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Chapter 177: Vacuum Drifting
We came out of the airlock tumbling and I got my arm around his throat before we had cleared the ship's hull.He grabbed my forearm with his remaining hand and pulled, it wasn't enough. My calcified skin gave him nothing to work with and I tightened the hold and we spun together into open space.The ship launched above us, and I watched it go. The detonator was still in his hand.[Vacuum exposure detected. Evolution reserves activating.][Estimated survival window: nineteen minutes.]Nineteen minutes, I kept the choke and he kept pulling at my arm. We couldn't speak, there was no air. He knew that and I knew that. We just held on to each other and drifted, he tried to break my grip and I didn't let him. His remaining fingers found the edge of my wrist joint, the one gap in the calcification where the skin was still soft, and he dug in hard. I felt the pressure but not enough pain to matter.The detonator was between us. His thumb was still on it. I got my free hand to his wrist and p
Chapter 176: The Clone's Choice
"Wait," I said. The clone looked at me. The sludge was already moving up her wrists, she hadn't pulled her hands back."There's another way," I said."There isn't," she said. "I've been doing the math since the hangar. The path is two hundred meters and the Rot won't hold open for biomass it can't verify.It needs something alive and it needs it now." She looked down at her hands. "I'm the only one it already knows.""You don't have to do this," my father said. She looked at him. "I know." She looked back at me. "The escape vessel is in the private bay on the north side of the hangar level. The Emperor kept it separate from the main fleet. It's on a raised platform, above the sludge line." She pulled her display chip out of her pocket and held it toward me. "The layout is on there. Bay seven."I took the chip. "Go now," she said. "Once I go under, the path holds for about four minutes. Maybe five.""Four minutes," I said. "Yes. Move fast." I looked at her for a second. She had Elowen'
Chapter 175: The Obsidian Shield
The Rot-shape moved toward me and my father grabbed my arm from behind. "Back up," he said. "Working on it," I said.The shape was rough and slow but it was getting more defined as it moved. The arms were filling out and the head was getting a neck. It was building itself denser as it walked.My left leg buckled. The motor signal was gone from the knee down and I caught myself on the wall. The sludge was at my mid-shin now.[Warning. Pathogen consumption of lower extremities accelerating. Biological tissue integrity compromised.][Recommend immediate countermeasure.]Countermeasure. I looked at my hands, the plasma was gone. The phase state was compromised from the waist down. I had one option and it was going to hurt."Get back," I told my father. "Against the wall and don't touch the floor." He moved.I looked at my legs and pushed inward instead of out. It wasn't an expansion, rather a compression. I forced the Pearl's energy into my cellular structure the wrong direction, driving
Chapter 174: The Great Rot
The Emperor's hand was gone up to the wrist before I moved.It wasn't dissolved, but consumed. The skin peeled back in layers and what was underneath went the same way, fast and neat, like something was eating inward from the surface. He watched it happen with his jaw set and his eyes calm. "You need to leave the Garden," he said. "What about you?" I asked. "I've been exposed," he said. "Leaving won't help me." He looked up. "Go to sublevel four. Get your father and use the east corridor, not the main hall."I stood up, the bench under me had a dark patch spreading across the armrest nearest him. I looked at it, the material was softening, and going dark at the edges."Go," he said. I wentThe corridor outside the Garden was already wrong. The walls on the left side had patches of black sludge forming at the joins, spreading slowly down toward the floor.It smelled like something biological and old, not sharp, just heavy and pervasive. Two of the Emperor's guards were standing at th
Chapter 173: The Garden of Screams
The map was accurate. I found the Garden on sublevel three, one level above what the clone had marked as the holding cells.The door was unlocked—that bothered me more than a lock would have.Inside, the plants were wrong. They looked like plants from a distance, tall and branching, filling the space from floor to ceiling in dense rows. Up close they were made of something that moved when there was no wind. The branches were pale and slightly translucent. They made a sound, low and continuous, that my translation buffer kept trying to process and kept failing on.[Unclassified biological material. Nerve-adjacent tissue structure detected.][Audio output consistent with sustained low-frequency vocalization.]Living nerves that kept singing. I kept walking. The Garden was bigger than the door suggested. The rows went back further than made architectural sense for a sublevel chamber. I followed the main path through the center and kept my hands loose at my sides.He was sitting on a ben
Chapter 172: The Gilded Nebula
The wormhole dropped me on a platform the size of a football field, and underneath the platform there was a star.Not a dead one; a dying one. The surface was close enough that the heat came through the floor material in long, slow pulses. The city built on top of it stretched in every direction, towers, walkways and open plazas, all made from the same gold-tinted material that the invitation spike had been made from. Everything glowed faintly from below.[New environment detected. Stellar proximity warning. Ambient energy absorption is active.]I took one step forward and the field hit me.It wasn't painful, it was just sudden. Like someone pulled a coat off my shoulders, except the coat was sixty pounds of integrated armor and scale plating. The black scales peeled away in sheets and dissolved before they hit the floor. My plasma housing went with them. The phase-state anchors in my skin went quiet. When it was done I was standing in plain clothes, roughly human-shaped, no visible
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