Solomon hurled his spear with all the force of a ballistic missile, the weapon shrieking through the remnants of a ruined lab and impaling a monstrous creature plated in jagged steel and barbed razors. The beast spasmed once before its limbs locked and it crumpled to the floor in a heap of twitching metal and flesh. Sparks shot from its back as the power systems stitched into its body convulsed, discharging one last time.

Behind Solomon, Ana knelt amid a chaos of reagents and shattered equipment, carefully measuring ingredients—dried herbs, pastes, glimmering powders—her eyes narrowed with razor focus. Tubes of glass and metal twisted around her like an alchemist’s web, glowing softly with simmering fluid. A low flame flickered beneath her apparatus, heating the central chamber.

“Ana, come on!” Solomon barked, his chest heaving. “My ability’s about to run out!”

The spear snapped from the downed creature’s chest and zipped back toward him, halting mid-air with a hum. Solomon smacked a pair of spectral blue gauntlets together, and with a sharp crackle, ghostly spikes jutted out from his knuckles like claws made of hardened lightning.

Another beast tore through the remains of a vault-like door with the screech of grinding steel. Solomon didn’t hesitate. He vanished in a blink, his body flickering forward in a blur of motion. A fist collided with the creature’s side in a sickening CRACK, hurling it sideways into a stack of shattered cryo-tanks. Glass exploded in a glimmering cascade as ice and fluid gushed out onto the floor.

Ana muttered something about “ruining the concentration gradient” and “how the hell is anyone supposed to stabilize an Iso-Core like this,” but her hands kept moving—pinching, swirling, stirring. She remained locked in her process, even as sweat beaded down her forehead.

The spear shot back through the air toward Solomon’s left. He caught it not with his hand but with a precise punch from his gauntlet, the blue spike on the knuckle sparking violently as it connected with the shaft’s butt. The spear was launched like a railgun round—whistling through the corridor and spearing through another creature mid-leap. Its corpse flopped against the wall before collapsing in a heap of gore and armor shards.

From the shadows, something howled. Something massive.

A deep screech echoed down the hall, like a metal coffin being dragged across a cathedral floor. Solomon’s jaw clenched.

Another creature came barreling forward, its arm a grotesque blend of car axle and flesh—fashioned into a living scythe. He dove back, narrowly dodging the swing. The air where he’d stood was carved in half. He flash-stepped again—appearing beneath the creature—and drove an uppercut directly into its gut.

A geyser of gore and shredded plating exploded upward as Solomon’s fist tore through it, launching the creature like a missile straight back through the door it came from. The door didn’t survive. Neither did the wall behind it.

Silence followed for one brief, haunting second.

Then came the scraping.

It started distant—then grew louder, sharper, multiplying. The sound of dozens, maybe hundreds of claws against steel. Metal against bone. Rasping screams—inhuman, grating, like chalkboards being chewed in half.

“Anaaaaaa,” Solomon said in a long exhale, not daring to turn around. “Ana I hope it’s soon. The ability’s almost out. Anaaaa…”

His voice cracked as he drained a potion from his belt—sweet at first, then acrid as it burned his throat. His lacerations hissed and sealed with vapor and popping sounds. But the ache in his bones stayed.

Then—slap.

A hand struck his shoulder. Ana leapt into his arms like a cat from a rooftop, holding a glowing purple flask like it was a divine artifact.

“I got it!” she cried.

He didn’t need to be told twice.

Solomon held her tight, and with a brief chant from Ana, his body erupted in light. His legs began to vibrate, high-frequency oscillations warping the air around him. Then—he was gone. A golden barrier burst to life around the two of them as Solomon ignited into motion.

The hallway shattered behind them.

Red veins crawled across his body. His skin rippled like fluid over steel. His muscles screamed. Every nerve in his body frayed at the edges as his frame struggled to contain the raw power surging through it.

Solomon kicked the air, and the air shattered. Each step left glowing footprints gouged into the ship’s steel floor. Panels burst. Wires ignited. Sparks sprayed like fireworks in their wake.

Ana tried to chant healing spells, her hands burning with holy light—but she couldn’t keep up. Her words were torn from her lips and whipped into the wind like leaves in a hurricane.

They took corner after corner, speed warping every corridor they passed. Solomon grunted in agony but didn’t slow. His arms wrapped tightly around Ana, shielding her. His eyes were locked forward. His will—indomitable.

With one last war cry, he launched upward—up a maintenance shaft, through a broken maglift tunnel, smashing debris and support bars—until they exploded onto a landing that overlooked the ship’s outer core.

A massive window stretched above them.

Beyond the glass: space.

Endless stars shimmered across the black. No land. No planets. No safety.

Only the infinite.

They had made it.

Their breath came in gasps. Ana slumped in his arms, still clutching the flask with trembling fingers. Solomon dropped to one knee, his body barely holding itself together. She hit a panel beside a door and it shut with a silent motion. A hidden control room with surveillance all over the place. With a quick flip of several switches corridors closed along the path they had taken.

And glowing between them—still pulsing with residual light—

Was the reward they had nearly died for.

Elixir of Evolutionary Pulse. 

This elixir allows for temporary durations of evolutionary adaption that then recede afterward. Duration of use propagates more changes depending on how it is utilized while within the state.

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Ana’s boots slipped across a metal grating slick with coolant as she sprinted up the debris slope, a gun of the future in one hand and her heart on the sleeve of the other gripping onto a thin key card.

"Solomon!" she screamed—her voice hollow in the vastness of the wreck.

She reached the top just in time to see him crushed against the bulkhead by a mechanical creature shaped like a centipede made from repurposed power armor, its torso a whirling core of sawblades and plasma vents. Its arms spasmed, dragging him up by the neck with twitching pincers.

Solomon’s feet kicked, gauntlets flickering as they tried and failed to charge again. His blood sprayed onto the metal walls in dark ribbons.

“I’m out…” he croaked.

The creature let out a pulse of static, its chest thrumming with a countdown. Overload protocol.

Ana’s hand tightened around the glowing core of the gun barrel. She pulled the trigger and shot after shot of glowing fireflies shot forward in a stream that melted the backend of the metallic shell of the thing attacking Solomon. Though the damage was substantial it was as if this thing was built to be broken as long as it completed its goal.

Solomon gave her a look and then a thumping sound began to ring out in the room.

For a moment, nothing.

Then everything exploded.

Solomon's back arched, and the sound he let out wasn’t a scream—it was a growl, low and evolving. The air around him rippled like heat off asphalt. Muscles twitched beneath his skin as veins surfaced unnaturally, glowing faintly as though his body was rerouting something ancient through them.

Then came the pulse.

His body snapped forward, bending unnaturally for a split second, and then correcting—like his nervous system had just rebooted from the ground up. He landed, not stumbling, but crouched—calm, coiled, eyes glowing with something wrong.

He moved.

Ana didn’t see the first strike, but the sound of it was enough—like bone splitting steel. The centipede’s core let out a horrid feedback screech as its torso buckled inward. Solomon didn’t stop. He was faster than gravity. He ducked under a flailing limb and slammed his elbow into its side, and there was a crack like a bridge snapping. His elbow bone protruded into a 6 inch spike, his fists and arms as thick as his biceps in the amount of muscle upon them.

A second strike with his heel severed its head unit clean off. That same leg had doubled in size.

Then, silence.

He stood there, panting, fists clenched, chest heaving—then dropped to one knee as the light drained from his veins.

“Solomon!” Ana ran to him and caught his weight as he sagged against her, steam rising off his skin. His body was now reverting from the temporary forceful evolution.

His eyes were bloodshot. One of them wouldn’t fully track but after a while it fixed itself but was now red and bloodshot.

“You used it,” she said, voice trembling. “I told you not to unless—”

“I was gonna die,” he rasped. “Didn’t think it would feel like being lit on fire and evolved out of my own skeleton. The pain after is horrendous but the feeling on the way up is…mesmerizingly odd. The first time I didn’t know what I was doing…that felt more in line with what I had in mind”

Ana dragged him back toward cover, her hand on his chest, already feeling the irregularities in his breathing. His pulse was skipping. Muscle groups twitching randomly beneath the skin. His body was reverting, but it wasn’t going back the same way.

“What’s happening to me…” he muttered.

“Your body doesn’t remember how it used to be,” Ana said, reaching for a stabilizer. “You overclocked your own evolution. It'll try to heal you up but you can’t use what the Elixer of Evolutionary Pulse gave you for a while. You need a cooldown period, it was literally on the fucking secret document with the recipe we used.”

Solomon smirked through a grimace, coughing blood into his sleeve. “Guess I’ll just have to keep evolving the habit of using it”

Ana didn’t laugh. She injected a stabilizer and whispered, “Don’t say that like it’s badass—you have no idea what that thing cost.”

He didn’t argue. He just leaned back, eyes closing, one word forming on his tongue.

“...again.”

“I wish the reward would have told more about the specifics. I thought this would have been a good option for us. I’m almost scared to use it but I do feel it like a little reserve within myself even if It’s just what I got out of the scraps of yours. Is it like that for you? You think…”

Solomon had fallen asleep.