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The space between them lit up, data slashes, kinetic pulses, brute force colliding with ghost-coded finesse.

Eugene snarled, deploying a swarm of crat-built mini-automatons, each bristling with neuro-stun prongs and acid-thread filaments. ‘Let’s see if your nerves can hold up against these, love.’

Miral responded in kind, her metanoids, unassailable and war-bred, flowered out of her body like molten mercury and struck with predator precision.

The first wave collided with her mid-air, the crat-droids bursting in silent explosions as her shielding sliced through them in synchronized arcs.

Eugene ducked, spun through the void, his ludicrous smoking jacket flaring. ‘You’ve got some upgrades. But you’re not me.’

‘Thank the stars,’ Miral muttered.

She surged forward, twisted, and drove her blade toward his chest. He blocked with a kinetic shield, laughed as it cracked under the blow, and then retaliated, not with physical force but code.

Miral’s HUD flared red.

.:: Intrusion Attempt Detected ::.

Eugene tried to hack her core, lines of invasive crat-script snaking through the digital space she protected.

Miral bared her teeth. ‘Wrong system, asshole.’

Her metanoids reconfigured, forming firewall fractals and counter worms that struck back with laser precision.

Coded sparks war erupted between them in swift and violent lightning arcs.

He screamed as one of her counter-hacks ruptured his neural shroud. ‘Fokk!’

‘You built yourself to be adored,’ Miral said, voice cold. ‘I am designed to survive.’

Eugene recovered, whirled back, bleeding lubricant across the vacuum, and extended a plasma blade from his forearm.

‘You’re going to wish you’d never crossed me.’

Miral twisted mid-air, dodged the cutting tool, and then hurled a core pulse that slammed into his chest, driving him backward into the edge of his own yacht’s shield wall. His frame convulsed, and sparks flew.

‘Give it up,’ she said. ‘Your leverage is gone. Your game’s over.’

He grinned, teeth slick with nano fluid and drifting bots. ‘My amusement’s just evolving, sweetheart.’

With a guttural roar, Eugene flung both arms outward, his synthetic muscles straining, and triggered the full barrage of armaments hidden in his grotesque pleasure yacht.

A sleek micro-missile cascade erupted under the hull, dozens screaming through the vacuum, tailing ion streaks behind them.

Miral’s head snapped up. ‘Incoming.’

The void lit up like a supernova.

A pulse flare detonated dead center, a vicious burst of blinding white and infrared heat. It swallowed her whole.

Her shields screamed warnings, overcharged and blistering, as she hurled backward through the zero-gravity space like a comet in recoil.

Her body spun, smoke trailing from one side of her shimmering armor. Her right pauldron was melting into slag, exposing sparking tendrils of synth-flesh.

She grunted, twisting mid-air to stabilize.

‘Xander,’ she said over the comms, her intonation hoarse but measured, ‘I’m getting my ass kicked out here. I might need you.’

Xander’s rasp came back, ragged with concern but steady. ‘I’ve got you. Can you last a few while I patch Savvine?’