Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-

  The alert from my wristlink wasn’t a chime or a buzz; it was a cold spike of dread driven straight into the bone of my wrist. The ship’s node, its usually blandly efficient system text, was screaming in my veins. My heart, a tired drum trying to beat past the constant, grinding ache in my meridians, seized for a terrified second.

  Taera.

  The thought was a white-hot brand. The XO was forming her spiritual root. Right now. Alone in her quarters, with no one to ground her, no one to talk her down from the psychic shockwave of awakening a part of your soul you never knew was sleeping. I’d seen strong men shatter on that threshold, their minds unmoored by the sheer, terrifying volume of their own existence. And Taera… she was the ship’s keel. If she broke, the Crow would flail.

  I was already moving, my body responding with a speed that belied the necrosis slowly petrifying my channels. Boots slammed against the deck plating, a frantic, off-rhythm tattoo that echoed in the empty passageways. The ship was on a post-raid lull, most of the crew either celebrating their survival in the mess or catching hard-earned rack time. The silence was a presence, thick and watchful, broken only by the hum of the life support and the ragged sound of my own breathing.

  Stupid, arrogant, I cursed myself, shouldering past a conduit junction. You knew this was coming. You felt the energy building around her quarters for days, a pressure cooker of potential. You should have been camped outside her door with a medkit and a stun rod, not brooding in the gym trying to out-lift your own damnation.

  My panic was a live wire, sizzling under my skin. It was more than just concern for a commanding officer, though that was part of it. It was the debt. The unspoken compact between us. She’d given me a berth on this rust-bucket of misfits and miracles, looked at my corrupted soul and seen a weapon she could still aim. She’d given me a purpose beyond my own slow rot. And she’d given me her—the brilliant, terrifying, and utterly unique creature known as Roisin Gabrielle Reynard. To lose Taera now… it was unthinkable.

  As I ran, the notification on my wristlink finally resolved past the initial adrenaline surge. I skidded to a halt near a maintenance airlock, my good hand slapping against the cold metal bulkhead to steady myself. I stared at the text, my mind struggling to parse it through the fog of pain and fear.

  Congratulations! You have unlocked the secret achievement, ‘Heart’s Hope’.

  I blinked. A secret achievement? Now? Of all the cosmically inconvenient timing…

  I read on, my breath catching in my throat.

  This achievement is for preventing the Force Key from being forcefully or unethically bonded, shutting down a potentially galaxy-wide fate chain. The Game of War congratulates you for holding the line against the destruction of a significant section of this universe.

  This achievement grants you a 10% resistance to the corrupting effects of acid, toxic, radiation, and necrotic essences.

  The world tilted. I closed my eyes, the words burning against my eyelids. Ten percent. A number. A tiny, insignificant number when weighed against the ocean of black, devouring entropy coiled around my soul. My Purify trait was a lone man with a bucket trying to hold back a tsunami, and I’d had to submerge almost my entire Life Essence affinity just to keep the tide from rising too fast.

  Does this mean I can finally turn the tide? The hope was a fragile, dangerous thing, a shard of glass in my chest. Can I finally start to push it back? Or is this just the universe giving me a slightly bigger bucket, a brief respite before the wave finally crashes over my head?

  The questions were a vortex, but they were secondary. Taera was primary. The achievement could wait. I pushed off the bulkhead and ran again, the new notification a confused, buzzing weight in the back of my skull.

  “Taera!” My voice was raw, stripped of its usual gruff authority, as I pounded on the beautiful, incongruous wooden door of her quarters. “Taera, I need your open-door policy right now!”

  I heard her voice, faint and muffled, filtered through the thick wood. “David? Come in. I am taking a bath.”

  Relief, cold and dizzying, washed over me. She was coherent. She was… bathing? The incongruity of it was almost as shocking as the panic. I shoved the door open, the well-oiled mechanism sighing softly.

  I charged through her meeting room—a study in organized chaos with data-slates and star charts—and her overly-wooden bedroom. I barely registered it; my focus tunneled on the open door to her bathroom. I burst in.

  And stopped dead.

  Yep. Taking a bath. She was submerged to her shoulders in a sunken tub that looked like it was carved from a single, massive piece of obsidian. Steam curled lazily in the air, carrying the scent of mineral salts and something sharp and clean, like crushed mint. The lighting was soft, glinting off the damp, pale planes of her shoulders and the flawless, seamless skin of her neck and head. Her featureless face turned toward me, a perfect, smooth ovoid that was somehow still expressive.

  "Crap. I’m sorry." The thought was a reflex, a lifetime of ingrained chivalry slamming into the biological reality of a taer.

  She shrugged a little, a ripple across the water’s surface. She waved a slender, elegant hand toward a polished marble stand that held towels and toiletries. “Sit. It’s not like I am showing anything or have anything to show. Tomorrow’s a big day. This was one of the most successful raids we have had since the new captain took over. What’s wrong?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I shivered, a full-body tremor that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. The aftermath of the adrenaline crash, the constant pain, the weight of the achievement—it all coalesced into a wave of pure, unvarnished exhaustion. I sank onto the stool she’d indicated, the cold marble seeping through my fatigue.

  She saw it. Of course she did. Taera missed nothing. Her head tilted, a gesture of avian curiosity. “David,” she said, her voice losing its relaxed cadence, sharpening with concern. “What’s wrong?”

  The words tumbled out, stripped of any pretense. “I just got a secret achievement, and it’s… I don’t know. Did your benchmark update?” I held up my wristlink, the text glowing ominously in the steamy room.

  Taera shook her head slowly, her smooth features somehow projecting a frown. She rose from the water in one fluid, unconcerned motion. Water sluiced off a body that was a sculptor’s study of ideal form, utterly devoid of secondary sexual characteristics. As seamless and unadorned as a river stone. She grabbed a large, plush towel from the stand. She didn’t bother to conceal herself—there was nothing to conceal—but old habits died hard. I turned my head respectfully aside.

  She finished wrapping the towel around herself and sat on the edge of the tub, facing me, her legs folded primly. “Scrot,” I muttered, the curse a soft exhale. “I hoped it would be enough.”

  “You hoped what would be enough?” she asked, her voice gentle but relentless. “And while we’re on the subject of things I’ve been too polite to ask… how did a Paladin become infected with necrosis essence and risk deviating despite holding to his vows, anyway?”

  The question hung in the air between us, direct and unavoidable. The steam seemed to still. I sighed, the sound coming from the very bottom of my soul, a well of old shame and older pain. “I was stupid. Do you know the paladin path?”

  She nodded, the towel shifting with the motion. “It’s not exactly a secret, just really hard to hold to. The vows are… absolute.”

  “I… broke with the church.” The admission was ash in my mouth.

  She nodded slowly, her smooth face intent. “I was wondering how you came here like a mercenary to fight rifts. Obviously, there was no way I’d say no to you joining the troopers, but I thought you were on a mission from the church to protect the girl.” She paused. “A mission of penance, perhaps.”

  I sighed, the memories rising like ghosts. “There were parts of the church that just struck me as wrong. Not the core scriptures, not the Divines. But the political maneuvers, the backroom deals, their acceptance of certain non-scriptural ‘traditions’ as commandments, their tolerance of certain evils for the sake of stability…” I looked at my hands, at the scars that littered my knuckles.

  “You must have been closer to the core of the church than most paladins. Holy Knight?” she asked.

  I nodded, the title feeling like it belonged to another man, in another life. “Yes. For ten long years. I was born a commoner, which meant a lifetime of service in exchange for training. Most Paladins get to stay in their shiny armor, go fight demons, and never see the seedy underbelly. But as a Holy Knight… I was the church’s garbage man. I was exposed to the dirt every day.”

  My voice grew hard. “But all too often, politics allowed even the truly evil—the ones who hurt children, who broke families for sport, who sold indulgences for sins they themselves encouraged—to simply get shuffled around to some other unsuspecting parish. That was the start. Then there was guard duty outside the chambers of the higher clergy. You hear things. You learn the price of miracles. I still believe in the Divines, their light is… It’s real. But I couldn’t support the institution anymore. I couldn’t be their blunt instrument.”

  She was silent for a long moment, absorbing the confession. “Did that cost you your protections? The divine grace that shields Paladins from corruption?”

  I shook my head. “No. That’s a common misconception. The Divines, both true priests and Paladins of Gold Core and above, still extend their protection to any Paladin who hasn’t truly lost his path, even if he’s not connected to the church. My faith wasn’t the issue.” I took a ragged breath. “My arrogance was. I chose to throw away that protection. I Ascended to Divine Paladin before I gained my Gold Core. The class path was just… there, available to me at Bronze. I took it. I thought it was just another of the church’s flawed, controlling doctrines. I thought I was special.”

  A bitter laugh escaped me. “I wasn’t special. I was an idiot. As a result, I didn’t gain my Refined Body—the full physiological transformation that makes a Divine Paladin nearly immune to lesser corruptions—when I took the class. And I voluntarily stepped out from under the collective protective aura of my order. I was a Divine Paladin in name, with a Bronze Core’s resilience. I was a knight who’d thrown away his armor before walking onto the battlefield.”

  “And then,” she prompted, her voice soft.

  “And then, like the complete, vainglorious moron I was, I decided to prove my superiority. I went solo into a Necrotic Rift, one ruled by a Necrotarsic Lich. Full Black Core. A being that had devoured worlds.” The memory was a cold knot in my gut. “I didn’t just walk in. I announced myself. I challenged him. I thought my pure will and my shiny new class would be enough.”

  She sighed, a whisper of sound. “How’d you escape?”

  I shook my head, a slow, painful movement. “I didn’t.”

  “Huh?” For the first time, I heard genuine surprise in her voice.

  “He found my… audacity… amusing. He didn’t kill me. He infected me, knowing I’d never be able to afford a Gold-Core Life Purification. He corrupted four of my meridians with a precision that was itself a form of torture.” I held up my right arm, the one that housed my energy blade emitter. “Both of the major channels in my fighting arm.”

  I gestured to my left leg and left wrist. “And one here, and here. To ‘balance’ me, as he said. To make every movement a reminder. And then he let me go, laughing. He thought it was an absolutely brilliant joke. Said he’d never had a paladin deliver himself as a long-term art project. Of all the dark-hearted, angst-ridden liches in the universe, I had to find the one with a truly cosmic sense of humor.”

  She was silent for a long time, the only sound the drip of water from the tap into the bath. “Well,” she said finally, “you are still alive. You haven’t deviated yet. That has to be worth something.”

  “It’s worth a great deal,” I admitted. “It’s worth every second of this pain. But I just completed a secret achievement. It gave me a ten percent boost against all corruption essence. I was hoping that was… enough. Enough to tip the scales. Enough to let my Purify trait finally gain ground.”

  “Enough to prevent your deviation?” she clarified, her head tilting. “Which would have, I’ll remind you, failed my first benchmark quite spectacularly.”

  I nodded, a wave of crushing disappointment washing over me. “Yeah. But apparently, it just wasn’t enough. The System notification didn’t come with a ‘Congratulations, you’re cured!’ banner. And now Gabrielle…” I trailed off, the fear for her a sharper pain than any necrosis. “She’s threatening to try to directly alter the essence when she hits Iron tier. She doesn’t understand. Even with her Forces affinity, the necrotic essence could jump the gap, infect her core until she hits Gold tier herself. She could burn out from the inside trying to save me.”