A planetless night cloaked the approach vector, save for the prickling blue haze of the Crystalbound Frontier. Mana had never liked this part of space. Even from orbit, the starlight looked sick. Her pod peeled away from the cold belly of the corvette, silent and invisible save for a brief speck on the enemy’s hundredth decimal of passive sensors. No one would spot her. No one, unless they were already looking in all the wrong ways.

The drop lasted less than a minute. On reentry, a quick melt of the outer hull glazed her viewport with streaks of black glass, obscuring the sickly shimmer below. Her helmet’s auto-polarize failed to filter it out. She blinked against the afterimage and did not reach for the Halo chip still zipped into her inner pocket. There were no checkpoints here, no clever lines for the next performance review—just the job, and the voice in her ear.

“The drop is within acceptable parameters, M-137," Fox said. His voice was steady in her ear, a metronome against the violent shuddering of the pod. If he felt any discomfort at her speed or altitude, he did not show it.

The surface approached with the usual violence. Gravity here was a memory at best, more gesture than law, so the final meters felt more like a slow fall and a sharp scrape than a crash. She kicked open the pod hatch and stepped onto the dry, high-iron crust, boots skidding as the impact dust settled around her.

“Nice landing,” Fox said, his voice warming by a few degrees in her earpiece. “Four centimeters off the marker, but I doubt your hosts will mind.”

Mana scanned the horizon. Flat, gray, featureless—until she toggled thermal and the world bloomed: faint veins of buried machinery, a cold spot that hinted at a centuries-dead reactor, and, dead ahead, the outpost itself—a skeletal pucker in the ground, outlined with the stuttering blue of what might have once been a forcefield.

“Abandoned Jäger outpost?” she said, checking the coordinates. “You sure?”

“Visual overlays from three different recon satellites confirm it,” Fox replied. “Intel says the base was lost to internal sabotage three weeks ago. No signals traffic since.”

Mana started down the slope, her suit’s claws gripping the metallic soil with reassuring bite. The sky above flickered—no stars, only the refracted glare from the crystal drift that ringed the whole sector. Once or twice, she thought she glimpsed movement in the haze, but the sensors were clear, and she knew better than to trust her own eyes after a month of forced quarantine.

Mana tapped her helmet mic. "Fox, talk to me," she said, out loud. Not because she needed the words, but because the silence had grown too close, pressing against her suit like the metallic soil beneath her boots.

Fox obliged, no hesitation. “You’re looking for anomaly signatures. If the Jäger have started integrating Kollektiven tech, it will show as a low-level resonance—audio, or more likely RF. Standard sweeps on entry. If you see anything…weird, use the helmet’s scan-and-push. And do not, under any circumstances, let a foreign node touch your Core.”

“I like my Core as it is,” Mana said. The joke rang hollow.

The approach trench was narrower than expected, the sides caked with half-melted slag. Her HUD painted routes in green and yellow: best path, least risk, minimum exposure. As she moved, the overlays built a structural schematic. She ducked under a collapsed archway, into the first antechamber.

The walls were gone, replaced by frozen ribs of composite and torn reinforcement mesh. Most outposts looked like this by the end—hacked up, torn open by their own automated defenses, then abandoned for the next inevitable recon. At least a dozen corpses lined the entryway, some still in half-melted armor, others stripped clean by fire or acid.

Mana swept her gaze across the twisted metal. "Why would they strip their own dead? Jäger don't salvage tech from the fallen," she asked, flicking her own scanner to wideband.

Fox: “Running a sweep. Hold a sec.”

Mana crouched by a corpse, pushing aside the armor with a boot. The helmet was fused shut, but the signature on the neckplate read: OBERJÄGER K-239, SQUADRON 5. She logged the data and moved on. In the next room, she found the first of the blue growths.

The crystal pulsed faintly in the dark, like a heart murmur. The growth emerged from a crack in the wall, extending in fractal splinters across the floor and ceiling. At first glance it looked like glass, but when she tapped it with her gauntlet, the crystal responded—a low, tremulous hum that set her teeth on edge. She scanned it, sent the result to Fox.

“Confirmed,” he said, a note of awe in his tone. “That’s Kollektiven architecture. But it’s interfaced to a Jäger neural substrate. See the filaments? It’s not even a patchwork. More like…a seamless interface.”

Mana’s visor magnified the node. Inside, she saw minute traces of circuitry—bio-wetware, like her own, but wrong. The color was all off, electric blue and purple, even under false light.

Softer than before, but distinct: "You're fine. It can't interface with your Core without physical contact. But it's..." Fox trailed off. His bandwidth flickered with the subtle static that always came when he was running parallel analyses. "Command's gonna lose their minds. This isn't just adaptation—it's evolution. The crystal's restructuring the Jäger neural architecture at the quantum level."

The air grew heavier, as if the whole outpost was exhaling through a pinched throat. Static sizzled along the walls, the ionization picking up with every step. By the time she reached the first security door, her HUD was almost unreadable, so thick was the overlay with Fox’s streaming analysis and her own scan results.

She palmed the door open. No traps, just more carnage: what must have once been a security checkpoint now packed wall-to-wall with the frozen dead, many of them Jäger, but some—her stomach turned—augmented humans in heavy black.

Fox: “Mana, that’s a dead Internal Security team. I’m reading their ciphers. They weren’t here when the outpost fell. They came after.”

Mana recognized the tactical patches. “They sent in a clean-up. Didn’t go well.”

“Looks like the Jäger rigged the whole entry with cryo charges. There’s no heat left. No sign of any living network.”

Mana navigated the bodies, stepping carefully to avoid contaminating the scene. She counted two, maybe three survivors—judging by the blood trails leading deeper. She followed, passing through a corridor where the crystal growths began to multiply. They weren’t random, she realized. Each sprouting followed the lines of the architecture, as if the outpost itself were being rewired, from the inside out.

“Still want to bet this is just a random spike?” Mana asked, her voice low.

“No bet,” Fox replied. “Updating mission parameters. If the Kollektiven are reanimating Jäger tech, we need a sample. Find the source, and get out clean. I want you back in one piece.”

She could have laughed, but didn’t. Fox’s version of tenderness always came laced with new horrors.

The outpost curved downward, the air thickening with each meter. She moved in silence, save for the crunch of glassy dust under her boots. On the next landing, her HUD flagged movement ahead.

Mana dropped to a knee, drawing her sidearm and toggling helmet optics to active scan. The corridor was empty, but her sensors disagreed.

She waited, slow-breathing the tension out. Then, from the far end, a ripple—a shadow, something bipedal but not human, flanked by two smaller forms. They glided rather than walked, every movement exact, rehearsed.

She recognized the silhouette instantly: Jäger. Three of them, moving in a wedge formation.

But these were not the standard breed. Their armor was partially peeled away, replaced by exoskeletal plating of the same blue-purple crystal, veins of it snaking up their limbs and across the exposed skulls. They moved with a unity that the old Jäger never had, and as they advanced, the crystals pulsed—alive, responsive, beating in time with their steps.

Mana froze, not out of fear, but because there was nothing in the training, nothing in any database, for this. She let her helmet record, focusing in on the leader. Even at this distance, she could see the micro-movements, the way its head cocked and eyes glinted, the subtle shudder through its shoulder plates when it tasted the air.

Fox whispered, “Mana…record everything. Full data dump. Do not engage unless necessary.”

She flicked her helmet cam to live feed, set the suit to passive EM, and waited for instructions.

The Jäger stopped, less than twenty meters from her. The two in the rear spread out, flanking. The leader advanced, then paused—directly in the cone of her scan.

For a long moment, nothing moved.

Mana’s mind counted out the ways this could end. None of them were good.

Fox: “Mana, if it moves, drop it. But if it signals, observe. This may be an attempt at—”

The Jäger leader did something she’d never seen: it raised its right arm, palm out, and slowly rotated it, exposing the inside of the forearm. There, fused into the flesh and armor, was a cluster of the blue crystals—pulsing, arranged in a spiral, not unlike a neural port.

Mana’s Core prickled at the sight, a pressure behind her eyes.

She raised her own arm, mimicked the gesture.

The Jäger didn’t attack. Instead, it lowered its arm, turned, and with a sharp, birdlike nod, signaled to the others. They vanished down the side corridor, smooth as water on glass.

Mana waited until the threat overlay faded, then exhaled, her breath fogging the inside of her visor.

Fox came through, voice urgent and low. “I’ve seen the feed. This is above P0. We need a sample of the node. Proceed with caution, and if you get a chance to snag a fragment—”

“Copy,” Mana said. She was already moving.