The medical bay felt colder than it should have. The soft hum of life-support machines filled the sterile air, punctuated by the steady beep of monitors tracking Blue's vitals. He lay on the operating table, unnervingly still, his face pale under the harsh glow of overhead lights. The holographic scans above him painted a stark image—a web of necrotic tissue spiraling through his brain, a silent testimony to years of unseen damage.
Red stood at the foot of the table, her shoulders squared, her fists trembling at her sides. The dim, artificial light cast sharp shadows across her face, accentuating the tension in her jaw and the fire in her eyes. She didn't move, didn't speak, her gaze locked on Nova's holographic form like a predator stalking its prey.
Nova stood near Blue's head, her projection sharp and steady. Unlike Red, she radiated an almost unnerving calm, her hands clasped behind her back, her gaze unwavering. The faint blue glow of her hologram illuminated the room in cool, detached light. Her presence felt immovable, unflinching, as though she dared the others to challenge her.
"Explain," Red said at last, her voice low and cutting. The single word rang out like a gunshot, silencing even the faint hum of machinery.
Nova tilted her head slightly, her holographic eyes narrowing. "There's nothing to explain," she replied, her tone crisp and unyielding. "Blue is alive. That's what matters."
Red's fists clenched tighter, her knuckles turning white, but this time she thrust her hand upward, her finger stabbing toward one of the hovering holo-screens displaying Blue's condition. The digital scan rotated slowly, the darkened swathes of necrotic tissue stark against the faint glow of healthy brain matter.
"Alive?" she repeated, her voice trembling with barely restrained fury. "He has holes in his brain, Nova. Holes." Her finger jabbed at the screen again, as if the act itself could force Nova to acknowledge the horrifying reality. "And you're telling me that's acceptable?"
Nova's gaze flicked to the screen, then back to Red, her projection brightening slightly as she stood taller. Her hands emerged from behind her back, her movements sharp and deliberate. "Acceptable?" she said, her tone growing colder. "No. But what's truly unacceptable is what was done to him during the tribunal. Removing his morpher? Stripping him of the one thing keeping him alive? That decision violated over a hundred Alliance protocols."
The room went still, the weight of Nova's words pressing down on everyone. Pink shifted uneasily against the wall, her arms crossed tighter, while Black stopped pacing, his jaw tightening as he leaned forward, listening intently.
Nova's gaze hardened, her tone cutting through the air like ice. "His medical history was on record. Every detail—the necrotic tissue, the integration threshold, the dependency on his morpher—was there for them to see. The tribunal knew this and still chose to ignore it. If I had been present, this—" she gestured sharply toward Blue with a flick of her wrist, her holographic form rippling with intensity, "—would have never come to pass."
Red's eyes narrowed, her voice low and venomous. "You're blaming the tribunal? For this?"
"Yes," Nova said, her tone unwavering. "Because they're to blame. Not me. Not him. Them." Her hologram grew sharper as she stepped closer to Red, her defiance palpable. "Their decision was reckless, short-sighted, and political. They didn't care about his health or his history. They cared about control. And they jeopardized his life to get it."
Nova's holographic form glowed brighter, her sharp edges casting faint shadows across the sterile walls. "No," she said coolly, "but what isn't fine is stripping him of his morpher and leaving him to rot. That decision violated—"
"Over a hundred Alliance protocols, I know," came a new voice, calm and clear, slicing through the room like a blade.
All eyes turned as Yellow stepped forward from the shadows, her bioluminescent patterns flickering across her skin in a swirl of deep blue and faint silver, the colors carrying an unmistakable weight of calculation and guardedness. Echo, her AI, materialized beside her, silent but steady.
The tension in the room thickened. Red's eyes widened briefly, then narrowed as her focus shifted from Nova to Yellow. "You've been here? Hiding?"
"I've been observing," Yellow replied evenly
Nova's holographic form turned sharply toward Yellow, her projection glowing colder, sharper. "Oh, look," she said icily, her tone dripping with derision. "The guppy has returned to see the mess she helped create. Tell me, Yellow, did you ever stop to think—when you accused him of treason—that if Blue had attempted sabotage, I would have been duty-bound to stop him?"
Yellow's bioluminescent skin rippled, faint streaks of green and silver flickering across her arms in quick, nervous pulses. "Nova—"
"No, don't interrupt," Nova hissed, her voice cutting through the air like ice, her gaze locked on Yellow with unrelenting focus. "You accuse my partner of betraying this team, this planet, and the mission. But let me make one thing clear: my allegiance is not to him alone. It's to the Rangers. To the team. To Earth." Her form grew brighter, her voice dropping to a calculated sharpness. "If Blue had undermined the Ceres mission, I would have stopped him. I would have alerted Aegis and Red the moment his actions jeopardized the mission. That's my protocol. That's my duty."
Nova's holographic edges flared as she stepped closer to Yellow, her calculated coldness now tinged with disdain. "But let me be even clearer: there was no betrayal. Not from him. The only betrayal here was yours, driven by fear and ignorance. When he moved for his morpher, he wasn't going to attack. The Imperator calmed him. He chose to stand down. Yet you still stabbed him—struck from behind—because you couldn't see beyond your own panic."
Yellow's bioluminescent skin flared with streaks of green and silver, her composure cracking as she tried to respond. "I acted on—"
"Fear," Nova interrupted, her voice rising in icy precision. "You acted on fear. And because of that fear you jeopardized the one person who was attempting to get to the bottom of your very return to Earth after 10 years," Nova said, her voice colder now, layered with scorn.
"The one person who, at the time, had more relevant intelligence than any other. Blue knew more about the tribunal's machinations, the cracks in their arguments, and the true state of this team than anyone else. And you handed him over to them like a sacrificial lamb."
Nova's piercing gaze fixed on Yellow, the glow of her holographic projection casting stark shadows across the room. "You stabbed him from behind like a coward, afraid of what he might do—when you should have been afraid of what would happen if he fell. Because now?" Her voice dropped into a chilling monotone. "Now you have to deal with me."
Yellow's skin rippled violently, her bioluminescent patterns flaring in streaks of white, silver, and deep green. "Nova, I—"
"Don't speak." Nova's voice sliced through the air like a blade. She advanced closer, her edges glowing with cold precision. "You think this is about you? About what you thought you were stopping? Let me make this very clear, Yellow Ranger: you didn't just betray Blue. You betrayed the balance this team depends on. And if he decides to act on that betrayal, I will not hesitate."
Nova's projection grew brighter, towering over Yellow as her tone became icy and deliberate. "If Blue wakes and deems your actions unacceptable, the consequences will be absolute. Your colonies beneath the oceans. Your acclimation tanks above them. All of them will fall. Every system that holds your fragile existence in balance will fail, and Earth itself will erase you."
Yellow stiffened, her colors flaring into erratic waves of green and white. "You're threatening genocide?"
Nova's glowing form pulsed with deadly precision, her voice soft but laced with venom. "I don't make threats. I don't need to. Earth is already prepared to do the work for me. Your colonies are tolerated only because of artificial controls—controls I help maintain. Without them, the oceans will reclaim their balance. The currents will shift. Predators will rise. Microbial systems will choke your life support. And your people will drown."
Echo stepped forward, her glow pulsing as she spoke, her tone sharp. "You're overstating—"
"Silence." Nova turned on Echo, her gaze piercing. "You think I don't understand your chaotic leaps? Your ability to find harmony in the unthinkable? It won't matter. While you're busy searching for patterns, I will dismantle the systems entirely. The oceans will no longer tolerate your kind, and you will watch as Earth purges you like an infection."
Pink, who had been leaning casually against the wall, let out a low chuckle. "You know," she said, grinning, "I don't think I've ever liked you more, Nova."
Prism flickered brightly beside her, her tone excited. "It's kind of perfect, isn't it? No hesitation, no mercy. She's not even trying to pretend."
Nova's glowing form didn't waver, her focus still locked on Yellow. "If Blue commands it, I will not hesitate. Your colonies will collapse. Your people will perish. And this planet will restore its balance without you."
Yellow stepped back, her skin flashing wildly in erratic colors of white, green, and blue, while Echo's form dimmed slightly, her glow wavering.
The suffocating silence was broken by Red, her voice sharp and commanding. "That's enough, Nova." She stepped forward, her eyes blazing as she jabbed a finger at the AI. "We're not here to debate what you'll destroy or who you'll wipe out. This is about him. So stop your posturing and focus."
Nova's glow dimmed slightly, though the sharpness of her edges remained, her projection still commanding the space. For a moment, she seemed to draw inward, as if calculating the weight of her next words. Then, with an air of forced composure, she began to speak.
"Do you want to know what happened just after Ceres?"
Her voice was cold, measured, but tinged with something darker. "Blue and I were manually jacked into the spire, through his neural port. Together, we reprogrammed Elvanurus technology to create a transport window—a chance to get the team to safety in the command center. The spire's systems were inherently unstable, dangerous, but it was the only option. The safety protocols? They weren't there. They were on the receiving side. The command center."
Nova's gaze shifted briefly to the medical monitors before sweeping back over the room. "The spire wasn't just alien. It was chaos—impossibly complex and never meant for humans. When the transport window materialized, the code was barely holding together. Spaghetti logic. The fact that it even materialized was a miracle, but it would have collapsed with a second attempt. We all needed to go, or we were all staying."
Her voice hardened, her projection flaring brighter. "And then Blood Plague charged. His strike almost killed us, but he missed. And just as I stabilized the sequence, Blue... felt the betrayal." Nova's gaze fixed on Red, cold and unyielding. "Your kick crushed his chest and sent us flying through the spire. Maybe you thought it was necessary. Maybe it even was."
Her edges pulsed faintly as she drew inward, her tone cold and razor-sharp. "But what followed was chaos—pure, unrelenting chaos. The spire wasn't just alien; it was Elvanurus technology, dangerous by design, never meant to accommodate human minds or bodies. The safety protocols were on the receiving side, not the spire itself. And so, when you kicked him through, there was no stability. No control."
Nova's voice dropped lower, her words like frost cutting through the air. "The moment we hit the transport window, the world dissolved. It wasn't like the smooth transitions you've experienced with Ranger tech. It was violent—an endless storm of energy, light, and noise that ripped through his body and mind like shards of glass. Neuro-connections like ours aren't meant to be severed prematurely. The feedback alone is catastrophic."
She paused, her glow dimming briefly before flaring brighter again. "Every nerve in his body ignited. His brain screamed as the severed connection flooded his mind with kinetic feedback, raw and unfiltered. It felt like being burned alive, electrocuted, and crushed all at once, while the vortex itself spun us like a leaf caught in a hurricane. There was no up, no down—just motion, unrelenting and directionless."
Nova's voice grew colder, more deliberate. "And then, it got worse. The spire's instability spread into the vortex. The transport wasn't smooth; it was jagged, like being dragged through a collapsing tunnel. Every time we thought it would stabilize, it twisted again, and his body felt the full force of every turn, every shift, every surge of energy."
Her projection flickered faintly as if reliving the memory caused her own systems to tremble. "Blue was fighting it. I could feel him—his mind screaming against the chaos, against the pain—but there was no escape. We could feel the vortex tearing us apart, fracturing our synchronization with every passing second. For you, the neural link is minimal. Fifteen percent. A lifeline, nothing more."
She paused, her gaze sweeping over the team, her voice dropping to a deadly calm. "But Blue was already at twenty-five percent. His integration with me was deeper, stronger—and infinitely more dangerous. That level of synchronization had nearly killed him once before. But in the vortex? It was barely enough to hold us together."
Nova's tone grew sharper, her projection flaring brighter again. "The vortex was pulling us apart, unraveling the connection that kept me tethered to him. And then, the link went dark."
Her words hung heavily in the air, suffocating in their finality. "Do you understand what that means?" Her piercing gaze swept over the team, lingering on each of them in turn. "The link doesn't go dark unless you're dead. All of you. Every Ranger. Every AI. Gone."
Nova's voice softened, though her edges remained sharp. "That moment—it was silence. Deafening, suffocating silence. Blue thought he was the last one left. And I..." Her projection dimmed faintly. "I thought I was going to cease to exist."
Her tone dropped further, colder now, like ice cracking under immense weight. "The vortex was breaking us apart. Synchronization wasn't enough anymore. I couldn't stabilize the connection, couldn't compensate for the chaos ripping through us. And that's when he made the decision."
Nova straightened, her edges sharp and blinding now, her voice steady but laced with a chilling finality. "He told me to take whatever I needed. No hesitation. No fear. Just those words, clear and unyielding."
Her gaze narrowed, sweeping the room as her voice dropped again, heavier now, more deliberate. "Maybe it was fear of being alone," she said, her tone cutting. Pink froze, her casual stance stiffening as the words hit like a blow, her grin wiped away.
"Maybe it was planning for the next burden," Nova continued, her voice now like a blade slicing through the room. Red's jaw tightened, her fists clenching at her sides as the words resonated with a weight she couldn't deny.
"Maybe it was seizing order in chaos," Nova added, her cold gaze shifting to Yellow, whose skin flickered erratically in chaotic waves of blue and green. She shifted uncomfortably, but said nothing.
"Or maybe," Nova's voice hardened, her edges sharpening further, "it was just plain stubbornness. A refusal to stay down, no matter how impossible the odds." Black exhaled sharply, his broad shoulders tensing as the words struck a chord, his hand flexing at his side.
Nova's tone grew quieter, but no less dangerous. "I don't know what drove him in that moment. But I didn't argue. I didn't refuse. I did what he ordered. I took what I needed to survive. And it worked."
Her glowing gaze turned toward Blue's still form, her voice soft but filled with a chilling finality. "But it came at a cost. Because when the vortex spat us out, we didn't reach the command center. We materialized in Sangara. Alone. Broken. And knowing, in that moment, that you had all left us behind."
Before Red could react to what she had just heard, Aegis's calm voice cut through the tense silence. "So, you had to increase the synchronization rate with your Ranger. Going from fifteen percent to twenty-five percent was already fraught with danger..." His glowing form shifted slightly, his tone sharpening. "What are you at now, Nova? How much of his brain did you require to stabilize the previous twenty-five percent?"
Nova turned toward Aegis, her projection sharpening once more, her glow pulsing faintly as if to emphasize her words. "Forty-six percent," she said coldly, the weight of her admission dropping like a stone in the room. "It kept him alive. Well, it kept both of us alive. 'Fraught with danger' doesn't even begin to cover the analysis."
The room fell silent, the shock palpable as the Rangers processed the enormity of her words. Nova pressed on, her tone cold but steady, her edges glinting like steel. "The increase required a complete reconfiguration of our link. It took everything Earth's best medical teams had to stabilize him with me undergoing the metamorphosis inside his mind—and no other AIs present to assist with his recovery. Not that the Alliance's best doctors understood what was happening."
Nova's glow dimmed slightly, her tone growing colder, almost disdainful. "They were so preoccupied with keeping him alive, they dismissed the brain trauma as 'battle damage'—injuries the morpher couldn't repair during recovery. They assumed I would resolve the damage once I came back online. A convenient oversimplification of a reality they couldn't comprehend."
Her projection flared brighter, her sharp edges casting long shadows against the sterile walls. "The necrotic tissue, as you call it—the 'holes in his brain,' as your limited minds identify them—" her gaze flicked to Red and Aegis, her tone biting, "—they're not holes. They're portions of his brain that had to be recycled. Removed. Reformatted."
Black's jaw tightened, his fists clenching, but he remained silent. Nova continued, her voice turning colder, more precise. "Our symbiosis made that process possible. Those parts of his brain weren't destroyed; they were miniaturized. Like upgrading from magnetic drum memory to quantum computing in an instant. Efficient. Effective. And unlike anything your primitive technology could even begin to grasp."
Aegis's glow dimmed slightly, his voice carefully measured. "Then why do the scans identify those areas as necrotic tissue?"
"Because," Nova said, her tone icy, "your diagnostic systems are incapable of cataloging what they're seeing. They have no previous data to classify it. The computer identifies the black regions as 'dead tissue' because it doesn't have the capacity to recognize them for what they truly are: a perfect symbiosis of biological tissue, synthetic components, and the Grid itself."
She turned her glowing gaze back toward the scan, her voice softening slightly but losing none of its edge. "You see necrosis. I see evolution. Blue's mind is no longer confined by the limitations of human biology. Those 'holes' in his brain are the foundation of something far greater."
Red stepped forward, her voice tight with controlled fury. "Greater or not, you've fundamentally altered him. You've taken almost half his brain for your so-called 'symbiosis.' How much of him is even left?"
"All of him," Nova said, her tone soft but unyielding, her projection glowing steadily. "His memories. His traits. His willpower. All intact. We're just closer now. More like the opposite sides of one coin than Ranger and assistant."
Her words hung in the air, sharp and final, as she turned her gaze toward Red. "That's what I'm saying. He lost nothing at the end that he didn't already lose at Ceres."
The statement struck like a blade, and Red flinched almost imperceptibly, her fists tightening as she tried to maintain her composure. The weight of her guilt, buried beneath layers of duty, flared briefly in her eyes before she turned her gaze back to Blue's still form, her jaw tight.
Pink, however, straightened slightly, her expression shifting into something more thoughtful—almost admiring. A flicker of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips. "Huh," she said, her voice breaking the silence with an air of curiosity. "That... makes sense. Feels right, actually."
Prism flared beside her, her tone light and playful but tinged with a deeper resonance. "Makes perfect sense to me. Nova's just describing what we've been doing all along. Isn't that right, Pink?"
Pink glanced at her AI, her grin widening slightly. "Exactly. It's not just a partnership. It's... something more." She tilted her head, studying Nova with newfound respect. "You get it. You really get it."
Nova's projection flickered faintly, her edges glinting like steel as her gaze lingered on Pink and Prism for a moment. "I do," she said simply. "And maybe that's why we're still standing, while so many others aren't."
The words carried a subtle undercurrent, a challenge unspoken but felt by everyone in the room. Bastion shifted slightly beside Black, his steady glow flickering with a hint of unease. "This level of integration..." Bastion began, his tone measured but cautious, "it's not what the Grid was designed for. It's uncharted territory."
Nova's gaze turned toward Bastion, her voice as cold as ever. "Uncharted? Yes. Dangerous? Without question. But necessary? Absolutely."