She followed the corridor the Jäger had taken, careful to step only where the pressure plates registered safe. The walls here were more crystal than metal; it was like walking through the inside of a frozen thundercloud. Sometimes she thought she heard voices, but when she paused, there was only silence and the faint tick of her own heartbeat.

She found a stairwell leading deeper. The temperature dropped. Ahead, she could see the faint blue halo of what was probably a generator, or maybe a control center, running on Kollektiven power.

At the base of the stairs, she found a chunk of the crystal, freshly torn from a wall. She scanned it, then, with a gloved hand, snapped it free. It pulsed in her palm, warm and almost…alive.

Fox: “Bring it home, Mana.”

As she tucked the crystal into her sample pouch, she felt the faintest flicker of motion behind her. She spun, weapon ready.

Nothing.

But when she looked up the stairs, the walls were crawling with the blue light, pulsing just a little faster now, as if excited.

Mana's jaw tightened a fraction, the only outward sign of the calculation happening behind her eyes. "Assessment: they are aware of my presence," she said, voice flat but precise.

Fox: “Then make it worth their while. Secondary objective: reach the command node. If the hybrid is running a network, we need to map it.”

“Understood,” Mana said.

She turned and moved, each step crisp, assured. She had lived in battlefields her whole life, but this was something else: a chess match played at the speed of thought, with pieces made of muscle and memory and blue fire.

The control center was closer than she expected. When she entered, she found it deserted, save for a single figure slumped over a console.

A Jäger, fused to the chair by loops of blue crystal. Its eyes were gone, sockets filled with a glowing mesh that writhed even as she watched.

Mana hesitated, then stepped closer, weapon trained on the thing’s heart. The display panel flickered to life, running a script in a language she didn’t recognize.

Fox: “If you can, plug into the console. I’ll filter the connection—should keep your Core safe. Be ready to cut instantly if anything pings back.”

She holstered her sidearm, removed a line from her suit, and jacked it into the port. The world rushed sideways as the helmet streamed the console data into a quarantined cache.

For a moment, Mana saw everything: the history of the outpost, the moment of sabotage, the Jäger’s last stand. And then, the blue light—everywhere, spreading in fractal pulses, devouring the base from the inside out.

She broke the link, gasping. The dead Jäger’s head lolled, a single shard of crystal tumbling from its mouth to land at her boot.

Mana pocketed the shard, sent the data to Fox, and braced herself for the sprint out.

The walls around her pulsed in sync with her heartbeat.

It was time to go.

She ran the return protocol, double-checking the sample pouches, her boots making careful, deliberate contact with the spindly, dust-clogged mesh of the command center floor. It was never wise to assume the dead stayed put—especially not here.

The main terminal still pulsed weakly in the dark, a dying eye caked with the debris of a thousand hurried log-ins. Mana swept a gloved hand across the panel, pushing aside the fusion-burnt residue, and found the port. The Jäger fused to the chair had not decomposed; the flesh was mummified, the skull still upright, fused to the shell with a filigree of blue crystal.

Fox’s signal came through faintly, the usual undertones of static now a surface buzz. “Reading you at 12%—local interference off the charts. I’m patching through using relay from the drop pod. The further you go, the more this place chews up signal.”

Mana knelt, her knees scraping the mesh. “Beginning uplink now,” she said. She routed her helmet’s interface line into the terminal. The expected authentication prompts appeared, first in Jäger text, then—after a flicker—replaced by a haze of layered scripts. She let the helmet’s linguistics do its work.

First log: a video snippet, timestamped eighty-two hours prior, showing a small room like this one, only the blue growths were smaller, less invasive. Three Jäger—two baseline, one officer—stood facing the camera, their visors down. The officer spoke, its voice rendered in glitching translation:

“Integration proceeds. Growth rate: seventy-two percent above expectation. Losses…acceptable. All units at readiness.”

The officer reached forward, its gauntlet hovering over something just out of frame. The Jäger’s hand trembled—barely noticeable, except at this resolution. The crystal at the back of its skull pulsed, and the room’s blue light spiked.

Mana’s hands didn’t shake, but her heartbeat was crawling up her neck now, audible in her ears.

She skipped through the logs, letting the helmet filter for high-priority tags. The pattern repeated: brief, clipped check-ins, each time more crystal in the shot, each time the Jäger less…organic. Their bodies turned rigid; their movements smoothed into a unity that made her queasy. By the last video, the original crew was gone. The room was empty save for a single, unmoving form in the background, so overgrown it was difficult to tell if it had ever been alive.

The last log was not a video. Just a string of code, scrolling at a pace too fast for human reading. The helmet highlighted blocks of it—most matching Kollektiven handshakes, but layered atop Jäger tactical schemas. No reason this should work. No universe where it did.

Fox: “It’s running simulations on how to fuse their networks. I’m running pattern analysis, but this is way outside doctrine.”

Mana said nothing, just watched as the code scrolled and, every so often, paused—as if waiting for a response.

She left the feed running and began a sweep of the room. The blue crystal had taken over almost every surface. In places, it seemed to glow with its own internal light, casting her shadow in multiple directions at once. She scraped a second, smaller sample and dropped it in the pouch.

A hiss of static made her flinch. For a split second, her helmet's display flickered, and Fox's voice cut out. What replaced it was not silence, but a layered, toneless voice, the cadence not quite right:

"We-see-you-bridge-entity."

"You-carry-fragments-within."

"You-are-incomplete."

The words seared through her consciousness, a hot wire threaded from optic nerve to brain stem. Without thinking, her fingers performed the emergency disconnect sequence along her chestplate seam—three precise touches right, three left—then tore the helmet cable free with a single, violent motion.

She backed away from the terminal, hand already on her pistol, but nothing moved.

Then Fox was back, but not really: "Mana—" his voice fractured, spliced with something else "—the—" static hissed between each word "—readings. It's in the—" another voice layered beneath his, speaking in perfect unison "—neural pathway. Cut connection. Now."

Mana took a breath, forced her blood pressure down. “Copy,” she said. She had never felt the Core this hot, not even during a full-system reset. Her hands moved, but the movement was clumsy, as if her bones were made of lead. She tried to recall the training for electrical shock, the checklist for heatstroke, but the only thing that came to mind was the color blue—everywhere, in every corner of her HUD.

The terminal flashed, once. Symbols rolled across the screen, none that belonged to either side. It was as if the Jäger code and the Kollektiven code had started speaking in a third, secret language.

Mana tore off the uplink and triggered the helmet’s hard-reboot. For a few seconds, she was blind, the black inside her visor absolute, and in that darkness she felt the crystals all around her—watching, waiting. Her spine twitched as the Core sent pulses of heat up and down her vertebrae, each spike timed perfectly with the rhythm of the glowing walls.

When her vision came back, the room was the same, but the light was different: the blue now beat in time with her own pulse. She made a fist and unclenched it. The movement felt delayed, a half-second behind her intent.

“Fox, I think it’s mapped my Core signature.”

No response. Not even static.

She reached for the sample pouch, the movement harder than it should have been. The fabric on her gloves was damp; the air in the room now pressed against her with a subtle but definite force. The blue light followed her, as if the crystals themselves wanted to record her movements.

The Jäger corpse in the chair had not moved. But the network it had joined was not dead.

Mana cycled her helmet comms to open air, transmitting at max power. “Fox. If you read, confirm. I’m prepping for exit.”

Still nothing.

She moved to the door, but it had closed behind her. When she tried the manual release, the wall seemed to absorb her touch. The crystal around the edge of the door pulsed, a single line growing brighter and brighter.

Mana holstered her sidearm and pulled out the emergency breach tool—a palm-sized charge meant for a hundred other situations, but not this. She set it to full yield and pressed it against the seam.

As she retreated, she watched the blue veins crawl along the wall, converging on the device.

The breach went off with a muffled pop and a shower of glassy dust. The door blew open, and Mana dove through, rolling to her feet on the other side. She sprinted for the stairwell.

The further she ran, the brighter the blue light behind her. Every corridor, every room she passed, was now alive with crystal, some of it branching out in long, jagged spears.

Her lungs burned with cold, the taste of ozone filling her mouth. She ducked under a low arch and found the stairwell choked with blue roots. She drew her knife, cut at the largest one—it bled, briefly, a burst of phosphorescent liquid that steamed and ate at her blade.

Mana tossed the blade aside, and went at it bare-handed. She punched, pulled, and snapped the crystal until she could wedge her shoulder through. As she did, her Core fired a fresh spike of heat, like a fever erupting inside her spine.