Chương 199: B2 Chapter 199: Competitive Mining

The Carrier released them in a snap. One moment Meno's SpaceAssault frame was locked against the outer hull with Jupiter filling half the universe behind Ganymede. The next, the clamps released and all five frames drifted away together without so much as a jolt. Only the Carrier shrinking behind them proved they were moving at all. With nothing else happening, Meno spent the next few minutes checking what Hyperion had given them.

The monomolecular blade unfolded into a long, narrow strip of metal nearly half the height of his frame. It looked less like a sword than a razor scaled up to building size with nobody bothering to add decoration. The beam cannon went the other direction: a giant tube mounted along his back that swung over one shoulder when activated, rotated into firing position, and filled his vision with a targeting overlay. For something involving secret space robots and a wormhole, deployment was taking forever.

"Where is my shield?" Thorn said.

"You gave me six limbs worth of thrusters and no actual shield to hold. This build is bricked."

"I have absolutely no idea what half these numbers mean," Karmabeast said.

"I am just going to assume green good, red bad, giant sword very good."

"Ooooh, the cannon gets its own screen," Arayu said.

"That means it's important."

"Half-useless unless we have enough distance to deploy it," Meno said.

"If something is already close, I can hit it ten times before this thing finishes stretching." He folded the cannon away. Useful at range. Trash under pressure. The Deep-Fryer deployed from the Carrier next. Calling it a box had been technically correct in the same way calling The Pearl a house would have been. The black containment unit was roughly the size of one of their frames, which meant Hyperion had handed them something closer to a suburban mansion with handles and told them to fill it with moon dirt.

Aurelia and Thorn moved to opposite sides and grabbed the reinforced grips built into the shell.

"Shovel?" Arayu asked.

"Not even one cute little space shovel?"

"You shoot things," Thorn said.

"We'll pump the stupid house." Karmabeast contributed nothing. His frame floated away with Jupiter behind it, completely motionless except for tiny automatic corrections. Meno could imagine Karma inside the XTachyon trying to process the fact that the thing filling his vision was not a skybox. The silence lasted long enough to qualify as permanent Stun. Movement came next.

Meno eased on the foot thrusters and shot forward much harder than expected, but there was no pressure against his back, no wind, no ground rushing beneath him, nothing his brain normally used to measure acceleration. The frame felt like his body, so movement simply happened. Without anything nearby for reference, speed became almost abstract. Meno cut thrust, rotated, and fired his back and palm systems together.

The frame snapped onto a new vector fast enough that his eyes reported something huge while the rest of his senses insisted nothing had happened.

"Someone fart on this thing so I can tell how fast it's going," Meno said.

"I get it now," Karmabeast said. His Frame finally moved, twisting through a clean three-dimensional turn.

"It's just Mush Flight without the body. Pick a point and go there."

"Easy for you two," Aurelia said. Her first correction turned into an ugly sideways corkscrew before she stabilized.

"My Titan evolution did not come with flying."

"I am moving," Thorn said, "but I refuse to call any of this controlled." Meno and Karma were Mush addicts, while Arayu mostly cast from range. Aurelia's class was built around not moving, and Thorn famously skipped leg days. Meno tried to simplify it.

"Stop imagining legs. You're mouse pointers. Pick where the pointer goes and drag yourself there. Don't think about what your body should do."

"That does not help," Thorn said.

"Now I am a mouse."

"I like mouse," Arayu said.

"Space mouse. Pew-pew." The wormhole offered no reference either. There was no giant spinning portal, colorful distortion, or even a suspicious patch of stars. Meno's HUD simply placed a marker beside Ganymede and insisted something impossible existed at those coordinates. They engaged their foot and back thrusters and headed toward it, five giant Frames and one mansion-sized cargo box crossing open space with Jupiter hanging behind them. Technically, they were tiny spacecraft now. That was stupid enough to be fun.

Meno spent the approach experimenting with the sword. He drew it and tried a controlled swing, but the movement immediately felt wrong. The Frame was fast, the blade met almost no resistance, and without atmosphere or any sense of its weight, holding back took more effort than simply committing to the attack. So Meno stopped holding back.

His arm blurred through repeated cuts while the thrusters corrected the rest of the Frame around each swing, and within seconds the pace started creeping toward Chain Madness territory. Much better.

"Low-speed sword control is trash," Meno said.

"Full send feels easier." He drove into another sequence, changing the angle of each swing while his feet and back thrusters kept him centered around an imaginary target.

"Actually, this is excellent," Meno said.

"You attack like an idiot until the double negative cancels the debuff and inverts into a triple positive."

"Shut up. This day started with a quadruple negative that turned into a ten-negative. What's that called, decadative? I also missed my evening protein shake, so that's probably one percent muscle mass lost to space bullshit," Thorn said. Aurelia tried one cut and spun almost ninety degrees before catching herself with a palm thruster.

"My hop-hold-for-pump-cancel-hop doesn't work like this," she said.

"I'm too used to powering up attacks and moving around that."

"Then invert it," Meno said.

"You get the damage buff while moving, and stopping cancels it. So don't stop." Arayu rotated her beam cannon over one shoulder.

"I claim the giant pew-pew. This is mage-coded." Karmabeast had already drawn his blade and started mirroring Meno from the opposite side.

"Fine by me," Karmabeast said.

"We're melee. Everyone else carries our bags." Good enough. Thorn and Aurelia could handle the Deep-Fryer, Arayu had already claimed ranged DPS, and Meno and Karma could cut apart anything stupid enough to get close. Hyperion interrupted shortly before they reached the wormhole.

"Attention," the mission voice said.

"Communication with Earth will terminate upon crossing. Mission data and local team communication will remain available. Do not attempt to reverse course during transit." Meno stopped swinging.

"Wait. If Earth can't communicate through the wormhole, how am I still controlling this Frame from Earth?" Karmabeast rotated toward him.

"Bro, don't. I just recovered from Jupiter." Meno considered it anyway. If his consciousness was still sitting in an XTachyon capsule on Earth, then something had to be crossing the wormhole. If signals could cross, communication should still work. If signals could not cross, then what exactly had Hyperion done to them? Uploaded copies? Temporary brains stuffed into the Frames? And if one of those bodies got destroyed on the other side, then what happened to the original?

Meno shut that line of thinking down before it turned into permanent brain damage. They reached the marked point, and space twisted. Then reality flushed them through a toilet. The first rotation sent Meno end over end. Halfway through, the toilet exploded, launched him through the ceiling, slapped him sideways like a fly, then dumped him back into the sewer facing the wrong direction. Every reference vanished. Jupiter turned into light, then black, then light again.

"WHAT THE F—" Thorn said.

"WHEEEEE—no, bad wheeee!" Arayu yelled.

"I hate space!" Karmabeast shouted. Then it stopped. Meno caught himself with all four thruster systems firing at once. Ganymede hung beneath them. Full black. The whole moon looked like somebody had painted it with liquid night, its usual brown-grey surface buried under a layer that swallowed almost all reflected light. Hyperion had left out one more detail. The moon was occupied. Huge worm-shaped machines crawled across the surface below, each one big enough to spot from orbit.

Their segmented bodies scraped through the black layer, swallowed the material through wide front sections, then compacted it somewhere inside while they crawled toward collection zones. And above Ganymede, an orbital platform waited. Calling it a station felt too small. The structure stretched across the sky like someone had built a city sideways, with broad sections rotating around a central spine while streams of worm machines moved beneath it.

"Those worms are farming," Karmabeast said.

"That's good. People who pick gathering professions are always dumbo," Arayu said.

"Meno, I am going to step on your balls for dragging me into this," Aurelia said.

"What happened to feeling alive while moving?" Meno asked.

"I meant on Earth."

"Land away from the main pack," Meno said.

"We figure out the mobs before we aggro the raid boss." They descended. The moment Meno's feet touched Ganymede, movement made sense again. Weak gravity stretched every step farther than expected, like a half-powered False Wings skip, but now there was ground beneath him, distance he could judge, and something besides numbers against darkness to tell him how fast he was moving.

A robot-worm noticed them almost immediately and changed direction, rushing across the black surface as its front segments opened around grinding machinery. Meno launched into it. One thruster-assisted stride carried him farther than a building length, putting him across the worm's path before he swung once. The blade passed through without resistance. Two enormous sections separated and kept sliding across the surface before weak gravity finally let them settle.

"This sword is disgusting," Meno said.

"Full Pierce, Massive damage, and Chain Madness attack speed. Nice." Karmabeast landed beside the remains.

"I want two." The orbital platform lit up, and a warning flooded Meno's HUD. [ORBITAL TARGETING] High above them, a point of light began growing against the black sky.

"Move!" Meno shouted. Aurelia and Thorn grabbed the Deep-Fryer and launched forward. The orbital weapon fired. White light erased the ground behind them. There was no normal explosion; the beam simply punched into Ganymede and tore out a huge section of the surface, throwing black debris into slow arcs while the crater glowed underneath. Nobody suggested testing whether their shields could tank that. More worms turned toward them. The raid had started.

Aurelia and Thorn kept the Deep-Fryer moving while Arayu collected chunks of exposed black material whenever they slowed enough for her to grab one. In the weak gravity, the pieces barely fell at all, so she had to catch them and shove them toward the open containment chamber herself. Thorn tried the beam cannon first. The huge tube rotated over his shoulder while he drifted alongside the Deep-Fryer, and the deployment delay nearly carried him straight into a worm before Aurelia yanked the cargo sideways.

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"Don't deploy the cannon with something already in melee," Meno said. He and Karmabeast split around the incoming machines. Meno carved diagonally through the front of one while Karma passed beneath another and opened its entire underside. Arayu caught a black chunk between both hands and shoved it into the Deep-Fryer.

"Sooo baaad," Arayu said.

"I want my space shovel." Aurelia finally got enough distance to deploy her cannon. Karmabeast kicked off a worm carcass and cut through the neck of another. Meno saw the orbital platform start charging again.

"New orbital mark. Keep the cargo moving. Don't stack." The beam came down behind them and turned another strip of black surface into a crater just as a fresh pack of worms crawled into range. The Deep-Fryer was barely filling. Every chunk Arayu threw inside looked microscopic against the containment chamber, and the orbital cannon forced them to keep moving while they gathered. Except Hyperion expected them to stop the moment it reached capacity and leave the thing untouched until the status light turned green.

Meno checked the platform as it adjusted along its orbit to maintain an angle on them. There was nowhere safe enough to park.

"Mission design is trash," Meno said.

"We have to stand still after filling it while the sky deletes wherever we stand."

"You could attack the platform," Aurelia said.

"And if we leave you three alone with the worms, you die," Meno said. That killed the obvious answer. Meno and Karma could fly up and start cutting pieces off the orbital structure, but the others would get buried long before they accomplished anything. Their blades against that much metal would be like trying to kill a raid boss by throwing apples at its ankle. The next few minutes became screaming with movement.

The orbital weapon was survivable only because it announced every shot with a charge light, HUD warning, and predicted strike zone before the beam came down. Every blast forced another violent direction change while more worms kept crawling into the fight. Aurelia dragged the Deep-Fryer sideways to avoid one.

"Ganymede is about forty percent of Earth's diameter, by the way. It's bigger than Mercury." She dodged another worm.

"I realize that does not help."

"Shut up and keep pulling, or I'll spank your ass," Thorn said. Karmabeast cut one worm into five sections and nearly collided with Meno coming the other way.

"We need more swords." Arayu boosted over both of them with another chunk of black material hugged against her chest. They kept hauling the Fryer, cutting worms, dodging orbital fire, and giving Arayu whatever half-seconds they could find. Meno started wondering whether Hyperion was hazing them and the entire thing was still some simulation nested inside the XTachyon setup.

It felt real enough, but the only alternative plan he had was abandoning the Deep-Fryer, flying straight at the platform, and asking its occupants to stop shooting. That failed the objective. So no.

"This feels like a fake quest designed to see when we give up," Meno said.

"Then don't give up," Karmabeast said.

"Break it."

"Please break it before my arms fall off," Thorn said. Meno looked at the worms again. They had been treating the mobs like enemies, but the mobs were workers, and workers carried loot.

"These things have to be taking the black material somewhere," Meno said.

"They scrape it up, compact it, then move toward the platform." Meno curved around the next worm and changed his cut, opening only the front section before letting the rest of the body slide past. Nothing. Next one, tail.

"We can make our own bunker," Aurelia said. Meno looked toward the latest crater.

"The orbital cannon is already digging for us," she continued while hauling the Deep-Fryer with Thorn.

"We bait several shots into the same narrow area until the crater is deep enough to break line of sight. Then we put the box inside, fill it, and leave it there while it processes."

"Good," Meno said.

"Who is pulling it out?"

"You," Aurelia said.

"Obviously me," Thorn said.

"Highest testosterone." Arayu veered around another targeting marker.

"I vote Meno. His brain created the quest." They changed the pattern. Aurelia and Thorn dragged the Deep-Fryer along a narrow path while everyone else matched their line. The orbital platform tracked the movement, charged, and fired. At the warning, the whole group broke sideways and let the beam dig another crater directly through the line they had just abandoned. Then they reversed and did it again.

Meno and Karmabeast treated the worms as moving obstacles, intercepting anything that entered the lane without shredding the bodies.

"Tail section," Meno said.

"Stop bisecting the whole thing. I want to see what they're carrying." Karmabeast stabbed one through the front and kicked the dead machine sideways.

"Try that one." Aurelia dragged the Fryer past as another orbital warning appeared.

"Shot incoming. Same line." The beam struck. When Meno reached the carcass, he finally found what he wanted. One enlarged section near the tail had cracked open, exposing a thick block of compressed black material. Bingo. They had been hand-shoveling moon rocks like idiots while the worms were mining, compressing, and packaging exactly what Hyperion wanted. From there, the whole operation found a rhythm.

They baited another orbital shot into the same line, broke sideways, reversed after impact, and harvested any worms that wandered into the lane. Each pass deepened the trench while intact carcasses piled up nearby with compressed black blocks waiting inside them. Thorn kept dragging the mansion-sized box beside Aurelia and sounded increasingly offended.

"I crossed a wormhole near Jupiter to push a shopping cart through a parking lot." The orbital warning flashed. Thorn changed direction with the Fryer.

"This is not what one hundred million credits should feel like."

"Should've injected those steroids into your brain instead," Aurelia said.

"Push the cart. More cart." Arayu flew over the growing trench and looked down.

"I'm checking depth." Another strike tore into the same line, deepening the excavation until the bottom disappeared behind the crater walls from several angles. Arayu dropped inside for a closer look, then boosted back out before the next targeting warning.

"This one. Deep enough."

"Next shot we peel away," Meno said.

"Cargo goes in immediately." Aurelia and Thorn tightened their grip on the Deep-Fryer.

"You better be right," Aurelia said.

"Push hard. Don't stop in the target zone," Meno said.

"Finally something that sounds like lifting," Thorn said. The orbital cannon charged. They ran the line one last time, broke wide before impact, and let the beam punch into the trench behind them. Aurelia and Thorn immediately shoved the Deep-Fryer over the crater edge. The giant containment unit dropped into the darkness, struck the slope, and slid deep enough to disappear below the platform's direct line of sight.

Meno and Karmabeast stopped wasting time on loose rock and moved from carcass to carcass, ripping open the enlarged tail sections for compressed black blocks while fresh worms kept charging in. Before long, Meno was fighting with the sword in one hand and a resource brick in the other, cutting through one machine, kicking the corpse aside, then hurling the block into the crater before grabbing another. It turned into competitive mining.

"I have three," Meno said.

"Beat that." Arayu intercepted one of the thrown blocks and redirected it down the crater.

"PBG, I admire your skill, but you dry up my puss puss," Arayu said. Karmabeast tore another compressed block free with both hands.

"I have four. He's losing." The Fryer was hidden well enough to survive the orbital cannon now, but nobody on the surface could see its indicator, so Arayu became the meter. She dropped into the crater while Meno, Karma, Thorn, and Aurelia spread out and deliberately pulled the worms and orbital targeting away from the hiding place. She boosted back out a short time later.

"Half full." Meno almost stopped moving.

"Half? That thing is the size of a house."

"Hyperion wants us to mine a moon by hand," Thorn said.

"Labor camp for product feedback. I'm posting a one-star review after this. Put shovels on the space robots, idiots."

"Technically, the pay is insane," Karmabeast said while carving open another tail. They kept going. Thorn and Aurelia switched to hauling resources while Meno and Karmabeast focused on turning every incoming worm into another compressed block. Weak gravity made loading far more finicky than it had any right to be. A block thrown toward the crater could miss by a few degrees, sail across the surface in a slow arc, clip the far edge, and drift away.

"I miss being a spoiled bitch," Aurelia said after chasing one down.

"Rare self-aware moment," Thorn said.

"Still delusional."

"Closer throws," Meno said.

"Drive them down. Don't lob." Arayu hovered near the crater rim and guided another block in.

"More left. This one almost skipped." Meno's attack rhythm kept accelerating. He had started by helping with cargo, but every second spent carrying rocks was a second he was not creating new ones, so he stopped mining and became the mining profession. He and Karmabeast tore through worms as fast as they arrived, leaving a steady field of carcasses for the others to harvest.

The blade met so little resistance that Meno's attacks began flowing together, his entire Frame correcting around each swing with foot, back, and palm thrusters. Eventually, Arayu dropped into the crater again and came back out fast.

"Full. Processing started. Red light."

"Then nobody touches it," Meno said.

"Red-light means good times," Thorn said.

"We pull everything away from the hole," Aurelia said. That would have worked if the raid had kept following the same pattern, but the orbital cannon stopped firing. Part of the platform detached. A huge six-limbed combat machine dropped toward Ganymede, each appendage carrying a long weapon. It started firing before it was even halfway down. A round punched into the surface near Meno so fast that black rock erupted upward after the projectile was already gone.

"New boss," Meno said.

"Kinetic weapons. Shields useless."

"That thing has a six pack," Aurelia said. A railgun round ripped through the space Karmabeast had occupied a moment earlier.

"I preferred the worms."

"Under eight is gymbunny territory," Thorn said. Their energy shields were worthless here, but a worm came charging across Meno's path and gave him something better.

"Don't kill this one. Cripple it." Karmabeast immediately understood.

"Worm shield?"

"Exactly." They cut out the front systems, severed enough movement segments to stop it, then caught the limp machine between them and boosted straight at the descending boss. The first railgun hit exploded through the worm's outer layers and showered them with metal. They kept pushing. The second round blew the carcass apart. Meno and Karmabeast burst through the debris already deploying their cannons. Both weapons locked forward at once. No shield shimmer. Good. They fired.

Twin white beams smashed into the six-limbed Frame and erased two gun arms at the shoulder, molten fragments spinning away into the dark.

"Melted two," Meno said.

"Four left."

"Thirty-second cooldown," Karmabeast said.

"Sword phase." Back on the surface, Aurelia and Arayu kept the worms away from the crater.

"We have the Fryer," Aurelia said.

"Do not bring that thing down here."

"Red light still active," Arayu added. Meno and Karmabeast hit the larger machine from opposite sides before it could descend any farther. It kept trying to create distance, firing railgun rounds through every opening, but Karma stayed high while Meno cut across one weapon mount, slipped around the next shot, and used a palm thruster to launch beneath the Frame.

For thirty seconds they kept it trapped between them, swords working from opposite angles while kinetic rounds tore through the space they had occupied moments earlier. Then the beam cannons unlocked.

"Ready," Meno said.

"Same side," Karmabeast said.

"Take the next two arms." They fired together again. Two more appendages vanished in white light, and both energy reserves crashed into critical immediately afterward. Cannon phase over. Two armed limbs remained. Meno folded the cannon away and drew his sword. Now it was a real fight. The larger machine kept trying to retreat and rebuild firing distance, but Meno and Karmabeast stayed inside the weapon arcs.

Meno cut halfway through one joint, reversed, and finished it from the other direction while Karma worked the opposite side.

"Take the mount, not the arm," Meno said.

"I'm on it." The fifth weapon came free, then the sixth. The damaged machine immediately turned and accelerated toward the orbital platform. Meno started after it before the objective pulled him back. Let it run. They needed the Fryer. Both Frames turned toward Ganymede. The platform resumed firing before they reached the surface. The first orbital strike went wide, but the second landed close enough to fill Meno's vision with black debris and white light. Karmabeast spun out of the blast. One arm was gone.

"MY ARM!"

"It's not your sword arm," Meno said.

"Compensate with back and feet."

"I KNOW, BUT I LIKED THAT ARM!" Losing the palm thruster on one side ruined Karma's easy directional corrections. He started moving in crooked bursts, compensating with the remaining hand, back, and foot systems while Meno stayed close enough to catch him if the spin got out of control. They reached the surface with both Frames still functional and went back to baiting orbital fire away from the buried Deep-Fryer while the processing cycle finished.

Arayu made the next check, dropping into the crater and boosting back out with both arms waving.

"Green. We can move it."

"Get it out now," Meno said. Thorn dropped over the edge.

"I knew the shopping-cart phase wasn't over." Aurelia positioned herself above him.

"I'll pull once you get the lower grip." Together they hauled the Deep-Fryer out of the crater, and the moment it cleared the rim, the problem was obvious. The orbital platform was still tracking them, and dragging the thing straight toward the wormhole would give it one giant predictable target. Meno split the party.

"Aurelia, Thorn, take the Fryer wide to the wormhole. Do not fly straight." Aurelia grabbed one side.

"Fine. Keep the sky angry somewhere else."

"We're the decoy?" Thorn asked.

"No," Meno said.

"We're the decoy. You're the objective." Karmabeast adjusted around his missing arm.

"Payback time." Arayu deployed her cannon.

"I can be extremely annoying." Aurelia and Thorn took the Deep-Fryer wide while Meno, Karmabeast, and Arayu launched in the opposite direction, straight toward the orbital platform. The worms stopped following the cargo pair once they left Ganymede's surface. Whatever controlled them cared about the mining zone, not open space. The platform cared about everything.

Its weapon tracked Aurelia and Thorn for another cycle, but Meno's group kept closing and throwing enough threat at the structure to pull its targeting away. Several minutes later, Aurelia came through the comms.

"We're at the marker. Taking it through."

"House delivery service complete," Thorn said. Meno watched both Frames and the Deep-Fryer vanish into the invisible wormhole.

"Objective clear." Good. Now they had to survive. Launch bays opened across the orbital platform. Hundreds of drones poured out, then enough behind them that counting became pointless. They spread through space like a metal cloud and opened fire with energy weapons instead of kinetics. For the first time in a while, the SpaceAssault shields mattered. Blue-white impacts rippled across Meno's defensive field, first one, then another, then twenty at once. His shield percentage started dropping.

"This is too many pew-pews," Arayu said.

"Our energy is already cooked," Karmabeast said.

"We can reach the platform, but we cannot turn around through that."

"Full faceripper ahead," Meno said. The platform was far too large for their swords to matter from outside.

"If the outside is full of mobs, go inside." Karmabeast curved toward the nearest section of hull.

"We are cutting into the raid boss?"

"Exactly." Arayu followed behind them.

"I like inside. Fewer bees." Meno drove his blade into the platform. The outer structure resisted more than the worms had, but not enough. Karma joined from the opposite angle, and together they carved open a gap wide enough for all three Frames. They forced their way inside, and the drone fire disappeared behind layers of metal. The interior had no corridors, rooms, or anything else meant for people.

Dense support framing, glowing conduits, and massive blocks of machinery filled almost every space, leaving only narrow gaps twisting between systems with no concern for human bodies. They had entered the wall of a machine, not a building. Arayu rotated slowly, inspecting the glowing systems.

"We hit the shiny stuff."

"Yeees, Arayuuu. Yeees," Karmabeast said.

"Stop that right now." Arayu pointed at another glowing section. Meno drew his sword.

"Please don't blow up." They started cutting. One glowing bank went dark, then another, and a whole section behind them lost power. Good enough. They pushed deeper, carving through anything that looked important while warning lights flashed in colors none of them understood. The platform shuddered around them as more systems shut down. Then Karmabeast cut through a thick conduit glowing molten orange. Everything became light. The internal section erupted.

The blast tore through the surrounding machinery, punched open the outer hull, and threw all three Frames into space.

"Oops," Karmabeast said.

"Nice grief," Meno said. By the time Meno's vision cleared, the orbital platform was already falling away behind him. Both legs were gone below the hips. Karmabeast had taken catastrophic damage across his already weakened side, while Arayu still had all her limbs.

"My gun is gone!" Arayu said. They had successfully reduced all three builds to trash tier. At least the explosion had launched them in roughly the right direction. The wormhole marker hung ahead. Karmabeast tumbled beside Meno in a crooked spiral.

"I am missing too many directional buttons." Arayu spun past them trailing glowing material.

"I'm leaking glowy stuff. Is that important?"

"Keep leaking toward the wormhole." Meno fired his back and palm thrusters to stabilize, and the others corrected with whatever systems they still had. Behind them, damaged sections of the platform flickered dark and vented debris while drones poured from the structure like angry bees from a kicked hive. Between them, Meno had no legs, Karmabeast had one usable arm, Arayu had no weapons, and their energy reserves were almost empty. They accelerated anyway.

The swarm closed fast, hammering their shields until the remaining percentages vanished and energy fire started burning directly into armor. Meno kept his frame aligned with his palms and back, every correction draining a reserve already scraping empty. They could not stop to fight or afford a bad turn. The wormhole marker stayed ahead.

"Full send," Meno said.

"One hundo million credits. Arayu, marry me," Karmabeast said.

"SPACE MOUSE!" Arayu yelled, then quietly added, "Okay." Meno nearly lost his vector.

"Wait, what?" Meanwhile, the XTachyon might have been launching Karmabeast's consciousness directly into the sun. They crossed the final stretch while the Frames came apart around them. A drone burst ripped through Meno's shoulder, more armor peeled away from Karmabeast, and half of Arayu's body flickered under the damage as the wormhole marker swallowed Meno's HUD. Then reality grabbed them. Space twisted, spun sideways, and threw the three wrecked Frames back through. Jupiter snapped into view again.

The Deep-Fryer was already with the Carrier, safe and intact. Behind them, on the far side of the wormhole, the orbital platform was damaged but still alive. Hyperion had sent five VR players to collect space rocks from an alternate dimension. They returned with the objective, three nearly destroyed SpaceAssault Frames, and left the orbital platform on the other side with a bloody nose.