Akiko's HUD flickered, a subtle pulse in the corner of her vision.

IFF: Driftknight. Proximity: 72 km.

Her heart surged, breath catching in her throat. They were close. Closer than she'd dared hope.

Relief didn't come all at once. It crept in like thaw, softening the edge of panic she hadn't fully let herself feel. She wasn't alone. Not entirely.

But the dragon noticed. It didn't move. Didn't speak. But something in the air shifted, like the mountain had become aware of her heartbeat.

You are not the first to come here uninvited.

The words dragged like a glacier across her skull, ancient and unmoved.

Akiko blinked. Not the first?

The dragon's gaze remained locked on her, but its breath deepened. The cavern responded, relics humming in sympathy, mana stirring with something more than reverence.

The hoard shifted. A wave of debris slid away as the dragon's tail swept lazily across the pile. From the wreckage, something rose, suspended in invisible current. A device. Small. Cylindrical. Too clean to be scrap.

Mana throbbed inside. Too rhythmic, too hungry.

It drifted forward, guided by unseen hands.

Akiko's eyes narrowed. That pulse, she knew that signature.

Karn.

The realization hit like a kick to the gut. The datapad on Ashara. The cryptic note about relocation. This was it. Karn had sent someone. Sent this.

The dragon let the object hover in the air like a child presenting a found toy.

One of your kind offered this as tribute. A device. A seed of rot. They believed they could hollow my essence. Twist it. Tame it.

A pause.

They were mistaken.

Their purpose was better served as a meal for one of my lesser kin.

The device spun lazily, as if caught in breath. Its mana was wrong, twisted in ways that reminded her of Ashara's ruined industrial sector and Karn's undead experiments. A corruption designed to graft onto a myth and remake it from within.

Akiko's eyes flicked to the device. Then to the dragon.

So it could be threatened. The device hadn't worked, but it had been enough to matter. Crude, maybe. But not meaningless.

She swallowed. "Crude or not," she said, voice tight but steady, "it got your attention."

The dragon's eyes narrowed. The mana thickened.

You tread dangerously. But you are not wrong. Their audacity was... notable.

Akiko's heart pounded. She didn't need to win this. She just needed a moment. Just one.

The dragon shifted again. It rose higher. Its wings unfurled slowly, vast sheets of light and membrane. The hoard shook beneath it.

You should be honored. A unique morsel such as yourself… I shall devour you personally.

Guess its patience didn't last forever.That's my cue.

Her breath tightened. Her claws flexed. The device still hovered, its mana warping the cavern's light.

Her window was closing. No backup. No magic shield. Just her, a dragon, and a bomb made by a madman.

Don't think. Act.

Her fingers tightened at her side. Mana surged inward, coiling at her core, channeled through the spellform burned into her suit's neural interface.

Applied Spellform Initialized: Foxfire Flare (Tier I)

She didn't wait for permission. Mana exploded from her hand in a burst of searing heat and blinding light, blue-white flames spiraling outward, catching the artifact dead center. The dragon recoiled, eyes narrowing.

The device shrieked. A pulse ripped through the air. Mana exploded outward in a toxic bloom, distorting light, unraveling the equilibrium of the cavern in one chaotic breath.

Akiko ran, and the shockwave hit a second later, chaotic and wrong, like a scream wrapped in radiation. The pressure wave caught her and swept her forward as corrupted mana swept out in a jagged wave, warping light, bending gravity.

Behind her, the cavern howled.

She didn't look back.

The tunnel blurred around her. Stone, shadow, mana, none of it mattered. Just the vector. Just escape.

Akiko sprinted, lungs burning, suit screaming in protest at the heat still clinging to her from the blast.

The Driftknight was waiting somewhere beyond this pulsing, screaming ruin. She launched herself forward with a burst of foxfire, vision swimming with afterimages, every motion a knife across frayed nerves.

"—Akiko, you need to move, now!" Kara's voice cut through over comms, sharper than the static. "Airlock's open. Thirty meters, you're burning your window."

She didn't waste breath on a reply.

The entrance to the Driftknight loomed ahead, half-shrouded in swirling dust and falling rock. The airlock door glowed with pressure seams, just wide enough for her to slip through. She dove, hit hard, shoulder first, then scrambled upright as the inner chamber sealed behind her.

The hiss of cycling pressure was too slow. Far too slow.

Outside, the mountain was waking.

Behind her, through the narrow viewport, the world distorted, twisting with violet haze as the dragon thrashed in the miasma. Its body coiled and bucked, scales shuddering with flickering light. It wasn't dead. Not even close. But it was disoriented.

For now.

The Driftknight shuddered. She caught herself against the inner wall as the RCS thrusters kicked in, short bursts of momentum pulsing down the hull.

"Kara, we are not clear," Lila's voice cut in from engineering, clipped and calm. "Structural integrity holding, but stress is increasing. If we don't get altitude—"

"We're moving," Quinn snapped back. "But we've got debris from the detonation blocking the cleanest path. I'm weaving best I can."

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"Captain," Joran's voice crackled through. "Can't get a clean shot. Targeting's unreliable. Mist is distorting the feed."

"Keep the pressure on," Kara replied. Calm. Controlled. "We're not here to kill it. Just keep it off us."

The airlock hissed. A final exhale. The lights shifted to green.

Cycle Complete.

The airlock door slid open.

Akiko staggered into the corridor beyond, one hand bracing against the bulkhead as her pulse slammed against her ears. Sweat slicked the inside of her suit. Her legs trembled.

Takuto's voice chimed in her ear. "You are aboard. Your vitals are stabilizing. Internal pressure nominal."

Her fingers twitched. "Good," she muttered, breathless. "Great. Fantastic."

With a thought, an external camera view flickered into place on her HUD. First static, then clarity. A wide-angled lens capturing the mountain's heart as the Driftknight reversed course through the broken tunnel.

The dragon was there. Still coiled. Still massive. But its body writhed within a haze of pulsing, corrupted mana thick as smoke, clinging to its limbs like leeching tar. Its wings flexed sluggishly, the membranes twitching. But its eyes…

Its eyes were locked on them. Twin crescents of liquid quicksilver, narrowing as if memorizing their shape.

The tail lashed and a section of cavern wall shattered, debris cascading like a waterfall of stone. Alarms flared as Quinn banked hard to port, the ship rattling under sudden Gs.

"We're clear of immediate strike range," Quinn reported, breath short. "But I wouldn't bet on that thing staying grounded."

Akiko shut the feed off. Her hands were still shaking. But she was alive. For now.

She stepped onto the bridge as the deck plates rattled beneath her boots.

Quinn didn't look back. His fingers danced over the console, eyes locked on the forward display. The Driftknight's thrusters hissed in sharp bursts, weaving the ship between shifting debris and gravitational turbulence.

"Didn't think you'd be walking already," he muttered.

"I bounce back," she lied.

Kara glanced up from the captain's station, one hand braced against the armrest. "Good. We're about to need you."

Ahead, the cavern narrowed to a broken shaft, an exit torn from the belt's interior by pressure and time. Beyond it, a black canvas speckled with hazard warnings. And something deeper. Invisible. Pulling.

Akiko felt it before the sensors confirmed it. More than pressure, more than mass. Curvature.

She closed her eyes. Let her awareness spread out. Not with thought, but with that strange second-skin instinct she'd never meant to keep. The one she'd borrowed. Or stolen.

Singularities. Dozens of them. A drifting maze of condensed gravity wells left as guardians, or perhaps scars.

Her throat tightened. "We're back in the gauntlet."

"We need a path out," Kara said. "Wide enough for us to slip through, not so wide we trip a collapse chain. We don't have the structural stability to brute-force this."

"Ship sensors can't map half the wells fast enough to plot a course," Quinn added. "They shift. Like they're watching."

They weren't watching. But something was remembering.

Akiko stepped closer to the viewport, fingers gripping the edge of the console.

She could feel them, like cold breath against her skin. The singularities tugged at her bones, some strong enough to bend light, others fragile enough to shatter with a whisper.

One by one, they spun into her awareness. The dragonling's instincts stirred in her spine.

"You do not need it," Takuto warned gently.

She didn't answer. Not with words. She let the edge of it slip in, just enough.

A shiver ran through her limbs. Her vision dilated. Paths opened in the dark like veins pulsing between stars.

"Quinn," she said. "Five degrees port. Then cut hard starboard at the drift-curve. Wait for the pull before you rotate."

He hesitated, then obeyed. The Driftknight shifted course. The bridge's warning lights blinked yellow.

"Thirty seconds to the pinch point," Joran reported, voice low.

Akiko leaned closer to the console, her breath shallow. The instincts pulled her deeper, threading shapes, seeing curvature as motion. But the longer she stayed in it, the harder it was to remember what was hers.

Takuto's voice stayed quiet. Watching.

Another singularity loomed close.

"Now, adjust two degrees up. Thread the overlap," she said sharply.

Quinn gritted his teeth. "You sure?"

"I'm not guessing."

The Driftknight groaned as the field brushed its edge. Then, release. The ship slid through, unscathed.

"Damn," Quinn muttered. "You're a freak."

Akiko didn't smile.

The exit came into view. Just one more drift curve, one more subtle twist of force and memory.

She closed her eyes. Just once more. Then let go. Just once more.

The stars opened before them. The Driftknight cleared the final singularity with a gasp of drive flare and strained hull plating. The mountain faded behind them, just another jagged silhouette in the dark.

For a breath, it felt like enough.

Quinn exhaled, shoulders slumping. "We're out."

Akiko didn't answer. Her grip tightened on the console.

The singularities behind them weren't drifting anymore. They were moving.

"…That's not right," she whispered.

Takuto responded before anyone else. "The pattern is converging. Gravitational curvature increasing across the belt interior. It is centralizing. Collapsing inward."

On the sensors, the mountain was just a blip in the background, until the top of it erupted. Stone disintegrated into dust, sucked upward into a bloom of fractured starlight and convulsing force. A column of pressure rose like a reversed waterfall, glittering debris pulled into orbit by something deeper than mass.

Quinn flinched. "What the hell—?"

"Gravitational detonation," Lila murmured. "Localized field compression. The entire peak just… folded."

"It's the dragon," Akiko said.

Her HUD flared red.

Gravitational shear ahead.

Velocity decay detected.

Trajectory instability increasing.

The Driftknight stuttered mid-flight. Its momentum strained against a growing pull behind them, like space itself was resisting their departure.

Kara gripped her harness. "Joran, status?"

"This isn't a weapon, it's the damn vacuum turning inside out. If we don't cut power now, we're going to tear the ship in half."

Quinn shouted, "We can't cut thrust or we'll drop into the singularity nest again!"

Akiko couldn't hear them anymore. All she could feel was presence.

Behind them, vast and impossible, the dragon had risen. Its will extended like a tide, twisting space around it.

You will not escape.

The deck groaned.

Takuto chimed in. "Approaching catastrophic vector divergence. If we do not redirect external force—"

Then, a flicker. New contacts. Multiple. Fast. On the display, a ripple of light cut across the void, followed by another. Then a barrage. Long-range missiles, marked TSDF, with familiar signal tags.

The Sovereign. They struck the mountainside first, impacting like thunder made solid. Then came the second wave, targeted for the space around the dragon's coalescing field.

The force broke the dragon's focus, and the pull wavered.

"Now, Quinn!" Kara barked.

The Driftknight surged forward, engines howling as they tore free of the edge of collapse.

Behind them, the Sovereign's outline drifted into partial view. Still distant, but unmistakably braced for combat. More missiles launched, streaking past on attack vectors.

The Sovereign drove forward through the dark, hull gleaming with shield shimmer and reactor heat. A spearhead of defiance.

The dragon emerged from the broken mountain like a god rising from ritual stone, coils rippling through vacuum, body contorting as gravitational eddies peeled debris from orbit. The first volley from the Sovereign's railguns struck true, impacts that split the void with bursts of superheated shrapnel.

But the beast didn't falter. It spun through the barrage like a living storm, wings flaring wide, sending shimmering waves of mana through the asteroid field. The rocks around them shuddered in orbit, spiraling under gravitational interference.

Akiko's breath caught as the Sovereign vanished beneath layers of serpentine bulk, wrapped tail to prow, its railguns pinioned.

"Keep firing," Kara ordered, voice low.

"Already lined up," Joran replied from gunnery.

The Driftknight's own railgun spoke, three bursts that punched into the dragon's exposed flank. Shards of scale and void-hardened blood scattered into the dark. Not enough to kill. But enough to hurt.

The dragon turned. Its head angled in eerie stillness, and Akiko felt it notice them.

Then came its answer. The asteroids moved. Chunks of iron and silicate, drifting innocuous moments before, twisted in on themselves as gravity vectors snapped. One hurtled toward them like a thrown world.

"Brace," Quinn shouted, pulling hard to starboard.

Akiko was already leaning forward, instincts flaring, mapping the invisible threads of force.

"There, roll ninety, then pitch down. You'll slingshot off the vector wake."

Quinn didn't argue. The Driftknight dipped and twisted, barely clearing the first projectile as it scraped past, close enough to rattle their bones.

Another wave followed. Smaller this time, sharper, like thrown daggers instead of boulders.

Joran fired intercept rounds. One broke the leading fragment apart; the others scattered just enough to thread through.

Akiko gritted her teeth. "Left. Sharp angle. Pull back on the throttle or we'll overshoot the clearing."

A pause. Then Quinn whispered, "Copy."

The void lit up with fire. The dragon twisted in pain. Its coils unwound, tail lashing as it released the frigate from its crushing grip.

"They're breaking free!" Lila called.

The feed zoomed wide. The Sovereign drifted back, its hull torn open in multiple places, vents of gas and debris leaking into the stars.

Space bent around the dragon. Rippling. Distorting. An aurora of force bled from its maw as it turned back toward the Sovereign. But the ship was no longer silent. Its guns fired again. Short range. Full spread.

The dragon reeled, momentum faltering. For a breath, it seemed to hesitate. Then, it opened something. Space twisted, bent, peeled.

Mana Surge Detected. Causality Drift Warning.

Stars warped. Light staggered.

The dragon slipped through, folding its bulk into a fracture of reality carved by sheer magical will.

Silence, thick and heavy, followed. The Sovereign drifted. Scorched, half-lit, hull plates twisted where the dragon had gripped too tight. But intact.

The Driftknight hung nearby.

Akiko let her breath shake free. Her muscles ached from tension she hadn't noticed holding.

"They're alive," Kara said softly, eyes on the Sovereign.

No one responded.

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