Captain Ironbelly had seen dead things in every size the universe could afford.

  This one was expensive. It had cost to put it down.

  The water bear lay half-submerged in its own gouged-out burrow chamber, wedged at an angle like it had tried to retreat into the earth and died mid-thought. Its armored hide still held that unnatural sheen—plates overlapping like welded scales, grooves packed with black grit.

  But the air around it was wrong.

  No mana-stink. No pressure in the skull. No humming undertone that made your teeth itch.

  Just… meat.

  Ironbelly stood with one boot on a cracked slab of granite and stared at the creature’s slack mouth. The circular maw—built for feeding and worse—was split, its rings of teeth frozen in a half-ejected snarl. Teeth lay scattered like broken glass.

  Nash kept his carbine trained on it anyway. Old habits kept you alive long enough to develop newer ones.

  Karn crouched near the bear’s flank, one hand hovering over torn plating, the other holding a small scanner that chirped quiet diagnostics through his suit. He was calm in the way only the unkillable looked calm.

  Vaeris stayed two steps back, eyes half-lidded, fingers flexing as if she could pluck answers out of the air. The tattoos along her wrists glimmered faintly and then—unsettled—dimmed.

  Chime, four-legged with horns again, kept inching forward, then hesitating, then inching again, as if it couldn’t decide whether the corpse was dinner or a warning.

  The captain stepped closer, careful of the blood. It wasn’t blood exactly—more like gel, tinted with that slick mucous the planet seemed determined to bleed from every pore.

  He put a paw pad on the stone beside the carcass. The rock was scorched—no, not scorched. That implied heat, friction, combustion. This was absence. A clean, deliberate strip where even the faintest mana residue refused to cling.

  A blank patch in a world that never stopped leaking magic.

  Ironbelly’s ears flattened.

  This wasn’t drone weaponry. Not SoulCorp standard, not black-market, not the Technocracy. He’d stolen enough toys and survived enough “classified incidents” to recognize the signatures.

  This was something else.

  He rose and circled the corpse, boots crunching on shattered tooth fragments. A chunk of the creature’s armored hide had been peeled back like someone had pried it open, revealing pale tissue beneath—tissue that should’ve been luminescent with mana channels.

  Instead, it just looked like wet muscle.

  Karn’s scanner chirped again. He frowned faintly and adjusted his reading glasses with a gloved knuckle. “It’s… inert.”

  Nash snorted. “Dead is dead.”

  Karn didn’t look up. “Not always.”

  Vaeris leaned forward, her voice a soft blade. “It should still have mana lingering. Even dead, creatures like this leave a stain. There isn't one. ”

  Chime made a sound that was half hunger, half confusion, like a dog sniffing a meal that didn’t smell like anything.

  Ironbelly stared at the corpse again, and the numbers in his head refused to stay where he’d pinned them.

  Ben and Thorn had fallen into a hole under a trashed communications center. That much they knew.

  They’d tracked the last signal burst. Fought drones. Cut through worms. Followed burrow paths like the planet itself was a throat.

  And then—

  Nothing.

  No beacon.

  No comms.

  No heat signatures from above.

  Down here, the only sign of Ben’s existence had been absence and blood and rubble.

  Ironbelly had run the survivability odds a dozen times.

  He’d made Thimble run them too, each pass colder than the last.

  Low. Likely dead.

  Unacceptable.

  He’d prepared for body recovery because preparation was what you did when you didn’t have the luxury of hope.

  Hope made men hesitate. Hope made them sloppy. Hope made them believe in miracles instead of trajectories.

  But the corpse in front of him threatened to shift the probabilities.

  Because this wasn’t a kill made by a squad.

  This wasn’t a kill made by heavy weapons.

  This was targeted. Deliberate.

  The damage wasn’t random—it was focused around the mouth, the jointed limbs, the burrowing claws.

  Someone had fought this thing.

  Someone had kept moving.

  Someone had lived long enough to learn.

  Ironbelly’s jaw tightened.

  Don’t.

  He didn’t say it. Didn’t have to. The word echoed in his own skull anyway.

  Hope.

  He walked to the bear’s head and peered down into the circular mouth. Along the inner rings, a thin line of black residue clung like soot that refused to fade.

  Not ash or carbon scoring.

  The residue looked… wrong. Like it didn’t belong in the universe’s palette.

  He extended one claw toward the residue.

  Vaeris’s tone sharpened. “Captain.”

  “I’m not licking it,” he growled.

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  The residue didn’t smear. It didn’t flake. It didn’t do anything a sensible substance would do.

  It simply existed, stubborn and dark.

  His claw tingled.

  Not pain. Not heat. Not cold.

  A brief moment of nothingness, as if his nerves had been convinced they didn’t need to report anything.

  Ironbelly withdrew his claw and pulled the outer shell off, letting it fall to the ground.

  Chime quivered, then pulled back slightly, as if the residue had a scent only it could understand.

  Karn finally looked up. “Captain. There are… scratches on the stone and footprints. Human.”

  Nash’s weapon dipped by a fraction. Not lowered. Just—less pointed.

  Vaeris’s violet eyes narrowed. “Fresh?”

  Karn examined the floor. “Not from us. Newer than the blood’s surface drying.” He looked to the tunnel that sloped upward, where dust still drifted in slow spirals. “They went that way.”

  Ironbelly stared at the tunnel mouth.

  The numbers shifted again.

  Up.

  His chest tightened with something that wasn’t fear. It was worse. It was the universe offering him a bargain: believe, and you’ll be punished if you’re wrong.

  He’d made that bargain before.

  He didn’t like how it ended.

  “Move it,” he ordered. Voice hard.

  The crew responded instantly. Nash took point, Karn behind, Vaeris flanking, Chime trotting along the rear like an anxious shadow. Ironbelly stayed centered, posture loose, eyes sharp.

  The tunnels up were narrower, scraped smooth by claws that didn’t care if stone protested. Their boots found purchase on broken shelves of rock. Dust coated their armor. The air warmed as they rose, the faint tremor of surface wind filtering down in pulses like the planet breathing.

  Thimble’s comms cut in and out, her voice coming through in fragments. “—surface readings—movement earlier—couldn’t lock—something is—”

  “Say again,” Ironbelly snapped.

  Static. A faint, offended gnomish curse. Then: “I SAID I saw movement topside a few minutes ago. Two heat signatures, intermittent. They disappeared behind the satellite hull. I couldn’t confirm identity.”

  Two.

  Ironbelly swallowed something sharp.

  Ben and Thorn.

  Or predators. Or drones. Or worse.

  His weapon stayed up.

  His mind stayed cold.

  He climbed faster.

  The tunnel widened abruptly to the surface. Red sky hit him like a slap.

  The sunburned wasteland stretched out, pocked ferrocrete and jagged rock, with the huge satellite structure looming ahead—half-buried, half-proud, corporate relic too stubborn to die.

  Wind hissed across the debris field.

  And in the open, silhouetted against that ugly light, two figures stood.

  For a half-second Ironbelly couldn’t make sense of them. The taller one was human-shaped, but it moved like a man who’d been hollowed out and refilled with resolve. The smaller one had—wings?—and flapped them in a way that suggested the concept of flight was still under negotiation.

  Weapons rose around Ironbelly in one synchronized motion.

  Nash’s carbine tracked the tall figure’s chest.

  Karn stepped up, revolvers angled down but ready.

  Vaeris’s fingers glowed faintly, her tattoos waking.

  Ironbelly’s sights settled over the taller figure’s center mass.

  Then the small figure launched.

  Thorn Seven Hollow screamed something triumphant and utterly unreadable and rocketed toward them, wings beating like he was trying to punch the air into submission.

  For one glorious second, it looked like he might actually pull it off.

  Then he hit a crosswind.

  His tiny body yawed sideways, overcompensated, and—

  He slammed directly into Karn’s chest with a wet thump that sounded like a bag of angry knives hitting a wall. And landed square on his ass.

  Karn didn’t move an inch.

  “…Calculated maneuver,” Thorn rasped from the ground.

  Karn looked down at him. Blinked once. “Sure.”

  Nash snorted.

  Vaeris’s lips twitched like they were resisting a smile out of principle.

  Chime made a curious chirp and leaned toward Thorn, sniffing as if checking whether he’d broken in a way it could eat.

  Karn crouched and, without asking, grabbed Thorn and hauled him to his feet like a troublesome kitten. Thorn’s wings drooped in offended defeat.

  “Need practice,” Karn said.

  Thorn bared needle teeth. “I need a better atmosphere.”

  “You need less ego,” Vaeris murmured, but her attention was already sliding back to Ben, hungry and wary in equal measure.

  Ironbelly didn’t move.

  Because he wasn't looking at the short demon.

  Ben stepped forward from behind Thorn’s chaotic entrance.

  No theatricality. No bravado.

  Just a man walking out of a nightmare because there was nowhere else to go.

  His clothes were shredded. Dust coated his skin. His hair was matted with grit. His eyes locked onto Ironbelly’s like they’d been looking for him in the dark and finally found the outline.

  Ironbelly’s breath caught.

  Not visibly. Not enough for anyone else to notice.

  But inside his chest, something tightened so violently it felt like the universe had tried to rip him open and check what he cared about.

  For half a second—

  He wasn’t on Brindle Scar.

  He wasn’t under a satellite.

  He wasn’t staring at a filthy human with blackened hands

  He was somewhere else.

  Smoke. Metal. A corridor lit by emergency strobes. A body on the floor that didn’t stand no matter how many times he barked at it to move.

  He blinked.

  The memory tried to cling. He crushed it. His stance stayed solid. His voice stayed level.

  Hope didn’t get to live here without permission.

  Ben’s gaze didn’t flinch.

  He looked… braced. Like a man expecting a verdict.

  Expecting anger. Disappointment. A lecture about procedures and survival odds and how expensive it was to lose an asset mid-operation.

  Ironbelly cracked a gate and ran an analysis in the space between heartbeats.

  Standing.

  Breathing.

  No obvious internal bleed.

  Gait stable.

  Conscious.

  Alert.

  Alive.

  The universe had tried to steal something from him again. And it failed.

  Ironbelly exhaled once through his nose.

  “Report,” he said.

  Ben’s shoulders dropped by a fraction, like the word itself had anchored him.

  “We were looking for a way to boost the tracking beacon's signal,” Ben said, voice rough. “But the place was trashed. We… fell. Big hole. Tunnels. Worm monsters. Then… that thing.”

  He jerked his chin toward the collapsed cavity behind them, the buried mouth of the underworld.

  Thorn, still at Karn’s feet, lifted his head with pride. “He killed it.”

  Vaeris’s eyes sharpened instantly. “How?”

  Ben glanced down at his hands like they belonged to someone else. “I… did something. I used—” He hesitated, as if the words were too strange to trust. “I unlocked a physical gate. Opened it and null at the same time.”

  Karn’s brows lifted a hair.

  Vaeris’s tattoos flared faintly, then settled. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

  Thimble’s voice came through the comms, clear now that they’d surfaced. “I’m sorry, at the same time? That’s—Ben, what did you do?”

  Ben’s jaw worked. “I don’t know. I made my null energy manifest again? And then I just pushed it out and—” He made a small, helpless gesture. “Then it stopped being magic.”

  Thorn pushed himself upright with dignity that ignored gravity. “He made it stupid. It was talking, Captain. It was laying eggs by eating mana. He shot it and it went dumb. Then it was just… a big angry animal. And I got wings! Isn't it marvelous?”

  Chime made a sound like it approved of “big angry animal” as a category.

  Nash lowered his weapon fully now, but his eyes stayed on Ben’s hands.

  Ironbelly watched them all, then looked back at Ben.

  Ironbelly had dealt with magic and tech and corporate nonsense. He’d seen weapons that burned, froze, disintegrated, twisted, and sang hymns while they did it.

  He’d rarely seen something that could erase.

  That kind of power didn’t come with instructions.

  It came with consequences.

  Now Ben stood in front of him, alive and breathing, and hope was no longer theoretical.

  It was real. And that was dangerous

  Ironbelly stepped closer to Ben, just enough that the others could pretend not to listen.

  His voice dropped low, private.

  “You stood.”

  Ben’s eyes widened slightly, like he hadn’t expected that. He stood straighter.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ironbelly held his gaze.

  Then, softer—not warm—just… true:

  “Good.”

  Ben swallowed, and something in his face shifted. Not gratitude exactly. Not relief. Something more complicated. Like a man realizing he’d been accepted into a pack he hadn’t known he wanted.

  Thorn chose that moment to flap his wings again, as if compelled by the universe to ruin sincerity.

  He crouched, launched, got a full foot of air, and then Karn reached up and grabbed his ankle.

  “Walk, we don't have time for flight lessons.”

  Chime made a delighted little chirp, horns disappearing into its head, each replaced by a tiny wing.

  Nash made that snort sound again.

  Thimble’s comms crackled. “Captain, I’m getting seismic instability. Collapse radius is widening. You’re going to lose your exit path if you linger.”

  Ironbelly’s patience—thin as it was—vanished. He turned toward the horizon where their shuttle sat at a distance, half-hidden behind jagged rock.

  “Back to the shuttle,” he ordered. “Now.”

  The crew moved.

  Not scattered. Not chaotic. As a unit.

  Ben fell in without being told where to stand. Thorn walked beside him, wings tucked, muttering about atmospheric betrayal and Karn’s “anti-fun aura.”

  Vaeris walked to Ben’s other side, already trying to pretend she wasn’t dying to poke him with a wand.

  Karn took rear guard, calm as a wall. Nash scanned the ridgelines.

  Chime between them, restless but obedient in its own unsettling way.

  Ironbelly took point.

  He didn’t look back at Ben again.

  Not for long.

  But the wind shifted, carrying the scent of dust and blood and something darker—something that made the air feel clean in the wrong way—and Ironbelly glanced sideways just once.

  Ben was still there.

  Still upright

  Still breathing.

  Still moving under his own power.

  Still with them.

  Ironbelly faced forward again, jaw set, stride steady.

  Hope stayed in its cage.

  But the lock wasn’t as tight as it used to be.