Kitt screamed out a warning as her favorite idiot marched headlong toward certain death. Again.

He barreled toward the thing—a mass of twisted flesh and alloy, the stink of Outsider corruption oozing from its cracked shell. Blake moved with that stubborn, tunnel-vision stride she'd come to know: the stride of a man with no room for fear or caution. She poured every scrap of herself into their bond, desperate to reach him. He couldn't hear her—too far gone, adrenaline and shock and all the hurts layered through his nerves. That left her screaming into a hurricane.

And all around her, another mind moved—immense, ragged, battered by agony but ancient and alive. The Leviathan. She was only a flicker beside it, an insect trying to be noticed by a mountain. Kitt strained to understand the undercurrents, fragments of thought drifting like whale-song: mourning, resolve, hunger for vengeance. The ship's spirit had surfaced fully now—no longer dormant, no longer simply resisting the Outsider's filth. Awake. Furious.

Kitt pressed herself against its presence, fighting to be seen in the riot of sensation—she needed its help but was a child at an adult table, her voice barely audible in a storm of sorrow and old wisdom. Images came in waves: children's laughter under golden light; blood on steel; void swallowing whole families; doors closing on hope; flame washing through corridors lined with weeping trees. She wanted to tell it she understood loss, even if hers was smaller. That she would help it if she could.

But there was no time for comfort or connection. Something else—something sharp—drew her attention back to the core chamber itself.

A shiver ran through the deck as part of the console unfurled like a flower under moonlight. Kitt felt it before she saw it: a crystalline structure rising from hidden wells beneath armored plating, facets shimmering with color only she could see—energy twisted tight as a fist ready to break bone. Her energy-sense flared wide open: this was raw power condensed into matter, a singularity on a leash.

The Leviathan's will pressed down on the chamber—a pulse through bulkheads and conduits—a warning for any living thing to clear out before something terrible happened.

On the far end of the catwalk, another aperture hissed open with surgical grace—an exit forming out of muscle and steel in perfect unity. The core weapon would fire in moments; nothing left in its wake would survive, and the Leviathan would take the outsider-spawn out, no matter who was standing between her core and the creature. Even without words, Kitt read intent from every cell in the living ship: Last Chance. Move Your Pilot.

She flung herself at Blake's mind with everything she had left—images flashing through their link: burning light, ejection ports opening wide, horror blossoming behind his eyes if he didn't get clear.

MOVE!

But he wouldn't listen—not because he didn't trust her but because he was half-deaf with exhaustion and agony and that goddamn stubborn sense of duty that refused to break even when his body already had.

He lurched as the beast's shadow fell over him—a warped titan made from dozens of merged souls, bones grinding under chitinous plating split by Outsider veins. It's core was bared again: veins pulsing purple-black around a heart like volcanic glass.

Kitt saw too late what he meant to do—as if he hadn't learned a damned thing from the first time he pulled this stunt—and then everything happened at once:

Blake triggered [Kinetic Detonation] at point-blank range.

For an instant reality buckled—the air between Blake and the monster warping as if someone twisted space like wringing out dirty laundry. The floor cracked under Blake's boots as raw power arced through the outsider's failing shell. He was hurled backward in an arc that slammed him into the console hard enough to leave blood on steel. By some idiot luck or predatory instinct honed over decades, he rolled as he landed. He'd be just outside the projected attack radius—a heap of armor and bad decisions barely breathing against the organic metal catwalk.

The creature reeled as well—energy tearing through its midsection where Fang had bitten deep. The explosion was being suppressed somehow—could this monstrosity adapt to attacks so well?—but the destructive power of the skill wouldn't be denied. Kitt caught flashes through her more supernatural senses: cracks radiating from the monster's exposed core—fractures forming where five back-to-back displacer rounds hadn't so much as marred its surface. [Kinetic Detonation] shouldn't really have done any better than the individual rounds, practically speaking, and yet…

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

She filed it away—a note burned into memory for later review—but there was no time now to do anything but watch.

The Leviathan exhaled power.

The crystalline weapon in the console erupted—no slow build-up or theatrical warning beam; just pure energy uncorked at close range—a pillar of shimmering translucence whose concepts Kitt could barely fathom. It was some unstable admixture of white fire and an ultraviolet shadow that threatened to burn out physical retinas and left afterimages etched on every sense Kitt owned.

Kitt had thought she understood her own mana affinities. How could she not? She wasn't like Blake or Eland; harmonic cultivators who had to seek out meaning and resonance to grow their spirits and access their magics—she was born with an understanding of what she was and what her power could become. And yet… The power pouring forth from the Leviathan was something she had never considered.

She watched (or rather felt) matter stripped from bone—corrupted flesh peeling away atom by atom under that storm—and for one sliver of time even Outsider horror knew fear. The beast tried to reform itself along lines only it understood—tentacles reaching toward every axis at once—but there was no escape in this place anymore; not while the Leviathan owned its core again.

Kitt could feel nearly every minute sub-aspect of the Warp affinity at play in the attack. [Travel] somehow combined with [Gravity] to invert its own purpose and lock down movement. [Spatial] mana forged into an endless storm of razors, each one impossibly small, and [Force] mana to sheer the severed matter away. There were even echoes of [Time] mana, an affinity only minimally a part of the greater [Warp] affinity, somehow being leveraged as a way to stymie regeneration.

The impact rolled through Kitt's mind like thunder cracking stone—the feedback loop nearly shorting out her focus—but she held fast even as time stuttered sideways inside her head. She tasted ozone and ancient copper; heard echoes of every lost crew member howling with satisfaction as justice finally arrived.

For one grotesque heartbeat after most of its matter was gone, the Outsider-spawn's exposed core hung suspended in fire—a black seed refusing annihilation on pure spite alone.

And then: the Leviathan flexed its will one last time—the aperture at the end of the catwalk snapping wide like a predator's mouth—and ejected that core into whatever corrupted space lay beyond. Gone. The aperture sealed shut behind it with finality—the sound more felt than heard—a signal that any attempt to break back in would be met with force.

Silence crashed down across everything that remained.

Kitt clung to herself—threadbare but whole—deeply humbled by the show of force. She committed herself to the goal of understanding her own [Warp] affinity so thoroughly one day.

She sensed the Leviathan's mind once more. It was almost incomprehensible in scope. She felt as if she were a cloud travelling over a continental shelf, only able to perceive limited areas at any given time. But everything she could currently sense was unified by the satisfaction that rippled through decks and conduits: Clean Again.

Relief washed outwards—a psychic exhalation strong enough to make her laugh. But exhaustion was riding close behind: centuries' worth bleeding away the joy and relief until only stillness remained where pain had been king for too long. Kitt wanted to pull back from that bedrock of numb trauma, but she couldn't risk severing the link Blake had suffered to establish.

For his part, Blake stirred against the console, grunting and clearly in pain, but alive. She wanted nothing more than to wrap him up in gratitude (and maybe strangle him for risking everything), but their core was as empty as it had ever been. There wouldn't be any fancy [Force Manipulation] tricks for the time being.

Not for the first time she wished she could do more for him. Their current circumstances so limited her that it was actually painful to consider. Blake's lack of compatible body cultivation, the strange and inefficient bonding of their cores into a single unit, her own damaged cultivation… All of it was just too much to consider while she was forced to sit idly by and watch Blake suffer.

Still, she had to admit that for all the downsides of their current situation, there were some real upsides as well. The version of herself that bound Blake may not have been overly concerned with his willingness to cooperate, but she had been concerned about getting the renovations to his body done correctly. The work was fantastic, and she was certain Blake did not fully appreciate the gift that he'd been given.

Eland understood, she was certain, but for whatever reason, the scholar had downplayed exactly how impactful the changes to Blake's body were. Kitt figured it was probably to keep Blake from getting complacent, but that was before either of them really understood Blake: He would never relax long enough to approach anything resembling complacency.

Even unconscious as he was, Blake's body was drawing in ambient energy at a rate that would mark him as some manner of heaven-sent genius in Tylwith circles. He had only been cultivating for around two months; at a similar point in his training, Vylaas would have been hard-pressed to match Blake's passive absorption rate even while actively meditating.

Still, refilling their mana was something Kitt could help make more efficient. If Blake needed a nap—and he did—then she could take over meditation for the both of them. He'd need as much mana in his system as he could get to heal up from his injuries.

They still had so much to do together.

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