The Arbiter’s voice cuts in—polite, sorrowful, almost gentle. “Bridge-Entity. Your inaction will result in total dissolution. This is not a threat. It is simply the end of counting.”

Mana finds her voice, ragged and thin. “There’s always another way.”

The Weapon-Touched does not speak. He stands as if frozen, watching Mana with the patience of a mountain. The Kollektiven drone also waits, the black Prism-Shard held before it like an offering. Neither flinches as the energy climbs, as the light intensifies, as the chamber starts to come apart at the seams.

Fox's voice, softer now, slips into the link's lowest register. "Mana. Es ist okay. Du musst es nicht tun. Ich übernehme."

She knows what he means. She doesn’t want to. Her right hand starts its old, comforting rhythm: three strokes along the armor’s edge, three back. A heartbeat. The only thing that’s ever kept her anchored.

She opens the neural link wide, the way Fox had always forbidden. The connection is instant, total, and absolute. "Zusammen," she whispers, and feels him answer without words. Fox pours into her consciousness like water finding every crack—his memories becoming hers: the sterile room where he's spent years, the pain in his atrophied legs, the half-jokes they traded during midnight operations. He is not just Controller, not just Operator—he is the hand she never held, the face she never touched, the only constant in a life of calculated violence.

The chamber flashes white. The keys dissolve into pure data. The resonance slams through Mana’s body, tearing every nerve, every synapse, every last regret. She feels her helmet shatter, the edges digging into her scalp, feels her own blood splash onto the crystalline floor, evaporate, and then nothing at all.

But she does not let go. She keeps her hand moving: three right, three left. Fox’s voice is not a voice anymore, but a presence, an arm around her shoulder, a laugh in her mouth, a warmth at her side. He channels the energy, shunting it into the gap between seconds, and for one instant Mana exists everywhere—on Eden, in the void above, in the archive on the ice moon, in every place they ever shared a joke or a moment of peace.

The machine wails. The light is so bright it punches through eyelids, through thought, through the separation of past and present. Mana screams, but it is the sound of release, not agony.

She stands at the center of the world, hands shaking, and opens her eyes.

The chamber is quiet. The runes are dark. The only light is the dim, amber glow of the Arbiter, who hovers a respectful distance away.

Fox is gone.

Mana falls to her knees, hand still tapping the three-right, three-left at her side. The Prism-Shard in her palm is dark, its color spent.

The silence is the worst part.

Mana lies on the crystalline floor, cheek pressed to a surface colder than ice. Her armor’s sensors chirp, then fall silent; the HUD reboots in grayscale, then static, then nothing. The world is heavy, dense with the absence of sound, of connection, of anything but the pulse in her own head.

She tries to reach for Fox, even now. It’s pure muscle memory—a flick of thought, a pulse at the base of her skull, the command so familiar it’s indistinguishable from wanting to breathe. The neural port behind her ear is cold, inert, a socket without a plug. She feels the echo of him for a half-second, the ghost of a hand on her shoulder, and then only the hollowness after.

The chamber has not changed. The runes that once chased light around its circumference are dead; the three keys remain in their sockets, but dull, the colors bled out like old bruises. The Jäger leader stands on the far side of the dais, one hand closed over the wound at his side, watching Mana with the calm of a man who has seen the inside of death and found it wanting. The Kollektiven drone floats near the ceiling, its surface inert, the black Prism-Shard now just a lump of perfect darkness.

The Arbiter hovers near, smaller than before, geometry collapsed in on itself, the gold at its core now a pale citrine. He does not count. He waits.

Mana pushes herself to her knees. The motion is automatic, every joint creaking in protest, but she manages it, hands braced on the floor. She keeps expecting the neural link to open, for Fox’s commentary to resume—admonishing her form, mocking the silence, counting down the seconds to extraction.

Nothing.

Her fingers find the release catches at her jawline. The helmet gives with a hiss of escaping atmosphere, revealing the face beneath—human, vulnerable, exposed to alien air for the first time. She raises her head, stares at the Arbiter through a film of sweat and blood and loss. "Is he alive?" The words come out raw, half-choked.

The Arbiter rotates, a slow, sad orbit. “Yes. The body lives. The mind is… elsewhere.” A pause, as if searching for the most precise word. “He is no longer yours.”

Mana searched the Arbiter's facets for something—grief, regret, anything. She found only the steady amber pulse of a machine that had calculated this outcome long before she arrived. She nodded once, a soldier's acknowledgment of intel received, while something collapsed inside her chest like a building whose support beams had been precisely removed.

The Jäger leader steps forward, one stride at a time, then halts at the edge of the dais. He nods to her—a gesture of mutual recognition, maybe respect, maybe just the acknowledgment that the cycle of killing has ended, at least for now.

The Kollektiven drone detaches from the wall, drifts across the chamber, and then out through the aperture it came in. No words, no message, no threat. Just the void where the swarm used to be.

Mana reaches to the edge of her armor, fingers tracing the battered seam at her right shoulder: three right, three left. The Core is sluggish, but it still responds, a faint heat at the base of her neck. She runs a self-diagnostic. Everything works. Nothing hurts, except the loss.

She stands. She checks her sidearm, then her backup knife, then the utility pouch at her hip. Each action is precise, economical, designed to avoid thought.

She looks up at the Arbiter. “You said the protocol was incomplete.”

The Arbiter seems to shrink. “The lens remains unaligned. Eden will sleep, until someone else arrives. But the event is finished. You are free to go.”

Mana stares at him. “What happens if I don’t leave?”

The Arbiter’s facets flicker, a microsecond of indecision. “You will remain. Alone. With the silence. Until you die. Or someone comes to find you.” He tilts in the air, almost a bow. “I do not recommend it.”

She picks up the iridescent key, now colorless, tucks it into her belt. She glances at the Jäger, at the distant exit, at the nothing beyond the chamber.

“Extraction?” she says.

The Arbiter is businesslike. “Path cleared. Shuttle at outer edge of city. No opposition. All parties have withdrawn. You have, as they say, won.”

Mana does not laugh. She walks.

The route out is shorter than she remembers. The city is empty, the grass at its edge bowed and trampled from the passage of the armies that came to witness the end. There are no bodies, no ruins, no sign of battle. Only the gold sky, and the glimmer of the shuttle in the distance.

She enters. The cockpit is cold, the seat fitted for someone her size. She closes the hatch, straps in, runs the preflight with hands that remember every movement. The shuttle lifts, cycles through the launch protocol, and Mana watches Eden shrink beneath her, the heart of the world receding to a point of blue and black and gold.

At the upper atmosphere, the comms panel chirps. She expects silence, but instead, a voice.

“Mana?” Fox. Tinny, awkward, not through the link but over standard comms. “Can you hear me? Are you alright?”

She does not answer. She waits, staring at the horizon.

“Mana, please. I see the shuttle. You’re alive. Talk to me.”

She leans forward, places a finger on the comm switch. The urge to reply is an ache, a wound, a chemical reflex. She thinks about the way Fox’s voice used to be: always inside her head, always exactly where she needed it, sometimes before she even asked.

She turns off the comm. Not out of anger, not out of cruelty. Just because it hurts too much to listen to a voice that can never come home again.

She flies.

Hours pass. Maybe days. The sky changes color, and the stars return. The HUD is still gray, still missing the familiar annotations, but she learns to live with it.

At the edge of the system, she pauses. Reaches up to the neural port behind her ear. For the first time in ten years, there is nothing on the other side.

Her fingers trace the seam of her suit, three right, three left.

A wetness tracks down her face. Her body performs an unfamiliar function without instruction, without tactical purpose. She does not notice the tears until one drops onto the control panel with a soft plink.

She sets a course for the next mission, for the next war, for the next cycle.

In the silence, she names herself. She counts her own steps. And for the first time, the number means something.