Cole’s knuckles blanched as he clamped down on the ‘Abyss Soul-Reaver: Void Phase Aberration Armor-Piercing Exclusive Hunting Dagger’ he’d just dug out of the bio-pod wreckage on the abandoned Ω-7 deep space station🗡️. The matte blade still carried the frigid chill of the pod’s leaking coolant, seeping through his finger joints and sending a shiver down his spine❄️. By 2419, the interstellar scavenging trade had long been monopolized by the armed scavenger fleets of the Galactic United Consortium. ‘Wild scavengers’ like Cole, if caught, were either press-ganged into the Consortium’s cheap labor force or left adrift in the vacuum of space. He’d risked entering the Ω-7 station, marked a ‘Death Zone’, only because of the legend of ‘psychic shards’ that could cure his sister’s neural decay syndrome. Tucked in the narrow groove of the blade was a half-carbonized biometric chip from the old-era Star Alliance Assassination Force’s standard issue💾. Using his portable decoder, he cracked the chip’s residual data, which looped a distorted encrypted message: ‘Hunting dagger bound to phase psychic energy, only activatable by aberration hosts… Void rift opened, objective: eliminate all non-aberration life forms…’ Just as he frowned, trying to parse the message, a viscous scraping sound echoed from the ventilation duct behind him—the predatory signal of a void aberration. He suddenly noticed the blade’s patterns beginning to glow with a faint purple light, and the scraping sound was rapidly approaching his position; in the darkness, a pair of glowing compound eyes had appeared at the edge of the vent🔦.