The sixty-second countdown felt like an eternity for the gathered miners, but for Vance, it was merely the tick of a cosmic clock.
The Forward Base's sensors remained flawlessly accurate. On the dot, the violent, chaotic storm of micro-asteroids at the belt's edge—the Turbulence Layer—began to thin. It was as if the universe itself had exhaled, creating a narrow, temporary corridor of relative calm.
The Window was open.
Without waiting for a formal signal, two hulls streaked forward simultaneously. Vance's Ore-Tyrant MK-II and Silas's Ore-Tyrant MK-I ignited their engines, their brilliant ion tails cutting through the obsidian void like twin daggers.
Inside the cockpit of the MK-II, the magnetic harnesses snapped tight, pinning Vance into his command seat. The vibration of the four heavy-duty particle thrusters hummed through the deck, a rhythmic thrum that Vance felt in his very marrow.
"System, reroute internal power," Vance commanded under his breath.
[Gravity Generators: Offline]
[Auxiliary Power Diverted: Attitude Thrusters +15%]
Click. The artificial weight vanished instantly. Vance drifted slightly against the straps, weightless. To a novice, flying without internal gravity in the middle of a high-G dogfight was a recipe for nausea and disorientation. To Vance, it was a tactical necessity.
By cutting the gravity, he funneled every spare kilowatt into the eight maneuvering thrusters lining the MK-II's hull.
He gripped the multi-axis flight yoke. His fingers danced over the touch-sensitive controls with a fluidity that no twenty-year-old miner should possess.
In his past life, Vance had commanded The Tomahawk, a Destroyer-class warship. Compared to that beast of steel and fire, this mining rig was a child's toy—clunky, slow, and fragile. It was like a Formula 1 driver being forced back into a rusty go-kart.
However, the MK-II had one hidden grace: its eight attitude thrusters. Most ships in this sector, including Silas's older model, were equipped with only four or six. The MK-II was designed for "fine-art" mining in tight spaces, allowing for micro-adjustments that defied standard physics.
Vance pushed the throttle to thirty percent.
"Let's see if the old man can keep up," he muttered.
The Ore-Tyrant didn't just fly; it pivoted. Vance engaged the lateral thrusters, sliding the ship sideways through a gap between two tumbling iron-rich rocks that should have been too narrow to pass. He didn't shed a single mile of forward momentum. He threaded the needle with a predatory grace, leaving a trail of shimmering ions in his wake.
Behind him, Silas was fighting for his life.
Silas had twenty years of experience, but he was a "Veteran" at best. He relied on instinct and grit. Vance, however, was operating on the level of a [Peak Elite] pilot. He wasn't just reacting to the rocks; he was predicting their trajectories seconds before they arrived.
In less than ten minutes, the gap between the two ships widened from a few hundred yards to several miles. Silas was a speck on the radar, struggling to maintain a coherent flight path as Vance led him deeper into the labyrinth.
But Vance wasn't just racing. He was watching.
His eyes flickered to the translucent azure overlay of the Auxiliary System. A wireframe of Silas's trailing ship was highlighted in a pulsating, sickly amber.
[Scan Result: Ore-Tyrant MK-I]
[Target Component: Thruster No. 3]
[Status: Sub-optimal (Yellow) - 64% Integrity]
[Maintenance Report: Crystallized lubricant detected in fuel lines. High risk of seizure under sustained high-G loads.]
Vance's eyes narrowed, cold and calculating. He remembered this moment with haunting clarity.
In his original timeline, he had been young, impulsive, and driven to madness by Silas's constant harassment. He had wanted the fly dead. He had intentionally chosen a path through a "Gravitational Shear Zone"—a place where the gravity of three large asteroids intersected to create a violent tug-of-war on any ship entering the area.
He had baited Silas into that zone. He had watched as Silas, desperate to keep up, pushed his No. 3 thruster past the breaking point.
Vance remembered the sound of Silas's scream over the comms when the thruster seized. The MK-I had spun wildly, its hull groaning as it clipped a wandering rock. The impact had been minor, but in the Shear Zone, a minor error was a death sentence. The ship had been sucked into a "Gravity Well," colliding head-on with a thousand-foot-wide asteroid.
Silas had managed to eject, but a stray kinetic fragment—a piece of his own ship—had struck the escape pod at four miles per second.
Instant vaporization.
Vance had been cleared by the authorities. The black box logs showed a mechanical failure. But the "Old Man" behind the mining company didn't care about logs. He cared about blood. Silas's death had lit a fuse that eventually blew Vance's life apart.
Vance looked at the jagged horizon of the "Red Zone" ahead.
I could do it again, he thought. I could lead him into the shears right now. One sharp turn to the left, and Silas would be space dust within five minutes.
The temptation was there—the dark, cold urge to end the nuisance forever. But the Vance of today was no longer that impulsive youth. He was a survivor who had seen empires fall and stars die. He knew that the most satisfying revenge wasn't death; it was the realization of total, crushing inferiority.
He didn't need Silas's blood on his hands. Not when the "Destiny Event" was only ten days away. He needed to be a ghost, a shadow that no one noticed until it was too late.
Vance gripped the yoke and pulled back, the MK-II's nose tilting upward. Instead of heading for the Shear Zone, he chose a path of "Pure Technique"—a route so complex and demanding that it required absolute perfection in thruster control.
He would show Silas a gap that the old man could see, but would never be able to touch.
"Watch closely, Silas," Vance whispered, his eyes glowing with the cold light of the system. "This is the difference between a miner and a Master."
The MK-II accelerated, diving into a cluster of spinning obsidian fragments. To the observers back at the base, it looked like the ship had vanished into a solid wall of rock.