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She thrashed, elbowed, and drove her foot back into the solid mass.

Whoever it was, whatever it was, did not flinch, held her tight.

She could not move.

Whoever it was turned in milliseconds, shielding her from the impact.

The force of it still jolted them backward as they were both flung wide by the extensive energy shockwave.

Her eyes rolled upward, and what she saw wasn’t human.

She jolted at the spectral vision, one of a giant lycan spirit.

Golden and violet, rippling with kinetic energy as if stars and wolf were meshed and made flesh.

The shimmer of his spirit plane masked his face, but she saw his frame, broad as myth, radiant with an aura so dense it bent the starlight around him.

They rocketed backward through the field, her rescuer carrying her with little effort, it seemed, past shrapnel and debris.

They rocketed through the pressure quake, moving so fast they stayed ahead of the central blast radius.

Debris zipping past, the heat singeing the edges of her armor as her rescuer twisted mid-flight.

The dissipating discharge rolled over them just as they crossed the outer edge of a vessel’s docking bay.

A feral jolt of loose rubble smashed into her helmet.

Her skull rattled, her vision blurred.

She tried to shout, to claw away, to understand.

The spectral arms didn’t loosen.

They surged into an airlock.

She was dimly aware of the heavy alloy door sealing behind them, keeping out the flame tsunami still churning over them.

She and her deliverer floated in zero g until the compartment re-pressurized.

Giving her time to lift her woozy head to glance outside the viewport.

To where explosions lit the dark in the far field, sending shockwaves rippling through the void and turning wreckage into molten dust.

She stared, breath caught, blinking behind her helmet.

Whoever dragged her from the debris field had just saved her life.

She also spotted her pinnace still visible, hanging a few hundred klicks away through the outer portal.

Safe, untouched, rocked slightly by the dissipating blast wave.

Her rescuer’s feet touched down with a whisper as gravity sensors kicked in.

Next, they were tracking through the foreign ship.

Still inhisarms, she caught flashes of her new surroundings through the trek.

Lights pulsed underfoot, forming a path in a soft violet glow that rippled like an invitation.