pause in rhythm that made her gut tighten.

"Kara?" she called out over comms, breath ragged. "Status?"

Before the answer came, her eyes caught the shift in the stars.

Wait, not the stars. The asteroids. A dozen of them. Maybe more. Tumbling, twisting, no longer drifting lazily in the belt's orbit. They were accelerating. Curved arcs of unnatural motion, all aimed at the Driftknight.

"Kara—"

"We see them," Kara's voice came sharp. "They've begun lobbing the debris. Maneuvering now... hold on..."

The ship's engines flared. A hot, violent burn that seared the void. The Driftknight kicked to starboard, barely skimming past one of the larger chunks. Another slammed into a minor outcropping and detonated into a cloud of debris. The swarm was weaponizing the battlefield.

Akiko snarled, pushing herself into a spin to avoid a tail swipe from one of the five dragonlings still hounding her. She had tried cutting them down one by one. Tried predicting their movements, her speed, her foxfire. It wasn't enough.

Their gravitational pressure layered and countered her every move. When she launched toward one, another spiked a wave beneath her.

She needed a way to break their formation. She needed them closer.

A reckless plan clicked into place.

She let her body drift. Canceled her foxfire thrust entirely. Limbs slack, head lolled, a trail of half-cooled foxfire flaring gently from one open palm as she twisted, weightless, in the void. A mask of stillness. Bait.

The dragonlings circled. Warily at first, but then with growing interest. One drew closer, maw parted, another twitched its wings, approaching in a slow spiral.

She felt the gravity waves adjusting. Testing. Measuring her. Believing her broken.

Good.

Her fingers brushed the sapphire core of her necklace. A flicker of command fed into the focus stone. Mana condensed, whorled through her limbs. The glyphs etched into her memory flared to life. She exhaled once, slow. Then pushed mana through her channels.

Foxfire erupted into a sphere of blue flame, expanding outward in a pulse that tore through vacuum without sound, only pressure and force.

Applied Spellform Initialized: Foxfire Nova (Tier I)

The proximity made it lethal. Foxfire slammed into the dragonlings at close range. Two went limp, caught in the center of the blast. The others were thrown away, trailing scraps of ether and stunned motion. Their gravitational grip shattered.

Akiko righted herself with a cough, the mana backlash wracking her core. Her aura shuddered, barely holding. Vision dimmed at the edges.

But she was alive. And she was free.

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