Survival [II]

Leo spun around with his bare heels catching on an exposed conduit.

He wasn't in the lecture hall… well he wasn't on Earth either. He was inside the elevated bridge of a battered starship. 

How did he know…?

'Well, just look up.'

Directly overhead, the ceiling wasn't steel or concrete, instead it was an expansive panoramic canopy of thick reinforced blast-quartz.

Beyond it lay an endless terrifying abyss of velvet black, salted with millions of diamond-hard stars that didn't twinkle. 

Right in front of their bow drifted the shattered carcass of a moon, surrounded by a swirling radioactive dust cloud and thousands of jagged hunks of floating planetary crust.

Leo's knees almost buckled.

'That's not a sim,' he thought. 'Sims don't make your skin crawl like this.'

Beneath the window sat a massive U-shaped operations pit filled with dead screens, flickering analog dials, and smoking relays. 

In the center, mounted atop a raised platform, sat a solitary high-backed command throne made of dark composite carbon.

A pale-blue holographic ledger flickered directly across Leo's retina.

[Vessel Designation: Derelict Hauler — 'Wanderer-7']

[Sector: Dead Outer Belt (Unmapped Scavenge Grid)]

[Hull Structural Integrity: 28% (Micrometeorite Pitting Detected)]

[Remaining Atmosphere Reserves: 14 Hours, 22 Minutes]

Leo took a slow deliberate breath with his throat clicking as he swallowed dry air.

'Breathe… Think,' He told himself, forcing the icy panic back down into his belly. 'Freaking out won't knit a pair of jeans so deal with the concrete facts… you're butt-naked in deep space, breathing recycled tank air, and you have half a day before the scrubber dies so deal with the room first.'

Ding!

The synthetic chime in his skull rang again indifferently.

[Global Transmission Broadcast Activated!]

[Attention all surviving seeds: Obey the following axioms to preserve your vital signs...]

[Axiom One: An unexpected cosmic fracture has eradicated 98.9% of planetary human populations… You seven are among the scattered remnants seeded across outer space. Abandon all expectations of planetary rescue, your survival is reliant on your own labor so be grateful you are still warm!]

[Axiom Two: The void is a predator… The drifting wreckage carries dormant Void Stalkers, scavenger drones, and radiation anomalies. Unshielded drifting during the night phase carries a casualty rate of 98.8%!]

[Axiom Three: Vehicle evolution is mandatory… All alloys, fuel cells, and water modules must be scavenged from orbital ruins. Failure to upgrade will result in bulkhead collapse under deep vacuum pressure!]

[Axiom Four: The vessel requires a single bio-anchor... Should the Highest Authority Holder die, the vessel's self-destruct cycle will complete within sixty minutes. No crew survival records will be archived.]

[Axiom Five: The initial three solar rotations constitute the Novice Buffer, Void Beast aggression is restricted to Level 1 scrap parasites. Use this window to secure basic armaments… Good luck.]

Ninety-eight percent... gone?

Earth… The campus… The coffee shops... His parents' house in the valley... All of it erased in the time it took to blink…

His hands started shaking but he clenched them tighter.

'Not now… You can fall apart later… Fourteen hours of air, remember?'

Before the horror could truly take root, a chaotic wall of screams, gasps, and frantic thumping erupted from the lower crew deck behind the pilot pit.

"What is this?! Where are my clothes?!"

"Don't look! Don't you dare look this way!"

"Harper, get off my foot!"

"Is that... are those real stars?! Where is the floor?!"

"Someone pull a curtain! Find a blanket! Anything!"

The voices collided in a shrill hysterical scramble.

Leo whipped his head around, keeping his hands clamped over his groin.

The crew mezzanine was a disaster zone. 

Five girls and their instructor were scrambling across the deck like cats thrown into an empty bathtub, desperately trying to shield their pale bare bodies with whatever junk they could tear loose from the bulkhead fixtures.

'They're alive... All of them.'

The relief nearly knocked him flat.

In the far corner, wedged behind an exposed water recycler, Chloe was curled into a ball so tight her forehead touched her bare knees.

Her arms were wrapped like iron bands around her shins with her dark hair falling forward to cover her face while her shoulders shook with violent ragged sobs. 

The tips of her ears were a bright humiliating crimson, and she was too terrified to even look up at the infinite void hanging directly over her head.

A few yards away, Harper was squatting behind a battered plastic cargo crate. 

Being an athlete, she'd reacted faster than the rest, using the container to block her chest and belly, but her shoulders, lean thighs, and long calves were bare to the biting draft.

"What kind of twisted hazing crap is this?!" Harper yelled with her knuckles white against the rim of the crate. 

Her wild eyes swept the bridge, locking instantly onto Leo.

Her jaw dropped. 

Her gaze dipped down... hard... landing square on his clamped hands, taking in the heavy unmistakable shape resting beneath his knuckles, before snapping back up to his eyes.

"Holy shit, Leo?!" Harper blurted out, her freckles disappearing under a sudden wave of scarlet heat. "You're naked too?! Damn... you're not even tense and you're packing half a foot of steel?! How is that fair?!"

Leo's cheeks went incandescent. 

"Shut up, Harper! Turn your eyes around! You think I asked for this?!"

'My oldest friend,' he thought miserably. 'End of the world, and that's her first review?'

Beside the airlock bulkhead, Camila had managed to rip a piece of yellow insulating foam from an exposed pipe, clutching it across her chest while her bronze thighs were pressed tightly together. 

Her hazel eyes darted across the flickering monitors with sudden sharp survival instincts. 

"The pressure gauge is dropping," she whispered with her voice tight. "The cabin pressure is leaking. This isn't a joke..."

Jin-Ah was crouched behind an overturned terminal, using a scorched metal service panel to block her front, her jaw clenched so hard the muscles jumped. 

"The external telemetry readings... those aren't simulated… The radiation background is cosmic standard, We're in deep orbit guys!"

And standing right in the middle of the corridor, clutching a ripped maintenance flag against her front, was Ms. Aoi Tachibana.

The cool unreachable grace of the university lecturer was completely shattered. 

The faded yellow fabric of the flag barely covered her lap, leaving her porcelain shoulders, the curve of her collarbones, and her bare slender legs fully exposed to the cold cabin draft. 

Her hair had tumbled free from its hairpin, hanging dark and wild around her flushed face.

She took a shaky step forward with her toes curling against the frozen deck, trying desperately to summon the authority she'd wielded five minutes ago.

"Everyone... quiet down!" Her voice shook, cracking in the middle. 

She looked toward the pilot dais with her dark eyes landing on Leo's unclad frame. 

She sucked in a sharp shuddering breath, her eyes widening in mortified shock before she snapped her head sideways toward the bare steel wall. 

"Leo... do not move. Stay... stay where you are. Be a good boy... please..."

Leo gritted his teeth, his pulse hammering in his throat. "Believe me, Sensei, I'm not going anywhere."

'Be a good boy? The fuck?'

Still…

'Damn it,' he thought, biting his lower lip until it tasted of salt. 'She's gorgeous even wrapped in a grease-stained flag. Focus, idiot! If you don't secure the ship, we're all going to freeze into Popsicles before noon.'

"Look at him," a sharp, venomous voice sliced through the noise.

Elena Sterling stepped out from behind the co-pilot's partition. 

She'd pulled a torn canvas seat cover over her chest, but her bare arms and hips were exposed as her fair skin was prickled with cold bumps. 

Her face was bright red with fury and embarrassment, but her haughty sneer hadn't faded one bit and Leo hated, absolutely hated, that his first thought wasn't an insult.

…It was that her legs went on forever.

His second thought was finding the nearest airlock for himself.

"A filthy disgusting exhibitionist," Elena hissed, pointing a trembling manicured finger at him. 

Her eyes flicked involuntarily down to his groin, taking in the heavy thick hang of him, before she curled her lip in exaggerated disgust.

"Look at you. Gross… Totally below average… A pathetic little stray showing off his junk like a dog in the street!"

Leo looked down, then looked right back into her furious eyes.

A sharp mocking chuckle broke through his stress. 

"Below average? If that's below average, Elena, your family's boarding school needs to hire better biology teachers and by the way, that seat cover you're holding is coated in fiberglass insulation… Have fun scratching your chest for the next three hours."

"You vulgar bastard—!"

"Shut up! All of you, shut up!" Harper roared from behind her crate, slamming her fist against the plastic.

THUNK!

"We're trapped in a tin can in outer space and you two are measuring his dick! Leo, look at the damn screens!"

Ms. Tachibana took a deep shuddering breath, using one hand to hold the canvas flag against her bosom while her other hand reached for an overhead handrail. 

"Harper is right. Leo, can you access the life support terminal? Is there an emergency beacon?"

Before Leo could take a step, the deck beneath them shivered.

VRRRMMM!

A column of cool golden light lanced down from the ceiling directly above the captain's dais, hitting Leo square in the chest.

[Initiating Master Vessel Registration...]

[Biological parameters confirmed: Homo sapiens (Remnant).]

[Neurological synchronization: 94.2%.]

[Target confirmed: Subject 'Leo'.]

[Binding Successful!]

[Designation granted: Sole Highest Authority Holder (Master Captain).]

[Command Authorization: Absolute… All cabin seals, life-support valves, thruster conduits, and supply dispensaries are exclusively tied to your neural imprint!]

[Requirement: Mount the Captain's Throne to initialize the Central Neural AI.]

The synthesized voice boomed from every speaker on the ship, echoing off the iron plates like a thunderclap.

The bridge fell into a dead suffocating silence.

Elena's jaw went slack as the fiberglass seat cover almost slipped from her grip. 

"What...? Him? He's the Captain?!"

"Wait..." Jin-Ah slowly leaned forward from behind her metal panel, her eyes wide as she read the flickering data stream on the console. "The life support... the airlocks... everything only responds to his biometric signature?"

"He has total control?" Camila whispered, her fingers digging into the pipe insulation. "Every door on this ship?"

"Bro," Harper choked out, her head popping out from behind her crate. "You didn't even clean the grease off your bike chain yesterday, and now you have the master key to our oxygen?!"

"It's not a joke, Harper," Leo said, his voice dropping into a steady flat tone. 

The humiliation of being naked seemed to evaporate under the cold heavy weight of the terminal's countdown timer… There was 14 hours of air and seven people with one key. 

…And the key was him.

He didn't bother trying to cover himself anymore. He turned, stepped up the three steel stairs of the dais, and walked straight toward the dark carbon chair.

He sat down.

The moment his bare skin pressed against the synthetic leather of the throne, four mechanical clasps slid out.

Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack!

They locked lightly around his wrists, securing them to the armrests as a cold electric prickle dug into the base of his skull, and a massive semi-transparent ring of cerulean holographic screens blossomed around him in a wide arc.

[Captain seated… Neural AI Core initialized.]

[Wanderer-7 online. Scanning local sector...]

Through the panoramic glass, Leo saw it clearly for the first time…

Three hundred yards out, coiling silently through the floating ribs of a shattered cargo container, was a twenty-foot-long creature covered in jagged obsidian chitin. 

It moved without sound with its pale violet eyes blinking in the dark as its segmented mandibles gnawed through a copper fuel line. 

[Void Beast, Level 1]

[Classification: Weak]

…It was the weakest thing out here, and every hair on Leo's arms stood up anyway.

If that thing smelled their leaking oxygen tanks, the thin glass canopy wouldn't last ten seconds.

Ding!

Then a deafening chime rang directly inside the center of his mind.

[Talent Extraction activated for all surviving remnants.]

[Evaluating biological potential... measuring anomalous resonance...]

Across the crew deck, faint rings of light began to flicker around the girls. 

A soft green aura hovered around Elena's manicured hands, a dull bronze ring chimed over Harper's shoulders, a pale silver mist wrapped around Ms. Tachibana's throat and the same happened for the other women as well.

Yet, directly in front of Leo's eyes, the air shattered.

KRSSSHHH!

A blinding majestic golden radiance, brilliant as the core of a dying star, exploded through his vision, drowning out the crimson alarms, the cold steel, and the dark void outside.

[Ding!]

[Anomaly confirmed! Universal soul resonance exceeding base by 10,000%!]

[Congratulations to Host Leo for awakening the Unique Hidden Talent:]

[SSS-Rank: Cosmic Gacha Wheel!]

[Skill Overview: Survive, scavenge, and eliminate void threats to amass Survival Points (SP). Every 1,000 SP grants one invocation of the Wheel of Fate, pulling divine blueprints, high-tier vessel augmentations, and permanent physical modifications!]

…

Leo blinked, his vision still swimming with residual starlight as the golden interface burned behind his retinas.

'What the hell...?'

The implications hit him like a physical blow. 

A thousand points for a single spin on a celestial wheel that ignored standard tech tiers. 

In a void this hostile, an edge like that wasn't just a cheat... it was a goddamned lifeline. 

If he could harvest enough scrap, kill enough beasts, and grind out the points, he wouldn't just be patching leaks with insulation foam. 

He could pull military-grade shielding, point-defense flak batteries, macro-cannons, maybe even permanent physical augmentations that would turn his bare flesh into something vacuum-resistant. 

The entire path from a drifting iron coffin to a dreadnought had just laid itself out right before his eyes!

"No! Absolutely not! This is a joke!"

The hysterical high-pitched screech sliced through his thoughts, instantly shattering his focus.

Down on the crew mezzanine, Elena was practically vibrating with incandescent fury. 

The ragged canvas seat cover she clutched against her front was slipping dangerously down her porcelain chest, exposing the flushed curve of her clavicle, but she was too furious to care.

 Her icy blue eyes were dilated, locked onto the emerald glyph floating over her own manicured fingers with an expression of utter disgust.

"A whole me?!" Elena shrieked, her voice cracking against the corrugated iron plates as her composure disintegrated into pure tantrum. "A Sterling?! You gave me... a mechanic subclass?! Junior Maintenance Apprentice?! Are you out of your psychotic digital mind?!"

She jabbed a trembling finger at the air, violently batting at the floating system window as if she could slap the code out of existence.

"I am an honors-track orbital architect! My family funds entire aerospace testing facilities! I design automated guidance platforms! And this wretched broken tin can expects me to crawl through filthy conduits and turn rusty bolts like some grease monkey in a back-alley garage?!"

Elena's humiliated glare whipped toward the captain's dais, locking directly onto Leo as he sat tall and unbothered in the leather throne.

"And he's the Captain?!" she wailed, her cheeks burning so hot they looked sunburned. "He gets supreme authority, and I'm supposed to patch his leaking pipes?! I'd rather choke on hard vacuum! I refuse! System, cancel it! Reroll it this instant!"