The freezing, acidic rain of the hollowed-out asteroid fell in heavy sheets, but not a single drop touched the Grand Inquisitor.
Cassian stood in the pitch-black mouth of the alleyway, a passive, microscopic spatial-fold rendering his immediate perimeter completely frictionless. The grime, the toxic water, and the stench of burning synthetic fuel slid off his void-black armor as if he were a ghost haunting a graveyard.
He leaned against the rusted iron bulkhead, delicately brushing a light layer of cosmic dust from his sleeve. It was the only visible sign of traveler's wear on the otherwise immaculate Inquisitor. With Warlord Garrick reduced to ash and the massive bounty on his head officially erased from the syndicate networks, Cassian was no longer the hunted. He was simply a man attempting to map a universe that had violently changed the locks while he was away.
His four silver All-Seeing Eye cores spun with a steady, relaxed luminescence in his chest. He was fully charged, his mathematical architecture resting at a flawless equilibrium. But even with infinite cosmic power at his fingertips, the sheer mundane inconvenience of navigating an outer-rim slum was profoundly irritating.
He watched the main thoroughfare. A patrol of four heavy-set Skarn soldiers marched past, their mechanized boots splashing through the toxic puddles. Cassian's silver eyes locked onto their weapons.
He analyzed the heavy, tungsten-plated rifles and the glowing glass chambers bolted to the chassis. Inside the chambers, raw, unrefined Aether-cores pulsed with captive energy, cycling through forced cooldown phases.
A mechanical bypass, Cassian thought, his aristocratic lip curling into a sneer of profound disgust. They are treating fragments of universal creation like disposable batteries. It is brilliant. It is highly efficient. And it is an absolute abomination.
He needed intelligence. He needed to know the exact coordinates of this slum, the reach of this new empire, and where their anti-orbital scanners were positioned so he could acquire a proper ship.
Cassian pushed himself off the wall and stepped seamlessly into the flow of the crowded, miserable street.
He moved with an elegance that defied the grimy surroundings. The wretched denizens of the slum—starving humans, shivering Vesperans, and broken Gorr laborers—instantly parted before him. He didn't even spark a core to push them aside; his sheer, unspoken aura of absolute supremacy triggered a primal flight response in everyone he walked toward.
He spotted a subterranean cantina glowing with a flickering neon sign that read The Iron Sump. It was loud, thick with the smoke of unregulated narcotics, and smelled of cheap plasma-fluid. It was the perfect place for a rat to hide data.
Cassian glided down the rusted metal stairs and stepped into the dimly lit cavern.
The cantina was packed with smugglers and scavengers, but Cassian's gaze immediately snapped to a corner booth. Sitting alone was a cybernetically enhanced information broker—a human whose entire left hemisphere had been replaced by a bulky, illegal data-processing rig. His organic eye was bloodshot, and his mechanical eye whirred as it scanned the room.
Cassian walked directly to the booth and sat down gracefully opposite the cyborg.
The broker jumped, his mechanical eye violently clicking as it tried to read Cassian's Aetheric signature. It found a wall of absolute, terrifying silence.
"Booth's taken, fancy," the broker growled, resting a hand on a plasma-pistol holstered at his hip. "Get lost before I sell your shiny armor for scrap."
Cassian didn't flinch. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the sticky, alcohol-stained table, steepling his fingers.
"I am a man who has temporarily misplaced his star chart," Cassian said, his voice a smooth, terrifying purr that cut right through the noise of the cantina. "And you have the distinct, paranoid posture of a man who makes his living selling secrets. I require a brief history lesson."
The broker sneered, drawing his plasma-pistol halfway. "I don't give free lessons. I take credits, or I take—"
Cassian didn't raise his hand. He simply forced a microscopic fraction of Aether into his left All-Seeing Eye.
The silver iris suddenly spun with a blinding, piercing light.
Cassian reached directly into the cyborg's neural-link. He didn't just read the man's mind; he flooded the cybernetic processor with a fraction of the universe's absolute math.
The broker gasped, his biological eye rolling back in his head. His hand fell away from the pistol. His mechanical eye sparked wildly, smoke hissing from the synthetic plating on his skull as his brain experienced the equivalent of a digital supernova.
"Who... what are you?" the broker choked out, completely paralyzed by the Grand Inquisitor's gaze.
"I am the architect of the map you currently reside on," Cassian whispered, his voice echoing directly inside the broker's skull. "Now. Tell me whose boot is stepping on this asteroid."
"The Skarn," the broker whimpered, unable to look away from the spinning silver eye. "The Skarn Hegemony."
"The Skarn?" Cassian frowned slightly, a genuine flicker of surprise crossing his perfect features. "The Aether-blind miners of the Eastern Rim? The Vanguard left them to rot centuries ago. They are cattle."
"Not anymore," the broker gasped, blood leaking from his nose as the pressure mounted. "They have slotted steel. They don't use marrow. They use the Ignition Chambers. They ripped through the Vanguard Remnant like wet paper. They don't get tired. They don't burn out. If a weapon overheats, they just cycle the core and keep shooting."
Cassian processed the data instantly. His brilliant, tactical mind assembled the horrifying puzzle. The Vanguard was dead, leaving massive armories of dormant cores unguarded. The Harvest was fractured, leaving the Skarn unchecked. And now, an industrialized war machine was using the universe's most lethal anomalies as standardized ammunition.
"Who commands them?" Cassian demanded.
"Archon Kaelith," the broker shuddered. "He rules from the Obsidian Forges. He's sweeping the outer rims. Anyone who uses natural Aether... anyone with a Vanguard registry... they execute them and harvest the cores from their chests to feed the guns."
Cassian leaned back, releasing the microscopic hold on the cyborg's mind.
The broker collapsed forward onto the table, gasping for air, his mechanical eye rebooting with a pathetic, whining sound.
"Fascinating," Cassian murmured to himself.
The Vanguard had relied on indoctrination and spiritual limitation to control their armies. But Archon Kaelith was relying on raw, uncompromising industrial scale. A single Skarn soldier wasn't a threat. But a million Skarn soldiers, marching in unison, wielding high-tier elemental disasters from mass-produced rifles? It was an extinction-level event for any Aether-user in the galaxy.
"One more thing," Cassian said, his tone returning to a polite, conversational cadence. "This asteroid. Where is the local planetary garrison command? I find myself in need of a trans-atmospheric vessel, and I refuse to fly commercial."
The broker, absolutely terrified, pointed a shaking finger toward the ceiling. "Upper levels. Sector Four. The Skarn overseer has a private docking bay. But you can't go up there. It's guarded by heavily slotted elites."
"Elite is a very subjective term," Cassian smiled, a cold, terrifying expression that didn't reach his eyes.
Cassian stood up, smoothing the front of his armor. He had the intelligence he needed. The Skarn Hegemony was an industrialized cancer rapidly metastasizing across the old Vanguard space.
Cassian was on his own mission to map the shadows of this fractured universe. He always kept Jax in the back of his mind, a cosmic failsafe he could call upon if the galaxy truly began to collapse, but the Grand Inquisitor preferred to conduct his own surgical strikes. He was pushing deep into the heart of the Skarn's newly conquered territory to find their foundries, entirely unaware that the Hegemony's expanding armies were simultaneously beginning to blindly press against the borders of the Azure Expanse light-years away.
Cassian turned and glided out of the cantina, stepping back into the freezing, acidic rain.
He was not exhausted. He was not running. He was the Grand Inquisitor, and as he looked up at the towering, iron superstructure of the Skarn garrison command, a familiar, dangerous thrill ignited in his chest.
He didn't need to shatter the sky to steal a ship. He just needed to remind this new, arrogant empire exactly why the Vanguard High Council had been terrified of him in the first place.