The shrill screech of metal scraping filled the air as interstellar scavenger Kael’s titanium alloy prosthetic hand drove this dagger into the alloy bulkhead of the "Styx" battlecruiser wreck⚙️. The pale blue blade instantly glowed with a faint ice-blue luminescence🔵. Three days ago, he’d found this weapon in an encrypted storage compartment of a dead Old Empire armory on Ceres, dismissing it as an obscure military trinket that could fetch a few credit chips—until he encountered the Bone Eroders just now, and realized its true purpose.
In 2469, the Federal blockade had trapped all scavengers in the edge star systems like a cage🚀. Kael had risked entering the "Death Zone" marked Styx wreck to gather enough credits for his sister’s bionic corneal surgery. Bone Eroders were a newly emerged anomalous species, their semi-transparent bodies feeding on starship alloys, impervious to conventional weapons. Cornered by three of the creatures, Kael had instinctively drawn the dagger, and to his shock, the monsters let out a shrill shriek as the blade approached, their bodies melting away like paraffin wax.
Kael stared at the hollow patterns on the blade; tiny glowing motes seemed to flow within the diamond-shaped gaps, as if countless wraiths from the star ruins were sealed inside💀. He pulled out the damaged datapad he’d found alongside it, and the last smudged line became visible under his cybernetic eye’s scan: "Star Ruin Blade resonance attracts Bone Eroders swarms..." Before the words fully registered, dozens of Bone Eroders’ silhouettes began to emerge from the bulkhead shadows, while the dagger’s glow climbed at a visible rate, casting Kael’s face in an eerie ice-blue hue❄️.