Like A Game

Spheres of violet blood drifted lazily across the zero-gravity corridor.

They caught the glare of seven helmet lights and wobbled like liquid mercury, throwing strange rippling shadows over the scorched bulkheads and the headless carcass of the nine-meter worm.

For five full seconds, the only sound on the team channel was Jin-Ah breathing.

She stood in the middle of the carnage with her boots locked to the floor, the smoking barrel of her carbine still pointed at the ruined mess that used to be the monster's throat. 

The last traces of golden light were evaporating off her shoulders like morning mist.

"Jin-Ah?" Camila's voice crackled softly. "Are you... are you hurt? Why were you glowing like that?"

Jin-Ah slowly lowered the empty gun.

Behind her emerald visor, her dark eyes were wide as she looked down at her gloved hands and flexed her fingers.

"I... I leveled up," she said, her usually clipped voice sounding almost dazed.

"You what?" Harper stepped closer, keeping her carbine angled toward the dark ceiling trusses. "Speak English, Jin… Did the bug spit acid through your visor?"

"No. I leveled up." Jin-Ah turned to look at them, and a flush of real excitement colored her pale cheeks. "When it died, something went straight through my suit and into my nervous system… My legs aren't tired anymore, the burn from the sprint is just gone and my vision… it's like the frame rate of the world just went up… Everything's sharper."

Before Leo could ask the ship to confirm it, a chime rang inside all seven helmets at once.

Ding!

[Crew Mate Jin-Ah Leveled Up]

[Killing hostile void entities releases bio-cosmic essence, which grants EXP to the crew members who earn it.]

[Each Level increases durability, metabolic efficiency, and the strength of your talents.]

[At Levels 10, 25, and 50, talents and subclasses will evolve and unlock new skills.]

[Note: EXP and Survival Points are separate… EXP belongs to the crew… Survival Points belong to the Master Captain and are earned only through his own actions.]

A second panel popped up right underneath it, glowing an unflattering shade of yellow.

[Combat Review… Crew Unit: Jin-Ah. You emptied an entire military battery in 3.8 seconds into one Level 1 target, which this unit estimates was roughly eleven shots more than the job required.]

[Efficiency grade: D-minus. This unit recommends conquering your fear of worms before the next worm conquers you.]

…Dead silence.

Then Harper burst out laughing so hard she nearly lost her grip on the floor.

"D-minus! Oh, man, even the ship's computer is roasting you, Jin! It basically just called you a trigger-happy coward on the official record!"

Jin-Ah's ears went bright crimson under her bob.

"It was a nine-meter segmented parasite with rotating teeth, Harper! The optimal response to an unknown biological hazard of that shape is immediate, overwhelming saturation fire! Any hesitation would've compromised our front line!"

"Sure, sure. 'Overwhelming saturation fire,'" Harper grinned, nudging Camila with her elbow. "You screamed 'die, abomination' like an action movie villain and emptied a whole mag into its tonsils."

"Regardless of the ammunition," Ms. Tachibana cut in smoothly, stepping around a floating sphere of blood with a warm smile, "she's just found something important for all of us. It isn't only the ship that can grow stronger out here… We can too. Well done, Jin-Ah."

"Yeah, seriously," Camila added, her hazel eyes bright. "If that thing got past you, it would've melted our suits open. You saved us, Jin…"

The embarrassment melted out of Jin-Ah's shoulders.

In fact, she visibly puffed out her chest, lifting her chin with a proud little hmph as she smoothed down the front of her suit.

Her eyes drifted across the corridor and landed on Leo.

He was standing a little ahead of the group with his carbine resting across his chest, looking right at her with a warm proud grin and an approving nod.

The moment their eyes met, Jin-Ah went stiff.

All the heat in her ears rushed straight into her cheeks. 

She jerked her head forty-five degrees to the left and stared very hard at a pipe weld on the bulkhead.

"D-don't look at me like that," she muttered. "I simply executed a necessary perimeter defense… I don't need a gold star from the captain."

Leo blinked.

The grin froze on his face.

'What did I do?' he thought, completely lost. 'I didn't even say anything! One second she's smiling like she aced a calculus exam, and the next she's acting like I insulted her grandmother.'

He sighed.

'...Women are harder to read than navigation telemetry.'

Shaking his head, he stepped over a severed tendril and looked down the long tilted dark of the engineering conduit.

His helmet beams faded to nothing about fifty meters ahead.

"Alright, listen up," he said, and his voice dropped and becamesteadier. "If there's one of these worms in the heat pipes, there's going to be more. Between here and the life support bays, we're going to run into them."

He breathed in the cool synthetic air.

And for a second, looking at the cold dead metal and the floating purple gore, a heavy hollow ache pressed against the middle of his chest.

'We need to get stronger,' he thought, his fingers tightening on the grip. 'All of us.'

Ever since the white light swallowed Room 402, there hadn't been a single moment to stop and breathe.

The freezing deck… The vacuum alarms… Chloe's frenzy… The flight course and now crawling through a pitch-black tomb with a death clock ticking on their wrists.

…None of them had had time to actually feel Axiom One as ninety-eight point nine percent of humanity was just… gone.

His parents, back in the valley. The porch light his mom always left on. His little sister, who used to steal his hoodies and swear she didn't.

Harper's folks down the street… The corner bakery Camila loved… Sensei's family in Kyoto…

Billions of lives, just... erased.

Sooner or later, the adrenaline was going to wear off, and when it did, the grief was going to hit this crew like a truck. 

They were students, barely adults, and one instructor who was only thirty herself that had been torn away from everything they'd ever known.

They'd need time to cry, to scream and to mourn.

'And when that time comes,' Leo told himself, his jaw setting like iron, 'I want us grieving with full stomachs and a week of clean air in a ship that can actually fight back… not choking in the dark.'

"Leo?"

Jin-Ah's voice pulled him back.

She'd fallen into step beside his right shoulder as they edged past the dead worm, though her eyes stayed glued to her wrist terminal.

"Yeah?"

"That panel said Survival Points only come from your own actions," she said, glancing sideways at him. "So my kill... it didn't give you anything for your wheel?"

Leo pulled up the little golden corner of his HUD.

[Survival Points: 5 / 1,000]

"Nope," he sighed. "Still five."

[Correct… The Master Captain cannot earn points by standing behind a screaming systems integrator and nodding supportively. This unit appreciates the attempt to find a loophole but there is no loophole.]

"I wasn't looking for a loophole!"

[You opened the tab, Master Captain… This unit saw you open the tab.]

Harper snorted.

Jin-Ah didn't laugh, though. 

She was looking at the side of Leo's face through the green glow of their helmets, and her mind was already running numbers.

She remembered the Wheel of Fate tearing open on the bridge, nearly five meters of blinding gold and platinum, packed with technology that broke physics.

'If he lands even one SS-Rank or SSS-Rank pull,' she thought, 'our survival odds jump to almost a hundred percent but he has to earn every point himself.'

Jin-Ah bit her lip.

'...Which means he needs to be in the fights and he needs to come out of them alive.'

She glanced at him again.

He was steady... He didn't panic when everything went sideways and he held the only power out here that could break this miserable game.

'I need to stay close to him,' she decided with her fingers tightening around her empty carbine. 'We all do… Well not like I had anything else planned.'

"Eyes sharp," Ms. Tachibana warned softly from the front.

The silver halo of her Tactical Cartography pulsed around her temples like a slow radar sweep.

"The corridor branches ahead and there's a heat signature behind the overhead grating."

Leo raised his fist and the column stopped.

"Everyone freeze and lights on the ceiling."

Seven beams snapped upward onto the ventilation mesh six meters above them.

SKRRT-CLACK!

Something up in the pipes shifted but it wasn't a worm.

Clinging upside down to the girders was something that looked like a horseshoe crab had crawled into a scorpion. 

Two meters across, flat and segmented, its shell the dull grey of old gunmetal that blended almost perfectly with the cold-scarred plating.

Eight blade-tipped legs clicked silently against the iron, and a long jointed tail arched over its back, tipped with a stinger that glowed white-hot.

[WARNING: Hostile detected!]

[Void Stalker — Level 1 (Ambush Predator)]

[Weak point: Eye cluster beneath the front hood.]

[This unit would like to point out that it mentioned these in Axiom Two… On your very first hour and nobody took notes.]

The Stalker didn't wait to be studied.

It kicked off the girder and dropped in a flat whistling dive straight at Camila and Chloe in the middle of the line.

"Watch out!" Harper yelled, swinging her barrel up.

"Hold."

Ms. Tachibana's voice wasn't loud but it wasn't panicked either. 

It carried the calm she used to settle a lab of overexcited freshmen, and it froze every finger on every trigger.

Everyone else flinched however Aoi didn't move her feet a centimeter.

Her silver halo flared white around her eyes. 

To her talent, the diving monster wasn't a blur… It was a vector…

Speed, angle, the pull of the station's broken gravity… and the exact point where its hood would lift.

She raised her carbine and tucked the stock into her shoulder.

The Stalker spread its legs wide to impale Camila, and the front of its hood lifted three centimeters, exposing a cluster of six glowing red eyes underneath…

Aoi pulled the trigger once.

THUMP!

A single tungsten flechette left the barrel at four kilometers a second in a perfect straight line of blue light through the dark.

CRACK!

It hit dead center between the eyes and punched straight into whatever passed for the creature's brain and the Stalker went rigid mid-air as its stinger flickered and died.

Its momentum carried the corpse down onto the deck a meter in front of Camila, and it skidded until it crunched against a stanchion.

…One shot.

[Ammo: 14/15]

Ding!

A pillar of golden light flared under Ms. Tachibana's boots.

[Threat Neutralized: Void Stalker (Level 1)]

[Precision Kill!]

[Crew Unit: Aoi — Level 1 ➔ 2]

Harper slowly lowered her rifle and stared at their instructor with her mouth hanging open.

"Sensei... what the hell was that?! Did you take sniper lessons in Kyoto before you came over on that fellowship?!"

Ms. Tachibana let out a slow steady breath and lowered her carbine with practiced grace. 

The faintest blush of pride touched her cheekbones, though she kept her voice perfectly academic.

"Ballistics is just applied astrodynamics on a small scale, Harper… Once my talent mapped its vector, predicting where it would be required only basic trigonometry." She paused. "And I must admit... this 'leveling' is quite invigorating."

"Remind me to never hand in a late paper again," Camila breathed, her hand pressed over her racing heart as she stepped very carefully around the dead crab.

[For the record, Crew Unit: Aoi just achieved an efficiency grade of A-plus… This unit will be printing it on a small imaginary certificate and placing it next to Crew Unit: Jin-Ah's D-minus for comparison.]

"Please don't," Jin-Ah said flatly.

[Already done.]

"Incredible shot, Sensei," Leo said.

He meant it, and the look of plain respect on his face made her dark eyes soften behind her visor then he glanced toward the wall beside the junction. 

"And look… Right past where that thing dropped from."

A recessed sliding door sat in the bulkhead, plated in faded yellow-and-black hazard stripes. 

Above it, deep angular symbols spiraled across a metal plaque, twisting the longer anyone looked at them.

[Translation: "Sector 4 — Damage Control and Emergency Life Support." Before anyone asks, yes, this is the door you have all been praying for… Please try not to cry as tears fog up the visors.]

"Emergency life support!" Camila gasped. "Air! There could be air in there!"

They rushed toward it and stopped.

At some point during whatever had killed this station, the ceiling truss above the corridor had buckled. 

Two tons of twisted girder and collapsed conduit had come down right across the door's track, jamming it half-shut behind a tangled wall of solid steel.

"Damn it," Harper cursed, slinging her rifle to grab a jutting beam. She heaved. Nothing. "It's pinned under the truss… Even with low gravity, this junk is wedged into the floor frame."

She tried again with Kinetic Tuning flaring bronze and the beam groaned but it didn't budge.

"Step back."

The voice was so quiet that half of them almost missed it as everyone turned.

Chloe was standing behind them with her small hands at her sides, staring at the wall of steel instead of at any of them. 

Her eyes weren't hiding under her bangs this time.

"Please," she said softly. "I can do this one."