The new underclothes arrived, delivered by a silent, efficient drone that waited patiently for me to sign. The bra was a necessary evil, a contraption of hooks and elastic that felt like a subtle form of bondage. I wiggled my shoulders for the twelfth time, trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t exist.

  I blame my grandfather for this, I thought sourly. My grandfather was a goblin, and if I’d taken more after his genes, I might be a lot less… top-heavy. Although now that I think about it, goblin girls are often really well-endowed for their size. Maybe my blame is entirely misplaced. Maybe I just blamed him because it was easier than accepting that my body was now its own sovereign nation, with laws and customs I didn’t understand.

  Food. The thought was a primal drive. Real food, not the pasty, nutrient-dense combat rations that had sustained me through the dig. The troopers had already had their celebration, a raucous affair that had apparently rocked the mess decks while Dienne and I were still wrist-deep in drone diagnostics and mineral assays.

  I didn’t begrudge them their fun. According to the scuttlebutt, even a training run in a copper-level rift usually resulted in at least one casualty, often a fatality. Rifts were meat grinders. The ever-present threat of a messy, final death was just part of the background radiation of a trooper’s life. The ship’s kitchens were always prepared for either a celebration or a wake.

  In a way, I was glad I’d missed it. The rumors flying around were… educational. More than a few troopers had been discovered in a drunken stupor in random access spaces and storage lockers, sometimes accompanied by equally inebriated and frequently naked colleagues.

  Apparently, Lindsay was currently furious with Dirk for being discovered half-clothed in a drone maintenance pod with Petty Officer Brenton. An unlikely pairing—Dirk was all affable, handsome brawn, and Brenton was a quiet, slightly older woman from engineering—but as the saying went, every drink shaved a year off a woman’s age. She must have seemed like a toddler to his beer-goggled eyes, I snorted to myself, the image both absurd and vaguely depressing.

  Tonight, however, was a different affair. As part of the core raid team, Dienne and I were invited to a fancy meal in the mess. It was the cook’s chance to show off, to create something beyond the standard, if high-quality, ship’s fare for a captive and appreciative audience.

  The atmosphere was quieter, more refined. Linda and Candace, two of the other drone operators, were there, happily digging into their meals alongside Dienne. All of us were pointedly avoiding alcohol. Elves, I’d learned, were incredibly picky drinkers, and the ship’s synth-beer didn’t meet Dienne’s exacting standards.

  As for me, I’d seen enough drunkenness back in the 132nd to have absolutely zero interest in the stuff. The loss of control, the slurry speech, the vomit… it held no appeal. Plus, with my enhanced endurance and metabolism, even getting a buzz would probably require me to down half a keg, a feat that was both impractical and undignified.

  My focus was entirely on the culinary marvel before me. It was called an ‘egg roll.’ A tube of impossibly crispy, golden-brown dough encasing a steaming, savory filling of shredded vegetables and tiny, spiced morsels of meat. You dipped it in a sweet and spicy sauce that made the flavors sing on my tongue. It was a revelation.

  The chef, a stout woman named Marian with forearms like a stevedore, beamed with delight from the serving hatch as I plowed through my third one. She wanted me to try something called ‘sushi’ next, but I politely begged off when I learned it sometimes involved uncooked fish.

  On Korse, fish weren’t food; they were ambulatory toxic-waste sites with teeth. Not even the most desperate goblin would try to eat something from Korse’s mineral-choked oceans. The idea of eating aquatic life from any world without first leaching it through three separate chemical processes and then boiling it for a week sounded… profoundly unwise.

  I knew, intellectually, that most worlds didn’t have Korse’s particular problems, but some aversions are baked into your DNA. I’d probably try it someday, but today was for safe, delicious, cooked wonders. Today was for refilling the immense caloric deficit the Kalisti rift had carved out of me.

  A soft cough pulled me from my culinary reverie. I looked up, and my breath hitched for a second.

  Chief Warrant Officer Wasserman stood there, his massive frame seeming to subtly bend the light around him. The chronic pain that usually etched lines around his eyes was still there, a familiar shadow, but it seemed… quieter tonight, less aggressive. The new magitech implant I’d woven for him was doing its job, holding the necrotic corruption at bay. For now.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in my chest.

  I nodded, perhaps a little too quickly. “Please!” I waved the half-eaten egg roll at him like a ceremonial scepter. “Have you tried one of these? They are called egg rolls even though they have almost no egg in them... They are incredibly delicious! Do you want one?” The words tumbled out, fueled by a sudden, nervous energy.

  He chuckled, a deep, warm sound, and did something that stole the air from my lungs. He reached out and took my hand, the one holding the egg roll. His touch was calloused but gentle, the magitech components beneath his skin humming with a power I could feel through my spiritual senses. He leaned forward, his eyes holding mine, and took a neat bite from the end I had already bitten from.

  It was startlingly, profoundly intimate. A shiver that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature raced down my spine. He pulled back, chewing carefully, his gaze thoughtful.

  “Oh, I have had them many times,” he said after swallowing. “They are part of the standard ship’s frozen supplies. Marian clearly has a deft talent with a fryer, though. These are prepared very well for one of our standard foods.”

  I nodded, trying to get my heartbeat under control. “Oh, I thought she had to cook them up and wrap them up special. They taste like it.”

  He shook his head, a faint smile touching his lips. “No… we probably have six crates of these in the frozen hold. Still, The Crow has far better supplies than most fleet ships. The captain believes good food is a tactical advantage. She’s willing to pay for it, instead of relying on the mass bulk synth-paste that most fleet ships take. Have you ever had synthesized food?”

  I shook my head, grateful for the shift to a less volatile topic. “I am not sure what you mean?”

  “You are lucky,” he said, the smile turning wry. “Bulk protein, bulk fat, bulk sweeteners, and carbohydrates. A machine prints it out in whatever shape you desire in seconds, steaming hot. It looks like real food—a steak, a potato, a roll—but it all tastes the same underlying paste, plus whatever artificial flavors get injected at the last second. It’s… crappy.”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  I stuck out my tongue in genuine disgust. “Then I am profoundly glad I am on The Crow. That sounds worse than combat rations.”

  “It really is,” he agreed. “I mean, at least combat rations start out as real food before they are desiccated, compressed, and… treated to be lightweight and last forever. Still, you…” He gestured at my plate, which held the evidence of my prodigious appetite. “You eat like a sorcerer after a major working. I think you might need better than copper-tier rations.”

  I paused, a new piece of jargon entering my lexicon. “Copper tier… food?”

  “Yes,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on the table. “The universe is stratified. Resource rifts and higher-tier worlds can produce food that is far more nourishing, more… potent. It builds essence better, refuels your core more efficiently than standard or lower-tier worlds can. I am silver. When I’m at rest, not using energy, I can exist fine on normal foods.”

  He continued, his tone turning serious. “But when I fight, especially for long periods or against powerful foes, I burn so much essence that normal food just isn’t… energetic enough to keep me from starving on a metaphysical level. If we hit a gold or platinum-tier rift, I might show you what I have to do sometime… You haven’t experimented with food until you’ve seared a high-tier chaos beast over a plasma torch in order to eat enough raw energy to go back and kill more of them.”

  The image was bizarre and vaguely horrifying. “That sounds… utterly disgusting.”

  He laughed, a real, full-bodied laugh that made the few other officers in the mess glance over in surprise. “Sometimes it is, especially since food that’s too high-tier can kill lower-stage people. Mana saturation, spiritual backlash—it’s like trying to drink from a firehose. But sometimes, chaos beast or resource rift meats, prepared by a high-tier chef who knows how to handle them, taste unbelievable. It’s an experience. Not even something I can properly describe.”

  I nodded, a reckless idea forming. “Good. So, when I hit silver, you will take me to eat at someplace that serves that stuff? As a celebration?”

  The laughter faded from his eyes, replaced by that familiar, grim shadow. He sighed, the sound heavy with a weight of years and pain. “I probably won’t live that long, Rose.”

  The casual acceptance in his tone sparked a flare of anger in me. I shook my head, my voice dropping to a fierce whisper. “Baloney.”

  He blinked. “Huh?”

  I leaned forward, our heads close over the table. The sounds of the mess faded away. “My new class. The one I took in the rift. It isn’t ‘Support Pilot.’ It never was.”

  His gaze sharpened, the paladin’s focus locking onto me. “Is it something we can discuss here?” he murmured, his eyes doing a quick, professional sweep of the room.

  I shook my head minutely. “Not unless you want the entire Fleet R&D division chasing me with nets and syringes.”

  “Tell me what you can, then,” he said, his voice barely a breath.

  I smiled slightly, a small, secret thing. “Well, the first thing is, I’ve been running analyses since I took it. I can’t understand why you can't use your own life essence to burn out the necrotic essence. The math doesn’t add up. You have the power. The energy is there. It’s like you have a bucket of water and a cup of acid, but you’re not using the water to dilute it. You’re just letting it eat the bucket.”

  He sighed deeply, a sound of profound weariness that had nothing to do with physical fatigue. “Because I became a Divine Paladin instead of a Holy Paladin.”

  The terms meant nothing to me. “I don’t understand what that means.”

  “It means,” he said, his voice flat and drained of emotion, “that I made a mistake. A colossal, arrogant, potentially fatal mistake. I thought I was a shoo-in for a Gold core when I chose my silver-tier class. I was powerful, confident, and I paid for that arrogance with everything.”

  I shook my head, frustrated. “I still don’t understand. A paladin is a paladin, right?”

  He looked at me then, and I saw the ghost of that young, confident man buried under the pain and regret. “No. Not even close. Holy Paladins choose to serve God, or a Divine. They gain immense abilities and protection from their link to that higher power through intermediaries—saints, angels, what have you—who they call upon for help, for strength, for inspiration. Their power is borrowed, in a sense, but it is vast and supported by an entire cosmology. We don't have evidence that they are really what we think they are, but for a portion of our experience, they help us control our power and protect us.”

  He took a slow breath, as if steadying himself to recount an old wound. “Divine Paladins, on the other hand… We cut out the middleman. We seek to link directly to the life and spiritual strength of the universe itself. It’s a philosophy, a path. We decide to become the divine, to embody those principles, instead of calling upon an external source.”

  He gave a bitter, hollow laugh. “It’s a recognized, if far less traveled, step on the path to ascension. The theory is, when you have a Gold core and start forming your soul-link, it’s a natural progression for a paladin of sufficient will… to stop calling on the divines for strength and start becoming one of the beings that others call upon.”

  “I thought I was taking a shortcut to ultimate power. And I did, in a way. By cutting myself off from the intermediaries, from the celestial support structure. There are many stages past Golden Core refinement, all the way up to true ascension, but for a paladin… You just can’t walk that path alone. Not really. I learned that lesson in the most brutal way possible.”

  He fell silent for a long moment, his gaze distant, seeing a different place, a different time. “I faced a Necrotarsic Lich, the master of a necrotic rift. A thing of pure, intelligent entropy. And when I was losing, when my own power wasn’t enough, I did what any paladin would do. I reached for that connection, I called for help, for strength, for divine intervention.”

  His fist clenched on the tabletop, the composite groaning under the pressure. “And there was nothing. No answer. No surge of borrowed power. No angelic blade manifesting in my hand. Just silence. Because I had set myself above them. I had declared, through my very class choice, that I didn’t need to call—I was the call. And the universe has a very dark sense of humor.”

  The anger was gone, replaced by a cold, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. “What happened?”

  “I am only alive today because the lich thought it was funny,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of inflection. “It saw my predicament, my futile rage and terror. It crippled me with its touch, infesting me with this… this necrotic cancer. It taunted me. It knew that only a handful of beings in the entire galaxy would ever be able to untangle my essence from its corruption.”

  He met my eyes, his gaze bleak. “And the vast, overwhelming majority of them were just as twisted and evil as it was. It knew I would spend the rest of my life, however short, tearing myself apart trying to find a cure that didn’t exist, or I would eventually succumb, my soul eroded, and wind up as a soulless killer—a death knight—a fate it would find endlessly amusing.”

  The horror of it washed over me. It wasn’t just a wound; it was a meticulously crafted damnation. “In a rift?” I asked, my voice small. “I thought that riftborn creatures were chaos beasts. Unintelligent monsters.”

  He shook his head slowly. “There are many types of rifts, Roisin. Chaos Lords, the masters of greater rifts, are often terrifyingly intelligent. But necrotic rifts… they are different. They aren’t openings from somewhere else, like chaos rifts trying to drag our universe into ultimate disorder. They are opened here, by the Lords of the Dead, by liches and necromancers of immense power. They are portals to the Deadlands, designed to bleed our reality into entropy, to enhance their own power.”

  He met my eyes, his gaze bleak. “Necrotic rifts don’t try to drag us into chaos. They are trying to drag us into the ultimate order. Into entropy. Into death. The absolute absence of chaos, of creation, of life. Utter, final, stasis. And I walked right into the heart of one, thinking my own power would be enough.”

  He fell silent, the confession hanging in the air between us, a testament to pride and its terrible price. I had no words. The egg roll on my plate sat forgotten, its deliciousness now ashes in my mouth. All I could see was the profound isolation in his eyes, the trap he’d built for himself, and the long, painful road that had led him to this table, to me.

  And the terrifying, burgeoning hope that my new, secret class might just be the key to picking the lock.