She stumbled up the stairs. Her HUD was now 90% warning overlays, the borders of her vision a pulsing frame of blue. She forced herself to move, hand over hand, until the next landing.

At the top, the passage to the surface was a narrow chute, half-collapsed. The blue light here was less intense, as if it had not yet infected the outer layers of the outpost. She squeezed through, scraping her armor on the stone.

When she reached open air, the world snapped back to its old gray. The only blue now was the faint shimmer on her suit, and the sky above—rippling with the distant glow of the Crystalbound.

Mana crouched, waiting for the next pulse from her Core, but it never came. The sensation ebbed, and she felt control return to her limbs.

Fox’s voice was so faint she almost missed it.

“I’m here,” she said, fighting for calm.

“I’m out. The base is active—alive, I think.” She took a deep breath, the cold air burning her lungs clean. “It tried to reach me, Fox. Not just through the terminal. Through the Core.”

Mana forced herself to her feet. The pain was real, but not disabling. She limped back toward the drop pod, scanning every meter for sign of pursuit.

She looked back once. The outpost entrance was awash in blue, the veins of light now so bright they cast shadows even at this distance.

Mana shuddered, not from cold, but from the certainty that whatever watched her from the depths was still learning.

She set the pod’s burn protocol, triggered the remote detonation.

The blue light flickered, spasmed, then vanished in the thermal bloom of the blast.

She slumped into the crash-couch, eyes closed, Core still hot against her spine.

But even as the pod lifted, she swore she could still see it, behind her eyelids and at the edge of every thought.

Silence, again.

She slapped the emergency comms, felt the channel open, then shatter in a waterfall of static. A rush of signals, then one clean voice: 

Mana’s helmet flickered, HUD warping at the edges. The voice was not Fox’s. It was guttural, heavy, with a reverb that filled the pod. She toggled the universal translator. The phrase returned, rendered: “They are searching for you.”

A shadow loomed in the viewport.

The Kommandant was bigger than any Jäger she’d seen, head and shoulders clear. Where the others had been infested, he was rebuilt: lines of blue and purple crystal plated his spine, curling up across the helmet like a crown. His right arm was sheathed in crystal from shoulder to claw, each finger tipped in a dagger of shimmering light. His left arm was bare, the muscle and metal beneath pitted by a hundred old wounds.

His visor flashed once, as if reading her thoughts. Then, with slow, perfect care, he peeled the pod’s hatch back, wrenching the durasteel like a toy. Air hissed, but the pressure stabilized; the Kommandant was careful, almost gentle.

Mana drew her pistol, thumbed it to full charge, but the Kommandant ignored the threat. He reached inside, his body blocking out all light but the blue from his own crystalline growths. The crystals pulsed—not wild, but measured, as if waiting for a signal. Mana watched, transfixed, as the Kommandant opened his bare hand, palm up, and held it out to her.

Resting in the palm was a fragment of data crystal, a perfect twin to the sample she had collected inside.

The Kommandant's voice thrummed in archaic Hochdeutsch—the language few still spoke, preserved only in old archives and military databases. The language she and Fox used when they needed privacy: "Die Erben wissen, was du bist."

Mana's breath caught. Her fingers tightened on her weapon. How? The dialect was precise, perfect—the cadence exactly as Fox would speak it. The voice was alien, inhuman, yet it had reached into the most intimate corner of her existence and extracted something that belonged only to her and Fox.

She reached, slow, and took the crystal. The moment her fingers closed around it, a jolt ran through her arm and up her spine, so strong her back arched and her teeth clamped shut.

Her HUD died. Every overlay vanished, the helmet suddenly nothing but dead glass.

The Kommandant withdrew, then stepped away from her.

Mana fought to restore the suit interface, but all she saw was a black void, shot through with the afterimage of the crystal. She was aware of her body, but her senses were wrong, lagged, as if the world had decoupled from time.

She called for Fox, but the neural link was gone. Not jammed or static—just absent, as if the other end of the line had never existed. Mana reached for him in her mind, probing the void where his presence should be, like a tongue searching for a missing tooth. Nothing answered. She existed in a void of her own consciousness, untethered from Fox's presence for the first time since activation. Her fingers found the familiar ridge along her armor's hip seam, tapping out their ritual—three right, three left—but the motion felt hollow, like knocking on a door she knew stood abandoned.

She tried to move, and found she could. She pushed herself upright, climbed out of the pod’s ruined shell, boots crunching on the crystallized ground. The Kommandant did not move, except to turn, slow, and indicate—follow

They reached the edge of the crater, where the Jäger corpses still lay frozen. The Kommandant stopped there, turned to face her. The blue light pulsed up the length of his arm, coalescing at the tip of a single crystal blade.

He pointed it at her.

Mana braced for attack. Instead, the Kommandant ran the blade along his own forearm, slicing a line through crystal and flesh. He bent the arm to drip a bead of blue blood onto the ground at her feet.

A sacrament, not a threat.

Mana’s body shivered. She understood, and hated that she understood.

The Kommandant dropped to one knee, head bowed.

She could not speak, but she nodded, once.

The Kommandant stood, took three steps backward, and vanished into the tunnel from which the light first emerged.

"Mana?" Fox's voice crackled suddenly in her ear, so faint she thought she'd imagined it. "I lost sight of you. Complete blackout. Are you—"

"I'm here," she whispered, her throat tight. "How did you find me?"

"Orbital scan picked up your signature. I sent the shuttle as soon as we had coordinates." His voice faded in and out. "What happened down there? Your vitals are all over the place."

Her hand moved to the pouch at her hip, fingers pressing against the outline of what lay within. She remained silent for three full seconds before answering. "It's complicated."

Re-entry came with all the usual violence, the hull sloughing off old black as the shuttle hit atmosphere. The landing was ugly—her hands on the stick, mechanical, perfect, even though her fingers shook with the aftershock of whatever the crystal had done to her.

On touchdown, a pair of station security waited, full armor and blank faceplates. They saluted as she emerged from the shuttle, then fell in step as she limped across the tarmac. Not a word exchanged, not a glance, just the silent geometry of soldiers doing what was expected.

Mana made it through decontamination in record time. No one spoke to her, but everywhere she looked she saw the outlines of herself reflected in mirrored glass: thin, sharp, haunted. She moved through the checkpoints as if rehearsing a dance from a dream she no longer wanted to remember.

The base corridors had changed. Blue light now traced every edge, running beneath the floor tiles and up the seams of the ceiling. It was not the electric, living humming of the outpost, but a colder, institutional shade. The difference was important, though Mana doubted the decorators knew why.

She passed the labs, and the mess, and the sealed doors to the barracks. No one met her eyes, though a few heads turned, just long enough to confirm she was real, not ghost or rumor.

At the final checkpoint, the sentry scanned her helmet and frowned. “Your handler’s gone dark,” he said, not even trying to mask the worry. “You want to see medical?”

“No,” Mana said. “Just quarters.”

He waved her through, uncertain.

She had almost reached her block when the elevator doors hissed open. A thin woman in a black suit—Defense Director Harrow. Steel-gray eyes found Mana's through rimless glasses, calculating and cold. The scar at her temple, where the neural-graft had failed, caught the corridor light as her gaze dropped to the crystal bulge in Mana's sample pouch, then back to Mana's face with sudden, sharp interest.

Her smile was precise. “Welcome back, Sergeant Major. I see you brought us a souvenir.”

Mana did not trust herself to reply. She dipped her head, a fraction, and kept walking.

Behind her, Harrow’s shoes ticked on the tile—three steps, and then she was gone, or at least out of sight.

Mana entered her quarters. The lights flickered on, soft and blue, and for a long time she just stood there, helmet under her arm, crystal in her hand, the old hunger and fear finally catching up.

She unclipped her suit, set the helmet down, and stared at her reflection in the blank monitor screen. The data crystal glowed in her palm, flickering with an internal light she knew was not entirely physical.

For a moment, she considered smashing it—ending whatever weird communion the Kommandant had started. But something in her rebelled. She turned the crystal over, again and again, the warmth of it seeping into her fingers, traveling up her arm toward the familiar scar at the base of her skull. Die Erben. The Inheritors. The word echoed against something older in her memory – twin circles, three connecting lines, the nightmare-word: Eden.

She collapsed onto the cot, armor plates still half-fastened. Her hand drifted to the blanket's edge—tracing three traces right, three traces left—each movement echoed emptily through her mind.

In the silence, the voices grew bold, layering together until they resolved into words.

The title echoed, not from her ears, but from within. Her face remained neutral as she cataloged the sensation: familiar yet wrong, like a weapon's weight shifted by a millimeter. She let the word settle around her consciousness, a perimeter established in unknown territory.

There was a sound, sudden, sharp—a static burst in the dead air of the room.

Fox’s voice, raw and wrong, but real.

She gasped, sat upright, and felt the Core surge with heat. She was not alone, not now, not ever.

“Fox?” she said, her voice shaking.

"I'm here, Chief," came the answer, his voice strained through what sounded like layers of interference. "Don't let go." But beneath his familiar cadence, a new chorus—quieter, but gaining strength.

Her face remained still, a soldier's mask, though something shifted behind her eyes. The crystal pulsed against her palm, matching the rhythm of her heartbeat.