Corebreaker

I didn’t ask to be born with a star burning in my veins.

They say the Hex awakened in me when I was six—before I knew how to tie my boots or tell Saturn from a sunspot. One minute I was clinging to my mother’s leg in a market corridor on Vega-9; the next, I was hurling a pulse of raw aether so hard it blew a grown slaver through a titanium wall. I don’t remember his face, just the smell of singed bone and my mother’s silence as she dragged me into the shadows.

That was the day I stopped being a child.

Now I’m twenty-three, and there’s a bounty the size of a small moon on my head. Most folks call me “the Neko Witch” because of the ears. Yes, I’m gene-spliced. Enhanced reflexes, low-light vision, tail for balance. Cute, right? But nobody’s smiling when I paint the skies with fire.

Tonight, I’m hunting a Syndicate freighter moving illicit tech through the Borealis Drift. My shuttle—a scrapheap named Voidkitten—hovers under cloak, riding the magnetic currents between dead satellites and fractured hulls. Inside, my fingertips crackle with contained magic, threads of glowing black lightning weaving between them.

I link my neural uplink to the drift scanner. The ship comes into view.

Time to breach.

I phase-jump into their cargo bay, landing like a whisper. Two guards spot me—just in time to die. My aether lashes out, one strike to each heart. No time for mercy.

Down the corridor, alarms shriek. I sprint into the heart of the ship, my tail whipping behind me, hair flying wild. I conjure a hex orb, detonate it mid-air, and slam into the mainframe chamber as smoke floods behind me.

The tech I came for floats inside: an aetheric core. Illegally forged. Dangerous in the wrong hands.

Which means it's perfect for mine.