The item materialized between them and cast blue light across the room.

It was an axe. Single headed, the blade wide and slightly forward swept, the metal of it carrying a color that sat between steel and ice, shifting depending on the angle. Blue-green energy ran through the blade in veins that didn’t follow any forged pattern, moving the way lightning moved, finding its own path. The handle was wrapped leather over a metal core, the binding tight and practical, and runes ran along the flat of the blade in a language Noah didn’t recognize but the system clearly did. The whole thing crackled faintly. Not loudly. Just enough that the air around it smelled clean, the way air smelled after a storm.

Lucas looked at it for a long time without touching it.

Then he reached out and the axe moved toward him the way Sophie’s mace had moved toward Sophie, the way all of them had moved, finding the hand they were built for.

The moment his fingers closed around the handle the blue energy surged, running up his arm in threads that followed his veins, and his eyes went the blue color they went when he was at full output.

He looked at it.

"What does it do," he said.

Noah looked at his system screen.

"Valor," Noah said.

---

[Weapon Name: Valor]

[Rarity: Mythic Relic]

[Status: Legendary]

---

"Start from the beginning," Lucas said.

"Core ability," Noah said. "Endless Storm. You know how you burn through your own energy generating lightning? This pulls from the atmosphere instead. Electrical fields, residual charge in the environment, anywhere there’s ambient electricity. It supplements what you produce with what’s already out there."

Lucas looked at the axe. Then at his hand where the blue threads were still running. "I’ve been limited by my own reserves my entire life."

"Not anymore," Noah said. "Lightning Battery. Everything you generate, absorb, or that exists near you gets stored in the weapon. Nothing gets wasted. Excess charge goes in and comes back out when you need it."

Lucas turned the axe once in his hand, slowly. "And in a storm?"

"Storm Engine," Noah said. "Storms, rain, charged air, wind. Any of that massively accelerates recovery and amplifies output."

Lucas looked at him. "On that planet. If we can create atmospheric conditions."

"That’s your problem to solve," Noah said. "But yes." He looked back at the system. "Static Harvest runs passively. The weapon pulls ambient electrical charge from the environment continuously. Outside of combat, your stamina restores on its own just from being near anything electrical."

"The Eternal Pyre," Lucas said, looking at the walls around them, the molten energy running through every surface of the fleet.

"You’ve probably been charging since you touched it," Noah said.

Lucas looked at his own arm.

"Overload Channel," Noah continued. "When you put out massive amounts of lightning, right now that goes through your body. That’s what costs you. This routes the majority through the weapon instead. You get the output without the physical toll."

"Any one again?," Lucas said.

"Perpetual Tempest," Noah said. "In an extended fight, energy regeneration surpasses consumption. Sustained high output lightning for as long as the fight runs."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Lucas looked at Valor in his hand, the blue-green veins moving through the blade, the strange, almost runic symbols catching the light.

"The longer the fight goes," he said slowly, "the stronger I get."

"That’s what the system says," Noah said.

Lucas said nothing for a few seconds. Then he looked at Noah with the direct look he gave everything.

"The spar," he said. "You remember."

Noah blinked. "The." He stopped. "Lucas."

"You said yes."

"That was before Aurelius showed up at Earth and we left the planet and I revealed four items and there was a party and." Noah stopped. "I forgot."

"I know you forgot," Lucas said. He didn’t sound bothered about it. "Do you want to go now?"

Noah looked at him.

Lucas was holding a weapon that ran on perpetual storm energy and got stronger the longer a fight lasted. He had just spent months fine tuning everything the shadow dimension had done to him. He was looking at Noah with the calm patience of someone who had been waiting for this specific conversation for a while.

"Yeah," Noah said. "Let’s go."

"Good." Lucas looked around the training room. "This won’t work."

"No," Noah agreed. The room was maybe twenty meters across. They’d put it through the hull in thirty seconds.

"I know someone," Lucas said.

---

The common area had maybe sixty people in it when they walked through, Eclipse members and task force personnel split between tables, the comfortable noise of people who had been on the same ship long enough to find their rhythms. Conversations, card games, someone in the corner had found an Ares instrument and was attempting to produce something musical from it with limited success.

Lucas scanned the room.

"Jemima," he called out.

The conversations adjusted, the way they did when one of the two faction heads said a name in a room. A girl at a middle table looked up. Mid-twenties, Eclipse insignia, the expression of someone trying to determine whether being called by Lucas Grey was good news or complicated news.

Lucas gestured her over.

She came. Stood in front of them both with her hands at her sides.

"Tell him your ability," Lucas said, nodding at Noah.

She looked at Noah. "I create vacuum boundaries," she said. "I can define the edge of a vacuum, make it solid enough to stand on, walk on, push off from. Like a floor but made of nothing." She paused. "There’s no air inside it. It’s still space. I just make the boundary physical."

Noah looked at Lucas. "We’d be fighting in open space."

"With a floor," Lucas said.

"With no air," Noah said.

"Correct," Jemima said.

Noah thought about that for a second. "How big."

"Under the right conditions, a couple of miles across. Maybe more."

"What conditions," Noah said.

She glanced at the table she had come from. "I need to be actively eating. The boundary runs on my metabolism. More energy I’m processing, the larger and more stable it gets."

"She needs food," Lucas said to Noah. "A lot of it."

Kelvin appeared from somewhere, tablet already out. "That actually makes complete sense," he said, to Jemima, with the tone he used when someone had done something he approved of. "Your ability defines the interface between vacuum and non-vacuum space by maintaining a continuous energy gradient at the boundary. Your metabolism is the power source sustaining that gradient. Higher caloric intake equals higher boundary stability and range." He looked at Noah. "The vacuum itself handles all collateral. No atmosphere means no shockwaves propagating through air. No pressure differential to breach. No hull to worry about. Whatever happens inside that boundary just happens in space."

"And we hold our breath," Noah said.

"You hold your breath," Kelvin confirmed, with the calm of someone stating a logistical fact rather than expressing concern. He looked at his tablet. "Though at your biology I’d be very interested to know for how long."

Something moved across his face. He opened a new window on the tablet.

"I’m going to need a timer," he said, more to himself than anyone.

Noah looked at Lucas. Lucas looked back with the particular patience of someone who had already decided and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.

"Get her whatever she wants to eat," Noah said. "Everything."

Jemima looked between them both.

"Everything," she confirmed.

---

Forty minutes later Jemima was sitting cross-legged on the hull of the Eternal Pyre, surrounded by more food than most people saw in a week, eating with the focus of someone who understood this was work. The vacuum boundary she had extended curved away from her in every direction, solid enough to stand on, invisible, and completely airless.

The stars were everywhere. Unfiltered, unblurred by atmosphere, sharp and present in a way that no planetary surface ever showed them. Asteroids drifted at range, one large enough that its surface detail was visible half a mile out.

Eclipse members filled the fleet’s outer viewports. Someone had convinced a stream drone to function outside the hull and it hovered between Noah and Lucas casting no shadow because there was nothing to cast one in.

Kelvin was inside at a viewport with Diana, tablet running, timer open and waiting.

"She’s processing four times her resting metabolic rate," he said, watching Jemima through the viewport. "The boundary is stable. Two miles at minimum."

"And they have no air out there," Diana said.

"Correct," Kelvin said. "Whatever their lungs are holding right now is what they have." He looked at the timer. "I want to see how long."

On the hull surface, Noah and Lucas stood facing each other, twenty meters apart.

The fleet hummed above them. The asteroid drifted at range. The vacuum boundary held solid under their boots.

Lucas rolled his neck. Valor in his right hand, the blue-green energy already pulling charge from the Eternal Pyre’s electrical field, the weapon feeding before the fight had even started.

Noah looked at him.

"Last breath," Noah said.

"Don’t go easy," Lucas said. Valor in his right hand, the blue-green energy running through the blade, pulling charge from the ship’s electrical field above them without Lucas doing anything to make it happen.

"Does that mean I can use erasure skills," Noah said.

"Do you want to go to that planet with one less S ranked soldier?"

Noah looked at him.

"Fair enough," he said. "Besides, erasure wouldn’t tell me much about myself anyway." He rolled his neck once. "I need to actually fight you."

"Good," Lucas said.

They moved at the same time.

BOOM!

The surface of the vacuum field cracked where Noah’s first step landed, a starburst fracture that spread two meters in every direction before Jemima’s ability healed it from below. Lucas was already not where he had been, the speed of him leaving a blue-white trail that took a second to dissipate, and Noah tracked it and adjusted mid-step and their first exchange happened in the space between one breath and the next.

Lucas’s axe came around in a horizontal arc and Noah ducked under it and drove his elbow up and Lucas rolled back and the lightning that discharged from the contact point of elbow on forearm cracked across the vacuum field surface loud enough that the people watching through the viewports flinched simultaneously.

They separated.

"Okay," Noah said.

"Yeah," Lucas said.

They went again.

BOOM! BOOM!

Lucas’s speed with Valor was different from his speed without it. Not faster exactly, but more sustained, the output not dropping between exchanges the way electrical ability output always dropped. He came at Noah in combinations that didn’t slow down the way combinations slowed down when the body was spending its reserves, each strike carrying the same charge as the first one, the weapon pulling from the Eternal Pyre’s electrical field above them and feeding it back into Lucas’s output continuously.

Noah caught the third strike on his forearm and felt it.

Actually felt it.

Not the sting of the Widow construct. Something that made his enhanced physiology register and respond, the electricity finding purchase even through his stats.

He grinned.

Lucas saw the grin and adjusted, reading it correctly as Noah deciding to stop being careful.

BOOM!

Noah closed distance in a step that cracked the field surface again and drove his fist toward Lucas’s center and Lucas got Valor up in a block that sent the impact sideways and the shockwave from it rolled across the vacuum field in a visible wave, the translucent surface rippling outward like water hit by a stone.

Inside the fleet, equipment vibrated.

Kelvin looked at his readings.

"The shockwave from that exchange registered as a localized seismic event," he said, mostly to himself. "Inside a vacuum field. In space." He looked at Diana. "They’re not even trying yet."

"That’s the warm up?" Diana said.

"That’s the introduction," Kelvin said.

On the field, Noah and Lucas were trading at a pace that the stream drone was struggling to follow, the camera cutting between impact points rather than tracking movement because the movement was too fast to track. Lightning discharged from every exchange, building in the vacuum field’s surface and running in channels across it, the field itself becoming charged from the volume of electrical output Lucas was producing.

Noah took a hit to the ribs that he didn’t fully avoid, Lucas’s speed catching him on a step where his weight was committed, and the lightning component of it made his left side light up.

’He’s faster,’ Noah thought, genuinely. ’Valor is feeding him and it doesn’t stop. Every second this goes on he’s at the same output level and I’m spending reserves.’ He looked at Lucas across the field. ’Perpetual Tempest. The longer the fight runs the better the ratio gets for him.’

’So don’t let it run.’

He moved.

Not faster than before. Differently. He stopped trading and started committing, pressing forward with the full weight of Strength 1,847 behind each strike, not giving Lucas room to extend the exchange, not letting the fight settle into the rhythm Lucas needed.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Three hits in sequence, the last one driving Lucas back three full steps, the vacuum field surface cratering under his boots as he planted to stop the momentum.

Lucas looked at his feet. At the craters. At Noah.

"There it is," he said.

"Yeah," Noah said.

They went again, faster now, the exchange escalating past what either of them had been producing in the first minutes, Lucas pulling from the atmosphere and the ship and the charged field surface itself.

The asteroids at range were vibrating from the shockwaves.

Kelvin had stopped trying to log individual readings and was just watching.

"Diana," he said.

"Yeah," she said.

"If this is what they produce in a spar."

"Don’t," she said.

"I’m just saying—"

"I know what you’re saying," Diana said. "Don’t say it."

On the field, Noah caught Lucas’s next combination differently. Instead of blocking or dodging he stepped inside it, inside the arc of Valor’s swing, inside the lightning discharge, and hit Lucas with a palm strike to the chest that came with chi behind it and the full weight of his body.

Lucas went.

BOOM!

He crossed the vacuum field in a line that the stream drone caught clearly, the trail of lightning behind him marking the path, and hit the large asteroid at range with a crack that split rock and sent debris spinning outward in all directions. The impact carved into the asteroid’s surface, stone erupting, and then went silent the way things went silent in space.

The asteroid’s debris field drifted.

Noah floated where he had stopped, one hand still extended from the throw, blood running from a cut above his eye where Lucas had gotten through two exchanges back. His regeneration was already handling it, the wound closing visibly.

He watched the asteroid.

In the center of the impact point, deep in the rock, something lit up.

Blue-white. The color of Lucas’s lightning at full output, running through the cracks in the asteroid like veins, spreading outward from where he was embedded, illuminating the debris field from inside.

The silhouette was visible. Lucas, standing in the crater he had made, Valor raised, the weapon pulling charge from the asteroid’s own mineral composition now, the lightning network spreading through the rock because there was electrical charge everywhere and Valor found all of it.

Noah looked at him across the distance.

The cut above his eye had closed. He could feel his ribs handling whatever the earlier hit had done.

He smiled.

"Okay," he said, his voice carrying across the vacuum field without air to carry it because Jemima’s pocket was doing its job. "Now we’re serious."