"I know."
"No," she snapped, shaking her head. "I mean—look at this." She pulled a secondary readout forward, fingers moving faster than I would have thought possible under that kind of stress. "The harmonic frequencies, they're changingafteryou correct course. Every adjustment you make, it answers."
I stilled for half a heartbeat, studying the pattern. She was right. Every evasive maneuver, every shield modulation, every vector shift was being mirrored, countered, and refined. Whateverthiswas, it wasn't trying to destroy us. Yet. It was still learning how.
The bridge shuddered again as the storm tightened its grip around us; space itself rippled like a living thing. Somewhere in that impossible turbulence, I felt it clearly now, the Abyss's attention settling fully upon us.
Curious.
Patient.
Hungry.
I wrapped myself around Nadine, shielding her body with mine as another gravitational wave slammed into us, my aura flared black at the edges as it strained to hold back forces that should have torn the ship apart.
"The Abyss found us," I asserted, clenching my teeth as I fought the controls. "And it doesn't intend to let us pass unharmed."
Her fingers tightened in my shirt. Despite the chaos, despite the terror etched across her face, her mind was already racing, analyzing, adapting.
"We can't fight it head-on," she agreed. "Storms like this—if that's what it is—you don't overpower them. You ride them."
I looked at her, really looked. There was fear, yes. But beneath it raged a fire of resolve.
The ship screamed again as the storm closed in, space itself folding like a fist around us. In that moment, with the Abyss pressing in and Nadine's body steady against my chest, I knew we were out of time.
"Ride it," I repeated, more to myself than to her. The idea was insane. It went against every instinct I had ever honed. You didn'tyieldto something that hunted. You broke it, bled it, or disappeared from its reach. But this wasn't an enemy in the way I understood enemies. It was a system. And systems could be tricked.
I loosened my hold on the controls, just a fraction. The ship lurched violently as I stopped countering the shear, letting the storm pull us sideways instead of fighting it head-on. Alarms spiked in protest.
Nadine sucked in a breath. "Dravok?—"
"I know," I cut in. "If we're wrong, we die."
She didn't pull away. Her hand slid up my arm, bracing, grounding. "If you keep correcting, it keeps learning. You have to stop behaving like something it can predict."
Another wave slammed into us, harder than before. The bridge lights flickered. A console exploded in a shower of sparks against the far wall.
"Talk to me," I demanded. "What do you see?"
She forced herself to look back at the projection, clenching her jaw, her fingers shaking as she dragged new layers into view. "The storm isn't uniform," she concluded rapidly. "There aregaps, eddies. Regions where the resonance collapses in on itself. They're unstable, but they're… quieter."
"Dead zones," I muttered.
"Not dead," she corrected. "Unresolved. Like interference patterns that cancel each other out."
The ship screamed again as we were flung sideways. I dug my boots into the deck, muscles locking as my aura surged outward, its shadows snapping tight around the hull to keep it from tearing itself apart. Every instinct in me roared—ancient, violent, absolute.
Fight.
Not for survival.
Forher.
To shield her body with mine. To stand between her and anything that dared reach for her. To be the wall the universe broke itself against before it ever touched her. There was no hesitation. No doubt. No choice. This was what I had been made for.
The realization hit harder than the storm itself; not pleasure, not thrill, but a brutal, clarifying truth. Purpose. Alignment. The kind that burned away centuries of restraint in a single, searing moment.
The Abyss help anything that tried to takeherfrom me. Because this—this ferocity, this need to protect at any cost—was not something I could put down again. This thought terrified me far more than the storm ever could.
