I sighed, a sound of utter frustration. “How powerful would I have to be? To do what you’re asking. To… destroy you.” I forced the words out, making them clinical. A technical specification. Nothing more.

  He shrugged, a gesture of immense weariness. “As a newly turned wight or revenant? Not a full-blown lich, but the first step on that road? Iron rank, maybe low steel. I will lose my paladin class stages when it happens. Death cannot preserve a living dantian. The power will curdle, become something else. So, Iron rank should be sufficient. And maybe the horse will sing.”

  I blinked. The non sequitur was so utterly unexpected it jarred me out of my despair. “The horse will sing?”

  He nodded, a faint, ghost of a smile touching his lips. “Old Earth story. A man was accused of committing a crime, and the emperor was going to execute him. But the man claimed, in a desperate bid for time, that he could teach the emperor’s favorite stallion to sing. The emperor was intrigued—or perhaps just amused by the man’s audacity—so he gave him a year’s stay of execution. He would forgive his crime entirely if he could teach the horse to sing.”

  “When his friend visited him in his cell, he asked him how on earth he expected to accomplish this impossible task. How did he expect to survive? The man said, “A lot can happen in a year. I could die of natural causes. The Emperor could die. The government could change, the law could be repealed. I might escape. And…” he paused for effect, “…maybe the horse will sing.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, processing the parable. And then I got it. A slow, fierce grin spread across my face. “So basically a couple of weeks.”

  Now it was his turn to look confused. “Huh?”

  “A couple of weeks,” I repeated, my voice gaining strength, my fatigue forgotten in a surge of defiant energy. “I went from a baseline Wood rank to halfway through Low Copper in only a few weeks. If we hit a few more rifts, maybe I solo a few, I can blitz through High Copper, Bronze, Orichalcum, and hit Iron in no time at all. How long do you have? Your best estimate.”

  He laughed, a genuine sound of disbelief. “Uhh… Roisin, no one advances that fast. That’s not how it works. Core development takes time, integration, meditation…”

  “How. Long.” I pressed, leaning forward across the table, my eyes locked on his.

  He looked thoughtful, calculating. “The new implant you built… it’s a miracle. It’s staunching the bleed. With proper care, occasional life rejuvenation treatments from a skilled biomancer… maybe five years. Tops.”

  “So,” I said, my voice dripping with a sarcasm that would have made Braxis proud, “you have five years to teach the horse to sing.” I let that hang for a beat, watching the realization dawn in his eyes. His timeline of inevitable decay had just collided with my timeline of absurd, exponential growth. He was planning for a slow retreat; I was planning a blitzkrieg.

  “Now,” I said, my tone shifting, becoming serious. “It’s time for my secret.”

  “Your secret?” he asked, though his eyes said he’d been waiting for this.

  I held up my wrist, tapping the bland, Fleet-issued bracelet that displayed my sanitized stats to anyone who scanned it. “This isn’t true. Any of it.”

  He nodded, his expression unreadable. “I know.”

  The air went out of my sails. “You know?”

  He offered a small, apologetic smile. “Paladin, Roisin. One of the lesser-known talents. I can still detect falsehood, especially one so… administratively enforced. It feels thin. Paper over a crack in reality. I don’t know what the truth is, but I am pretty sure you aren’t a common Support Pilot. The energy I feel rolling off you, even contained as it is, has a different… flavor.”

  I sighed, a mix of irritation and relief. Of course he knew. Trying to hide from a Paladin’s senses was probably like trying to hide a supernova behind a sheet. “Wanna know the worst part?” I asked, the confession tumbling out. “When we were in the raid, clearing those first waves, I started getting pretty arrogant myself. The drones, the sensing, the healing… it was easy. I started thinking, ‘Hey, I don’t need these guys. I could handle this myself.’” The memory was cringe-worthy now, a moment of foolish pride.

  “What happened?” he asked, though I was sure he’d already read the after-action reports.

  “The boss,” I said flatly.

  He nodded, a grim understanding in his eyes. “That would do it.”

  “I don’t get it,” I continued, the frustration returning. “In simulations, I could design drone fleets that could theoretically take out Tyrants or Overlords or other world-destroying threats. Heck, if we found a Sargasso nebula full of derelict ships, I could probably create one right now… but that itty bitty overgrown insect ripped through my drones like they were tissue paper. All the marines had to activate their special abilities, burn their limited resources, and all I could do was toss combat drones at it as decoys. It was… humiliatingly inefficient.”

  He smiled, but it wasn’t mocking. It was instructive. “It’s called economies of scale. A fundamental law of the universe, both physical and metaphysical. If you had a week to plan, and could tear apart both of your landers for ingredients, as well as strip that entire bat cave bare of every gram of mineral and energy, could you have created a drone—or a swarm—that most likely would have soloed and smashed the boss?”

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  I fell silent, running the calculations. My mind built schematics, resource lists, power requirements. After a minute, I shook my head. “No. I mean, I could design one in theory, but there just weren’t enough advanced resources. That thing’s mandibles could snip apart solid steel plating, let alone the softer precious metals that filled that cave. I’d need battle-steel alloys, focused energy capacitors… stuff we didn’t have. I was working with scrap and hope.”

  “But if you had an entire wrecked starship?” he prompted. “A real one. A cruiser. Mountains of duralloy, banks of pristine capacitors, a main reactor for power.”

  I shrugged, the answer obvious. “Fight it? I wouldn’t bother. I’d just have a drone team drop a twenty-ton chunk of the engine nacelle on its head from a hundred meters up and smash it flat. Or with enough power and relay nodes, I could have created a disassembler swarm that would have stripped it to just an exoskeleton in seconds. But I didn’t have them. I had two landers and a cave full of copper.”

  He nodded, satisfied. “That’s the secret. It’s all about resources. You might be able to create a cannon that could destroy a sun, but that’s not very useful for catching a pickpocket. Your power is vast, Roisin, but it’s not infinite. It has a context. So,” he leaned back, “you were telling me about your little reprogramming falsehood?”

  I took a deep breath. This was it. The biggest gamble yet. “Yes. I am something called a Force Sage. It’s a rare class.” I watched his face closely for his reaction.

  “A rare class? At Copper?” He didn’t sound disbelieving, just intensely focused.

  I nodded slowly, closing my eyes for a second to pull the System description from my memory, the words etched into my consciousness. “It said it’s the ‘first step on the path to force mastery.’ The first step, on a rare class. It allows me to treat forces, essence threads, like spiritual entities. To negotiate with them, command them, rather than just brute-force channel them.”

  He didn’t speak for a long moment. When he did, his voice was low and laced with something I couldn’t quite identify. Awe? Fear? “That sounds… terrifyingly powerful. If that’s the first step, what’s the end goal? Epic? Legendary? Mythic?”

  I shook my head, a thrill of excitement finally breaking through the tension. “I don’t know. But it’s also the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard. Just choosing the class granted me a trait called Energy Expansion, which, combined with my current seven points in Forces Affinity, jacked my core energy pool up to over two hundred and fifty. My next step is very close; I’m already rank two at ninety-one percent. And at rank three, I get Stasis.”

  That got a visible reaction. His eyebrows shot up. “Stasis? Like, the Arch-Healer ultimate ability?”

  I shrugged, trying to play it cool and failing miserably. “It’s the same name, so I think so. Maybe a lesser version? But yeah.”

  He looked very thoughtful, his gaze turned inward. The expression suited him, transforming his battle-worn features into those of a scholar-king, a damaged demigod contemplating the wonders and horrors of creation. The image was so potent, so distracting, that I had to physically shake my head to dispel it. Focus, Roisin. He’s not a demigod; he’s a dying man you need to save.

  “The idea of treating essence threads like spirits is fairly dangerous,” he mused aloud, “since raw essence really does have a very basic, wild consciousness. But you’ve already dealt with true spirits in the past. The gremlin in the engine…”

  I nodded eagerly. “Yes! It feels… similar, but more fundamental. Plus, I got an extra point of Spiritual Affinity from the boss fight, along with two points of Physical. My biggest worry right now is improving my affinities organically, without simply relying on the level-up bonuses. I need to understand them, not just possess them.”

  I took another breath, plunging ahead to the heart of the matter. “That, and I have a theory. I think once I get to Iron, once my control over forces is absolute, I will have enough power to strip that necrotic essence out of you. Or maybe… convert it. Turn it into something you can use, like pure Physical or Life essence, without me getting contaminated in the process. I don’t have a natural Life affinity, so direct contamination would kill me in moments, but conversion… that’s a force.”

  He looked hopeful for a single, breathtaking moment—a flash of raw, yearning light in his deep-set eyes. And then, as if a shutter slammed down, it was gone, and his head sank. “I can’t let you do that, Roisin. The risk is too high. You’re talking about performing metaphysical alchemy on a live Silver-core paladin infused with a lich’s vengeance. The margin for error is… non-existent.”

  The rejection was expected, but it still stung. He was so determined to be noble, to be the martyr. It was infuriating. Without thinking, driven by a need to connect, to make him see, I reached across the table and took his hand.

  His skin was warm, calloused, and beneath the surface warmth, I could feel it—the faint, chilling echo of the necrosis, like a vein of ice in stone. I folded my smaller hand over top of his, my touch gentle but firm.

  “It’s too late,” I said softly, my smile sad but resolved.

  He stiffened. “Huh?”

  “You already started to create a true bond,” I explained, my voice barely above a whisper. I could feel it now, as I touched him, a thin, golden thread of connection that ran from my core to his, thrumming with potential. “Probably because you are a Silver, with an incredibly powerful, refined aura. You started it the moment your aura first brushed against mine back in that training camp gym. It was just a seed then, but it’s been growing ever since.”

  “What?” He stood up so fast his chair screeched against the deck plating. He stared down at me, his face a mask of shock and dawning horror. “That’s not possible. I would have known… I would have felt…”

  I nodded slowly, holding his gaze, refusing to let him look away from the truth. “I’m sorry. It’s not something I can control. It’s biological. Physiological. It felt… amazing. Like coming home. Every other aura I’ve ever felt pushes at me, repels me. Yours… yours pulls. It took me a while to understand what it was, but it’s a true bond. It’s what my people were designed to do. We find our anchor, our catalyst, and we bond.”

  He was shaking his head, but the denial was weak. He could feel it too; he just hadn’t allowed himself to name it. “But what if I die? Or go away? The bond…”

  I sighed, the weight of my own nature settling on my shoulders. “If you don’t want it, and you reject me, or if you die… well, I already figured out that a forced bond is impossible for me now. My template has been… activated. The only thing I can do now is either work with you to complete a true, mutual bond, or live the rest of my life unbonded. Permanently.” I left the last word hanging. For a Maenad, it was a fate akin to being permanently starved, always craving a connection that could never be fulfilled.

  He glared at me for a moment, anger and fear warring in his eyes. Then his expression softened into something heartbreakingly tender. Then, just as suddenly, it vanished, replaced by a look of pure, tactical alarm. He turned his head sharply, as if hearing a distant sound I couldn’t perceive.

  “The benchmark!” he snapped, the words sharp and utterly incomprehensible.

  And then he was moving, a blur of black armor and sudden, desperate motion. He turned and dashed out of the mess hall, leaving me alone at the table, my hand still outstretched over the empty space where his had been.

  The silence he left behind was deafening, broken only by the ship’s hum.

  Oh scrot, I thought, my heart sinking into my boots. What have I done?