"By Megra’s balls!" I yelled out loud as the multiple broken bones in my body jolted me awake. The spire reminded me that all it had in store for me was pain. Pain was the path to power, and I was determined to attain it no matter the cost. Above me, the others from my drop ship moved toward the lower domes. Power came in different forms, and they needed to seize what they could. Unlike me, they would never have gotten past the first door of the trial ground—at least according to testing. Of the two thousand who had come with me, only five hundred had made it to the power pods. Those five enormous domes had become a testing ground for those who would serve as my support staff—if I succeeded.

Most of my contemporaries had jumped before me from their own drop ships and were flying toward the spire at a leisurely pace. The drop ships had been necessary only for getting past the defenders. I was the last to arrive, conserving what little fuel remained in my suit. Founder Forge Worlds hosted vast tower-like shipyards that built massive symbiont ships.

Upgrading symbiont ships had no known upper limit. They were capable of performing any function, thanks to their unique biomimetic cores and the linked, dynamic synthetic tritanium internal structures. These two technologies allowed symbiont ships to grow through combat, upgrades, and completing Founder missions throughout the galaxy. However, without exp—a unique Founder radiation that permeated all known space—symbiont ships could not grow. How exp was created, distributed, and absorbed by symbionts remained a mystery to all the powers in the universe.

We earned Experimental Xenotrophix Polymers, or exp, through the four virtues of Founder society. When exp accumulated to a sufficient amount, symbiont ships could level up and eventually evolve. The changes affected not only the ship but also their commanders. Only the Founders had possessed the knowledge to manufacture this technology, but they had been eradicated trillions of years ago.

Founder Forge Worlds had less atmosphere to allow for the entry and exit of massive objects. The shipyards were located in the highest regions. The coolest feature of these worlds were the crater mining platforms, where we observed giant asteroids being hurled at the planets, only to be caught and consumed by the maws of these mining platforms to produce ships. Standing on one, my mouth felt as dry as the Serengeti at midday. My knees buckled like a struck bell, and my vision blurred as I remembered the life-taking moments that had brought me here.

With a gesture, I disabled my heat shield. The gentle blue second skin that had covered my armor vanished, and I found myself in what felt like a hot oven. My skin, like a lobster plunged into boiling water, reacted painfully, but my nanoweave suit wouldn’t allow anything to escape. The medical nanites got to work as the damage continued.

The sergeant had reinforced Master Wilson’s lesson about thinking through pain. To me, it felt like plunging a hand into sulfuric acid and using that same hand to build a puzzle with missing pieces. The pain only ended when the puzzle was complete. Phantasm club owners even ran competitions to see who could finish the quickest.

I had been doing those phantasms since I was twelve. It was my first lesson from Master Wilson: "Pain is power. The more you can endure, the more powerful you will become." In reality, pain was the only currency poor people could afford—pain, perseverance, and a dose of patience.

The flight system used a mechanical-hydraulic system, which took ten seconds to boot up. I wished I had known that before they gave me the damn thing. At least it performed impeccably, even if it had a slight whistle. I was sure the sound only happened when there was an antimatter leak.

BOOM!

Everything went black as I smacked into the spire. My knees broke as they halted my velocity in less than a second. Thrown forward and upward, my shoulders both dislocated, and the sockets shattered against the large door. If I hadn’t turned off my heat shield, I would have died in the explosion.

I checked my weapons. My shoulder-mounted plasma cannon had melted into scrap. The physical pain would end in less than a minute as my nanites finished their work. I had acquired the cannon because it was a Predator staple weapon. I had always fancied myself a Predator symbiont ship. They were stealth-heavy torpedo fighters that hit hard and vanished. This particular symbiont type used to be called the Raider, but it fell out of favor when Aurora Vern Klause-Sirchildes went Supreme. Since then, we in the Hegemony had named most symbionts of this type after her ship: the Predator.

My small arms, including the thermite knife and hand-built door hacker, were ruined. I had planned on using the door hacker to bring my nonsystem items with me. It was a well-known and frequently used trick among potents who could never, in ten lifetimes, afford multiple system-recognized items.

The only thing that had survived was the GR-4000 Space Marine Gauss Rifle. It had interlocked mag rail chambers that could be extended for long-range sniper fire. The rounds were 5.56x45mm, standard Drop Trooper issue—high-penetration rounds good against people, tanks, and most high-tensile personal mechanized armor. Most importantly, it was a system staple and the reason for years of hard work in minefields. I was hauling enough reinforced material to create ten thousand rounds. My plan depended on my rifle and on sacrificing food and water. Starving for a day to defeat the machines in the shipyards was a small price to pay.

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I took a deep breath and initiated a neural node reset. For the next seven minutes, I remained in total darkness.

Mercy Gumede, the most brilliant person I had ever met, startled me over the edge when she asked, "What are you doing?" Only my magnetically locked boots saved me from plummeting to the lower levels. She was wearing system gear, its ethereal quality obvious. I wasn’t stunned by how it held her form—not at all. She was just a friend, after all.

I had been reassessing my plan. Those weapons had taken me years to acquire. I stiffened, then muted myself and sniffed hard. On her heads-up display, it would appear as though I had muted myself to cough. I hadn’t heard her and the others arrive. The full reboot of my suit had left me in darkness for about seven minutes. Seven minutes I had used to cry and process my loss. At the same time, I repeated my mantra to stay calm. Being frozen in a suit was nothing short of horrifying, especially when I couldn’t move an inch.

Master Wilson had taught us to process emotions as quickly as possible and to focus the intent of our soul on purpose. My purpose had always been clear: to become strong enough to protect my family, to build a dynasty so large and powerful that nobody could ever destroy it. There was only one way I knew to achieve that.

The way I had grown up was not something I would wish on anyone. I had done things I still wasn’t proud of, even now. The only people I knew with such power were the masters of our universe. The Supremes all had powerful families and influential people around them. As they say, "A rising tide lifts all boats." Becoming a Supreme was the only goal I had ever had—along with discovering who had destroyed my homeworld.

"I was just looking at the miner," I said, pointing to the massive, twenty-seven-kilometer-wide crater. They were only five kilometers deep, but they were far more impressive in action than I had imagined. Documentaries didn’t do these complexes justice. They were much more intricate than television ever showed. These miners, as we called them, processed all the material used to create symbionts and the various rewards earned through exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. According to research, they were the primary creators of all the loot we earned. Acquiring a Founder Forge World was always an expensive and dangerous endeavor, but every power in the galaxy was trying to claim one. A Founder Forge World was a symbol of legitimacy.

"More like he’s thinking of jumping. Isn’t that right, Foster?" said Peirce Montgomery Sirchildes-Batten, the annoyingly handsome, über-rich son of a generational military family with three living Supreme Commanders. His great-grandmother was still alive and running her own fleet. I never understood why she stayed in the Hegemony. She could have started her own country but chose to remain within its ranks. Peirce was only here to pretend he was doing this on his own—not counting the six augments he had. He was also wearing the latest military-grade suit from the system shop, no doubt bought for him by his mother.

Refilwe chimed in after him. "Yeah, Foster! Reduce the burden."

It wasn’t uncommon for people like me to commit suicide. The world was a harsh place, and when an ungodly number of poor people died in the late 2040s, the Hegemony Home Ministry had rebranded these deaths as a "noble sacrifice." The catchline had been, "Reduce the burden on the state."

I could have told them how I had outscored them on every test we’d taken or how my intangibles were sky-high. But they only cared that I didn’t have a family. Lineage in the Hegemony was second only to capability. As much as we liked to believe we lived in an egalitarian society, in practice, it was family first, second, and last.

"I told you, Bats, my family name is Anasazi. Just because I was raised in an orphanage doesn’t mean I don’t have people. I’m not a Foster or a Ward or whatever the hell you want to call us!" I said, hiding the fire in my eyes.

He could have flicked me off the shipyard, and I would have had to find another. But I hadn’t lied. I only knew my family name because it was the only thing found in my neural node. The manufacturer was from three sectors away in the Zeta sector, near the Hydoron-held Andromeda Galaxy. Over the years, I had uncovered only small fragments of information about what had happened to my people.

The Hegemony, for simplicity's sake, had divided the Milky Way Galaxy into ten sectors. Each sector was ten thousand light-years cubed. At the speed of light, it would have taken ten years to cross a single sector. Our arrival was unusual; outside of Founder-built gateways, sector travel took years. In my youth, I used to dream I was the lost prince of a powerful kingdom. But such nonsense was for those without the will to persevere. During the destruction of our homeworld, someone had placed a group of children on a ship and sent them toward human space.

The others chuckled at how easily I rose to the bait. I had shown them many times that I was willing to fight. But having the only thing tying me to a people taken away—even in word—was unbearable and demanded immediate action. Being tarnished by these pompous idiots was grating, to say the least.

If not for Mercy, I would have joined one of the other thousands of teams on the planet. Each shipyard could host five potents, but there were six types of symbiont ships available at our tier level. Often millions of potents tried, but the Human Hegemony government had increased the requirements, which meant that only 800,472 of us were on this world at that moment. Our purpose here was to acquire one of the six types of symbiont ships. These ships would become the strength we used to bend the universe to our will. Higher-ranked empires had access to more options in the types they could obtain.