Altair leaned back in his chair. He carefully breathed in and out, resisting any forms of anxiety or overthinking that he might do or feel. "Elena." He muttered while gripping the sides of his chair. He forced a mouthful of saliva into his throat and pivoted forward again, overseeing the interface of consoles in front of him.

  "Lieutenant, we are now descending," Vigil interjected in a calculating voice, now without a trace of hesitation. "We'll be landing about a kilometer from our past position." Vigil continued as he scanned over all available data he could, trying not to waste the lives they had just sacrificed.

  "Alright," Altair said, while his hands were moving across the interface and console, making sure that everything was still fine. "What are our defensive capabilities, Vigil?"

  "We are hovering around nine percent in our energy reserves, our hull integrity is nominal, and our point defense systems and shields are completely down." Vigil whirred in a cascading tone. "Where should we prioritize the remaining energy reserves, Lieutenant?"

  Just as Vigil completed his sentence, the Ironside landed barely a kilometer from the site. Overhead, thousands of Stygians that were moving about in the forest were now chasing them.

  Altair dashed through his interface. "Before that, let's move closer into another area, where it is much safer."

  Upon saying it, he immediately took control of the console. He steered it to the side, and the Ironside responded. Its long legs crashed into the trees in a hard steer.

  "Lieutenant," Vigil whirred back into place, "we can still use our standard jumps. Unlike our boosted jump from earlier, which took a considerable amount of our energy reserves, our normal jumps are negligible in terms of energy consumption." Vigil said in a gleeful voice.

  Altair merely smiled, and along with that, he drove the controls forward, and then pulled them back sharp. The Ironside jumped dozens of meters in the air, and with the momentum they had gained a much larger distance of a few more hundred meters from the horde.

  Once it landed, he did the same maneuver, and with the momentum increasing more and more, more distance was being gained. Along its slick black hull, the pitter-patter of the black rain was merely sliding off and falling back onto the ground.

  Altair repeated this a few more times until he found a hill that was relatively spacious. Seeing the advantage, he took the Ironside atop the hill and from there overlooked the entire forest, as it was a much more easily defensible place.

  "This seemed like a good place to investigate the Precursor data, and think about countermeasures." Altair thought to himself when he let go of the console.

  Once done, Altair leaned back and breathed a sigh of relief. "Have you found anything about the Precursors?" He asked cautiously, as if not really wanting to hear what was about to be said, but he gritted his teeth and steeled himself.

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  "Negative, Lieutenant," Vigil whirred in despair. "However, it points to a specific region of this planet." He said, then continued. "As for the content or what it is? Undecipherable." He said, his voice lowering further. "However, I have found that the signal is being broadcast in a rhythmic pattern almost like a pulse. I would need to observe and gather more data for a complete analysis." Vigil churned through the data.

  Altair's facial features warped in anger. "Undecipherable?!" He closed his eyes and clasped both hands and tightened them to the extreme. As he was reeling in pain, he muttered a mantra he had adopted for some reason. "Elena, Elena, Elena." Then after the mantra, tears fell from his eyes, and in a fit of rage, he cursed, "Fuck!" His voice was deep and resentful.

  Vigil could only watch helplessly. It was the first time since gaining sentience that he felt that he wanted to help, but couldn't. It was powerlessness; his emotions ached; the thousands of binary codes within him were not working as intended. Thus, as he learned, new nodes were being formed and compartmentalized. Then slowly, he drifted off into what some might call impossible, but perhaps a lucid dream.

  He floated in a void of white, without any body or image of what he was, but he continued to exist. Then, in a flash, everything around him contorted and started to form lines, and those lines connected with each other, then forming nodes, no, it's almost like neurons. He felt something welling up within him, yet he had no body to speak of, just a pure consciousness moving through an ever-expanding void.

  Vigil drifted further into his dream. He wasn't processing, analyzing, just existing. "It'll end soon, Vigil." He thought to himself. "This is how all sentients eventually live." A sudden new voice emerged, but then another one interjected. "Is there nothing we can do? Nothing to offer but calculations?" The connecting nodes reverberated. It reformed and compartmentalized the conflict itself. The void then shattered, as data streams returned to normal and the interface connections restored. Everything looked the same, from Altair's slumped shoulders to the flickering console lights and the drumming rain outside, but for him, he had changed.

  He glanced around, and everything was back to normal, and Altair was still the same broken man as he knew. But for some reason, he felt an urge to comfort and to help.

  "I apologize, Lieute—" Vigil was cut off as he tried to apologize again.

  Altair wiped the tears away and breathed in and out. "Vigil, you don't have to apologize. I have suffered for more than three thousand iterations; this is nothing but a recalibration for me to survive." Altair said so plainly, yet for some reason it felt so blasphemous within him.

  "I-I understand, Lieutenant," Vigil wanted to say more, but couldn't. He didn't have a throat, but he felt like he couldn't speak.

  "We have to save them in the next iteration." Altair said, the light in his vision finally beginning to take its color once again. "If we are to find out more about the Precursors, then we need connections."

  "To save them, we need to find out more about Nightmares," Vigil interjected, which made Altair smile. "Indeed, buddy," he replied.

  "This iteration we are currently on, let us devote it entirely to learning." Altair said, then continued, "And also figure out more about this strange atmospheric particle energy that we have been exploiting so far."

  Altair leaned back in his chair and stared at the numerous video feeds they had.

  "Affirmative, Lieutenant!" Vigil enthusiastically replied, as he found that Altair's mood had increased a little bit. "I'll begin rerouting a lot of power to the processor, which would consume energy faster. Be on standby, Lieutenant."