The rusted bulkhead screeched shrilly in the gamma ray wind🌌, and scavenger Kahn’s boots crunched over the shattered alloy deck as his portable spotlight swept across the forgotten crates of ordnance in the cabin’s corner. This was the wreckage of the Imperial "Iron Dome"-class battlecruiser, adrift in the asteroid belt for over a century; Kahn had originally only come to scavenge recyclable fusion batteries, never expecting to stumble upon such a find. When he pried open the last welded sealed container, this matte white short dagger lay quietly in a custom shock-absorbing sheath🔪. The etched plaque inside the hatch was mostly eroded by gamma rays, but the words "Stygian Abyss Piercer - Alpha Type", "Exclusive to the 7th Assault Corps", and "Stellar Remains Parasite Assault Configuration" were barely discernible.
As soon as his gloved finger touched the blade, a sharp pain came from the neural interface on his wrist—the microscopic nanoscale patterns on the blade’s surface were actively docking with his scavenger cyber-eye, and a broken stream of encrypted information forced its way in: "Initiation sequence... Biometric match... Clearance: Scavenger Kahn, gene sequence matches Private Kahn Reinhardt of the 7th Corps... Mission: Retrieve the core of the Stellar Remains Parasite... Coordinates: Ship’s main reactor compartment..." The moment the information stream cut off, a viscous dragging sound echoed from the depths of the cabin👾, the beam of the spotlight was twisted by an invisible force, the hollow channels of the dagger began to glow with a faint purple light, and the armor-piercer interface at the end of the grip started to heat up, as if urging him onward. Kahn tightened his grip on the dagger and shone the spotlight toward the end of the dark corridor, where only endless shadows writhed in the darkness.