The words hung in the dead air of the comms room, an impossible, world-breaking pronouncement.
A crashed Imperial starship.
Then, static. The connection was gone.
Himari's hand, which had been a white-knuckled fist on the console, went slack. A strange, tingling numbness spread up her arm, as if the limb had fallen asleep. She stared at the speaker grille, the source of the impossible words, as if it had just cursed her in a dead language. The low, monotonous hum of the fortress's power systems seemed to warp, twisting into the sound of a slow, deep, alien breathing. The air, which a moment ago had smelled of burnt dust and ozone, now seemed thick with the scent of a thousand-year-old tomb. Stale. Forgotten. Utterly, fundamentally wrong.
A ship.
Her mind, which had been a frantic battlefield of tactics and fear, went utterly, terrifyingly blank. The carefully constructed reality of her world—a world of kings and magic, of Weavers and the Locus, of a history written in stone and steel—crumbled into dust. A silent, catastrophic implosion. The stories of the Star-Fallen, the divine beings who descended from the heavens a millennium ago to found her entire civilization… they weren't gods. They weren't even divine. They were just… survivors. Castaways. Like Haruto. Like Akane and Sakura. Her entire culture, her religion, her lineage, the divine right of her family to rule… all of it. Built on the wreckage of a forgotten accident.
A lie.
A wave of dizziness so profound washed over her that she had to grip the edge of the console to keep from falling. Her knuckles were white against the dark metal. Her father. His secrecy. His fear when he spoke of the Locus. He must have known. He had been the Duke of Silverwood before the traitor, before the coup. He had held the keys to this… this lie. Was this the burden that had crushed him? This terrible, cosmic joke? She wanted to laugh. Or scream. Or vomit. She did none of those things. She just stood there, her knuckles now digging into the cold console, a silent, screaming statue in the heart of a dead man's fortress.
"What… what does that mean?" Sato, the young tech, whispered the question into the crushing quiet. He wasn't looking at her. He was staring at the subterranean map, at the glowing red icon that no longer represented a magical heart, but a metal coffin. "A ship?"
Himari didn't have an answer. All she had were questions, a million of them, each one sharper and more painful than the last, tearing through the quiet vacuum of her mind.
The comm crackled, a sharp, angry sound that shattered the fragile stillness. It was Akane's voice, strained, breathless, punctuated by the high-energy snap-hiss of plasma fire from her end. The sound of the battle was a brutal, physical intrusion.
"Command, status! We're drawing Weavers to the market square. I count at least four. They're… they're adapting. Using the architecture for cover. We're pinned. I need to know what Haruto's doing. We can't hold this position for another ten minutes. We can't even hold it for another five."
The immediate, life-or-death reality of Akane's voice was a bucket of ice water poured over Himari's head. The existential crisis would have to wait. Her people were dying now.
She grabbed her own comm, her hand strangely steady, the shaking having given way to a stark, rigid control. "Akane, what do you need?"
"An exit!" Akane grunted. A nearby explosion made the transmission distort into a burst of static, a sound like tearing metal. "—need a new route. They've cut off our path back to the west. They're herding us. Towards the old aqueduct access point."
"That's a kill box," Himari said, her eyes flying across the tactical map, her mind forcing itself back into the cold, brutal logic of the fight. The Weavers weren't just attacking; they were thinking, coordinating, using the city's layout against them.
"Yeah, I know," Akane's voice came back, a dry, ragged rasp. "That's why I need you to find me a way through it. A sewer line, a collapsed building, a goddamn chimney. Anything. Now."
"Working," Himari said, her fingers a blur on the console. The larger truth could wait. Survival came first. Always.
The silence in the aqueduct was a different kind of terrible. It was a wet, dripping, rot-scented quiet, thick with the weight of the mountain above and the impossible truth Haruto had just spoken. Kaito was staring at the impossible, perfect blast door, his face a pale, slack mask of disbelief. Riku, in contrast, had moved to the door and was running a gloved hand over the seamless alloy, his head tilted in a gesture of cool, analytical curiosity.
"A ship," Kaito finally whispered, the words a puff of white vapor in the frigid air. "Like… like the Icarus?"
"Older," Haruto said, his own voice a low growl. The shock was already hardening in his gut, crystallizing into a cold, sharp-edged fury. This wasn't just a discovery. It was a desecration. The Duke hadn't just found a source of power. He had broken into an Imperial tomb. He had been robbing the graves of Haruto's own people. "Much, much older."
He approached the biometric scanner, the soft blue light an infuriatingly calm beacon in the dark. This changed everything. His mission was no longer about helping a princess reclaim her throne. This was about purging a heresy. This was about reclaiming a piece of the Empire.
"What are you doing?" Kaito hissed as Haruto reached for the panel. "We need to go! We need to help Akane!"
"We help Akane by getting this door open," Haruto said without turning. He looked at the scanner. Biometric. It would be keyed to the ship's original crew. A specific genetic signature. A command-level officer's neural implant. He had neither. But he had a standard Imperial officer's access codes. A long shot. But the only shot he had.
"Akari, access my service record," he said, his voice a low murmur. "Isolate my genetic marker and my officer-rank command codes. Interface with the scanner. Attempt a handshake protocol using a priority-one distress signal override. Designation: sole survivor, callsign Icarus."
The blue light on the scanner flickered. It shifted to a soft amber. A series of clicks and whirs echoed from within the door, the sound of ancient machinery stirring from a long, deep slumber.
Kaito gasped. "It's working."
The amber light held for three point seven seconds. Then it flashed a deep, angry red. A new sound filled the tunnel. Not a siren. Worse. A synthesized, female voice, speaking in the crisp, formal cadence of the Imperial navy. The sound of it, so familiar and yet so out of place, made the hair on Haruto's neck stand on end.
"Oh, hell," Riku said from beside the door, his voice a flat, deadpan statement of fact. It was the first sign of emotion—if it could be called that—Haruto had ever heard from him. It sounded like mild annoyance.
The hum from behind the door deepened, rising in pitch. Heavy, metallic thuds echoed from within, the sound of locking mechanisms engaging. Or, Haruto realized with a sudden, cold spike of dread, disengaging.
"Haruto, what did you do?" Kaito's voice was high with panic.
"I woke it up," Haruto said. He took a step back from the door, raising his carbine. His mind was already working the next angle. The security protocol. What would it be? Automated turrets? Sentry drones? A containment field? He didn't know. This ship was a ghost, a black box of forgotten technology and unknown variables.
He didn't have to wait long.
A section of the stone wall to their left, a section he had thought was solid rock, began to grind inwards. Not a door. The wall itself. It split apart with a sound of tortured, groaning rock, revealing a dark, perfectly square opening where none had been a moment before. From the blackness within, two points of red light flickered to life.
A low, mechanical growl echoed down the tunnel, a sound that vibrated up from the floor, through his boots, and settled as a cold, heavy weight in his gut. Something heavy was coming. Something made of metal.
"Contact," Haruto said, his voice dropping into the familiar, cold cadence of combat. "Kaito, right flank. Riku, left. On my mark."
He could feel it now, the vibration through the soles of his boots. The rhythmic, stomping tread of a machine built for one purpose. The tunnel, which had felt claustrophobic and dangerous before, now felt like a tomb. A trap they had just willingly sprung on themselves. The Duke hadn't needed to guard this place. The ship was guarding itself. And they had just knocked on the front door.
The machine stepped out of the newly-formed doorway, its hydraulic systems hissing like a nest of angry serpents. It was humanoid, just over two meters tall, with a bulky, slate-gray chassis that was pitted and scarred by time but showed no sign of rust. Its head was a single, smooth plate of armor with the two glowing red optics set deep within. One of its arms ended in a multi-barreled rotary cannon; the other in a massive, pincer-like claw that flexed open and closed, the sound of grinding metal echoing down the tunnel.
"Mark-II Security Automaton," Haruto breathed, the words tasting of dust and disbelief. A museum piece. A relic. The kind of thing they used for garrison duty on backwater asteroids a generation ago. Obsolete. Slow. And, in the claustrophobic confines of this tunnel, one of the most dangerous things he had ever seen.
"Kaito, right flank, thirty meters back. Find cover and draw its fire. Do not engage directly," Haruto's voice was the calm, clipped cadence of command, a voice he hadn't used in what felt like a lifetime. It was a stranger in his own throat. "Riku, left. Target the leg actuators. It's old, the joint armor will be its weakest point. On my mark."
The automaton's red eyes fixed on them. Its cannon began to spin, a high-pitched whine that drilled into their ears.
"Mark!"
The world dissolved into a storm of noise and violence.
Haruto dove left, his shoulder slamming into the slimy stone wall as the automaton's cannon roared to life. The sound was not a gunshot; it was a physical concussion, a deafening, continuous BRRRRRRRT that hammered the air from his lungs. A stream of white-hot plasma bolts tore through the space where he had been standing, striking the far wall and exploding in a series of brilliant, blinding flashes. The tunnel filled with the smell of ozone and superheated steam as the water on the floor vaporized instantly. The heat was a physical blow, baking the moisture from his skin.
He landed in a crouch behind a curve in the tunnel wall, his ears ringing. Riku was already firing, his carbine spitting precise, single shots. The plasma bolts struck the automaton's right leg with a sharp crack, showering the tunnel with sparks. The machine's armor held. It didn't even flinch. It simply turned its torso with a low groan of ancient metal, its red eyes fixing on Riku's position.
"Kaito, now!" Haruto yelled over the ringing in his ears.