Draft Space was a monument to cosmic refuse.
It was a sprawling, lawless graveyard of shattered planets, derelict Vanguard cruisers, and hollowed-out asteroids, all tethered together by massive, rusted poly-steel chains. It was illuminated by the flickering, toxic neon signs of black-market cantinas and the volatile thruster-burns of smuggler skiffs. Out here, there was no High Council. There was only scrap, survival, and the warlords.
On the floating asteroid-city of Rust-Peak, Warlord Kaelok sat on a throne of welded engine blocks.
Kaelok was a prime example of Draft Space biology. He was a massive, scarred Gorr brute who had survived the fall of the Vanguard by adopting the outlaw philosophy of Aetheric manipulation: brute force over harmony. Rather than mastering different frequencies, Kaelok had forcefully jammed eighteen identical Tier III Magma cores into his chest. His veins constantly bulged with glowing, painful orange light. It was a horrific strain on his nervous system, reducing his lifespan by the hour, but it made him the undisputed king of Rust-Peak.
He was in the middle of counting a tribute of stolen hyper-fuel when the warning sirens of the asteroid violently shrieked to life.
"Boss!" a Vesperan scavenger yelled, sprinting into the throne room, his four eyes wide with absolute panic. "Slipspace ruptures! Massive displacements right on the edge of our gravity tethers!"
"Vanguard Remnant?" Kaelok growled, standing up. The eighteen cores in his chest flared, the ambient heat in the room instantly melting the frost off the iron walls.
"No," the scavenger gasped. "It's... it's a factory."
Kaelok stormed out of the throne room and onto the massive, rusted viewing deck of the asteroid. He looked up into the dark, chaotic sky of Draft Space, and his glowing orange eyes widened.
It wasn't a pirate fleet. It was an industrialized armada.
Hundreds of massive, blocky dreadnoughts composed of seamless, dark-gray tungsten were dropping out of the void. They didn't have the sleek, aerodynamic curves of Vanguard vessels, nor the mismatched, welded-scrap aesthetic of Draft Space. They looked like floating anvils. Their engines burned with a cold, mechanized precision, completely ignoring the volatile magnetic storms of the sector.
"Sound the general alarm!" Kaelok roared, his magma cores burning so hot his skin began to crack and bleed. "Get every gunship in the air! Nobody takes Rust-Peak!"
Thousands of smugglers, pirates, and scavengers swarmed out of the neon-lit slums. They boarded their heavily modified skiffs and rusted cruisers, powering up their black-market weapons. Down on the docks, dozens of lesser warlords sparked their own chaotic, brute-force internal cores, preparing to defend their lawless home.
But the invading armada did not broadcast a demand for surrender. They did not ask for tribute.
The ventral bays of the massive Skarn dreadnoughts simply opened.
Thousands of heavy, mechanized drop-pods rained down upon Rust-Peak like a meteor shower of solid iron. They smashed through the neon signs, crushed the cantinas, and cratered the rusted landing pads.
The pods hissed open, and the Skarn infantry marched out.
They moved with terrifying, synchronized perfection. There was no battle-cry. There was only the heavy, rhythmic thud of mechanized boots and the glowing, mechanical hum of their weapons.
Kaelok roared, launching himself from the viewing deck. He fell a hundred feet, slamming into the center of the docks like a volcanic eruption. The eighteen Tier III Magma cores in his chest detonated simultaneously. He didn't use Bagua flow or martial arts; he simply unleashed a massive, omnidirectional wave of superheated, chaotic magma designed to incinerate the invading infantry in a single blast.
The tidal wave of liquid fire washed over the first two ranks of Skarn soldiers.
When the magma cooled and crusted over, Kaelok grinned, expecting to see charred bones and melted armor.
Instead, the Skarn formation was entirely unbroken.
The front line of heavy infantry had simply raised massive, rectangular tungsten riot shields. Locked into the center of each shield was a Tier IV Thermal-Displacement core. The raw stones pulsed dimly in their glass chambers, having mechanically absorbed and negated the entirety of Kaelok's biological attack.
"What?" Kaelok breathed, the agonizing Aetheric strain in his chest causing him to violently cough up a wad of glowing, boiling blood.
The Skarn soldiers lowered their shields. In perfect unison, the second rank stepped forward, raising heavy rotary rifles. The glass chambers on their weapons glowed blinding white as they mechanically extracted the energy from their slotted Tier IV Kinetic-Pulse cores.
They opened fire.
It was an execution by firing squad, powered by the stars. The sheer, overwhelming kinetic force didn't just pierce Kaelok's armor; it completely pulverized the massive brute, blasting him backward into a cloud of red mist and shattered bone.
As the Warlord of Rust-Peak fell, his eighteen Magma cores clattered onto the iron grating, glowing and pulsing without a host.
A Skarn lieutenant walked forward. He didn't look at the pulverized body of the warlord. He knelt down, pulled a heavy, lead-lined extraction canister from his belt, and began meticulously collecting the eighteen raw cores.
"The biologicals have severely degraded these stones with their crude internal routing," the lieutenant spoke into his comms, dropping the cores into the canister. "But they will serve the foundries. Commence the harvest."
The slaughter of Draft Space began.
It was not a war; it was an industrial processing operation. The smugglers and pirates fought with chaotic, desperate fury, but they were fighting a machine that did not feel pain, did not suffer Aetheric exhaustion, and did not break formation.
When a group of Vesperan pirates tried to flank the Skarn lines using stealth-generators, the Skarn simply slotted Tier III Seismic-Sense cores into their helmets, mechanically mapping the vibrations of the pirates' footsteps and systematically gunning them down through the rusted bulkheads.
When a heavily armored smuggler cruiser attempted to launch from the docks and escape into the deep dark, a towering Skarn anti-air platform tracked its trajectory. The gunner slotted a Tier V Spatial-Anchor core into the massive orbital cannon. The weapon fired an invisible wave of collapsed gravity, instantly freezing the cruiser mid-air before a secondary barrage of slotted plasma tore the ship to shreds.
Every time a Draft Space outlaw fell, a Skarn soldier was there with an extraction canister. They didn't care about the stolen credits, the illegal narcotics, or the hyper-fuel. They cut open the chests of the dead, ripping out their internal Aether-cores with surgical, mechanical precision.
Commander Vrox stood on the boarding ramp of his command dreadnought, watching the neon-lit slums of Rust-Peak burn below him. The chaotic, vibrant lawlessness of Draft Space was being methodically erased, replaced by the cold, sterile efficiency of the Hegemony.
"Commander," a tactical officer said, approaching Vrox and snapping a rigid salute. "Sector six of the scrap-chain is secured. We have harvested eight hundred and fifty-three active cores in the last hour alone. The local resistance is entirely broken."
Vrox nodded, his featureless visor reflecting the burning ruins of the cantinas.
"Process the scrap," Vrox ordered, his synthesized voice echoing coldly. "Dismantle their ships and their rusted cities. Feed the metal directly into the dreadnought foundries to forge more ignition chambers."
"And the survivors?" the officer asked.
"There is no biological labor in the Hegemony," Vrox replied, turning his back on the burning asteroid. "Eradicate them. We are here for the stones, not the flesh."
The officer saluted again. "Yes, Commander. Our vanguard fleets have also mapped the trajectory of the massive chains tethering these asteroids together. They lead outward, directly toward a highly anomalous region of ionized gas and magnetic storms."
Vrox paused. "The Azure Expanse."
"Yes," the officer confirmed. "Our long-range scanners are detecting massive, impossible Aetheric signatures hidden within the nebula. It defies our current mathematical models."
Vrox gripped the hilt of his massive, empty-chambered buster sword. He looked out into the deep void, past the burning wreckage of Draft Space, toward the swirling, violent violet clouds of the Expanse.
"Then let them burn with the rest of this graveyard," Vrox commanded. "Once we purge the last of Draft Space, bring the armada around. We will enter the slipstream to the Azure Expanse. Whatever is hiding in that storm... we will slot its power into our steel."