Ethan moved like a knife just out of sight, cloaked, focused, bleeding quietly.
His left forearm throbbed beneath the half-melted sleeve of his coat, plasma scoring blistered across the skin. The fight had been brief, but sharp. Every step reminded him that even surviving a skirmish didn't mean escaping unharmed.
He shifted the Gryllex shard's containment vault closer to his center of gravity, adjusting the magnetic holster beneath the cloak. The casing was cool against his ribs, stable. Silent. Still his.
For now.
"Iris," he whispered, voice taut with control. "How close are we?"
"Two levels above the private ferry docks," she responded. "Multiple converging threat signatures on Deck F-3. No alerts on your credentials… yet."
He exhaled, quietly.
The corridor ahead opened into a sealed observation atrium, wide and tall, lined with cracked luxury panels and fractured starlight streaming through panoramic viewports. A once-beautiful space, now dimmed by power fluctuations and marred by smoke and flashing hazard warnings.
He slowed at the threshold, hand grazing the wall as he scanned ahead—
And stopped cold.
At the far end of the atrium stood the Zelsari elite.
She hadn't fled like the others.
Her silver-black gown shimmered in the dying light, its hem torn, her multi-faceted eyes narrowed with absolute calm. Around her hovered a personal shielding array, refracting incoming fire like droplets off glass.
But it wasn't her that held Ethan's eye.
It was the Vennari beside her, towering, brutal, purposeful. His four arms moved in a lethal rhythm. One held a plasma-laced glaive, the other three alternating between deflecting bolts, throwing reinforced knives, and shielding the Zelsari with his armored back.
He wasn't fighting to escape.
He was holding the line.
The Vennari moved with terrifying precision. Four arms a storm of muscle, plasma, and violence. Each step was grounded, purposeful, deliberate. He wasn't covering a retreat. He was a wall. And walls didn't run.
Across the atrium, pirate operatives surged in disciplined formation. No shouting. No wasted motion. Just the methodical advance of trained professionals. Tactical armor clung tight to their forms, black visors hid their eyes, and their weapons, sleek, silent spoke of funding, planning, and precision.
Not looters.
Not scavengers.
A strike team.
And they weren't here for the Zelsari.
They were converging, tight angles, flanking arcs, toward a steel-bolted platform just behind her: a vaulted lift, its surface lined with defensive plating and embedded command runes. The telltale glow of a layered stasis seal flickered across its seams.
Ethan's gaze narrowed.
Not a personnel lift.
Not an emergency exit.
A containment chamber.
The realization hit like gravity shifting sideways.
They weren't defending their lives. They were defending a payload.
The broken molecular sword.
That broken relic from the auction, the one worth a billion credits. The one wrapped in silence and myth. The one that didn't belong in the open at all.
A gravitational point for the ambitious. For the violent. A spark dangled above fuel tanks.
And now the whole damn ship was burning for it.
These attackers weren't reacting. They weren't improvising.
They came for that blade.
He stepped back slightly, watching as the Vennari launched forward, glaive spinning, cutting through two assailants in a blur of motion. One pirate tried to flank. A blast rang out. The Zelsari moved her fingers delicately, and the attacker crumpled as if gravity itself had turned against him.
They didn't need help.
Not right now.
And more importantly, it wasn't his problem.
He turned silently, slipping into a maintenance hallway flanking the atrium wall. A flickering panel blinked red above a vertical shaft, its biometric lock half-destroyed, exposed wiring dangling like severed veins.
Ethan placed his palm against the side panel.
"Iris. Bio-sensor override."
"Standby… Please apply psionic field mask… Signal dampened. Access accepted."
The lock clicked open.
He slipped inside.
The shaft descended into darkness, slick with coolant runoff and exposed to flickering hazard beacons below. A fall would kill most people. So Ethan didn't fall.
He climbed. Swiftly. Gracefully. Using old handholds, embedded brackets, and a steady trickle of psionic feedback to anticipate weakened rungs before they gave way.
He was thirty meters down before he looked back.
The atrium was gone. The Zelsari was a memory again.
His breath came quiet but steady.
There was a war erupting aboard Xanthe's Dream.
Not a simple pirate attack. Not chaos born from panic. But a battle of interests, of factions in this galactic sector clawing at each other through smoke and steel, vying for power rooted in myth, in relics that were never meant to surface.
Ancient technology, whispered about in coded channels, now dragged into the light like a spark flung into dry brush.
And it was spreading. Fast.
Sector lords, Military higher-ups, syndicate operatives, faction-backed mercs.....each had come expecting leverage, but none had expected this.
Ethan stood at the threshold of that storm, just out of sight, and watched it turn.
And he knew, he wasn't on anyone's side.
Not today.
He wasn't here to win the war.
He was here to make sure he walked away from it.
"Let those rich elites bleed for their relics," he muttered, voice low, almost calm.
Beside his ear, Iris answered with flawless composure. "A wise choice. Shall I update your exit vectors based on the current breach patterns and reduced drone activity?"
Ethan gave a short nod, already turning from the observation alcove.
"Already on it," he said. "Take me down to the ferry ring."
He moved without hesitation, cloak frayed, side stinging, but his movements were crisp. Efficient. There was no room for second thoughts, no indulgence in second chances.
He wasn't a savior.
He wasn't a saboteur.
He was a shadow with a prize and a clock.
As he descended into the guts of the ship, into the tight maintenance shafts and echoing service corridors, he left the chaos behind.
None of it mattered.
What mattered to him was still in his possession.
In the fading lights of Xanthe's Dream, his mind clicked back into clarity like a blade returning to its sheath.
He wasn't part of this game, and he wont let anyone or anything drag him more into this mess.
He was the knife that left before the table overturned.
And right now, survival wasn't cowardice.
It was strategy.
The only move worth playing after securing what he came here for.