Mana stands at the heart of the world, or what is left of it. Eden's terminal chamber is larger than any cathedral, any starport launch bay, any memory of home: a vault of geometry so clean it erases all concept of chaos, the space defined by perfect symmetry, by the million-fold reflection of blue and gold. The air is cold but still. The only motion is her own breath, fogging inside her helmet, and the slow, inexorable rotation of the Arbiter at her left shoulder.
She expects an army. Instead, the Weapon-Touched comes alone, save for a brace of honor guard—six in total, three to a side. Her fingers find the armor seam without thought—three right, three left—the motion automatic as predator and prey recognize each other across the crystalline floor. Their armor is new, spined and burnished to a mirror finish, the underlays red as the arterial blood they no longer carry. At their center, the Jäger leader stands unhelmed. The crystal across his cheek glows as if lit from inside, and in his hands—palms up, held out as one might a baby bird—rests the second key.
It is the color of heart's blood, the red so dense it seems solid, the light inside not just alive but agitated. Mana watches the way the glow flickers in the shallow hollows of the Jäger's hands, the trembling at the edge of the pulse. He does not look at her. He only walks, measured and without deviation, toward the platform at chamber's center.
At the platform's edge, he halts. For a moment, the entire chamber seems to hold its breath. The honor guard forms a half-circle, standing at rigid attention. The Weapon-Touched raises the Prism-Shard, and as he does, the ancient runes that ring the floor spark to life: not blue, but a burning, vibrant red, tracing a path from the outermost glyphs inward. The resonance is physical now, a pressure on Mana's eardrums, a thrum at the base of her teeth.
The Arbiter hovers a pace behind. He spins with his customary lazy elegance, but there is an edge—an uptick in velocity, the ancient runes on his own surfaces now flickering between languages, some of which Mana cannot parse. She hears him counting, just above a whisper: "Dreißig… einunddreißig… zweiunddreißig…."
The Jäger leader steps forward, to the first of the three circles carved in the crystal platform. He kneels. The move is not a bow; it is a promise. He places the Prism-Shard in the slot, the red light erupting as it makes contact. The resonance doubles. Runes along the walls activate, a corona of light that pulses outward in time with Mana's heartbeat.
She stands at the center of the platform, the first key already in her hands. Her own Prism-Shard is clear, iridescent, the colorless heart of a weapon designed to never be used. She feels the energy coiling in her Core, each synapse crackling as the machine in the floor reads her, incorporates her, makes her part of the process. For a brief instant, she thinks she can feel Fox—a flutter at the edge of the neural link, a question that goes unasked.
A sound builds in the upper reaches of the chamber. It is not a voice, but a multiplicity of them, layered and modulated and then resolved into something like a song. The Kollektiven enter, not as soldiers or drones, but as a single entity—an immense, floating body that glides above the floor, its surface covered in what looks like a thousand smaller siblings, all fused together in a skin of blue-black glass. The whole assembly undulates, alive with motion, and at its core it carries the final key: a Prism-Shard so utterly black it hurts to look at, a knot of anti-light that absorbs the glow of all the rest.
The Kollektiven body does not land. It simply hovers, rotating until its "face"—a smooth oval ringed with mirrored pinpoints—aligns with Mana and the Jäger. It speaks, but the sound is everywhere, filling every crevice and every cavity of her skull.
"The Threshold awakens. The Bridge stands ready."
The black key is released from the Kollektiven's body, floating toward the platform under its own power. It moves slowly, deliberately, a ritual of inevitability. As it settles into the third slot, a line of darkness traces out from the circle, dividing the red and blue light with a perfect, cutting precision.
Mana's suit diagnostic goes wild: all sensors off-scale, all alerts suppressed by the override signal from the platform. Her hands are locked around the iridescent Prism, and it feels as though it is drawing not just her physical energy but her mind, her entire history, into the mechanism below.
The Arbiter's polyhedron whirls, surfaces colliding and sliding with an audible click at each integer. "Siebenunddreißig. Sechsunddreißig. Fünfunddreißig," he says, the numbers gaining speed.
The chamber itself begins to move. The runes on the walls spiral inward, tracing the direction of the protocol. The floor beneath her feet hums, then shakes, then flexes as if the whole structure were alive and about to give birth.
The Jäger leader stands, blood-red light reflected in his face. He looks at Mana, for the first time, and there is nothing of hatred or even rivalry in the look. Only anticipation. "When it is done," he says, voice deep as the platform's vibration, "there will be no more war."
Mana wants to answer. Instead, she focuses on the pressure at her temples, the ache behind her eyes, the rising memory of pain and triumph and loss that threatens to drown her if she lets it.
The Kollektiven speaks again, this time more quietly, but its voices synchronize to a purity that is almost beautiful. "The Bridge must choose."
The Arbiter's counting is a staccato now, slicing the air: "Neunzehn. Achtzehn. Siebzehn."
The three keys glow, then pulse in unison. The chamber's light goes out, replaced by the energy of the Protocol—a spiral of color and shadow that wraps around Mana's body, weaving her into the pattern of the machine. She feels herself lifted from the floor, her arms outstretched, the three keys spinning around her head in a pattern older than any living thing.
Time slows. In that instant, she sees every path: the city she left behind, the girl she used to be, the faces of the Jäger she killed and the marines she failed to save. She sees Fox, his voice muffled but urgent at the edge of the void.
"Mana. You don't have to do this."
The light surges. The Protocol is in its final cycle.
The Arbiter's eye, brighter than the sun, fixes on her. "Initiate."
The world becomes one perfect note.
The world vibrates in a register not meant for nerves. Mana floats, half-evacuated from her body, aware of her hands only as theoreticals: one set clutching the iridescent key, the other set flexing in the electric blue afterimage left by the Protocol. She is a spindle, a tuning fork, a bridge exactly as the machine promised.
Fox's voice stabs through the neural link like a distress beacon. "Mana—Mana—listen, you have to do something, it's not stopping, it's—" The words fragment, coming in and out as if the transmission were skipping across broken glass.
Mana tries to speak, but her own voice is lost in the sonic overload. The sound is everywhere: in her skull, in her teeth, in the Core at the base of her spine. She senses the presence of the red and black keys flanking her, the Weapon-Touched and the Kollektiven drone holding position as if trapped in the amber of the event. The chamber vibrates, and the pressure ratchets up with each cycle of the runes.
Fox's voice drops to that flat, precise register she'd learned to recognize as terror controlled. "If you don't channel it, it will wipe everything—planet, orbit, you—" Each word measured, deliberate, the calculation audible in what he's not saying. "You have to give it a target."
Mana blinks. The world refuses to clarify; the runes are now a corona of light, cycling through color bands at speeds too fast to resolve. She feels the machine reaching for her, looking for agency, for the will to direct its violence.
She wants to let go. She wants to let the machine burn itself out, consume every enemy on the surface and in the sky. But she cannot decide which enemy deserves to die first, and the thought is a pit opening under her feet.
She clamps her hands to her sides, refusing to move. She will not be the judge.
The Arbiter's voice cuts in—polite, sorrowful, almost gentle. "Bridge-Entity. Your inaction will result in total dissolution. This is not a threat. It is simply the end of counting."
Mana finds her voice, ragged and thin. "There's always another way."
The Weapon-Touched does not speak. He stands as if frozen, watching Mana with the patience of a mountain. The Kollektiven drone also waits, the black Prism-Shard held before it like an offering. Neither flinches as the energy climbs, as the light intensifies, as the chamber starts to come apart at the seams.
Fox's voice, softer now, slips into the link's lowest register. "Mana. Es ist okay. Du musst es nicht tun. Ich übernehme."
She knows what he means. She doesn't want to. Her right hand starts its old, comforting rhythm: three strokes along the armor's edge, three back. A heartbeat. The only thing that's ever kept her anchored.
She opens the neural link wide, the way Fox had always forbidden. The connection is instant, total, and absolute. "Zusammen," she whispers, and feels him answer without words. Fox pours into her consciousness like water finding every crack—his memories becoming hers: the sterile room where he's spent years, the pain in his atrophied legs, the half-jokes they traded during midnight operations. He is not just Controller, not just Operator—he is the hand she never held, the face she never touched, the only constant in a life of calculated violence.
The chamber flashes white. The keys dissolve into pure data. The resonance slams through Mana's body, tearing every nerve, every synapse, every last regret. She feels her helmet shatter, the edges digging into her scalp, feels her own blood splash onto the crystalline floor, evaporate, and then nothing at all.
But she does not let go. She keeps her hand moving: three right, three left. Fox's voice is not a voice anymore, but a presence, an arm around her shoulder, a laugh in her mouth, a warmth at her side. He channels the energy, shunting it into the gap between seconds, and for one instant Mana exists everywhere—on Eden, in the void above, in the archive on the ice moon, in every place they ever shared a joke or a moment of peace.
The machine wails. The light is so bright it punches through eyelids, through thought, through the separation of past and present. Mana screams, but it is the sound of release, not agony.
She stands at the center of the world, hands shaking, and opens her eyes.
The chamber is quiet. The runes are dark. The only light is the dim, amber glow of the Arbiter, who hovers a respectful distance away.
Fox is gone.
Mana falls to her knees, hand still tapping the three-right, three-left at her side. The Prism-Shard in her palm is dark, its color spent.
The silence is the worst part.
Mana lies on the crystalline floor, cheek pressed to a surface colder than ice. Her armor's sensors chirp, then fall silent; the HUD reboots in grayscale, then static, then nothing. The world is heavy, dense with the absence of sound, of connection, of anything but the pulse in her own head.
She tries to reach for Fox, even now. It's pure muscle memory—a flick of thought, a pulse at the base of her skull, the command so familiar it's indistinguishable from wanting to breathe. The neural port behind her ear is cold, inert, a socket without a plug. She feels the echo of him for a half-second, the ghost of a hand on her shoulder, and then only the hollowness after.
The chamber has not changed. The runes that once chased light around its circumference are dead; the three keys remain in their sockets, but dull, the colors bled out like old bruises. The Jäger leader stands on the far side of the dais, one hand closed over the wound at his side, watching Mana with the calm of a man who has seen the inside of death and found it wanting. The Kollektiven drone floats near the ceiling, its surface inert, the black Prism-Shard now just a lump of perfect darkness.
The Arbiter hovers near, smaller than before, geometry collapsed in on itself, the gold at its core now a pale citrine. He does not count. He waits.
Mana pushes herself to her knees. The motion is automatic, every joint creaking in protest, but she manages it, hands braced on the floor. She keeps expecting the neural link to open, for Fox's commentary to resume—admonishing her form, mocking the silence, counting down the seconds to extraction.
Nothing.
Her fingers find the release catches at her jawline. The helmet gives with a hiss of escaping atmosphere, revealing the face beneath—human, vulnerable, exposed to alien air for the first time. She raises her head, stares at the Arbiter through a film of sweat and blood and loss. "Is he alive?" The words come out raw, half-choked.
The Arbiter rotates, a slow, sad orbit. "Yes. The body lives. The mind is… elsewhere." A pause, as if searching for the most precise word. "He is no longer yours."
Mana nods. She knew, but the confirmation lands anyway, a hollow point at the center of her chest.
The Jäger leader steps forward, one stride at a time, then halts at the edge of the dais. He nods to her—a gesture of mutual recognition, maybe respect, maybe just the acknowledgment that the cycle of killing has ended, at least for now.
The Kollektiven drone detaches from the wall, drifts across the chamber, and then out through the aperture it came in. No words, no message, no threat. Just the void where the swarm used to be.
Mana reaches to the edge of her armor, fingers tracing the battered seam at her right shoulder: three right, three left. The Core is sluggish, but it still responds, a faint heat at the base of her neck. She runs a self-diagnostic. Everything works. Nothing hurts, except the loss.
She stands. She checks her sidearm, then her backup knife, then the utility pouch at her hip. Each action is precise, economical, designed to avoid thought.
She looks up at the Arbiter. "You said the protocol was incomplete."
The Arbiter seems to shrink. "The lens remains unaligned. Eden will sleep, until someone else arrives. But the event is finished. You are free to go."
Mana stares at him. "What happens if I don't leave?"
The Arbiter's facets flicker, a microsecond of indecision. "You will remain. Alone. With the silence. Until you die. Or someone comes to find you." He tilts in the air, almost a bow. "I do not recommend it."
She picks up the iridescent key, now colorless, tucks it into her belt. She glances at the Jäger, at the distant exit, at the nothing beyond the chamber.
"Extraction?" she says.
The Arbiter is businesslike. "Path cleared. Shuttle at outer edge of city. No opposition. All parties have withdrawn. You have, as they say, won."
Mana does not laugh. She walks.
The route out is shorter than she remembers. The city is empty, the grass at its edge bowed and trampled from the passage of the armies that came to witness the end. There are no bodies, no ruins, no sign of battle. Only the gold sky, and the glimmer of the shuttle in the distance.
She enters. The cockpit is cold, the seat fitted for someone her size. She closes the hatch, straps in, runs the preflight with hands that remember every movement. The shuttle lifts, cycles through the launch protocol, and Mana watches Eden shrink beneath her, the heart of the world receding to a point of blue and black and gold.
At the upper atmosphere, the comms panel chirps. She expects silence, but instead, a voice.
"Mana?" Fox. Tinny, awkward, not through the link but over standard comms. "Can you hear me? Are you alright?"
She does not answer. She waits, staring at the horizon.
"Mana, please. I see the shuttle. You're alive. Talk to me."
She leans forward, places a finger on the comm switch. The urge to reply is an ache, a wound, a chemical reflex. She thinks about the way Fox's voice used to be: always inside her head, always exactly where she needed it, sometimes before she even asked.
She turns off the comm. Not out of anger, not out of cruelty. Just because it hurts too much to listen to a voice that can never come home again.
She flies.
Hours pass. Maybe days. The sky changes color, and the stars return. The HUD is still gray, still missing the familiar annotations, but she learns to live with it.
At the edge of the system, she pauses. Reaches up to the neural port behind her ear. For the first time in ten years, there is nothing on the other side.
Her fingers trace the seam of her suit, three right, three left.
A wetness tracks down her face. Her body performs an unfamiliar function without instruction, without tactical purpose. She does not notice the tears until one drops onto the control panel with a soft plink.
She sets a course for the next mission, for the next war, for the next cycle.
In the silence, she names herself. She counts her own steps. And for the first time, the number means something.