Relief hit her like a physical wave. Maria’s knees threatened to buckle as muscles went soft all at once, so she locked them and forced her spine straight. Ethan needed to see her steady now after what he’d just done. Dizziness washed over her as she stepped forward. The world tilted while her vision dimmed and sweat slicked her palms. Her shoulder burned hotter while the infection pulsed beneath her skin like something alive and impatient.

  A final advisory flashed urgent but silent.

  CelestOS: Immediate Rest Recommended.

  She dismissed it with a flick of her fingers and kept walking. Each step was deliberate: heel down, weight transferred, balance corrected, and breath held. She focused on the sound of her boots on metal and stone alongside the familiar stink of the Forge. Oil, ozone, warm circuitry, anchor grease. Real things. Solid things. She reached him just as Ethan tried and failed to push himself upright.

  “Hey,” she said softly. “Don’t move. You already won.”

  She knelt beside him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, careful of his injuries and her own while pulling him in anyway. Ethan sagged into her with a broken exhale as his forehead pressed against her collarbone. His arms came around her like he feared she’d vanish if he let go. The world narrowed to breath and warmth.

  “I told you I’d come back,” he said hoarsely. Maria closed her eyes and held him tighter. “You did. Now don’t you dare go anywhere,” she whispered.

  The ore sat heavy and real at their feet. Ever since the descent alarm screamed, Maria allowed herself to believe they still had a chance. Ethan looked up at her like nothing else existed, but even through the relief she knew he could see how bad she was. Being in the third trimester meant the swell of her belly was visible even through the engineering suit. Red tracery crept up her neck from beneath the collar, and she felt the way his breath hitched when he noticed. Her movements were careful and optimized to hide weakness. One hand hovered near her shoulder without touching it, as if contact would make the damage undeniable.

  The infection had spread. It was significantly worse than it had been hours ago through the grainy video feed. She hoped he’d made it back in time. Ethan tried to stand, but his legs refused. The servos were dead and his muscles had blown past any reasonable limit somewhere around the forty-meter mark. He made it halfway before his knees buckled and he pitched forward.

  Maria was there before he hit. “I got it,” Ethan said, breathless. He nodded weakly toward the ore bag. “The ore’s safe.”

  “Stop talking.” Her hands were already on his shoulders, fingers moving with practiced efficiency through seal checks and damage assessment. Professional field-medic mode snapped into place even as her hands shook. “Let me look at you.”

  Her fingers traced the spiderweb of microfractures across his rear plating, the compromised seals, the burned-out servo housings in his gloves, and his left boot. She cataloged everything without comment, jaw tight. “Suit integrity’s shot,” Maria said. “Three seal breaches and microfractures across the rear plate. What’d you do down there?”

  “Disagreed with a mountain and maybe the Loch Ness monster.” Her lips twitched despite herself. “Who won?” Ethan tapped the ore bag weakly. “I did.”

  The assessment stopped there. Maria leaned back on her heels and really looked at him. She saw the man she’d known before Veslaya, before the crash, before the hunger, and before survival became the only metric that mattered. “You made it back,” she said quietly.

  “Promised I would. Besides… you were alive.” He left the pregnancy unsaid. “That made everything else mandatory.”

  They were moving now, slowly and carefully. They moved away from the Forge, the cliff, and the place where they’d both almost broken. He’d made it. He was alive. He’d climbed most of the way on his own, but Maria had saved his sorry ass at the end and they both knew it. The world tilted slightly to the left. It had been doing that for over an hour. Maria compensated automatically, shifting her stance to counter the angle her body wanted to list toward. A moment later it tilted the other way and Ethan adjusted in response. The infection chewed at her balance while his exhaustion limited his.

  Her body throbbed with pressure and heat instead of pain. Being near the Syntropic ore muted the worst of it, which she took as a good sign. Still, a sense of wrongness spread through her like ink in water, tendrils creeping toward her neck and chest. They crept toward her heart. Hours left. Maybe a day if she got lucky. She needed that ore.

  CelestOS: Core Temperature: Elevated | Recommendation: Seated Recovery.

  She ignored it. Another alert followed, gentler and no less insistent.

  CelestOS: Balance Instability Detected | Fall Risk Increasing.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “I’m fine,” she said to the system. As irritating as it was, she’d finally found time to repair her copy of Celestitech’s broken flagship AI and replace it with something rudimentary. It at least told the truth about her vitals. The display updated silently.

  CelestOS: Status: Concerning -> Alarming.

  She almost smiled while her eyes locked on tether distance and terrain ahead. Mapping systems remained unreliable for both CelestOS units, so she trusted her instincts instead. The bio-monitor pulsed again. She felt the truth of the numbers in the tremor in her hands and the heat behind her eyes. The infection had advanced from forty-one to forty-three percent during Ethan’s ascent. Fever rose to 101.3°F and rising while systemic stress elevated and pregnancy compounded the immune load. She stayed upright anyway.

  She overrode the automated winch when it glitched thirty meters from base, fingers steady through sheer will. Maternal determination braided with military discipline to hold her together when her body wanted to fold. Ethan said something quiet. His eyes were closed. How he stayed upright she had no idea. Three weeks had turned the man she loved into this: burned and broken. but they needed a break. Just a short one. So they stopped and leaned against the wall to rest.

  She pulled up the scanner and ran the projections she’d already run a dozen times, hoping irrationally they’d change. They didn’t. Infection accelerated while the original window invalidated and the stress response elevated.

  CelestOS: Revised Estimate: 14–18 Hours to Critical Mass.

  The baby remained stable. The placental barrier shielded the tiny life inside her from the entropy spreading through her tissues, but that protection was temporary. At seventy percent integration, her immune system would collapse and the buffer would vanish. They needed the ore studied. They needed answers. Ethan claimed he knew what to do. She pushed doubt aside because trust was mandatory now. Behind them, the winch motor screamed, an ugly and strained sound well outside normal parameters. It cut out with a stuttering hiccup.

  Maria’s breath caught hard enough to hurt. Ethan fumbled for the ore bag with clumsy hands. The seal resisted twice before finally giving, letting him angle it open for her to see inside. Four violet ore cores rested within. Each one was the size of a football, irregular crystalline forms catching the Forge’s dim light. They glowed faintly with bioluminescence, pulsing in a slow and steady rhythm like a heartbeat.

  Maria stayed silent as she pulled out her scanner and held it over the largest core. Violet light washed over her face, softened sharp lines by reflection. She looked unreal and alien. The scanner chirped. “99.7% pure Syntropic Ore. Iron Loop crystalline matrix,” she read quietly. She swallowed. “Ethan… this is perfect. It’s better than perfect. This much could cure a dozen infections.”

  “If anyone had ever known what it did or lived long enough to bring it back,” she added, voice rougher than she meant. "Listen, if the cure only saves one of---"

  “We’re saving both of you,” Ethan said without hesitation. “It’s non-negotiable. I went into a lake full of monsters, fought a mountain, climbed fifty meters without servo power, and survived to get this,” he said evenly. “I’m keeping both of you now.”

  Maria studied him again, slower this time and deeper. It was the way she’d back in officer training when she’d first decided this awkward guy might actually be worth her attention. “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “Three weeks alone’ll do that.”

  “No,” she shook her head. “You aren't just harder; you're more certain. Like you decided the universe works the way you need it to and you’re done accepting arguments.” Ethan met her gaze steadily despite everything.

  “That’s exactly right.”

  Maria stayed still while the Forge hummed around them familiar and constant. She stayed where she was with hands braced on the rail. Her eyes remained on Ethan like she needed to be sure he wouldn't dissolve if she looked away. Relief arrived tangled with fear and the afterimage of everything that could've gone wrong.

  “You know,” she said quietly, “I started planning for the version where you stayed lost.” Ethan’s breath caught just slightly. “Logistics habit,” she went on with a tone dry but strained at the edges. “You plan for failure, assume losses, and build contingencies. I told myself it was just discipline and meant nothing.”

  He shifted closer and was careful of both of them. “And?”

  “And it meant I was scared,” she said. It was honesty. “I can handle dying, but I was scared of you having to live with it.”

  Ethan looked down at his hands which were trembling faintly now that the adrenaline had begun to leak away. “I stopped planning,” he admitted. “I only focused on finding you. Everything after that was noise. And honestly, I made some pretty stupid decisions trying to find you. It's a miracle I'm still alive.”

  She huffed a soft breath. “That tracks.” Silence stretched between them for a moment. It felt full and weighted with six months of absence and all the conversations that hadn't happened because survival kept interrupting. Maria finally reached out to touch his forearm gentle and testing like she was confirming something real. “When the winch stalled,” she said, “I almost pulled the emergency ascent. Even knowing what it might cost us.”

  Ethan’s head snapped up. “Maria...”

  “I held off because I trusted you. I just need you to know how close I came.”

  He nodded once. “I need you to know I would've forgiven you.”

  She smiled faintly at that. “I know.” Her hand slid down so fingers brushed his, and for a second they stayed anchored and present. Maria straightened as the moment carefully folded away. “All right,” she said while steel crept back into her voice. “We have work to do.”

  Ethan followed her lead, his jaw setting and focus sharpening. “Yeah,” he said. “Now we work.”

  They needed to move and begin cure refinement immediately. Every minute was another increment of infection spreading through Maria’s system and another step closer to critical mass. Ethan took ten seconds anyway. It was ten seconds to just be here with her alive and together. The separation of six months ended momentarily before the next crisis and the next fight for survival arrived.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For being the kind of person who does impossible things when I need you to.”

  Ethan pushed himself upright, his body protesting the decision with sharp and immediate feedback. He held out a hand and Maria took it. He provided something solid to lean against. She came up with him anyway with jaw clenched and breath tight. She refused the tilt in her inner ear and the heat crawling up her neck. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go do another impossible thing. Save our family.”

  Heron's Hearth In Another World

  TweekZ