When Jace and Lessa made it into the hallway beyond the stairs, they came face-to-face with another pair of guards. Lessa blasted one with her plasma rifle, and Jace struck the other on the back of the head with the pommel of his whistling blade.

But it still slowed them down, and there was a Wielder on their heels. The man leapt across the gap in the stairs and landed on the platform right behind Lessa and Jace, then reached for Jace’s shoulder.

Jace pushed the man’s arm away, then ducked under a punch. Lessa fired a bolt of plasma at him, but he raised his fist with almost prescient speed, and the fortification technique blocked the plasma Aes. She severed a few chunks of the scrap scale defenses, but more swirled to fill its place.

The Wielder lifted his arms and pointed his open palms at the roof, then dragged downward, as if dragging something down from a high shelf.

The tarp and wires in the ceiling buckled, then collapsed toward Jace and Lessa, threatening to crush them. It was another ranged scrap manipulation card, like the Wielder had used to bend the stairs out of shape—just slightly stronger.

Reaching up, Jace slashed through it, splitting it around himself and Lessa and protecting them from harm.

Wielders could use two of the same cards. Noted. He hadn’t caught a perfect glimpse of the second card, but it was probably a higher grade option of the same type.

But that also meant this Wielder had used five cards. He was all out, and would be for at least a few more seconds, depending on how long the cooldown was.

Jace snatched up a chunk of rubble from the fallen ceiling material and clutched it tight in his hands. It was a misshapen chunk of hard, plastic-y substance, vaguely transparent, and curved with the shape of what had once been a pipe.

Then he swapped in the Wanderer’s Expulsion to his two foundation pillars and activated it. He clenched the object tight and concentrated his Aes, then pushed it out toward the Wielder.

The debris flashed into hyperspace, and this time, it would interact with physical objects. As it launched, it pressed against his stance, but he widened his feet and concentrated his Resistance, then let the object leave his influence.

The Wielder’s eyes widened, and just in time, he adjusted his fortification technique, shifting the scales over his chest. The object smashed into him, sending out a wave of scrap at fractions of lightspeed. They sheared through the wall in an explosion of sparks and screaming steel.

The impact itself knocked the Wielder flat on his back, but the man’s fortification technique protected him from lethal damage—and was enough to deflect the debris up into the wall. It smashed through levels of the sect headquarters, destroying tubes and rending steel.

“No time to marvel at your handiwork!” Lessa exclaimed. “It won’t keep him down for long, and you’ve probably just pissed off a whole lot more of them!”

Jace sprinted through the hallway with her, then turned back down the hallway they’d travelled on the way from the landing pad. The door to the Luna Wrath should be somewhere along the wall here…

The Wielder rounded the corner once more and flung out another attack of scrap metal—a ranged attack of shrapnel shards.

Lessa ducked, and Jace braced for an impact, but it never came.

A blast of vibrant orange flame soared between them, colliding with the shards head-on and incinerating them. It disrupted the technique.

Kinfild.

He marched down the hallway in the opposite direction, holding his staff ahead of him.

The Wielder shouted something unintelligible, but then scrambled back to his feet, and more clearly, said, “You’ll not defy the Brakamen! We’ll—”

Kinfild conjured the same card again, then stabbed through its form with the tip of his staff. The card disintegrated into a puff of sparks, and a bar of swirling flame spat out. It caught the scavenger right in the chest.

The blast melted straight through his fortification, applied a temporary anti-Potency curse, and a hole in the man’s breastplate, charring the flesh below.

“Time to leave!” Kinfild exclaimed. “You got the card?” He turned to the side and tapped a control panel on the wall to his right. The door beside it didn’t open. With a frustrated grunt, he activated his own fortification technique and swatted the panel, denting and bending it, and ripping apart the material below.

The door hissed open.

“I got the card we need,” Jace said. “You didn’t give very good instructions of where to go looking.”

“Pish. You figured it out, didn’t you?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Yeah, but—”

“Then everything is going to plan. To the Wrath!”

He darted out the door, and Jace and Lessa followed. Two more guards waited on the landing platform, standing watch in front of the starship. The boarding ramp was closed—probably Err-Seventeen’s doing—and the thrusters still burned bright blue.

Kinfild launched one more burst of flame out the tip of his staff, smashing the same card in the process, and struck one guard. The other raised his rifle but Lessa shot him.

Jace winced. Really gotta get myself a ranged attack. He couldn’t always keep closing the distance with a hyperdash.

But he could worry about that once they got in the air.

Kinfild ran to the boarding ramp and tapped it with his staff. The door whirred, then folded open. Jace jumped to the side, stepping out of the way, then took a step up the ramp. He stopped halfway up when a loud clunk rattled around the scavenger haven.

A turret swivelled toward the Wrath. It clung to a ledge high up on the scavenger sect’s main tower, with a full view of the landing pads. Though it was about the size of an earth battleship’s main gun, it had no armour plating—only exposed, cobbled-together inner workings and mechanics.

“Uh…Kinfild…?” Jace pointed.

“I see it! Now get in the ship before they load it!”

“Can we take a hit from that?” Lessa exclaimed.

The three of them ran up the ramp and sprinted to the cockpit. First, Kinfild flipped the switch to activated the shields, then shunted them to full power. “It’s not a starship’s main gun, that’s certain, but it’ll still hit hard.”

Jace dropped down in the copilot’s seat and set the engine telesignal to full forward, sending orders to Err-Seventeen. The thrusters roared louder as the stoker kyborg set the furnace to the hottest blaze it could handle.

Kinfild wrenched the Wrath’s control yoke to the side without even sitting down, and the starship drifted laterally on its repellers, shifting along the landing platform and dragging its landing gear along the surface.

The turret fired, spewing two plumes of black smoke and soot. Violet plasma beams shot out the center of both barrels. One missed entirely. Instead, it blasted the center of the landing platform, throwing up a massive curtain of sparks and flame. The other would’ve grazed the Wrath’s flank, tearing a hole in the hull and rendering it non-spaceworthy, had it not been for the shields.

They blocked a single blast, flaring blue and erupting across the starship’s entire surface with their hexagonal pattern, before guttering out and fading. An alarm blared red on the central console, and sparks rained down from the ceiling.

Kinfild pushed the control yoke forward, sending the starship into a dive and letting the thrusters take over. They plummeted through the hull of the gloryship for nearly a kilometer, before Kinfild pulled up. Jace clutched his armrests, then tugged a switch on the console ahead of him, surging the repellers.

The Wrath levelled out, then climbed up toward the hole in the ancient starship’s hull.

“Uh, guys…” Lessa warned. She had strapped down in the radioman’s seat, but she was leaning over and looking at the center console.

Jace glanced at the scanners. “Wha—”

The Wrath shuddered and bucked. The stench of burnt plastic wafted through the cabin, and a trio of alarm lights flared to life on the console.

Not to mention the three red dots trailing behind them—as the scanners depicted. Starfighters. They’d overtake a slow freighter like the Wrath. They needed someone on the guns.

“How do I activate the artificial gravity?” Jace asked. They were in a climb, and if he got out of his seat, he’d just slide back to the stern.

“We’ve been over this, Mr. Baldwin,” Kinfild grumbled. “The blue switch on your right.”

“Thanks.” Jace flipped the switch Kinfild had indicated, and the floor thrummed. Jace unbuckled his crash harness, then slipped out of his seat.

Two forces of gravity worked against each other. As far as Jace had learned, artificial gravity was a function of a technique card as well—meant for gravity-aspect users, but the low-level cards could function with a starship’s onboard supply of pure Aes. They triggered in a chain, maintaining a simple field of gravity throughout the ship.

It was enough to mimic a standard-sized planet’s tug, but not enough to overwhelm the tug of Braka completely.

Jace’s skin pulled in two directions. One wanted to tug him down toward the deck, and the other wanted to keep him in orbit of the planet. He leaned against it and staggered to the hatch in the floor, then pulled it open, revealing the small ladder to the ship’s underbelly turret.

He slipped down into the gunner’s nook—a position that required him to lay on his stomach, looking toward the stern, with only a dinner plate-sized viewscreen to watch out of—and a holographic video feed of their surroundings—in the direction the two-barreled turret was facing.

He gripped the turret’s controls and twisted them to the stern, putting the enemy starfighters into view. Each of the three vessels was different, though they were only large enough to carry a single pilot. Some had horizontal wings, others had vertical. Their thrusters burned blue or magenta, and smoke chuffed out assorted vents along their hulls.

Jace pulled down on the trigger, but the turret only coughed out a puff of dust back at him.

Right. The power coupling.

“Lessa!” he called.

“I’m on it!” She was already jumping up from her seat and running to the tangled mess of tubes and wires beneath the control console. She bent down and connected the wires, activating the turret’s cannons.

When Jace clamped his finger down on the trigger again, a blast of magenta plasma seared out, firing at the starship behind them. It didn’t hit anything.

The Wrath shot out into open sky, but the starfighters were faster. They’d catch up before the Wrath reached the upper atmosphere.

But Jace had plenty more shots where that came from.