Jace sprinted back through the hallways of the crumbling factory, keeping his head low and eyes wide. Girders fell from the ceiling and the floor shook, and it wasn’t just because of the unstable reactor—not anymore.

High pitched whines raced down from high above, gaining a final burst of intensity before finally impacting the ground and making the entire planet’s crust shake. Magenta light poured in through cracks in the wall and motes of plasma-Aes swirled in the air all around. It stung when a large enough clump touched his arm, like a spark from a campfire.

“Just…three more turns!” Lessa called to him through the earpiece. “Left, right, and left again!”

“I’m working on it!” Jace uttered back.

“If you hadn’t taken the detour…”

“You can blame the falling debris, not me!” He slammed his shoulder into the wall as he rounded the corner. His boots scrambled along the slippery floor, and he gripped a wall-mounted pipe to help propel himself forward.

Left, right, left. Simple enough.

Except for the swaying, sparking wires. It just couldn’t have been a straight shot. Already, a whole swath of alien workers lay scattered across the ground, electrocuted or otherwise killed by something Jace couldn’t see.

He didn’t have time to assess, only to react. He used a hyperdash to pass the majority of the wires, then dropped to the floor beside a fallen worker and crawled, slipping side to side when the angry cords whipped closer.

With each passing second, he cursed his lack of advancement. He needed a new technique card, more foundation pillars, something to get him through. Or to just enhance the card’s runes and make it faster.

But with their meagre tools, they couldn’t enhance the cards more than they already had.

Jace needed something more, and he knew it.

When the last whipping cord passed by, Jace jumped up to his feet and kept sprinting. He took the turns as tight and carefully as he could. Those who could escape the factory already had, and he was one of the last. There were no more guards or live workers to look out for.

When he reached the end of the last hallway, he arrived at a simple hatch. It lay wide open, leading out to a thin walkway over the blue-crystal surface of Kei-Qy-Haan. Jace sprinted onto the walkway, hoping to suck in fresh air, but all he inhaled was acrid smoke and dust.

The sky, previously pale blue, was now covered in ash and smog. Three Starrealm battleships hovered high in the sky, black misty shapes against the cloud cover. They aimed their massive plasma cannons down at the surface and fired, unleashing plumes of ash and streaks of magenta light, before the plasma shell hit the sapphire surface and detonated.

In the distance, sharp crystal mountains shattered into dust, and a different factory, nestled on the opposite side of the valley from the current side, burned. Its walls crumbled, its concrete foundations shattered, and its main hall exposed to the elements.

Jace couldn’t spare a thought for the workers. Not anymore. They’d been making weapons, and the factories were as valid of targets as any. And how was he supposed to know that the Starrealm was going to begin an orbital bombardment of the planet’s surface only hours after they’d landed?

He sprinted across the walkway. On the opposite side was a circular expanse of concrete for starships to land. The charred husk of a Phélese military cargo transport lay in the center of the platform, having been speared in half earlier by a bombarding bolt.

On the very opposite edge of the platform was the Luna Wrath, a freighter tiny in comparison. Its thrusters still burned and its smokestack still chuffed soot into the sky.

“You couldn’t have parked any closer?” Jace complained. A bolt of plasma seared through the edge of the platform, making it shudder and sending cracks through it. Dust wafted across, and crystal shards pelted the side of his body.

“Parked?” Lessa asked.

“Landed!” Jace exclaimed. Not Earth. Not a car.

“Any closer to the factory, and we’re within range of the reactor explosion!”

Jace clenched his jaw and sprinted faster. The Wrath’s boarding ramp swung open, and Kinfild stood at the top, holding his staff in one hand and a hydraulic cylinder in the other. As far as Jace knew, the old Wielder didn’t have any defensive technique cards, but he didn’t need any. It was the Wrath that needed it.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Shield Aes rippled across the freighter’s stern in a hexagonal pattern, blocking an onslaught of debris. At least they still had some energy in the shield generators. After the Battle of Celacor, making repairs had been absolutely necessary, and they’d installed an upgraded shield generator with the help of the Thegn.

Jace bounded up the boarding ramp and gripped the hull of the Wrath. The moment his fingers touched the steel hull, his breath left his throat, and a weight settled down on his core. For a moment, it felt like all the sound had fled from his ears, then a sudden and deep crack reverberated through the valley.

A violet orb erupted at the center of the factory, expanding equally in all directions, until it caught enough air. Fire washed out the walls, and a column of smoke blasted up into the sky. The Luna Wrath shuddered and rocked, and its starboard landing struts lifted off the landing platform.

Kinfild ran through the ship to the cockpit. The shockwave of the explosion launched Jace back into the Wrath’s cargo hold and slammed him into the far wall. He slid down to the ground.

He purged the haze from his mind and jumped up, then sprinted to the boarding ramp and pulled a lever beside it. With a whir, it closed, lifting up into the ship’s hull.

“Jace!” Lessa exclaimed, leaping up from the radioman’s chair and running toward him. “Are you alright?”

“I’m good,” he said, then pulled his backpack open and showed her the contents. The six pearl-silver accumulator nodes.

“Even better now!” she said, then turned about.

Kinfild dropped down in the pilot’s seat and lifted up on the control yoke, and the deck thrummed. The repellers lifted the Wrath up, and the thrusters churned.

“Get strapped in,” Jace said, then cast one last glance back at the engine room. A new stoker kyborg, Err-Seventeen, shovelled starcoals into the furnace, keeping the boiler hot and the engines running. “I get the feeling it’s gonna be a rough ride!”

“That’s what I was saying!” Lessa exclaimed.

They sprinted back through the starship to the cockpit. Jace dropped down in the copilot’s seat, and Lessa slipped back into the radioman’s chair—nestled off to the side in the joining hallway. They both pulled crash harnesses on.

“Do you have a destination in mind, Mr. Baldwin?” Kinfild asked.

“Up! Up is our destination!” Jace gripped the armrests of the seat. “We can figure out what we’re doing next before those battleships glass the surface!”

“Will they attack us?” Lessa asked.

“We’re not a Phélese model, and we’re not big enough to be carrying anything important,” Jace said, then grunted when the Wrath lurched forward. He was pushed back in his seat once. Just when he was getting comfortable and ready to speak again, Kinfild jerked the control yoke back, and he was pushed back in his seat a second time.

“We’re not big enough for them to care!” Jace said. Over the past three months, in the three orbital bombardments he’d witnessed, no starship had even cared about a dinky old freighter trying to get out of harm’s way.

“But it’s the Starrealm we’re dealing with!” Lessa called. “The others were Koedor-Terginian and the like!”

“You should be thankful it’s the Starrealm,” said Kinfild. “So far, they have only bombarded factory worlds, and planets of strategic importance. They say they’re minimizing casualties, and I hope that the policy is some working of Lady Fairynor.”

“Or some other cooler heads within the Parliament!” Jace called.

The Luna Wrath arced up out of the valley, escaping the creeping barrage of plasmafire. When the hull stopped shaking and Jace’s ears stopped ringing from the high-pitched vibrations of the impact, he let himself sink into the smooth seat.

The sky outside the viewscreen darkened. First, as they passed through a cloud of ash, then a second time as they entered the void high above. A spattering of stars lay ahead, and Kinfild aimed away from the system’s central star.

Finally, when Kei-Qy-Haan was a simple speck of blue behind them, Kinfild cut the thrusters.

“We need a plan,” Jace said. “Wandering is nice, and I’m all for it, but I haven’t been advancing.” He pulled off his crash harness and stood up, then marched back through the ship to the main hold, where the table was.

With a flick of a switch, he activated the holographic galactic map above it. “What was it those void herders on Gangreen Hold were saying? The Flaxen Moon mining sect found a dungeon on Ifskar?”

Kinfild and Lessa glanced at each other. Finally, Lessa said, “I thought we agreed that such a dungeon was…too advanced for us at the moment.”

Jace snorted. “I agreed, yeah. It was level rated for…what, thirty? Thirty five?”

“As a low estimate,” said Kinfild.

“Okay, but,” Jace raised a finger, “I need to push myself again. It’s been a while, and I’m stagnating. I can feel it.”

“You’ll stagnate worse if you die. Rotting corpses and all.” Lessa wrinkled her nose. “Though…you’re kinda stinky now.”

He rolled his eyes. “You try running through an exploding factory at full-tilt, carrying a backpack, and not getting a little sweaty.” Though, he knew well enough that being a candlefolk, she’d just end up smelling like beeswax. That was beside the point. “We’re getting distracted. Look, scavengers from all over will be heading to Ifskar. We can try advancing a little before then, too.”

“The Vaults have had diminishing returns,” Kinfild said.

“Maybe I need to find a better Vault Core that’ll put me in rougher situations.”

“It’d certainly help.” The Wielder stroked his beard. “Scavengers will have Ifskar locked down well before we even arrive.”

“Sure, then we’ll need an in with them. I was trying to say that.”

“And you wanna steal from the scavenger sects?” Lessa inclined her head.

“We’d have to steal some sort of torpedo-net key at some point.” Jace shrugged. “What if we stole just a little bit more from them while we were at it?”