Chapter 69: Rolling An SSS-Rank Item

The boot had landed dead center over his ribs, and the sound of his own sternum flexing inward had traveled through his chest like cracking slate then came the meter-wide tear in the flexible accordion sleeve, the screech of magnetic latches shearing off the Wanderer-7’s outer ring, and the violent blinding suction of the void.

...There was no sound in the abyss.

The roar of venting air cut off into suffocating silence the instant his boots cleared the threshold, and the universe stripped away every familiar constant in a single concussive beat.

The air tore out of his throat in a foaming pink mist that froze into crystal needles against his eyelashes before he could clamp his teeth shut.

The moisture on his tongue boiled away into cold vapor, his eardrums bulged against his skull and the capillaries along the bridge of his nose burst, painting his cheeks with tiny scarlet beads that hardened into frosted ice.

...Leo tumbled.

He had no suit, no tether and no thruster pack to stop the spin of the kick, and the dark wheeled around him in sickening violent circles until he couldn’t tell up from down.

Every three seconds the starlight flashed across his eyes, followed by the jagged silhouette of the outer asteroid belt, and then the twin turquoise plumes of the Wanderer-7 and the pale green flare of the Black Kite, already hundreds of meters away and pulling further with every heartbeat.

The two ships were still locked together in a five-kilometer-per-second cruise along Beta-9, carving a clean line through the drift, and every second stretched the gulf wider.

The gunmetal hull of his corvette, the ship he’d pulled out of the tutorial rubble and patched with his own hands, shrank into a tiny distant needle of grey iron.

’Air’s gone...’

The thought was slow and heavy, dragging through his freezing brain like a rusted chain over stone.

’Thirty seconds... brain death in ninety...’

The cold crawled into him from the inside out, sinking through his cotton shirt, turning the sweat along his collar into brittle glass and pulling the heat out of his blood until his fingers locked into stiff blue claws.

His lungs convulsed against the empty vacuum, trying desperately to drag in a breath that didn’t exist.

The edges of his vision darkened and swallowed the stars in creeping static-laced shadow, and his heartbeat became a dull hollow thud behind his ears that slowed with every tumbling turn.

’Not out here...’

His teeth ground together so hard the enamel cracked.

Faces flickered through the dark behind his eyes.

Harper laughing with grease on her nose, Camila’s first tomato sprout, Chloe asleep against his sleeve, Aoi frowning over her star charts with her glasses pushed up into her hair... and every one of them was still on that ship, with Ren.

’I cooked their food... I patched those plates... I dragged them all this way, and I’m not turning into frozen meat because an unwashed raider smiled at them...’

With the last agonizing scrap of his fading consciousness, Leo dragged his mind inward past the dying nerves of his limbs and hammered his intent straight into the dormant system anchored to his soul.

’Open it!’

SHING!

A clear ethereal chime rang inside his skull and shattered the silence of the vacuum.

Before his freezing eyes, hanging against the indifferent blackness of space, a radiant circular wheel of celestial brass and starlight unfurled.

It stretched five meters wide, etched with ancient constellations that turned with slow timeless majesty, and a single gleaming pointer of white fire hovered at its top.

Down in the corner of his dimming vision, the spin he’d been saving since the Shroud Ray flared in clean golden numbers.

[WHEEL OF FATE]

[Available Survival Points (SP): 1,032... Cost Per Spin: 1,000 SP... Would you like to spin the Wheel of Fate?]

His last trump card... The loaded gun hidden in his boot, the last door out when every other door was shut.

’Spin it!’ Leo screamed in the silence of his own mind, his frozen lips refusing to part. ’SPIN IT!’

CLIK-CLIK-CLIK-CLIK-WHIRRRRRRR!

The 1,000 SP vanished from his ledger in a flash of dissolving gold, leaving a balance of exactly 32, and the wheel tore into motion...

It spun like a collapsing galaxy.

Bands of amber, emerald, sapphire and violet blurred into one blinding vortex that threw long radiant flares across the frozen fabric of his flight jacket, and the pointer clicked over invisible pegs with a slow thunderous rhythm that he felt against his dying heart.

TICK!

TICK!

TICK!

The blur began to drag.

The wheel groaned as the bands of color separated into sectors... It glided past a dull grey B-Rank field and slid over a shimmering silver A-Rank segment, rolled lazily across a deep sapphire S-Rank arc and a blazing violet SS-Rank band... and then, as Leo’s vision greyed out into the last stage of hypoxia, the pointer crossed a thin razor-sharp boundary etched in abyssal obsidian.

CLACK!

The wheel seized and stopped dead on an impossibly narrow needle-thin sliver that blazed with a crimson-gold light so fierce that the stars around it seemed to dim.

KRA-KOOOOOOOM!

A silent concussive explosion of celestial energy tore through the inside of Leo’s mind.

The system panel slammed into his consciousness with the weight of a falling monument, framed in burning crimson runes that dripped with ancient fire.

[You have received an SSS-RANK ITEM!]

[Item: Blood of the Space God (Primordial Essence Catalyst)]

[Rank: SSS-Rank Purity]

[Biological Compatibility Check: Pass]

[Note: Host currently carries a dormant hereditary bloodline concentration of 0.01% Space God’s Blood... Catalyst synchronization threshold achieved.]

FLASH!

The radiant wheel collapsed into a single point of light, and in that same split second something heavy materialized against the stiff blue flesh of his right palm.

It was a hexagonal vial forged from an unknown crystalline black metal that felt neither warm nor cold.

Behind its narrow quartz windows a thick viscous liquid swirled, molten starlight and pure gold and abyssal darkness all turning together, swallowing the faint light of the void.

Leo had no air left to think with, and the frost had already crept over his eyelids.

He drove his thumb up and snapped the crystal seal.

CRACK!

He jammed the open neck of the vial straight into his frozen mouth.

GULP!

The liquid hit his tongue, and it tasted like raw concentrated lightning... The moment the golden-black ichor cleared his throat, Leo’s whole universe detonated from within.

BOOM!

It tore through every cell in his body like an ignited sun.

The dormant 0.01% of divine blood that had been sleeping in the marrow of his bones woke and answered the catalyst with a deafening roar that ripped through his nervous system, and every capillary in his body flared white-hot as if molten bronze were being forced through his veins.

The cold that had paralyzed his muscles was blown out of his pores in a fine hissing mist of scalding steam, and his heart seized into a knot of diamond-hard muscle before it hammered against his ribs hard enough to send a pulse through the fabric of his torn jacket.

THUMP!

THUMP!

THUMP!

The frost on his skin cracked, peeled back and re-formed in intricate geometric lattices that clung to his jaw like frozen armor.

His hair stood out against the dark, and behind his closed eyelids a brilliant golden fire erupted and burned away the black until his whole field of view was drowning in dawn.

SHING!

A second panel tore through the golden haze, its edges framed in shifting constellations that hummed with authority.

[NEW SKILL AWAKENED]

[Skill Name: Universal Determination]

[Rank: SSS-Rank (Passive / Active Trigger)]

[Description: As long as you have enough determination, the universe will bend to your will to make sure you accomplish your goal.]

Leo’s eyes snapped open, and his dark brown irises were gone.

In their place burned two blinding pools of liquid celestial gold, like miniature stars blazing with an unyielding wrath and they threw two straight beams of light across the vacuum.

The stars sharpened until he could count them... The distant corvette sharpened until he could see the scorch marks on her stern plating and the faint shiver of her drives, and the whole cold universe around him seemed to lean in and wait for him to tell it what to do...

The fragile human business of lungs and oxygen had been forced down beneath the impossible weight of his will.

He looked ahead.

Three kilometers away now, the Wanderer-7 was shrinking into the dark with its turquoise thrusters stopped along Beta-9 with Black Kite carrying his crew toward the jaws of a slave market.

’Give me my ship back...’ Leo thought.

The thought carved itself into the fabric of reality like a law.

CREAK!

The space around Leo’s body began to bend.

The void groaned and warped around his outstretched boots like a rubber sheet under a lead ball, and the three kilometers between his hands and the corvette’s stern folded in on themselves in shimmering iridescent ripples of warped starlight, collapsing without a single meter of travel.

....It felt like falling and standing still at the same time, like the universe was a door and he’d simply decided to walk through it.

WHOOOOOOSH!

Frost spread across his knuckles, his neck and the high collar of his jacket, glittering like diamond dust in the glare of his eyes.

The stars stretched into long violet streaks, the tumbling asteroids of the outer belt froze mid-turn, and in a single impossible stride that broke every law of physics he’d ever learned, the void closed behind his heel and the gap was gone.

His boots touched the Wanderer-7’s hull with a soft magnetic thud that he felt in his teeth more than he heard.

What came next arrived in a storm of broken half-remembered fragments... shattered glass, white noise and the smell of burning copper.

FLASH!

The ventral maintenance hatch of the Wanderer-7.

His frost-burned hand slammed against the manual cycling stud on the outer hull, and the hatch buckled inward under the terrible unnatural strength of his grip as the seal spat a burst of white vapor into the black.

HISS-BANG! FLASH!

The starboard airlock.

Their luggage was still stacked in neat little rows against the bulkhead, Elena’s silver trunk and Aoi’s satchel and Camila’s crate of tomato cuttings, and every room behind it was empty.

Ren had already taken them across, and the deck by the torn sleeve was still slick with the frost the vacuum had left behind when it ripped him out.

The emergency klaxons were screaming, strobing across the composite bulkheads in bloody red waves, and Ren’s virus chip was still jammed into the open maintenance port in the airlock wall, glowing with its sick parasitic crimson light and choking the ship’s brain in a false telemetry loop.

Leo drove his bare frost-blackened fingers straight into the composite around the port.

CRUNCH-RIP!

He tore the chip out of the wiring harness with his bare hands.

Its gold pins snapped and trailed shredded ribbons of fiber-optic glass, and the skin of his fingertips tore against the jagged frame, leaving four frozen bloody fingerprints smeared around the empty socket.

He kept the chip clenched in his fist as he ran with the cold of his skin freezing it into a solid lump of red and frost.

FLASH!

The bridge.

The companionway doors blew open under his palm... The deck was freezing with the air thin and bitter as the consoles flickering dead slate-grey.

His breath came out in faint white puffs that never seemed to warm.

Leo climbed the three steps of the dais with heavy boots that left melting frost prints across the floor, and he dropped into the leather of the command throne with his chest heaving in silent ragged spasms.

The chip fell out of his loosening fist and clattered onto the plating beside his boot as he slammed both frostbitten palms flat into the crystal cradles.

THOOM!

The Wanderer-7 screamed awake...

The neural link seized his spine with a jolt of liquid golden fire that raced from his vertebrae straight into the ship’s Tier-2 Micro-Fusion Core.

The dead displays exploded into brilliant cerulean light, and the sub-light ion drives flared turquoise with blinding fury as their output jumped from sixty percent to one hundred and twelve percent in a single heartbeat.

Ren’s false telemetry loops melted off every screen line by line like wax under a torch, replaced by the clean blue readouts of a ship that knew exactly who was holding her, and the whole frame shuddered around him like a hound that had heard its master’s voice.

FLASH!

Four kilometers off the bow, the ninety-meter slate-armored frame of the Black Kite was turning slowly in the drift, swinging its heavy rail-cannons around to bear on him.

...Somewhere on that raider, tied up on a cold deck, were six people he’d promised to keep alive.

Leo’s golden eyes locked onto it, and the faint familiar tingle stirred in the small of his back as the Kite’s gunports began to glow.