Ishtar stared at the broken avatars before her. The giant, the glitch, the three-armed one. In them, she saw a reflection—but not one of kinship. It was a mirror of what she feared becoming most: a creature permanently mutilated by the system, surviving in the shadows like a wounded animal.
Khepri's offer was logical. Strategically, it was the correct move. But the wound at her core—the memory of Alexandre casting her out, Sally's condescending smile—screamed louder than logic ever could.
"No," Ishtar said, the word slicing through the silence of the room. "An alliance is just a betrayal waiting to happen. I survive by my own rules. I won't chain myself to a group of… ghosts."
A murmur of disappointment rippled through the Exiled. Khepri, in his plain, faceless avatar, merely nodded slowly, as if he had expected nothing else.
"Paranoia is the cage you built for yourself, Ishtar," he said, without anger. "The door will remain open for when you grow tired of beating against the bars."
Ishtar turned away without another word. The wall of pixelated bricks dissolved for her and reformed behind her, leaving her once again alone in the neon-lit darkness of Finite Space.
Proof that the cage was real came three days later.
She was docked at a clandestine trade post, reloading her kinetic ammunition, when the attack came. Four ships—bounty hunter models painted with pirate clan insignias—opened fire simultaneously.
It was a poorly planned ambush, based on brute force, not skill. And against Ishtar, that was a fatal mistake.
She used the trade post itself as a shield, diving beneath its docks and forcing the hunters to split up. The first to follow her was greeted by a proximity torpedo she deployed like a mine. The explosion hurled the ship into the station wall, turning it into a fireball.
The other three came after her. Ishtar didn't flee. She flew straight at them. In a maneuver that defied sanity and physics, she spun her ship one hundred eighty degrees, firing her kinetic cannons while flying backward, using her enemies' speed against them. Tungsten rounds shredded the cockpit of the second hunter. The third, trying to evade the debris, collided with the fourth.
In thirty seconds, silence returned. Three ships destroyed. One left drifting, its life-support systems failing.
Ishtar approached the crippled vessel. She didn't destroy it. She opened a channel.
"Who paid?" she asked, her voice a scalpel of ice.
The panic in the pilot's voice was unmistakable. "I—I don't know! The contract was on the board! Anyone could take it! Fifty thousand credits for the hull of the 'Black Ladybug'!"
A contract. It wasn't random. It was a hunt.
Ishtar cut the transmission. She hacked into the pilot's damaged flight log. There it was—the bounty contract, issued through an anonymous proxy, but stamped with a code watermark that only surfaced under deep analysis. A subtle mark of Apex.
A thin, dangerous smile curved Helen's lips. So the queen on her glass throne was afraid. Good.
She didn't go back into hiding.
She went hunting.
She didn't need a guild. She became her own intelligence agency. She tracked the players who accepted the contract—and one by one, she dismantled them.
A pilot named "Razor" was found with his ship perfectly intact, but with life-support systems and fuel tanks completely drained, drifting a week away from the nearest jump gate.
A pair of brothers known as the "Wyvern Twins" were lured into an unstable asteroid field. Ishtar never fired a shot. She simply triggered a rockslide with a well-placed seismic charge. Their death logs would read: environmental accident.
A veteran named Jax, who bragged on the forums that he'd claim the bounty, was found with his ship methodically stripped apart. First the shields. Then the weapons. Then the engines. Last, the cockpit was vented to vacuum, forcing him to eject. Ishtar left his escape pod intact, just meters from his ruined ship—a humiliation worse than death.
She never left direct evidence. There were no combat logs bearing the name "Black Ladybug." But the survivors—few and terrified—knew. Whispers on the underground channels began to crackle like static.
"She doesn't kill you. She takes you apart."
"It's not a ship. It's a ghost."
"I saw it… she didn't even scratch Jax's paint. Just opened him up like a can."
"The bounty isn't worth it. She's not hunting for credits. She's hunting for sport."
The name "Black Ladybug" stopped being a bounty target and started becoming a horror story of the underworld. And on her throne, Ninsun felt the sting of every rumor, realizing that in trying to erase a legend, she was—unintentionally—forging one far more terrifying.