The silence of the void lasted less than a minute. A proximity alert blared a harsh, red strobe through the Gutter's Glory's cockpit. Lyra, now back at the controls, swore vividly. "They've pinged us! Coming out of the debris shadow, three o'clock low!"
Kai, now slumped in a grimy passenger harness inside the cluttered cabin, twisted to look. The second white Orthodoxy skiff had navigated the underbelly maze and was now accelerating toward them, a dart of polished menace against the stellar backdrop. But it wasn't alone. From behind a tumbling cluster of ancient shipping containers, two more angular vessels appeared. These weren't white; they were patchworks of armored plate and welded weapon barrels—scavenger ships, drawn by the commotion like carrion birds.
"Bounty hunters," Jaxxon growled, his hands flying over a cracked auxiliary console. "The Orthodoxy puts out a standing credit for 'anomaly retrievals.' Makes for eager freelancers."
The chase became a three-way dance of death in the debris field surrounding Ash-Heap. The field was a graveyard of shattered industry: continent-sized hull fragments, spinning vortexes of metallic scrap, and the dormant, cavernous shells of dead freighters. Lyra piloted with a frenetic, instinctual genius, weaving the Gutter's Glory through gaps that seemed mathematically impossible. She used the debris as shields, swinging around a massive engine block just as a sizzling white Erasure-Lance from the Orthodoxy skiff lanced past, deleting a chunk of a nearby derelict's wing.
The scavenger ships were less precise but more brutal. They opened up with projectile cannons, filling the space with red tracers and shrapnel. A hail of fire pinged against their hull, and the skiff shuddered.
"We can't out-gun them! We need to skip!" Lyra yelled, banking hard to avoid a cloud of fragmenting metal.
"The nearest current is the Cerulean Scythe! It's volatile!" Jaxxon shouted back, his eyes scanning a static-filled navigational hologram.
"Volatile is our brand! Hold onto your guts!" Lyra slammed the throttle forward, aiming the skiff not away from the chaotic field, but deeper into its heart, toward a shimmering, twisting ribbon of cobalt energy that pulsed like a wounded vein in space itself—a wild Pneuma current.
The Orthodoxy skiff, sensing their intent, redoubled its efforts. A shot grazed their rear stabilizer, and the Gutter's Glory yawed violently. Kai was thrown against his harness, the world a blur of motion and panic.
They hit the edge of the Cerulean Scythe.
Reality stretched.
The sensation was less of speed and more of being unmade. Kai's body felt like it was being pulled into infinite strands. The debris field, the pursuing ships, the very light of the stars—everything smeared into long, screaming lines of color and noise. He could hear Lyra whooping with delirious adrenaline and Jaxxon's grinding curse. His own Pneuma, the chaotic graffiti-energy within him, flared in sympathetic resonance, painting the inside of his eyelids with frantic, neon Rorschach blots.
Then, with a sound like a universe sucking in its breath, it was over.
The Gutter's Glory tumbled out into calm, empty space. The violent smear of colors resolved into a serene, star-dusted vista. Ash-Heap was gone. The jagged debris field was gone. Behind them, the Cerulean Scythe shimmered, a distant, turbulent ribbon. They had skipped across light-years in a heartbeat.
Silence descended, broken only by the ragged sound of Kai's breathing and the skiff's complaining systems. He fumbled with his harness release, stumbled to the nearest viewport, and dry-heaved. Nothing came up. His stomach was a knot of twisted dimensions.
"First skip's always the worst," Lyra said, her voice slightly shaky but buoyant. She was running diagnostics, her fingers dancing across the console. "Welcome to the big black, Kai."
Kai turned from the viewport, his mind a storm of fragmented terror and awe. He looked at Jaxxon, who was calmly checking the integrity of his mechanical arm. The man's casual competence in the face of cosmic violence was infuriating.
"What," Kai began, his voice raw, "was that? What am I? And who are you to drag me into… into this?" He gestured wildly at the alien starfield.
Jaxxon leaned back, the cabin's dim light etching deep shadows into his face. "You felt the energy in the current? That's Pneuma. The breath of the cosmos. It flows between everything. Most people have a thimbleful. You… you've got a geyser." He pointed a blunt finger at Kai's chest. "Normally, that energy is shaped. Cultivated. Given form and rules through Astral Sigils inscribed on the body. Those forms are the Constellations. The Seventy-Two Sanctioned Forms handed down by the Orthodoxy of the Fixed Star. The Wolf, the Dragon, the Phoenix… clean, predictable, controlled power."
He leaned forward, his grey eye sharp. "What you did back there? That riot of color? That's not a Sanctioned Form. It's what they call an Anomaly. I've heard rumors of them, whispers in the darkest ports. Scribble-Souls. Graffiti Constellations. Powers that look like mistakes. The Orthodoxy hates mistakes."
Kai looked at his hands, remembering the neon spray. "A mistake. So they were going to… fix me? Like they fixed my father?"
"They don't fix," Jaxxon said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "They erase. They simplify. They make you fit the pattern." He began to roll up the sleeve of his left arm, above the mechanical limb. The skin there was a horrifying landscape of old, twisted scar tissue and faded, corrupted Sigils—the lines jagged and broken, the once-silver ink now a tarnished, sickly black. "Let me show you what their 'correction' looks like."
The story that unfolded was not told with dramatic flair, but with the grim, heavy tone of a man reciting a prison sentence.
Jaxxon had been a contender. A true rising star in the Celestial Gauntlet two decades prior. His Constellation was the Iron Golem—a powerhouse of adaptability and resilience, capable of integrating environmental metals to repair and reinforce itself mid-fight. He was winning. He was popular. And he grew ambitious.
"I started to ask questions," Jaxxon said, staring at his scarred arm. "Why seventy-two forms? Why not seventy-three? My Golem… it learned. In the heat of battle, it would develop new plating patterns, new joint articulations to counter specific foes. It was evolving. I thought that was the point—to reach for higher forms."
In the quarter-finals of the Inter-Shard Gauntlet, facing a fan-favorite from a core world with a pristine Lightning Wyrm Constellation, Jaxxon's Golem did something unprecedented. To counter the Wyrm's aerial mobility, it didn't just anchor itself. It sprouted crude, grappling-hook chains from its back, not to pull the Wyrm down, but to swing itself into the air, becoming an unlikely, brutal pendulum.
"The crowd loved it. It was ugly. It was new. And it was working." Jaxxon's fist clenched. "That's when the Orthodoxy observers signaled a pause. 'Potential deviation from sanctioned parameters.' They gave my opponent a moment to confer with his handlers."
He fell silent for a long moment. The only sound was the hum of the life support.
"When the fight resumed, the Wyrm didn't aim for the Golem. It aimed for me. A new technique. A focused, white-hot beam of light that didn't burn, but… unraveled. An Erasure Technique." Jaxxon touched the worst of the scars. "It hit my primary Sigil nexus. My Constellation didn't shatter. It rusted. The connection froze, corrupted. The adaptability became instability. The self-repair became a slow, painful decay. The pain was… intellectual. Spiritual. Like watching your own soul crumble to dust."
He was disqualified for "loss of controlled manifestation." His career was over. The Orthodoxy offered "rehabilitation"—a complete Sigil overhaul that would have locked him into a basic, static form. He refused. He vanished into the lawless edges of the galaxy, his body failing, his once-great power now a crippled, grinding ghost of itself.
"They don't want champions," Jaxxon finished, his eyes burning with two decades of banked fire. "They want compliant examples. You're not a mistake, Kai. You're a rebellion they haven't stamped out yet. And I'm going to help you paint that rebellion across the biggest canvas in the galaxy."
Before Kai could process the weight of this, Lyra announced, "Approaching The Gutter's Glory. Brace for… well, for everything."
The trading shard emerged from the darkness not as a single entity, but as a chaotic cluster of interconnected structures—salvaged starship hulls welded to asteroid cores, glowing biodomes, and spindly towers of scaffolding, all tangled in a web of glowing transit tubes and buzzing personal fliers. It was a riot of light and motion. Where Ash-Heap had been a study in grim endurance, The Gutter's Glory was a carnival of transgression. Holographic advertisements for neural mods and black-market Pneuma crystals flickered in a dozen languages. The din of engines, commerce, and raucous music leaked through the skiff's hull.
Lyra guided them into a cacophonous docking bay that smelled of ionized fuel, fried food, and alien musk. Beings of all shapes and physiologies bartered, brawled, and hustled. Jaxxon moved through the chaos with the ease of a native, leading Kai through winding, crowded alleys until they reached a reinforced hatch marked only by a faded symbol of a hammer over a gear.
Inside was a mechanic's den that made the Gutter's Glory's cabin look tidy. It was a cathedral of disassembly. Engine parts, weapon components, and half-built drones hung from the ceiling. Workbenches groaned under tools and schematics rendered on scrap metal. In the center, humming with quiet power, was a massive forge-unit fed by a captured sliver of a Pneuma current, its flame burning a steady, deep blue.
"Home," Jaxxon said, shrugging off his coat. "For now."
Lyra immediately flopped into a nest of old cushions, plugging a data-cable into a port behind her ear, her eyes scrolling with information. "Orthodoxy bulletins are already up. 'Unsanctioned Manifestation, considered volatile. Approach with extreme caution and report.' They've blurred your image, Kai. Not great, but not terrible."
Kai stood amidst the controlled chaos, feeling profoundly displaced. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a hollow, aching exhaustion. "You said you could teach me to control it."
Jaxxon nodded. He cleared a space on a greasy workbench and produced a vial of silvery, metallic ink and a fine application stylus. "All control starts with the Sigils. They're the circuitry that directs the Pneuma from your core. The most basic is the Kinetic Focus rune. It converts raw energy into concussive force, channels it to a fist or a foot." With practiced ease, he drew a complex, elegant geometric pattern on his own forearm in three swift strokes. The lines glowed softly with a steady, bronze light. "Your mind holds the intent. The Sigil provides the path. Now you."
He handed Kai the stylus. The ink felt cold and heavy. Trying to mimic Jaxxon's pattern on his own forearm, Kai's hand trembled. The lines came out wobbly, uneven. But the real problem started when he tried to push a trickle of his Pneuma into it, as instructed.
His energy didn't flow. It splashed.
The moment the silver ink connected with his inner power, it reacted like water hitting hot oil. The clean geometric lines bubbled, warped, and bled. The silver color was violently rejected, transforming into a seeping, neon green that pulsed erratically. The Sigil didn't glow with focused intent; it flickered like a broken sign, sputtering tiny, useless sparks of chaotic color before the ink itself seemed to evaporate off his skin, leaving only a faint, rainbow sheen.
Kai tried again. And again. Each attempt was a more spectacular failure. One Sigil melted into a dripping purple mess. Another seemed to try to crawl off his arm before dissipating. Frustration boiled over, hot and sharp. He was failing the most basic test. He slammed his fist down on the workbench. "It's useless! My own power won't even listen to me!"
"Good," Jaxxon said, his voice calm.
"Good?"
"It means it's not their power. It's yours. It doesn't want their roads." Jaxxon pointed at the fading stain on Kai's arm. "That wasn't a failure. That was a refusal. Now, stop trying to give it a map. Just… let it out. Aim it. Feel it."
Furious, humiliated, Kai didn't think. He just acted. He thought of the rigid, perfect lines of the Sigil, of the Orthodoxy's white skiffs, of the cold, deleting light. He gathered the churning, rebellious energy in his core and, with a wordless shout of frustration, shoved it down his arm and out through his palm—not through any prescribed path, but through the raw, messy conduit of his own anger.
A torrent of vibrant, neon force erupted.
It wasn't a focused punch. It was a wave, a booming splash of blazing pink and electric yellow energy that shot across the room. It didn't strike the stack of empty metal cargo crates against the far wall with a concussive bang. Instead, it enveloped them. The energy sizzled over the metal, and where it passed, it didn't dent or crush.
It rearranged.
When the light faded, the stack of identical, grimy crates was gone. In its place was a twisted, beautiful sculpture. The crates were now fused together into a spiraling, graffiti-tagged tower, each surface covered in shimmering, spray-painted patterns—loops, stars, and jagged lightning bolts that glowed with their own inner light. It was chaotic, vibrant, and utterly, breathtakingly unique.
Kai stared, panting, his hand still outstretched.
Lyra let out a low whistle. "Okay. That's a statement."
Jaxxon walked over to the transformed metal. He ran his organic fingers over the glowing tags, a slow, genuine smile spreading across his weathered face. It was the first time Kai had seen him look anything other than grim or pained. "There it is," Jaxxon murmured, almost to himself. "Not a weapon. A language."
He turned back to Kai, his eyes alight. "You can't use their Sigils. So we won't use Sigils. We'll find another way. But first, we need to get you into the ring. The local Celestial Gauntlet Qualifier is in three days, in the main arena dome. It's our ticket in."
"Ticket?" Kai asked, the glow from his accidental art casting his face in shifting colors.
"To get into the official qualifier, you need an entry fee. Five hundred credit chips." Jaxxon's smile turned razor-edged. "We're fresh out. So, you're going to earn it. The old-fashioned way."
Lyra sat up, her crystalline discs catching the light. "The Pit beneath the Pit. The fights that happen before the 'official' fights. No rules, no Constellations over a certain class, and a lot of very rich, very bored people betting on the chaos." She grinned at Kai's transformed sculpture. "I think you'll fit right in."