“Restoring vitals in 3…2…1…”

An electric current shot through my body, causing my eyes to snap open. Blood obscured my vision, my visor was cracked, and the injuries I’d sustained had overwhelmed the regenerative mods I possessed. It would take some time for me to recover.

My health was blinking a dangerous red on my glitchy overlay, and no part of my vital scans came back reassuring.

Still, I was alive, and that was something.

Shaking my head, I felt dizzy like I hadn’t in years. My survival had taken precedence, dulling many of my normal functions as I painstakingly got to my feet.

A lingering tinnitus rang in my ears, my armor was broken, and—

“Welcome back, Sir. For a while there, you actually did manage to kill yourself. Good job!”

Damn it. System override…

She was back.

Ignoring my UI’s voice, I slapped the broken floodlights of my armor a few times, causing a faint glow to flicker to life within them.

“I hate when that works,” my UI sighed. “It means you’ll just keep doing it when I could’ve—”

A silent command set her to mute as I limped forward, my shattered femur having yet to fully mend itself. Not that I had time to wait for it either.

That dull scraping and chittering had picked up behind me once more, trapped behind the rubble which filled most of the hallway. It would buy me a couple of minutes at most, and as it was, there was no escape for me to be found.

The lesser hall that now opened up before me ended in a singular smooth, seamless piece of stone. This one, too, was lined with more of those intricate scriptures and carvings I’d seen earlier. Swirling lines and complex shapes ran over and under one another, organized in a strange composition I couldn’t comprehend.

“Language check,” I grunted, but the pause that followed was too long. With a frown, I glanced down at the weathered Interface where my armor had crumbled away.

Did it break again, or is she sulking because I muted her? But no, I could see it working. A slow buffer ticking away on that display I hardly ever used, loading like some ancient Proto-Terra device.

And then, finally, “Any matches within the database are few and scattered at best, Sir. Just like your good ideas. Nothing to discern its meaning. It seems we have reached a dead end…

“We should never have come here.”

I could hear that, ‘I told you so,’ tone in her voice all too well, but that wasn’t what irked me. With a frown, I brushed my fingers along the stone. It was the wrong time for a joke. Surely, she must recognize this writing…

I pulled off my helmet as the visor was only obstructing my view.

Yeah, I’d seen it before, centuries ago. It was the same writing that’d started this all so long ago. Across a galaxy and a thousand solar systems away, on a different planet. My jaw set, and I clenched my fist.

“I won’t let 250 years of service end like this,” I said. “Wherever I set my foot, the Triumvirate will forever shine brightly.”

“Yamien, the unified senate fell over two hundred years ago. There’s—”

“As long as a single soldier of the Astral Fleet stands, their light shall never be extinguished.”

I pulled out the only dagger that’d survived the explosion, the sounds behind me having intensified. The scraping and chittering had reached almost frantic levels. Time was running out.

Without hesitation, I ran the blade across my palm.

“It’s always been sacrifice you bastards seek, no?” I said as a fresh stream of blood sprang forth between my fingers, glancing up at the alien figure of stone that loomed over the entrance. It was barely visible beneath my weakened floodlights.

If I hadn’t known it was there, I would’ve completely missed it.

Now, however, as I pressed my bloodied palm against the stone, its eye sockets lit up with ancient energies. There was a groan, a hiss, and the entire wall shifted before me, grinding open to dust and rank air. Just like back then…

The one difference being, instead of my fellow soldiers nervously raising their rifles around me as the entrance slid open, what filled my ears was another deep thrum that passed through the air around me, causing the floor to quake and dust to fall from the ceiling above.

An oppressive presence had appeared on the other side of that weak barrier, drawing closer.

They’d noticed what I’d done. Another tomb had been opened.

“Irregular energies detected, Sir. Caution is advised. Caution is advised. Turn around and—”

Their presence had knocked the last intelligence out of my UI, leaving it a beeping red as that same, standardized message kept repeating ad nauseam.

Probing tentacles assaulted my mind. They were stronger than back then, but so was I. I didn’t even go down on a knee this time, despite blood dripping from my nose and several capillaries having burst in my eyes.

Everything was painted red by the time that great hall opened up before me, my gene mods struggling to repair me at the same rate they were breaking me down.

Countless had died just from that tomb opening that day — hundreds of billions more in the years to follow.

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Now, there was only me left.

I spat out a mouthful of blood as I bitterly strode forward, the darkness ahead of me chased away by seven orbs of pale blue, spinning in a slow halo around that altar up ahead. The room was sterile, carrying no decorations to speak of beside a singular figure of stone, occupying the entirety of the ceiling where it reached down with teeth and tentacles towards those orbs.

It was different from back then. There, only—

A great rumble in the floor beneath me caused me to snap around just in time to see an explosion of stone, clearing the hallway outside with force.

Rather than chittering cries, however, all I heard from beyond was a pair of slow, scraping steps. That, and something sounding an awful lot like a voice.

“At last…”

One of the Primaries was here.

This time, the force slamming into my mind was there to kill me. Something snapped in my brain, knocking me to my knees before I knew it. Everything flickered in black and white, excruciating pain shot through my limbs, and then, the needles within my suit pierced my skin.

Liquid STIM began pumping into my veins, alleviating the pressure from my mind.

I snapped around, never bothering to see what’d just emerged from the darkness behind me as I set off in a sprint towards that altar.

“NO!”

Another wave of power thundered across the hall, but before it could reach me, something else had pushed back against it. The authority of this place protected me. It was my blood which had unleashed it.

My overlay had stopped working at some point, only brief flickers of something flashed across my vision. Ghostly figures and ancient memories. My breaths were ragged, and my own footfalls echoed in my ears. I was barely holding out as that same something screamed at me to get down.

I rolled sideways across the floor as the stones besides me exploded. Pebbles struck my side, cutting me across the face and leaving me blinded as one shard embedded itself into my eye.

Still, I never broke my momentum. I could sense those orbs even without seeing them. They called me.

Something lashed me across the back, nearly pushing me over – a violent force constraining my organs and battering my mind.

Between the STIM coursing through my body and the distance I’d put between myself and my assailant, however, it was too weak to stop me. I was the Astral Fleet’s last soldier: the Triumvirate’s final light. I wasn’t allowed to fall until I’d made these alien bastards suffer.

Even as my bones broke and my sinew tore, even as I threw up blood by the lungful, I staggered up that short flight of stairs towards the altar. I collided with something, and my burned out gene mods had only just restored enough of my vision to see those swirling orbs that floated above me. Watching.

They stilled, reversed, and then, slowly began circling down around me.

Another angered cry cut through the hall, but that next wave of energy was repelled long before it could get close to me. Heaving for breath, more injury than man, I observed those orbs as they seemingly observed me.

They pulsated, changed, and shifted, their light steadily shining brighter until everything else was erased from existence. Until all that remained behind was a text I hadn’t seen in over a century, floating before my eyes.

One that I’d thought completely gone ever since the Intergalactic System fell.

Grand Simulation, Iteration #7703, Completed…

Survivor Found

Administrator Access, Unlocking…

Chance of Fate 001 Being avoided, 4%

Recalibrating, 2%

Recalibrating, 7%

Recalibrating…

Error, No Other Survivors Found Across 10^5 Iterations

System Override…

…

…

Proceeding with Singular Survivor:

Nyamien Yerak Astera

Grand Simulations, Ending…

The Last Reality, Resuming In:

200…

199…

198…

𐫰 𐫰 𐫰

I floated in space. The dark, endless void stretched out before me. But even so, I was not alone.

Around me, countless worlds were dying. Solar systems wrapped in war, planets ravaged by disease. And through it all, the presence of the Scourge could be seen — twisting, hungering, devouring all.

All of it was familiar, burned into my mind over these past two centuries I’d fought, and failed, to prevent it from happening. I’d been but a single soldier, forced to watch as every last sign of life slowly got snuffed out from the galaxy – as stars got sucked dry, and great fleets crumbled beneath mindless abominations.

Everything I’d once known, gradually turned gray and barren before my eyes. Friends, family, and hope turned to ashes.

“The last child of L’Ithari,” a voice, having originated from somewhere deep inside of me, spoke.

It was alien even to me who, throughout my life, had known men with gills but no mouths, singing gastropods, and floating brains who could only communicate with their neuron uplinks.

It was distant, deep as space itself, yet at the same time, closer than anything had ever been to me in my whole life. “Only you’ve seen the end that must be prevented. Only you may uphold our legacy…”

Those orbs were there again, encircling me closer and closer. That haunting voice replaced for my own.

“War tore us apart, disease weakened our home worlds, and then came the Scourge, wiping out civilization from the most barren moon to our most distant star. Now, there’s only me left, Yamien Silmund, Captain of the Astral Fleet’s 113th division. I lost contact with the last survivor settlements fifty years ago along with my crew, and any of the other brigades have long since been lost to the void. If there’s anyone out there, anyone to hear this message, meet me at Asteroid CZ-914, 814, -94.32.

“I’m heading there to respond to what I believe to be a recent distress signal. I’ll arrive by the new year 264, Salazar, the last light of humanity. May he rest in peace.”

My own baritone, augmented to be able to carry across the void of space with thundering authority, sounded mockingly familiar.

“My name is Yamien Silmund, born Nyamien Yerak Astera, and I was taken from my home on Ferada-1109, M94, when I was still a child.” I could still envision it before me, that weathered moon, unremarkable even compared to the backwater planets surrounding it. It’d been a home to farmers and exiles, meant to supply provisions within the outer galaxies where life was scarce and new conscripts were hard to find.

“For seven years, I was trained as a soldier at the Imperial academy, located within the Wochir-11 system. At the age of nineteen, during the great solar flares of 894, Vorath, I was accepted into the Astral Fleet’s 194th division. Since then, for the past 267 years, I’ve served beneath the Triumvirate’s light.”

Has it already been that long? I’d lost count when the last cities fell.

A soldier of the Stratos Apolytos, and by extension the Astral Fleet, was considered lucky if they lived past 22 during the Age of the Fall. Even of those who did, few ever cursed themselves with the longevity mods – forcing us to outlive our own species in the darkening void.

Only those whose hatred for the Scourge ran deeper than their sanity ever bothered with them, and they rarely got it before their late forties when their bodies had already began to break down.

For the past hundred years, every veteran I’d encountered had walked around with hair that was forever graying and deep lines etched deep into their faces.

The me I’d briefly glimpsed in mirrors included.

“…I’ve climbed the ranks, I’ve fought in countless wars, and I’ve seen worlds fall apart and stars be extinguished. I was there as our great Empress got murdered, I saw the rebel’s uprising and fall, and it was my brothers that first fell sick, their own bodies turning against them as the Scourge devoured them from within. I’ve grown stronger since then, but never strong enough to protect anyone but myself.

“As a soldier, as a captain, I was a failure. I was a—”

The voice cut out as something slithered around my throat, hellbent on squeezing the last life out of me and causing the vision to flicker out of focus.

84…

83…

82…