Laying on the ground, partially covered in shattered glass, Lian is in awe.

  The silver robed cultivator sprints around the room, sparks flashing as her sword blocks an endless stream of bullets as she charges down an increasingly panicked enemy.

  There’s a single diagonal slash of silver and she leaps away, her movements some strange combination of attack and dance as she weaves through attacks closes distance against impossible volume of fire again and again.

  But even as she flows between one enemy and the next it’s clear that she’s not invincible, attacks slowing her down and disrupting this invisible rhythm on more than one occasion. Even as she makes the act look effortless more than once she’s forced to abruptly change directions to take a hit that sends her flying.

  But as another orange robed cultivator falls with a scream and the echoing sound of gunshots attempt to drown out the pure tone of ringing steel, thudding footsteps rushing past her head shocks Lian out of her stupor and she realizes exactly how bad her situation is.

  Now’s her chance. Time to leave.

  Now.

  Pushing herself up, the scrapper distantly notes that the boilersuit actually protected her from the shards of glass, and beneath the mental static of thought halting fear she’s begrudgingly grateful for the garment.

  But as she hurriedly tries to brush the glass off of herself she hears more footsteps and looks up to see a large crowd of mortals wearing a piece of red ribbon around their neck are rushing toward the fighting instead of away.

  It takes a second longer for her to notice the weapons in their hands as she presses herself against the metal scaffolding of the destroyed call box to stay out of their way.

  “This is it! Remember to stick with your squads and watch your lines of fire! Guard the AC team at all costs!” One shouts, and as Lian watches them rush by she sees groups of people running alongside, carrying large high caliber mounted guns, drop the stand to the ground and mount the weapon to the top.

  Anti-cultivator weaponry.

  Hurriedly the scrapper breaks into a crouching sprint to the corridor that leads back home. But as she runs by she can see the mortal soldier wrack the slide of his weapon, and the atrium is illuminated by orange tracers.

  Glancing back, she sees the silver robed cultivator slow to a crawl as she struggles to deflect the new rounds that explode on contact with the blade, almost unable to move as she’s forced to focus purely on defence. Finally she gets out of the line of fire when she leaps ten stories up into the balcony of one of the upper levels, ducking and weaving though cover while deflecting smaller caliber bullets and simultaneously fighting an orange robed opponent who leaps up to meet her.

  Then Lian gets into the hallway, the deafening sounds and glow of tracers quieting as adrenaline allows her to sprint despite previously struggling to walk.

  With this much violence there must be at least one ship attempting to flee, and there’s no guarantee any new ships will be arriving anytime soon with this revolt going o–

  Then she hears something, a dim hissing roar from back the way she came, the echo suggesting that it came from much further away than the atrium and much louder.

  And Lian feels her heart spasm in her chest.

  She knows that sound.

  She’s heard that sound fifty thousand times before, and every instance is playing in her head as she struggles to deny her senses and comes to a stop, looking around wildly for an air vent.

  One of the most effective ways to empower a poison cultivator in game is to do a series of missions which –in lore– turns the entire station into a poison jar that sacrifices everyone inside to it to empower however many cultivators made it.

  Whenever they succeed in doing this, there is a cinematic, of purple smoke erupting from the vents, people choking on air, dying, then dissolving into black goo.

  Lian releases a tiny wheeze as she sees something coming from the air vent, wisps of smoke so black it eats the light around it that coils and writhes as if alive.

  The scrapper steps back.

  She needs to get out of here. She needs to get out of here now!

  Then she sees the orange flow of tracers shooting down the hallway behind her head before feeling a hand grabbing her by the shoulder and dragging her around a corner.

  It’s the silver cultivator, robes riddled in burns and bullet holes with the flesh underneath looking only slightly better.

  “I’m commandeering your ship!” She says, in her hand a bloody handgun, which she pokes around the corner and fires six times before looking back at the scrapper. “You will do whatever it takes to bring it to operation and pilot me t–”

  “RUN!” Lian screams, ripping herself out of the cultivator's grip as she stumbles into a sprint back into the hallway that had just been illuminated by tracers with reckless abandon.

  There are more tracers flying over her head, and the sound of fighting, but after she turns a corner the gunfire falls silent, leaving only the sound metal clashing against metal.

  As she runs she passes by confused and frightened faces of people with no idea of what’s going on, growing more desperate as the smoke gets thicker on the ground.

  She sees them tying cloth over their faces and stuffing more cloth into the vents even as they cough and migrate through the halls looking for safety like rats on a sinking ship. All the while the substance creeps up to her ankles.

  Then Lian turns a corner and sees a hallway choked in black smoke forcing her to skid to a stop, creeping toward her hungrily as the people caught within it writhe silently on the floor.

  That was her way home.

  This route is impassable, she needs to think of a way around.

  She can see some of them meltin–

  She can't think about it, she needs to find a way around.

  After a subjective eternity her mental map provides a solution and Lian starts moving on. But as she tries to lift her leg into another sprint she feels something in her already injured ankle pop and a body pushed far beyond what it should be able to do finally gives way, sending her to the floor in a heap.

  On the ground, she has no choice but to take a breath of the toxic smoke, and can feel the substance attempt to kill and strengthen her in equal measure, ripping through her body toward her center where it meets and homogenizes with its like.

  Then she feels herself start to melt.

  The scrapper struggles, mind sending orders her body cannot obey as she tries to both breathe and hold her breath at the same time. Splattering black tar on the ground with every cough.

  Then the cultivator appears in a blur of dirty silver, hand clenched around a growing patch of dark red at the bottom of her ribcage, her blood sizzling as drops fall into the toxic smoke.

  She looks down at Lian in disdain, but her attention is quickly redirected to the smoke as she realizes it’s there.

  “What is–” She’s cut off by Lian struggling to breathe through her cough, reaching a hand up to ask for help.

  “H–” Is all she can say before making a sound like a broken coffee maker and splattering more black tar on the ground.

  But instead of grabbing the hand, Lian sees the cultivator look back down at her with an irritated expression, crouch down, and throw the moral over her shoulder like a bag of flour.

  “Guide me!”

  Lian tries to speak but can only cough for a few long seconds, speckles of tar adding yet another mess to already ruined silver robes, and vaguely points in the direction until she can speak again.

  “Next hallway. Take a left. Hurry!” Lian complies with a wheeze pointing at where they need to go.

  Then they’re moving forward again, however the cultivator is clearly impacted by her injuries and exertion as she seems to struggle to get up to speed. But even injured she runs as fast as a horse, sliding around corners at her passenger’s rasping commands.

  Moving through the mazelike twists of nearly identical hallways toward their destination the smoke only grows thicker as time ticks on, pooling along the ground ever higher before erupting from vents and filling hallways in large bursts.

  But they manage it.

  Somehow they manage it.

  “There!” Lian screams, pointing at the hole in the wall she’s spent so long living in, grunting in pain as she’s unceremoniously dropped onto the ground and only barely keeps her nose and mouth above the smoke.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Struggling to keep upright, she sees the cultivator also stagger, leaning against a wall for a moment before straightening.

  The cultivator glares hatefully at the wall before sheathing her blade with one lightly trembling hand, then struggles to enter a shallow crouch.

  There’s a moment of stillness, followed by a flash of silv–

  It flickers.

  And Lian blinks in shock as the blade is embedded halfway into the wall, failing to cut the entire way through. But that emotion only lasts until she sees the smoke creeping higher even as she stands here.

  They’re wasting time!

  She shoves past the cultivator, takes a deep breath, and holds it before throwing herself down into the thigh high smoke and into the vent she’d been forced to leave open when she was taken, scraping on the corners in her haste to get through.

  Surprisingly, inside the vent there’s almost no smoke, only faint wisps flowing by her face in otherwise clean air.

  She doesn't exhale, only straining to pull herself faster through the vent as she hears the cultivator struggle to enter the vent behind her.

  But as she crawls through, she can hear it.

  A faint hissing roar, like the combination of a buffeting wind, acid dissolving working to dissolve something, and a rattlesnakes rattle.

  The wind picks up, pushing against her face, and the noise gets louder.

  She pushes harder, feeling the skin on the palms of her hands tear as she struggles to move just the slightest bit faster.

  But the noise only gets louder and louder, like an oncoming train it overwhelms everything else as the vent around her begins to vibrate.

  Faster!

  It becomes so loud she’s sure it’s right on top of her before she realizes she’s at the other vent, still open. Gripping the sides of the vent she drags herself through into the almost completely smoke free room, only the smallest haze on the bottom.

  Shambling out, she grabs the starmap from where it’s still sitting next to the vent and half crawls half drags herself toward her lifeline. Desperately, she throws the lever bar open and yanks open the circular airlock door, roughly places the starmap inside, then reaches out and grabs the airlock door to pull it shu–

  But as she looks back her eyes land on the vent, screaming with the wind, and she remembers the person who should have been following her.

  So she pauses.

  Hazarding a breath in the air, she watches as the amount of smoke coming from the opposite side of the room only increases.

  Where is she!?

  A few harrowing seconds later she sees two hands reach out, gripping the sides of the vent.

  Yes!

  “Hurry!” Lian shouts before the metal around the cultivator’s fingers deform like wet clay, followed by her shooting out of the vent with great force.

  But before the cultivator has a chance to stand the smoke erupts into the room, completely obscuring that entire side of the room and quickly spreading toward the pod.

  No!

  She tightens her grip on the airlock door.

  She can't let this stuff get inside the pod! She’s not even sure her air scrubbers will be able to manage normal waste gasses!

  But even as it approaches Lian holds off on closing the door for just a moment longer, knuckles white as she watches the darkness for–

  The cultivator erupts from the toxic cloud, flying through the air toward the pod in an uncontrolled, tumbling leap.

  She doesn't land gracefully, legs giving out on the landing and ragdolling end over end into the pod as the scrapper wrenches the door closed and throws the locking bar back to its proper place.

  She’s just in time.

  The black crashes into the airlock window the instant after the lever is dropped and the seal is made airtight and Lian takes a second to breathe as she looks through the double windows to the swirling black, only now noticing sparks of green lightning, before giving a hesitantly relieved smile.

  “Heh… heheHA!” She laughs hysterically.

  It’s gas, trying to get through a door designed to stop gas from getting through. They’re sa–

  There's a spark of green lightning and the station side airlock window cracks.

  Lian releases a yelp as the smoke begins hissing against the door and tiny wisps enter the empty space between the two windows that make up the center of the airlock.

  Not safe!

  Not at all safe!

  Sense of urgency renewed, she scurries over to the pilot’s seat of the escape pod. Stepping over the still collapsed –but breathing, she thinks– form of the cultivator, the scrapper throws herself into the chair, looking over the switches she’d spent months repairing.

  …

  …..How does one start this thing?

  Lian looks up and down the switches and blank screens.

  From what she can tell, normally all an operator would need to do is press a button and the automatic flight control module will take everything over. But that was one of the things that was both incredibly valuable and not essential so she barely even tried to find it.

  With the realization a shard of panic spikes past the already high water mark of ambient fear but she works past it.

  She’s worked on this thing for months, she’s seen it done in the cockpit view of the game, she’s got a basic understanding of how things work.

  She can figure it out.

  …Probably.

  “Ok… Ok. Uh…” She mutters, looking over the dozens of switches in front of her. “Switch from external to internal power.”

  The lights go dark.

  “Shoot. Um.” She flips the switch back. “Switch source from reactor to SMES bank, then switch to internal power.”

  The lights flicker but stay on, having been slowly trickle charged from the small amount of power still flowing through the escape pod room, and a warning light begins blinking on the console reading ‘power plant excess load.’

  Well… at least it means they’re on internal power. But she’s seen the explosive bolts, with how thick the cable is she needs the reactor working before she has the power to blow them.

  “Alright, good start.” She mutters, flipping more switches that cause the various screens on the console to illuminate with simple readouts. “Instrumentation online. Water pump online, electrolyzer online.”

  A hud appears on the glass in front of her as she hears an ominous crackling around from behind.

  Lian chooses not to turn around.

  “Magnetic containment rings online. Igniting fusion reacto– Shoot!” She shouts as the lights flicker and warning indicators start flashing on the screens and lights around her. “Couldnt you have had an automatic flight control module that’s easier to find!?”

  She takes a shallow breath.

  Calm.

  The scrapper looks around at the dashboard of blinking lights.

  What are the warnings saying?

  “Insufficient reactive mass? Uhhh. Oh. Low pressure.” She says with a squint, turning a knob on the readout screen until the display switches to something that looks like instrumentation for the reactor.

  Looking closer, the flickering screen shows a bar marked pressure in the red and slowly rising, and she hums in thought.

  “Alright. I think I just need to–”

  “You think?” The cultivator asks with a slight groan from the floor. “What do you mean you–”

  “Shh!” She hisses back as she hears something hissing against their ship’s side of the airlock door.

  The pressure bar climbs past a point and becomes yellow, meanwhile Lian continues flipping systems online if only to do something and make sure they’re not going to die of cold or asphyxiation a few hours after they disconnect.

  “O2 distributor online. Air scrubber online. Temperature control online. Flight control and thrust vectoring online…” She stops for a second as the pressure bar flips to green. “...Igniting reactor.”

  She presses the button again and holds her breath.

  Pressure drops.

  Lights flicker.

  Glass cracks.

  Then a switch on the dashboard automatically flips from SMES to reactor power and the screen readouts show temps spiking.

  Did she…

  She turns the dial on the readout screen a few times, blinks at the flashing warning light saying the cooling pump is off, flips that on, then feels a smile appear on her face as the ship thrums beneath her.

  Yes!

  Yes!

  “Yes! Reactor online!” Lian shouts, grabbing the control yoke and flipping up the covered button to blow the bolts. “Disconnecti–woah!”

  There’s a muffled thud, followed by almost complete silence, and the sudden feeling that she’s falling.

  She grips her control yoke in fear, until she sees a loose screw lift from some hidden place, and she realizes that she’s not falling.

  She’s flying.

  The scraper floats out of her chair, having not strapped herself down as their disconnection from the station means they're no longer within their artificial gravity envelope.

  But as they drift away from the station, their pod slowly rotates until the station takes up the entire view. Where she can see the yellow light of the station’s windows fall away to a darkness more complete than the void around them.

  Watching the lights get snuffed out one by one, Lian realizes that since she woke up here there has always been noise, human and mechanical endlessly beating at her senses.

  All gone.

  They continue to rotate, spinning until she’s looking back at the airlock they’d undocked from. She can see the toxic cloud venting into space in long strands like the limbs of some massive tentacled creature reaching out.

  Watching the airlock drift away in that defending silence, Lian glances at the cultivator who’s floating beside her, gripping the back of the chair.

  And wonders what happens next.