The station was already dying.
Kael staggered through a collapsing corridor lit by red emergency strobes. The floor buckled beneath his boots, power conduits sparked from open walls, and every screen he passed bore the same warning in a hundred dialects:
> "Codex Host Identified. Anomaly Class: Omega. Termination Authorized."
He didn't understand how he got here.
One moment, he was standing in the Codex vault… the next, ejected into this station like the system had booted him into quarantine. And now, someone—or something—was coming for him.
The walls shuddered with distant impact.
---
Somewhere on the far side of the station, a dropship docked with practiced silence.
It was jet-black, sleek, bearing no insignia except a faint sigil burned into its underbelly: a single eye pierced by a blade.
An Inquisitor had arrived.
Inside, the first step onto the deck belonged to a towering figure cloaked in liquid obsidian armor. No flesh was visible. No face. Only a voice, filtered and cold.
> "He carries the shard. He's bleeding time."
A second, smaller figure followed—a woman with short white hair and mechanical eyes, flicking between spectral readouts projected by her wrist gauntlet.
> "Confirmed. His neural signature is deviating. The Codex is waking him."
The Inquisitor turned.
> "Then we erase him before it finishes."
---
Kael ducked into a side corridor, following half-lit signs toward Docking Bay 7. He didn't know what he was looking for—a ship, an escape pod, anything. But the Codex shard burned hotter in his hand, pulsing like it knew something was coming.
> "Left," whispered the Echo's voice inside his skull.
Kael obeyed.
Doors hissed open, revealing a forgotten hangar—mostly collapsed. But in the far corner, buried under scrap, a small one-man vessel blinked weakly. Its core thrummed with erratic power. A sleek, rogue-class scout skimmer—old but fast.
"Please work," Kael muttered, vaulting over debris toward the cockpit.
As he touched the hull, the ship flickered to life.
> "Pilot recognized. Neural link initializing… Codex Host detected."
Kael froze. "What?"
> "Designation: ARCHAI. Autonomous Recon-Class Host Intelligence. Requesting interface handshake."
"You're… sentient?"
> "Technically, sarcastic. Now strap in. We're being hunted."
---
The bay doors behind him exploded.
Kael slammed the cockpit shut as the Inquisitor stepped through the smoke, eyes locked on him with ancient fury. The woman raised her gauntlet and fired.
Blue plasma struck the hull.
ARCHAI roared to life, engines screaming, the hangar groaning as Kael gripped the controls.
> "You're not trained for this!"
"I don't care!"
> "Then we learn fast."
With a blast of pressure, the skimmer tore from the ruined station—just as the Inquisitor hurled a black spear of condensed voidlight.
The spear struck the launch deck.
It collapsed behind them in fire.
---
Space tilted.
Kael's breath caught in his throat as the skimmer spiraled past shattered moons and shipwrecks caught in a low-grav drift. Warnings blinked across the controls. ARCHAI growled internally, rerouting power.
> "They tagged us with a hunter-mark. We've got twelve minutes before a trace packet reaches the Silent Armada."
"What happens then?"
> "They erase the system."
Kael turned, gripping the glowing Codex shard. "There has to be somewhere we can run."
The shard pulsed once. Stars realigned on the interface display. A single point lit up—far beyond the Inquisitors' known reach.
> Planet: Hallowven. Status: Redacted. Codex Fragment Likelihood: 72%.
> "Coordinates locked," ARCHAI said.
Kael took a breath. "Then let's go."
The skimmer vanished into the foldstream.
---
In the silence that followed, back on the ruined station, the Inquisitor knelt beside the broken hangar floor.
He pressed one armored hand to the dust where Kael had stood.
> "He is no longer just a vessel," the Inquisitor said.
> "He's the start of a prophecy."