"Drae, look at me," she commands, her voice filling with a fierce, grounding demand.
I force my head up, my neck servos holding strong despite the damage. The casual endearment strikes my audio receptors with the weight of a grounding hand, easing the combat static still lingering in my mind. My HUD exhibits a graveyard of dead pixels, but I see her clearly. Her brown eyes are wide, scanning the hole in my side where Korr’s slug remains lodged. Her quick fingers move with the frantic precision of a scavenger, stripping away the dangling bits of my chest plate to reach the wound.
"The secondary reactor sub-level," I rasp. The adrenaline releases as a thick, intoxicating current in my veins, dulling the agony of the impact into a distant, manageable throb. "It is shielded. Selra’s ghosts have yet to reach the hardlines here."
“Good,” she snaps, all stubborn edge and hard focus. “Because I need you functional, and I’m not dragging eight hundred pounds of Reaper through a war zone.”
The lift doors stagger open. We are deep inVirex Prime’s belly, where grease and static press in, warm and pervasive. The space acts as a secured bunker, built to keep engineers alive if the hull fails entirely. I step out, my gait heavy but certain. I prioritize the security of the space, slamming my palm against the manual override. The thick glossy slab hisses shut, the heavy deadbolts thudding home with a finality that shuts out the distant echoes of the boarders' boots. My eyes instantly lock onto a sealed, emergency Hegemony armory cache riveted to the far wall—untouched for thousands of years.
I lock more than the physical doors. Reaching past her, I slam my palm into the terminal beside the bulkhead, biomechanical veins flaring as I sever the main data artery. Smashed conduits spark and die, erecting an absolute, physical hardware firebreak between the systems. It won't hold Selra off forever, but it instantly dead-ends her ghost code, isolating this local grid and buying us the precious window of time my volatile biology violently demands.
We are alone. The only light comes from the low gleam of the secondary conduits and the frantic, flaring beam of the mark.
Bypassing the bench, I step deeper into the area, my secondary heart hammering aggressively as I reach for my helmet seals. My fingers twitch with the residual energy of the slaughter, but I maintain control. The sensors are fused, melted by the pulse-fire, yet I force the manual release with a snap of sheer strength.
The helmet comes free.
The cool, metallic air of the bunker hits my face. I breathe deep, my lungs drawing in the scent of oil and her.
"Locker," I grunt, nodding toward the recessed panel by the door. "Emergency supplies."
She moves instantly, her scavenger instincts taking over as she yanks the handle. She pulls out a standard-issue Hegemony trauma kit—a sleek, white polymer box that has sat untouched for centuries. She bypasses the bandages and the thermal blankets, digging until she finds the pressurized canisters ofWeave—the same regenerative serum I used on her, now in a higher concentration, calibrated for the dense tissue of a Reaper.
"This is going to burn," she warns, her hands shaking as she primes the canister.
"Apply it." I brace my weight against the bench.
She presses the nozzle against the torn opening in my side. With a hiss of compressed gas, the thick, iridescent blue-silver gel of theWeavefloods the wound. It operates on the same mechanics as what I used on her wrist, simply interacting differently with my dense tissue. I roar, the sound bouncing off the very bulkheads, as the nanites begin their frantic work. It is the sensation of a thousand white-hot needles stitching my muscle back together in real-time. My biomechanical veins flare a blinding, angry violet, and I clutch the reactor housing so hard the metal indents beneath my fingers.
The bleeding lessens to a sluggish drip. The deep, hollow ache of the puncture recedes, and the itchy, crawling heat of accelerated repair replaces it. Stability returns even if wholeness remains out of reach, leaving me functional for the tasks ahead.
I reach out, my large hand wrapping gently over hers, taking the canister ofWeavefrom her grip. "Your wrists," I grate out, my eyes locking onto the angry, bleeding welts left by the wire. "Treat them. Now."
"Drae, I'm fine?—"
"Do it," I command softly.
She sighs, digging past the intensiveWeaveto pull out a canister ofVelox-C. Ignoring the aggressive nanites entirely, she sprays a thin layer of the basic numbing gel over her own cuts until the bleeding stops and the skin cools.
"Better?" she asks gently, returning her attention to me, her eyes searching mine for any sign of collapse.
"I am the storm," I quip, the words tasting of iron. My boast shatters almost instantly. A violent tremor wracks my massive frame, and I stagger, my knees buckling as my restraint begins to rapidly disintegrate.
"Draevik!" she yells, catching my uninjured arm as I slump back against the reactor housing.
The stasis-decay, the accumulated injuries, and the sheer trauma of the breach collide with the adrenaline of the rescue, driving my autonomic systems into a catastrophic feedback loop. The adrenaline floods my system, accelerating theWeave's repairs and stitching the torn muscle together, but my neural control splinters.
My restraint fails, spiraling into a volatile storm of static and violet fire. A violent tremor wracks my massive frame. I stagger, my knees actually buckling as my internal matrix begins to tear itself apart.
"Draevik!" she yells, catching my uninjured arm as I slump back against the reactor housing.
Nyra watches my neck veins pulse with a frantic, aggressive light. I identify the exact moment comprehension dawns in her gaze. This isn't just a medical emergency—it is the raw, unbridled surge of a Warlord realizing how close he came to losing his heart.
"You're shaking," she breathes, her panic shifting into a fierce, steely resolve. "Draevik, you're losing control."
Bypassing my confirmation, she reaches out, her palm pressing flat directly onto my chest, right over the flaring mark.
The bond detonates. Her palm grounds the storm for a microsecond, but the static in my skull quickly dials into a blinding roar. My Reaper command structure, destabilized by centuries of stasis and flooded with combat adrenaline, is catastrophically fracturing. A simple touch is insufficient to repair a failing neural matrix. Our marks work both ways—I need absolute, unfiltered biological integration. Only by merging our nervous systems physically can her stable human baseline absorb the chaotic static in my mind and anchor my overloaded grid before it fries my system entirely.