The Dark Gate unfolded behind Trinity’s throne—it had always been there, hidden until he allowed lesser eyes to see. Ancient emerald runes spiraled around a stone arch, exhaling black mist as if filtering the darkness of another world.

  Skyler and Zoe stared, awe crackling in their chests. It was close enough to understand one truth: try sneaking through without permission, and you’d be digging your own grave.

  “Emilia. Go with them. See it done.” Trinity’s command echoed, the sound itself a verdict. “You may leave.”

  The short decree slammed shut on the conversation tighter than prison doors.

  A force yanked them forward. The four were dragged into the Dark Gate as if some cosmic hand had seized them and hurled them through the void.

  Trinity didn’t move. His face remained motionless—godlike, unreadable. Beside him, Len lingered, hollow features fixed on the Gate, bottomless, unfathomable.

  —WHOOSH—

  They were spat out—cannonball mode. Skyler hit the ground, bracing against gray dust as fine as ash.

  The lunar surface stretched around them—pockmarked craters, jagged ridges—and above, sunlight flared off the rim of stone. Yet a massive glass dome enclosed them, a false sky overhead. Oxygen filled their lungs—manufactured, artificial, but breathable.

  The dome stood on the dark side of the moon. The side Earth never sees. Not from love—only because gravity forced its obedience.

  And there, dead center, loomed a fortress.

  A blocky monolith of concrete and steel, built to intimidate rather than welcome. Its gray walls were cracked, iron ribs showing through old wounds. Windows—few, shuttered tight. The main gate, a slab of reinforced steel, barred from the outside. Not to keep intruders out… but to keep whatever lived inside in.

  “Roxy—how do you know the aether ore here is the same as Gaia’s cave?” Skyler asked, the question that had been gnawing at him since before they jumped.

  “You think I bought my rank?” she shot back, chin high. “I’m Sigma-Four’s commander. If you can’t even identify ore, maybe you shouldn’t be stepping foot on this ground.”

  The words hit—syntax error to the soul. And weirdly—he liked it. Maybe too much.

  Great. So now I’m into getting roasted by scary-smart women. Fantastic. He still caught himself smiling. I’m losing it. Totally losing it.

  “Humans tried colonizing here once, right, Sky?” Zoe piped up, bouncing, her steps scattering dust that kicked her higher each time.

  “Yeah. Project got scrapped. Records are blank—some said budget, some said contamination. Right now? I’m leaning contamination.”

  “Ugh, what a waste… I mean, where’s my moon bunny then?!” She hopped twice more, hands doing floppy rabbit ears.

  Skyler cracked a grin before his brain caught up.

  Wait—what the hell does that have to do with anything?

  But… it proved something. At least Zoe and he came from the same world—different timelines, maybe—but the same Earth. Because Eden? Eden didn’t have a moon.

  “They’d all be dead by now… if you were in charge of feeding them.” Roxy’s jab cut—sharp, the sting of a whip.

  Zoe tripped on a rock, nearly face-planting. Skyler snagged her waist just in time.

  The girl shot him a sheepish grin. And stuck her tongue out at Roxy on her behalf.

  Truth settled in: no matter how freezing the lunar air was supposed to be… it wasn’t half as cold as the tension between those two girls.

  —

  The lunar base interior was too perfect. Gravity calibrated, temperature steady, air crisp and clean—no tang of heavy metals. It felt less survival—more a welcome prepared for guests.

  Skyler flicked his wrist. Blue lines shot from his glove, a holographic grid blooming across the walls and ceiling—schematics lighting the way.

  “…This is it.” His gaze swept the map, nodding once. “Matches the professor’s data exactly.”

  Roxy leaned in, scanning the glowing lines for barely five seconds before she tapped four pulsing nodes.

  “This base has four control hubs,” she said flatly. “All must be activated simultaneously to unlock the lower levels.” Her gaze snapped upward, cutting across them one by one. “We split up.”

  The authority in her tone sucked the oxygen out of the room. Silence. Except for the static in Skyler’s head.

  How the hell does she figure things out this fast…?

  Roxy wasn’t just some dorm-rat kid raised on digital textbooks. She’d devoured everything—science, physics, engineering, astronomy—and survived raising herself and her mother. She was living proof that intelligence equals sexy,no debate.

  Skyler stared at the redhead until his lungs forgot their job. Zoe caught him looking and nearly murdered him with a glare.

  “I’ll take this route,” Emilia announced before anyone else could. No surprise—the woman thrived on charging in first.

  “Skyler—top left.” Roxy pointed—a general issuing orders.

  He flinched as if his mom had just told him to do the dishes.

  “Zoe—bottom left. I’ll handle top right.”

  Zoe exhaled hard, every molecule screaming unfair.

  “What? Or do you actually want to pair up with me?” Roxy asked, tone deceptively casual, her intent anything but.

  “As if! Who’d wanna go with you? I’d rather go with Sky—” Zoe latched onto his arm—claiming property.

  “You think he wants to go with you?” Roxy shot back, zero hesitation.

  Zoe’s teeth clenched. A blade shimmered into existence at her hip. Roxy’s fingers twitched, ready to summon a spear from her mirror-dimension. Skyler stood between them, sweating despite the perfectly regulated climate.

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  Yeah, sure—it looked like they were fighting over him. Reality check: they weren’t. It was just another one of their games. He was the chew-toy, nothing more.

  Even now, a pathetic part of him wanted to believe he was worth fighting for.

  “Are you two eight years old?” Emilia cut in—her voice a bucket of ice water. “Quit it. We’ve got four paths, four people. Simple math.” She paused—then dropped the bomb.

  “And besides… the boy’s mine.”

  The words landed—full shock-grenade vibes, no respawn timer.

  Wait—what?!

  Skyler’s brain scrambled. Was she serious? Joking? Testing him? Or had he just quantum-leaped into an entirely different reality?

  Either way, Emilia’s poker face didn’t blink.

  “Alright,” she said crisply, as if the matter were settled. “Move out.”

  The tiniest one in the group… and somehow the room bent around her authority.

  The lower-right wing—Emilia had picked it herself. Not because intel marked it as critical, not because instinct screamed danger ahead. No. She just didn’t take orders from anyone. If there was a voice in her head whispering go this way—fine, she’d go.

  And now?

  Yeah. Regret tasted real.

  “Pfft… dead quiet. Guess this’ll be a chill stroll,” she muttered, humming, every note drifting with the ease of a lazy afternoon walk.

  Then—click-clack. A faint sound from deep in the dark.

  Most people would’ve frozen, maybe taken two cautious steps back. Emilia? Please. She’d fought Rippers until it got boring. A little sound in the dark wasn’t enough to scare her—

  Until it multiplied.

  Until it layered itself into a symphony of skittering legs.

  “Come out already!” she barked into the black.

  The glow from her visor caught shapes moving. And her gut clenched.

  Oh, hell no.

  Spiders. Not the fuzzy kind. Robotic spiders, palm-sized, swarming by the thousands—across the walls, ceiling, floor. The kind you could see perfectly, yet your brain refused to accept.

  For once, Emilia wished she could rewind time and punch herself unconscious before saying I’ll take this route. Because the iron-blooded commander of Sigma Unit… was deathly arachnophobic.

  “No. Nope. Absolutely not. Can I switch routes?!” Her lip split as she bit down hard enough to taste iron. Above, fate was laughing, while the tide of skittering machines rushed closer.

  “Nononono!”

  Her rifle barked before her brain could process. Sometimes the only cure for fear was a wall of bullets.

  Rounds shredded clusters off the walls, tore others dropping from the ceiling into fireworks of shrapnel and sparks. Explosions lit the corridor—New Year’s Eve after the apocalypse.

  “DIE, YOU CREEPY LITTLE FREAKS!”

  The hall thundered with gunfire, metal shrieks, and the hiss of burning circuits. Smoke thickened, swallowing her view.

  Crap.

  Ventilation was nonexistent. This narrow corridor was a throat, and she was the prey choking inside it.

  She sealed herself in silence, forcing her ears to work overtime.

  Click-click-click-click.

  Metallic legs closing in from every direction. The hairs on her neck stiffened into antennae. Every instinct screamed at her to panic—scream—run.

  But she couldn’t. Not as a commander. Not as a leader. No matter how bad her skin crawled, she had to keep firing, grinning wide, her madness a performance for gods watching through cosmic CCTV.

  I am the leader. I am the commander.

  “Come at me, you tin-crawling bastards!” she roared—

  And they did.

  Hundreds burst from every shadow, a tidal wave of metal and mandibles.

  That’s when her resolve cracked.

  “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

  Her scream ripped through the base—half war cry, half cinematic nightmare.

  Emilia Stromwood wasn’t born a warrior. If her family’s script had been followed, she’d have grown up in velvet-draped drawing rooms, sipping tea on a balcony garden reserved for Eden’s elite—smiling politely for diplomats and practicing the right kind of laugh.

  Her father, Sir Kalen Stromwood, ran internal affairs for Eden—an iron-clad bureaucrat who administered entire departments with the same blank expression he used on formal invitations. He tried to control everything... including his only daughter. He had plans: a marriage into some old noble line, heirs, continuity, the whole boring dynasty checklist.

  Her mother, Lady Eveline, was the kind of quiet old-money woman who never once contradicted her husband.

  Emilia grew up in a household—a micro-kingdom where your heart had to file a request before it dared to beat fast.

  So she did the opposite. Small frame, fragile health as a kid—those became reasons to train three times harder than anyone else. While the debutantes polished manners, Emilia was in the stacks, reading combat manuals instead of etiquette books. While others practiced smiles, she practiced falling, reloading and getting back up—often in the dead of night.

  At nine, she sneaked into the cadet academy’s wall-training circuit and fell into an abandoned pit no one used anymore. It was dark. It was cold. And it echoed with the rasp of tiny legs across the stone.

  “AAAAAHHHHH!!!”

  She’d never screamed like that before. Real spiders—actual, crawling nightmares—were her first enemy. They didn’t even bite, just being close dragged breath from his lungs.

  Rescued by officers, she said almost nothing afterward—buried the fear so deep she could only muscle through it. Train. Train. Train.

  When gravity-bending showed up at fourteen, it felt like the universe was giving her back something it had taken. Emilia learned to bend gravity to her will and paired that with relentless training until the girl who once hid in drawing rooms became Commander of Sigma Unit Three—fast and without mercy.

  Not by class. Not by luck. Not because anyone handed it to her.

  She earned it by refusing to be told what to do. By refusing to be cataloged—even by destiny.

  After she took command, the Sacred Key—officially called the Lestial Key—wasn’t something you just ‘get.’ It wasn’t a lab-made trinket. It was the product of Eden’s darkest marriage of arcana and tech—the Legacynthium project, a secret research division insiders called ‘the Eternal Heritage.’

  This was where myths weren’t just read about; they lived, breathed—and sometimes bit back.

  Professor Berenail—the dimension-energy savant who taught Emilia in closed lectures—once explained the Key in a voice that made the room feel smaller.

  “The Lestial Key is a specialized booster. It can amplify a user’s mystical or bio-aug power to the absolute limit…or beyond. But there’s always a price—sometimes it’s courage, sometimes pain, sometimes pieces of memory you’ll never get back.”

  He showed the prototype: a clear palm-sized card. Unlock the mechanism embedded in its core, and trapped energies unfurled—raw, wired, obvious.

  “In each Key is the essence of a legendary beast—real, not just lore. Some contain phoenix feather from the Solis Range. Some hold scales from the snake-god of old. Some—blood-crystal from hydra. Converted into hybrid arc-mech power—think of it like the ether-drive on an Aether-class warship.”

  Professor Berenail looked at Emilia, then added with a weight that made her spine straighten:

  “There used to be thirteen Keys. Now—only five remain.” He paused long enough for that to land.

  “…And the Key will never choose the weak. You’d die before you could use it.”

  Emilia yanked the five Lestial Keys from the pouch on her hip and slammed them into the chamber of her gravity cannon.

  Click.

  She knew damn well these weren’t toys. Each one could flip the game instantly—from being prey on the run… to becoming the hunter.

  She’d gotten them the night Roxy vanished from camp. A cloth bag had been left at her door. Inside—these Keys. Emilia never asked if Roxy had stolen them or discovered them. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that right now, they were the only thing standing between her and a swarm of mechanical arachnids by the thousands.

  “YAAAHHHH!!!”

  The Sigma Three commander pulled the trigger—unleashing a blast that inverted gravity itself. The smoke cleared, and in a blink, every spider-bot was weightless, flailing in the air—steel popcorn kernels bouncing inside a microwave from hell.

  “Ew—gross as hell!”

  Emilia shrieked, then broke into a manic grin, firing round after round into the writhing swarm above her. She didn’t even aim—the bullets found their marks as if the heavens themselves sided with her phobia.

  Metal bodies burst midair, fire cascading down, raining shards of broken limbs. When they hit the ground, the breath of curses lingering past their death.

  The dark-skinned warrior rested the cannon on her shoulder, chest heaving, while the vents hissed out heat that steamed past her body. Her long auburn braids whipped in the draft.

  In that instant, she looked straight out of a AAA game poster—the badass heroine with a gun the size of a tank. Only difference? She wasn’t doing it for the cool factor. She was doing it because she’d just fought for her life against the one thing in the entire universe she hated more than losing.

  And you already know what that is.