Laying on the ground, partially covered in shattered glass, Lian is in awe.
The silver robed cultivator sprints around the room, sparks flashing as her sword blocks an endless stream of bullets as she charges down an increasingly panicked enemy.
There’s a single diagonal slash of silver and she leaps away, her movements some strange combination of attack and dance as she weaves through attacks and charges down endless enemies.
But even as she flows between one enemy and the next it’s clear that the volume of fire leveled at her is slowing her down, even as she makes the act look effortless more than once she’s forced to abruptly change directions to take a hit that sends her flying.
But as another orange robed cultivator falls with a scream and the echoing sound of gunshots attempt to drown out the pure tone of ringing steel, thudding footsteps rushing past her head shock Lian out of her stupor as she realizes exactly how bad her situation is.
She needs to get out of here now!
Pushing herself up, the scrapper distantly notes that the boilersuit actually protected her from the shards of glass, and beneath the mental static of thought halting fear she’s begrudgingly grateful for the garment.
But as she hurriedly tries to brush the glass off of herself she hears more footsteps and looks up to see a large crowd of mortals wearing a piece of red ribbon around their neck are rushing toward the fighting instead of away.
It takes a second longer for her to notice the weapons in their hands as she presses herself against the metal scaffolding of the destroyed call box to stay out of their way.
“This is it! Remember to stick with your squads and watch your lines of fire! Guard the AC teams at all costs!” One shouts, and as Lian watches them rush by she sees groups of people running alongside, carrying large high caliber mounted guns, drop the stand to the ground and attach the weapon to the top.
Anti-cultivator weaponry.
Hurriedly the scrapper breaks into a crouching sprint to the corridor that leads back home. But as she runs she can see the mortal soldier wrack the slide of his weapon before the space is illuminated by orange tracers shooting across the room toward his enemy.
She sees the silver robed cultivator slow to a crawl as she struggles to deflect the new rounds that explode on contact with the blade. Until finally she gets out of the line of fire when she leaps ten stories up, dodging and deflecting bullets as she does, simultaneously fighting an orange robed opponent.
Then Lian gets into the hallway, the deafening sounds and glow of tracers quieting as adrenaline allows her to sprint despite previously struggling to walk.
With this much violence there must be at least one ship attempting to flee, and there’s no guarantee any new ships will be arriving anytime soon with this revolt going o–
Then she hears something, a dim hissing roar from back the way she came, the echo suggesting that it came from much further away than the atrium and was much louder.
And Lian feels her heart stop in her chest.
She knows that sound.
She’s heard that sound fifty thousand times before, and every instance is playing in her head as she struggles to deny her senses and stops, looking around wildly for an air vent.
One of the most effective ways to empower a poison cultivator in game is to do a series of missions which –in lore– turns the entire station into a poison jar and sacrifices everyone inside to it to empower however many cultivators were involved. The larger the station the more power given.
Whenever they succeed in doing this, there is a cinematic, of purple smoke erupting from the vents, people choking on air, dying, then dissolving into black goo.
Then she sees something coming from the air vent, wisps of smoke so black it eats the light around it that coil and writhe as if alive.
Lian steps back.
She needs to get out of here. She needs to get out of here now!
Then she sees the orange flow of tracers shooting down the hallway behind her head before feeling a hand grabbing her by the shoulder and dragging her around a corner.
It’s the silver cultivator, robes riddled in burns and bullet holes with the flesh underneath looking only slightly better.
In her hand is a bloody handgun, which she pokes around the corner and fires six times before looking back at the scrapper.
“I’m commandeering your ship. You will do whatever it takes to bring it to operation and pilot me to the Silver Firmament se–”
“RUN!” Lian screams, ripping herself out of the cultivator's grip as she stumbles into a sprint back into the hallway that had just been illuminated by tracers with reckless abandon.
There are more tracers, and the sound of fighting, but as she turns a corner the gunfire falls silent, leaving only the sound metal clashing against metal.
As she runs she passes by confused and frightened faces of people with no idea of what’s going on, growing more desperate as the smoke gets thicker.
Then she runs around a corner and sees a hallway choked in black smoke, creeping toward her hungrily as the people within it writhe silently on the floor.
This route is impassable, she needs to think of a way around.
She can see some of them meltin–
She can't think about it, she needs to find a way around.
After a subjective eternity her mental map provides a solution and Lian starts running on.
But as she tries to lift her leg, a body pushed far beyond what it should be able to do finally gives way, sending her to the floor in a heap.
On the floor, she has no choice but to take a breath of the toxic smoke, and can feel the substance attempt to kill and strengthen her in equal measure, ripping through her body toward her center where it meets and homogenizes with its like.
Then she feels her body start to melt.
The scrapper struggles, mind sending orders her body cannot obey as she struggles to both breathe and hold her breath. Splattering black tar on the ground with every cough.
Then the cultivator appears in a blur of dirty silver, hand clenched around a growing patch of red at the bottom of her ribcage.
She looks down at Lian in disdain, but her attention is quickly redirected to the smoke as she realizes it’s there.
“What is–”
“Next hallway. Take a left. Hurry!” Lian interrupts with a wheeze reaching up for help getting up.
Instead she sees the cultivator look back down at her with an irritated expression on her face, crouch down, and throw the moral over her shoulder like a bag of flour.
“Guide me!” She shouts as she seems to struggle to get up to speed. But even injured, she runs as fast as a horse, sliding around corners barely losing speed.
Lian complies, leading them through the mazelike twists of nearly identical hallways toward their destination. As they run the smoke only grows thicker, pooling along the ground ever higher before erupting from vents and filling hallways in large bursts.
But they manage it.
“There!” Lian screams, pointing at the hole in the wall she’s spent so long living in, grunting in pain as she’s unceremoniously dropped onto the ground.
Pushing herself up, she sees the cultivator stagger and lean against a wall for a moment before straightening up and struggling to enter a shallow crouch.
There’s a moment of stillness, followed by a flash of silv–
It flickers.
And Lian blinks in shock as the blade is embedded halfway into the wall, failing to cut the entire way through.
But the scrapper doesn't have time to think about that, shoving past the cultivator, she takes a deep breath and holds it before throwing herself into the thigh high smoke and into the vent, scraping on the corners in her haste to get through.
However, inside the vent there’s almost no smoke, only faint wisps flowing by her face in otherwise clean air.
She doesn't exhale, only straining to pull herself faster through the vent as she hears the cultivator struggle to enter the vent behind her.
But as she crawls through, she can hear it.
A faint hissing roar, like the combination of a buffeting wind, acid dissolving working to dissolve something, and a rattlesnakes rattle.
The wind picks up, pushing against her face, and the noise gets louder.
She pushes harder, feeling the skin on the palms of her hands tear as she struggles to go just the slightest bit faster.
The noise gets louder and louder, like an oncoming train it overwhelms everything else as the vent around her begins to vibrate.
But as it becomes so loud she’s sure it’s right on top of her she realizes she’s at the other vent and drags herself through and to her feet.
Exiting, she grabs the starmap from where it’s still sitting next to the vent and half crawls half staggers toward her lifeline. Throwing over the lever bar and yanking open the circular airlock door, she roughly places the starmap inside before reaching out and grabbing the airlock door to it shu–
Then her eyes land on the vent, screaming with the wind, and she remembers the person who should have been following her.
A few harrowing seconds later she sees two hands reach out, gripping the sides of the vent and pulling.
“Hurry!” She shouts as the metal around the cultivator’s fingers deform like wet clay, followed by her sliding out in one move with great force.
But before the cultivator even has a chance to stand a black smoke erupts into the room, completely obscuring that entire side of the room and quickly spreading toward the pod. But even as it approaches Lian holds off on closing the door, knuckles white as she watches the smoke for–
The cultivator erupts from the toxic cloud, flying through the air toward the pod in an unsteady leap.
She doesn't land gracefully, legs giving out on the landing and tumbling end over end into the pod as the scrapper wrenches the door closed and throws the locking bar back to its proper place.
She’s just in time, the black crashing into the airlock window the instant after the airlock is made airtight.
Lian takes a second to breathe as she looks through the double windows to the swirling black, only now noticing sparks of green lightning, and gives a hesitantly relieved smile.
It’s gas, trying to get through a door designed to stop gas from getting through. They’re sa–
There's a spark of green lightning and the station side airlock window cracks.
Lian yelps.
Not safe!
Not at all safe!
The scrapper scurries over to the pilot’s seat of the escape pod, stepping over the still collapsed form of the cultivator, and throws herself into the chair, looking over the switches she’d spent months repairing.
…How does she start this up?
A shard of panic spikes past the already high watermark of ambient fear but she works past it.
She’s worked on this thing for months, she’s seen it done in the cockpit view of the game, she’s got a basic understanding of how things work.
She can figure it out.
“Ok… Ok. Uh…” She mutters, looking over the dozens of switches in front of her. “Switch from external to internal power.”
The lights go dark.
“Shoot. Um.” She flips the switch back. “Switch from reactor to SMES bank, then switch to internal power.”
The lights flicker but stay on, having been slowly trickle charged from the small amount of power still flowing through the room, and a warning light begins blinking on the console reading ‘power plant excess load.’
Well… at least it means they’re on internal power. But she’s seen the internals, with how thick the cable is to those explosive bolts are holding them to the ship, she needs the reactor on before she has the power to blow them.
“Alright, good start.” She mutters, flipping more switches that cause the various screens on the console to illuminate with simple readouts. “Instrumentation online. Water pump online, electrolyzer online.”
A hud appears on the glass in front of her as she hears an ominous crackling around from behind and Lian chooses not to turn around.
“Magnetic containment rings online. Igniting fusion reacto– Shoot!” She shouts as the lights flicker and ten warning indicators flash on the screens and lights around her. “Couldnt you have had a control module that’s easier to find!?”
Calm. What’s it saying?
Lian looks around at the blaring warnings.
“Insufficient reactive mass? Uhhh. Oh. Low pressure.” She says with a squint, turning a dial on the readout screen until she sees the instrumentation for the reactor, the flickering screen showing a red bar marked pressure in the red and slowly rising. “Alright. I think I just need to–”
“You think?” The cultivator says with a slight groan from the floor. “What do you mean you–”
“Shh!” She hisses back as she hears something hissing against their ship’s side of the airlock door.
The pressure bar climbs past a point and becomes yellow, meanwhile Lian continues flipping systems online if only to do something and make sure they’re not going to die of cold or asphyxiation a few hours after they disconnect.
“Life support online, O2 tank reading full, air scrubber online. Temperature control online. Flight control and thrust vectoring online…” She stops for a second as the pressure bar flips to green. “...Igniting reactor.”
She presses the button again and holds her breath.
Pressure drops.
Lights flicker.
Glass cracks.
Then a switch on the dashboard automatically flips from SMES to reactor power and the readouts show temps spike.
Yes!
Yes!
“Yes! Reactor online!” Lian shouts, grabbing the control yoke and flipping up the covered button to blow the bolts. “Impulse thrusters online! Disconnecti–woah!”
There’s a muffled thud, followed by almost complete silence, and the sudden feeling that she’s falling.
She grips her control yoke in fear, until she sees a loose screw lift from some hidden place, and she realizes that she’s not falling.
She’s flying.
The scraper floats out of her chair, having not strapped herself down as their disconnection from the station means they're no longer within their artificial gravity envelope.
But as they drift away from the station, their pod slowly rotates until the station takes up the entire view. Where she can see the yellow light of the station’s windows fall away to a darkness more complete than the void around them.
Watching the lights get snuffed out, one by one, Lian realizes that since she woke up here, there has always been noise, human and mechanical endlessly beating at her senses, all gone.
They continue to rotate, spinning until she’s looking back at the airlock they’d undocked from, and can see the toxic cloud venting into space in long strands like the limbs of some massive tentacled creature exploring the space.
Watching the airlock drift away in that defending silence, Lian glances at the cultivator who’s floating beside her, gripping the back of the chair.
And wonders what happens next.