Leviathan

Vale Korin is void-born. Raised in zero gravity, where human bones don’t grow right and fracture if you look at them wrong. Everyone told her tempering can fix it — drawing in ambient aether to reinforce the body. Reach Tier 2 by thirty and the bones stabilize. Miss the window and they don’t. Easy enough if you’re rich and can inject credits directly into your soul with expensive tempering compounds.

She can’t afford the compounds that make tempering faster, and the universe has only one discount. Stress.

So she does it the hard way — rigging her own gear from salvage scrap, mapping derelicts in hard vacuum with a tether rig held together with hull adhesive. The kind of work where worrying about your skeleton dissolving takes a back seat to the vacuum. One kills you slow, the other kills you fast.

She’s good at it. Good enough to win six-on-one disputes and walk away with the claim. Good enough to draw the wrong attention.

When a Tier 2 warlord drags Vale and the crew of the Rusty Lung to the Pale Leviathan — two kilometers of dead ship that’s killed every salvage crew sent inside — he expects his reinforced body to keep him in charge.

The vacuum disagrees.

Oxygen doesn’t care about your tier. Strength means nothing without gravity to push against. On a derelict, the deadliest person isn’t the strongest.

It’s the one who knows the corridors.