Kade’s knuckles were clenched tight around the hilt of his Starframe Battle Blade, his fingertips brushing against the congealed interstellar dust trapped within the blade’s openwork pattern 🪐. As a scout in the Federation’s Interstellar Marine Corps, he had salvaged this dagger from the personal effects of his fallen captain—back then, it was the very weapon that pierced the exoskeleton of the Zerg hive, buying precious time for the fleet to retreat. Now, stranded inside the derelict wreckage of the Ark VII, with relentless Zerg scouts hot on his heels, Kade pressed the concealed switch on the side of the hilt. Instantly, a faint blue energy ribbon lit up the blade’s intricate openwork design ⚡. With a swift twist, he spun around and drove the battle blade precisely into a crack in one of the scouts’ armored carapaces, splattering thick, viscous bodily fluids onto the hollowed-out sections of the blade. Just as he caught his breath, an encrypted signal from his captain crackled through his comm unit—the source was deep within the wreck’s core compartment, where the temperature was soaring…