“Get me a visual,” Silvia commands, instantly snapping to focus.

Lethia’s machina hums, and several camera feeds from both The Blade and the rest of the fleet’s ships are beamed onto the front canopy, half obscuring the view of the churning qi outside.

Nothing appears amiss at first glance; the space surrounding them is dense with chaotic energy but otherwise calm. However, at the edge of their tightly-packed flight formation, there’s a small gap of empty space where another ship should be, filled with nothing but dense, glistening qi.

“Nothing visually abnormal,” Silvia mutters, her eyes glowing with qi as she scans the images. “Any energy-reading spikes?”

“Negative,” Lethia answers without missing a beat. “Levels have been unstable since we arrived, but no fluctuations notable enough to flag as a cause.”

“Damn, patch me through to all bridges.”

“Done.”

“Look alive, ladies and gents, it seems like we were right to be cautious of this tip. We’re down a ship already, and we’re yet to work out why. I want all ships to follow protocol A-13 and maintain a constant stream of activity pings. Send over all your scanner logs now, and keep an eye out for any oddities outside or within your ships.”

A flood of confirmation messages rolls in, along with a stream of data through The Blade’s main data relay. Emily immediately begins parsing through the data without needing to be asked, drinking in the fresh information and searching for anything out of place that could explain the missing ship.

She easily finds the last communication logs between the missing craft and their neighbouring ship in the flight formation, and identifies it as a light, combat-focused cruiser with a limited crew of ten second-level-and-below awakened. This last message was a standard location ping, showing them in place in the formation five seconds before Lethia reported their absence. Their energy vents were opened in time with the rest of the fleet, and none of their sensors reported any abnormalities.

“I’m finding nothing here,” Emily reports, glancing at Lethia, who nods in agreement.

“Okay, we keep going deeper into the storm then,” Silvia decides. “Keep The Blade and all scouting ships’ scanners on high alert and watch our wake for any tails. It’s either something in here or someone using it as cover. Either way, we should be able to pick up something if they try to take another of ours.”

“Roger that,” Lethia responds, her fingers gliding over her controls as she relays the command to the rest of the fleet. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

They fly in with tense silence hanging over the bridge, all of them splitting their attention between the camera and data feeds tracking the rest of the fleet around them.

“What’s that?” Pod asks, breaking the silence after a few minutes.

He points at the canopy between the video feeds, towards a far-off blur of motion. Emily follows his gesture, narrowing her eyes and focusing them on the distant cluster of movement. She sees hundreds of small, dark bodies pressed close together, buzzing about in a chaotic swarm and quickly getting closer. They look a little like stout centipedes, with an armoured carapace covering them entirely and tens of pointed legs flanking their torsos. Their backs are split apart, letting their thin wings move freely, buzzing faster than Emily can follow at such a great distance.

“A flock of ratch,” Lethia responds dismissively. “Hardly surprising in an area as qi-dense as this. They’re nothing to worry about: we’ll deal with them if they choose to approach, but they’re not the source of the disappearance.”

“It looks like they’re focused on something else,” Emily points out, noting how the swarm of bugs are buzzing in place, circling something their bodies are obscuring.

“Approach them and get us a picture of what they’re looking at,” Silvia commands. “It may be related after all.”

Lethia nods and changes the fleet’s heading, pointing towards the dense swarm to get within range with their more detailed scanners that can penetrate it. An image of the clustered bugs appears across the canopy, and it slowly peels away layer by layer until all that’s left is a damaged ship, dotted with holes punched through its hull. However, it doesn’t match the ship that is missing from their fleet, and there’s an unfamiliar, broken symbol painted along one of the ripped-open sides. The ship’s computer begins trying to reconstitute the symbol from the remaining fragments of the torn hull, flashing up several possible options, all sharing similar forms of four interlocked rings in various formations.

“Does anyone recognise that group marker?” Silvia asks, glancing at Lethia for an answer from the rest of the fleet.

“Yes,” the head gunner responds before Emily can, both of them reaching out with their machina for a data packet sitting in The Blade’s data banks and pulling up an image on the screens before them that matches one of the possible symbols’ forms. “It’s the mark of Quad Sipahee, the merchants who gave us the tip.”

“Of course.” Silvia scoffs. “They lost a ship and fled before handing off the coordinates to us to act as test subjects. Typical merchant cowards.”

“At least that cuts the chances this is an ambush.” Lethia highlights the holes dotting the wrecked ship. “Those don’t look like typical dogfight wounds: they’re too uniform and not focused around any key systems.”

“Get rid of the ratch and get us closer. I’ll go take a look on board that thing to see if we can find any other clues as to what did this.” The vampire turns to Emily. “Care to join me on a short spacewalk?”

“Sure.”

“Mother,” Mensacus cuts in, drawing her attention to one of the still-active camera feeds showing the edge of their fleet. “We’ve lost another one.”

“Seriously!” Silvia growls, glaring at the screen where another gap at the edge of their formation has formed and letting slip a drop of bloodlust, filling the bridge with a heavy iron tang. “Rewind that feed. I want to see what’s fucking with my fleet!”

Lethia responds without a word, and the image on the screen flickers, winding back until a small ship reappears in the void. The feed begins to play forwards again, and they all watch as the ship vanishes without a trace. One moment it’s there, the next it’s not. There isn’t a single visible fluctuation in the space around it, and none of the linked sensor arrays displaying their results beside the feed indicate anything out of the norm.

“That should narrow down what we’re looking for then,” Emily says, earning a confused glance from Pod and nods of agreement from Lethia and Silvia.

“How?” her apprentice questions.

“There weren’t any markers of interference from another ship, so it has to be related to the qi storm. It’s making space here unstable enough that we can’t detect how our ships are being taken, but it wouldn’t mask another crew’s interference if I understand the tech available to us right.”

“You’re correct,” the head gunner agrees. “Mid-grade space magic or tech should give us at least some feedback with how good our sensors are, so unless we’re dealing with an eight or ninth level being themselves, who wouldn’t need to take us one-by-one, we’re looking for whatever’s causing this storm.”

“Are we sure whatever’s causing it isn’t eight or ninth level?” Pod asks.

“The energy density isn’t high enough,” Silvia answers this time, getting her frustration under control and withdrawing her bloodlust. “It’s only just strong enough to give me a slight boost in cultivation speed, so we’re only looking for something at the high end of seventh phase.”

They reach the drifting, damaged ship as they talk, and several of the fleet’s smaller fighters open fire immediately. Beams of plasma and a hail of metallic projectiles cut through the swarming ratch, punching bloody holes and disintegrating their shells, exposing their weak inner flesh to the vacuum. The insectoids react immediately, fleeing the dead ship and charging the attacking fighters, spewing streams of sickly-green acidic bile and attempting to latch on and gnaw through their energy shields.

The fighters split from the fleet and weave away from the beasts with practised ease, drawing them further away as they rapidly cull the horde.

“Could you get us out there, please?” Silvia asks Emily, nodding towards the now-empty ship floating before them.

“Sure thing.” Emily nods, glancing at her children and Pod as she tethers the vampire to herself with a thread of space mana and weaves a simple Blink spell. “Keep an eye out while we’re gone.”

They disappear from the bridge and reappear outside the ship in the same instant with a gentle fluctuation of space. Emily immediately steps forward, forming solid footholds of raw mana, to inspect the tears in the ship’s hull up close. She brushes the edge of one of the holes with her metal fingers and a gentle stream of machina, examining how the reinforced alloy was torn asunder.

“Curious,” she mutters. “There are no signs of the alloy’s internal bonds weakening.”

“And that means?” Silvia urges, a hint of impatience in her tone as she casts her qi over the vessel, searching for any signs of life.

“It was broken by force, not heat. Not even a fast-moving projectile, which would have caused some heating due to friction. It’s like a hydraulic press was put against the hull and the pressure was turned up till it shattered.”

“Or a large set of teeth.” Silvia traces the dotted puncture wounds with glistening red qi, drawing out a long, uneven, shallow arc.

“A very large set of teeth.”

Emily walks over to the ship’s external airlock door and forces it open with a burst of machina, stepping in with Silvia hot on her heels. They stroll with purpose through the ship’s underbelly, occasionally finding the continuation of the holes they saw from outside dotted across every surface. They check the bridge and a small mess hall, not finding a single sign of life other than a few scattered metal trays floating aimlessly. Emily notes how several surfaces appear scorched and distorted, as if soaked in searing heat or burning acid, and when they try to head into the crew’s quarters, they find a twisted wreck of what was once a corridor, melted beyond all recognition with several gaping holes into the ship’s internal systems below.

“You think this was the ratch?” Silvia questions, reaching out and snapping off a shard of the weakened metal blocking their way in.

“Unlikely. Their bile looked too weak to do this, even with prolonged exposure,” Emily replies, sending out a flood of machina and using its magnetic pull to tear open a clear path to check the hardware below.

She blinks in surprise at the absent space where the main processing core and power generators should be.

“It looks intentionally gutted. Why?”

“Fuck,” Silvia hisses, turning to Emily with a scowl. “Get us back to The Blade, another of our ships was just taken, and I think I know what we’re dealing with.”

Emily nods and begins casting.

“The qi storm and teeth marks could have been a lot of things, but not many creatures hunt ships for their power sources.” They Blink back onto The Blade’s bridge. “I think we’re dealing with a world-eater.”

“A juvenile?” Lethia asks, joining the conversation without missing a beat.

“Most likely. I didn’t want to do this, but tell all ships to vent all excess qi, and I’ll wrap us in a barrier. That should stop it from being able to grab us from a distance, but it’ll sure as shit draw its full attention.”

“What’s a world-eater, and why didn’t you protect the fleet if you knew you could?” Pod asks, as Emily scans through her memory banks for any mention of world-eaters.

“I’m not a formation master, so my extended barriers are horribly inefficient, and unless we find this thing within a few hours, I’ll be too drained to fight after shielding a fleet this large,” Silvia explains, shutting her eyes and building up a dense bundle of deep crimson qi between her hands.

“World-eaters aren’t a specific species; it’s a classification of supermassive lifeform,” Emily takes over, picking out several records of related creatures to try to narrow down what they’re dealing with. “Anything that feeds on high-level energy sources and grows to a size capable of devouring a planet for its core qualifies. Usually, they’re beings that naturally reach eighth level at maturity. I don’t see any mention of energy storms related to them in the data I have, though.”

“That’s because most of them don’t create such large disturbances once they reach maturity,” Lethia says. “They normally travel quietly and only draw attention when they eat a planet. Juveniles, however, often release their energy in full to probe for nearby food sources. However, that’s normally when they’re too weak to cause a storm, since most reach an adolescent state by sixth or seventh level and learn to keep a lower profile.”

“So, we’re looking for a super-powerful baby then?” Pod asks, just as Silvia releases the bubble of qi she’s made, wrapping the entire fleet in a thin red film and forcing out the foreign qi.

The reaction is instant, as the entire sea of energy surrounding the barrier begins to quake, the density around them suddenly rising.

“Yep, and we just made it angry,” Silvia says, gritting her teeth and pushing back against the violent qi clashing with hers. “Please tell me we can tell where the energy influx is coming from.”

“I’m getting a lock now. All ships to full sub-cruise speed,” Lethia hisses, turning The Blade towards a new heading and receiving a chorus of affirmation from the fleet as she lets her machina flow through her ship. “The Vice is keeping us safe, so make it count. I don’t care if you have to burn out, we’re getting to our prey while she’s still ready to fight.”