"I must have heard that wrong," Blake said incredulously. "Can you run it by me again?"

  "It's not as crazy as it sounds!" Kitt demanded.

  "You want me to fire off a Singularity Shot and then jump in after it." Blake deadpanned.

  "Well, obviously I'd help with the timing," Kitt huffed. "We need to follow the spatial cavitation down before the outsider's influence can re-assert itself, and the main attack will breach the hull to give us access. It's a good plan."

  Blake burst into laughter, the sound echoing through the twisted wreckage around them. "Your pouting is priceless, Kitt."

  "I'm not pouting," Kitt said, voice tinged with indignation. "I'm proposing a legitimate tactical solution."

  "And I'm just giving you a hard time." Blake checked Verdict's chamber, the motion automatic as breathing. "This wouldn't crack my top three most dangerous airdrops. There was one time in Kazakhstan where I had to bail with no chute."

  "I wouldn't know," Kitt said waspishly.

  "Or that drop where my equipment failed on me, and I overshot the DZ. Landing in a minefield tends to—"

  Blake could sense Kitt's intention through their bond: they were constantly nudging, poking, and smacking one another mentally through their shared link. He could almost see the image of her rearing back and swinging a paw towards his arm. What brought him up short, however, was the very real impact that struck his shoulder, rocking him sideways.

  Blake froze.

  "Kitt?" His voice dropped low with caution. "Did you just hit me?"

  Silence hung between them for three heartbeats.

  "I... I think I did," Kitt sounded genuinely shocked. "It was reflex. You were being smug."

  "You used [Force Manipulation] on me..." Blake rotated his shoulder, testing for damage. He was fine—he had been knocked off balance due to how unexpected the blow was, but it hadn't had any serious force behind it. It was precisely what he had sensed coming from their bond: a friendly punch to the shoulder.

  "I didn't know I could actually do that," Kitt whispered. "I just... did it."

  Blake's mind raced through implications. Aside from how she interfaced with technology, he'd never seen Kitt interact with the outside world before. He'd have been more suspicious of it were it not for the fact that he could feel Kitt's surprise and confusion so clearly.

  "That's new," Blake said.

  "And concerning," Kitt added. "What if I'd done worse? What if I—"

  "Hey." Blake cut her off. "We'll figure this out together. Don't freak out on me right before we're supposed to literally leap into action."

  Kitt laughed, and Blake smiled. He could feel her calming down, but she was still distant. Something about this had shaken her. He opted to remain silent and leave her to her thoughts. He had to find an ideal place to drop down from, anyway.

  After a few minutes of searching, Blake found an ideal location: a large tear in the bulkhead of the corridor that looked down directly over the main body and was large enough to fit through easily. He didn't let himself think too hard about the fact that the hole was on the opposite side of the corridor from the last gap they had used to look out over the ship—it should, by all accounts, be showing him the sky.

  "So," Blake finally said, shaking off his discomfort and breaking the silence, "you can touch me now."

  "Apparently." Kitt was doing the mental equivalent of holding very still, apparently waiting to see where Blake was going.

  "And you chose to smack me," he said with exaggerated disbelief. That helped. He could feel her opening back up a little.

  "You deserved it," she shot back with a hint of her usual attitude.

  "So weird." A simple sentiment: It was weird, but he wasn't threatened, so she should stop worrying.

  "Yeah…" Kitt was still confused, that much Blake could feel through their bond, but after a moment she smiled and responded in kind. "Definitely weird."

  A distant howl echoed through the twisted passages, followed by the sound of scuttling claws on metal. Distant, but not distant enough for comfort.

  "We'll table this discussion," Blake said, raising Verdict. "For now, let's stick with the plan. Singularity Shot?"

  "Hold on, hotshot, we still need to go over the details."

  "Alright," Blake conceded, "hit me—I mean, let's talk."

  Kitt snorted—a feat for someone with no lungs.

  "Ok, so I made it sound simple before: 'just fire off the attack and we follow its wake through the turbulent space,' but it isn't quite that simple."

  "I'm shocked," Blake responded. "But I think I know why. Space is already a hot mess down there, and Singularity Shot isn't exactly easy on things, either. So me firing down into that chaos is probably going to make things worse instead of better."

  "Got it in one," Kitt said. "Aeons be praised, you're not as much of a meathead as you act like."

  "You just assume I'm dumb because I'm so pretty," he countered.

  "I'm the one who made you pretty. You're welcome." Blake could feel Kitt's smirk, and he hated it. He definitely didn't want to admit how much of an improvement Kitt's renovations were over how he had actually looked in his twenties.

  "Funny," he said flatly instead. "Back on topic: why do we want to make things worse?"

  "Right now, the outsider has control of the area, but if we make the entire mess too chaotic for anyone to control, then we have a chance of slipping through."

  "Okay," Blake replied. "Sounds dangerous, but I assume you've got a way to stabilize things in the attack's wake?"

  "I was going to say that you do, but after what just happened..." Kitt's voice trailed off, contemplative. "I wonder what I could achieve solo if I pushed hard enough. But no—we still share a core, and I'd rather not trigger a mana deviation if we're both cycling energy simultaneously."

  "Focus, Kitt."

  "Sorry, sorry," she said, sounding contrite. "You've been doubling down on your [Force Manipulation]—even getting that skill evolution for it—but you also got [Spatial Manipulation] at the same time."

  "I suppose I haven't really been training that up," Blake admitted. "It always feels a little abstract."

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  "Well, it's about to become pretty concrete."

  Blake straddled the jagged hole in the corridor floor, legs planted wide, knees bent. The yawning void beneath opened directly to the body of the corrupted Leviathan. He raised Verdict with both hands, aiming through his legs at the pulsing mass below.

  "This is still a terrible plan," Blake muttered.

  "Got a better one?" Kitt asked.

  "Nope," Blake said, rolling his shoulders.

  "Then quit stalling and fire."

  He drew a deep breath, steadying himself against the metal framework. The barrel of Verdict glowed violet as power surged through its chambers. The weapon grew hot in his grip, vibrating with barely contained energy.

  "I've locked in the targeting solution," Kitt said. "Three-point-six seconds after firing, the shot will reach optimal penetration depth before detonation."

  "And we follow in its wake," Blake affirmed, nodding.

  "If your spatial bubble holds."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  "Hey, if we die, at least we'll make for interesting corpses," Kitt's voice echoed pleasantly in his head.

  "Not helping." Blake squinted down the barrel, focusing on the mass of twisted flesh and metal below. "Firing in T-minus three, two, one—"

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Verdict bucked in his hands. Power drained from the weapon in a violent rush that left his arms tingling. A streak of purple-black energy shot downward, leaving a warping tunnel of disturbed air in its wake.

  The projectile struck the corrupted mass.

  Reality broke.

  The already stressed fabric of reality screamed under the assault. Where the shot passed, the air fractured like tempered glass struck by a hammer. At the point of impact space folded inward, then burst outward in fractal patterns. The air split into shards of color—colors Blake had never seen before, colors that shouldn't exist—hues that scraped against the optic nerves, virulent yellows and sickly greens swirling with reds too deep, too wet, to be simple light. Blake's mind reeled as reality seemed to hemorrhage before him, the impossibility of it threatening to shatter his own sanity.. His Adaptability and Resilience flared white-hot in his core, feeling like irons left in the forge too long.

  But they held fast, and so did he.

  Geometry buckled. Straight lines curved into nauseating parabolas. Angles refused to add up, folding inward and outward simultaneously. Fractals of light that hurt to look at unfolded and refolded, forming impossible shapes that existed in more dimensions than Blake could comprehend. Structures that resembled buildings, organs, and machines all at once pulsed with alien light. Behind them lurked shapes—vast, patient things with too many eyes, too many mouths, too many angles.

  A thing like a hand with fingers that branched endlessly reached toward the tear, even as a mass of writhing tentacles composed of what looked like living mathematics assaulted it in order to reach the cracks first.

  The impression was mesmerizing and repellent, a cosmic car crash he couldn't look away from. Blake was supremely happy that he wasn't strong enough to worry about ever causing damage like this on his own.

  The corrupted Leviathan convulsed. Its twisted flesh stretched and distorted around the growing point of gravitational chaos. The singularity pulled everything toward its center—flesh, metal, light, even the corrupted space itself.

  "Bubble up! Now!" Kitt's voice jolted Blake back to himself.

  Blake focused, reaching for his mana reserves. His [Spatial Manipulation] flared. He poured every scrap of Intent he possessed into the skill, focusing his will into a singular point: stability. A subtle shimmer coalesced around him, barely visible. It wasn't a hard shell, but a localized smoothing of spacetime, a personal bubble of normality that was infinitesimally small compared against the cosmic horrors below.

  He could feel the effort straining his core, stretching his nascent abilities to their absolute limit. It felt like trying to damn a river with nothing but his hands. But Blake was nothing if not stubborn—he'd hold back the entire Atlantic if it meant proving a point.

  "NOW!" Kitt shouted.

  Blake leaned forward and fell.

  Dropping into the wake of the Singularity Shot was like diving into a kaleidoscope assembled by a lunatic god. The stable bubble of his creation plunged into the wake of the Singularity Shot, following the path torn through warped reality. Outside his protective cocoon, space itself thrashed like a wounded animal. The visuals that had assaulted him from afar now engulfed him. He plunged through layers of fractured light. Colours smeared and bled, painting impossible landscapes across his vision for microseconds before collapsing.

  He tumbled through a tunnel of broken physics. To his right, he saw the same corridor repeated a thousand times, each version slightly different—some occupied by things wearing his face, others filled with fire or ice or void. To his left, he witnessed versions of himself dying in countless ways: shot, stabbed, crushed, dissolved into atoms, aged to dust in seconds.

  The walls of the tunnel flexed and contracted. The geometries twisted around him, space compressing and expanding rhythmically, squeezing him like a giant fist then stretching him thin. He caught fleeting, clearer glimpses of the horrors behind the veil—eyes like galaxies filled with cold indifference, limbs composed of frozen lightning, mouths opening onto vistas of screaming stars. The passage wasn't silent. It was a roaring, grinding pressure inside his skull, the sound of fundamental laws breaking down.

  As he fell deeper, the visions grew more alien. Landscapes of flesh and crystal. Oceans of liquid thought. Forests of bone and sinew. Beings composed of pure concept rather than matter, feeding on ideas and memories.

  Through it all, Blake held his focus on the bubble, pouring every scrap of power and concentration into maintaining its integrity. The strain burned through his muscles, set his nerves alight. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the lack of heat.

  "Hold it together," Kitt whispered in his mind. "We're almost through."

  The bubble squeezed through a final constriction in the tunnel. For a split second, Blake felt his protection thin to nothing—his skin brushed against the raw edge of reality itself, sending white-hot pain lancing through his body.

  Then he was through, falling into absolute darkness.

  The bubble popped like soap film. Blake tumbled forward, blind and disoriented, arms still crossed tight over his chest. He hit something solid—a floor, a wall, he couldn't tell—and rolled to absorb the impact. His shoulder slammed against a hard surface, sending pain shooting down his arm.

  He came to rest on his back, gasping for breath in the perfect blackness. He was inside the body of the Leviathan; he'd made it. The fall was, visibly, a simple drop of 10-12 meters. Somehow, it had felt like minutes had passed while he fell.

  "We did it," Kitt said with mock enthusiasm. "Woo-hoo."

  He almost asked Kitt to provide light—he knew she had worked illumination into his armor—but his training superceded his instincts. Instead, he called on [Warden's Chimeric Insight] in order to borrow some of Kitt's more esoteric visual senses.

  The darkness transformed into a landscape of heat and energy as the skill activated. Through Kitt's borrowed senses, the blackness gave way to threads of power—some pulsing blue-white like arterial highways, others dim and flickering. Heat signatures bloomed in patches across what must have been bulkheads and floor panels.

  "Holy shit," Blake whispered.

  The Leviathan's internal systems sprawled before him in thermal relief—circuitry and organic matter interwoven in ways that defied conventional engineering. Organic veins carried nutrients alongside fiber optic cables. Power conduits wrapped around biological structures like ivy on stone.

  But through it all ran something else—a substance that registered as neither heat nor electricity. It moved like oil through water, corrupting everything it touched. Where it flowed, the clean lines of the Leviathan's systems warped and twisted.

  "That's our target," Kitt said. "The outsider's influence. It's... eating the ship from inside."

  Blake tracked a particularly thick strand of the corruption as it wormed through a cluster of power nodes. "Think we can trace it back to a central source?"

  "Maybe, but—"

  Emergency lights snapped on without warning. Red LEDs embedded in the floor and ceiling illuminated the chamber in harsh crimson. The room stretched longer than Blake had guessed—at least thirty meters of what appeared to be a central corridor, walls lined with access panels and strange, pulsing sacs.

  "Well, that's not good," Blake muttered, rising to a crouch. "So much for the element of surprise."

  "To be fair, we blew that when you fired a literal gravity bomb into the place," Kitt replied.

  "You're idea," he countered, sensing for Verdict and carefully calling the weapon back to hand.

  The lights pulsed in sequence, creating a path leading deeper into the corrupted vessel.

  "It's... inviting us in?" Blake checked Verdict over, the motions pure soothing reflex.

  "Or herding us," Kitt countered.

  "Either way," Blake said softly, "I don't think we'll have any luck trying to hide from the ship."

  "Not while we're inside it, no," Kitt confirmed.

  "Okay. Then let's get to it."