Destiny Among the Stars - Scifi - LitRPG - Adventure

Luca wasn't sure who'd called this an elevator shaft. Not him, that was for damn sure. Danny gripped a heavy harness clip and walked them down the vertical tube like they were hauling a cargo sled, the rest of them clutching the thick cabling to keep from drifting off. Zoe and Ryan prowled ahead, flashlights dancing over the warped metal plating.

The shaft was pitch black, until a low rumble vibrated through Luca's boots. Far below, hidden behind broken grates, the cooling reactors were breathing. Blue-white jets of plasma shot into the corridor for a split second, then vanished, leaving pulsing afterimages on his retinas.

"Shit," Zoe hissed beside him. "Timing's going to be everything."

Luca wiped sweat from his grip, his palms slick inside his gloves. The heat radiating up from the reactors made the air shimmer. Each blast was enough to melt through suit plating, to fry them alive if they weren't careful. He sealed his visor shut with a click, the hiss of his life-support starting up a cold comfort against the rising heat.

Great, he thought. One of those bursts could roast us faster than a toaster oven on steroids. This is going to suck.

Ryan swung back, his visor catching the glow. "They cycle roughly every ten seconds. We move in the gaps."

"Brilliant, Einstein," Luca muttered, though the words were lost in his own comms. He wanted to flick an elbow at him, but Ryan's smug grin was probably still there under that glass dome. Behind him, he could feel the tension in Emily's grip as her fingers dug into the cable next to his. Danny cracked his knuckles, Joey cinched his belt tighter, and Chris hovered with his rifle, twitching like a giddy kid at the firing range.

The rumble increased, a deep vibration that resonated in Luca's chest.

PLASMA BURST.

A streak of white-blue fire lit the tunnel, a silent, furious roar like God turning on a blowtorch. Luca pulled his body flat against the wall, grabbing a handhold so tight his knuckles ached. His heart thumped so hard he could taste the metallic tang of fear in his mouth.

Seconds later, the jet screamed shut. Zoe drifted back, her face pale under her visor light. "Clear."

"Move," Ryan ordered.

They inched forward, hand over gloved hand, praying the friction would hold. The next burst came so fast they only had a two-second window, enough to slide maybe three or four yards before they had to freeze again, clinging to the cable like terrified spiders.

Luca's suit did that glorious thermal lockdown thing, keeping him alive but making him feel like he was wrapped in a hot, wet blanket. He glared at Danny's back as the big man continued his steady, unbothered descent.

He swallowed around the heat in his chest. "You sure this is the only path?" he hissed over the comms.

Danny shrugged without slowing. "Shortcut unlocked."

"Right." Luca kept moving between fiery blasts, each one spiking the corridor's temperature like an angry dragon's sneeze.

After four pulses that felt like an eternity, they saw it: a grated catwalk bridging across the shaft, miraculously intact. Beyond it, a grid of tunnels yawned into deeper decks.

"Shortcut unlocked," Luca echoed, his voice dry as dust.

Zoe exhaled, her voice a relieved hiss over the comms. "That catwalk leads to new access tunnels, probably the old maintenance shafts."

Luca floated for a bare second, letting the victory rush hit him, a wave of adrenaline-laced triumph. He ducked under the next vent burst, the heat washing over his back as he clung to the cable.

"Let's go," he said, his voice gravelly from the dry, recycled air. "Before this place decides to incinerate us."

One last shiver ran through the shaft as the reactor cycled. Danny moved first, sprinting as much as one could in low gravity, crossing the catwalk in three long strides before dropping into the dark tangle of new corridors.

His interface pinged, the notification a cold, impersonal measure of their progress.

[Mission Objective: Secure the battleship and defeat the AI‑controlled defenses. 30% Complete]

They slipped off the catwalk and into the next corridor, a space half-lit by the rhythmic sweep of emergency strobes, the rest swallowed by darkness. Gravity here was weak but real; the team's footsteps echoed on scuffed plating. Luca flexed his shoulders, his knuckles white on the grip of his plasma blaster. Ten hours in, only thirty percent done. His impatience was a hot, bubbling thing in his chest.

Got to keep it together, he told himself, but the corridor stretched on, a seemingly endless metal throat. He watched the team ahead. Emily's pace was steady despite the ache he knew she felt in her arm. Zoe walked beside Danny, who was already scanning for trouble. Chris lagged a few steps behind, fingers twitching on his trigger. Ryan brought up the rear, his visor light bouncing off the grimy walls.

At the corridor's end, a massive chamber yawned before them. It was a vaulted hall filled with colossal, humming monoliths, each one crowned with a glowing crystal node. A pulse of raw power crackled through the air, raising the hairs on Luca's arms and making the air taste of ozone.

"What the hell are these things?" he muttered, his voice tight.

Ryan drifted up beside him, his visor scanning the colossal, humming monoliths. Awe and a hint of fear colored his voice. "Shield emitters. High-capacity, battleship-grade. TL9, easy. Looks like the main array for this whole sector of the ship."

In the dim glow, Luca could see that half the emitters were shattered, cracks spidering out from destroyed crystal nodes. They must have been overstressed during whatever battle had crippled this vessel. Others hissed, spitting intermittent sparks like angry cats. The remaining ones, however, were terrifyingly active, raw electricity arcing between them in jets of blue-white plasma that danced like vengeful spirits.

He could barely hear Danny's voice over the loud, violent crackle. "Watch for loose currents and snap arcs!"

Luca floated forward a step… and the whole room answered. A thunderous roar erupted as the damaged emitters misfired, spitting jagged bolts of plasma at random across the deck. The floor grates held, likely built to withstand reactor blasts, but the crew? They were tin cans in a lightning storm.

Danny gripped a handhold, his face lit by the crackling blue-white flashes. "This is insane!" he yelled, his voice nearly drowned by the static of every emitter cycling.

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Luca clenched his rifle tighter, sweat beading under his helmet. No Faraday cage, he reminded himself. Just us and the storm.

Emily pressed herself flat against the wall beside him, her visor light bouncing off the blown-out emitters. He saw her flinch as another arc slammed into the floor nearby, the motion pulling at her injured arm. Zoe and Ryan stood at his flanks, their eyes wide and watchful behind their visors.

His own voice vanished under the torrential blasts. Sparks leaped from emitter to floor, carving glowing scars in the metal. It was a beautiful and grotesque spectacle, a Van de Graaff nightmare come to life. His helmet lamp faded into insignificance against the brilliance of the storm.

Each step was a gamble. One wrong move, one stray bolt, and their suits would be slag. He timed his breathing to the emitter pulses, forcing himself into a rhythm: step, duck; step, duck, leaning into the corridor as arcs lanced overhead and thundered through the mesh ceiling.

He tried to shout directions, but his voice was swallowed by the noise. He watched Chris drift past, assault rifle blazing at a misdirected arc that surged toward him. Sparks erupted where the shots hit, sending metal fragments skittering across the deck.

Heart hammering, Luca stared into the storm ahead, an unbroken wall of plasma forks and deafening noise. Somewhere past the next cluster of monoliths lay their goal: the next deck.

He took a breath, braced his boots against the bulkhead, and stepped into the tempest.

The next arc exploded around him, so close he felt the heat sear through the outer layer of his suit. His vision tunneled to a single, dark shape flickering beyond the lightning; a movement too deliberate to be another random arc.

He glanced at Emily's visor light, then at Ryan's shoulder. They were as blind as he was, their attention fixed on the arcing plasma.

The roar built as the shield emitters continued their chaotic function, arcs of plasma flinging out farther, the chamber seeming to lean in around them.

Luca realized with a sick twist in his gut that they weren't alone. Whatever was moving in that deadly dark was hunting them.

He bit back a curse, his thumb finding the trigger of his blaster.

Luca sealed his visor and activated life-support. The storm of arcs was all around them now, plasma bolts hissing off the shield monoliths, thunderclaps rocking the deck. Every step felt like walking across a live power grid. And he was completely exposed. Was rubber even conductive? he wondered frantically. Probably an insulator. I now wish I was wearing rubber, not… whatever this is.

"Stay close!" he yelled, his voice swallowed by the roar. Emily was on his left, one hand gripping a maintenance cable, the other pressed against her splinted arm. Ryan and Zoe hovered on his right, their silhouettes flickering in the strobing light. Danny and Chris brought up the rear, every flash illuminating their tense faces.

They edged forward, timing each lunge between pulses. Sparks flared inches from Luca's boots, sizzling on the grated floor. Metallic dust danced in the air like angry fireflies. His heart hammered as he spotted dark shapes drifting at the edges of his vision. Nullmaw silhouettes, their bodies writhing in the zero-G, drawn to the electric frenzy like moths to a lethal flame.

At last, they reached the chamber's center, where a colossal monolith dominated the space. Its crystal core crackled with a giant ball of lightning, arcs splintering out like tentacles. The noise was deafening, his comms flickering in and out of static. Every instinct screamed to bolt, but this was their only shot.

He pulled out his TL8 hacking pad, feeling its obsolescence in a room wired for TL9 tech. Zoe drifted beside him, a smirk visible under her level-64 visor. "You got this," she whispered into their private comm.

A surge of pride, stupid and reckless, warmed his chest. "Watch me."

Luca angled his visor light at the monolith's control panel, a lattice of conduits and blinking servos. His fingers, slick with sweat, tapped out entry commands. The pad buzzed, the signal distorted by raw energy discharge. His screen glitched, then locked onto a single, stable frequency. He tried to activate [Power Flow Intuition], but it was useless against this raw chaos. Wrong tool. That's it, [System Bypass].

"Connection stable," he murmured, a bead of sweat trickling down his brow. He navigated through firmware loops, tracing an emergency channel until a side panel popped open with a pneumatic hiss.

Inside, a heavy lever awaited. Emergency Shutdown, hopefully.

His breath caught. The sound of the emitters screamed around him. He pressed his palm against the monolith for balance and yanked the lever down with all his weight.

Instantly, the chamber plunged into darkness. The thunderous roar cut off mid-arc, as though the ship itself had exhaled. Sparks winked out. The only light came from his glove's emergency LED, a feeble beam flickering against the now-blank walls.

They hovered in the sudden, ringing silence, the drumming in Luca's ears the only sound. He let out a breath, his voice trembling but triumphant.

"Shield array… offline."

Thump.

The whole deck shuddered like a fist against a drum.

Thump.

A second blow, harder this time, rattling the dead silence. Luca floated there, his heart lodged in his throat. They'd just yanked the only shields this damn ship had.

Great, he thought, a cold dread seeping in. This hull's plate armor is beefy… but how long before we're nothing but space Swiss cheese?

Emily's hand found his shoulder. "What was that?" she whispered, her voice tight with fear.

Ryan was already hitting his pad, the glow illuminating his grim face. "Outer hull impacts," he said, his voice low. "We're drifting through a debris field, and Luca just killed the ship's shields." Fuck.

The exit beckoned ahead, a dark tangle of the battleship's guts. Their only escape route. But Luca didn't dare move. Something in the pitch-black corners of the room had shifted: a pair of eyes, gleaming for a split second in the final plasma flashes before they'd gone dark.

Not just debris, he realized with a sick twist. We've got company.

Danny leveled his Warhammer toward the shadows. Chris clicked his rifle to high-voltage mode. Zoe reached for her plasma dagger, the blade humming to life with a soft, deadly sound.

Luca's grip tightened around his blaster. He swallowed the lump in his throat. "Let's get out of here," he mouthed, not trusting his voice.

But as he turned toward the exit, the deck jolted again, harder than before. A spray of sparks rained down from a ruptured conduit overhead, briefly illuminating the nightmares that were now crawling out of the dark.

They vaulted off the grated floor and sprinted toward the exit Avengers-style, if the Avengers fought tentacle-eyed horrors in zero-G.

Chris laid down a wall of suppressing fire with his heavy assault plasma rifle, roaring arcs of high-density bolts punching holes through the first wave of Nullmaws. They hissed and dissolved where the shots landed, but more pressed in behind them, a tide of writhing limbs.

Danny, his armor glowing with the red aura of his [Taunt] ability, slammed his energy Warhammer into the deck. The AOE pulse sent out a radial shockwave that vaporized a dozen Nullmaws at once. "Come on!" he roared, swinging again to carve a crater through the black mass.

Mid-blast, Ryan skidded to a halt next to a shattered emitter. "Hold on!" he yelled, yanking his plasma shotgun free. Luca watched, bewildered, as Ryan jammed his dagger into a cracked access hatch of one of the large shield emitters and levered it open. Sparks flew. He yanked a glowing power core free and tossed it to Danny, who snatched it from the air and tucked it away. Looting in the middle of a firefight. Classic Ryan.

From the rear, Joey hung back blasting any snarling creature that broke through their lines. His med-kit beeped warnings of low supplies; a stark reminder that they couldn't afford any real injuries here.

Then Zoe darted ahead. She went [Ghost], her form shimmering into near-invisibility before vanishing completely. Luca's HUD couldn't even track her; she was just gone, a phantom cutting silent, deadly gaps through the Nullmaw tide with her plasma dagger and pistol.

Emily became a whirlwind of motion, a ballet of light and death. She leveled her twin plasma blasters, emptying her [Power Cells] into the throng as she spun, each shot finding a target. He could see the strain on her face, the way she favored her injured arm, but every blast rang true.

And Luca? He charged with his energy tomahawk raised, the weapon humming as he slashed through the living darkness, then drew his plasma blaster to fry anything that slipped past the blade's arc.

They were being overwhelmed, creatures pouring in from all sides. "To the exit!" he roared, his voice raw.

They burst through the shield-array chamber's exit and into the next corridor, the sound of the Nullmaws crashing against the closing hatch behind them. The walls here glittered with fresh scorch marks, and molten drips from ruptured conduits hissed at their boots.

Luca skidded to a stop, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against his ribs. Ahead, the corridor forked into two paths. One was lit by the erratic pulse of emergency strobes. The other plunged into pitch-black.

Split up? Backtrack? Hold the line? The questions screamed through his mind. No time. A decision had to be made, right now.

He swallowed the coppery taste of fear. "This way!" he yelled, pointing down the dark hall. It was a gut call, nothing more.

"After you, Captain," Emily called out, her voice steady despite their desperate situation.

Luca gripped his tomahawk tighter, the familiar weight a small comfort. He could still hear the hundreds of Nullmaws surging in the chamber behind them, their silent screeches echoing in his mind.