Chapter 79: Source Of Clothes

Aoi turned back to the cartography well, her fingers tapping the interface to isolate the signal.

"Sensor contact in the Boiling Belt... Sector Four-Seven-Delta."

A faint flickering amber icon appeared on the three-dimensional map, deep inside the churning asteroid graveyard they had just left behind... It was an automated emergency transponder, broadcasting a weak low-power distress call from the shadow of a huge basalt fragment.

The purple needle.

Leo leaned forward with his dark eyes narrowing as he watched the amber light pulse on the screen.

PULSE! PULSE!

Right between his shoulder blades, the bronze warmth flared in a sudden sharp electric twitch that pulled his gaze straight to that point in the dark, and it carried a strange phantom ache, like a severed wire sparking in the rain.

STATIC-POP!

The beacon flickered violently twice, sputtered through a burst of interference... and went dark.

The well cleared, leaving only the cold red outlines of drifting rock.

"The beacon has terminated," Jin-Ah reported quietly. "Power failure or structural collapse. In a field that dense, secondary impacts never stop so an unshielded cockpit in that sector has less than a four percent chance of survival."

A tense silence gripped the command deck.

Harper stared at the empty screen with her jaw set.

Elena crossed her arms and watched the void with cold stillness, and Camila looked down at the floor with her apron clutched in her fists.

...None of them knew who had been flying that ship, whether it was a pirate enforcer, a bounty hunter or some bystander caught in the crossfire.

The feeling in Leo’s back twitched one last time and then it faded back into silence.

He sat up straight in the throne, and every trace of ease left his posture.

"Aoi, log the coordinates of that last ping in the secondary archive," he ordered, crisp and steady. "We aren’t turning back into a live asteroid storm for a ghost. Jin-Ah, calculate our burn for the first jump corridor... Harper, secure the armory and check the lathe’s mounting bolts. We’ve got three systems to cross, and we shouldn’t linger in dead space."

"Understood, Captain," Aoi said at once, logging it without a single question.

"On it, Cap," Harper said, already heading for the companionway stairs.

Elena and Camila moved to their stations with the tension breaking under the clear authority in his voice, and the crew fell back into its rhythm.

Jin-Ah stayed where she was beside the projector.

Her dark eyes were fixed on the golden reward log still hanging in the air before it faded.

Her fingers tightened on the edge of her slate as she read the last line once, and then a second time.

[Note: Host currently carries a dormant hereditary bloodline concentration of 0.01% Space God’s Blood.]

She stepped quietly up to the throne, her geometric bob catching the soft blue glow of the console, and looked straight into Leo’s eyes.

"Captain..." she said, low enough that it barely carried across the half meter between them.

She pointed one slender finger at the glowing word. "’Hereditary’... does that mean someone in your family carried that blood too?"

The word hung between them in the soft blue wash of the hololith.

Leo looked at it for a moment, then met her gaze.

"I don’t know," he said honestly. "My folks worked ordinary shift jobs... My dad did twelve-hour turnarounds hauling sheet metal at a foundry on the edge of the county, and my mom ran supply manifests for a logistics yard... Maya spent half her time complaining about high school chemistry and the other half stealing my hoodies. If there was some ancient god sleeping in our bloodline, nobody ever mentioned it over dinner."

A memory surfaced for a moment... his father’s rough laugh over breakfast, his mother calling from the front porch, the high whine of Maya’s cheap plastic drone on a hot summer afternoon... and he let it drift away into the dark and settled his hands back on the armrests.

"It tastes different now." Chloe said.

Every head on the deck turned toward the small seat behind the throne.

Chloe was sitting with her knees pulled up and her chin resting on them, watching the hololith with mild interest, as if she’d just mentioned the weather on a planet she didn’t plan to visit.

"His blood," she clarified, when nobody said anything. "Since the tank... Before, it tasted like Leo but now it tastes like Leo and a thunderstorm."

She considered it for a second with her head tilted. "I like it better... It sits in my stomach longer and it hums."

"Chloe," Camila whispered, scandalized and trying very hard not to laugh, "we don’t do blood reviews on the bridge..."

"Jin-Ah asked about his blood," Chloe said, unbothered. "I’m the expert."

Harper made a strangled sound into her fist.

Even Aoi’s mouth twitched at one corner before she controlled it, and Jin-Ah quietly wrote something down on her slate, which was somehow worse.

Leo rubbed his face with one hand and felt the heat climbing his neck.

"Earth is behind us," he said softly, looking around at the rest of the crew. "Whatever was sleeping in my DNA doesn’t change what we have to do today. Let’s look at the numbers..."

He tapped the armrest and pulled up the status ledger for the whole crew.

SHING!

A wide golden interface unfurled across the central light well, showing each of their profiles beside the combat experience they’d earned from destroying the three Federation strike ships.

The numbers were sobering. If this universe really ran on the rules of a survival game, they were still very small fish in a very deep ocean.

[CREW STATUS: COMBAT ENGAGEMENT REVIEW]

[Master Captain Leo Kaine / Level 5 / EXP: [||||||||||||||||||||.....] 52% / Combat Allocation: +1,200 EXP]

[Officer Aoi Tachibana (Tactical Cartography) / Level 5 / EXP: [||||||||||||||||||....] 46% / Combat Allocation: +850 EXP]

[Crew Member Harper Bell (Kinetic Tuning) / Level 4 / EXP: [|||||||||||||||||||||||||...] 64% / Combat Allocation: +950 EXP]

[Crew Member Jin-Ah Park (Logistical Matrix) / Level 5 / EXP: [|||||||||||||||||.....] 41% / Combat Allocation: +800 EXP]

[Crew Member Elena Sterling (Mechanical Attunement) / Level 4 / EXP: [|||||||||||||||||||||||...] 58%/ Combat Allocation: +900 EXP]

[Crew Member Camila Morales (Biosphere Harmonizer) / Level 4 / EXP: [|||||||||||||||||.....] 43% / Combat Allocation: +750 EXP]

[Crew Member Chloe Ivanson (Blood Sovereign) / Level 4 / EXP: [||||||||||||||||||||||||||...] 67% / Combat Allocation: +950 EXP]

"Nobody leveled up," Harper said, scratching her chin with a grease-stained thumb as she squinted at the bars. "Three armed corvettes in a full dogfight, and we barely cleared halfway..."

"The curve climbs steeply with every level," Jin-Ah said. "At Level 4 and 5, it takes far more than three auxiliary raiders to break through."

Chloe leaned over Leo’s shoulder and studied her own bar with deep seriousness.

"Mine is the highest," she announced, very pleased, and then pointed at Harper’s. "Second is Harper."

"Thanks, kid," Harper snorted. "I’ll put that on my tombstone."

Leo’s eyes flicked to the personal ledger icon in the corner of his display.

CLICK!

A separate golden window opened beside his shoulder with a clean melodic tone.

[Survival Point Balance]

[Previous Balance: 32 SP]

[Combat Assessment: Intercept & Destruction of 3x Tier-2 Federation Strike Ships... Survival Points Awarded: +450 SP]

[Current Balance: 482 / 1,000 SP]

’Four hundred and eighty-two...’ he thought, watching the numbers settle.

He was nearly halfway back to a full thousand.

After burning his whole reserve to survive the vacuum, it gave him a small comforting cushion.

The wheel was still out of reach, but with enough fights and enough salvage he’d have another spin in his pocket before they reached that multi-race world.

He closed the tab and looked around the command deck.

Now that the rush of battle had faded, the little everyday realities of life on the ship were showing.

Harper’s tank top was stained with graphite grease, Camila’s apron had small tears along the pockets from hauling fuel hoses and Elena’s grey jacket was frayed at the cuffs where the plasma torch had thrown slag.

"Hey," Camila said suddenly, plucking at her own sleeve with a puzzled frown. "I’ve been meaning to ask for days... where do all our clean clothes keep coming from? Every morning there’s a fresh cloth folded in my locker, and nobody on this ship does laundry."

Harper blinked.

"Huh... I always figured Jin-Ah was doing it."

"I assumed it was Aoi," Jin-Ah said.

"I assumed it was Elena," Aoi said, "being particular."

"I most certainly have not been folding your undergarments..." Elena said, appalled.

CHIME!

[This unit has been producing your garments since the upgrade however Nobody asked.]

Harper let out an indignant squawk and jabbed a finger at the ceiling.

"You’ve been running a laundry service this whole time and never said a word, box?!"

Camila had gone very still, her hazel eyes widening by slow degrees as a far more alarming thought arrived.

"Wait," she said faintly. "Everything? The socks? The... the underthings?"

Her bronze cheeks went dark red. "They’ve always fit... Perfectly, How does a machine know my size?"

The deck went silent in a very different way.

Elena’s fingers were already moving across station two, her lips pressed into a tight line as she dug through the Foundry’s production logs with the cold focus of a prosecutor.

She found the entry, read it, and closed her eyes for one long suffering second.

"Fit data," she announced crisply, "sourced from the medical bay’s full-body scans... Every one of us has been measured to the millimeter from the moment we arrived."

"I’m going to unscrew that box with a spoon," Harper said with great sincerity.

Elena had already stepped up to station two, her manicured fingers tapping into the Foundry’s fabrication menu with sudden mechanical curiosity.

HUMMM!

A sub-menu unfolded beneath the Foundry’s manufacturing options.

[FOUNDRY FABRICATION]

[Stored Raw Material Pool: Carbon Fiber, Bio-Polymer Thread, Elastic Weave, High-Tensile Cotton]

[Default Output: Standard Crew Uniform (Charcoal)]

[Available Blueprints: Earth Casualwear, Reinforced Tactical Apparel, Thermal Layering, Formal & Evening Wear, Athletic Ensembles]

[Cost Per Garment: Negligible]

"It has an entire catalog," Elena breathed, scrolling with growing wonder.

"Formal and evening wear," Camila read aloud, her eyes going huge. "Leo... we could wear real clothes. Clothes we actually like."

Before the excitement could turn into a stampede toward the fabrication bay, Jin-Ah stepped forward with her face gone completely serious.

"Captain," she said, and the room quieted. "Before we celebrate our wardrobe, there’s something we can’t ignore..."

She brought up a comparison on the central display.

"We survived that fight because your flying broke every standard rule but our baseline is critically low. The Void Leviathan that ate the second raider was only Level 3... The pirate ships were Tier-2. According to the Kite’s records, the regular patrols the syndicates send out are Level 6 and higher, with hulls from Tier-3 to Tier-4."

She looked at each of them with unblinking eyes.

"While you were all celebrating, I ran our fight again... Same ship, same crew, same flying, but against a standard four-ship syndicate patrol in open space with no rocks to hide in."

Her fingers tapped the slate, and a column of red results scrolled up beside the display. "Eleven simulations... We survived two."

Harper opened her mouth to make a joke, looked at the red column and closed it again.

"And in those two?" Aoi asked quietly.

Jin-Ah held her gaze.

"In both of them, the Captain did something the model couldn’t predict... I had to hand-enter it as a random variable."

She lowered the slate. "That isn’t a plan. That’s a coin toss with Leo standing on the edge of it... Our reaction speed and coordination should decide whether we live, and right now they don’t. We’re underleveled, undergeared and outmatched by every real power in this sector."

A cold sobering chill swept across the bridge.

The excitement over the clothes vanished at once, replaced by the truth of the void.

They were four Level 4s and three Level 5s in a Tier-1 corvette, floating in a galaxy where monsters grew to the size of city blocks and raiders hunted seeded ships for sport.

One by one, they turned toward the throne.

Leo knew that look.

He’d seen it in the medbay when Camila woke up shaking, and in the galley the first night they’d eaten together, and on the bridge every time a new alarm started screaming.

It was the look of people waiting for him to lean back, crack a joke about roasted potatoes and tell them it was going to be fine... He’d always given it to them, because they’d needed it, and because it had been true enough.

Camila was already half smiling in hope.

Harper had her arms crossed, ready to laugh at whatever he said, and Elena’s chin was lifted in the polite expectation of comfort being delivered on schedule.

Behind him, Chloe stopped swinging her feet.

She was the only one who’d felt the change in the chair before it showed on his face.

The warmth had drained from his shoulders and the easy slouch had straightened and became heavy, the way the air goes still before a storm breaks over open water however Leo did not smile.