Kole’s knuckles tightened around the grip of the 'Abyss Wave Soul-Reaver Piercer', his thumb brushing against the still-drying pale green alien slime in the wavy grooves🩸—a prize he’d dug up in the bio-arms hold of the derelict Kra’Heg battlecruiser E-79🚀. As the most reckless lone wolf in the Scavengers’ League, he’d scraped by in this sector, marked a death zone by the Federation, for seven years, relying on his scarred wrists and lockpicking precision to outlast rivals and predators alike. He instantly recognized this as a standard-issue melee weapon for Kra’Heg high-rank hunters; the two hollow blood grooves along the blade weren’t for weight reduction, but to channel prey’s bodily fluids to activate the built-in neurotoxin glands hidden beneath the biopolymer surface⚗️. When he pried open the hold’s rusted hatch earlier, he’d stumbled on the half-eaten remains of a Federation armored soldier💀, the 17th Mobile Infantry Battalion insignia still faintly visible on their dented pauldron, their neural interface flickering with faint blue light as if transmitting an interrupted, garbled warning. Kole clipped the dagger into his tactical belt’s quick-draw sheath, turning to loot the energy core components stacked on the other side of the dimly lit hold. He didn’t notice the thin strand of almost invisible purple mycelium creeping up his wrist’s old combat scar, seeping into his subcutaneous tissue through the tiny gaps in the grip’s wave patterns🔮. His tactical helmet’s heads-up display suddenly flashed an unknown bio-signal alert, the numbers spiking wildly, but when he lifted his hand to tap the screen to investigate, a sharp, numbing sensation shot through his fingertips, and distorted, pulsating visions of a Kra’Heg hive mind’s core began to bleed into the edges of his field of view, a low, alien hum echoing in the back of his skull.