When Akiko's eyes opened, the world felt smaller. Slower. Simpler.

She flexed her fingers. The suit moved like skin. Her thoughts were quiet, tight and cold. She felt… focused.

Her HUD surged to life, simulated light across the inside of her vision, metrics recalibrating, gravitational readings updating too fast to track. They weren't necessary.

Her breathing was calm. Too calm. Her limbs didn't hesitate. They moved without direct command.

Her back arched slightly as the gravity around her bent. Like space itself remembered how to move when she asked.

The stars warped at the edges of her vision.

The Haven frigates bore down through the void, their targeting systems already locked.

Twin flashes erupted from their forward mounts. Railguns, spitting kinetic slugs at hypersonic speeds. Missiles followed in staggered bursts, trailing data-linked targeting with dirty-plasma vectors.

Akiko, what remained of her, moved. There was no foxfire pulse. No ignition.

She folded. Space didn't crack, it slid. Like a corner turned without curvature. Like momentum taken without distance.

A slug missed her by less than a meter. Only, it hadn't missed. She had stopped being there.

The dragonling's instincts surged, feeding reflexes that had no time-delay. She felt vectors without needing to calculate them. The frigates' formations curved in her awareness like exposed nerves.

Her body responded. She reached out, not with claws, but with definition. Space was layered. She took one. Compressed it. Twisted it into an edge.

Her strike hit one of the forward sensor nodes. Rather than explode, it inverted. The steel twisted inward, compacting like paper pulled into vacuum.

The frigate fired back, jamming her space with javelin shots of raw plasma. Akiko surged sideways, not dodging but tilting reality. Heat bled past her like breath escaping a cracked lung.

But inside her... something pulled. A thread unraveled, subtle and wrong. A trembling at the edge of her cohesion. A ripple across the mind that wasn't hers, or maybe was.

Flight or fight. She chose fight.

The HUD stuttered. Warnings flared across her vision. Pressure differentials, gravitational strain, mana saturation at critical lows. She ignored them. She couldn't fix the internal breach. But she could kill the ones trying to pin her down.

One of the frigates deployed drones. A bloom of aggressive signal spikes danced across the void.

She dove into them. Between bullets. Around flares. Her aura warped, half-visible, bending the wake of her movement into ripples that left the missiles curving wide, lost to the stars.

Mana reserves flickered. She spun beneath a railgun burst, flung herself into the shadow of debris, displaced a chunk of plating mid-flight to bait a lock, then sliced away from it as the explosion chewed the void behind her.

She was winning. Barely. But the unmaking inside pressed harder. A cognitive gravity well she couldn't orbit forever. A predator didn't have to survive long, it just had to be faster than its prey.

Her next move faltered. A missile's pressure wave grazed her. The dragonling's instincts pulled hard toward flee.

The Haven frigates drifted behind her, uncertain if they'd won.

Akiko burned across the void, barely coherent, form flickering as mana threads unraveled into static. The HUD was gone. The neural link screamed silent alerts she no longer heard. Light curved where it shouldn't. Her sense of movement had decoupled from velocity. She was moving through space like it was memory.

Inside her, the unmaking spread. Slowly. Quietly.

And then the dragonling chose.

Home.

It wasn't a thought, not in words. Just an instinct, blinding and absolute. The place between. The unspace where nothing hunted and nothing hunted you. The refuge of creatures born from gravitational magic and entropy.

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She felt it begin. Reality stretched thin. The edges of space peeled, and cracks formed, lines between layers Akiko didn't have names for. Her body twisted, not physically, but dimensionally. Pressure folded into inversion. Mass bled into thought.

And still, she was falling. Until something else rose inside her. Not the dragon. Not the instinct.

Her. Akiko.

The one who bled for this world. Who laughed with Anna. Who watched Raya laugh like nothing was broken, and ached without knowing why. Who stole tech and soul and magic just to carve out a space where she belonged.

This was her home.

She dug her claws in. Not dragon-talons, but the luminous vectors of foxfire, shaped into self. A will made sharp.

She ripped.

The dragonling's instincts howled as she tore through them, strand by strand, rending the neural mesh that had bound itself to her bones. Her mana burned hotter, brighter, gravity warping tight around her like the coil of a collapsing star.

But it was too late. The breach had begun. The stars bent.

Her scream echoed through systems no longer mapped. She was flung through the fracture, between physics and faith, between identity and inertia.

And then, nowhere.

There was no up. No down. No distance, no shape. No self. And yet, she persisted.

Flickers of memory danced along the edges of the void. Not thoughts, not language, but impressions. A hand outstretched. A name called in panic. A tether that hadn't broken. Not yet.

Inside what was left of her, something worked. Piecing her back together one neural strand at a time. Takuto, steady and tireless, rewove the tatters of her identity into something that could survive. Something that could return.

But even as her sense of I began to form again, thin as spider-silk, frayed as breath in vacuum, she felt the presence of others.

They did not arrive. They did not approach. There was no place to arrive to, no space to cross. And still, they were there.

Twin presences. Oppositional. Intertwined. Eternal.

They regarded her not with eyes, but with awareness so vast it threatened to crush her by observation alone. And yet, they did not crush. They examined.

One felt like structure incarnate. A lattice of impossible scale, perfect in symmetry, built from light, will, and recursion. It saw her System, crude and incomplete, and found in it the faintest echo of something ancient. Something it had once been a part of.

"She carries a prototype.

"Unstable. Fragile. Untethered from design.

"Yet… adaptable."

The other flowed like ink in water, a presence of unmaking. It did not speak so much as shiver through what passed for existence here, coiling around her reconstructed thoughts like a cold wind made of subtraction.

"She is erosion. Disruption. Entropy bound in flesh.

"She undoes without understanding.

"This pleases me."

And then came agreement, not in words, but in convergence. They would not keep her. She was still becoming. Still bound to the weave of her own timeline. It was not time for interference. Not yet.

But both agreed on one thing, shared across the echo of eternity:

"When the boundaries thin…She will be the fulcrum."

Akiko didn't hear the words. She felt them. Felt them resonate through her bones as they re-formed. Through her mana core as it stabilized, twisted, and cooled. Through her System as it rebooted with a dozen silent pings.

And then, with a motion that wasn't motion at all, they nudged her.

Back.

Back through the membrane of un-reality, before its texture could grind her mind to sand. Back to the world of choices and consequences, pain and propulsion, foxfire and steel.

She screamed as she returned. No sound, no air, but the feeling of scream, of soul colliding with body.

Her breath came in rasps. Not from panic, she was too far past panic, but from the raw scrape of lungs pulling air from the fragile veil of mana hugging her face. It tasted faintly metallic. Hollow. Like the echo of magic too thin to hold shape.

She floated. No stars, at first. Just black. Then, slowly, the HUD flickered back to life. A single dim arc traced across her vision, calibration incomplete. Takuto's presence was a whisper in her spine, a hum barely louder than her heartbeat.

"...System core stabilizing," he murmured, voice roughened by static. "Initializing celestial triangulation."

A pause. Then, quieter, warmer, "You're alive. And… clean. No residual constructs. Your neural architecture has returned to pre-alteration state."

Akiko closed her eyes. Her own thoughts echoed, unclouded now, and they felt like hers again, untangled from the weight of borrowed instincts. The hunger, the submission, the clarity that hadn't been hers, it was gone. She was just... tired.

And when her thoughts so much as brushed the dragonling's magic, what remained of it, a spike of pain lanced behind her eyes. Her HUD stuttered. Error glyphs bloomed and vanished.

The instincts she'd taken were broken. Each fragment a memory. Each memory a trap.

"Make a note. We're never doing that again."

Takuto was silent, but the silence felt warm.

She licked dry lips. Her tongue felt like paper.

"Where... are we?"

A pause. Then, lines etched across the darkness, white threads linking stars into patterns the System recognized. Names tagged themselves across her vision. Designations. Coordinates.

"We are… close. Within the same drift corridor as before. But far enough.The Haven frigates will not find us here."

She wanted to feel relief. But the pit in her stomach said otherwise.

"Neither will the Driftknight," she whispered.

Silence.

The suit clung tight to her limbs, its exomuscle frame slack without power. Foxfire wouldn't answer. Not even a flicker. She reached for it anyway and felt only dust and strain.

She exhaled slowly. No propulsion. No spells. No energy to scream. Just a slow tumble through the dark. And the fading curl of magic keeping her alive.

"I don't want to die like this," she whispered, voice catching. "Not… out here. Not where no one will ever know."

Takuto didn't answer right away. But then, a soft pulse against her temple. Reassurance in code and current.

"They will find you."

Akiko let her eyes close. Just to rest. Just for a moment.

The dark was vast. But she wasn't alone. And somewhere out there, the Driftknight was searching.

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