It was pitch-black.

  No—more like the afterimage of it. That drifting, fluffy swirl of black snow was still stuck to the back of my brain, like I’d pressed my face into an ashtray in a nightmare and woke up with the smell on my eyelids.

  I must’ve passed out, because I only remembered the sensation—powdery black flakes clinging to the inside of my skull.

  What is this? The lingering hangover of a bad dream?

  “Ah… wha…?”

  My throat rasped like I’d been chewing gravel. I pushed myself up slowly—

  …and froze.

  Black. Black. Black.

  The trees were like twisted, burnt wire, their trunks warped into ugly spirals. Charred-looking spore pods lay scattered around like dropped marbles. Above, black snow drifted lazily, and deeper in the haze I saw a wavering smear of green gas.

  “This… isn’t that forest… is it…?”

  I remembered the sequence too clearly: my gaudy stepmother hacking my work suit to lock the temperature down, trying to turn me into a nice decorative ice statue—

  and then everything cut out. Dead, or almost dead. That was supposed to be the end of it.

  Except… I was alive.

  My body didn’t hurt much. The suit was running normally. Honestly, being this intact was more terrifying than being injured.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Who dragged me here!? And why am I still breathing!? I was on the ‘freeze solid’ plan, wasn’t I!?”

  I smacked the chest panel hard enough to make my palm sting.

  A message popped up with the calm, clinical energy of a machine that had never once panicked in its entire existence.

  [STATUS] Second-degree frostbite across the skin.

  [TREATMENT] Nanomachines and painkillers suppressing inflammation and pain.

  “…Excuse me? That’s not normal. Emotionally, I need you to immediately collapse into chaos with me!”

  The suit, naturally, didn’t care about my emotional needs. But… yeah. When I paid attention, my skin did feel tight and half-numb, like it belonged to someone else.

  Still, with the suit’s assist, I could move. I scanned the area again.

  The ruin’s entrance yawned open just a few meters away.

  I’d collapsed out on the open plain, not here. And yet I was right by the forest edge—right by the ruins.

  “Did I… walk?” I muttered. “No. I didn’t. I don’t remember walking. So that means…”

  Someone carried me. Something dragged me. Or the ruin itself had… rescued me?

  If this ruin had a rescue function, people would’ve been screaming about it in every academic journal for decades. And I’d never heard a single rumor.

  “Ugh. It smells like something burned…”

  My suit had an olfactory synthesizer: it analyzed airborne chemicals and reconstructed the “smell” as a simulation. Out in the forest, that simulation was feeding me a scorched, bitter stench.

  And once I noticed it, I saw it—scattered signs of burning.

  What, from the fight earlier? But there was no way stray lasers reached all the way out here.

  “God, I don’t get it. But… if I’m alive, I guess I shouldn’t complain, or the universe will slap me for being ungrateful…”

  Spitting out that little prayer to no one, I slipped back into the ruin.

  Staying outside felt like begging to get found. And if she found me again, I wasn’t going to get a second miracle.

  “Ugh… this is the bad kind of quiet.”

  Inside, the corridor was still softly lit. The self-repairing metal rippled as if the walls were breathing, re-aligning their surface layer in slow waves.

  So it wasn’t a hallucination. I’d really crawled back from the brink.

  “Also… why am I the one running?” I snapped at the empty hallway. “This is my planet. Not that gaudy witch’s backyard!”

  But yeah. That was the reality.

  This was supposed to be my home—the governor’s daughter’s territory.

  Instead, I was fleeing because my life was in danger. Pathetic.

  And yes, it was all my stepmother’s fault.

  On paper she called herself “acting governor,” all polished smiles and righteous speeches. But from what I’d learned, her real face was—

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  a senior figure in a gang called the Witches’ Family.

  I’d heard that name before.

  They were one of the major crime syndicates in human space. Weapons trafficking, illegal gene editing, designer drugs, planetary-development scams… if it was vile and profitable, they’d done it.

  I’d once overheard Dad talking to security officials—something about the Family expanding even into frontier worlds like ours.

  I didn’t know how high up she was inside the syndicate, but she sure as hell had the résumé to ruin my life.

  Given how smooth everything had been, the story basically wrote itself: sell our mineral rights through black channels, grease politicians, squeeze corporations, swallow the security forces whole… and finally orchestrate a mysterious “accident” to put my father—the rightful governor—into a coma.

  And then she came for the next problem.

  Me.

  “A gang boss going after a helpless teenage girl,” I muttered. “Where’d you leave your ethics? At the edge of the galaxy? In a black hole? Did they get sucked in on the way here?”

  As I kept grumbling, my eyes caught something on the wall: a faint scorch mark.

  A neat, circular burn. Like a laser impact.

  “What’s this? Something happened while I was out?”

  The ruin was alive. There were scorch marks. And I was waking up in the wrong place with no memory of getting there.

  This wasn’t a situation where I was the only thing moving.

  “Haaah… If you’re going to try to kill me, could you at least pick a method with a little more dramatic flair…? I mean, okay, the method itself is peak melodrama, but still!”

  Right. Focus. The real problem was my stepmother—an evil-queen cliché who’d decided to upgrade into a Witches’ Family boss.

  She’d tried to murder me. Her people were still out there.

  And I still had no idea why I hadn’t frozen all the way through.

  But if I was alive, I couldn’t keep running forever.

  “…I need to retrieve the Dwarfs. They should still be around here.”

  Those little combat drones—if I had their firepower, I could actually hit back.

  “Heyyy, Dwarf-chan—no, seriously. Dwarfs, you alive!? Come on!”

  I shouted as I headed down the corridor toward the storage bay.

  No response.

  Sure, the Dwarfs didn’t “talk,” but they made startup noises. A ping. A whir. Anything.

  But it was quiet.

  Quieter than before. The air felt… sticky. Like it didn’t want sound to travel.

  “Yeah. I hate this. I hate this feeling.”

  I stepped into the deepest hangar—

  and my bad feeling turned into a direct hit.

  All seven Dwarfs were gone.

  The wall was carved with countless fine scratches. Soot-like black powder dusted the floor. And leading deeper into the facility was a long groove, like something heavy had been dragged away.

  My suit ran a quick scan and spat out a result I didn’t like: faint residual RF chatter, the kind my Dwarfs used when they synced. Whatever had taken them hadn’t just dragged metal—it had yanked their signal down the corridor, too.

  “…Huh?” My voice came out sharp. “Hold on. Who the hell drags seven Dwarfs!? What kind of monster strength is that!? Hey! Whoever you are—give me my Dwarfs back!”

  My anger detonated so fast it surprised me. I’d never felt my thoughts spin this hard on pure rage.

  And then—

  the ceiling shuddered.

  The ruin groaned. The upper layers trembled like something massive was pressing down from above.

  A concussive boom hit from outside.

  Blue flame flashed, bleeding through the entrance as thin, cold light.

  “Wh—what is happening!?”

  I sprinted for the exit.

  Smoke was rising in the forest.

  On a world this cold and oxygen-poor, you didn’t get wildfires. That smoke had to be from a missile blast or something similar.

  Then a sound rolled out of the trees.

  A roar rolled out of the trees—metal-deep and animal-wrong, the kind of sound you felt in your ribs more than you heard.

  “Don’t tell me… is that alive? Is it a machine? Which is it!?”

  Goosebumps crawled over my skin.

  My suit’s monitor snapped bright and shoved a warning into the center of my vision.

  [WARNING] Wide-area energy discharge detected.

  “WHAT!? Oh come on—my life is way too eventful today!”

  But complaining didn’t freeze the world.

  Something was moving in the forest. There was a huge scorched patch on the plain between the ruins and the trees. There were drag marks where something had hauled away my Dwarfs.

  Fear and anger rose together, hot enough to drown out the cold.

  “…No. I can’t sit here. I can’t understand anything like this.”

  I checked my suit’s locks, took one more breath, and stepped out.

  My stepmother’s gang. An unknown mechanical weapon. A monster hidden in the black forest. The people who tried to freeze me to death—

  I didn’t know what I was dealing with. But I had to find out.

  Black snow poured down as I ran.

  I pushed the pressure suit’s leg assist to full and sprinted through the rough ice-rock.

  Black snow smeared my vision. The ground was jagged and uneven. If I slipped, I’d crack my tailbone so hard I’d be walking crooked for the rest of my life—assuming I lived.

  Panting, I finally burst out into a slightly clearer stretch and stopped dead.

  There, carved into the plain, was a set of massive tire tracks.

  Not a snow-loader’s. Not even close.

  The width was absurd. The depth was worse—like something had rolled through while dragging an entire building behind it.

  “What is this…? Do the Witches’ Family have a monster truck the size of a small apartment block now? Nobody told me!”

  Sure, big syndicates had heavy firepower. But this was beyond “gang equipment” and into “military nightmare.”

  At this size, it's possible to build a fairly large armored land platform, like the ones the Frontier Patrol Forces have. Of course, it’s 100% illegal for private ownership.

  A small warning chirped from my sensors.

  I took a breath—

  Something in the forest gouged the ground as it pushed forward, screeching against ice and stone.

  THUD… THUD…

  The vibrations got closer.

  No. Not a truck. Not a tank. The sound was too heavy. Too deep.

  My eyes flicked upward, instinctively searching the sky.

  Through the falling black snow, a huge shadow shifted.

  My HUD overlaid a blunt estimate.

  [ALERT] Large object approaching.

  Estimated mass: 50+ tons.

  “Fifty tons!? What are you people bringing out here, Witches’ Family!? That’s not syndicate muscle—that’s military hardware!”

  Breath caught in my throat as the trees bent and snapped.

  A shape forced its way out of the black forest.

  Not all of it—just enough.

  First came a limb like a crane boom, jointed wrong, plated in matte armor scarred by old impacts. It sank into the plain with a wet crunch, and the ground answered with a tremor. Then another. Between the trunks, something huge scraped forward, dragging a groove that matched the one inside the ruins.

  A slit of blue light opened—an optic? a vent?—and swept once across the snow, slow and searching.

  THUD. THUD. The ground shook. Black snow pattered down from the branches above like rain of ash.

  “Seriously…” I whispered, sliding behind a boulder. “What did you drag out here…?”

  Behind the curtain of snow, something metallic clinked against rock.

  For half a heartbeat, I saw it—a rounded shell tumbling along the ground, a stubby manipulator arm flailing uselessly.

  One of my Dwarfs.

  It scraped past a tree root and vanished into the thing’s shadow, swallowed like a toy under a tank tread. My HUD tried to lock on, but the signal stuttered—static, then nothing.

  Yeah. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just passing through.

  My fingers tightened around the suit’s emergency cutter handle—pathetic comfort, but it was better than nothing right now.

  I held my breath and watched.