A soft, repetitive beep pulsed through the cracked visor—faint, weak, and fading. His systems were collapsing, one by one, their icons blinking dim red across the shattered interface. The inside of his visor flickered in bursts of static. A small oxygen warning blinked in the corner, but he ignored it.
All around him, there was nothing but endless, colorless space.
The "Pathless Realm"—the designation had been whispered in fragmented data across outdated satellite feeds, and now he understood why. It was a graveyard of lost things. Twisted remains of ships, drifting stations, fractured panels, bent metal, fragments of things that once had names—all suspended in a dense, electromagnetic fog that made his skin crawl beneath the armor.
His body floated freely, exoskeleton locking up to preserve energy, keeping him stable amid a silent, motionless drift. Gravity was irrelevant here—there was no reference, no direction. Just entropy.
The remnants of their warp attempt had torn the space around them. Mira had vanished—gone in that blinding supernova of resonance and gravity, her last light etched into his retinas. He had survived, somehow. Barely.
Caleb's fingers twitched.
A low groan escaped from his lips as he forced his visor to reboot. Static cleared in jagged streaks, offering glimpses of the ruined wreckage around him. His ship—or what was left of it—floated like a mutilated skeleton. Scraps of the hull rotated slowly. Sparks burst in the void like dead stars trying to scream.
He squinted. Something was heading toward him.
A ship.
It was spiraling out of control, barely holding course. Panels bent, one thruster completely blown out. It was on a collision path. Caleb clenched his jaw, extending one trembling arm. His energy flickered, sluggish—but alive. He summoned his Evol.
Gravity bled from his palm, cushioning the ship's impact. It slowed, scraping past his body, and bumped gently against a large piece of wreckage. The motion triggered another explosion from the hull—debris pinged off his armor. But he didn't flinch. His eyes had locked onto the vessel.
Inside...
He could feel it. A gravitational echo—an essence that called back to him like a distant echo of his own power.
Someone like him.
Another version.
A distorted memory cracked through his consciousness—his own face staring back at him in another place, another war, another timeline. His chest tightened.
This wasn't coincidence. This was a sign.
Guided by instinct, he used some of his power to nudge the damaged vessel away from the epicenter of the Protofield anomaly. It wouldn't survive much longer in this cloud of radiation. But if the pilot inside woke up—if that version of himself was intact—maybe it would change something.
He pulled himself upright, floating in space like a lone god with failing stars beneath his feet.
"Mira..."
He whispered her name like a prayer.
The space around him jittered. Cracked. Like the loading screen of a broken simulation.
He could still feel her. Somewhere.
Time was collapsing, threads unraveling. The exoskeleton on his back began to hum. Warning glyphs surged through his visor—don't use it, too unstable, critical failure imminent.
He ignored them all.
Caleb curled his fingers into a fist and centered himself. There was no ship. No AI. No calculated navigation. Only his will.
No coordinates. No certainty. No return.
Just her.
He pressed his palms together, and the space between them began to bend, light distorting around his fingers. He could feel it—his Evol tearing through dimensions like paper. This wasn't warping anymore. This was compression.
Collapse.
His vision blurred. Blood pooled at the edge of his lips. The field around him shuddered, reality fracturing like glass.
He smiled through it. A painful, burning smile.
If this was the end of him, let it be in search of her.