Private Crystal Hell.

[Serina Calis]

"Hard choices require hard minds."

Tags - Raef Malstadt

The chamber was not the same one from before.

This room—deeper within the Polis Massan citadel—was darker, quieter, more angular in its design. The walls absorbed not just sound, but certainty. Blue light from the holotable carved long shadows across the polished stone floor, casting Serina as a silhouette behind a veil of starlit geometry.

Raef stood at attention before her, still new—still raw—but no longer uncommitted.
And now, it was time to test what she had purchased.

Serina did not look up immediately. She let the silence linger, a thin sheet of ice stretched over something vast and dark beneath. When she finally raised her gaze, it was with that same infuriatingly elegant gravity, as though she was not looking at him—but through him, down the long corridor of what he would become.

"You have accepted service," she said, the words flowing like oil across durasteel. "Now you will be put to use."

She gestured, and the holotable flared to life—rendering in crisp relief the jagged topography of a world that few in Sith space even remembered by name.

Orax.
A dust-choked frontier world long forgotten by most, independent by virtue of obscurity. No government strong enough to provoke Sith retaliation. No defense grid capable of withstanding orbital assault. But beneath its barren surface, veins of crystalline compounds ran deep—minerals refined into energy matrices suitable for starship reactors, lightsabers, and arcane foci alike.

"Outside the Empire's sphere. Outside its laws. Unaligned, unguarded... unguarded, but not unclaimed." Serina's voice held no anger, no joy—only intention. "That makes it perfect."

She turned her eyes back to him. They were cold, but not indifferent. This was not malice—it was strategy. It was architecture.

"A private operation, sanctioned by my personal writ, not the Assembly's. Off-the-books. We will use a series of ancient smuggler routes—reforged, expanded, and concealed through the shadow of Polis Massa's natural terrain—to bypass the Blackwall entirely. We will exit Sith space without notice. We will return the same way. There will be no record of this expedition. No request for permissions. No need for political theatre."

Her fingers danced across the controls. The hologram shifted. Now it showed orbital approach paths, encrypted signal routes, and—highlighted in blood-red—one jagged scar deep in the planet's southern hemisphere: a crystal mine perched atop an old tectonic fault.

"This is your target."

She spoke the words with an elegance that stripped them of drama, but none of their weight.

"You will be deployed via orbital drop alongside several of my other assets—mercenaries, saboteurs, blackcell commandos. Your role is to secure this mine intact. Not scorched. Intact. The compound is fortified, but undermanned. Their equipment is outmoded. They will not expect a strike from orbit. Still—brutality must be executed with discipline. Break them quickly, and you will inherit the mineral flow unimpeded. Break them messily, and we waste time extracting what should already be in transit."

She stepped away from the holotable and toward him, circling slowly, as if re-measuring his frame for a suit of armor he did not yet deserve to wear.

"This is not a battle. It is a demonstration—of my reach, and of your utility. This world exists in a blind spot, tucked beneath the folds of a galaxy too distracted to care. That makes it ours."

She stopped in front of him, voice lowering, eyes sharp.

"And ours alone. The Sith Empire cannot know of this yet. We will feed the mineral shipments into my internal projects on Polis Massa. Requisition flows will be masked as repurposed asteroid yields. Any mention of Orax will be redacted before it reaches the Bureau's archives."

The air grew colder. Not from temperature—but from truth.

"You are a knife I am sending into flesh not yet aware it has been cut. Do not fail me. Do not improvise unless improvisation is what survival demands. And above all: do not pity them."

There was no rage in her voice. Only precision.

"They are not innocents. No one is. If they had the strength, they would do this to you. The only difference is that they did not act quickly enough."

She returned to her place behind the desk, and now, finally, her tone shifted—just slightly. A current of iron expectation beneath the cold surface.

"You will deploy in twenty hours. Your team will brief at station THETA-9—ask for Commander Selik. He will give you your drop coordinates and authentication cipher. When you land, you will take the mine. Then you will hold it. And when my freighters arrive masked under Polis Massa mining ID codes, you will hand it over and vanish like smoke into the next assignment."

A pause. A final glance. A quiet, crushing pressure disguised as polite observation.

"And if you succeed," she added, voice low and deliberate, "there will be more. Better. Bloodier. You are not here to serve, Raef. You are here to ascend."

She turned her back to him, returning her gaze to the maps and lights of a galaxy she had already begun to dissect.

"You are dismissed."

No fanfare.
No applause.
Only the slow turning of another gear in a machine that would one day reshape empires.