Kael stared at the words on the console, brows furrowing.
WELCOME TO THE SYSTEM
AND GOOD LUCK—YOU'RE GOING TO NEED IT.
"Good luck?" he muttered. "Good luck with what?"
His voice sounded alien in the silence, like it didn't belong. The pod had gone still—too still. Even the quiet hum of standby power had faded, replaced by a low, pressing absence, like the air itself was waiting.
Then he heard it.
A slithering, mechanical hiss.
Kael turned toward the core housing just as its central seal cracked open. Not with a soft hydraulic release, but with a violent lurch, like something alive forcing its way free.
From the split came movement.
Tentacles—slick, gleaming, segmented lengths of alloy and synthetic fiber—uncoiled in rapid succession. One, then ten, then hundreds. Soon, the pod was swimming in them. They didn't flail—they searched, each one scanning the interior with eerie precision. A faint bioluminescent glow pulsed through their veins, matching the blue light now throbbing from deep within the core.
Kael's heart thundered in his chest. He backed away instinctively, eyes darting for a control switch, a safety lock—anything. But he already knew. Whatever this was, it had bypassed every manual override he could think of.
"AI, what's happening?!" he barked.
No answer.
Only the sound of the tentacles slithering deeper into the pod's infrastructure, disappearing into vents, wrapping around pipes, crawling under the floor plating. The lights flickered, then dimmed. The escape pod was no longer his. Not really.
One of the larger tentacles unfurled in front of him and snapped open the suit locker.
Kael's stomach dropped. "No. Don't—"
But it was already moving.
The tentacles grabbed his spacesuit with blinding efficiency and began dressing him—arms forced into sleeves, legs yanked into place, seals twisted and locked with metallic finality. His protest was drowned out by the clanking hiss of his helmet locking into place. A blue glow illuminated the HUD—static at first, then lines of foreign code he couldn't interpret.
Then the airlock hissed open.
Kael didn't even have time to scream.
The tentacles launched him out into the void.
He was weightless—tumbling head over heels into the silent dark. His breath hitched, adrenaline spiking. Before panic could fully take hold, another wave of tentacles erupted from the pod and caught him mid-tumble, snaring his limbs like a puppet. He was yanked into place, held still, suspended in space like an offering to something vast and unseen.
He couldn't move. Couldn't even blink.
All he could do was watch.
The escape pod—his escape pod—was changing.
The AI core inside pulsed again, faster now. Tentacles burst from its hull and darted into the black, seeking wreckage. Kael watched as they wrapped around chunks of the Prospector's Dagger: hull plates, shattered antennae, coolant conduits, even a twisted navigation panel. Everything they touched lit up with that same unnatural blue glow.
Then the debris started to move—no thrusters, no propulsion, just motion. The tentacles pulled the pieces in with impossible strength. Once near, the metal softened and reshaped, melting into the pod's frame like molten wax guided by invisible hands.
Kael could barely process what he was seeing. The pod stretched and thickened. Armor plates folded into place. A secondary canopy formed near the front. Thrusters repositioned themselves along an extended spinal hull.
It wasn't a pod anymore.
But it wasn't a shuttle either.
Twice the size it had been—sleek, curved, and alive in a way that defied explanation—it hovered in the vacuum, still pulsing with that strange blue light. The transformation was… beautiful. Terrifying. Impossible.
And yet—it worked.
Somewhere deep inside Kael, a spark of awe flickered. For the first time in a long while, he felt something close to hope. If it could do this… maybe survival wasn't just a string of desperate duct-tape fixes anymore. Maybe it was… possible.
But hope was a fragile thing.
The tentacles moved again, pulling him gently back toward the transformed craft. The new airlock irised open like an eye dilating in slow motion. Kael was drawn inside, deposited on a newly textured floor that hummed beneath his boots.
Then everything went dark.
No lights. No sound.
Then a voice.
It was not the AI's voice—not the cool, crisp programmatic assistant he'd known.
It was deeper. Warmer. Alien.
"Welcome to Level One of the System."
A single tentacle emerged from the shadows and slithered up his back before he could react. It paused at the base of his helmet, then struck with precision—sliding through the gap at the base of his neck and plunging a needle-thin extension into his spine.
Kael screamed.
Pain—cold and searing—spread through him in an instant. His limbs spasmed. His vision warped.
And then—
Blackness.