[POV Era]

  The air inside the steel whale was dense, heavy with the smell of ozone and something biological, like the scent of an ancient forest trapped inside a metal box. My new white metal gauntlets felt heavy yet perfectly banced, and the bck suit Chelsea now wore seemed to have granted her a confidence her eyes—once clouded by fear—now reflected with steely determination. We walked through corridors with no corners, only elegant curves that closed around us like ribs of obsidian.

  [Turn left at the next energy node. You are three hundred meters from the Central Command Chamber] the system’s voice resonated in my skull, clear and omnipresent.

  [Link signal integrity is optimal. Data transfer protocols are standing by for your physical proximity.]

  “It sounds like your friend is in a hurry to get there,” Chelsea remarked, her voice slightly deeper due to the combat suit’s thermal resonator. “Era, do you really think we’ll find answers here? This whole pce… it feels like a tomb that doesn’t yet know it’s dead.”

  “We have to believe it, Chelsea,” I replied, my gaze fixed on the blue map floating in my vision. “There’s nowhere else to go. The clock is still ticking down, and this ship is the only trace we have left.”

  We reached a massive opening. The door—if it could even be called that—dissolved into a mist of silvery nanobots that parted to let us through. The Central Hall was an immense dome, its ceiling appearing to be made of liquid gss. At the center, there were no chairs or control consoles, but rather a circur ptform floating above a well of blue light.

  We approached cautiously. When I touched the edge of the ptform, the ceiling lit up, projecting a holographic image of Earth. It was both beautiful and terrible. The pnet rotated slowly, but its surface was mottled with hundreds of red points pulsing like open wounds.

  “Those points…” Chelsea pointed to a massive concentration of red lights over what used to be our city. “They’re the whale ships, right? They’re everywhere.”

  “Not just the ships,” I murmured. “They’re activity centers. They’re the Harvest silos.”

  I stepped closer to the ptform, feeling an almost magnetic pull. My hands, protected by the white gauntlets, brushed against the surface of light.

  [Administrative interface detected. Initiating forced extraction of the whale ship’s core memory] the system announced, and this time its voice was not a suggestion. It was a decration of digital war.

  [Era, maintain physical contact. Data volume is massive. Proceeding with direct neural download.]

  “What? Era, wait!” Chelsea shouted as she saw my body tense unnaturally.

  I felt an electric shock that did not travel through my skin, but through my thoughts. It was intangible, a cold, cutting tide of information that flooded my mind like an overflowing river. The reality of the Central Hall began to blur. Chelsea spoke to me, waved her hands in front of my golden eyes, but her voice faded, becoming a distant echo, a whisper drowned out by the roar of a thousand memories that were not my own.

  My knees buckled, but I did not fall. I entered a state of conscious sleep, a sensory paralysis where time and space ceased to exist.

  Then I began to see.

  The first recording was not a clear image, but an amalgam of sensations and light. I was seeing through the ship’s eyes. I was in the same Central Hall, but the environment was absolute chaos. Dozens of tiny beings, no rger than small dogs, with pale skin and multiple thin limbs, ran frantically from one side to another. They were not the monsters I knew; they were fragile, fast, almost pathetic.

  A voice echoed throughout the ship, a shrill, polyphonic sound I could not understand, but the tone was unmistakable. Emergency. Panic. They were fleeing from something, or perhaps trying to avert an imminent disaster. Then, as if someone had flipped a universal switch, all the beings froze. For five seconds, the silence was absolute. No movement. No chirping.

  After those five seconds, they resumed their functions, but the urgency had vanished. Now they moved with robotic calm, a soulless precision that chilled my blood. They were no longer frightened individuals; they were tools executing an order.

  The recording jumped. Now I saw everything from an external camera. The whale ship hovered in Earth’s upper atmosphere, surrounded by bck storm clouds. I watched as smaller vessels detached from the leviathan’s sides. Inside the descent capsules, those tiny beings writhed. Their bodies swelled, their bones broke and reformed at impossible angles, their skin hardened until it became the grayish armor I already knew.

  Before my eyes, the tiny beings transformed into Ganuts and Dreadnoughts in a process of accelerated, painful metamorphosis. They were biological weapons dropped from the sky to clear the nd. They were not invaders; they were the pesticide.

  The final recording was the clearest—and the most disturbing. The Central Hall was empty, steeped in a reddish gloom. Only one of those tiny beings remained. It was kneeling on the floor, sobbing with a sound like that of a wounded child. Between its thin limbs, it clutched an object glowing with an inner light: a red egg, translucent in surface and veined with bck, far rger than the creature itself.

  The being stared toward the doorway with pure, animal terror. From the shadows of the entrance emerged something the recording could not capture clearly, a distortion in space, a blot of absolute darkness that moved with predatory grace. Without a sound, the tiny creature was dragged toward the st small ship. The egg was left forgotten on the floor as the creature and its invisible captor abandoned the steel whale forever.

  “Era! Come back! Please, answer me!” Chelsea’s voice struck me like a physical blow.

  I snapped out of the trance. My lungs—though I did not need them—filled with air in a desperate gasp. I colpsed onto the circur ptform, my forehead slick with cold, synthetic sweat. My system flickered with data overload warnings, but the information was already etched into my memory banks.

  “I’m here… I’m here,” I gasped, feeling my joints tremble.

  Chelsea was gripping my shoulders, her face contorted with anguish. When she saw my eyes regain their normal glow, she let out a breath that was almost a scream of relief.

  “You were gone for five minutes, Era. Your body started glowing and emitting a hum… I thought you were going to fall apart,” she said, helping me sit up.

  “I saw… what happened,” I murmured, trying to organize the images in my mind. “They weren’t warriors, Chelsea. The Ganuts… they were them. They were transformed. Used to empty the pnet.”

  “Who?” she asked, gncing around with renewed paranoia.

  I did not answer. My gaze drifted to the floor a few meters away. There, resting on the obsidian surface of the Central Hall, was the object from the final recording.

  A red egg.

  It was exactly as I had seen it in the ship’s memory. About the size of a human torso, its shell appeared to be made of organic crystal, pulsing with a rhythmic scarlet light like a heart beating in the dark. The bck veins running through it seemed to move beneath the surface, feeding whatever was growing inside.

  “It’s the egg,” I whispered, stepping closer.

  “Don’t touch it, Era,” Chelsea moved in front of me, her hand hovering over the combat suit’s cannon. “If that’s what I think it is, we don’t want it opening in here.”

  [Proximity analysis initiated] the system intervened, its voice returning to the cold precision of data.

  [The object possesses a unique biological signature. It does not match Ganut or Dreadnought patterns. A high concentration of stable biotic energy is detected in the core. Era, this object is not a remnant. It is an Alpha-css specimen. It is the reason this ship was abandoned.]

  I stopped a step away from the egg. The heat radiating from it was comforting and terrifying at the same time. In the recording, the creature had protected it with its life. In reality, the egg watched us with its scarlet pulse.

  “Sora isn’t here, Chelsea,” I said, looking at my friend with deep sadness. “But now I know why the clock reached zero. The steel whales have fulfilled their function. The world no longer belongs to them… and it doesn’t belong to us either.”

  I stared at the red egg, knowing that whatever y inside was the key to everything that would come next. The silence of the ship was now absolute, but in my head, the countdown seemed to have been repced by the heartbeat of that new being, waiting for its moment to awaken amid the ruins.

  “What are we going to do with it?” Chelsea asked, her voice barely a whisper in the vastness of the hall.

  “Take it with us,” I replied, extending my hands toward the red glow. “It’s the only bargaining chip we have in this new world.”