He turned and dragged the trolley behind him,. The corridor ahead was quiet and dimly lit, the air heavier than usual.
Halfway back to his room his phone buzzed again.
It was Zelaine.
"Are you gone?"
He smirked despite and typed back a message using his thumbs.
"Apparently there are repairs going on, so no."
He hit send, and put the phone in the pocket, and kept walking.
On the other side of the branch, in the visitor reception wing, Zelaine's screen lit up with his reply.
Her eyes went wide.
'He's not gone yet.'
A sharp and genuine grin split her face, the kind she only showed when nobody was looking. She didn't spend any time delibearting on the decision.
She turned on her heel , abandoning the welcoming committee pretense without as much a glance.
One of Nastrus's junior researchers opened his mouth to ask where she was going but quickly decided against it when she looked at him.
He closed his mouth.
Zelaine moved fast, long strides down the corridor, vaulting over a maintenance drone that beeped indignantly behind her.
She skipped the elevator entirely and took the service stairs.
By the time Atiya reached his door and swiped the panel, she was already there.
Leaning against the frame, arms crossed, one eyebrow arched, a chip halfway to her mouth like she had been there the whole time.
"Miss me already?" she asked enjoying the taken aback expression of Atiya.
Atiya stopped mid-step. His trolley bumped into his heel.
He blinked once and said.
"You literally just texted me thirty seconds ago."
Zelaine shrugged and crunched the chip loudly. "Super speed is a perk of being the strongest one left in the branch." A pause. "Also boredom. I am hella bored looking at those famous scientists or whatever."
She pushed off the wall, stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, and dropped onto his bed like she owned it.
She kicked her shoes off, stretched her arms wide, and released a long contended sigh.
"Repairs will take until midnight," she said, patting the space beside her. "Means you're stuck for few hours why don't we play some games."
Atiya stood in the doorway and looked at her for a long moment.
Then he sighed in defeat and ended somewhere closer to fond, and dragged the trolley inside.
He shut the door behind him and dropped onto the bed beside her.
Zelaine immediately extended the paket of chips to him. "Eat. You've been staring at linear algebra too long. Your brain needs grease."
He took a chip and crunched it slowly.
'I like this flavour.'
"Barrier's down for repairs," he said, more to himself than to her. "Feels weird. Delegates just arrived and suddenly no one can leave."
Zelaine's chewing slowed for half a second. It was barely noticeable.
Then she shrugged, a little too easy about it. "Probably nothing. Stations glitch sometimes. Or maybe the guests brought bad luck with them."
****
At the 49th Belt outpost, Wels sector.
Z. Zextire stood in the dimly lit command room with his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the main tactical screen.
Multiple feeds cycled across the display in split view, grainy drone footages alongside thermal and Yai signature scans.
The anomaly was unfolding in real time across a barren asteroid crater roughly three hundred kilometers from the Ansep facility.
"It's literally impossible for them to be this coordinated."
His voice was low and clinical, but the tension sitting in his jaw gave him away.
One of the scouts, a young woman in a reinforced suit, leaned forward and pointed at the central cluster on screen. "Sir, the investigators on site are all puzzled by their movement patterns. They're converging on this exact point as if something called them there."
On screen, there were numerous yai beasts present visible. Lion-headed brutes with molten-maned necks. Grey sea-deer with crystalline antlers that split the ambient light into sharp painful rainbows.
Towering spindly forms like living tripods, ant-like mandibles clicking at the air. Scaled serpents coiled around boulders. Winged things that looked like it had the power to shred storm clouds.
Zextire zoomed in on one of the feeds and studied it carefully.
"Yai-beasts do have leaders, those are specimens that have ascend or evolve beyond the rest. That part is understandable." He gestured at the full spread of the screen. "But these are not a single species, there are multiple yai species meeting there. Predatory hierarchies between them should have collapsed into slaughter the moment they came within range of each other. That is not what is happening."
The scout nodded, her expression grim. "Nothing about this adds up."
Another feed shifted focus and pulled their attention.
A small group of corporate researchers in white coats were advancing toward the gathering horde, scanners raised, moving with reckless enthusiasm that had historically preceded a great number of avoidable deaths.
Their voices crackled over the open comm channel, bright and completely unbothered.
Zextire stared at them for a moment.
"Those are psychotic scientists who are too fascinated to remember that safety protocols exist and they are the ones that made them in the first place," the scout said.
"They are always the first ones to die in horror stories." Zextire pinched the bridge of his nose. "Get through to them. Now."
"On it, sir."
He switched channels without waiting. "Security detail, intercept those researchers immediately. Pull them back by force if you have to. Do not let them get within fifty meters of that perimeter."
On site, the researchers were already too close.
The wiry one with augmented goggles was pointing at the convergence with barely contained excitement, with his voice pitching upward. "Look at this coordination. Could they all be waiting for a single leader? Or multiple leaders working in concert? Lion-heads, grey sea-deer, the tall ants, those winged fractals, just how many evolved Yai-beasts have gathered here?"
The woman beside him clutching a portable analyzer laughed, the sound carrying a nervous edge. "Evolved specimens aren't that uncommon on their own individually, but the number of distinct species has exceeded twenty now. What could possibly be commanding all of them if not a high-class anima?"
The group edged forward another step.
"Ouch."
One of the scouts yanked his arm back sharply and stared at his wrist. A small iridescent butterfly had somehow pushed straight through the reinforced thermal suit fabric as though the material simply wasn't there, and was now latched onto his skin, its abdomen pulsing steadily as it fed itself eith his blood.
"How," the man said, his voice cracking. "I'm in a full thermal suit."
A researcher nearby leaned in close, eyes wide behind his visor. "Is that a Yai-beast? Wait, that looks like a caterpillar stage, but these aren't supposed to exist anywhere near the 49th Belt. The ecosystem here doesn't support—"
A sharp voice cut across the open comms, urgent and clipped.
"To all the clever idiots down there, Vice Commander has ordered you all to come ba—"
The scout who had been speaking stopped mid-sentence. His gaze lifted skyward.
The clear black expanse above the crater had darkened in seconds.
"Oh shit. Run!"
A massive horde of black butterflies descended like a living storm front, each one marked with vivid crimson slashes across the wings.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
The air thrummed with the low collective sound of their wings, with intense pressure.
The researchers and scouts bolted. Boots pounded regolith, suits hissing as they sprinted for the nearest outposts and emergency airlocks.
Behind them, the gathered Yai-beasts, the lion-heads, the sea-deer, the tall ants, every evolved alpha that had converged on the crater, did not move. They simply stood and waited.
The butterflies reached the fleeing figures first.
Nothing stayed clear after that.
The horde enveloped everything in a writhing black and red shroud. Screams erupted from the beasts, raw animal wails and screeches that sounded almost human, roars that choked off into wet gurgles.
The sounds rose and fell in a sickening rhythm, like a choir being slowly drowned one voice at a time.
In the command room above, Z. Zextire stood in front of the feeds with his face pale under the blue glow of the screens and said nothing.
Twenty minutes passed.
Then the cloud began to thin.
The butterflies lifted away in perfect formation, spiraling upward in tight concentric rings until they vanished into the void as completely and suddenly as they had appeared.
The crater floor was empty.
Not empty of life. Empty of everything.
"What the hell," Zextire breathed.
One of the scouts who had made it inside stumbled through the outpost airlock, ripped off his helmet, and vomited onto the floor. The researcher beside him stared at the feed with his voice shaking.
"They ate everything! Bones and all in twenty minutes."
Zextire's comm crackled while Inteja's tight furious voice came through it.
"Zextire. Report. Now."
He opened his mouth.
Then stopped.
On the feed, blood was dripping from the butterflies still hovering above the crater floor, falling in slow deliberate drops, thick and almost syrupy, each one carrying a faint sickly violet glow as it struck the regolith.
The drops did not scatter. They did not soak in.
Within seconds, intricate Yai formulas etched themselves into the blood-traced perimeter, interlocking runes, fractal matrices, symbols that twisted and shifted like living equations.
The air above the circle shimmered and heated up with yai energy.
One of the researchers who had barely made it back to the outpost whispered through chattering teeth.
"They made a Yai circle. Out of the blood of..."
He couldn't finish the sentence.
The circle flared.
A pulse of violet-white light erupted upward, silent but violent enough to rattle the outpost viewports from kilometers away.
The remaining butterflies, those still hovering or clinging to invisible tethers in the air above, were yanked toward the center all at once as though pulled by a single invisible fist.
Bodies crumpled and dissolved before they reached the ground. The entire horde funneled inward like water rushing down a drain, tightening, compressing, disappearing into the blazing core.
In less than a minute the last black and red wing vanished into the light.
The light snapped off.
Silence settled over the crater.
The circle held for three heartbeats, the blood blackened now and cracked like cooled lava along every traced line. Then it crumbled all at once into fine ash and scattered on the thin wind.
Nothing remained.
Not even a drop of blood.
In the command room, Zextire stared at the feed with his knuckles white against the console edge.
The scout beside him swallowed audibly.
"Sir," she said quietly. "That wasn't feeding."
She looked at the empty crater on the screen.
"That was a ritual."
****
"I have something to tell you," Shilial said. "And it's serious."
Cale looked at her sideways. "You always have something serious to say about me. What is it now."
"You made a promise to me on our engagement."
The moment she said it, he remembered. The full weight of it landed before she could say another word.
"Don't tell me you..." He stopped. "It was only once."
"By the chain of Artem I bind my oath. The oath to free our child from the shackles of parents who forced a marriage out of convenience. Our child will not be a tool of the family." She looked at him directly. "That is what you said."
Shilial's voice was steady and quiet, saying the words that reminded him of an oath he took at their wedding night.
A long silence stretched between them.
"I remember," Cale said. "And I will uphold that oath. Even at the expense of my life."
"The time has come."
It should have been a moment that opened into something longer. There was more to say, more that needed to be said, and both of them knew it.
Cale drew a breath to begin.
Then his eyes caught something through the window.
Something moving fast. Something that should not have been there.
His eyes went wide.
"Duck!"
The bang swallowed the word whole.
The room exploded.
And from that moment, nothing would be the same.