The transition from the churning, claustrophobic tunnel into the cavernous belly of the facility was not a shift in space, but a violent rewrite of reality. Arkan felt the vacuum pressure finally release, the sudden, sharp gasp of recycled, ozone-heavy air hitting his scorched lungs like a cold, metal spike. Beside him, Maya was dead weight, her skin flushed a sickly, luminous pale as the remaining traces of the Hive’s bio-light bled from her pores. He dropped her carefully onto the hard, grated flooring of the primary observation hangar, his own legs giving way. Every muscle fibre he possessed was singing in a harmonic frequency of pure, white-hot exhaustion.
Above them, the shattered remainder of the descending shell continued to groan, its magnetic anchors grinding against the vertical
