"Marcus." A hand shook my shoulder. Ferdinand. "Your name. They called your name."
"What?"
"You're up, idiot." Ferdinand tried again.
The Assembly Hall swam back into focus. Three faces stared at me.
"Marcus Tiernan!" The announcer's voice boomed again, a hint of impatience leaking through the rehearsed grandeur. "Marcus Tiernan!"
"I think they want you," Tom said dryly.
Right. Yes. My name. My turn...
The Federation logo on the floor began to pulse; the flashes of light mirrored my heartbeat, rapid and never-ending. I stepped onto it, forgetting the walk across the room. My legs felt as though they belonged to someone else.
"Uphold the name, Tiernan." Ferdinand's voice followed me. Cold. Legacy-coded. The only kindness we knew how to offer.
CLINK
The platform descended with mechanical smoothness, rotating as it went. The Assembly Hall ceiling receded above me, replaced by the yawning maw of the arena. A hundred thousand faces turned upward. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes found me. They examined. They weighed.
"Marcus Tiernan!"
The announcer's voice thundered through the space, wrapping around me like chains.
"The Tiernan Line! Forty-one generations of service!"
Forty-one. I'd heard it my whole life. Forty-one generations of pilots, soldiers, heroes. Forty-one generations of blood spilt for the Federation. Now it was my turn to be revealed, aired in front of untold trillions, like livestock on display.
"Son of Major James Tiernan! Grandson of General Arthur Tiernan, currently serving!"
Holograms lit up across the arena, revealing my family's service record. From the very first General Marcus Tiernan, all the way to my Sister, Sara Tiernan. Every name, a new weight, added to my shoulders. I caught glimpses of the crowd. The Scholars Seating. The Common stands. The Legacy Section. The Chen Dynasty's box, where Wei had already been escorted.
"Great-nephew of S-Grade Luminary Lydia Tiernan, who gave her life at the Battle of Proxima!"
The pin burned my chest. Not warm—hot. Copper flooded my mouth, sharp and sudden. I nearly gagged. It was stronger than the dream. Like my blood had turned to metal and was trying to escape through my tongue.
The crowd noise began to fade. Not quieting, distancing. As though I was hearing it through water.
"...seventeen combat..."
The announcer's voice stretched. Fragmented.
"...three gener..."
"...awarded posthum..."
Words arrived out of order. The arena had taken on a strange quality. Lights too bright. Shadows too deep. Faces smeared at the edges.
How long had I been falling?
THUD
The world slammed back. Sound, light, and heat crashed in. I staggered, almost collapsing. The crowd's roar hammered my skull.
The pod waited.
Twenty meters away.
It gleamed under the spotlights, almost alive. The same pod Wei entered minutes ago. The same pod that measured every Tiernan before me and found them worthy.
I walked toward it, each step heavier than the last. The pin burned. The copper drowned.
Ten meters.
The pod's surface caught the light in a strange way. Almost iridescent. Almost—
Five meters.
breathing.
I reached out, fingers brushing against its hull. Warm, but not metal-warm. Skin-warm. It pulsed, gentle and rhythmic. In the polished surface stood a silhouette, wearing my face.
Darkness.
The pod sealed behind me. The noise of the arena vanished. My own breathing was all that remained.
Then pain.
Waves of force slammed my skull, again and again. Pressure built from behind my eyes, in my temples, at the base of my brain. Something was probing, searching for a way in.
The needles descended. Light pricks of pain came from my arms, neck and the base of my spine as they inserted themselves. The sensation paled in comparison to the feeling of something vast trying to push in—tendrils of ice seeking purchase, something reaching for an emptiness only to find it... Occupied.
Copper flooded my mouth. No longer a taste—a drowning. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think. I could only feel the forces of an immovable object and unceasing momentum colliding.
My mind emptied. The edge of reality slipping away.
-
Stars that were eyes, wheeling overhead in patterns spelling meanings I couldn't read. My hands are wrong, too old and too scarred with battles never fought. Armour fused to my chest, pulsing with a foreign heartbeat.
A silhouette at the edge of everything.
"Again?"
It was holding something. A blade. A star. A heart. It kept changing, and I was dropping it, always dropping it.
A woman made of ice, crying tears of purple. "Stop..." she begged, "Please..." She pleaded.
Every nerve ending screamed copper; every thought drowned, screaming in that wrong, searing taste. I was nothing but pain, metal and consciousness.
Then every star blinked shut. No explosion. No sound. No light. Only the memory of what once was.
A pressure surged one final time, but this time from within my mind.
It crushed me, it folded me, it swallowed me whole.
-
Light flooded in. I stumbled forward, legs failing. At once, the arena came back—crowd stunned and murmuring, heads craned, some with open mouths, some with narrowed eyes, all staring at me as the massive holographic display overhead pulsed with my result.
I looked up.
Grey letters. Dull and lifeless.
F-GRADE
The silence was absolute.
A hundred thousand people. Not one breath. Not one whisper. The word hung above me like a sentence already carried out. Forty-one generations ended here, on this floor. With me.
The copper was gone. Gone without warning. For the first time in recent memory, my mouth tasted like nothing. The familiar sharpness, the constant presence that had tethered me to myself, was simply absent, leaving emptiness in its wake. It was as though it had never been there at all. I ran my tongue across my teeth, desperately searching for it. Hoping for it.
Clean.
Then my stomach heaved.
Not copper— something worse. My body rejected what my mind couldn't process. I doubled over, hand to my mouth.
Blood.
Bright red. Yet there was no taste at all.
The silence cracked. The arena filled with murmurs and gasps. A familiar voice screamed from the Legacy section. Officials surged toward me. Faces twisted in shock, pity, awe.
The Tiernan heir. Forty-one generations. F-Grade. Bleeding onto the arena floor.
But I couldn't hear any of it.
Because in the emptiness where copper used to be, something woke. Not cold like the machine's probing, not heavy like the presence that had blocked it. Something new. Something hungry.
[TRUE-NOOSPHERE INITIALISING]
[PROGRESSION TO ■■■■■■■■: 0.00%]
[ITERA—6.6260̷̢7̵͇015×1■■... ERR_OR...]