Mana anticipated the feint, sidestepped, but the creature did not attack her. It swept past, snatched up the relay beacon, and—before she could even process the move—hurled it as far as it could into the rocks.

Mana watched the relay arc through the air, tracking its trajectory with cold precision. Her face remained impassive, only her eyes narrowing slightly as the device shattered against distant rock. A single exhaled breath, barely audible, was her only acknowledgment.

Fox muttered, "Tactical vandalism. Effective, if petty," but there was a trace of pride in his voice. "I'd have done the same thing."

Mana sheathed the katana. The weapon’s plasma edge collapsed with a musical chime, leaving the air smelling faintly of electricity. She squared her shoulders and approached the remaining Jäger, empty hands raised in a mockery of surrender.

The Jäger hesitated. Then, with a suddenness that startled her, it knelt, its throat vibrating with a sound like distant thunder. She could have ended it, but something in the posture—a vulnerability, a gesture of meaning—made her pause.

Fox's whisper, only for her: "It's offering surrender. Or communication. Either way, this isn't in the briefing. Command would want you to terminate, but..." A pause, his voice dropping even lower. "I think it's trying to tell us something. Your call, Chief."

Mana knelt as well, mirroring it. The Jäger cocked its head, watching, and slowly, carefully, set its claws against the ground in a pattern—one, then three, then two, then one. Mana frowned, translating the rhythm.

Mana watched the precise tapping of alien claws against stone, recognizing the rhythmic patterns of Kliktik—the percussive language Fox had briefed her on but she'd never witnessed firsthand. "It's speaking to us," she breathed, "actual Kliktik dialect."

Fox ran a quick translation. "It's saying 'bridge-entity,'" he replied, voice tight with concentration. "And something about... collective recognition? My Kliktik is rusty, but I think it's trying to tell us you're different from other humans they've encountered."

Mana stared at the creature. She reached out, palm open. The Jäger recoiled, but did not attack.

“Fox, if I die doing this, you have permission to say ‘I told you so.’”

She touched the armor plating. The surface was cold, ridged with microchannels. The Jäger's visor flickered, then locked on her face. She felt—not through her skin, but deep in the interface at the base of her skull—a wave of static. The world around her blurred; for a moment, she saw through the Jäger’s eyes, a vision of herself standing tall and luminous, surrounded by a corona of soft, blue-white fire.

The connection snapped. The Jäger jerked away and collapsed, motionless, at her feet.

Fox let the silence hang. Then, gently: "What did you see when you touched it, Mana? What did it show you about yourself?"

She shook herself, checking for wounds or sabotage. “Fine. They just… wanted to see me. Or maybe show me something.”

Fox said, more urgently, "Mana, we've got incoming. Two more signatures—bigger than the others. These are elites. Drop what you're doing and prepare for contact."

The first hit her before she saw it. A wall of impact, not sharp but overwhelming, like being hit by a speeding train made of muscle and rage. Mana tumbled, rolling with the blow, and came up with the katana blazing. The new Jäger was twice the mass of the others, armored in geometric plates that deflected her first strike. The blade sizzled against the shell, sending sparks into the wind.

The second one closed from the other side, flanking perfectly. Mana jumped, twisting midair to avoid claws aimed at her waist, and landed on the back of the first. She stabbed downward, seeking a gap in the armor.

The katana met resistance, then found the seam at the base of the neck. Mana drove it deep, using her full weight, and the beast shuddered and crashed forward. The other elite adapted immediately, grabbing for her legs. Mana kicked free, landing a glancing blow that sent her tumbling over the relay node.

She rolled, came up to one knee, and found herself staring into the flat, mirrored gaze of the elite.

Fox relayed the data in a burst. "Mana, these aren't standard Jäger—they're mimics. They've been studying our weapons, our tactics. The blade it's carrying? That's a perfect copy of your katana's energy signature. They're learning from you with every engagement."

Too late. The elite leveled a blade at her—a perfect twin to her own katana, only red as heart-blood. The energy hum vibrated in her bones. Mana's mind raced: mimics shouldn't be here, not in this sector. These were high-class adversaries, deployed only in contested zones sectors away from this backwater operation. Someone had changed the rules without telling her.

Mana blinked, once, and felt something inside her—fear, maybe, or awe.

“Fox?” she whispered.

The world narrowed until only the standoff remained: Mana, her plasma blade trembling with micro-oscillations, and the mimic-Jäger, which tilted its head in perfect harmony, its own blade pulsing an angry crimson. The light refracted from the scarred basalt and painted the entire scene in war-colors.

The hum inside her skull spiked. Fox, rapid and clinical now, abandoned metaphor. “Weapon core phasing at six megahertz above baseline. The energy signature—they have improved the capacitor cycling. Mana, assume the mimic will counter your standard sequence.”

Mana feinted left, but the Jäger didn’t bite, didn’t even twitch. Its mirrored blade tracked her, angle-for-angle. She clustered her options, ran through them, discarded most. Fox peppered her feed with new overlays—critical joints, likely weaknesses, calculated probabilities of success. None of them broke fifty percent.

“They’re using predictive vectors—modeling your previous engagements. Your past behaviors are now an exploit. Suggest rapid divergence from pattern.”

“On it,” she whispered, but her mouth was dry, tongue stuck to the roof.

The mimic advanced in increments of perfect geometry—three steps, pause, blade raised at an angle calculated to intercept her reach. Mana eased right, holding the katana with reversed grip. She’d never trained for this; she’d have to improvise and hope the lag time in their algorithm gave her just a crack.

Fox kept relaying updates, but they were granular, a data-snowfall she ignored except for the flashes of bold red—danger, predicted loss, imminent termination. If this was a test, she owed them a surprise.

Mana lunged, but instead of the expected strike, she dove low, catching herself on her left hand, flipping into an arcing kick. The mimic adjusted, parried her boot with its own reinforced tibia, redirected the force back into her. The shock rippled up through her armor, rattling her teeth. She spun with it, used the momentum to come up behind, but the mimic’s swatted her midsection, slamming her into the dust.

Her HUD howled with amber alerts. She rolled, bracing for the killing blow. It didn’t come.

Instead, the mimic crouched, as if studying her. The crystalline panel on its armor plating fluttered, then split to reveal a cluster of shimmering filaments—neural receivers, maybe, or organs for communication.

Fox's voice tightened with concentration. "I'm picking up a signal—complex waveform, nothing like standard Jäger protocols. It's broadcasting on at least sixteen channels simultaneously, but the signature..." A pause, the sound of his breath catching. "This isn't in our database. Whatever's watching through that thing, it's not just the hive we know."

The mimic shifted, recalibrating, sensor arrays flicking as it drank her in with those the dark visor. In her mind, Fox’s voice beat urgent and cold: “Mana. Kill it. Now.” No reason, no context, just that hard flatness she’d never heard from him before.

She stumbled upright, core burning, the katana still humming low in her grip. The space between her and the mimic stretched—one long, deliberate inhale. It waited for her.

But something else moved in her vision: the relay node, still blinking weakly. The second elite had circled, probably to cut off her exit, and was now moving in a low-bound sprint for the horizon, relay clamped in a vice. Not a weapon. The message.

Fox's voice sharpened. "Mana." Just her name. She went.

The mimic advanced, carving scarlet lines through the dust with every step, but Mana ducked under the swing of its twin blades. She felt the heat of plasma burn past her jaw, close enough to fuse the air. Instinct yanked her left, following the relay like a north star, while the mimic slashed through empty space behind her. She rolled, momentum carrying her up and over a basalt outcrop, then sprinted.

Pulse shrieking in her ears. The other elite had a full ten-meter lead, relay tucked like a precious egg—must have snatched it when the first one fell. No way to catch up—not with her leg half-numb from where the mimic's blade had grazed her, and the second Jäger closing in tight behind, its footfalls sending tremors through the basalt.

Fox said, “You have a shot. Take it.”

Mana dropped to one knee, braced against a cratered ridge, both hands clamped on the katana’s hilt. She switched modes—edge to lance—fine-tuned the core. She tasted copper, heat, and something sharp at the back of her throat. She’d never risked this shot outside the sim: trainers always screamed at her for abusing the high-voltage modes.

The elite vanished into a dust vortex, six heartbeats from escape.

Mana locked her limbs, found the relay’s outline through the haze—and threw.

The katana tore free with a hollow scream of blue-white light, splitting the air. She didn’t breathe. For a fraction of a second there was only that arc of brilliance, the ghost of Fox’s steadying hand in the dead-world range, and the certainty that what left her would not return.  

The blade struck the relay dead center, passed through the elite’s midsection, bisecting the armor with a pop of ozone and a spray of luminous ichor. Time stretched: the mimic froze, the relay spun, even the sound seemed to stall. Then the elite toppled, the relay clattering out as the katana buried half its length into the obsidian wall behind.

Fox exhaled sharply in her link. “You missed the primary by three centimeters. But it’ll do.”

Mana straightened and limped toward the wreckage. She wrenched her katana from the obsidian, the blade flickering back to life. The relay blinked, battered but alive; she scooped it up, still hot to the touch.

A second elite emerged at the ridge's far edge, already in retreat. Its silhouette shrank against the horizon with each bounding stride. Mana subvocalized her command.

"Fox, range."

Fox's voice streamed data like a targeting computer: "Distance: 1,243.7 meters and accelerating. Wind: 5.2 m/s from 315°. Target velocity: 48 km/h and climbing—49—51—it's hitting sprint mode. Ambient temp: -14 °C. Barometric pressure: 98.7 kPa. Recalculating... Distance now 1,267 meters. Target lead: 0.74 degrees right. Compensate minus 0.03 for Coriolis. You have a three-second window before it breaks line of sight."

Mana's Nexus pistols hovered in her vision. She exhaled, calibrated the micro-adjusters at her hips, and drew them in one fluid motion so blindingly fast it felt telepathic.

She squeezed the triggers. The world narrowed to two pinpoint flares of violet-gold. The rounds punched through the swirling dust, arcing perfectly over the crater rim. At 1.24 kilometers they struck together—one in the chest cavity, the other through the neck joint—vaporizing the elite’s neural cluster in a shimmer of energy. Its head snapped back, visor fracturing in a blossom of sparks, then it crumpled without a sound.

Fox’s voice came low, edged with…question? “Nice shot. Relay is secure. Extraction in two minutes.”

Mana dropped to one knee, breathing hard, the copper tang thick on her tongue and she turned to the last survivor.

It stood just beyond the flare of her muzzle flash, blade folded at its side. It did not charge; a low rumble escaped its throat, almost…hesitant. Mana’s grip tightened.

The Jäger made a simple gesture—two claws together, then pointed at its fallen kin, then at her. Slow. Deliberate.

Fox went silent.

The elite crouched by the first body and, with an alien gentleness, drew a looping glyph in the dust: two circles intertwined, pulsing faintly under the UV glow of her HUD. Mana's breath caught. Twin circles, one inside the other, connected by three precise lines that pulsed with faint bioluminescence. The exact configuration from Lab 7's sealed files—the symbol that jolted her awake at 0300 hours, sheets soaked with sweat, the word "Eden" frozen on her lips.

Mana watched, heart hammering. The creature she’d trained to kill was painting a memorial.

She lowered her pistol, dust erasing footprints, the relay beacon cold in her palm. The Jäger remained kneeling by its sigil, head bowed,a sound like metal cooling after fire escaped its throat.

"Fox," she whispered. "What is it doing?"

"Kill it." Fox's voice cut through static. "Now."

Mana raised her pistol. The alien's sensor clusters reflected the weapon's muzzle. It didn't flinch. Didn't run.

Her finger tightened on the trigger. The shot echoed across the barren landscape—clean, through the neural cluster. The elite collapsed beside its own memorial, limbs folding neatly like a paper doll.

Fox went silent, then: "Extraction ETA ninety seconds."

Mana pressed the relay to the ground, green light blinking alive beneath her fingers. Her free hand found the seam of her chestplate—three traces right, three traces left, the rhythm as familiar as breathing. The wind howled, dust swirling around her boots.