The art of deception, I was learning, wasn’t about grand lies. It was about the meticulous curation of truth, a subtle game of show-and-tell where you proudly displayed the obvious so no one thought to look for the hidden and profound. Keeping my actual Class and the full breadth of my Traits to myself was second nature now, a defensive habit as ingrained as breathing.

  It helped that my particular brand of paranoia was practically Fleet standard. No one liked being forced to bare their soul to the System’s invasive scrutiny. The conscription bands weren’t just shackles; they were mandated violation, which was why every soul aboard this ship, from the lowliest greaser to the Captain herself, guarded their private stat sheets with the ferocity of a starved Noxian hound.

  My new Class, Force Sage, was a treasure trove of utility that made my fingers itch with creative energy. The most immediately vital was Energy Expansion. The name was bland, but the effect was a miracle. It didn’t just add to my core energy; it deepened the well, widening the reservoir from which I could draw.

  Crafting the enchantment lattices for the powered armor was an energy sink of monumental proportions. Without this trait, weaving the intricate spiritual and technological matrices for even one suit would have left me a drained husk for a week. To manage three in a fortnight? Sheer, impossible madness. I began to understand why even the steel-ranked technomancers were so terrifying a threat.

  It finally made the ludicrous timelines of traditional magitech smiths make a grim sort of sense. A year for a single, masterwork suit or weapon? Suddenly, that didn’t sound lazy; it sounded like a brutal necessity. My advantage was a freakish regeneration rate and a team of savants who, for reasons I was still figuring out, had decided my mad project was the most interesting thing on the ship.

  Without Dienne-Lar’s unnerving precision with golem-core logic, Braxis’s darkly humorous but brilliant insights into structural integrity, Murphy’s sensor calibration genius, Kessler’s grounding in spiritual harmonics, and even Braddoc’s grumpy, dwarven assistance with the forge-work, I’d probably still be on the Mark Two prototype, surrounded by scorched failure and my own tears. Their help was a gift, a stunning display of camaraderie I hadn’t expected.

  The revelation of why they were so eager to help, however, was a little more pragmatic. Outside of combat upgrades and maintenance, a droner’s life was a soul-crushing cycle of monotony punctuated by sheer, pants-wetting terror. My project was a welcome distraction from the endless diagnostics and simulator runs.

  Not to mention, working on ‘original’ designs had sparked their advancement. Ironically, the mark four was actually their biggest gains. Apparently, the system rewarded creativity, and the Mark Four’s horrific potential was certainly creative. Even Dienne-Lar was designing a new drone now that utilized some nonstandard configurations, inspired by the monstrosity he helped create.

  Then there was Stasis. Now that was a trait worthy of a storybook. It allowed me to lock a defined volume of space-time, freezing everything within in a perfect, immutable moment. For a technician, it was pure magic. I could halt a failing power conduit mid-arc, swap out the fried regulator, and release the stasis without so much as a flicker in the lights. I could examine a micro-fracture under full operational stress.

  The tactical manual, of course, listed its primary use as a battlefield medic’s ultimate tool: stop the bleeding, freeze the poison, preserve the dying until a proper healer arrived. A noble purpose, to be sure. But in my day-to-day, I was far more excited about its applications for keeping my coffee hot and my soldering iron from cooling down mid-circuit.

  But the big one, the game-changer that terrified and exhilarated me in equal measure, was Matter Conversion. Boy, where to even start? It was almost easier to list what it couldn’t do. First, it allowed me to manipulate the metaphysical ‘tier’ of simple materials.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  By spending a considerable chunk of energy, I could nudge a piece of copper-tier steel up a grade, refining its molecular structure. Conversely, by degrading it—say, turning it back into common tin-tier iron—I could recoup a surge of energy. It was a built-in battery, a way to refill my reserves in a pinch if I had some high-quality scrap to sacrifice.

  The second function was even more audacious: I could shift materials along the periodic table. Push a base element up a few atomic numbers, expending vast amounts of energy? Possible. Slide a precious metal down into a cheaper, more common one, and get a nice, healthy energy kickback? Also possible. It was like having a personal, alchemical fission/fusion reactor in my soul.

  The catch, of course, was scale. The energy costs weren't linear; they were exponential. Trying to convert a kilogram of lead into gold wouldn’t just fail; it would probably turn my insides into a miniature supernova.

  But I’d discovered, almost by accident while fiddling with a scrap of wiring, that like most of my abilities, I could channel this insanity through my Copper-tier micro-swarm. Individually, each nanite could handle a minuscule, manageable conversion—a few micrograms at a time.

  But collectively, my swarm of millions could process a respectable amount of material, creating a smooth, controllable flow of energy. I could feed them scrap zinc and, with a low hum of effort, get a trickle of pure copper and a pleasant warmth of replenished essence.

  That particular trick was going into the mental vault, right next to my real Class and potential. The implications were too staggering, too… lucrative. My swarm had grown denser, more intelligent, and I could see the ghost of the Terraformer class I’d rejected in my current powers.

  I didn’t have the ability yet, but the path was clear. Molecular recombination. Taking something like water and effortlessly separating it into hydrogen and oxygen. Compressing carbon into diamond lattices or perfect carbon nanotubes.

  I wasn’t just a technician; I was a walking, talking alchemical forge.

  Yeah, and if I were a slaver, I thought, a cold knot tightening in my stomach, I’d burn entire worlds to get my hands on a slave who could, given time and raw material, print antimatter cores or transmute garbage into starship fuel. It was the ultimate argument for my personal crusade. And it was the ultimate reason to keep my mouth shut.

  My limits were my essence capacity, time, my current rank cap at Copper, and the terrifying certainty that if Fleet Command ever got a whiff of this, they wouldn’t just lock me in a box. They’d dismantle me into my component atoms to see how I worked.

  No. I wasn’t telling a soul. Not even David.

  I knew why. I understood the conflict raging behind his steel-colored eyes. He wanted to bond. I could feel the pull of it, a taut wire between us thrumming with a potential that was both terrifying and achingly sweet. But that damned necrotic essence, that creeping death he carried within him, made it an impossibility. A death sentence for me, and then for him.

  And as long as that specter hung over him, his life didn’t have any room for me. Oh, it had room for Petty Officer Second Class Gabrielle Reynard, the promising droner. It had room for ‘Rose,’ the gearhead who fixed his toys and built clever suits of armor. But for Gabrielle, the woman who wanted him? There was no space left between his duty, his pain, and his scrotting honor.

  It meant his loyalties were divided in a way mine could never be. I cared for him deeply. But I was also a realist, forged in the crucible of betrayal and loss. I knew it was entirely possible for a man like Charlie David Wasserman to shove his own desires into a deep, dark hole, clap me in irons, and deliver me to the highest bidder—be it Fleet or the Church—if some high-minded doctrine convinced him it was ‘for the greater good of the universe.’

  Don’t get me wrong, I cared about the universe. It was a mess, a beautiful, terrible, chaotic mess, and it had handed me a pretty cold deal. But I still lived here. Every breath was a stolen gift, and I intended to keep on stealing them. I just wasn’t brainwashed enough to believe that some committee of admirals or a conclave of priests had a better right to decide my future than I did.

  Or that my eventual bonded and I did, if the man in question ever, in the immortal words of the sage Manboobs, ‘got his head out of his ass.’

  I wasn’t ready for bonding yet, either. Not until the necrosis was handled. Not until I was stronger, closer to his Gold rank. But I needed to know he wanted it. I needed to hear him say he was willing, that he would, when the stars finally aligned for us.

  Until that day, I couldn’t trust his loyalties. And I definitely couldn’t trust his discretion with a secret that could rewrite the galactic economy.