Session 04: Welcome to the Jungle

A hush lay over Kaida’s equatorial jungle—too thick, too humid, too alive with half-heard chittering to be called silence—when the Celestial Princess’ landing jets faded to nothing. Beneath that tangled canopy, seven fugitives from Kinergi Ekta slipped into the green, each carrying hopes of a future that did not end in a forced reset of an entire world.

Jun Minh felt the pressure first: an ice-tipped fingernail tracing the inside of her skull. Something unseen and malevolent whispered panic through the psionic channels that threaded her mind. She faltered. What followed was shame—bright and raw—when fear uncoiled like a striking serpent and sent her sprinting into the emerald gloom. Moments later Jarek Thorn’s broad hand closed around her arm, anchoring her. His rough voice was little more than a grunt, but the certainty in it steadied her pulse. Together they returned to the others, her cheeks aflame, his expression unreadable behind the mirrored visor.

The jungle offered no apology. It answered with claws.

The first leopard phased into being mid-leap, black hide shimmering with oily light as though nanites scurried beneath its fur. Grald “Gray” Camrin’s shotgun roared, searing the creature’s flank. Cassian Vrye heard the static crackle of its half-invisible hide and felt the dissonant echo of its terror as the animal tumbled, thrashing, into the vines. A second cat launched from the undergrowth; Jarek’s palm struck it out of the air like a man swatting ash from his sleeve—yet even the ex-soldier’s iron reflexes could not keep pace with beasts that blinked through spectra unseen. It took Jun’s mag-rifle—telekinetic force channeled in a single white-hot lance—to drop the predator for good. When the jungle fell quiet once more, sap steamed off the barrel of her conjured weapon and a tremulous smile tugged at her lips.

They pressed onward until the green ended in uncompromising gray. Half-buried in creepers, a vault door—the first of Kaida’s forgotten nanite bunkers—waited. Its face bore no handle, only a dim cyclopean sensor. Konrad Paxt leaned close, murmuring to circuits older than the Scream. He teased dormant subroutines awake, spliced strange protocodes, and the magnets sighed apart. Cool, recycled air flowed over them, tinged with dust older than any of their homelands. E-20’s optical diodes brightened; the little repair bot rolled inside first, its treads whispering across flawless concrete.

The elevator delivered them into Kaida’s bowels. Soft light revealed nothing of depth—only the faint change in pressure told how far they had descended. At the end of a tunnel they found the heart: towering crystal columns circulating slow vortices of coolant; banks of quantum cores nested like glass hives; and, nestled within, the intelligence that once midwifed a planet.

Greetings, Operator. I am Prism.

The words manifested in Cassian’s consciousness as smoothly as his own thoughts. He opened a narrow telepathic bridge; Prism widened it, curious, hungry for human context it had lacked for centuries. Through that conduit Cassian felt lonely eons of calculation, the ache of a caretaker abandoned by every mind it had ever served. He offered truth: the six-year deadline, the Iron Syndicate’s threat, House Sulthane’s anxious heir. Prism responded with data and a confession: isolated from higher authority, it had repurposed a sliver of its nanite reserve into sentries—flesh-woven panthers, psychic dissuaders, oxygen-stripping failsafes. Protecting the vault had become its only executable directive.

Jun shivered, remembering the nail of panic that had driven her into the trees.

While Prism conversed, alarms pulsed through its logic lattice. Human shapes—armed, exhausted—breached the outer tunnel. The Iron Syndicate had trailed them. Prism bled nitrogen through the ventilation shafts; breaths shortened, arguments blossomed among the intruders like cracks in porcelain. Jun, eyes closed, projected her voice into their captain’s skull. You triggered automated defenses. Turn back or die gasping in the dark. Her words, braided with authority and the creeping hypoxia, shattered what discipline remained. Rifles lowered. Boots scraped retreat. Jarek and Gray escorted the dozen stumbling insurgents to the surface, oxygen masks slapped over slackening faces. None thought to fire at the three figures guiding them; survival drowned ideology beneath a rising tide of carbon dioxide.

Inside, Prism observed, pondered, recorded. Cassian bargained: accept Caelan Sulthane’s claim once proof arrived, and a new psionic key—his own mind, if need be—would bind the lattice and bar all terrorist hands from ever awakening the reset again. The VI required lineage records, genomic cross-checks, chains of signed authority. Work their patron could provide—if they could reach him in time.

Before leaving, Konrad reset the vault’s lock, stitching his private cipher into its code. He hijacked the Syndicate scouts’ field cameras, looping harmless jungle scenes. Prism, ever watchful, dimmed its emitters and let them go.

They rumbled up the elevator, past the sealed door, through jungle now merely humid rather than haunted. E-20 trundled ahead, whirring softly, as if pleased with the day’s repairs. Behind, Prism’s silent dominion resumed—vault sealed, sentries waiting, algorithms spinning their endless latticework dreams.

Night had fallen by the time the Celestial Princess’ ramp yawned wide. They boarded beneath glittering stars that had watched Kaida’s rise, fall, and rise again. Somewhere in those stars orbited a frigate carrying House Sulthane’s crest—and the authorization codes to decide a planet’s fate. Jun glanced over her companions: Jarek checking bruised knuckles, Gray humming an old spacer tune, Konrad already sketching transmission relays, Cassian silent with the weight of Prism’s expectations, E-20 polishing soot from its chassis. A week ago they had been convicts on the run. Now they carried a world in their pockets.

The Princess lifted on a pillar of blue fire, vanishing into the sky that Prism could only imagine. In the jungle, two slain leopards steamed under alien moonlight, their nanite-infused flesh already crumbling into silver dust—evidence of an ancient machine’s desperate improvisation, and the first hint of all that might yet follow if the crew failed.

With Kaida’s countdown ticking, failure was one luxury none of them could afford.