====== NOVA BASTION: SEEDS OF REVIVAL ======

The capture of **Nova Bastion** was only the beginning. For a month, the team—battered by radiation, mycofiends, and the eerie silence of **Herd**—took their first real breath. Wounds healed, skills sharpened, and whispers of their discoveries spread through the **Thuadal Caliphate’s** ranks. Between training sessions in starship protocols and mech piloting, they tinkered with their spoils of war:

  - **Void Thrusters:** A daring module that let mechs plummet from orbit unscathed.
  - **Empathetic Receptors:** Strange devices that hummed with the promise of deeper camaraderie—almost like reading a comrade’s thoughts before they spoke.

The generators, once dead, now thrummed with stolen life, powering medical bays and carving crude airlocks into the facility’s scarred hull. For the first time, soldiers could walk the corridors without suits, though the thin, recycled air still tasted of metal and old secrets.

Reinforcements arrived: a few hundred souls, turning the derelict outpost into a fragile foothold. Among them were the **//Al-Munawwirūn//**, the Illuminators, their robes embroidered with geometric sigils that glowed faintly in the dim light. They knelt on Herd’s cracked surface, pressing their hands into the dust, and *something answered*. The planet’s frozen breath warmed, just slightly. The atmosphere, once a vacuum, now clung like a ghost, enough to dull the bite of the cold, but not enough to survive without a suit.

//"A start,"// their leader murmured, though her eyes betrayed doubt. Rebuilding a world wasn’t alchemy; it was patience. And time was a luxury Herd had already squandered.

Below, in the guts of Nova Bastion, Thuadal scientists picked apart the **Gypsy Danger’s** corpse, their fingers tracing the seams of its **Coalescence Core**. Sy lent her witchwarper’s insight, but the machine’s mind stayed stubbornly silent, its dual-pilot synch system as inert as the planet’s dead core.

//"It’s not just broken,"// one researcher confessed over static. //"It’s waiting."//

Meanwhile, above the storm-wracked skies, the skeleton of an orbital station took shape—another promise, another gamble.

The party watched it all from the helipad, where the wind no longer howled quite so viciously. Progress, yes. But Herd had been dying for centuries. And some wounds didn’t heal clean.