It wasn't a crash.
It was a splash.
A cold, thick, viscous impact that stole Haruto's breath and filled his world with a suffocating, oily blackness. The shriek of the nest, the whine of plasma, the roar of Riku's sacrifice—all of it vanished, replaced by a profound, pressurized, liquid silence.
He was sinking.
His armor, a dead weight, was pulling him down into the biomass. The substance was thick, like moving through half-set gelatin, and it was cold. A deep, penetrating cold that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, a cold that felt... aware.
The song in his head was no longer a thread. It was an ocean. A deafening, overwhelming chorus that hammered against his skull from the inside, a million voices singing one, terrible, welcoming note.
Welcome. Welcome home.
He struggled, his limbs heavy, useless. Panic, a hot, sharp, metallic thing, flooded his throat. He was blind. The world was a vortex of black, oily fluid, lit only by the faint, internal, green-black pulse of the Anomaly itself. It was like being inside a dying heart.
Then he remembered.
The crack in his visor.
The spores.
The taste.
The fluid was already inside his helmet.
He could feel it, a cold, thick film on his face, in his mouth. He gagged, a violent, full-body convulsion, but he couldn't spit it out. It was too thick. It tasted of rotten flowers and old, wet copper. He was not just drowning in the Anomaly. He was breathing it.
Let go, the song whispered, no longer a chorus, but the intimate, sibilant, singular voice of the Conductor, speaking directly into his mind. It is over. The struggle is done. You are a broken piece. We can make you whole.
No.
The word was a thought, a bubble of defiance in the overwhelming tide. He was a soldier. He would not.
He fought, his arms and legs churning, trying to swim, to gain purchase in the clinging, heavy biomass. It was like trying to fight his way out of wet cement. The substance held him, cradled him, pulling him deeper.
He saw Kaito.
A few meters away, suspended in the black, oily light. His arms weren't flailing. He was just... floating. His eyes were open, wide and vacant, staring at nothing. A thin, faint, almost beatific smile was on his lips. The song was in Kaito, too, but Kaito wasn't fighting.
He was accepting.
He was… happy.
The sight of that smile, so unnatural, so utterly wrong, was a splash of ice water that cut through Haruto's own terror. This wasn't peace. It was consumption. A beautiful, melodic, horrifying digestion of the soul.
He saw Kaito's harness, the strap where he had tied the micro-filament. It was just out of reach.
He needed a new plan.
Logic doesn't matter anymore, he had told Riku. He was wrong. Logic was all he had left.
The Anomaly had a physical body. He had his suit.
His suit had thrusters.
He ignored the song, the cold, the suffocating, sweet taste in his mouth. He built the wall. The box. The empty room. He focused on the small, blinking red icon in the corner of his HUD.
14%.
His power cell was almost dead. The plasma purge had seen to that. He would have one burst. One shot.
And he was low on propellant.
He forced his arm, slow as a dream, through the thick, resisting ooze, towards his wrist-slate. The Anomaly tried to stop him. He could feel it. The substance tightened around his arm, not with tendrils, but with a sudden, crushing, uniform pressure, like a giant's fist closing.
No. Stay. You are home.
"I am... Haruto," he hissed, the words a stream of grotesque, black bubbles from his lips.
He slammed his fist against the control stud.
Thrusters. Full. Now.
The suit's reactor, what little power it had left, responded. A violent, churning explosion of superheated gas erupted from the vents on his back. It was not a clean burn. The thick biomass of the Anomaly choked the vents, the ignition a muffled, boiling thump.
But it was enough.
The force of the single, desperate burst was a mule-kick. It shattered his connection with the song, the mental chorus dissolving into a shriek of what felt like... surprise. He was moving. Not up. Sideways. He had seen it before he fell. The platform. The console.
He shot through the black, viscous sea, a broken, lopsD-sided torpedo, dragging a comet's tail of boiling, vaporized Anomaly behind him.
He grabbed Kaito's harness as he passed, the impact nearly tearing his arm from its socket.
He was a meteor. A dying, frantic, desperate star.
He saw the platform before he hit it. A dark, solid shape in the green-black gloom.
He slammed into it.
The impact was a cataclysm of metal on metal. His cracked visor spiderwebbed, the world dissolving into a fractured, useless mosaic. His shoulder, the one he'd landed on, exploded in a universe of pure, white-hot agony. But he held on. His other hand, a desperate, clawing gauntlet, found purchase on the edge of the catwalk.
He was out.
He hung there for a long, shuddering moment, half in, half out of the roiling, black sea. He was a piece of flotsam washed up on a dead, metal shore. The song was a distant, angry, frustrated buzz. He had escaped.
He pulled.
His body was a single, screaming nerve of pain. But the training held. The discipline held. He pulled Kaito's dead weight, hand over hand, an agonizing, inch-by-inch retrieval from the abyss. The Anomaly did not want to let him go. The ooze clung to Kaito's armor, thick and tenacious, like strings of black, molten tar. But the Conductor was not here. And without its direct, focused will, the ooze was just… a substance. A thick, heavy, hungry substance, but a substance nonetheless.
With a final, desperate, guttural roar that tore at his raw throat, he hauled Kaito's limp body up and over the edge. The man flopped onto the catwalk with a wet, heavy, unliving sound.
Haruto collapsed beside him, a heap of smoking, broken armor.
He rolled onto his back, his chest heaving, and spat a thick, black, oily mouthful onto the metal deck. It lay there, glistening, a small, obscene puddle in the strobing, blue-green light of the reactor.
He was alive.
He was contaminated.
He was in hell.
But he was on the platform.
He lay there for a long time. Maybe a minute. Maybe an eon. The cavern was silent again. The chittering of the bugs was gone. The roar of the plasma caster was gone. The only sound was the deep, continental hum of the reactor core and his own ragged, desperate gasps for air. He ripped his ruined helmet off, tossing it aside, and took his first, shuddering breath of the hot, metallic, ozone-laced air of Engineering.
He tasted flowers. He would always taste flowers.
He forced himself to sit up. His shoulder screamed. He looked at Kaito. The man was alive. His chest was rising and falling in a shallow, rhythmic beat. But his eyes... his eyes were still open, still staring at something far, far away, that faint, beatific smile still gracing his lips. He was breathing, but he was not there. He was lost in the song.
Haruto had saved the body. He had lost the man.
He pushed the thought away. Triage. Prioritize the mission. He looked around.
He was here. The main reactor control console.
It was right in front of him.
It was just as he'd seen from the gantry: a cocoon. A pulsating, throbbing, throne-like mass of black, living biomass, completely encasing the Imperial technology within. The Conductor was gone, but its presence remained.
And the song, the quiet, insistent, silver thread of it, returned to his mind.
You are so tired, Lieutenant.
You are hurt.
Rest.
Join.
He looked at the pulsing, organic console. He looked at Kaito's empty, smiling face. He looked at the red, blinking, 3% power warning on his wrist-slate.
He was out of time. He was out of power. He was contaminated.
His ancestor's final, desperate plea... Complete my final act. Scuttle this ship.
How? How could he scuttle a ship when the very controls he needed to use were a part of the monster he was trying to kill?
He stood up, his body a collection of broken pieces, and faced his objective. He had no plan. He had no weapons. All he had was a name he didn't want and a promise he couldn't keep.
He put his hand on the hilt of his vibro-knife. It was his last, useless tool.
"Guardian," he whispered, his voice a dry, broken croak. "Talk to me. Tell me what to do."
There was no answer. Only the low, steady, throbbing hum of the god in the machine, and the quiet, patient, welcoming song in his own blood.