The silhouette of Lucas burned inside the asteroid.
Blue-white light spiderwebbed through every crack Noah had made, spreading through the mineral composition of the rock like sothing being switched on from the inside. The asteroid was half a mile across and within four seconds of Lucas landing in it, the entire mass was lit up. Not glowing. Lit, the way a lantern was lit, light pressing outward from the inside through every seam and fracture.
Kelvin’s tir read nine minutes forty-two seconds.
For context, the world record for a human holding their breath under stress conditions was around six minutes. Standard military dive training pushed exceptional candidates to eight. Both of those numbers assud the person was doing nothing except not breathing.
Nine minutes forty-two seconds. Both of them still moving.
Kelvin watched the asteroid and said nothing for once.
Inside the fleet, the viewport was pressed with bodies. Eclipse mbers, task force personnel, a significant portion of Aurelius’s crew who had apparently received word that sothing worth watching was happening off the hull. Nobody was talking above a murmur. The stream drone’s viewer count had been climbing for the last four minutes and Reyna, watching from back on Earth through the feed, had sent three consecutive ssages that were just question marks.
Noah was still at the field’s edge where the throw had ended, one hand extended, the cut above his eye already sealed. New blood from a split across his knuckles ran down his wrist and the enhanced biology was handling that too, the wound pulling itself closed while he watched the asteroid.
The light inside it got brighter.
And brighter.
The cracks Noah had put in the rock were spreading now, not from impact, from the inside, the lightning finding the mineral veins and running through them, the charge propagating through the asteroid’s own structure the way electrical current found a path. The entire mass was a network of lit fractures, every vein filled with blue-white energy, the rock itself becoming a conductor.
It looked like sothing alive.
Then it split.
Not the way things shattered when force hit them from outside. Clean. A vertical line appeared at the asteroid’s center where the largest cluster of fractures t and the two halves simply separated, pulling apart with the deliberate finality of sothing that had decided to beco two things instead of one.
Lucas ca out of the center.
He didn’t jump. The word jump implied effort, implied pushing against sothing. He ca out the way a railgun round ca out of a barrel, the asteroid’s own discharge accelerating him, the explosion of energy he had built inside the rock releasing behind him in a column of blue-white that lit the debris field for a mile in every direction.
He crossed the half-mile back to the field boundary in under a second.
The halves of the asteroid drifted apart behind him, still lit from within, the mineral veins cooling slowly from white to blue to a dim pulse that would probably take an hour to go dark completely.
Noah looked at him coming.
’He punched his way in,’ Noah thought. ’Built a reactor inside a rock and rode the detonation out.’
He moved to et him.
BOOM!
The collision didn’t produce sound. There was no air to carry it. What it produced was visible, a compression wave that rolled outward through the vacuum field’s boundary in a ring, the solid surface of Jemima’s ability rippling like water struck by a stone. The ring traveled outward across the field and when it reached the nearest cluster of asteroids, small fractures appeared across their surfaces.
Nothing had touched those asteroids.
The collision had simply reached them.
Kelvin looked at his sensor readings. "The force displacent from that impact just fractured rock at four hundred ters," he said to Diana. "They didn’t hit those asteroids. The shockwave propagated through the vacuum boundary material itself and transferred into adjacent mass." He looked at his tablet. "That’s not supposed to be possible."
"And yet," Diana said.
"And yet," Kelvin said.
The debris field from the split asteroid was spreading around them now, car-sized chunks of rock drifting in every direction, the battlefield filling with material that would have been terrifying to any normal combatant and was instead furniture.
Noah grabbed a piece as he moved. The chunk was roughly the mass of a mid-range transport vehicle. He held it the way you held sothing you intended to use quickly and threw it without breaking stride.
Lucas cut through it.
Valor ca around in a horizontal arc and the rock split before it arrived, the charge in the blade converting the impact into an instant fracture that divided the chunk cleanly. The two halves tumbled past him glowing at the cut edges, spinning off into the debris field.
Lucas didn’t slow down.
A kick from Noah that missed its target sent a spinning slab of rock outward at a velocity that, when it reached a smaller asteroid forty ters distant, didn’t bounce off it. The slab hit and the asteroid ca apart, the entire mass converting to fragnts that expanded outward in a silent cloud.
The kick had missed.
The miss had destroyed an asteroid.
Neither of them acknowledged it.
They t in the debris field, two people surrounded by drifting rock and the glowing remnants of what had been solid stone, and hit each other with the accumulated montum of the last three exchanges.
The ripple this ti didn’t stop at the nearby asteroids.
It kept going.
The vacuum boundary transmitted it outward in a wave and rock after rock after rock developed hairline fractures across its surface. Not nearby. Distant ones. Asteroids that were three hundred ters out, four hundred, further. The wave reached them and they cracked, small splits appearing across cold stone that hadn’t been touched by anything, hadn’t been close to anything, had simply been in the path of the force the collision produced.
Area of effect.
Not as a technique. Just as a consequence of two people hitting each other hard enough.
Kelvin’s tir read eleven minutes eight seconds.
Lucas caught Noah’s next swing at the wrist.
He didn’t block it. He redirected it, rotating his grip and dumping Valor’s charge behind Noah’s shoulder simultaneously, turning the punch’s montum into a different kind of problem. The charge hit like a booster and Noah wasn’t attacking anymore, he was moving, fast, in a direction he hadn’t chosen.
He hit the first asteroid at a speed that converted the rock to fragnts.
Hit the second one.
Hit the third and the fourth and skipped across the debris field like a flat stone across water, each impact adding to the expanding cloud of rock fragnts around them, each explosion sending new material spinning outward until the space between them and where they had started was unrecognizable, the original clean field replaced by a growing halo of drifting ice and stone that caught the distant starlight and threw it back in every direction.
By the ti he stabilized, the battlefield they had started with was gone.
He turned.
Lucas was already coming back.
Noah closed the distance instead of receiving it.
He got his hands on Lucas properly for the first ti. Both arms. Grip locked. No lightning redirection, no technique, just the full application of Strength 1,847 finding sothing to hold onto.
He rotated.
Once.
Twice.
Three tis, each rotation faster, the chanics of it simple and brutal and exactly what it looked like.
He let go.
Lucas beca a streak of blue across the debris field, not slowing, drilling straight through a cluster of asteroids ahead of him without stopping, the rock parting around him the way it parted for sothing moving too fast to be resisted, the tunnel he carved through solid stone lit from inside by the residual charge of Valor, blue light lingering in the passage he had made through the cluster.
The tunnel sat there glowing.
Lucas stopped himself. Turned. Ca back.
He was smiling.
Noah felt his own mouth do the sa thing without deciding to.
’There it is,’ Noah thought. ’That’s the line where it stops being a test and starts being sothing else.’
They both knew they had crossed it at the sa mont.
The next exchange didn’t build toward anything. It just happened, both of them committing simultaneously, Lucas channeling everything Valor had been storing through the blade and Noah driving forward with the full weight of everything he was and the collision detonated the cluster between them.
Dozens of asteroids. The ones behind the cluster, the ones beside it, the debris from the earlier exchanges that had been drifting nearby. All of it fractured and broke and expanded outward in a silent bloom of rock and ice and spinning fragnts that caught the starlight and threw it back in a thousand directions simultaneously.
Both of them were thrown.
Not staggered. Thrown, the force of their own collision adding to the detonation and sending them in opposite directions at velocities that turned the debris field into a blur around them.
Noah tried to stabilize. The field was gone, they were past its boundary now, actual vacuum with no surface to push off from, and the montum was carrying him and the debris was thinning and the stars were opening up ahead of him and behind him and to every side of him.
Ahead of him, sothing filled the sky.
Large. Pale. Growing.
Not an asteroid.
A moon.
Cold and cratered and growing very fast because he was moving very fast toward it and stabilizing was no longer an option.
KOOOOOOOOOM
He hit.
The surface of the moon ca up and he went into it and the frozen ground erupted around him, ice and rock and dust launching upward into space in a plu that caught the distant sunlight and turned into sothing briefly beautiful before dispersing. He skipped once, twice, the trench carving itself across the moon’s surface behind him, miles of frozen ground displaced by the passage of one person moving too fast to stop.
He ca to rest in the bottom of the trench he had made.
Dust settled. Slowly, in the moon’s low gravity, drifting back down in ways that didn’t match how dust fell anywhere with real atmosphere.
To his left, another impact point. Another trench running parallel to his, carved by Lucas arriving at the sa moon from the opposite direction, the two trenches eting at an angle a mile ahead of where they both lay.
Then there was a brief silence.
The silence of a moon surface. The silence of no atmosphere. The silence of two people who had just carved trenches into a celestial body with their bodies.
Kelvin’s tir read fourteen minutes nineteen seconds.
He stared at it.
"Diana," he said.
"Yeah," she said.
"Fourteen minutes. In open vacuum. While doing." He gestured at the viewport, at the expanding debris field visible in the distance, at the moon they had apparently relocated to. "That."
Diana looked at the viewport.
"The human body," Kelvin said, his voice taking on the tone it got when sothing had exceeded every model he had, "cannot do this. Biologically. Physiologically. By every asurent we have for human capability, what those two just did is not possible. Well I suppose they are both monsters after all," He looked at his tir again. "And they’re not done."
In the trench, Noah pushed himself up.
Dust fell off him in slow arcs, drifting back to the moon’s surface in the low gravity, unhurried. Blood from a new cut across his cheekbone ran down his jaw and the enhanced regeneration was already closing it, new skin finding the edges of the wound, the biology that had been running continuously for fourteen minutes still running, still handling every hit, still refusing to treat any of this as unsustainable.
Across the trench, a figure pushed itself upright.
Lucas stood in the parallel crater he had made. His gear was shredded at the shoulder from an earlier exchange. Blood ran from his nose and he didn’t wipe it. Valor in his right hand, the blue-green energy running through the blade, pulling charge from the moon’s own mineral composition now, finding whatever electrical potential existed in frozen rock and adding it to what the weapon already carried.
The longer the fight ran, the more it had to draw from.
They looked at each other across the frozen distance.
One of them laughed.
The sound didn’t carry. No atmosphere. But the shoulders shook and the other one saw it and the shoulders shook again for a different reason.
They pushed themselves upright properly. Both of them, in their respective craters, rising from the surface of a moon they had arrived at by accident.
They looked at each other across the trench.
And they grinned.
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