The signal Jade Killington followed did not spike.
It did not flare, pulse, or announce itself the way Dark Buddy transmissions did. It didn't scream with stolen power or reek of corrupted sigils. If anything, it tried very hard to not be noticed—a low, organic irregularity buried beneath layers of decaying telemetry and abandoned infrastructure.
That alone made Jade uneasy.
He crouched atop the skeletal remains of a communications spire on the outer rim of a dead system, boots balanced on corroded alloy ribs while dust and ice crystals drifted sideways in the thin, artificial wind. The planet below had once been named—once been important enough to catalog—but now it existed only as Site 47-Kappa, a footnote in a ledger that had stopped being updated centuries ago.
His coat snapped softly behind him as he leaned forward, eyes narrowed.
"Too quiet," he muttered.
Jade let his breath slow, chi settling into his arms with the familiar, comforting weight of something that had broken bones and shattered armor more times than he could count. He didn't carry weapons when he worked alone. He didn't need them. His body was enough.
The signal pulsed again.
Not electromagnetic.
Not arcane.
Biological.
Jade's jaw tightened.
He dropped from the tower.
The landing shattered the last intact section of ferrocrete beneath him, but the sound was swallowed by the constant groan of the failing dome overhead. He rolled, came up low, and slipped through a ruptured service hatch into the facility's interior.
The air inside was wrong.
Too wet.
Too warm.
Emergency lights flickered on as he moved—not motion-activated, but reactive. As if the structure itself had noticed him and decided to wake up.
Corridors stretched out in angles that felt subtly distorted, walls scarred by long gouges that hadn't come from tools or weapons. Something had dragged itself through here. Something that had grown heavier with every step.
Jade moved fast.
Labs blurred past him—overturned containment tanks, shattered observation windows, restraints ripped free from mounting brackets. He knelt beside a terminal half-fused to the floor, brushed away dried translucent residue, and forced the screen awake.
The display stuttered, lines of corrupted data snapping into alignment.
PROJECT B.L.O.B.
BOUNDLESS LIFEFORM OBTAINING BIOMASS
Jade exhaled slowly through his nose.
"So the stories weren't exaggerating," he said quietly.
Logs cascaded down the screen.
Magic water slime origin. Accelerated mutation. Consumption-to-replication cycle. No cellular decay. No known saturation point. Every attempt to destroy the organism had resulted in greater mass retention, not loss.
And then the later entries appeared.
Not panic.
Not containment failures.
Optimization.
Someone had changed objectives.
Behavioral conditioning trials. Environmental shaping. Stimulus–response mapping. The language shifted from scientific caution to curiosity.
And finally—authorization codes that did not belong to B.U.D.D.I.E.S.
Jade's fingers clenched.
"This isn't an accident," he murmured. "Someone's raising it."
The whisper came from above him.
Wet. Curious. Layered.
Jade didn't look up.
He moved.
Chi detonated from his forearms like twin concussive blasts as he launched backward, shattering through a wall just as something amorphous surged into the space he'd occupied. The corridor filled with the sound of tearing matter and hungry replication.
Jade hit the ground running, boots hammering across broken platforms as the facility began to collapse in on itself. He vaulted a railing, fired another compressed chi burst into a support column, and dropped three levels through smoke and falling debris.
He reached his ship just as the thing reached the outer hull.
Jade didn't wait to see it clearly.
Engines roared.
The jump tore space open as Dark Buddy scout signatures flared into existence behind him—too late.
As hyperspace swallowed the stars, Jade leaned back in the pilot's seat, chest rising and falling hard.
He opened a secure channel and dumped everything—raw data, corrupted logs, growth projections—straight to B.U.D.D.I.E.S. HQ.
EXTINCTION-LEVEL VARIABLE CONFIRMED.
B.L.O.B. ACTIVE.
SIGNS OF GUIDANCE. NOT ALONE.
He cut the transmission and stared into the swirling blue of hyperspace.
"Magic Kid," Jade said softly.
***********************
The return to B.U.D.D.I.E.S. HQ did not feel like victory.
It felt like compression.
Danny noticed it the moment Solmara's vessel locked into the docking ring and the engines powered down. The familiar vibration of the station—usually a steady, comforting thrum—had deepened, as if the entire structure were carrying more mass than it had before.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
He stepped onto the docking platform and felt it in his bones. Six sigil stones were now within the same frame of reference, five already secured and one newly returned, dormant but whole. Individually, they were inert unless acted upon. Together, they created a subtle pressure gradient in reality itself. Not dangerous. Not yet.
But undeniable.
Technicians moved with practiced precision as the containment unit bearing the sixth stone was transferred from the ship. The stone itself did not glow. It did not resist. It simply was—a geometry older than morality, older than fear, its surface etched with lines that were not symbols so much as decisions fossilized into matter.
Solmara walked beside the unit, her ring unlit but her attention absolute.
"Stability?" she asked.
"Nominal," one of the engineers replied. "Dormant state holding. No drain spike. No resonance bleed."
Jimmy appeared at the edge of the platform, flanked by aides who were already adjusting projections and updating secure ledgers. He looked… tired. Not physically—Jimmy rarely showed that—but weighted. The kind of fatigue that came from seeing the board fill with pieces that could not be moved easily once placed.
"Six," Jimmy said quietly as Danny approached. "We're officially past the point of abstraction."
"And the Elemental Lords?" Danny asked.
"One," Jimmy replied. "Solmara gave us her word. The others are no longer aligned."
Solmara inclined her head slightly. "Aligned is a generous term. They are fractured. Suspicious. And aware now that Bones has lied to them."
"That helps," Danny said.
"It buys time," Solmara corrected. "Nothing more."
The containment unit slid into the sigil chamber with a sound like distant thunder muffled by miles of stone. The lattice adjusted automatically, six anchor points locking into place with microscopic shifts that rippled outward across the chamber walls.
Danny felt it like a breath being held.
The chamber sealed.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Jimmy finally broke the silence. "We'll announce the update to the Federation after a stabilization cycle. No reason to invite panic."
Danny nodded, though his attention had drifted inward. Being this close to so many stones at once didn't overwhelm him—it focused him. Creation didn't roar. It aligned. It showed him the shape of what needed to be done without telling him how to do it.
Responsibility without instruction.
"Danny."
He turned to find Sedge Hat standing at the far end of the platform, hands folded behind his back. The centuries in his posture felt heavier here, in the presence of the stones he had guarded, failed, and feared.
"I'd like to speak with you," Sedge Hat said. "Privately."
Jimmy's eyes flicked between them. He didn't object. He simply nodded once.
"There's an observation deck off Ring Seven," Jimmy said. "No surveillance. No recordings."
Sedge Hat inclined his head in thanks and turned without waiting to see if Danny followed.
Danny did.
The walk was quiet.
Ring Seven was old—older than most of the station's current architecture. The corridors here weren't polished chrome and adaptive lighting. They were stone and alloy layered together, built during a time when B.U.D.D.I.E.S. hadn't yet learned how to make danger look clean.
The observation deck opened onto a field of stars so dense it felt like looking into a living thing.
Sedge Hat stopped at the viewport.
For a long moment, he didn't speak.
"I have hated Golden Dragons for a very long time," he said finally.
Danny didn't interrupt.
"At first, it was grief," Sedge Hat continued. "Then rage. Then something colder. Something that convinced me I was justified."
He turned, eyes reflecting distant galaxies. "They created Bones. Not intentionally—but inevitably. Creation without restraint always births its shadow."
Danny's jaw tightened.
"They built the cage," Sedge Hat said. "Seven sigil stones. Perfect geometry. An elegant solution."
"And then they left," Danny said quietly.
"Yes," Sedge Hat replied. "They sealed Bones and walked away, convinced that permanence was the same thing as responsibility."
He laughed once, bitter and hollow. "They never stayed to watch the cracks form."
Sedge Hat faced the viewport again. "My people were chosen as custodians. We didn't ask for the role. We accepted it because someone had to. Because someone needed to stay."
Danny felt the truth of it resonate—not as guilt, but as context.
"My son was born into that duty," Sedge Hat said. "He grew up hearing Bones whisper through the cage. Not promises of power. Promises of meaning. Of ending the vigil."
Sedge Hat's hands curled slowly.
"When I returned from an off-world council, the prison was open. The cage incomplete. My world was gone."
Silence stretched between them, heavy but unbroken.
"So you killed my families," Danny said at last.
"Yes," Sedge Hat said without flinching. "Not because they deserved it. Not because you deserved it. But because I needed you to feel what abandonment costs."
Danny turned away, breath steady but strained.
"You could have told me," he said.
"No," Sedge Hat replied. "You wouldn't have understood. Not until creation had a price."
The words landed hard—but not explosively.
Danny closed his eyes.
"When I awakened," he said, "I thought my power was something to fear. Something that would hurt people if I wasn't careful."
Sedge Hat watched him closely.
"Now I see it differently," Danny continued. "Creation isn't dangerous because it's powerful. It's dangerous because it convinces you the work is done once something exists."
He opened his eyes and met Sedge Hat's gaze.
"I won't forgive you," Danny said. "What you did was unforgivable."
Sedge Hat nodded. "I never expected forgiveness."
"But I understand why you did it," Danny said. "And I won't repeat your mistake—or theirs."
For the first time in centuries, something in Sedge Hat's expression eased. Not relief. Not absolution.
Resolution.
"That," he said softly, "is all I ever needed you to learn."
Far away, in another wing of the station, Elysara slept—and dreamed of forests bathed in gold light, where a voice waited patiently beneath the trees.
And somewhere beyond even that, Bones felt the sixth stone settle into place.
He smiled.
Not because he was winning.
But because the game had finally reached a stage where no one could walk away without consequence.
Elysara's dream did not feel like a dream.
There was no disorientation, no sense of slipping from wakefulness into illusion. One moment she was asleep in her quarters—breathing slow, the hum of B.U.D.D.I.E.S. HQ a distant cradle—and the next she was standing barefoot on cool soil beneath a sky she had never seen but somehow recognized.
The trees were tall and pale, their bark smooth and luminous like moonlit bone. Leaves whispered softly overhead, shedding motes of golden-white light that drifted down and vanished before touching the ground. The air smelled of rain and summer sap and something older—memory, perhaps, or longing.
Elysara looked down at her hands.
They were steady.
This wasn't a nightmare.
This was an invitation.
"You always liked forests," a voice said gently.
She turned.
He stood several paces away, beneath a tree whose roots curled into the earth like patient fingers. He was not skeletal. He was not wreathed in green flame. He wore no crown of bone or aura of destruction.
He looked… ordinary.
Tall. Calm. Dark hair streaked faintly with silver. Eyes the color of deep embers banked low—not raging, not empty. Curious.
Bones smiled at her like an old friend.
"You shouldn't be here," Elysara said.
"No," Bones agreed easily. "But neither should you."
She felt a prickle of fear then—but it did not overwhelm her. The dream-space held her gently, as if even panic would be given time to breathe.
"You're trying to manipulate me," she said.
"Yes," Bones replied without hesitation.
The honesty threw her.
He gestured around them. "I could have appeared as a monster. I could have screamed truths into your mind until you broke. But you wouldn't listen then. You'd survive it, and survival would harden you against me."
He took a step closer—but stopped well outside her reach.
"I don't need you afraid," Bones said. "I need you thinking."
Elysara's jaw tightened. "About what?"
"About Danny."
Her breath caught despite herself.
Bones watched the reaction closely, like a scholar noting data points.
"He's kind," Bones continued. "Earnest. Burdened. And catastrophically powerful."
"You don't get to judge him," Elysara snapped.
"I don't," Bones agreed. "I understand him."
He looked up at the canopy, light drifting through his fingers. "Creation Dragons are not tyrants. They don't want to rule. They want to build. To heal. To fix what is broken."
His gaze returned to her.
"And that," he said softly, "is why they fail."
Elysara felt something cold coil in her chest. "You're lying."
"No," Bones said. "I'm contextualizing."
He waved a hand, and the forest shifted—not dissolving, but layering. Images bled into the space around them: worlds blooming under golden fire, life spreading, civilizations rising. And then—absence. Dragons gone. Creations left to mature alone.
"Creation is an act," Bones said. "But stewardship is a process. One your kind was never meant to carry alone."
Elysara's voice wavered despite her effort. "Danny is trying to stay."
"Yes," Bones said. "And that is why he will suffer."
The images shifted again—Danny standing before the sigil stones, pressure bending his posture but not breaking it. Danny burning with creation flame to heal a battlefield, his expression tight with restraint. Danny watching worlds he saved drift into futures he could not guide.
"Every time he chooses to stay," Bones said, "he takes responsibility for outcomes he cannot control. Every time he leaves, he becomes what I was accused of being."
Elysara clenched her fists. "You're trying to turn me against him."
"No," Bones said gently. "I'm offering you a role."
The forest dimmed slightly, light pooling around her instead.
"You are not like him," Bones continued. "Your bloodline is diluted, yes—but that gives you perspective. You were raised without expectation. Without destiny crushing your spine before you could walk."
He stepped closer, lowering his voice.
"You could be his anchor," Bones said. "The one who reminds him that creation and destruction are not enemies—but phases."
Elysara stared at him, heart hammering.
"And what do you get?" she demanded.
Bones smiled sadly. "Honesty."
She laughed, sharp and disbelieving. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have," Bones replied. "I don't want to rule the multiverse. I don't want to end everything."
He met her gaze fully now, embers flaring just a touch.
"I want the cycle acknowledged," Bones said. "Not denied. Not imprisoned and forgotten."
The forest began to fade—not collapsing, but releasing her.
"You don't have to decide anything now," Bones said as the light thinned. "Just… don't let them convince you that staying forever is the same as saving."
Elysara woke with a gasp, sitting upright in her bed.
Her heart raced. Sweat slicked her skin. The hum of the station rushed back in, grounding and real.
She pressed a hand to her chest.
No corruption burned there.
No compulsion.
Just a question.
—
On the Lupine homeworld, the sky burned with ceremonial fire as the Wolf King's fleet returned.
The palace gates opened wide, banners snapping in solar wind as warriors lined the approach. The people howled—not in triumph, but in recognition. Their king had left to answer annihilation and returned with their empire intact.
The Wolf King strode forward, armor scorched, presence blazing.
Shadeclaw followed, shadows subdued but alert.
Mira walked beside him.
The Wolf Queen stepped forward—and stopped.
Her gaze locked onto Mira, pupils narrowing as recognition flared like struck flint.
"You," she said.
Mira met her stare without flinching. "Me."
The silence stretched, taut as drawn wire.
The Wolf King placed a hand on both their shoulders. "She is pack," he said. "By bond. By choice."
The Wolf Queen studied Mira carefully—her posture, her eyes, the way shadows answered her movements. Not weakness. Not corruption.
Adaptation.
"And you chose this?" the Wolf Queen asked.
Mira nodded. "I did."
Something like surprise flickered across the Wolf Queen's face—then faded into a slow, measured nod.
"Then you are welcome," she said. "Not as a rival. But as family."
Shadeclaw's shoulders eased for the first time since the war began.
High above the palace, stars burned on.
Across the multiverse, lines tightened.
And in the quiet between wars, choices began to take shape—choices that would not reveal their cost until it was far too late to undo them.
Night settled over B.U.D.D.I.E.S. HQ in a way that had nothing to do with the local star cycle.
Artificial dusk rolled across habitation rings, lights dimming by degrees, simulating rest for beings who needed it. But the station itself did not sleep. It listened. It recalibrated. It waited.
Danny stood alone in the sigil chamber.
Six stones hovered in slow, deliberate symmetry, their shapes refusing to resolve into anything familiar no matter how long one stared at them. They were not beautiful. They were not ominous. They simply were—decisions made permanent by beings who had believed permanence was enough.
Danny felt them all now.
Not as voices.
Not as commands.
As tension.
Six anchor points pulling reality inward, leaving a seventh gap that tugged at the structure like a missing rib. He could almost see it in his mind's eye: the cage incomplete, its geometry elegant but unfinished, its failure mode obvious once you knew where to look.
Anyone could place the stones.
That had always been the flaw.
Jimmy's footsteps echoed softly behind him, deliberately unannounced but impossible to miss.
"You're going to wear a groove into the floor if you keep pacing," Jimmy said mildly.
Danny didn't turn. "I'm not pacing."
"Right," Jimmy replied. "You're brooding with intent."
That earned the faintest hint of a smile.
Jimmy joined him at the edge of the chamber, hands folded behind his back as he regarded the stones. For a moment, he didn't look like the head of B.U.D.D.I.E.S. or a cosmic custodian who had outlasted empires. He looked like a clerk staring at an unfinished form that had been sitting on his desk for six thousand years.
"Six," Jimmy said quietly. "You realize how close that is?"
"Yes," Danny answered. "And how far."
Jimmy nodded. "The Elemental Lords still have one. Solmara is trying to convince them to surrender it without bloodshed."
"And you don't think that will work," Danny said.
Jimmy shrugged. "I think Solmara believes in persuasion. I believe in redundancy."
Danny finally turned to face him. "You think Bones is already planning around the seventh stone."
Jimmy snorted softly. "Bones plans around everything. He's had longer to think about this than anyone alive."
Silence fell again, broken only by the faint harmonic hum of the stones interacting with the chamber's containment fields.
"Jimmy," Danny said at last. "Why didn't you stop them the first time? The Golden Dragons. The abandonment."
Jimmy's gaze remained on the stones. "Because they didn't ask permission."
"That's not an answer."
Jimmy sighed. "All right. Because even then, I knew you can't force someone to stay vigilant forever. Responsibility has to be chosen. If you impose it, it turns into resentment. Or worse—neglect."
Danny absorbed that.
"And Bones?" he asked.
Jimmy's eyes hardened. "Bones is what happens when creation refuses to acknowledge its shadow."
They stood there, two custodians of different kinds, staring at a problem that had never been meant to have a clean solution.
Elsewhere on the station, Jade Killington sat alone in a debrief room with the lights off.
Holograms hovered around him—fractured images of the derelict outpost, growth charts extrapolating B.L.O.B.'s mass curves, red lines spiking into the margins where predictions stopped making sense.
He replayed the audio logs again.
Wet sounds. Curious inflection. Replication through consumption and expulsion.
Someone had taught it how to grow.
Jade leaned back, arms crossed, jaw clenched.
"This isn't just a monster," he muttered. "It's a project."
He keyed up a secure channel and sent a short addendum to his earlier report.
SUBJECT: B.L.O.B.
ASSESSMENT UPDATE:
Behavioral shaping detected. Likely external handler.
Primary suspect: Magic Kid.
Secondary concern: B.L.O.B. may develop emergent agency if growth continues.
He cut the channel and stared at the ceiling.
For the first time since the tournament, Jade felt something like unease creep under his skin.
—
Far from B.U.D.D.I.E.S. HQ, in a place where the stars thinned and the void pressed closer, Magic Kid floated upside down in zero gravity, hands clasped behind his head.
The containment sphere before him pulsed softly.
Inside, the B.L.O.B. shifted—larger now, more complex, its surface rippling with patterns that mimicked neural activity.
Magic Kid hummed tunelessly.
"You're doing great," he said cheerfully. "Really. Exceeding projections."
The B.L.O.B. pressed against the barrier, pseudopods flattening, reforming, testing.
Magic Kid leaned closer, eyes bright with curiosity rather than fear.
"You see," he continued, "everyone thinks chaos is about destruction. Smashing things. Burning worlds. Very messy. Very boring."
He tapped the containment field lightly.
"But chaos," Magic Kid said, "is really about options."
The B.L.O.B. absorbed a chunk of prepared biomass and split again, its mass redistributing with unsettling efficiency.
Magic Kid grinned.
"Bones wants the cage gone," he mused. "The Buddies want it sealed forever. The Elemental Lords want power."
He spread his hands.
"And I just want to see what happens when nobody gets exactly what they want."
—
Back on the Lupine homeworld, the Wolf King stood on a balcony overlooking his capital, the night alive with firelight and distant howls.
The Wolf Queen joined him, her presence steady and fierce at his side.
"Our borders are reinforced," she said. "The packs are restless—but resolute."
"They should be," the Wolf King replied. "This was a test."
"And we passed," she said.
"For now," he corrected.
Behind them, Shadeclaw and Mira stood together in the shadows, watching the city breathe.
"Do you regret it?" Shadeclaw asked quietly.
Mira shook her head. "No. I chose strength. I chose belonging."
Shadeclaw nodded. "Then whatever comes… we face it together."
Above them, stars burned on—indifferent, ancient, waiting.
And across the multiverse, threads tightened.
Six stones rested in careful balance.
One remained beyond reach.
Bones whispered not of escape—but of understanding.
The cycle turned, whether anyone was ready or not.