The Jäger spoke, voice raw and unmodulated. “Weapon-Touched.” The syllables were torn from a damaged larynx, but clear enough. “You remember.”

She nodded, one sharp dip.

He gestured to the dead Mimics. “You do not die. Not like others.” He looked at her, unblinking. “We know your violence. It is…different.”

She waited, unsure if the Jäger was posturing or buying time.

He pointed to the archive, black and angular behind him. “We want inside. As you do. We seek same thing. You call ‘Eden’.” The word came out strange, as if the Jäger had never formed it before.

Mana’s Core stuttered at the name. Theories and warnings whirled in her neural stream, none of them helpful. She stared at the Jäger, reading his body language, the slow, almost reverent way he held himself.

The leader gestured again. “We can fight. You may win. You may lose. But…” He shrugged, the motion stiff. “No point. Both want same. We can wait.”

Mana held the katana a moment longer, letting the weight of his words settle. It was against every protocol to trust a Jäger, even one who owed her a debt. But something in his stance—defiant, but also expectant—made her believe him.

She shut off the blade, let it vanish in a hiss of cold air.

The Jäger nodded, satisfied. “You may pass. But know—” He drew a slow line across his scar. “If we meet again, it is not here.” He looked back at the archive, a flicker of something like awe in his dead eyes. “Eden changes everything. Maybe even us.”

Mana moved past them, toward the entrance. The Jäger leader stepped aside, watching her with a soldier’s wary respect.

Fox, voice barely a whisper: “What now?”

Mana didn’t answer. She pushed open the obsidian doors, stepping into the dark. Behind her, the Jäger watched, silent as statues.

Inside, the blue light waited. And for the first time, she felt the faint stir of fear in her own chest—because she was not sure, anymore, if Eden was meant for her kind.

The corridor was cold, but her hands burned with the memory of impossible violence.

She followed the geometry of the archive, ready for whatever it had been built to preserve.

The entry corridor narrowed, forcing Mana to fold her shoulders in. The walls—if they could be called walls—were striations of glassy mineral, patterned in fractal tessellations that shimmered at the edge of vision. No dust, no scent of rot; just the faint ozone of static charge and the subliminal thrum of an energy source so old and deep it made her tongue taste metal.

She walked, each step a test of the ground’s strength. The light inside the archive was not reflected, but generated: cold blue rays pulsing from seams in the crystalline floor. The glow carried no warmth, only the suggestion of memory, as if the whole place was a solidified thought waiting to be recalled.

Mana traced the walls with her eyes, mapping the runes that crawled along their length. Each sigil, each spiral, echoed the neural lattice she carried in her own skull. She could almost feel the language unfolding, a logic older than her ancestors’ wars.

At the first junction, a holographic display bloomed from the wall—pure light, geometric, yet rippling with analog softness at its edges. The projection rotated, collapsing and reassembling into a familiar shape: the double helix, but expanded, spun into a toroid, recursing into itself. As she approached, the display’s axis tilted, following her face, then blossoming into a three-dimensional map of star systems.

Fox, in her neural stream: “The system is responding to your Core signature. Compatible architecture.”

Mana reached a hand out, fingers splayed. The projection’s light caressed her palm, and at the touch, thousands of symbols rushed past, arranging themselves into a tight cluster. At the center, a single coordinate blazed white-hot.

The word formed in Mana's throat at the exact moment it materialized in her neural link, their voices overlapping in perfect synchronicity: "Eden."

"Wir haben es gefunden," she whispered in the old language, the words escaping unbidden.

Fox's voice, indistinguishable from her own thoughts: "Tatsächlich."

Nothing more. Nothing needed in this moment of perfect alignment.

Mana let her suit record everything, cycling the visor to maximum intake. She transferred the star map to her Core. The neural download was smooth, but cold.

Fox, softer: “You did it. That’s the location. Copying to relay. Stand by.”

She blinked, clearing her mind, and that’s when the archive’s quiet was punctured by a low, rising hum.

Warning lights guttered to life, painting the corridor in angry red. Above her, the smooth planes of the ceiling cracked open along hairline seams, and through these wounds poured the Kollektiven drones—hundreds, maybe more. They moved like oil, each appendage extruded in new directions as needed, their crystalline claws singing against the glassy walls.

The first drone reached her at the intersection, moving faster than any organic thing should. Mana dropped, letting it glide overhead, and drew both NEXUS pistols in one fluid arc. The air was too thin for proper recoil, but the report of the shots still left an afterimage of sound in her ears. The rounds punched through the drone’s organic core, crystal shards exploding in microgravity, and the drone disintegrated in a shimmer of blue dust.

More followed. Mana retreated into the main chamber, fighting for every meter. Her breathing was ragged, the suit’s O2 injectors working overtime to keep up with the spike in demand. Sweat froze at the edges of her mask, melting only where her blood ran hot down a new cut on her shoulder.

“Mana, there are too many,” Fox said, voice hardening. “You need to exit—now.”

She turned, mapped the geometry of the archive in three seconds, and found the shortest route out. The drones anticipated her, filling the hallway in a moving wall. Mana toggled the pistols to scatter, gritted her teeth, and fired in rapid succession, cutting down the front line. She ran through the debris, boots skipping over blue shards, the wound in her arm searing with every stride.

The next chamber was round, domed, the ceiling mapped with the same star chart as before—only this time, three coordinates pulsed in sequence, triangulating the path to Eden. The effect was almost beautiful; Mana registered it only as a waymarker. She leapt for the next corridor, ignoring the pain in her lungs.

More drones, smaller this time, shaped like obsidian wasps with wings that blurred in the dark. They stung at her calves and back, slicing her suit open in a dozen places. Each wound bled, the liquid boiling off to steam in the frigid air.

She reached the entry corridor, blinking blood and sweat from her eyes.

Fox, raw: “Extraction team ETA three minutes. You must reach the surface.”

The corridor now crawled with drones, a living carpet of obsidian and light. Mana drew the katana again, plasma blade singing as she sliced through them. Every stroke cost her—a bite to the thigh, a puncture at her hip, a shot of crystal through her palm—but she kept moving. Always forward.

At the last turn, her foot slipped on blood-slick ice, and she crashed shoulder-first into the wall. The pain was electric, so bright she saw stars. A drone lunged for her throat; she caught it barehanded, felt the heat of its living core against her skin, and crushed it until it popped. As the creature's fluids ran between her fingers, a sound escaped her throat—hmm-hmm-hm-hmmmm—the notes rough and wrong but reaching for something older than the pain.

She made the door, then stumbled onto the open ice.

The world outside was chaos. The Jäger—Weapon-Touched and his squad—were already engaged, fighting off a tide of drones that spilled out of every aperture. The Jäger leader caught Mana’s eye across the field; he gave a single, slow nod, then turned to cut down two more drones with his bare hands.

She ran, legs burning, lungs desperate for air.

At the extraction point, the shuttle waited, Fox’s signature pulsing in the cockpit. Mana dove inside, slamming the door with a bloody fist. The shuttle rose, blue light streaking past the viewport as the drone swarm battered the hull.

Inside, Mana collapsed to the deck, blood freezing to the cold metal. Fox's voice clicked through her neural link: "Mission parameters met. Vital signs suboptimal but within acceptable range. Your extraction timing was... efficient."

She couldn’t speak. Instead, she watched through the frost-blurred glass as the Jäger leader’s silhouette shrank into the distance, still fighting.

The data core in her spine pulsed with the new coordinates.

Eden is real.

The price of finding it was written across her armor, and in the scars to come.

Mana closed her eyes. In the neural darkness, Fox's presence registered—steady, constant—the only fixed coordinate in her universe. His voice would be there when she woke. That was enough.