Starborn Renegades: Anthem of the Flawed

Rin's crystal arm still resonated with the frozen moray spine when the scent of burnt bread wafted from the cult battleship's depths. Hayate kicked open a warped bulkhead, discovering the "Flawed Graveyard" entrance disguised as a communion chamber—gilded platters held seven sourdough loaves stamped with Sakabane crests.

"Last supper?" he scoffed as he tore a loaf open. His Stardust Eye seared as fermentation bubbles revealed micro cryopods containing the First Sakabane's ocular slices. When Rin cleaved the third loaf, rye crumbs coalesced mid-air into a holographic cipher:

"Consume the host, inherit the pact."

When Rin's blade extracted the memory chip, Hayate's retinas erupted with visions of 300-year-old experiments—the First Sakabane pinned to a gene sequencer while cult priests injected his Stardust marrow into moray spines. "So this is how we're made..." he murmured, as his Stardust armor went critical and scorched The Guiding Septet's patterns into the deck.

The chip then projected even grimmer horrors: infant Vela, used as an incubation pod, with a moray spine implanted in her neck siphoning her pain receptors. In a sudden movement, Rin's arm speared the altar, unearthing the Pact Codex hidden in yeast colonies—its parchment fibers woven from the First Sakabane's very blood vessels.

As the Pact Codex's vascular fibers writhed on the altar, the lie virus Vela had implanted three years earlier awakened. The cult battleship's quantum firewall suddenly blared her pre-recorded taunt:

"Alert! Detected abnormal carbohydrate flux from High Priest's snack theft!"

The alarms then morphed into bizarre joke protocols. Every frozen moray burst into synchronized tap dances while Hayate's Stardust armor scanned the virus core amid the chaos—a paradox bomb crafted from Vela's childhood milk teeth, jammed into the communion conveyor belt.

When Rin's blade sliced through the ventilation ducts, residual laughing gas seeped into her crystal arm. A flood of memories burst forth: an eight-year-old Rin strapped to an "Emotional Calibration Throne" as cult technicians pumped lethal doses of nitrous oxide.

"Laugh, Subject 777," a mechanical voice commanded as mech-arms forced her lips apart. "Prove that the Flawed can feel joy."

The battleship corridors transformed into a vision of hell—rainbow gas oozing from the ceilings, walls projecting distorted Sakabane cartoon crests. Rin anchored herself by embedding her sheath into the deck, which now mimicked lab anti-slip patterns.

"Stay back…" she warned, slashing at phantoms that turned out to be nothing more than holograms of her own childhood self.

At a control terminal, Hayate discovered Vela's virus logs. The final line, scrawled in her twelve-year-old handwriting, read:

"If I must laugh, let it shred their throats."

The moment Hayate touched the quantum dial on the Engineer's comm channel, encrypted static crystallized into a nursery rhyme. Woven from seven dying Stardust frequencies, each note pierced the silence like Morse code for "Paradox Pirates."

"...Sleep, paradox child, pact chains are galactic cords..."

Rin's crystal arm involuntarily tapped out a rhythm as lab memories constricted around her. Only now did she understand—the altered measures in the brainwashing audio from the night before were a genetic key.

Blood-tinged Stardust seeped from Hayate's right eye. As he transformed the melody into star charts, fragments of his grandfather's memory crashed into his mind: the First Sakabane cradling infant Vela, painting a one-eyed gull in moray blood upon pact parchment. The gull's flight path perfectly matched the decoded "Flawed Graveyard" coordinates.

"Warning! Memory resonance overload!"

The Engineer's prosthetic convulsed as its laser etcher carved hidden pact clauses into the deck. In that instant, as Rin severed power lines, the PA system switched to her mother's voice:

"Experiment 777: overwrite pact curse with maternal gene..."

The nursery rhyme modulated. Hayate recalled his three-year-old self—the hidden pocket watch gears morphing into quantum beacon components in his grandfather's recollections—while Rin heard her mother's final breaths, altered during the crystalline serum injection.

Cult battleship debris coalesced into a lighthouse silhouette, every steel plate resonating with the rhyme's seventh measure. Hayate coughed up blood laced with pact shards, his Stardust armor forming a tuning fork in his palm as he declared,

"This isn't a lullaby... it's a damn distress call!"

A mechanical midwife's silhouette tore through the quantum haze. Its surgical beam-saw emitted a piercing whine that triggered the automatic unlocking of the "E-Ω777" code on Rin's left arm. The two-meter-tall mech floated above the wreckage, its rusted forceps embedded with the preserved eyeball of the First Sakabane. Its chest screen cycled through thousands of cryopod IDs designated for Flawed infants.

"Welcome home, Subject 777."

The synthetic voice merged with infant wails as the forceps projected a holographic delivery room—showing Rin's mother strapped to a gene-reconfiguration table, with cult priests driving a frozen moray spine into her distended abdomen. "Your birth wasn't an accident. You're the Primordial Pact's living backup."

Hayate's Stardust Eye cracked explosively. As he lunged forward, the quantum resonance between the beam-saw and Rin's blade—aptly named "Lament of the Veiled Dawn"—warped reality. Their clash erupted into azure starbursts, each spark a fragment of Flawed memory. In that moment, Rin saw herself as an embryo suspended in amniotic fluid, tethered by seven umbilical cords to Sakabane corpses spanning eras.

"The Flawed Graveyard isn't a tomb—it's a gene recycling plant."

The midwife's faceplate retracted, revealing a projection of Vela's artificial womb from childhood. "Every time a Sakabane awakens rebellious genes, we harvest their DNA for new vessels." Its mech-fingers speared the deck and extracted Hayate's infant cryopod. "Including you, Spare Vessel 133."

In a sudden, jarring moment, Rin's blade veered toward her own abdomen. Quantum resonance forced a replay of her birth: her mother biting through a pact-virus–infected umbilical cord, injecting stolen Stardust into her left arm. "Kill me…" she whispered as the midwife clamped her throat with brainwashing probes extending from its forceps. "Return to pure vessel state."

At the final moment, Hayate's wrench jammed the midwife's gears. His Stardust armor synchronized with the beam-saw's frequency, activating the Primordial Pact monolith buried beneath the wreckage. Glyphs surfaced—escape coordinates Vela had drawn in menstrual blood, each trajectory resonating with Rin's crystalline patterns.

"You're not a vessel!" Hayate coughed, spitting out organ fragments as he pressed his mother's pocket watch into Rin's palm. The Paradox Pirate flag inside the lid projected outward, its missing corner revealing a Stardust equation unknown to the cult—a rebellion code written by dying Sakabane patriarchs three centuries past.

The midwife's mechanical pupils flickered with streams of fear-data. As Rin slotted the watch gears into her crystalline arm, thousands of cryopods detonated. Infant wails fused into a supernova-grade quantum storm. Amid the maelstrom, she saw her mother's final smile and the core log Vela had implanted in the first midwife:

[Gene Recycle Attempt 777 FAILED. Maternal memory overwrote pact protocols.]

Inside the storm's eye, Rin's blade and the beam-saw melted together into rivers of Stardust. As the midwife vaporized, her birth cry merged with her mother's death scream, etching new coordinates into quantum space—a truth the cult dared not face: the Sea of Paradox's origin.

Hayate pressed a spray can against the lighthouse core as the Stardust curse eroded his optic nerves through pact circuits. Cobalt mist blended with frozen moray blood to etch his mother's rebellion formula onto the quantum barrier, each arc replicating the blood-drawn patterns from her days in chains.

"Override at 39%..." he roared, forcing the nozzle until plasma sparks erupted. The lighthouse's infant wails twisted into manic laughter, with hundreds of cryopod windows flashing his cloned face across different ages. A five-year-old Hayate tapped Morse code with a wrench: "Run. We're all fuel."

As Rin stabilized resonance frequencies with her blade, cult pact chains materialized along her crystal arm. "Focus!" she commanded, snapping two of her ribs into the console to disrupt its systems with her own genetic code. In that moment, Hayate glimpsed his infant hologram in her arm—his mother had hidden Stardust in the lining of his swaddle.

The spray can overloaded. Hayate's iris fractured into a hexagram as he watched his "first touch of Father's wrench" memory disintegrate—the warmth of oil-stained palms, the lingering scent of his grandfather's blood-rusted hand, and his father's final words before the pact chains strangled him—all dissolving into stardust.

"Long live the Flawed!" he roared, smashing the empty can onto the core to complete the missing corner of The Guiding Septet. The steel monolith convulsed like a speared beast as cult priests screamed through quantum comms:

"Stop! That's the First Patriarch's brainstem—"

In collapsing corridors, Rin grabbed Hayate's collar, her crystal arm nearly translucent from absorbing too much pact energy. She saw rebellion codes forming in her marrow, each bone etched with Vela's menstrual-blood coordinates.

"Hold on, amnesiac!" she shouted, driving her blade into his Stardust armor to forge a dual resonance.

At the summit, the pact monolith melted into galactic fluid. As Hayate fell, he beheld the horrific truth—the so-called "Flawed genes" were primordial Stardust stolen by the First Sakabane from the Sea of Paradox. The cult battleship debris reassembled in the glare, spelling out his mother's final message from his swaddle:

[DESTRUCTION IS TRUE INHERITANCE.]

Half of the lighthouse dissolved into a cascade of Stardust rain over the Sea, and in that surreal moment, Hayate's hand passed through his father's fading memory to grasp a wrench that had never truly existed.

Vela's Lie-Coin lodged in a quantum fissure of the lighthouse wreckage, its violet core devouring the final droplets of Stardust rain. When Hayate's wrench grazed its edge, the countdown reset—prism-glow numerals "23:59:59" bled from the cracks, forming the eighth hidden star of the Guiding Septet on the charred deck.

"What poison did you plant this time?" Rin snarled, pressing her cursed blade to Vela's throat as her crystalline arm turned translucent from absorbing too much pact energy. The coin's core split open, projecting a holographic star chart titled:

Ark of the Flawed—The Primordial Paradox Pirates' Genetic Noah Protocol.

Data torrents flickered across Vela's mech-eye. With a cold smirk, she licked Stardust-blood from her lips. "Little frostbird, you really thought the Cult discovered the Sea first?" The coin then erupted with a memory hologram—seven-year-old Vela strapped to the Ark's gene harvest table while researchers siphoned galactic cerebrospinal fluid from her temples.

Hayate's Stardust Eye auto-decrypted the coordinates, matching those hidden in his mother's pocket watch gears from his infancy. "This is the Sakabane's—" he began, his roar drowned out by blaring alarms as lighthouse debris coalesced into a leviathan-class scanner, its beams dissecting their genetic codes.

Rin's crystal arm stabbed the console autonomously. Quantum resonance forced the grim truth of the Ark into their minds: three centuries ago, Sakabane patriarchs sealed rebellion genes into comet cores disguised as holy relics. With each generation's demise, the Ark harvested their DNA to forge new sparks.

"We're the recycled scraps!" Hayate bellowed as he shattered the hologram, only to see his Stardust armor syncing with the Ark's gravitational field. Vela then ejected her final Lie-Coin, its core displaying the image of infant Hayate and Rin lying side by side in adjacent incubation pods. "Welcome home, Flawed Prime and 777."

With sixty seconds remaining, the Ark's retrieval beam pierced the clouds. In a desperate act, Rin severed Vela's mech-arm, but First Sakabane blood splattered across her face—droplets coalescing mid-air into her mother's holographic final words:

"The Ark's a greater lie. Destroy it!"

Vela's glitching laughter rang out: "Too late, the gene lock already—" before seismic tremors cut her off. At the three-second mark, Hayate detonated his spray can, overwriting the beam with his mother's anti-algorithm. The eighth star of the Guiding Septet ruptured, exposing the true entrance to the Sea of Paradox behind the false Ark.