The cockpit of the Obsidian Wraith was quiet. Not empty, there was the soft hum of systems, the ambient breath of circulating air but quiet in the way a calm sea is quiet: full of latent power beneath a still surface.
Ethan tightened the straps across his chest with a quiet hiss. The inertial dampeners were already online, humming faintly through the seat beneath him. From this position, the view ahead was completely dominated by the inner corridor of the massive relay. The gate's energy pulse cast a soft blue glow over the instrument panels. Every light in the cockpit dimmed slightly, as if respectfully yielding to what was about to happen.
"Status?" he asked, his voice low.
"Pre-jump systems green," Iris replied calmly. "All stabilizers synchronized. Gravity mesh active. Reactor harmonized with relay oscillation."
The ship trembled, not from its own systems, but from the space around it. Ethan felt it through the floor, a vibration like a subsonic hum, as if reality itself were preparing to bend.
He looked down, then smiled faintly.
His drink, half-finished, citrus-sweet, sat in its magnetized slot, sealed tight in a floating mug clamped to the armrest tray. He reached for it, took one last sip, savoring the sharpness of it on his tongue.
Then he leaned back and said, "Here we go."
The HUD displayed a countdown, luminous and silent: T-minus 10… 9… 8…
Around him, the power levels spiked. A bass rumble rolled through the Wraith's bones, not threatening, but primal. The cockpit's light dimmed further as external radiation peaked.
Outside the forward viewport, the Relay began to stir.
It didn't just activate, it awakened.
The massive rings of the structure rotated in opposite directions, slow at first, then accelerating with mechanical elegance. Streaks of electric blue danced along their edges, tracing ancient symbols embedded into the surface. As the internal corridor aligned, lines of energy lanced outward from its central eye, forming a complex lattice that shimmered with potential.
Then came the silence.
And then… the flash.
A burst of white-blue light flared silently at the center of the tunnel, opening into a spiraling vortex of compressed reality. It wasn't a tunnel in the traditional sense, it was a path of pure distortion, infinitely long and impossibly narrow. Not a hole through space, but a folding of space into a single piercing thread.
"Jump corridor stabilized," Iris announced. "Velocity locked. Aligning for insertion. Maintain current trajectory."
Ethan rested his fingers loosely on the control yoke, not to steer, but to ground himself.
The ship surged forward.
Not with fire or thunder, but with precision. A perfect leap guided by invisible laws older than any civilization still breathing.
Sound vanished.
The stars outside elongated into glowing strands, stretched beyond recognition, spinning gently in arcs of impossible symmetry. The cockpit became a capsule suspended in abstract geometry: hexagonal corridors of energy, braided threads of light, slow-turning wheels of plasma folding into spirals.
Ethan's breath caught, not in panic, but in awe.
He wasn't seeing space. He was seeing through it.
Galaxies twisted past him in silence. Not stars, not systems, concepts of them, impressions embedded in the lattice of the Relay corridor. Gravity was both present and absent, pulling at his skin and soul in opposite directions. At times he felt weightless, and then, in the next blink, like he was a hundred times heavier, every atom compressed into a singularity before releasing again.
He didn't fight the feeling.
He just breathed.
And in that moment, between the blinks of light and the absence of time, he thought:
Nothing on Earth had ever been like this. Not the oceans, not the sky, not even the vast silence between city lights at midnight.
Not even Kynara's deserts or Ashen Prime's towering spires could compare.
This was the universe, raw and unshaped.
And he was inside it, cutting through its veins.
Suddenly, compression.
A violent stillness snapped everything back into order.
The HUD flickered as the jump concluded. The pressure equalized. The stars reassembled themselves in recognizable patterns. Outside the viewport, space was once again space. A galaxy of stars, of darkness, of real matter and measurable vectors.
The Beltrax Sector sprawled out before him.
It was brighter than the Ashen Sector, denser system clusters, twin stars in the distance, and a field of orbital relays broadcasting tightbeam comms. Navigation pings and ship beacons flickered across the sector map. A merchant fleet crossed in the far distance, trailed by small escort ships.
"Iris," Ethan said, voice low but steady.
"Jump successful," Iris replied. "Temporal drift minimal. Local time recalibrated. Nearest relay to Enover is eight standard days at FTL cruising velocity. Shall I begin route plotting?"
"Do it," Ethan murmured.
The words slipped from his mouth like vapor, a quiet command wrapped in the lingering afterglow of the jump. Around him, the Obsidian Wraith realigned with precision, its stabilizers humming softly as thruster arrays adjusted to new headings.
There was a subtle vibration through the deck plating, barely noticeable, but Ethan felt it, like the ship was catching its breath after slipping through the skin of the universe.
He exhaled slowly, finally allowing his posture to ease. His fingers, still curled around the armrests of the pilot's chair, loosened their grip one knuckle at a time. The pressure in his chest released like steam from a sealed vent.
He leaned back deeper into the chair, letting the memory foam adapt to the new weight distribution. Above him, the cockpit's ambient lighting returned to its default level, casting a soft amber hue across the dashboard, restoring the human element to the machine's cold grace.
Without thinking, he reached for the mug nestled in its magnetic dock beside him. The matte-gray surface was still cool to the touch, the drink inside chilled under the temperature-stabilized lid. He twisted the cap open and took a slow sip.
The flavor had changed. Diluted, softened.
Not quite the sharp citrus burst he'd enjoyed earlier, but something more mellow now. Less bite, more breath. But somehow, it felt more fitting. Like a quiet reward earned at the end of a passage through something ancient and untamed.
The stars outside had changed, too.
No longer the familiar constellations of the Ashen Sector. These were new pinpricks of light, arranged in unfamiliar angles, glimmering across a canvas that felt subtly denser, more alive. The Beltrax Sector pulsed with latent traffic streams, blinking nav-buoys, and distant flare-outs from jump drives far off in the distance. Trade lanes shimmered like threads of silk across deep space. Sensor pings bloomed faintly against the HUD, tagging passing vessels on silent transit paths.
Ethan let his gaze drift across them.
Each dot represented a ship. A crew. A mission. People moving toward something or running from it.
And now, he was among them.
"I'll never get used to that," he muttered aloud, voice quiet enough that only Iris, if she were listening for anything other than commands, might've caught it.
Because it wasn't just the jump.
It was the feeling.
The visceral strangeness of having come so far, so fast from cracked concrete on Earth to walking windswept plateaus on Kynara… and now to slipping through interstellar arteries carved by civilizations long extinct. Traveling between stars had become part of his routine, but the sense of scale? The raw immensity of it all? That never dulled.
And he didn't want it to dull.
Not yet.
He set the mug back in its slot and reached for the side console embedded beneath his right hand. A single tap opened the recording function, a private log, timestamped and encrypted. The interface flickered to life with soft blue light, a simple waveform pulsing to register his voice.
He paused for a moment. No grand speech. No dramatic monologue.
Just one line.
"One sector down. Three to go."
His voice was steady.
He pressed the interface again. The file saved and encrypted with a quiet beep.
Outside the ship, the Wraith's systems completed the FTL spooling sequence. The soft whine of the drive coil crescendoed to a barely perceptible peak. And the stars, those newly familiar Beltrax stars began to smear into elongated ribbons of light as the ship accelerated past lightspeed.
The streaks formed a cocoon of motion. Silent, fluid, endless.
Ethan didn't lean forward.
He simply watched.
Watched the universe distort again. Watched distance lose its meaning. Watched as his destination lay somewhere ahead, and knew that even now after everything he was still only beginning.