Chapter 78: Truths

The scent of ionized ozone from the laser capacitors drifted through the vents and mixed with the crisp mint Camila had poured earlier, while the bridge of the Wanderer-7 buzzed with loud overlapping chatter and pure leftover adrenaline.

Harper was practically hanging over the back of the port gunnery seat, her dirty-blonde hair escaping its copper-wire knot in frayed strands as her freckled face split into a wide toothy grin.

"I still can’t get over the backward drift!" she yelled, waving both calloused hands through the air to trace the flight path. "You cut the burn, spun the whole nose around while we were still screaming forward at six kilometers a second, and punched that lead bastard right through his tailpipes before he even figured out his targeting lock was looking at our windshield... You just threw the whole thing into the vacuum!"

"The physics were technically non-standard, but magnificent," Elena chimed in from station two, her icy blue eyes sparkling with an unusual warmth as she smoothed down the lapels of her uniform jacket. "Though I believe the true masterpiece was the harpoon sequence. The cable hit ninety-four percent of its tension tolerance when their manifold seized, and the frame held without a single micro-fracture... Dragging an eighty-meter raider between two basalt pillars to set up the turret’s shot was... remarkably elegant, Captain."

"Elegant?!" Camila laughed from the mezzanine step, her bronze cheeks glowing as she kicked her feet against the riser. "Elena, he fed the second ship to an actual monster! It had teeth the size of our cargo hold! I thought we were going straight into its stomach, my heart was up in my throat, and then Leo just rolled right over its lip and let the pirate fly into its mouth! The crunch alone made my teeth hurt!"

"I felt it through the ventral armor," Aoi added, her dark eyes shining with quiet relief as she unbuckled her harness and stepped to the edge of the dais. "That creature’s jaws could have sheared through forty millimeters of hyperalloy in a fraction of a second... If Leo had misjudged our altitude by half a meter, we’d have lost the dorsal array."

"And what about that purple needle?" Harper cut in, turning to Jin-Ah with wide questioning eyes. "The ship that came screaming out of the moonlet’s shadow right after the third raider blew! It looked like some kind of racer, doing at least nine klicks a second, and then it chased us straight into the Boiling Belt like it had a personal grudge!"

"Its acceleration was beyond any military interceptor I have data on," Jin-Ah said, tapping her slate to bring up the broken sensor playback. "It stayed on our vector through four gravitational shears and copied the Captain’s maneuvers with frightening precision... right up until those two iron asteroids collided. Our rear sensors caught a massive impact against its forward shields before the dust cut our line of sight. It crashed hard."

"Serves them right," Harper scoffed, though there was a trace of awe in her voice. "Nobody flies like Leo through a rock storm... Nobody..."

While the girls talked over one another, trading theories and laughing in bright breathless bursts, Leo sat quietly in the command throne.

His dark hair hung loose around his shoulders and brushed the collar of his flight jacket, and his dark brown eyes stared absently through the canopy at the endless indifferent stars.

He was thinking about that fourth ship... the purple needle.

The moment it had locked onto their wake, he had felt it... The pilot of that strange iridescent craft had moved with an easy grace that mirrored his own, and it had felt nothing like the cold prickle of a raider lining up a weapons lock.

’We piloted the same...’ he thought, his thumbs lightly grazing the cool seams of the leather armrests.

Every time he’d thrown the Wanderer-7 through a gap that shouldn’t have existed, that purple ship had been right behind him, slipping through the same vector with the same razor-thin margin.

No computer could have calculated those margins in a field of tumbling basalt however the pilot had felt it.

He reached inward toward the base of his spine, remembering the molten bronze guide that had pulled him through the fight.

During that chase through the Boiling Belt, the feeling in his back had done more than hum for his own ship... it had twitched and pulsed and reached outward, as if an invisible wire had stretched across the vacuum between his seat and that violet cockpit.

’Do me and that pilot have the same feeling...?’

The thought lingered in his chest for a moment, curious and electric, and then it faded and settled back into its quiet steady dormancy.

Leo let out a slow breath through his nose and let it go.

The void was huge and full of ancient monsters, strange technology and millions of beings living and dying in corners of space he would never see.

...Whoever had been flying that racer had pushed their luck too far and eaten a five-hundred-ton rock for it.

He had a ship to run, six people to keep fed, a tiny girl who needed his blood, and three solar systems to cross before they ever saw a civilized port so he wasn’t that interested in chasing ghosts.

Leo cleared his throat, and the quiet sound cut straight through the chatter.

The six of them stopped talking and turned toward the dais.

Leo leaned forward with his forearms on the console rim, and a warm genuine smile broke across his face as he looked at each of them in turn.

"You all did a great job," he said, his baritone low and steady. "Harper, your lathe gave us slugs that went straight through their reactors without jamming the feed... Elena, your plates took a full plasma wash and didn’t let a single degree of heat into the crew decks... Camila, the propellant you and Aoi pumped into our bladders gave me the extra burn I needed to clear that leviathan’s teeth... Aoi and Jin-Ah, your calls kept us from getting boxed in when they opened up. And Chloe..."

He glanced over his shoulder at the small figure in the seat behind the throne.

"...you carried half the armor on this ship across open space by yourself. We survived because everybody did their job."

A soft collective stillness settled over the deck.

They looked at him with relief and quiet pride.

Harper looked down at her grease-stained boots with a small pleased smirk tugging at her mouth, Elena gave an elegant formal dip of her chin with a faint pink warmth in her cheeks, Camila clasped her hands over her apron with her hazel eyes shining and Aoi gave him a slow respectful nod.

Behind him, Chloe hummed a tiny satisfied note and swung her feet then the silence stretched on.

The adrenaline had burned away, and what was left was the question that had hung over the ship ever since Leo stepped out of the medical cylinder.

Harper glanced at Aoi, who hesitated for a split second before she met Leo’s eyes.

"Leo..." Aoi began softly, her voice careful and measured. "There is something we have all wanted to ask... Ever since you brought the Wanderer-7 back to the raider’s flank with frost on your skin."

Harper took a half step forward and leaned against the chrome stanchion, her rough voice dropping into an earnest gentle register.

"You don’t have to tell us, Cap. We mean that... You don’t owe us an explanation, and if it’s something personal, or something the system wants kept quiet, we won’t push... We’re your crew... We trust you, and we’re just glad you’re sitting in that chair."

"Truly, Captain," Elena added, her eyes steady and sincere. "Your privacy is your own. The fact that you came back to pull us out of the dark is more than enough for any of us."

"We just..." Camila murmured, small and hesitant. "We were so scared for you, Leo. When your chest burst open on the console... we thought we’d lost you forever."

Leo looked at the six faces gathered around the dais, including Chloe, who sat quietly behind him with her green eyes fixed on his profile in calm unwavering devotion.

They were asking because they cared.

They’d spent a whole week scrubbing his blood off the floor while he healed in a glass jar, and none of them was demanding anything.

He let out a quiet sigh and rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the long strands of dark hair brush his fingers.

"I don’t mind telling you," he said, completely relaxed. "We’re past keeping secrets on this bridge... If we’re going to cross three systems together, you need to know what we’re working with."

He tapped the master interface on his armrest and pulled his personal system logs into the central holographic projector.

SHING!

A vivid golden display unfurled in the middle of the bridge, glowing with crisp celestial runes that bathed the clean Graventhal plating in warm light.

"When Ren kicked me out of the airlock," Leo said, as levelly as if he were describing a difficult repair, "I was tumbling with no suit and no air. My lungs were empty, and my brain was maybe thirty seconds from shutting down but after we killed the Shroud Ray, I’d saved a spin on the Wheel of Fate. I had just over a thousand Survival Points sitting in my ledger..."

Harper’s eyes went wide. "The gacha wheel? You spun it while you were freezing to death in space?!"

"I didn’t have a lot of options," Leo said with a faint smile. "I spent the thousand points and spun it. It landed on an SSS-Rank item..."

He tapped the screen and expanded the first log.

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

[Rank: SSS-Rank]

[Biological Compatibility Check: Pass]

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

The bridge went dead quiet.

Elena leaned forward with her lips parted in astonishment, her eyes racing across the glowing script.

"Blood of the Space God... an SSS-Rank primordial essence... That shouldn’t even be possible in a tutorial sector."

"A vial appeared in my hand," Leo went on quietly, remembering the taste of raw lightning. "I drank it... It burned through my veins like molten bronze, woke up whatever trace of it was already in my body and rebuilt my cells so the cold couldn’t freeze me and the moment it settled, the system gave me a skill."

He swiped the projector and brought up the second panel.

[PERSONAL SKILL PANEL]

[Skill Name: Universal Determination Rank: SSS-Rank (Passive / Active Trigger)]

[Current Status: Deactivated]

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

[Availability: Locked as System criteria is unfulfilled... Host biological parameters currently insufficient for conscious reactivation.]

CHIME!

[This unit confirms the Master Captain’s account... This unit also notes he was very nearly a smear on the canopy.]

Harper let out a breathless half-strangled laugh with her eyes shining between terror and awe.

"Universal Determination... the universe bends to your will? Leo, that sounds like something out of a holy book. You literally folded space so you could reach the ship?!"

"My eyes were burning gold, and the distance between me and the hull just... collapsed," Leo said, looking down at his calloused palms. "I ripped Ren’s virus chip out of the airlock wall, got into this chair and shredded their drives but a human body isn’t built to hold that kind of power. The second the fight was over and the ship was safe, the pressure blew out from the inside... My chest burst, my ribs shattered and my left cheek tore open."

Camila covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes welling up as she looked from the panel to his healed face.

"That’s why the tank took a whole week... you had to rebuild your entire skeleton."

"And that’s why the skill is locked," Jin-Ah said, already piecing it together. "Your body forced a synchronization while you were dying of hypoxia, and the rebound almost killed you... The system has put a safety lock on it... Until your body is strong enough to carry the load, you can’t trigger it at will."

"Which is probably a good thing," Leo chuckled, rubbing his ribs. "I don’t think I’ve got enough blood left to survive another round..."

"Do not even joke about such a thing, Captain," Elena said sharply, though her eyes were soft. "You are our commander, not a disposable warhead... We will strengthen this ship and ourselves so you never have to tear yourself apart again."

"Agreed," Aoi said firmly, stepping closer to the display. "From now on we rely on discipline, not miracles."

Before anyone could answer...

BEEP!

A sharp low sensor ping sounded from the secondary console, and the bridge went silent again.