Prequel Chapter 2: The Race Against Time

Hi, it’s me, James Fox—now Silverfoxx, my evil, ultimate villainess avatar. Yeah, I know, my name is cringe. Believe me, I have a plan to change it as soon as possible. It’s just… now isn’t exactly a good time.

Because, thanks to the order I just pulled out of my ass, we’re now racing against the clock.

"My troops are going to blow up this station soon, and I'm going literally nowhere because trying to ask for directions and dodging incoming disruptor bolts is apparently not mixed well.

The interior of the station wasn’t doing me any favors. Stray relativistic-speed pebbles and splashing plasma aside, there were no sign boards or friendly receptionists in sight.

Everywhere that was still intact was covered in dim lighting that flickered like the station was trying way too hard to be spooky, casting long, dramatic shadows across the hallway. The walls were covered with nonsensical spirals and cryptic symbols, eerily etched into every available surface. They also had this weird pulsing vibe, like they were alive—or trying to convince you they were.

Ritualistic? Probably. Random? Maybe. But one thing I was sure of: the guy who designed this place definitely succumbed to a case of eighth-grade syndrome.

“Xor'Kod, I need that turret destroyed!” one of my soldiers yelled, crouched behind a barricade beside me.

A moment later, a guy with a shoulder-mounted cannon popped up—only to be hit squarely in the chest.

“Xor'Kod!!!” another trooper screamed.

Oh. Xor'Kod is that guy, huh? May he rest in peace.

But before I could finish that thought, the trooper who’d been shouting grabbed Xor'Kod’s cannon, rolled into position, and fired.

With a big boom, the turret exploded, and just like that, my troops jumped out of cover like a bunch of fanatics and charged forward.

What just happened made me realize that now is definitely not the best time to start memorizing people's names. But, hey, at least I spotted a control terminal at the far side of the hall. Maybe this is the perfect moment to put my maxed-out hacking skill to the test.

“Cover me!” I ordered, sprinting toward what I hoped was the control room.

My troops responded quickly, adjusting their formation to clear out any obstacles. By the time I reached the control room, two of my soldiers had already emerged, leaving a few bodies in station uniforms sprawled inside.

By “uniform” I mean long robes over armor with more gold embroidery than a royal banquet. And the helmets? Smooth, expressionless masks with glowing eye slits. Like they decided that wearing upside-down colanders from the kitchen would make them look intimidating.

I looked away from them and grabbed the console, willing my nanomachines to get to work.

But instead of the usual puzzle mini-game that I’d played a million times, my vision transformed into something straight out of a programmer's worst nightmare. Millions of lines of code floated in a vast, dark void—but somehow, I understood them by instinct.

That clutter on the left? The door locking mechanism. The long strings of encryption routines? Those were guarding console access. And the tangled loops and recursive algorithms? Those were the station's security protocols. The smaller functions handled basic communication between the consoles and the main computer.

In a matter of seconds, I had complete control of the console, thanks to my maxed-out hacking skill.

I then tried to gain access to the main computer but was immediately blocked by its adaptive security system. The bandwidth between this console and the main computer wasn’t fast enough for me to push through the station's primary defenses.

So, I shifted my focus to a less secure subroutine—the surrounding network devices.

I hijacked several communication nodes, rerouting all internal sensor data to my troops. I searched for controls to disable the station’s internal security turrets, but came up empty. Great, they must be on a separate network.

Before I pulled away, I decided to take a look at the docking ports’ computer cache, which had far weaker security than the main station’s systems. I sifted through the data, pulling up a list of ships currently docked.

Freighter, nope. Construction ship, nope. Battleship… nice, but the jump drive’s being overhauled—pass…

Finally, I found something interesting. An advanced war cruiser. Fast, well-armed, and perfect for a quick escape, though it was still docked because its shield system was glitching.

Well, better than nothing.

I decided to pick the cruiser.

“Docking Bay 7!” I called the soldier stationed behind me as I disconnected from the console.

After we have the station's internal sensors in our control, and have a solid destination, the progress went a lot smoother.

There is no such thing as being ambushed anymore, well, more like we are ambushing them instead.

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The last corner for example, since we know the enemy is scuttling behind what used to be a medical facility, a few well placed plasma grenades quickly make short work of them.

I would like to say that everything from there went smoothly, but as we descended to the docking bay 7 entrance there was a heroic looking old man waiting for us.

It was a guy in a very neat white with golden trim robe, his ashen serious face giving off a vibe of “You cannot pass” thingy.

But without any greetings, my troops unceremoniously opened fire and tossed grenades at him. The disruptor bolts were deflected by some kind of invisible force, and the plasma grenades flew back at us.

I jumped out of the way, but still felt scalding heat from the grenade on my back.

With a wave of his hand, several of my soldiers flew off the industrial catwalk.

This guy seemed to be an enchanted soldier like me. So as a gamer, I decide to use the surefire technique which normally bypasses any kind of defense.

I remotely choked him across the hall.

The sensation of using this power for the second time was still foreign to me. It was beyond anything physical—like I had a new organ I didn’t know existed, suddenly spasming hard. The first time, when I flung people against the wall, it had been an instant release, sharp, quick, and intense. But this time, it lingered. The force kept clenching around the old man’s neck, gripping tighter with every passing second. It felt like I suddenly had a disembodied muscle popped into existence around his throat.

The closest thing I can compare it to is that one time I had a fever so bad I started dreaming in 4K. And not just any dream—oh no, it was a vivid dream about being climaxed as the opposite gender. Why did that even happen? I blame my sister for constantly blasting Sixty Shades of Grey on an audiobook while watching over me. My brain was clearly corrupted by her.

Anyways, the old man fell to his knees, one hand clawing at his neck. Then, without breaking his grim expression, he slowly raised his hand toward me.

Common sense kicked in. I didn’t know what he would do, but there was no doubt that something dangerous was about to happen.

Seeing the threat, I increased the pressure of the chokehold, and his neck snapped like a twig.

The sickening feedback from what just happened made my stomach churn, but the soldier beside me jolted me out of my thoughts.

“Captain, the sabotage team was successful. Estimated time to station destruction: five minutes.”

With that in mind, what was left of us scurried toward the ship in Docking Bay 7, desperate to get off this soon-to-be ground zero.

The engineering personnel in the docking bay were “politely” asked to leave—courtesy of my troops’ warning shots. Several of them were, unfortunately, not quite fast enough and were “accidentally” hit. At this point, though, I wasn’t sure what to feel anymore.

And since ethics had already jumped out the nearest airlock, I grabbed the wizard staff the old man had been holding. Special power? I don’t know, but it looked damn expensive.

Then, we quickly took control of the ship, and I was escorted to the bridge. Once there, I connected to the ship’s system through the nanomachine interface in the captain’s chair.

At first, it was just like when I was hacking—my other vision filled with a new void of codes and status windows. But suddenly, it was like a rush of data flooded my brain.

My sense of self blurred, and the ship became an extension of me.

I could feel coolant and plasma flow inside me, the antimatter generator thrumming with power. And the world around me became more... confusing. I could detect the entire electromagnetic spectrum and more: gravimetric waves, muons, neutrinos, and all kinds of strange particles I had never sensed before.

The ship's controls felt like second nature. I unlocked the docking clamp as if it were part of me. And the sensation of flight wasn’t like piloting—it was more like forcing plasma out of the thrusters in the opposite direction.

I shifted my focus to the external sensors and selectively beamed up my stranded troops from the station one by one, all while running a quick system check in the background.

I tried raising the shield around me like I was pulling a cozy blanket over myself. But due to its glitching, it flickers from time to time.

As I finished beaming everyone up, all 53 of my remaining homicidal troops were coming aboard. I pushed the thrusters as hard as I could, not caring what my plasma tails would do to the docking bay anymore.

My ship… No, I sped out, several enemy ships seemed to realize something was wrong and began turning their weapons.

But I was a step ahead. I fired everything at the ships around me.

Rail cannons tore into the destroyer on the port side and two frigates to starboard. An entire salvo of missiles launched at the battleship ahead of me.

The rail cannon rounds ripped through the destroyer and frigates with ease, and seconds later, they exploded. The battleship, however, put up more of a fight.

I could see that the electromagnetic activity from its main gun had ceased—a clear sign it had broken down—but it was still trying to bring another set of functional weapons to bear on me. Good luck with that. My rail cannons reloaded in seconds, and I delivered another salvo directly into the breach caused by the missile barrage.

This time, the battleship was done for. Its antimatter container exploded, creating a distinct white flash from within the ship. A fraction of a second later, debris from the battleship scattered in every direction.

With all that happening behind me, I was still accelerating at the maximum capacity of my ship’s thrusters.

Then it happened.

The station’s power core imploded.

The containment field inside the artificial singularity reactor collapsed. Its internal accretion disk expanded, cutting through the station’s structure. The reactor debris collapsed into the singularity, causing a feedback loop that rapidly expanded the event horizon.

In minutes, the once mighty space station was nothing more than a small black hole.

My old ships, still stuck on the station, were sucked in along with several crippled ships from both sides that had been firing just a moment ago.

The remaining functional ships tried to catch up with me, but they were too slow. I had already exited the station's gravity well. Just as I was about to initiate the Quantum Jump protocol, some shots from the pursuing ships were deflected by my shield. But a few slipped through the flickering barrier and slammed into my armor plate. The impact was jarring, and the ship violently shook.

Annoying, but not enough to stop me.

Without wasting any more time, I initiated the Quantum Jump and left the system.