The drone’s optical sensor flared blue.
A soft, chirping alarm tone began to build.
Rohan was moving before he’d fully processed what was happening, spear already in hand, driving the blunt end into the drone’s housing hard enough to crack its casing and silence the alarm mid-cycle.
It wasn’t fast enough.
Somewhere above him, deeper in the ship, a second alarm — louder, more insistent, unmistakably human in its origin rather than automated — began to sound.
"Unregistered biological signature, lower deck seven, section C," a voice announced over what Rohan assumed was the ship’s internal comm system, clipped and professional in a way that made the situation sound almost administrative. "All security personnel converge. Non-lethal protocol authorised. Repeat, non-lethal protocol authorised pending identification."
Small mercy. They want to catch me, not kill me. For now.
Rohan didn’t wait to see how long that mercy would last.
He moved down the service corridor at a dead run, spear held low, mind racing through everything Tavin’s sketches and Maerin’s warnings had ever told him about ship layouts — none of which, he now realised with a distant, hysterical clarity, had actually covered what happens after they catch you.
Improvise. You’re good at that. You’ve had to be.
The corridor opened into a wider junction, lit brighter than the maintenance decks, crew quarters lining one side and what looked like a secondary cargo lift on the other. Two guards in the same sleek grey armour he remembered from Odris’s delegation rounded the corner ahead of him, compact weapons already raising.
"Halt! Identify yourself or —"
Rohan didn’t let them finish. He closed the distance in three strides, spear sweeping low to catch the first guard across the shins before the weapon in her hands could level properly. She went down hard, and Rohan pivoted the spear’s momentum up and around into the second guard’s forearm, knocking his weapon wide as it discharged a bright bolt of energy into the ceiling instead of into Rohan’s chest.
The impact sent a shudder of pain through Rohan’s own arm, the spear’s shaft absorbing a fraction of whatever energy the weapon carried, and he understood in that instant that these were not glassmaws or skarn or anything the Ashen Marches had prepared him for. These were trained soldiers with weapons built by a civilisation centuries ahead of anything he’d fought before.
’I cannot win a straight fight against these people. Not with a spear. Not alone.’
He drove the spear’s butt into the second guard’s jaw hard enough to drop him, then kept moving, stepping over both fallen bodies without slowing, because slowing down was how people ended up caught.
The junction split three ways ahead of him, and Rohan chose the narrowest of the three corridors on pure instinct — narrow meant fewer guards could converge on him at once, narrow meant a straight fight became a series of one-at-a-time fights, and one-at-a-time was a math problem he actually stood a chance of solving.
It nearly cost him everything anyway.
A third guard stepped out from a side alcove Rohan hadn’t clocked, close enough that there was no room to bring the spear’s full length to bear. The man’s weapon discharged at point-blank range, and only the fact that Rohan had already begun twisting away — pure reflex, nothing tactical about it — saved him from taking the bolt through his ribs instead of across the meat of his upper arm.
Pain flared white and total, and for one long, terrible second his whole left side refused to answer him.
Move. Move or die. Those are the only two options right now.
He drove forward into the guard instead of retreating, inside the reach of the weapon before it could fire again, and used the spear’s haft like a club, short brutal strikes that had nothing of the elegance Maerin had drilled into him and everything of the desperation that kept a person alive when elegance stopped being available. The guard folded under the third strike, and Rohan didn’t wait to see him fall before he was moving again, clutching his wounded arm against his side, blood already soaking hot and slick through the ash-cloth wrapped there.
[Warning: Injury sustained. Health reduced.]
[Skarn Hunter I bonus applied: Bleeding mitigated.]
[Origin Energy reserves declining faster than baseline recovery.]
’I hate every single one of you notifications right now, in case that wasn’t clear.’
Behind him, voices sharpened into something with real urgency now, no longer the calm procedural tone from the ship’s comm system but the raw sound of people who had just watched two, then three of their own go down to a single intruder and were beginning to recalculate exactly how dangerous he might be.
"He’s armed with some kind of energy manipulation," one voice called, breathless, somewhere back toward the junction. "Sector command, upgrade threat assessment, I want additional units on this level immediately —"
Rohan didn’t have the luxury of listening to the rest. He rounded another corner at a dead sprint, boots slipping once on decking slick with something he chose not to examine too closely, and nearly collided with a service cart abandoned mid-corridor, its contents — spare conduit, insulated tools, a scattering of components he couldn’t name — clattering loudly enough to announce his position to half the deck.
He didn’t stop to apologise to the empty corridor for the noise. He kept running, left arm screaming with every stride, spear held awkwardly now in his uninjured hand, until the mouth of the service shaft finally opened ahead of him like the first honest piece of luck he’d had since boarding.
[Notification: Combat Engagement Detected]
[Skarn Hunter I bonus applied: +Reaction Speed vs. Non-Awakened Combatants]
[Warning: Origin Energy reserves declining.]
’I noticed. Thank you.’
More voices ahead. More footsteps converging from at least two directions, judging by the way sound echoed off the metal corridors. Rohan made a decision in the half-second he had to make it — not toward the cargo lift, which would trap him in an open space with nowhere to run, but toward a narrower service shaft he’d glimpsed on his earlier exploration, one that ran, according to a small stencilled label on its access hatch, toward the ship’s primary systems.