Chapter 31
G reta sat curled against the tilted bulkhead, knees drawn to her chest, tail still wrapped tightly around the spot where Klari’s had been only minutes earlier.
The wreck groaned around her like a dying animal, metal seams popping as the ocean pressed in from every side.
Cold seawater poured through the breaches in steady, merciless streams, claiming back the ship that had dared to attempt escape.
She didn’t move.
The ship was broken beyond any hope of repair. Consoles sparked and died one by one. The crystalline power core — exposed now through a jagged tear in the deck plating — pulsed with an unstable, sickly blue light.
Every few seconds it flickered dangerously, sending small arcs of energy crackling across the flooded floor. She noted it distantly, the way she would note a failing capacitor in one of her drones. Dangerous. Unstable. Something that could be useful later… if there was a later .
But right now, she couldn’t bring herself to care.
All the rivals were dead.
Klari had made sure of that. He had torn through them with single-minded fury, protecting her until the very end. He had given everything — his strength, his blood, his life — so she could have this one fragile moment of safety.
And it had cost him everything.
Greta stared at her empty hand, the one that had been holding his when he disappeared.
The fingers were still partially scaled, but the rose-pink shimmer was fracturing at the edges.
The timer inside her chest throbbed like a second, dying heartbeat.
She could feel it counting down the final seconds of her aquatic form.
She wished it would hurry up.
The water reached her neck. She tilted her head back, gills fluttering weakly as they struggled to pull oxygen from the flooding compartment.
The pressure in her veins built slowly, then faster — a familiar tightness that had once terrified her and now felt like mercy.
She lifted her hand out of the water and watched.
The glowing vein patterns under her skin pulsed erratically, bright rose fading to dull pink, then to nothing. The scales along her fingers lifted at the edges like dead leaves, dissolving into faint clouds of shimmering particles that drifted away in the current.
The webbing between her fingers thinned, stretched, and melted away. Her tail began to split — bones reshaping with wet, painful cracks.
It hurt.
Not the sharp, violent pain of the first change, but a deep, aching dissolution. Like her body was unmaking itself piece by piece .
She was becoming small again. Soft. Fragile.
Human.
The gills along her neck fluttered one final time, then sealed shut with a sickening ripple. Her lungs — weak, inefficient human lungs — burned instantly for air that wasn’t there.
Greta gasped, the sound wet and desperate. Water rushed into her mouth. She coughed, choking, but there was nowhere to go.
The wreck was almost completely flooded now. The alien ocean pressed against every seam, patient and eternal.
She thought of Klari in the cave.
His voice, low and honest in the small air pocket.
“The reset condition has changed. The only thing that now triggers a full platform reset is your death.”
She thought of his markings dimming slowly in her arms.
The way his golden eyes had stayed on hers until the very last second.
The quiet promise in his final words: “I love you.”
Tears mixed with the seawater on her face. She refused to sob — not yet — but the grief was a living thing in her chest, sharp and suffocating.
If she died here, the game would reset.
All the rivals would come back. The claims would carry forward — two of them already completed. Klari would wake in his pod. She would wake in hers. They would begin again.
But this time would be nothing like the first time.
They would both remember.
Every kiss. Every touch. Every brutal, beautiful moment. Every time he had chosen her, protected her, loved her.
She held onto that thought like a lifeline .
Her legs were fully human now — pale, soft, useless in the water.
Her lungs screamed. Black spots danced at the edges of her vision. The power core nearby flickered faster, unstable energy arcing dangerously close to her.
She was scared.
Terrified.
She feared death, the way all living creatures did. And now it was coming to claim her.
The ocean pressed in from all sides, cold and endless. The broken ship creaked its final warnings around her. She was alone in the dark, small and fragile and dying.
But she wasn’t alone in her heart.
She thought of Klari’s markings glowing soft and warm in the cave.
The way he had looked at her when the ship first hummed to life.
The quiet reverence in his voice when he said she was magnificent.
She closed her eyes.
“I’m coming,” she whispered into the water, the words bubbling away like a prayer. “Wait for me.”
Her human lungs had nothing left.
She breathed in.
Water rushed into her chest — cold, burning, final.
And darkness consumed her.