The steady thrum of electronics and machinery was a welcome change. Blake leaned against a cool metal console in Engineering, letting the steady vibration seep into his bones. Clean air, tasting faintly of ozone, filled his lungs. Order. Stability. A welcome change-up from the madhouse corridors he'd just navigated.

Kitt was… elsewhere. Not gone, but occupied, working with the sub-cores she had just finished linking together. He felt her presence as a low, constant hum just beneath his own thoughts, a warmth that was both intimately familiar and, at least for the moment, strangely distant. She was plugged into this place, weaving herself into the ship's surviving memories, trying to coax coherence from the fractured ghosts of its cores. Her presence felt like it was actively expanding away from him, sinking tendrils into the very structure of the Leviathan, a silent, intense communion.

He closed his eyes against the stark white lighting of the safe area. The backs of his eyelids felt gritty with exhaustion. The trip from the mess hall hadn't been a straight shot. Far from it. Reality had twisted itself into knots back there. Corridors folding in on themselves like cheap paper, gravity shifting without warning, pockets of temporal bleed where the past flickered like bad projector footage. He'd surfed gravitational waves, punched through unstable spatial pockets with bursts of mana, used his Insight until his brain felt scraped raw just to find the path forward.

A grim smile touched his lips. If he was being honest, he had actually enjoyed it. The sheer mental and physical demand, the forced improvisation, the feeling of his abilities stretching, adapting, meeting the insane challenge head-on. This was the kind of crucible he needed. Pushing against the impossible, forcing his limits outward. Hard to replicate that kind of workout down at the local gym.

Without conscious effort he slipped into measure, meditative breaths, letting go the last of the adrenaline swimming in his veins. He felt the tension drain from his shoulders, a heavy weight dissolving notch by notch down his spine. His muscles screamed fatigue, a deep, satisfying ache from exertion pushed past normal boundaries. The deck plating beneath him felt solid, real, and blessedly stable.

But the job wasn't done. Not even close.

He shoved himself upright, palms leaving faint prints on the console edge. He couldn't get comfortable, couldn't lower his guard, not yet. Not after what Kitt had yanked out of the engineering core earlier.

"Blake." Kitt's voice was soft and weighted with a gravity he rarely heard from her. "We figured that the Leviathan had crashed herself, but I've got details now."

"What'd you learn?"

"That she was completely lucid when she did it," Kitt replied. Blake didn't have anything to say to that—it was a hell of a thing.

"She was protecting something. Under assault from the Outsider, yes—but she was in control of herself when she crashed. That was the best solution she had… the only one, really. She keeps saying she had to protect the rift."

Blake frowned. "So that also confirms the rift was already here? On this planet?"

"Yes. Leading to... something else. Another world, I think. Isolated. Hidden." Her mental presence flickered with uncertainty. "Her memory is fragmented, but whatever's through that rift—it's valuable. Immensely valuable."

"And the Outsider wants it."

"Yes. The rift was likely the entire point of the outsider's attack. It held enough sway over her long enough to get to the planet, but… When she hit the gravity well she pushed back. Hard. And once she had control of herself again..."

"Right. She made the sacrifice play." Blake ran his hand along the scarred wall, feeling the dead ship around him with new eyes.

"Its Pilot, its crew, its own existence—all of it." Kitt's voice had trembled. "It came here knowing it would likely die, and took the hit anyway."

Now, standing in engineering, Blake felt the weight of that sacrifice press against his chest. He'd seen suicide missions before—hell, he'd volunteered for a few. But this was different. This wasn't desperation or fatalism. This was calculated, deliberate self-destruction for a cause greater than survival.

The Leviathan had known exactly what it was doing.

It had carried families, children. People with dreams and futures. And it had brought them here, to this backwater planet, to make a stand that nobody would witness or remember. To die in silence, fighting an enemy most people would never know existed. It was a hell of a way to bow out.

He walked slowly around the engineering bay, fingers trailing along consoles and bulkheads. The ship had crashed itself to become a barrier, a wall between the Outsider and whatever lay beyond that rift. It had converted its own body into a fortress, its crew into defenders, its very existence into a shield.

Blake understood that kind of choice. The willingness to stand between danger and the innocent. The cold math of sacrifice.

He felt that old, familiar weight settle across his shoulders—the burden he'd carried as a soldier, then as a mercenary, and now as something new. Roadwarden. The title felt right suddenly, aligned with what he was seeing here.

Standing between order and chaos. Between civilization and barbarism. Between the innocent and the monsters that would devour them.

The Leviathan had been a Roadwarden in its own way. It had found its road, marked its boundary, and made its stand. And it was still fighting. Suicidal plan or not, she was still kicking, and Blake would be damned if she was going to have to keep fighting alone.

"What the hell could be worth all this?" Blake paced the length of the console, his boots marking a path worn by previous engineers. "Knowledge? Weapons? Resources?"

He stopped, braced both hands against the cool metal surface. What was valuable enough to cause a sentient ship drive itself into the ground? What treasure justified the sacrifice of children?

Each guess he made felt hollow, inadequate against the scale of what had happened here.

"People?" That thought snagged in his mind. "Refugees? A colony?"

Blake stared at the readouts flickering across the emergency displays. The language was foreign, but the warning symbols transcended translation—red triangles, flashing indicators, critical system failures cascading across the board. Yet somehow, impossibly, the core systems maintained minimal function.

"A population, maybe… Whatever's through that rift, they gave everything to protect it." His hand curled into a fist against the console. "I can't see making that trade unless you're saving more than you're sacrificing."

He stared at the unreadable displays for another long moment, hoping they'd somehow provide an answer. They didn't. He resigned himself to the possibility that he might never know for certain.

That knowledge—or lack thereof—should have bothered him more. In his old life, intelligence was everything. You never moved without knowing the objective, the stakes, the value proposition. Here, he was flying blind, fighting for a cause he couldn't name, protecting something he couldn't see.

And yet…

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The scale of the sacrifice answered the question in its own way. If the Leviathan and its crew had been willing to die for it, if they'd been willing to strand themselves forever on this backwater rock, whatever lay beyond that rift wasn't just valuable—it was essential.

"Blake?" Kitt's voice bloomed in his mind, stronger than before. "I've finished extending the network."

"Tell me something good."

"We've got a stable connection between the sub-cores. It's limited—more like a series of outposts than a unified system—but it's working."

"What's that get us?"

"Less than you're hoping for, probably," she replied. "But more than I bargained for."

"Okay, make that make sense for me."

"With the sub-cores networked I've got a much more functional personality construct to commune with, and a stronger connection to the ship to leverage. And I've found something important."

"Spit it out, Kitt."

"Someone's impatient," she complained. "This gal managed to seal off and preserve her primary core. We might be able to wake her up completely!"

"Shit," Blake responded. "That could be huge, if she can help stabilize things and push back against the outsider."

"Exactly! I'd have never suspected the core was uncorrupted, and we'd certainly never have found it."

Blake straightened up, rolling tension from his shoulders. "But with the sub-cores?"

"I've already found it." A three-dimensional map materialized in his vision, courtesy of his HUD. A pulsing red dot marked a location deep within the ship's structure. "It's heavily shielded. The Leviathan put everything it had into protecting it."

"That's our target?"

"Yes. It's where the Leviathan's primary consciousness would be housed. If we can reach it, I should be able to help wake her up. After that, who knows? But it's our most actionable option."

Blake stared at the pulsing red dot on the HUD map Kitt projected into his vision. The primary core. Deep inside the Leviathan's guts. Another gauntlet to run. He swallowed, the clean engineering air suddenly feeling thick.

One detail still clawed at the back of his mind. He forced the words out, his voice tight. "The community center… the nursery sub-core. We still need that one?" He felt a cold knot form in his gut even bringing it up.

"Aeon's preserve, but no," Kitt sighed. A wave of palpable relief washed over him from Kitt's side of their bond, mirrored in her tone. "We can bypass it. It'll make integrating with the primary core more difficult—more brute force required from both of us—but yes. We can skip it."

"Good." The word came out clipped, rough. "Let's do that."

"Agreed." Kitt's presence sharpened, focusing alongside his.

The red dot on the map pulsed steadily. Blake studied the map, tracing possible routes with his eyes. "You said 'if we can reach it.' What are we looking at?"

"Three possible routes." The map shifted, highlighting different paths in blue, green, and yellow. "None of them good."

The blue route twisted through what had been crew quarters. The green path cut through maintenance tunnels. The yellow sliced directly through the central atrium—the fastest route, but also the most exposed.

"Blue route first," Kitt said. "The corruption is less severe there, but the spatial distortion is extreme. You'd need to maintain a bubble the entire way."

Blake grimaced. Maintaining a spatial bubble required constant mana expenditure—not something he had in abundance right now.

"Green route is mostly stable spatially, but the Outsider's influence is stronger. The environmental hazards are... unpleasant."

"Define 'unpleasant.'"

"Organic growth that responds to movement. Pockets of altered atmosphere that affect perception. And… biologicals. I doubt they're anything friendly."

"Sounds delightful." Blake's gaze shifted to the yellow path. "And the express route?"

"Direct line through the central atrium. Minimal spatial distortion, but maximum exposure. If the Outsider is paying any attention to us, it will throw everything it has at you the moment you enter that space."

Blake absorbed this, weighing options against energy reserves. His mana core hummed just above critical—enough for one sustained push, but not much more. The protein bar he'd eaten earlier had barely taken the edge off his hunger.

"Any good news?"

"We have a little time to regroup." Kitt's voice softened. "But otherwise… Nothing more than I've already shared."

Blake nodded. That tracked. The closer they got to what mattered, the harder the fight would become. Standard tactics for defending high-value targets—concentrate your forces around the critical objective.

"So we rest here, make our push to the main core, then turn this ship's systems against the Outsider." Blake rolled his neck, feeling vertebrae pop. "Simple."

"No," Kitt corrected. "Not simple at all. The main core is dying, Blake. What's left of the Leviathan's consciousness is fragmenting. If we want to use its systems, we need to stabilize it first."

"And how do we do that?"

"I need direct access. A full interface. And even then, I'll need your help to... wake it up."

Blake frowned. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"It means I'll have to go deep into its systems while leaving enough of myself connected to you to maintain our bond. It's going to stretch me thin." Kitt paused. "And it means you'll need to defend us both while I work."

Blake absorbed this silently. The sub-cores were refuges—places to catch their breath. The main core was the solution—the key to turning this deathtrap of a ship into a weapon against the thing that had corrupted it.

But reaching it meant crossing a gauntlet of horrors. Defending it meant standing alone against whatever the Outsider threw at them. And awakening it meant Kitt would be vulnerable, stretched between systems, unable to help.

Blake pushed off the console, straightening to his full height. His muscles ached with fatigue, his head throbbed with the residual pain of their earlier ordeal, and his mana reserves hovered just above critical. By any reasonable metric, he should fall back, regroup, maybe even retreat to the surface to recover.

But the Leviathan hadn't retreated. It had stood its ground, become a wall between the Outsider and whatever lay beyond that rift. It had made its stand here, alone and unwitnessed. And that thought pushed him to action.

Still, he wasn't suicidal. He had to rest.

After an hour of recuperative meditation, a light snack and some water, Blake felt ready. He checked his mana: 62%. It would have to do until they got to the core.

"Which route gives us the best shot?" he asked.

Kitt's voice was steady in his mind. "Green. The environmental hazards are predictable. The corruption is stronger, but the space is stable—less drain on your reserves."

Blake nodded. "Green it is."

He moved toward the exit, muscles protesting with each step. Behind him, the engineering bay hummed with the faint pulse of the ship's systems—damaged but not defeated. Not yet.

"Blake?" Kitt's voice was soft in his mind. "What we're doing... it matters. The Leviathan knew what it was sacrificing for. We don't have to know the specifics to know it was worth it."

Blake paused at the threshold, looking back at the room where fallen engineers had once maintained this vessel. Where they'd stood their posts until the end, fighting to keep their ship alive even as it drove itself into the ground.

"Yeah." His grip tightened on Verdict. "Let's go wake up this ship."

The door slid open, revealing the green-tinged corridor beyond. Organic growth pulsed along the walls, floor, and ceiling—alive and aware in a way that set Blake's teeth on edge. The air shimmered with particles that caught the emergency lighting, creating an eerie, underwater effect.

Blake stepped forward into the corrupted passageway, feeling the subtle shift as they left the protected zone of the sub-core behind. Ahead lay the central nervous system of a dying leviathan—and the entity that had killed it.

It was high time to return that favor.

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