He didn’t know exactly what waited at the end of that shaft.
He suspected, given the way every ship he’d ever read about in old Earth stories worked, that it would be something important.
Important enough that they won’t want it damaged. Important enough to be leverage.
It was, he would later reflect, either the smartest decision he made that entire night, or the single most reckless — and for a long stretch of the fight that followed, there wasn’t a meaningful difference between the two.
The service shaft dropped him into a maintenance crawlway two decks lower, tight enough that he had to move at a crouch, the walls thrumming with a deep mechanical pulse that grew stronger the further he crawled.
Behind him, he could hear the pursuit organising — not the chaotic scramble of the first two guards, but something more coordinated, voices calling positions and cutoff points to each other with the calm precision of people who had done this before, possibly many times, possibly against people considerably more dangerous than one exhausted stowaway with a spear.
They’ve done this before. That’s not good. That means they have a plan for exactly this situation.
He emerged from the crawlway into a wider access corridor, alarms still sounding somewhere in the walls, red emergency lighting now bathing everything in a colour that made the whole ship look like it was bleeding from the inside.
A door stood at the corridor’s end, heavier than anything he’d passed through so far, its surface marked with warning symbols in three scripts and a single word he could read, stencilled large enough that even a stranger to this world’s alphabet couldn’t miss it.
ENGINE.
Rohan’s pulse steadied, oddly, at the sight of it. Not because the word promised safety. Because it promised a plan — something better than running blind through a ship full of soldiers who knew every inch of it while he knew none.
He reached the door as the first guards rounded the corridor behind him.
"Stop! You have nowhere left to —"
He didn’t wait to hear the rest. Molten Assimilation surged down his arm and into the door’s locking mechanism, the same trick that had freed him from the casing scaled up to something far more stubborn, far more heavily reinforced. The mechanism fought him — genuinely fought him, in a way the simple latch never had, its structure dense and cold and clearly built to resist exactly this kind of intrusion.
A weapon bolt struck the wall beside his head, close enough that he felt the heat of it against his cheek.
Now. Now, now, now —
The lock gave all at once, the door’s internal bolts retracting with a shriek of overstressed metal, and Rohan threw himself through the gap and into the chamber beyond as a second bolt scorched the frame where his shoulder had been half a second before.
The engine room opened around him — vast compared to the cramped corridors he’d been fighting through, a cavernous chamber dominated by a central drive core that pulsed with soft blue-white light, banked by consoles and support machinery on every side, the deep thrum he’d felt through the walls now a physical pressure against his chest.
Rohan didn’t pause to admire it.
He spun, drove the door closed against the frame Molten Assimilation had warped in the process of opening it, and pressed his palm flat against the metal, reaching for every scrap of control he had left to fuse the locking mechanism shut from the inside — not open this time, but sealed, welded, immovable.
The heat of the effort ran up his arm like fire, and somewhere behind his eyes a warning flared bright enough to hurt.
[Skill Activated: Molten Assimilation]
[Warning: Origin Energy reserves critically low.]
[Warning: Continued use may result in system-imposed cooldown or physical collapse.]
The door held. Fists began pounding against it from the other side almost immediately, followed by the whine of some kind of cutting tool being brought to bear against the frame.
Rohan turned, breathing hard, spear still gripped in one shaking hand, and looked properly at the room he’d trapped himself inside.
The drive core stood at its centre — a towering column of layered alloy and glowing conduit, humming with a power he had absolutely no ability to understand, connected by thick cabling to consoles arrayed around its base like petals around a stem.
He had no idea how to fly a ship. He had no idea how any of this actually worked. Every console, every readout, every glowing indicator arrayed around the drive core’s base might as well have been written in a language built for gods rather than men — which, given everything Hestia had told him about her own universe, was perhaps not so far from the truth.
But he understood, with the particular clarity that came from months of learning to read danger by instinct rather than explanation, that this room was the single most valuable space on the entire vessel — and that the people currently trying to cut through the door behind him would do almost anything to keep it intact.
Almost anything.
The question was whether "almost anything" included giving him what he actually wanted.
The comm panel nearest the drive core lit up on its own less than two minutes later, a soft chime preceding a voice Rohan recognised immediately — smooth, warm, and utterly, infuriatingly composed, as though the man on the other end of it had not just had a stowaway rip open his engine room door and lock himself inside with the single most critical system on his ship.
"Well," Captain Odris said. "This is certainly an unexpected turn of events."
Rohan pressed his back against the drive core’s housing, spear across his lap, and made himself sound steadier than he felt.
"Captain Odris."
"You have my attention, young man, which is more than most stowaways ever manage." A pause, faintly amused. "Though I confess I expected you’d hide in a cargo hold, not commit yourself to what my chief engineer is currently describing to me, with considerable distress, as an act of catastrophic sabotage in progress."