No 1. Worm Hater

"Deuterium fuel..." Camila gasped while edging forward. "Why is it glowing like that? Is it radioactive? Are we going to get poisoned?"

[Relax. The tanks hold Refined Hyper-Deuterium, a Tier-2 propellant, The glow comes from isotopic ionization, and it is perfectly safe behind the containment glass… Please do not lick the tanks.]

"Who would lick the—" Harper started, then glanced at Chloe. "...Okay, fair."

Chloe made a tiny wounded noise.

"So how do we carry them back?" Harper asked, eyeing the drums. "Those things have to weigh half a ton each and we can't drag four of them through an eleven-meter window."

[You don't have to… The Master Captain can use Foundry Recall. Touch the container, say the command, and the Wanderer-7 will break it down and pull it through the station's conduits straight into the ship's reservoir.]

"Seriously?" Leo raised an eyebrow. "That convenient?"

[No. Before the Captain gets ideas, there are rules… Recall only works on loose objects and sealed containers, so it can't tear out anything welded into the station's structure, Every use drains ship power, and the ship does not have much power to drain, It also only works within two kilometers of the Wanderer-7 so no, Master Captain, you cannot touch the wall and teleport the entire station home… This unit saw you thinking it.]

Leo coughed. 

"I wasn't—"

[You were.]

He stepped up to the nearest drum and laid his gloved palm flat against the cold titanium.

"Foundry Recall."

BZZZT… FLASH!

The drum erupted in a grid of azure scan lines.

In half a second, metal and glowing liquid dissolved into a whirl of blue particles that poured down through the deck plating, racing along the station's conduits toward the ship waiting outside.

[Ding!]

[Acquired: Refined Hyper-Deuterium x40]

[Ship Fuel: 88% of Tier-1 Capacity]

[Ship Power: -6%]

"It worked!" Camila cheered, clapping her gloves together. "It actually worked!"

Leo didn't waste a second.

He tapped the next three in quick succession. 

"Recall… Recall... Recall..."

FLASH! FLASH! FLASH!

[Acquired: Refined Hyper-Deuterium x120]

[Ship Fuel: 100% of Tier-1 Capacity]

[Surplus fuel moved to the Foundry buffer]

[Ship Power: -18%]

A wave of relief rolled through the group.

For the first time since waking up naked in deep space, they had a full tank so there was no worry that the engines wouldn't die on them halfway through a flight.

Then a harsh crimson box flared across every visor.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

[WARNING: Oxygen consumption rising.]

[Suit Life Support: 00:51:12]

[Ship Life Support: 01:49:00]

"What the hell?!" Harper yelled, grabbing her helmet. "Fifty-one minutes?! We've only been out here half an hour! Why's the clock burning faster than it should?!"

"Exertion," Jin-Ah said, her voice cracking as she read the metabolic numbers on her wrist. "The scrubbers scale with our output. Every time our heart rates spike… the jump, the climb, the panic… we burn more air. We're not sitting in chairs anymore so our bodies are eating the air up."

[Correct. Fear is expensive… This unit recommends being less afraid, which this unit realizes is unhelpful.]

"This is madness!" Ms. Tachibana snapped.

Her composure cracked clean through, and she slammed her fist against the bulkhead.

THUNK!

"Damn this psychotic system! It gives with one hand and strangles us with the other!"

Seeing their poised dignified instructor curse out a ceiling was enough to shock even Elena silent.

Leo reached out and put a gloved hand on her shoulder.

"Sensei."

She flinched, then let out a shaky breath, and the fist against the wall slowly uncurled.

"...Forgive me," she murmured. "That was unbecoming."

"It was kind of refreshing," Leo said. "We're getting out of here… All of us."

She looked at him for a long second, and something in her face steadied.

The truth was sinking in.

If they didn't find those scrubbers in the next forty-five minutes, they'd be gasping on their knees.

"Move!" Leo barked, his voice cutting through the panic. "Fuel's done. Scrubbers are deeper in… Spread the lights and check every door!"

They ran.

Two corridors down, Harper skidded to a stop outside a reinforced door covered in more of those spiraling angular symbols.

[Translation… "Armory and Damage Control." The rest is a safety notice. It says that unauthorized personnel will be "unmade," which this unit assumes was meant as a figure of speech. Probably.]

"Leo! In here!"

The heavy door had already been blasted off its tracks and they rushed in with their lights slicing through drifting dust.

The armory was a long-abandoned chamber lined with empty racks and shattered lockers. 

Centuries of vacuum and some old firefight had wrecked almost everything. 

Barrels were split open like peeled bananas, and composite housings had gone brittle and cracked.

Harper picked up a heavy rifle, and the receiver crumbled into flakes in her hands.

"Junk," she muttered. "All of it."

"Wait!" Camila called from the back corner. 

Her light was locked onto a sealed locker with a faint amber light still blinking on its keypad. "This one's still sealed!"

Leo didn't bother with the keypad. "Chloe… Do the honors…"

Chloe nodded silently, wedged her armored fingers into the seam, and pulled.

SCREEECH… BANG!

She tore the ten-centimeter door off its hinges and tossed it aside like cardboard.

Inside, packed in dry preservation foam, sat six compact carbines.

They were brutal pieces of hardware. 

Matte-black composite, holographic sights, integrated lights, and magnetic accelerator rails running the length of their short barrels and beside them sat a long slim case.

[Weapon Found: Mag-Pulse Carbine 'Viper-C']

[Tier: 1]

[Condition: Operational (Preserved)]

[Ammunition: Tungsten flechettes, magnetically fired at 4 km/s]

[Charge: 15 shots per weapon with no spare batteries so count every shot.]

"Guns," Harper whispered, her eyes lighting up with savage glee.

She snatched the first carbine. 

The moment her fingers closed around the grip, Kinetic Tuning flared bronze along her arms, and the weapon seemed to settle into her hands like it had always belonged there. 

She flicked the safety on and off with practiced ease.

"Oh, baby. Now we're talking… Fifteen shots each so it's like ninety rounds between the six of us."

She started handing them out.

Before each one left her hands, she popped the battery, checked the rail, and slammed it back in.

Click-clack!

"Armory Technician," she said with a grin when Camila stared. "Turns out I just know this stuff now. Rails are clean, batteries are solid… These babies will shoot."

Leo… Camila… Jin-Ah… Ms. Tachibana... Chloe… then she reached Elena, who hadn't held out her hand.

"Absolutely not," Elena said, folding her arms. "A Sterling doesn't carry a gun like some common foot soldier… That's what guards are for."

Harper's face went blank. "...Guards?"

"Six of you have weapons," Elena said, as if explaining something to a child. "Arrange yourselves around me accordingly."

"Are you kidding me?!" Camila blurted. "We're not your bodyguards!"

"The audacity," Jin-Ah said flatly. "She wants a motorcade…"

"I'll guard you," Harper said sweetly, "right out an airlock."

"Elena." Ms. Tachibana stepped between them before it could explode. 

Her voice was patient, but there was steel under it. "Nobody here is anyone's servant. If something attacks us and you're standing there empty-handed, someone may die trying to protect you… Is that what a Sterling wants on her conscience?"

Elena's jaw worked as she looked away.

Ms. Tachibana opened the slim case beside the carbines.

Inside lay a dagger. 

Its blade was a sleek curve of dark metal with a thin seam of violet light running down its spine, and the handle was wrapped in something like black leather.

[Weapon Found: Arc-Charge Dagger 'Wasp']

[Tier: 1]

[Function: Stores a charge along the blade and releases it on impact as a small concussive explosion.]

[Note: Elegant enough for royalty, violent enough for everyone else… This unit believes it has found a compromise.]

Ms. Tachibana held it out by the blade. 

"It's not a gun but something more... refined."

Elena eyed it for a long moment then she plucked it from Aoi's hand with two fingers, turned it in the light, and slid it into her belt.

"...It's acceptable," she said stiffly.

[Weapons synced to HUD… Ammunition counters active… Please do not waste the batteries, This unit cannot stress that enough.]

"We have teeth now," Leo said, racking his charging handle.

CLACK!

"Let's go find those scrubbers before our lungs freeze."

They pushed deeper.

The corridor widened into a massive multi-level transit conduit running straight through the heart of the station. 

There was no gravity in here, and loose debris hung motionless in the dark and the moment they crossed the threshold with their soles lost the floor.

Leo's stomach lurched as his boots drifted a few centimeters off the deck.

[Gravity in this section has failed… Your soles will still grip any surface you touch, so walk along the walls and floor like normal people. Do not push off and fly around like children as this unit is aware that at least two of you are thinking about it.]

The lights swept across the open space then every beam stopped.

Twenty-seven meters ahead, floating in the middle of the zero-gravity shaft, curled around the shattered frame of a high-voltage line, was a nightmare.

…It was enormous.

A segmented worm-like horror nine meters long, armored in thick glistening plates of milky-white chitin threaded with pulsing amber veins. 

It had no eyes and no face, there was just a gaping circular mouth lined with five rings of rotating obsidian teeth that dripped with frozen crystals of acid.

Thick sensory tendrils sprouted from its neck, tasting the vibrations in the metal.

[WARNING: Hostile detected!]

[Void Carapace Worm… Level 1 (Scavenger)]

[Threat: Lethal… It was heavy armor plating and its acid melts Void-Weave uniforms in seconds.]

The tendrils flared as its body coiled like a spring.

"CRRR!"

The mouth snapped open with its rings of teeth grinding into motion.

GRRRRRR!

The vibration ran through the deck straight into their boots.

"Hold your fire!" Leo roared, raising his carbine. "Don't waste the batteries! Wait for it to open its mouth and aim for the—"

"Worm..."

A whisper over the channel… It was full of psychotic loathing.

Jin-Ah stood frozen at the end of the line.

Her calm analytical face had twisted into raw revulsion, her pupils were dilated, locked on the writhing segments with a hatred so deep it skipped every rational part of her brain.

Back on Earth, she could handle anything in a lab, even complex orbital physics didn't faze her.

…But a single garden earthworm would send her flipping furniture.

And now, floating twenty-seven meters away, was a nine-meter cosmic maggot with razor teeth.

"Disgusting..." she hissed, her knuckles bone-white around the grip. "Filthy... wretched... crawling... ABOMINATION!"

"Jin-Ah, wait!"

She didn't wait, in fact, she flipped the selector to full-auto.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Blue streaks of tungsten screamed down the shaft.

SPANG! SPANG!

Sparks burst across the worm's armored head as the plates deflected the first rounds into the walls!

SKRRRREEE!

The beast's agony shook through the deck, and it launched its whole nine-meter body straight at her like a battering ram.

"Die! Die! DIE!" Jin-Ah screamed as she marched forward.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

Flechettes shredded its tendrils into frozen chunks and the mouth gaped wide to swallow her whole…

Jin-Ah shoved the barrel straight into the spinning rings of teeth.

"Eat it."

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-CLICK!

BOOM!

The flechettes tore through the worm's soft throat and burst out the back of its head in a spray of glowing violet ichor, shattered teeth, and shredded tissue as the body went instantly limp.

In zero gravity, the blood didn't fall. 

It broke apart into thousands of perfect shimmering violet spheres that hung in the air like a strange morbid galaxy.

The headless carcass kept drifting forward until it bumped gently against Jin-Ah's visor and slid past her then it floated away into the dark.

A few of the violet spheres drifted toward the back of the group.

Chloe went rigid.

Her nostrils flared, and her pupils flickered crimson for a heartbeat before she clapped a gloved hand over her visor and twisted away.

"It smells... wrong," she whispered. "Like poison… Please don't let it touch me."

"Nobody's letting anything touch you," Harper said, swatting a sphere away with the butt of her carbine. "And don't you dare lick that."

"I wasn't going to!"

Behind them, Elena was pressed flat against the wall with the Wasp clutched in both hands with its violet seam glowing. 

She noticed Leo looking and quickly lowered it, lifting her chin as if she'd never drawn it at all.

…Silence.

Jin-Ah stood among the floating violet bubbles, her chest heaving with her gun locked in a white-knuckled grip.

[Ammo: 0/15]

Leo stared at the carnage, his jaw hanging open inside his helmet.

He looked at the smoking barrel, then at the floating blood and finally at the unhinged look in Jin-Ah's eyes as he slowly lowered his carbine.

"What did I just say?" he muttered. "I literally said conserve the batteries… and you dumped an entire military-grade power pack into a worm's face in four seconds flat."

[For the record, the Master Captain did say that… This unit heard it clearly however crew Unit: Jin-Ah did not.]

Jin-Ah didn't answer.

Slowly, the fury drained from her eyes, replaced by a deep mortified exhaustion.

She blinked and right in the center of her vision, a radiant golden box burst open.

[Ding!]

[Threat Neutralized: Void Carapace Worm (Level 1)]

[Solo Kill Confirmed!]

[EXP gained...]

A pillar of golden light erupted from the deck beneath her boots and wrapped around her white armor, racing along the cobalt lines of her suit in a warm intoxicating surge.

Her tired muscles came alive and her mind sharpened to a razor's edge.

[YOU HAVE LEVELED UP!]

[Current Level: 1 ➔ 2]

[Specialist: Systems Integrator]

[Processing Speed +15% | Neural Latency -0.05s]

Leo's own HUD stayed dark.

[Notice to the Master Captain… Survival Points are earned through your own actions only, crew kills grant EXP to the crew as this unit can see you checking… You got nothing...]

'Of course I didn't,' Leo thought.

Jin-Ah stood frozen among the floating spheres of violet blood, staring at the glowing prompt in the dead silence of space.

'Leveled up...?'

The thought echoed in her skull looking foreign and surreal.

'Like... a video game...?'