"Huh? That's weird." Orlan's voice came back, a little more focused now.
"The scanners aren't flagging anything on our end, but you're getting a reading? How's that possibile? Any chance you kidding right now?"
"No, I'm serious, Orlan. Here, sending you the data now."
She tapped her interface, transmitting the anomaly feed.
A beat of silence. Then—
"Hold up... this—!!" Orlan stopped himself.
Lirica raised a brow.
"What?"
"Lirica, you gotta hold on," Orlan's voice was sharper now, more urgent.
"I need to discuss this with the higher-ups. Just stay right there. Don't move. Absolutely do not move."
Lirica's instincts flared. Orlan wasn't the type to panic over nothing, and the way he emphasized staying put sent a chill down her spine.
Whatever he saw in the data was serious.
Her grip on her controls tightened, but she did as he said, keeping her position steady. The anomaly was still there, just a faint distortion in the distance, but now it felt more… deliberate.
Another pause. The comms stayed silent for a moment, then a different voice finally cut through.
"Lieutenant Barnett, this is Control. Do not engage. Maintain observation distance."
That got her attention. If Control was stepping in, that meant they weren't sure what it was either.
She zoomed in with her visor feed. The anomaly shimmered faintly, almost like a tear in space, but too weak to be an actual rift. If she just got a little closer—
"Lieutenant Barnett." Control's voice turned sharp.
"Hold your position."
Lirica clicked her tongue.
"Tch. Yeah, yeah. Just observing."
But something about this wasn't sitting right with her.
If the anomaly was harmless, Control wouldn't care.
And if it was dangerous, why wasn't HQ picking it up properly?
Lirica had always been good at bending the rules just enough to get away with things.
It wasn't about defiance—it was just how she operated.
And right now, something about this situation wasn't adding up.
Her thou'est conspiracy theorist blood was fired up.
Lirica tightened the last strap of her EX-45 Maneuver Gear, securing the propulsion unit to her back. It wasn't the most comfortable piece of equipment, but it allowed for controlled movement in zero gravity.
She flexed her fingers, adjusting the micro-thrusters on her suit.
Her fingers hovered over her controls, checking that her tricks still worked.
A small sense of relief washed over her as the device Orlan had given her years ago flickered to life.
It was an old prototype—a compact holographic emitter that could project a convincing body double in her place.
The image wasn't perfect, but in a low-light environment like this, it would be enough to fool any standard surveillance system.
At the same time, she activated her suit's light camouflage function.
The EX-45's adaptive plating adjusted to the surrounding visuals, bending light just enough to make her nearly invisible.
She moved carefully, ensuring her trajectory stayed outside the drones' pre-programmed sweep patterns.
Slipping past automated cameras was second nature to her. After all, back at the academy, she and Orlan had spent years dodging security just to sneak out of class.
The only difference now was the stakes—back then, the worst consequence was detention.
Now? She wasn't sure what she was sneaking toward, but she knew one thing, if Control didn't want her to move, then there was definitely something worth seeing.
With a final glance at her HUD, she disengaged from the harness and pushed off, drifting toward the anomaly near the southern pole.
Her propulsion unit hummed faintly as she maneuvered, careful to keep her movement subtle.
The anomaly flickered in the distance, a distortion that shouldn't be there.
And whatever it was, she was going to find out.
Lirica's grip on her controls tightened as she made her approach, carefully adjusting her trajectory with short bursts from her micro-thrusters.
She kept her movements precise, gliding through the space like a natural debris. The less motion she made, the lower the chances of getting picked up by stray sensors.
The distortion flickered ahead, its edges warping the light around it in ways that didn't make sense.
She had seen rifts before—unstable tears in space from experimental weaponry or natural gravitational anomalies—but this one was… different.
She wasn't close enough to fully analyze it, but even from here, her HUD struggled to get a clear reading.
Her private comms suddenly pinged.
Orlan.
She sighed before opening the line.
"Lirica… please tell me you're in that drone right now?"
Silence.
"..."
A moment too long of hesitation. She knew that he knew.
"Well, actually…. Orlan, I—uh…"
She tried to find a way to spin it, but nothing came to mind fast enough.
"Lirica, I'm going to ask you real nice. Please go back. Immediately."
His voice was controlled, but she could hear the edge creeping in. He wasn't just annoyed—he was genuinely concerned.
Lirica glanced at the flickering anomaly, then back at her HUD feed. She was already this far.
"Look, I'm just taking a peek. I haven't touched anything. Yet."
"That's not the point!" Orlan hissed.
"You don't even know what you're looking at! HQ doesn't know what they're looking at!"
"Exactly." Lirica countered.
"If they don't know, shouldn't we find out?"
"You're impossible." Orlan groaned.
She grinned. "You say that like it's a bad thing."
A frustrated sigh came through the comms.
"Just… at least send me your data feed. If you're going to be reckless, I want to see what you're seeing."
Lirica smirked.
"Already did. Figured you'd ask."
Another sigh.
"I hate that you know me."
She chuckled, then refocused.
The distortion was getting clearer now, the warping effect more distinct. She adjusted her visor's zoom, sweeping over the anomaly's shifting edges.
It wasn't just bending light—it was emitting something.
As she got closer, her visor's warning indicators flared red.
[ALERT: UNKNOWN ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED]
[SIGNATURE MATCH FOUND—IMPERIAL CLASSIFIED]
Her smirk faded.
What the hell was she looking at?
Imperial-classified?
That wasn't something she could just brush off.
"Orlan…" Her voice was quieter now, focused.
"I just got a match. Imperial-classified."
"What?"
"Yeah. And I don't think it's just some random distortion. There's something inside."
Orlan's voice dropped lower.
"Lirica, listen to me. I don't know what the hell you're looking at, but if that tag is showing up, you need to get out of there."
Lirica's fingers twitched over her controls, but she didn't move back.
"I need to get closer."
(A/N: Women. (⌐■-■))
"No, you don't. For once in your life, just—"
A sudden beep interrupted him.
Lirica's eyes snapped to her HUD. The anomaly's energy signature spiked.
Something was powering up.
Her stomach dropped.
"Orlan…?"
The beeping intensified.
Orlan cursed.
"LIRICA!! MOVE—"
Her entire HUD flooded with emergency warnings.
[WARNING: ENERGY WEAPON LOCK DETECTED]
[SOURCE: IMPERIAL ORIGIN—BATTLESHIP-GRADE]
Her body tensed.
"WHAT THE F###?!"
Her instincts screamed at her to move, but before she could fire her thrusters—
[WARNING: AUTO-DEPLOY CORE SHIELD]
A blinding blue-white beam erupted from the anomaly.
Her sensors barely had time to register it before it struck her head-on.
BOOM!!!
Lirica never even had time to scream.
A shockwave tore through her, though in the vacuum of space, there was no sound—only raw, unfiltered destruction.
Her suit's shielding barely had time to engage before it failed spectacularly. The impact tore through her systems, overloading circuits, frying connections, and shattering her HUD display in a cascade of broken data streams.
[WARNING: SYSTEMS OVERLOADED]
[ENERGY OUTPUT: 98% EXPENDED]
[CRITICAL ENERGY AMOUNT EXPENDED]
[CRITICAL STRUCTURAL DAMAGE DETECTED]
Lirica barely registered the alerts as her body was flung at an astronomical velocity, spiraling into open space. Her limbs felt distant.
What is that thing?
Why the hell just happened?!
Her HUD flickered violently, struggling to stay operational. Then, among the scattered warning prompts, the weapon was identified—
[ENERGY SIGNATURE MATCHED: ARCHONIC MASS DRIVER ARRAY]
Her stomach twisted, if she can even feel it.
That wasn't just any weapon.
Archonic Mass Drivers.
These weren't just ordinary weapons. They were classified planetary-tier artillery, designed to obliterate entire swarms of Chaos-borns in a single strike. Their projectiles were folded through space-time, accelerating to near-relativistic speeds before impact.
Against a fleet, it could shred an armada in seconds.
Against a single person?
It should have reduced her to vapor.
And yet, she was still here.
How?
And one just fired at her.
A crackle burst through her failing comms. The signal was mangled with interference, but a voice pushed through—
[ORIGIN: HEADQUARTERS CONTROL]
[ORIGIN: SENIOR ENGINEER VANCE ORLAN ASTERRA]
[STATUS: AUTHORIZED INTERFERENCE DETECTED]
"—RICA—LIR—CA—!!!"
"...Orlan—"
Someone is calling her but her mind can't focus on it.
Lirica gritted her teeth—or at least, she tried. She could barely feel her own jaw. Her hands trembled, fighting against the dead weight of her limbs.
Her vision swam, but through sheer stubborn instinct, she reached for her controls.
She was still hurtling at extreme speed. Her body? she doesn't know if it's intact, and if she didn't stabilize soon, she was going to either drift into deep space or slam into something at lethal velocity.
"....pleas—,....please….help…"
[WARNING: VELOCITY EXCEEDING SAFETY LIMITS]
[SYSTEMS COMPROMISED: STABILIZERS OFFLINE]
She felt herself spinning uncontrollably, her own interior functinal gyros failing to keep up. Her entire body slowly but succumbing to deathly numbness, but she was still conscious—barely.
Lirica fought to regain control, her vision spinning as the force of the blast sent her tumbling.
Through the chaos, her HUD flickered, barely managing to process the source of the shot.
Then she saw it.
Emerging from distorted space, a colossal 48,000-kilometer warship materialized—
An Imperial Governor-class Battle Cruiser.
The Imperial Starship, Karakoa.
Her blood ran cold.
Named warships.
Named warships were only granted to imperial war heroes, those who had fought alongside the Emperor in the ancient war against the Chaos-Borns.
This wasn't just any battleship that was lightly named—someone who made a legend was onboard.
But how is it here?
Why did it shoot?
A warship of this class had no reason to be here.
Their mere presence in this sector was an anomaly on its own.
She could barely muster the continuous questions appearing in her mind, before her fingers twitched, trying to get control of herself.
Then—
Her HUD picked up something else.
[IMPACT EVENT DETECTED]
[TARGET: PLANET PX-79]
[TARGET: AEGIS MORS ORBITAL DEFENSE STATION]
Lirica's sluggish mind struggled to process the information, her vision swimming from the force of the blast. But her gut already knew.
The battleship, 48,000 kilometers long, had punched through distorted space, its nose breaking through the clouds of wreckage as if it were carving a path for itself.
A bore shot.
It tunneled through AEGIS MORS's planetary shield, piercing the upper atmosphere, and drilled straight through PX-79's mantle in a single devastating strike.
The shield should have contained such an impact. Its bore-cannons, designed to fire through shielded ports without compromising planetary stability, should have been able to hold against extreme conditions.
But this wasn't a controlled collapse.
This was a planetary strike.
The shield—built to withstand core destabilization procedures—ruptured from the inside out, its entire containment system overloaded in an instant.
The Karakoa's mass driver array hadn't just broken through PX-79's defenses—
It had weaponized the planet's own shield system against it.
The bore-cannons, calibrated to focus energy into precise core-strikes, were thrown into catastrophic misfire sequences, sending uncontrolled energy bursts back into the shield matrix.
Instead of safely destabilizing the core, the energy rebounded, tearing through the mantle in an uncontrolled chain reaction.
The planet cracked open, shockwaves tearing across its surface, a cataclysmic failure of the containment system designed to prevent exactly this kind of destruction.
AEGIS MORS, its reinforced framework meant to endure planetary-scale mining operations, shattered in the backlash.
Its reinforced structure meant nothing against the sheer force of an Archonic Mass Driver Array.
Its shield collapsed, the structure detonating from within, sending fragments of reinforced plating—some the size of cities—spiraling into space.
A system meant to control destruction had been annihilated in an instant.
Her blurred vision caught the sheer scale of it.
A planet-killer of Imperial design, moving through the debris field like a glacier cutting through rock.
Everything in its way was pulverized or pushed aside, pieces of PX-79's crust and shattered AEGIS MORS plating collapsing along the ship's wake.
The ship's bow, larger than entire continents, descended through the planet's burning atmosphere.
It had pierced straight through PX-79.
The planet cracked open, a chain reaction of explosions ripping through its crust. The collapse began instantly, the entire surface engulfed in fire and shockwaves.
And the newly built AEGIS MORS, an orbital defense platform stationed above the planet, was shattered in the blast.
This was a full-powered battleship-grade assault.
[EMERGENCY TRANSMISSION RECEIVED]
[ORIGIN: I.S.S. KARAKOA]
[STATUS: UNAUTHORIZED INTERFERENCE DETECTED]
Her internal comms crackled, barely holding up under the interference.
"—nidentified—Imperial transponder—cease movement—"
She didn't hear. The rest of her body finally gave out.
Her limbs went slack, her vision darkened, and the last thing she felt was the sensation of being hurled away at impossible speeds.
The moment the Archonic Mass Driver Array fired, her suit's and her own body's Auto-Deploy Core Shield had barely flickered to life before being overwhelmed.
It held for a fraction of a second—long enough to prevent instant vaporization—but the cost was catastrophic.
Her head and half of her body—gone.
Not burned, not shattered, but erased, torn away from crown to torso, the raw energy of the impact searing through her before her shielding could fully contain it.
Her broken HUD flickered desperately, struggling to function without half of its system intact. The warning readouts were incomprehensible—entire sections of her interface were corrupted, missing, torn apart along with the physical components they were meant to display.
[WARNING: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY—NONEXISTENT]
[WARNING: CORE SHIELD DEPLETED]
[REMAINING ENERGY RESERVES: 2%]
That was all she had left. Two percent of her core energy. Barely enough to keep the shreds of her body from completely shutting down.
Her body, what was left of it, was still moving, still tumbling through space, dragged along the wake of planetary-scale destruction.
Then, before her consciousness finally faded, her HUD flashed one last alert.
[VELOCITY: UNCALCULATED]
[TRAJECTORY: UNKNOWN]
[STATUS: UNCONSCIOUS]
Her thoughts were fragmenting, her consciousness slipping away, but the last thing she saw—the final image burned into her failing mind—
Was the Karakoa.
The battleship descending like a god, crashing through the ruin it had created.
Then, everything went black.
.
.
.
————————————————
(A/N: if nobody say something about the hella hard English on the half end of this chapter, I will not revise it. Like tell me, is it better if it's there, or does it need more revision?
For the Emperah!)