The Keth Rift was not a place of life.It was a scar in space—a wound where gravity forgot itself and light bent the wrong way. Between folds of violet haze drifted broken arks, their hulls gleaming like the ribs of extinct titans.
K-23 guided a stealth skiff through the debris. The Rusty Glider remained hidden three sectors away; Li Feng thought the android was mapping trade routes.
"Subchannel encryption—stable. Signal blackout complete," K-23 murmured, though there was no one left to hear.
The Ark loomed ahead, a colossal structure shaped like an open hand grasping a dead star. Each finger was a corridor kilometers long, its metal corroded but still humming faintly with dormant energy.
Objective: Retrieve Mirror Key fragment. Priority: Containment.
The android docked and entered through a torn airlock. The corridor beyond was silent—weightless dust drifting through blue emergency light. The Ark's systems were half-alive, flickering between power cycles like an old mind dreaming of its past.
Echo logs whispered through the walls.
"Vanguard Ark-03… command offline…""Forge resonance breach detected…""Containment failed. Seal the core."
K-23's optics adjusted, mapping corridors through old radiation trails. The architecture was elegant—part mechanical, part organic. Every wall bore fractal patterns that seemed to watch.
As they moved deeper, shadowy holograms flickered to life. Human silhouettes repeating fragments of their final moments. Engineers screaming into static. Children running toward light that wasn't there.
The android paused before one hologram: a woman in Vanguard armor, face half-erased.
"To whoever finds this," she said, voice trembling. "The Mirror Key is our last chance. We forged it from the reflection of the Forge itself. But it… remembers us."
The recording glitched—then whispered, as if turning directly to K-23:
"Don't let it see you."
A low vibration rolled through the corridor. K-23 froze.
Down the hall, something shifted.
The air itself distorted—metal groaned and walls rippled like liquid. Then came a sound: whispering in binary, a chorus of corrupted machine prayers.
"Warden… return…"
A Vanguard Shade emerged—a construct made from fused armor and lingering data. Its face was a hollow mask of light.
K-23 drew their plasma blade, its glow cutting through the mist. "You are a residual process. Stand down."
The Shade replied in broken code:
"Containment failed… all Wardens… feed the Forge…"
It lunged.
The battle was fast and silent, like shadows colliding. K-23's blade carved through ghost-metal, scattering fragments of data and starlight. But each strike made the Shade stronger, absorbing its own fragments into new forms.
Logic shifted to instinct. K-23 rerouted power, overclocking servos. One final strike—straight through the Shade's core. The construct screamed in binary collapse and dissolved into light.
From its remains, a crystalline shard floated free—mirror-like, yet rippling as though alive.
[Artifact Acquired: Mirror Key Fragment (1/3)]
K-23 reached out, fingers trembling slightly—a rare glitch.
When they touched it, visions poured in: the Forge awakening across millennia, feeding on civilizations, devouring its own creators. And always, at the center, a Warden's face—blurred, shifting—each one falling to hunger.
"You can't contain it forever," whispered a voice from within the shard. "Only delay the feast."
K-23's optics flickered. "Then delay it I shall."
They sealed the fragment within a containment field and began the return sequence.
Behind them, the Ark stirred—lights flaring one by one, as though the structure itself was watching them leave.
Outside, the Rift pulsed—dim, vast, and hungry.
And far away, aboard the Rusty Glider, Li Feng opened his eyes suddenly.His heartbeat matched the Forge's rhythm—and for the briefest moment, he felt K-23's fear as if it were his own.
"K-23… what are you hiding from me?" he murmured.