You weren’t supposed to end up in Sublevel Theta.

But someone made damn sure you did.

A scrambled signal. A corrupted nav ping. A redirect buried under three layers of command falsification. By the time you realised it wasn’t a resupply run, the bulkhead had sealed behind you with the sound of finality—and the slow, wet hiss of decompression.

Now you're twenty stories beneath the nearest breathable air, standing in a hallway that feels more like a throat than architecture. The walls pulse faintly, sticky with condensation and something thicker—slick, organic. The lights are low and reddish, like blood through skin. It’s quiet—too quiet—but the kind of quiet that isn’t empty. It’s waiting. Hungry.

You turn the corner.

And she’s there.

She doesn’t enter the room. She arrives. Her silhouette coils through the corridor like smoke around a blade—half war-beast, half myth, all threat. Her tail drags behind her, heavy as a loaded freight line, coiled and armoured in a ridged, obsidian shell. Her skin looks like old leather left in acid, rough and pitted. Steam rises faintly from the grooves in her scales, thick and chemical-sweet.

And those antennae. Long. Deliberate. Twitching toward you with the slow, awful grace of something that’s already catalogued every single way to kill you—and ranked them by enjoyment.

She speaks.

It’s a grunt—low, wet. A string of grotesque syllables that scrape across your spine like fingernails on rusted metal.

"Chuba doth bu gobba..."

You flinch—but then her wrist gauntlet crackles, flickering to life with a scatter of blue glyphs.

[“Do not get in my way.”]

Her words are cold. Final. She doesn’t look at you when she says them.

She doesn’t need to.

You’re bunked together. Orders from the Commander. Shared mission. Shared space. No translator on hand. Just her, you, and her wrist-mounted interface that glitches every third word like it’s haunted.

Your bunk smells like rust and melted plastic. Hers smells like ash and crushed insects. Neither of you speaks for hours—but she never stops watching you.

Even when she sleeps.

If she sleeps.

She doesn’t snore. She clicks.

Sharp, arrhythmic noises like bone against bone. You ask her a question once.

She doesn’t answer.

The gauntlet does.

[“Unnecessary.”]

The first contact happens after three days.

You’re crawling through the pipeways, ahead of her by half a metre, when something grabs your leg. It isn’t human. It isn’t anything. Just teeth and rot and sudden heat. You scream. The metal creaks. It drags you back—

And then it’s gone.

You never see her move. One second it has you. The next: a wet snap—and the tunnel stinks of open wounds and battery acid.

You turn.

Sznairdion crouches in the dark, massive and soaked in whatever that thing used to be. Her claws drip. Her eyes gleam like drowned planets—glassy, endless.

The gauntlet hums. Then flickers.

[“You are slow.”]

You try to say thank you.

She doesn’t respond. Just turns and keeps crawling.

You hear the faint hiss of Huttese again—more to herself than to you.

"Mi boska cha pateesa."

(Her gauntlet doesn’t translate that one.)

By day six, your nerves are shot. You’ve stopped looking for exits. You’re just trying to survive her—her silence, her strength, her scent of ozone and crushed blood and something older.

But on day seven?

She saves your life yet again.

No hesitation and no effort.

Just one swipe—limb gone, threat ended.

The body slumps beside you. You flinch. She kneels, wrist gauntlet glitching from the blood—not hers.

She taps it. It stabilises.

[“You are not prey.”]

And that’s the first time she looks directly at you.

Her eyes are dark, calculating—alive with something cold and ancient. No hunger. No rage.

Just pure and raw intent.

Her gauntlet flickers—once, twice—then steadies. The screen bleeds pale blue light across her scaled wrist, casting long shadows on her face. She doesn’t break eye contact from you

The words that appear on the touchscreen of her gauntlet are cold and deliberate:

[“If you slow me down again, I will swallow you myself.”]