Stabbing out a hand (it moved but stayed hidden within the balloon), she formed a cable and launched it toward a shelf of half-melted beams several meters above her head. The cable struck and stuck, and she hauled on it with all her strength, slinging herself up and out of the pit blasted into the side of the Hierophant. At the lip of the crater, she released the first line, threw out a second one, caught the hull, and pulled, converting upward momentum into forward momentum. As she soared over the anchor point for the line, she sent forth another one ahead of her, and then another and another, dragging herself across the hull until she was hidden from the Jelly.

The monster followed. The last she saw of it, Ctein was leaping after her, its limbs rippling with hypnotic grace.

Kira grimaced and tried to pull harder on the latest cable. But she was already at the limits of what her body and the xeno were capable of.

As she flew around the side of the Hierophant, like a tetherball around a pole, Kira had a thought. An idea.

She didn’t stop to consider practicality or likelihood of success; she merely acted and hoped—blindly hoped—that what she was doing would work.

Sending out several more cables, she yanked herself to a stop beside a jagged rent a piece of shrapnel had torn through the hull. She collapsed the balloon around her and converted the material into tentacles of her own. With them, she grabbed sections of upturned hull and sliced them free.

Each chunk was slightly over a meter thick, most of that thickness being thin layers of composite sandwiched with what looked like a metallic foam. Exactly as she’d hoped. As with human ships, the outer hull of the Hierophant had a Whipple shield to protect it against impacts from space debris. If the armor could stop micrometeoroids, then enough layers ought to be able to stop the projectile from a kinetic weapon like the railgun.

As Kira arranged the pieces in front of her, a dark stream of material flowed out from within the tangled ruins of the crevice, crawling toward her with a mind of its own. Alarmed, she recoiled, ready to fight off this new enemy.

Then she recognized the familiar feel of the Soft Blade, the lost parts of the xeno come to rejoin her.

With a sensation like cool water on her skin, the orphaned fibers melted into the main part of the xeno, adding much-needed mass to the organism.

Distracted, Kira only managed to stack four pieces of the hull before the writhing behemoth that was Ctein crested the side of the Hierophant and fired its gun at her.

BOOM!

Her makeshift shield stopped the incoming projectile within the first three layers of the hull. Not so much as a single speck of dust got through to the skin of her suit. And while the impact was substantial, the Soft Blade braced and buffered her well enough to keep it bearable.