Kali was still trying to make sense of the twisting corridors and multi-tiered walkways of the Caladrian Station when a familiar voice cut through the noise of the crowd.
"Hey, did you find what you were looking for?"
He turned just in time to see Lio weaving effortlessly through the foot traffic, his small frame darting past towering merchants and chrome-armored peacekeepers. The boy was chewing on something that looked like a metallic-wrapped candy bar, its foil crackling between bites.
Kali nodded. "I did."
Lio glanced up at him with a grin. "You wouldn't happen to be looking for the mercenary guild, would you?"
Kali blinked. "Actually, yeah."
"Thought so." Lio chomped down the rest of his candy and crumpled the wrapper into a compact ball. "I know Caladrian like the back of my hand. Come on, follow me."
He took off at a quick pace, slipping between groups of travelers and under the occasional hover-sign. Kali followed, pulling his coat tight as they passed a corridor vent blasting recycled air.
"This station's huge," Kali muttered, watching a multi-legged transport mech thud past them. "How do you even know where anything is?"
Lio shrugged without looking back. "You live here long enough, you learn. My friends and I used to run errands for the traders and pilots. You get good at finding shortcuts, or you don't eat."
The boy's voice was light, but Kali caught the edge beneath it. The kind that came from learning survival young.
After a pause, he asked, "What about your parents, Lio?"
The question seemed to slow the boy's step for a heartbeat. He kept walking, but his voice dropped a notch.
"Don't have any. Not anymore."
"I'm sorry," Kali said quietly.
Lio shrugged again, more defensively this time. "It's okay. I barely remember them anyway. I've been on my own since I was six. Caladrian's not the safest place, but if you're smart, and you don't piss off the wrong guilds, you can make it."
They crossed into a new district, signaled by a change in architecture. The corridors widened and the air took on a tang of ozone and oil. Neon signs buzzed overhead, most of them written in trade pidgin and glyphs.
Lio pointed ahead to a squat, ironclad structure flanked by weapon scanners and two guards in powered exo-frames. "There it is. Mercenary Guild Hall."
Kali turned to the boy. "Thanks, Lio. Really.
Lio grinned. "Don't mention it. Just buy me lunch one day when you're done."
"Deal."
The interior of the Mercenary Guild Hall was colder than Kali expected, both in temperature and tone. The walls were lined with matte-gray alloy and bare support struts, reinforced with armored ribs that suggested this building had once doubled as a military holdfast. Dim white-blue lights buzzed in panels overhead, casting long shadows across the floor.
He stepped through the threshold, and the weapon scanners on either side flared to life. Red lasers scanned his frame, pausing at the cluster of alloy and bone at the base of his neck where Rizen resided. A synthesized voice buzzed overhead.
"Unknown biological augmentation detected. Stand by for additional scan."
Kali tensed, but after a few seconds, the lights flickered green.
"Cleared. Welcome to the Caladrian Guild of Contracted Arms."
Inside, the hall opened into a wide chamber, somewhere between a military barracks and a casino. Walls of glowing contract boards lined one end, constantly updating with scrolling lists of bounties, escort runs, security jobs, and warzone deployments. A long bar to the left served synth-drinks and biofuel for cybernetic clients. The clientele was as diverse as the port, grizzled veterans, gene-mod warlords, off-world tacticians, and a few cloaked figures who looked more like assassins than soldiers.
Behind a curved obsidian desk sat a tall, bored-looking woman in a black and crimson coat with the guild insignia, a split-sword sigil, stitched onto her shoulder.
She barely looked up as Kali approached. "Do you have job for the guild?"
"No, I'm tryna join as a merc," he replied.
That made her glance up, just slightly. Her cybernetic eyes flickered as they scanned him.. "What are you? You looking kinda Rusa, but not quite."
"Hybrid, from the fringe zones," he lied.
"Name, skills, class if any."
"Kali. Close-quarters combat and sniper specialist. First-order awakened."
"Alright," she continued, shrugging. "You'll start at Tier Three, Rogue Entry. You want higher-paying work, you'll have to prove yourself. Oh, and pick a callsign."
He thought for a moment, then said. "How's Scarecrow?"
"Good enough," she replied, reaching under the desk and tossed him a thin metal disk about the size of a coin. It shimmered faintly with embedded circuitry.
"This is your token. Syncs to the guildnet. Accept a job, complete it, and the token logs it automatically. Bring it in once you've completed five standard jobs, and we'll talk about promotion. Get yourself killed and the token logs that too, for the bounty board."
Kali turned the token over in his hand. It pulsed once, warm to the touch.
She pointed to the contract boards. "Start there. Jobs refresh every cycle. If you want the faster pay, bounty hunts and salvage missions tend to move quick, but they're also where the desperate and dumb go to die."
Kali gave a respectful nod and walked toward the boards. Around him, mercenaries huddled near terminals, arguing over territory claims and payout shares. Some wore battle-worn armor, others sleek suits of living alloy. At least one had no body at all, just a floating sphere of neural mist encased in a containment field.
The board flickered as new listings scrolled into view.
Bounty: Rogue Geneticist on Lira-Tau – Reward: 50000 Standard Credits
Escort: Diplomatic Envoy through the Antimatter Belt – Reward: 75000 SC
Retrieval: Abadoned tech salvage in Dreg Moon Ruins – Reward: 32000 SC
Arena: Trial Combatant Entry – Reward: Variable
Special Notice: Shadow Contracts (Restricted Access Tier 3+)
Kali's eyes lingered on the bounty contract, its payout tempting enough to stir his mercenary instincts. 50000 Standard Credits for a single target, good money by any stretch, especially on a first run. But the reward size also hinted at high risk. A rogue geneticist with enough heat to attract a bounty of that size likely wasn't hiding in some back-alley dustbin. He was thinking it through, assessing the risk-reward curve, when a sharp voice cut the static behind him.
"I still say we take the bounty," someone argued. A tall Rusa male, easily over six feet, with bright red hair like ignited copper wire, gestured toward the board. "It's clean creds."
Kali half-turned, listening. The Rusa wore impact armor painted in flaking crimson and bore a shoulder-mounted coil launcher—clearly the squad's heavy hitter.
"Yeah, yeah," said the second merc, shorter, leaner, his gray skin and four eyes marking him as Vrohlite, one of the species Kali had seen in the port. "But let's not pretend we're invincible. I'd feel better with a sniper covering us from the ridgeline. That terrain's jagged."
The third member, a pale-skinned Myrsian woman with gill lines on her neck and a curved dagger at her waist, shook her head and exhaled in annoyance.
"We don't need a sniper, Kharv. It's just one rogue scientist, not a military op. Probably hiding in a hole with a makeshift turret and a pissbucket."
The red-haired Rusa grimaced. "Peep the location though, Sela. That's in the Arixon Dead Zone, just past the fifth rift line."
That drew silence. "Shit," Sela muttered, her earlier confidence faltering. "You think we'll run into... one?"
"If it's active, it could be crawling with fade anomalies," Kharv said.
Kali didn't wait for the debate to implode. He turned fully and cleared his throat just enough to draw their attention.
"If you're short a sharpshooter," he said, "I'm available."
All three heads turned to him, appraising. The Rusa's brow raised. "You a freelancer?"
"Just registered," Kali nodded. "Tier Four."
The red-haired Rusa crossed his arms. "Name?"
"Kali."
The three exchanged glances, some calculation passing between them.
"Well, I'm Brann," said the redhead, then gestured. "This is Kharv—our tactician—and Sela, infiltration and recon. We go by Team Crosshatch."
"What's your effective range?" she asked, her tone clipped and professional.
Kali met her gaze calmly. "Between 1.5 and 2 kilometers. Under ideal conditions, I can push a little further."
Kharv gave a low whistle. "Well, he's not Aegis Black, but he's decent."
Sela snorted. "No shit. Aegis Black could hit a flicker-drone through the eye slit of a reinforced helmet at twelve kilometers. In a sandstorm."
She turned back toward Kali, her expression neutral but not unkind. "Don't take it personally. Aegis Black is a Second-Order Distance Awakened. People like him are basically long-range artillery with a soul."
Kali nodded slowly, hiding his surprise behind a thin mask of composure.
Twelve kilometers…? The number echoed in his mind like a gunshot. That wasn't just skill. That was something else, something post-human. It rewrote the entire scale of a battlefield.
"Aegis is a demon, alright," Brann muttered, finishing the last check of the bounty board. "But whoever made the extraplanetary shot, that's something else entirely."
Kali raised an eyebrow. "The what now?"
Kharv turned toward him, clearly eager to explain. "You've never heard of it? Seriously?"
"I'm from a fringe world," Kali replied, shrugging. "We didn't get much news beyond what the local barons wanted us to hear."
"Fair," Kharv said, leaning against a pillar. "Alright, so... the extraplanetary shot, it's more myth than history, but every sniper knows it. It's like the holy grail of precision kills. Picture this, someone made a confirmed hit from a moon, almost nine hundred thousand klicks out, to a target on the surface of a planet."
Kali frowned, skeptical. "A shot through vacuum, between celestial bodies? That's—"
"Yup. Bullet took a full seven minutes to reach the target. They say it punched clean through the guy's ocular socket. Dead center."
Kali went quiet. He wasn't just skeptical, he was running the math in his head. Seven minutes at hypersonic velocity. Gravitational variance. Interbody drift. Orbital mechanics. Atmospheric re-entry. The shooter would've had to account for the planet's curvature, its spin, axial tilt, solar wind interference, Coriolis force, the deceleration curve upon impact with denser layers of atmosphere—
"That's impossible," he said flatly, voice low with disbelief.
Kharv just smirked. "That's the common reaction. But they say the rifle used was a Deus relic. Some old-world masterpiece, pre-collapse tech. The scope alone was supposedly godlike."
Kali stared at them, the weight of the story settling in his chest. Myth or not, it carved a shape in his mind. A peak. A concept of perfection. He didn't know why, but the idea of a shot like that called to him.
Brann slapped his armored gloves together. "Alright. We've digressed long enough."
He turned toward Kali. "We'll take you. You've got the calm and the bones of a professional. Meet us at Dock Bay 14 in an hour. We'll go over the plan in the drop shuttle. Bring what you need, this crew doesn't do hand-holding."
Kali gave a sharp nod. "Understood."
As the trio departed, Kharv called back, half-laughing, "And maybe one day you'll be the myth they whisper about."