Blake pressed his spine against the cold metal wall, controlling his breath. The corridor's shadows wrapped around him like a cloak. His hands settled into the familiar grip of his pistol—the weight both comforting and insufficient against what might come through that door.

The airlock cycled with a hiss of equalizing pressure. Starlight spilled across the threshold, three silhouettes blocking out patches of the alien constellations beyond. The figures moved with the careful steps of seasoned scavengers, weapons raised.

The first man's head turned, scanning. A beam of light swept the corridor, stopping just short of Blake's position. Metal clinked against metal as they advanced.

Blake's finger rested alongside the trigger guard. These weren't like Eland—no rapid regeneration, no supernatural endurance. Just men. Dangerous men, but still flesh and blood. Three rounds would do it if he placed them right.

The lead figure paused, head cocked. "Something ain't right."

Blake's muscles coiled. Fifteen rounds total. Had to make them count.

The flashlight beam crept closer to his position. Sweat gathered at his temples, but his hands remained steady. Just a few more steps.

Blake squeezed the trigger twice. The first round caught the leader high on his cheek, snapping his head back sharply. The second punched through his sternum.

The body hit the deck. Two left. But the others moved with inhuman speed. Blake's next shot went wide as a fist crashed into his shoulder. The pistol clattered against the deck.

Steel flashed. Blake twisted away from a blade that would have opened his throat. His attacker's arm extended past him. Blake grabbed the wrist, pulled, and drove his elbow into the man's face. Bone crunched. The knife fell.

A boot slammed into Blake's kidney. Pain exploded through his side as he stumbled forward. He stumbled, found the bulkhead, spun away from death. The attacker's boot left an impression in steel where his skull should have been.

These weren't normal humans. Their movements had a surreal quality, like watching film on fast-forward. Blake absorbed another hit. Like taking a sledgehammer to the forearm. Everything below his elbow went dead.

The passage felt like a coffin. No tactical advantage. No breathing room. Just the brutal geometry of close-quarters combat. Each second brought new pain, fresh damage. He could taste blood.

Blake's training screamed at him to create distance, but the corridor trapped him. Another strike hammered his ribs. The pain ignited something—a spark of heat deep in his core. The energy Eland had awakened surged through his limbs.

Time stretched like taffy. The next punch came at him with deliberate slowness. Blake shifted, caught the fist in his palm. The impact rattled his bones, but he held firm. His attacker's eyes widened.

Blake drove his knee up, felt something give in the man's torso. As the body doubled over, Blake grabbed the back of his head and brought it down to meet his rising elbow. The crack echoed off the walls.

The last attacker backed away, face twisted in a snarl. "Who even are you?"

Blake's fingers curled around the grip of his combat knife. The weight settled into his palm like an old friend. Blood trickled from his split lip, dripped onto the deck plates.

The last attacker raised his own blade. Light from the airlock caught the edge, traced a silver line through the darkness. His stance betrayed his training—weight balanced, knife held low and close.

Blake closed the gap. He pressed forward, drove his shoulder into the man's chest. They crashed against the bulkhead.

The attacker's knife slashed across Blake's bicep. A line of fire bloomed across his skin. Blake trapped the man's knife hand against the wall, pinned it there with his forearm. His own blade found the soft spot beneath the jaw, angled up. One sharp thrust.

The man's eyes went wide, then empty. His knife clattered to the deck. Blood ran hot over Blake's knuckles as he withdrew the blade. Retrieving his pistol, Blake put a single round into the skull of the scavenger he had bludgeoned into submission. No sense letting him recover to get into flanking.

"How was that for a show of force," he asked aloud.

[Sufficiently brutal] came Chimera's response. [My last host was rather more soft-hearted, requiring me to step in to protect him.]

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I like to think I can handle myself," Blake responded.

[Indeed. It will allow me to focus on a more supportive role. But there are several scavengers unaccounted for. You should locate them.]

Blake grunted in acknowledgment. The strange symbiote wasn't wrong. There was a rent in the hull around the starboard side of the ship. It was where Blake had first come into the ship with Eland, and an obvious point of entry. He'd have to move "down" two decks and circle around. If the noise of his initial shots hadn't scared them away they'd likely already be in the ship.

Blake holstered his pistol, careful to avoid getting too much blood on it. He kept his knife ready and stalked his way into the darkness of the ship.

----------------------------------------

Eland settled into a cross-legged position on the metal deck plating, his back straight against the curved wall of the bow section. The cultivator's presence lingered at the edge of his awareness - a raw, unrefined power that leaked mana like a cracked containment vessel.

He inhaled through his nose slits and released a measured pulse of golden light. The energy rippled outward, touching the shadows and distant corridors. A deliberate broadcast of his position and strength.

"Your technique is sloppy," he said to the empty air. "All that power, wasted on brute force applications."

The metal creaked and settled around him. Dust motes drifted through shafts of starlight streaming in from the observation windows. Eland maintained his steady breathing, each exhale carrying another wave of his aura into the darkness.

His fingers traced idle patterns on his knees as he waited. The other cultivator's energy signature flickered and shifted, neither advancing nor retreating. Like a predator uncertain whether to strike or slink away from larger prey.

"I could teach you proper cycling methods," Eland said. "We could trade! Knowledge for parts. But no, you choose violence." He spit over the edge of the craft.

His next words were infused with his will, not spoken idly but instead directly at the hidden cultivator. "Come then, coward."

That did it. He felt a spike of aura, and the presence of the cultivator began to move towards him. Finally.

A figure emerged from the shadows, his cybernetic arm catching the starlight. The metal gleamed with an oily sheen, its surface etched with crude power-focusing runes. The man's face twisted into a sneer, revealing teeth filed to points.

"Interloper," he said. "Sitting alone in your broken ship." His boots clanked against the deck as he circled the room's perimeter. "I am Rax. Guardian of the Salvage."

Eland remained seated, tracking the man's movement with subtle turns of his head. The cultivator's aura pulsed with raw, unrefined strength - like a fusion reactor on the verge of meltdown.

"My men are already inside," Rax said. He flexed his cybernetic fingers, the servos whining. "That human you've been protecting? Probably bleeding out in some dark corner by now." He laughed, the sound echoing off the metal walls. "Or perhaps they're taking their time with him. Teaching him what happens to outsiders who don't know their place."

Eland's nostrils flared at the copper-tang smell of old blood that clung to Rax's clothes. The scavenger leader's aura roiled with malice and barely contained violence, but beneath it lay something else - a tremor of uncertainty that made his declarations ring hollow.

"My friend," Eland said, "is already finished with the first group of your men. It isn't too late to save the rest."

"You won't bluff me, interloper!" Rax screamed in response.

Eland stood in the destroyed frame of the observation window and stared down at Rax. "Is your foundation so poor you can't sense auras unless they're purposely directed at you? You are this unrefined and still choose to confront a Cultivator of the Shelter?"

It was worth trying to throw his sect's weight around. They visited this planet semi-regularly. Many of the clans knew of them, at least by reputation. Rax, however, looked completely nonplussed. No, instead he looked furious.

"You dare insult a cultivator in the third circle so casually? Come down here and speak your final words to my face, coward!"

Eland was flabbergasted. Third circle and he was this spirit blind? First he didn't sense his men dying, and now he was picking a fight with someone well above his own cultivation level. Blind arrogance.

But Eland would give him what he asked for. He stepped from the ship, falling 60 feet to land heavily on the packed earth of the crash site. He rose to his full height and began to walk towards Rax.

The ground cracked under Eland's feet with each step. His aura pulsed outward in golden waves, casting strange shadows across the crash site. Rax's face shifted from arrogant certainty to confusion, then fear as understanding dawned.

"What manner of-" Rax's mechanical arm whirred as he stumbled back like a kicked dog. "Which circle?"

"Numbers." Eland's boots crunched dirt. "Mean less than you think."

"Keep your distance!" Power crackled around Rax like a desperate man's last coin. His blade sang free, edge burning bright as false courage. "I've put better than you in the ground!"

"Have you now?" Eland halted, ten strides distant. "No. No you haven't."

Rax came at him screaming, augmented limb trailing light like a child's sparkler. His weapon carved empty air where Eland's skull had been a heartbeat before. Each of Eland's movements flowed smooth as blood from a fresh wound.

"Stand still, damn you!" Spittle flew with Rax's increasingly frantic swings. "Fight me!"

"What for?" Eland's fingers closed on synthetic sinew and metal. "You're already dead."

Golden light slithered across artificial muscle and chrome. Crude runes sputtered and failed like wet tinder. Gears shrieked in protest.

"What-" Fear made Rax's voice crack like a boy's. "Stop this!"

Eland's only answer was to squeeze. The arm collapsed with a sound like crushed dreams, sparks and arcane discharge painting the night in brief, violent colors.

He released the ruined limb, ready to finish teaching Rax his final lesson, when the ship's hull burst outward in a shower of twisted metal. As he spun to face this new threat, he felt Rax's presence fade into the maze of wreckage.

Let him run.

Blake needed him.