The two kitsune followed me out of my bathroom. I snagged a simple shirt and leggings and then promptly deployed my armor over them. It was kind of strange how naked I felt without the armor considering I wasn't born as a unicorn and never experienced the protections that young unicorns had, but it made me feel safer so the armor got deployed.

The Yunikōn seemed to be pretty well furnished, although I didn't really have another ship to compare it to. Still, when I thought of the interior of spaceships I imagined bare metal walls, cots instead of beds, and cramped living conditions. The Yunikōn was anything but. Even the corridors were brightly lit and spacious, and the furniture was a far cry from the uncomfortable fixtures I was imagining.

Stepping into the mess hall really drove home how big the ship was. Even when it had been squeezed into that tiny hanger on the asteroid I hadn't really paid attention to the ship’s size. But the mess hall was absolutely huge, taking up the middle of the top level. I could probably fit at least three of the captain’s quarters into this space. It was here that I found the quartet of engineers still gobsmacked over the Yunikōn.

“This ship is insane,” Spirit informed me, her pigtails bobbing as she shook her head. “The fact that so much of it is automated makes this vessel nearly priceless.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Aren't other large ships in this universe automated?”

“Not even close,” Eve interjected. “Training the AI of bots and drones is a ridiculous expense. No ship is going to handle the exact same way as the next, so the artificial intelligence for each ship would have to be trained and coded manually. There's no one size fits all that a ship builder can just download into a shell. For that reason alone even nobility, who can often just flush away oceans of credits, never bother trying to fully automate their biggest ships. At most they'll automate the waste management systems.

“But the Yunikōn? You have everything automated. Your waste management system, your ammunition systems, your fire control systems, the fire suppression… it's all handled by machines. You being a unicorn just makes this entire thing beyond broken. Once you've learned telekinesis you won't even need an operator helping handle radar adjustments and defensive measures. Any space farer out there is going to be willing to either murder you or just straight up steal the Yunikōn out from under you if you let them.”

“So don't go anywhere without activating it's shields,” I nodded. “I can do that.”

“That's going to be your best bet,” Sensa agreed. “Ground based weapons aren't going to be able to pack the punch required to get through the shields while it's sitting in a port.”

I accepted a plate of some sort of meat from Naida. I thought it might be steak, and it tasted similar, but I had too many things to think about to ask where she had even got it. “What shall our move be now?”

I paused, considering. The cevanti triplets were digging into their own meals, but they paused to hear my answer. “Well, our long term goal is to stay alive. To that end, we're probably going to have to deal with House Orion sooner or later. I'm assuming that having such a large fleet in cevanti space is illegal?” I directed this as Sophia.

She shrugged slightly. “Technically, yes. Unfortunately, the Imperium fleets aren't in any position to do anything about them. The Imperium is limited to roughly a quarter of the total fleets that the Termia Empire possess, per the treaty they basically forced our ancestors to sign. The Imperium relies heavily on mercenaries and local police forces to keep its colonies safe, while the fleet is mostly forced to safeguard the Core Worlds.”

I hummed. “So it'll be up to us to take care of them. How much trouble will I be in if I just completely dismantle his House?”

“You're nobility yourself,” Edelguard’s voice was muffled around the rim of her drink. “Nobility is basically the judge, juror, and executor in this universe. The Yunikōn will have battle data pointing to the fact that he attacked you unprovoked, so under the laws of most space empires you're free to attack him in return. However, doing so would likely drag any allies he has into the issue. You'd need a lot more evidence of his indiscretion to get those allies to back off, especially since Termia is split between nobles who support the Emperor and those who support Houses like Orion.”

“In my experience, bullies like him don't know how to handle prey who's not scared of him.” I began pacing a bit, another old habit I turned to whenever thinking through a problem. “It's likely he's got informants all over the place, but we can't exactly just never set foot onto colonies. We won't put ourselves into a position where he can just attack us easily, but even if an informant on the colony alerts him of our presence trying to hunt us down in the space around a colony will still be almost impossible. He'd need to dedicate a lot of resources to any endeavors like that, and if he's actually stupid enough to try we can tie up quite a bit of those resources into hunting us down.

“We’re going to need to get used to fighting as a crew, and Artemis also needs power. I saw we should dedicate ourselves to hunting pirates and the like for right now, until we're able to challenge Orion directly. To that end, what authorities do I need to be in contact with if I'm looking to start my own fleet to hunt down the scum of space?”

This time it was Chie who answered. “Well, it depends. There are generally two factions attempting to keep sectors safe: knights, and mercenaries. The only real difference between the two is that knights are often considered honorary nobility but on the very bottom of hierarchy. Knightly orders are usually headed by nobles, so that's probably going to be your best bet.”

“Okay, so then the plan is to start my own knightly order. I'm under no illusions that we can do everything ourselves, so having more allies will be important. We're going to be pretty busy here soon, so if you're done eating let's go pay Artemis a visit. I'd like to see if she has any other suggestions.”

We all trooped down to the Lunar Core, and for the first time since I'd met them all ten of my new crew were completely stunned into silence. The Lunar Core was still just as impressive as the last time I had seen it, and this time I noticed that it seemed to be just floating within its containment gyros. It also seemed to be thrumming with just a bit more power than it had been before my misadventures with the pirates.

Naida was the first to find her voice. “Celestia, are my eyes deceiving me, or is that a fucking moon powering the Yunikōn?”

I laughed at her lapse into crasseness.

Clara had her own terminal out and appeared to be studying a readout of the Core. “This is beyond anything I've ever seen. I take back what we were talking about earlier. This is beyond merely priceless. I doubt the entirety of the Termia Federation has enough wealth to even buy half of a single Yunikōn.”

“Wow, seriously?” That sounded impossible to me, but I also understood I wasn't a native.

“Seriously. These readings suggest that this Lunar Core could power an entire fleet of superdreadnaughts with power to spare. You never even see more than maybe five of those classification of ships in a single fleet because of their gigantic power requirements. And it's only supposed to grow stronger? This is beyond even a national treasure at this point.”

“Huh. Wait until you hear that I'm likely sitting on four more similar ships.”

Eve’s head snapped towards me so fast I thought she'd broken it. “Four?!” She repeated, incredulous. “The hangers are empty. Where in the universe are you hiding more ships with Lunar Cores?”

I shrugged. “According to my codex, among the items I picked up in the base were four Ship Summoning Tokens. The item description implies that if I use them they'll bring forth more Artemis class ships, and I'm assuming they'll also be equipped with Lunar Cores.”

This time it was Chie who frowned at me. “Ship Summoning Tokens? There shouldn't have been anything like that among the cevanti dowries and our personal belongings.”

I sighed. “Well, that's one of the reasons why I'm wanting to talk to Artemis. Consider, for a moment. I get reincarnated into a brand new life serving under a Goddess who's still being punished for stuff that happened thousands of years ago. Somehow, I ended up in a sector of space belonging to the same Empire who used to follow Artemis before becoming the entity known as the Cenvanti Scourge. I'm immediately beset by pirates, who have a nearby base that I just so happened to discover coordinates for.

“Inside that base I find the ten of you and four items that could produce more Artemis-class ships while simultaneously making an enemy out of a faction of nobles belonging to the same space Empire that fought against the Scourge. I don't believe in coincidences. If Artemis didn't have the Faith to do more than give me the Yunikōn, who else is pulling the strings to ensure I ended up in my current situation?”

Deafening silence answered my thoughts. A slow, weak clap finally broke the tension. When I turned to look at the noise, I found Artemis standing before the Lunar Core. Yet, she wasn't the Artemis that I remembered, brief as our interaction had been before my reincarnation. She looked like she had aged several centuries. She had a bit of a stoop, crow’s feet crinkled her eyes, and her once vibrant hair was a sickly white. Despite her appearance, she still carried her bow slung over her shoulders.

“Holy shit, my lady.” I breathed. “What happened to you?”

My goddess chuckled weakly. “This is what was left of me after giving you the Yunikōn. Believe it or not, I was even worse off before you hunted those pirates. But enough about me. I'll be fine soon enough. I'm far more impressed at your deductions, Celestia. I didn't expect you to be more than a musclehead.” She grinned at me when I huffed at her.

“Still, you are correct. There's another deity involved. I don't know who, but someone else has certainly been pulling some strings. Part of me wants to claim that they're benevolent, considering they just made it easier to obtain some of my ships. The larger part of me wants you to be cautious. Someone wants you to revitalize the cevanti. I don't know what their endgame is by doing so.”

I shrugged. “Well, that's about what I expected. I'll proceed under the assumption that this other God or Goddess doesn't have my wellbeing in mind.”

“Either way, this was beyond my expectations. I never imagined that you would come into contact with my old chosen race so early.” Artemis glanced at the triplets, tears in her eyes. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Sophia was the one who frowned. “I don't know what to feel. On one hand, you've put my people through a lot of pain. On the other hand, you're a Goddess.”

I broke in. “What happened, Artemis?”

My goddess sighed. “I'm not going to use the name of my old champion. He doesn't deserve the recognition saying his name brings. He was the greatest champion that I'd ever had, yes, but he was also a zealot. I knew this, but turned a blind eye. Thanks to him I was one of the most powerful deities; I didn't care that he took things to the extreme. I only cared about the Faith he was providing me.

“Ultimately, that was my greatest mistake. He took my unwillingness to reign him in as a sign that I approved. By the time I tried to get him to simmer down, it was too late. He and the cevanti were so strong that I couldn't stop him directly. Still, the others took that as a sign that I was growing too much. It didn't matter that I was just as powerless against him as they were individually. What mattered was that I allowed this to happen in the first place.

“Prometheus was the first to condemn me for harming his precious humans. Many deities flocked to him, just as eager to put me down as they were to stop my champion. My allies also didn't provide much in the way of help, as they understood the threat my champion had become even if they disagreed with what Prometheus was doing. I honestly don't know how many of them I can even consider friends these days.”

Antonietta spoke up next. “But you're trying to fix things, aren't you? Isn't that why you have Celestia now?”

Artemis shook her head. “I'll be blunt: I had no plans for Celestia to end up here. She's the only champion I'm allowed to have for the entire duration she remains my champion. My only concern is keeping her alive, and having her try to uplift the cevanti again is counterproductive to that desire. And yet… here we are. Whatever plans I had are now ashes. Right now, I don’t even have a directive to give. Thanks to whoever is meddling in my affairs and Celestia’s own accomplishments despite having been reborn for all of a day and a half, I’m basically stuck in limbo. I’m going to have to be reactionary in my planning for now instead of proactive. I can’t keep this up for much longer, so my only directive to you, Celestia, is don’t die.”

I saluted my goddess even as she faded and then popped out of existence like a soap bubble. Silence fell between us, broken only by the thrum of the Core. Sophia was the first to speak. “She felt kind of abrasive.”

“She’s worried,” Orochi countered. “Celestia is her lifeline. Do you know what happens to a goddess who drains every ounce of her faith? They fade away completely. It's the only way a deity can die. Artemis spent almost everything she had left on the Yunikōn. If Celestia hadn’t happened upon those pirates, it's likely that Artemis would have vanished. This is also why Artemis can’t say for certain whether or not whoever is meddling is helping. On one hand, they saved the Goddess of the Hunt from death. On the other hand, they’re deliberately twisting things to put Celestia into harm’s way.”

I was still staring up at the Core when I interjected. “Honestly, this is better for me. Fighting is all I’ve known, and I’m a woman of action. It would have killed me if I had been dropped in a quieter section of the universe. Besides, I’ve met you all. I can’t say it's all bad.”

Nadia came up to hug me on one side, while the triplets took the other. The kitsune came at me from the front, and even the engineers joined in from my back. “Just don’t forget to slow down every now and then. There’s no need to burn yourself out.”

I considered her words as I brushed one of her chilly scales with my lips. “You have a point. In my old life, I was always rushing forward with little regard for anything else. Maybe that’s why I failed to anticipate the event that ultimately killed me.”

I could sense that my new crew wanted to hear more details, but in the end they let me go. The Yunikōn was still in FTL and would be for another couple of days before it would hit the hyperlane. Despite the advancements of technology in this universe, space was unimaginably huge. Even with the Lunar Core providing a stupid level of power, it simply wasn’t possible for the Yunikōn to condense that travel any more than it already was. I asked the engineers to keep an eye on things while I retired to my quarters. I had just spent the past several hours in a state of heightened awareness, and I was quite honestly exhausted. It was kind of strange, because my tiredness was more emotional than it was physical or mental. It seemed my new body was handling the rigors I was putting it through quite well, but my emotional state hadn’t quite caught up yet.

To that end, I decided a bit of a nap was in order. As Nadia had mentioned, there was no point in just moving ahead full steam. I had time to unwind a bit during the month it would take us to complete our journey, and with ten souls now depending on me it was my duty to ensure that I was in the best form I could be. This time I disabled my armor before flopping into my surprisingly comfortable mattress. I had considered changing into proper nightclothes, but now that I was on the bed I actually didn’t feel like getting back up again. I stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes before I closed my eyes in preparation to drift off into sleep. The lights of the room somehow sensed my intention and turned themselves off.

I woke up an unknown time later, clammy and drenched in sweat. Phantom pain lingered upon my lower jaw, and I darted a hand up to futilely press against a wound that wasn’t there. My heart hammered in my chest and my breath left me in panicked rasps. A hand with flecks of lilac scales entered my vision and rubbed against my side soothingly, and it took me long moments to remember where I was and who that hand belonged to. My heartbeat finally began to slow and my breathing evened out. I turned slightly to see Naida watching me with gentle concern. Apparently she had slipped into my bed while I napped.

“Are you okay, Tia?”

I grinned weakly at the nickname before blowing out a breath. “Just a bad dream. I had thought I was handling things well, but apparently there are some wounds that are too fresh for me to forget.”

The siren’s heterochromatic eyes glimmered. “What happened to you, captain? What caused a reaction like that?”

I sighed again. “I’ve hinted that I was first a soldier, then a mercenary, right? That was my entire identity in my old life. I grew up a military brat– that’s a phrase generally used to describe kids who've had one or both parents in the military while growing up. So naturally I followed in the footsteps of both my mom and my father. I was driven. Almost too driven, maybe. I strove to be the best all the time. As a soldier in the military for my nation, I quickly reached the first lieutenant rank and led my own platoon. It was at that rank where I kind of stagnated.

“Ranking too much higher would eventually have me behind a desk more often than being out in the field. So when my second enlistment I was up, I allowed myself to be honorably discharged and I instead joined a mercenary group the military had worked together with occasionally. The plan was to save up enough money to buy a nice house with my childhood friend, Millie Millim. That all changed when my squad was betrayed by my mercenary organization. I won’t go into details, but I was already dying when I decided to put a bullet right through my head to hurry it along faster.”

Naida was still rubbing my arm. “You need something else to distract you. Tell me about this Millie Millim you just mentioned.”

I grinned, more than happy to. “Millie and I grew up together. She was a military brat like I was, but initially didn’t seem to have much interest in joining the army…”

***

Valentina Corjax sipped tea from a cup daintily. The room she sat in was decidedly minimalist. It was large to be sure, but it still had nothing more than the table she sat at and a few chairs. Once upon a time, this room had been excessively lavish. Rare paintings, the busts of famous cevanti, the exotic throw rugs… All of it had been sold over the years to help provide reparations for the sheer amount of damage the old Cevanti Scourge had caused. And while the Imperium of Cevanti had finally gotten to the point where the nation as a whole was no longer operating in the red, the Empress had never decided to refurnish the Imperial palace with its lavish trappings.

Empress Valentina herself was an absolute vision, marred slightly by the stress of running her diminished empire. She had faint wrinkles around her gold eyes and her dark hair had lost a bit of its luster. Every day that she woke up and saw her reflection she frowned. She was barely into the middle of her long life, and she looked like she had aged several centuries over the course of only a couple of years. A light application of makeup and tasteful dresses (today was a gentle maroon number) allowed her to cover some of the signs of stress, but as a young woman it still bothered her.

A gentle knock rapped at the closed door to the sitting room, and it opened without waiting for her acknowledgement. Another cevanti stepped in, this one definitely older than the Empress. Her hair and eyes were both black, and her white wings were hidden by an illusion. Her halo was also black, although it was slowly shedding its own illusion and returning to its typical golden hue. This was one of Empress Valentina’s spies. “What news do you bring me?”

The spy knelt. “My Empress, they’re gone. Not just the triplets, but all of the ten slaves the pirates were holding are also gone.”

Valentina frowned mightily. Naturally, she was too late. She had scrambled a task force of her own Royal Guard to hunt down the de Casteinau sisters and figure out where they had been taken. It had taken a month, but one of her Royal Guards had managed to locate the pirate base and had infiltrated it from the shadows. The guardsmen had been able to confirm the triplet’s whereabouts, in addition to several other potentially high value would-be slaves. Yet sometime after the discovery and leaving to await further orders, the captured slaves had been collected. Valentina tried hard to compose herself, ignoring the tears that threatened to fall. Once again, she was too late.

“I have additional news, Empress. The slaves weren’t collected by their new owners. They were rescued by a third party.”

Valentina’s head snapped up. The spy had a terminal in her hand, and she pressed a button. A hologram sprang to life on its surface, depicting a unicorn of all things. Her horn was sharp and her hair was an interesting two tone white and pink coloration. That hair alone would suggest her insane magical potential, but the stranger was also decked out in a complete suit of Unicorn Magus armor. She carried a Class III laser rifle in her arms and the image was captured with her midstride. Her eyes were an almost eerie, luminous blue. Valentina studied the image intently, trying to memorize every single detail she could see. Finally, she spoke. “Who is that?”

The spy shook her head helplessly. “We don’t know. The pirates were slaughtered to the last, and they had no time to destroy their security footage. The running theory is that the unicorn attacked so swiftly the pirates never had enough time to muster a proper defense. This suggests that she is no stranger to the battlefield, although the fact that she apparently rescued ten kidnapping victims also hints to a kind disposition. Security footage shows that she arrived in a strange ship that none of our experts have ever seen before. Judging by its size, it's a mothership of some sort and the weapon bulges we could see confirmed that it's heavily armed. The prefix was ALS, which is one that no other ship in the universe seems to possess.

“The more worrying thing was that House Orion surrounded the pirate base right as the unicorn and those she was rescuing were leaving. There was only a single recording device pointing towards the entrance of the base hanger so we don’t have the full picture, but that ship was able to completely break a destroyer and cripple a cruiser before presumably escaping. House Orion grunts proceeded to sweep the base and found nothing; no prisoners, no loot, it was all gone. We’re lucky that they didn’t think to check to see if the pirates had destroyed security footage, otherwise we wouldn’t even have this information.”

Valentina leaned back in her seat. This news was equal parts relieving and troubling. She was glad that House Orion had been denied valuable slaves and that three of her most influential nobles had survived, but she also now had an unknown unicorn flying a never-before-seen spaceship in cevanti space. A ship that sounded like it could potentially challenge an entire fleet. Unicorns in general had a reputation for being whimsical at best and outright teasingly malicious at worst, and now she had one who was basically nobility with no entourage that she had to deal with. “Any other information to go off of?”

“Judging by the mangled remains of a heavy power armor we found, the unicorn is capable of overpowering just about anything we could throw at her. A one-on-one confrontation isn’t advisable.”

Valentina snorted. “Make sure the entire military knows this: Do not antagonize that unicorn. For now she has done us a major favor by getting rid of pirates colluding with Orion, and she’s saved three of our own in the process. Dedicate what available resources we can spare towards finding out who she is and what her goals may be. If she’s aware that Orion is going to be after her, she’s not going to go anywhere near Jinkath. The next closest colony is going to be Laloria. Have the mercenary and knight guilds keep an eye out for her or her ship, and spread these orders to other colonies further out from Jinkath. Until she gives us a reason to believe otherwise, we’re going to believe that she means us no harm. Clear?”

“Crystal, Empress.” The spy saluted before leaving. Valentina rubbed the headache she now had forming between her brows. What a pain this day was turning out to be. Still, this could be an unexpected boon for her ailing empire. If she could manage to persuade that unicorn to stick around, provided that she wasn’t an issue… The Imperium might finally claw back some of its authority on the galactic voice. And so Celestia carried on about her best friend, all while unaware that the first of many potential enemies and potential allies were starting to take notice.