“I think I can take it, let’s give it a shot.”

  Soren stood in the forest of AE-2045 that surrounded The Cradle, providing security from the planet’s Aether infused beasts. The team had been on duty constantly, working in rotating shifts—today he was with Amalia. She had been putting in serious work to build more endurance after Riza gave NMW to her.

  Soren wanted to see if he could channel Aether Dust to form some sort of personal barrier—and there was no better test than that sniper cannon to see how durable the shield might be.

  “You think?” Amalia looked up at him with an amused but skeptical expression. “This baby isn’t really something you roll the dice with.”

  She wasn’t exactly wrong, but she turned and started walking away to find a vantage point anyway.

  Six days had passed since they'd discovered The Cradle, and the Liberty Union had turned The Professor’s once hidden research compound into a full-blown occupation zone. Mountains of research and technology had been recovered—singularity inducing graviton explosives, personal armor possibilities similar to the body of the Conservatory soldier Veolo had carried off of Piria.

  And personal shielding plans—which gave Soren this idea.

  It had taken him a couple days to figure out how to even generate a barrier around him. Since Aether Dust affected gravity, he realized he was effectively creating a sphere around himself of pure gravity—it wasn’t something physical, it was a literal field of force that kept things out. But just like a ship overcoming gravity to launch into space, if the field wasn’t strong enough, things could break through.

  So he needed practice.

  Soren took a deep breath and set his feet.

  He raised his hands, palms out, and the light around him started to subtly bend. A pressure dome formed outward from his body in all directions, dense enough to push away loose dirt and lift a few scattered leaves off the ground. His breath caught in his throat as he stabilized the barrier—he could feel the subtle buzzing as the Aether Dust channeled throughout his body.

  And he began to glow.

  A heartbeat passed.

  Riza’s mythological scoped cannon shot slugs the size of the average human forearm. And like most guns, the projectiles moved faster than the speed of sound—in this case much faster.

  So Soren never even heard Amalia shoot.

  One instant, he held a sphere of Aether Dust fueled gravity around him.

  The next instant he felt like he’d been punched in the chest by a collapsing star. The round slammed into his sternum and launched him backward like a ragdoll.

  He flew through the air so fast he didn’t even remember hitting the first two trees. The third exploded in a spray of bark and splinters and the fourth at least bent before cracking in half as he went through it. The fifth tree finally stopped his momentum, and he hung in the air for half a second before falling face down into the dirt.

  His back had gone numb and something in his shoulder felt just… wrong.

  Everything felt silent for a while.

  Then he slowly groaned.

  “Fuuuuck…” He let out a ragged breath, rolled over, and looked up at the sky. The sunlight filtering through the branches above wasn’t blinding, just distant—like light from a world he wasn’t quite touching anymore. His ribs hurt. His shoulder hurt worse. But he could still breathe.

  Amalia’s hooves crunched as she jogged up next to him. “Soren?!”

  He forced a response out. “Ow.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “You flew pretty damn far.”

  “How did you find me then?”

  “Well you went through like…” she turned and counted for a moment. “Like five big ass trees. And you’re lit up like a fucking beacon—they can probably see your hair from orbit.”

  That made sense. It didn’t make it hurt any less—but it made sense. In addition to his superhuman abilities, the Aether Dust seemed to keep him alive if he took any sort of damage.

  But he still felt all the pain.

  Soren started trying to stand, rolling back over and bracing a hand on his knee.

  Amalia moved to put a hand under his shoulder to help pick him up, but then she exclaimed, “Holy shit, why the fuck are you so heavy?!”

  She didn’t let up, groaning and face going red as she heaved his weight upward.

  Soren rose up, shaky but managing to stay on his feet. “Elias had a hypothesis,” he said, rolling out his shoulder. “He said that the Aether Dust is likely making my cells more dense, so they weigh more.”

  Amalia stared up at him, her mouth a flat line. “You are kind of dense.”

  Soren’s eyes narrowed at the jest and he just sarcastically said, “Ha ha.”

  He took a breath and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm the cosmic power surging through him.

  “Hey wait!” Amalia said.

  “Hm?” Soren opened his burning white eyes.

  “Didn’t Veolo say you almost flew on Piria? And you hovered a bit in Altina.”

  Soren nodded.

  “Well, have you tried it again recently?” Amalia tilted her head slightly to the side.

  “Well no, but I’m… just trying to figure out this barrier. One thing at a time.”

  Amalia stared at him, wide-eyed and deadpan. “Maybe you can hold yourself up better than you can hold up a barrier.”

  “You know,” Soren started, raising one finger like he was scolding a child.

  “What?” she challenged playfully.

  He just sighed. “Nothing.” He started turning to walk away.

  Arguing with Amalia felt like arguing with a little sister that kept blasting him with happy energy until he finally gave up.

  “Well if you’re not going to make yourself float, can I at least try?!”

  Soren turned back to look at her. “You want me to intentionally use my gravity powers on you? Have you not seen me crumple the beasts around here like a wad of paper?”

  Amalia pouted a little. “It’s not fair! Violet got to try! And Riza! And Aura! It’s like everyone gets to except me!”

  Soren couldn’t help but chuckle. He let the glow fade from him finally. “You make it sound like I’m a carnival ride.”

  “Veolo seems to think so,” Amalia’s face went smug as they started walking back out of the forest.

  “Can you… can you not? I get enough reminders about how she feels about me without you piling it on.”

  “Ooooh, poor Soren,” Amalia teased. “Trapped on a space adventure with a harem of sexy babes.”

  Soren just rolled his eyes. “Is it really a harem if I’m not having sex with anyone?”

  “Hmm,” Amalia shrugged. “I’m not sure. Harem is kind of a foreign concept to lacravida. Hey—”

  She looked around as they walked along. “Is it just me, or are there less of those creatures around today?”

  “No, not just you,” Soren answered. “Inelius and I noticed less yesterday too, I think they’ve wisened up to the fact they keep dying if they come close to the complex.”

  They crested a bluff, catching sight of the main landing ring for the LU. A transport drone zipped overhead and disappeared into the sky. Below it, a handful of armored personnel moved between temporary research shelters, hauling sealed cases of tech that hadn’t seen daylight in millennia.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Smart monsters,” Amalia said as they kept walking.

  “Monsters?”

  “Yeah, they sort of remind me of the monsters in this book I’ve been reading.” Amalia’s voice was chipper as always. “It’s got these nasty irradiated critters that seem like a bunch of nightmares pulled inside-out by their assholes and smashed together to make an even worse nightmare.”

  Soren recoiled slightly. “Holy fuck, Amalia. What type of horror stories have you been reading?”

  “What do you mean?” She looked up at him innocently. “It’s a romance.”

  They made their way over to a shuttle that was preparing to return to The Bastion of Libertas and hopped aboard, finding a place to settle amongst the cargo. The ships had been coming and going non-stop since the first day, not even slowed by nighttime on account of the planet’s equilibrious location between two suns.

  They’d even recovered the mysterious ship found inside The Cradle—but the LU troops had to move it the hard way.

  After 48 straight hours of techs failing to get any response out of the ship, Admiral Marrow had ordered the hangar doors blown open. A network of tethers and low-orbit haulers had dragged the ship out like the husk of some dead god.

  It now sat nestled deep in one of the Bastion of Libertas’ cargo bays under constant watch—still not entirely understood.

  Soren had visited it once since the relocation. Standing near it made his skin buzz. Not in the way Aether Dust normally did—this wasn’t a hum of potential or power. It felt like the ship was watching him back.

  According to the Commandant, it would be taken to Libertas—the LU’s capital planet—for extended analysis and storage.

  But Riza wanted that thing understood before they left the planet.

  Tamiyo, Raine, and Brana had made themselves indispensable. They’d shadowed the LU engineers from day one—offering help, patching interfaces, mapping the ship’s internal architecture faster than anyone else on-site. They didn’t ask for permission. They just inserted themselves until the tech teams started treating them like part of the department.

  And now, what no one knew outside of the dozen souls focused on saving Nox, was that the ship had started responding to them.

  “Eep!” Amalia let out a startled cry as the shuttle suddenly shifted and began its ascension.

  The Cradle quickly grew smaller below them, and in a few short minutes, they would be docked back aboard the Commandant’s massive flagship.

  “Hey,” Amalia said in a curious tone. “I have a question.”

  Soren turned his gaze from the window to look at her. “Shoot.”

  “How is it that they’re finding all of these plans down there like blueprints for singularity grenades and Aether based shielding tech?”

  Soren’s brow furrowed slightly. “I don’t follow.”

  “Well isn’t this place like, thousands of years old? Some of this gear looks almost identical to the gear the Conservatory was using when we fought them, and that stuff definitely seemed cutting edge. I guess… like, the timelines don’t add up in my brain.”

  “Ooooh,” Soren said. Even before the transformation, he’d been working around Aether Dust long enough he sometimes forgot how foreign it was to most people.

  “Well, let’s see how to best explain it…” Soren’s hand went to his chin as he thought.

  “You know how DNA helps understand and develop medicine?”

  Amalia nodded bright-eyed.

  “Well it’s not like there was just no medicine before those things were discovered. There was a lot of trial and error. From what I’ve gathered, most of Aether Dust tech today works the same way early medicine did before anyone understood cells.”

  “Wait, so the Conservatory has just been fumbling around in the dark for seven millenia? Just throwing noodles at the wall to see what sticks?”

  “Very likely,” Soren chuckled. “It’s dangerous guesswork to reverse engineer without knowing what you’re even looking at. The Professor was a bit of a mad genius when it came to Aether Dust, so he was able to churn out a ton of technology during his lifetime. Then the galaxy got to stare at his paintings when he died and decipher what they meant.”

  Amalia just responded, “Hm,” thoughtfully, but yielded from asking any further questions.

  The shuttle touched down aboard The Bastion of Libertas with a soft thrum. As Soren and Amalia stepped off the ramp and onto the polished flooring of the flagship’s hangar bay, a wave of cool washed over them.

  A message was waiting for Soren with the deck officer, the Commandant wanted to talk with them.

  “Does it request me by name?” Amalia asked, peering over at the tablet.

  “Uhh, no,” Soren said. “It does not specifically say ‘Amalia’.”

  “Heheh,” she let out a gremlin-like chuckle. “Have fun, Glow Stick, I’m gonna go take a nap.”

  She skipped toward the elevator without even waiting for him to respond.

  Soren sighed with a small smile and handed the tablet back to the deck officer. As he rode a separate lift out of the hangar, he leaned back against the wall and let his head rest for a moment. Eyes closed, the hum of the ship’s systems vibrated faintly through the soles of his boots. When the doors slid open, he stepped out onto one of the upper administrative decks and followed the signs to the command center—a trip that took almost ten minutes on account of how damn big the ship was.

  The moment Soren walked in, he could tell something was off.

  Riza was there, reclined slightly in an officer’s chair—posture powerful but relaxed like she owned the place. Aurania stood tall on the left side of the room, one hand on her hip in that way Soren had come to know she was thinking or negotiating. Inelius stood to the right, both sets of arms crossed and brow furrowed.

  “You’re leaving?” Inelius asked, then turned and nodded as he caught sight of Soren.

  “Yes,” the Commandant answered, sitting in his chair like a throne. His fingers were steepled in thought. “I need to report these drastic findings to my superiors so they can decide how best to announce it to the public.”

  “And where does that leave us?” Inelius was sounding strangely defiant. He was still respectful, but his tone had an edge to it.

  Carnasi was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You all have a decision to make. As of this morning, we’ve completed the first full-stage data sweep of The Cradle’s recovered archives. No significant developments yet regarding gravitational stabilization systems of planetary scale. We are, however, continuing deeper-level decoding.”

  Riza was glaring daggers at him. “So no sign of anything resembling a Graviton Anchor.”

  Carnasi hesitated. “Not yet.”

  Soren felt something twist in his gut, but he didn’t speak. He took a place near Aurania without even thinking about it—it was just where he felt comfortable.

  “If you would like to remain behind and wait to hopefully find more information, you are welcome to do so.” The Commandant continued. “But The Bastion will depart in three days to return the recovered ship and high-value data stores to Libertas, as well as inform Parliament of the cultural discoveries we’ve made here. A substantial detachment will remain behind to secure the site and assist with continued research.”

  Almost imperceptible, Aurania recoiled slightly. “This star system does not fall under Liberty Union jurisdiction.”

  “It does now.” The Commandant’s tone was a little too firm.

  Soren’s jaw tightened. It sounded less like a defense plan—and more like a land grab. Like watching a body be claimed before the heart had stopped beating. He knew it was necessary, but he didn’t like how much it felt like conquering.

  “What we’ve uncovered here is simply too sensitive,” Carnasi continued. “We simply cannot risk this technology falling into Conservatory hands. A permanent presence will be required to prevent that outcome.”

  Soren glanced sideways at Riza and caught the tight clench of her jaw. She let out a small tch, then muttered, “I knew it.”

  Carnasi narrowed his eyes. “You care to elaborate?” He and Riza were friends, but they each seemed to be throwing daggers at one another with their tones.

  Riza’s brow drew even tighter. “I was hoping I was fucking wrong. But somehow I knew the politicians were going to bail on us eventually. Nox isn’t part of the Liberty Union, so now that they’ve gotten some use out of us, we’re left on our own to figure it out.”

  Carnasi’s tone stiffened. “You know it’s more complicated than that.”

  “Of course it is,” she said, gaze full of venom. “Everything’s always complicated when you need an excuse.”

  She shifted in her seat, changing the subject like it hadn’t even happened. “This system’s dangerously close to Conservatory territory. You’re not worried about provoking open conflict?”

  Carnasi gave a slight shake of his head. “It’s a risk, yes. But we’re not unprepared. The Conservatory’s weakness is the scale of their empire—they’re spread thin to maintain control. They can’t afford to over-commit to any single operation.”

  “The same could be said about the Liberty Union,” Inelius said. “Doesn’t leaving this many ships here leave other fronts exposed?”

  Carnasi didn’t bristle, but his response came faster this time. “We’ve accounted for all variables. The strategic calculus has been reviewed. This is the correct deployment of resources.”

  Then he looked directly at Soren for a long moment—before sweeping his gaze across all of them. “But none of that is your concern. What you need to decide is what you plan to do. You’re welcome to stay here and continue your search. Or you may travel with The Bastion and continue research on Libertas. Either way, we’ll continue to assist you as best we can.”

  The best they can.

  A diplomatic response that promised nothing. A polite way of saying ‘you’re not our priority anymore.’

  He didn’t say anything, but his mind was already turning.

  If The Cradle really held the answers to saving Nox, then every second that passed without a breakthrough was another nail in the coffin.

  Riza must’ve been thinking the same thing. She let the silence linger for a few beats, then let out a breath.

  “Kade,” she stood from her seat, movements deliberate. “I apologize for the tone earlier. I do appreciate the Liberty Union’s support up to this point. Your people have been helpful, and your hospitality has been generous.”

  Carnasi didn’t interrupt—he seemed cautious now, sensing something beneath her shift in tone.

  “I know we’ve been a bit... volatile,” Riza added, with a slight smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “So if it’s alright, I’d like to do something to give back to your troops before we part ways.”

  She glanced at the others. “As much as the spotlight may bug me, I can’t say I don’t appreciate the reverence the Liberty Union military holds for me. If we’re truly going to part ways in three days, I’d like the chance to say goodbye. Maybe some sort of send-off. Something small.”

  The entire room went quiet. Even Aurania gave her a sidelong glance.

  Carnasi’s head tilted as he looked at her—analyzing. “You’re requesting... a farewell ceremony?”

  “Something like that,” Riza said, all grace now. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been an official part of the military, but I’ve served alongside many that are still active. I don’t want something grand for people to honor me. I want to say goodbye to them.”

  There was a long pause.

  Then, almost reluctantly, Carnasi gave a slow nod. “Very well. I’ll speak with operations and arrange something.”

  But as they made their way out of the Commandant’s command center, Soren felt tension so thick he could cut through it with a knife.

  Something about Riza’s request felt off.

  And Carnasi felt it too.

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