With his knuckles pressed against the cold bulkhead of the warship, Kaid’s fingertips brushed over the fluorescent-yellow, openwork pattern of the “Void-Eating Carapace Hook Blade,” his fingers still tinged with the alien mucus he had just wiped away 🟡. The Falcon, a vessel belonging to the Federation’s 7th Fleet, has been out of contact for three months; the emergency lights inside the compartment flicker erratically, corroded by the Zerg acid, while the air is thick with a pungent mix of metallic rust and decaying biological odor. As the breacher for the special operations team, he grips this hook blade—designed specifically for interstellar combat: its bionic, hollowed-out structure reduces weight by 30% in zero gravity, and its plasma-coated, hook-shaped edge can instantly tear through the Zerg’s silicon-based exoskeletons as well as the ship’s titanium-alloy bulkheads. Just as he pried open a sealed hatch, he heard faint scratching claws behind him. The fluorescent-yellow blade glowed with a dangerous arc in the dim light, and beyond the bulkhead, a pair of compound eyes stared intently at him through the acid-etched cracks 👁️. He spun around abruptly; the sharp swoosh of the blade slicing through the air mingled with the Zerg’s screech, only to halt the instant it struck that dark shadow—it was Layla, the team’s missing medic. Her left arm had already transformed into a mucus-covered chela, while her right hand clutched half of a communications panel emblazoned with the Federation insignia 📡; the encrypted signal flashing on the panel was pointing straight toward the ship’s inner power core. Kaid’s throat tightened, and the handle of the hook blade trembled ever so slightly—he knew this mission’s end would be far more than just retrieving some data.