The world was trying to kill her again.

  This time, it had chosen a particularly scenic method: a dome the size of a city district, a civil war between planetary powers, and enough stray energy discharge to vaporize a neighborhood. Kelly crouched behind the fractured stump of a building’s support column. Chunks of polycrete the size of her head ripped through the air where she’d been standing half a second before. The suppressing fire wasn’t aimed at her—she was still invisible in her stealth suit—but the battlefield, and the people after her, had decided her general vicinity was an acceptable loss.

  Kelly peeked through a bullet hole in her cover’s weak point, and she saw exactly who was leading the assault. Through the debris fog, and the day got a lot more personal.

  Vector.

  He was fat. Not standard-issue fat, but impressively, monumentally obese in an era where you could dial your bodyfat percentage down for a monthly subscription. It implied a commitment to gluttony that was almost artistic. The man had dinner plate hands. He wore a cold, placid smile that didn’t reach his cold, calculating eyes. One eye was normal, human. The other was excessively large, swollen with expensive tech, and glowed a persistent, unhealthy green. The components inside were visibly overclocked, humming with a strained energy she could feel in her teeth.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Kelly muttered inside her helmet.

  The last and only time she’d seen him, she’d been hiding behind a flattened wall. He and his squad of black ops psychopaths had been recklessly attacking her adoptive ‘father’, Caliph. They’d gotten every innocent they were supposedly sent to extract killed in the process without a single care. The only reason she’d survived that day was because Caliph, the mad criminal, had been so violently uncooperative that he’d forced their full retreat.

  Vector hadn’t looked overclocked then. Now, the man was a monolith of hivemind control and barely contained madness. The fact that he still had his job and had regular soldiers following his orders implied he was, and had gotten very, very good at killing. Too good for his superiors to let go, even as the tech ate his mind.

  The Fatman, Vector, was on the move. His battle mechsuit—a hulking, multi-limbed frame—shifted and reconfigured. Portions of its armored carapace hissing, sliding and reshaping, forming eight long, sleek twisting barrels that tracked the chaotic movements in the combat zone, zeroing in on her last position. He turned himself into a horrific, gun-toting octopus.

  While his soldiers scurried to drag wounded comrades toward the dome’s fractured edges, and while Venus occupied Freya and Cain traded blows with the angel in the sky, the second-in-command wasn’t managing the retreat. Vector performed a heavy, piston-driven mech traversal, crushing rubble underfoot, going straight for the patch of empty air where Kelly was.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” she said again, the humor entirely absent. He couldn’t see her, but the suit’s sensors were clearly a grade above standard issue. He was hunting a ghost, and he was good at it.

  Realizing this, Kelly decided to bail. She pushed off from the column, making a beeline for the nearest skeletal wall that might offer a path out of this immediate blender. A way out of the dome. The goal was to exit the scene, regroup, and maybe let the idiots above finish each other off.

  The enraged, fat, overclocked man in a battle mechsuit didn’t let her.

  A motor whined. One of his massive mech-suit hands, not a gun barrel, lunged from his side. It was big enough to crush her whole and the ground beside her. It moved faster than anything that size had a right to, a piston-driven blur aimed to grab the space she occupied. Simultaneously, all eight of his gun barrels flashed. They fire at more than just her—they blasted everything around her to mist. The air superheated. The ground erupted in a line of geysering slag and fragmented cover. It was perfect, calculated suppressing fire, designed to herd and disorient while the hand closed in.

  “Persistent,” Kelly spat, already shifting her weight as the runes in her bracelet flared, and a dense network of erected shields sent it all ricocheting into everything but her. Her reaction system helped, a little, but the guy really packed a punch. Her shields frayed and shattered one by one under the assault. The spectacle overhead was someone else’s problem. This was now a very immediate, very heavy problem.

  Kelly’s scanner gave her a quick read. The guy in the cockpit had an Enhancement score of 25, specialized in cognitive function. Fine. Standard officer material. Then she looked at the suit he was wearing. Her eyebrows went up.

  The suit was a piece of work. Obscenely expensive hardware that under normal circumstances, only ever showed up in corporate R&D vaults and black-site military manifests, not stomping around a collapsed city. She whistled, a low sound lost in her helmet. That piece of kit was obscene. Her scanner adjusted, recalculating, and the new numbers it flashed were just rude.

  The mechsuit the fat man wore was boosting him. Brute-forcing a flat, non-specialized surge to a score of 45EQ. Across the board. Every category. It was turning him from a simple problem to a catastrophic one. A tank, stronger than a Tüin ambassador.

  So when his arm shot out and she deflected it with what looked, from his perspective, like casual magical ease, the whole many-ton machine ground to a halt. The cockpit hissed. Vector blinking, his brain trying to reconcile the math with the reality. His voice, filtered and metallic, muttered something she barely caught through the armor. “...freaking monsters breaking the rules.”

  Kelly’s head tilted inside her helmet. “Monster xenophobia? Really?” Her voice was a dry distorted crackle through the helmet.

  “And rules,” she said, “are incredibly breakable, by the way.” Then she sped up, dilating time, hastily dodging gunfire from too many limbs that still moved fast even in dilated time. She shifted her weight, the mana in her augments whining softly. “It’s the best thing about them.”

  Time dilated around her, the world sinking into syrup. She’d started moving the moment she finished talking and was instantly annoyed by the fact that he still tracked her. Gun barrels from too many limbs were already moving her, spooling up, shifting to where she stepped. Even in her slowed time, they moved fast. She wasn’t faster than the guns. She just needed to be somewhere they weren’t already aiming. She dropped into a crouch, letting a burst of high-velocity rounds chew a canyon into the pavement where her chest had been. Chips of melted concrete drifted past her visor like slow-motion snow.

  “That’s too many guns!” Kelly called out, her voice stretched strange in the time bubble. She pushed off the ground, her augmented and mana-charged legs coiling and releasing, launching her sideways behind the jagged stump of a concrete pillar. A second burst stitched a line across its face, spraying dust. “You outsourcing the aiming? Do the hive charge consultant fees? Or do they just tell you where to shoot like a good ape?”

  At her words, the overclocked man jerked, roared, and kept firing.

  The suit was terrifying on paper. In practice, the man inside wasn’t used to it. She could tell.

  Kelly watched its movements from her cover. The paint was pristine, barely scratched. Fresh out of the box. Its footfalls were heavy, yes, but they followed a predictable rhythm—step, stabilize, acquire target, predict target, step. The weapons fired with perfect synchronicity, their patterns overlapping to cut off angles. It was textbook. Sterile. It had a cold, efficient calculation—an AI hive-mind running drills. His predictions of her dodges were about 80% accurate. What he lacked was the beautiful, messy innovation that came from genuine panic, from adrenaline screaming at you to forget the manual and just live. He didn’t have conflicting instincts. He’d probably outsourced control of each gun to a basic targeting AI. Amateur hour.

  “Busy guy,” she grunted, coming up into a sprint that zigged behind a slumped transport pod.

  She’d seen these tactics before. Recognized the tactical patterns—predictive targeting, group drills, the precise flanking maneuvers of Euro-Asia wars and urban pacification units. She’d seen it in a few of her crazier days, too; in Genecorps tower, against the mercs under the city, and that time she’d raided the hyperloop.

  This suit was built to be a one-man suppression unit, to replicate the strength and tactical fire of a full squad. A prototype. It had the hallmarks of something designed to preoccupy a big, aerial, and resistant target that could stand there and take a beating. Something like Freya. Or Cain.

  It was not designed for an agile and stylish fashion icon who could dilate time, like Kelly.

  He brought aerial machine guns and sub-sonic artillery to a fight that needed sonic rounds or a magic sniper to even touch her. A showy, area-of-effect solution for a problem that required a single, focused point of impact. Kelly watched the fireworks and thought he’d brought a sledgehammer to a lock-picking contest.

  She activated her perception enhancement a fraction of a second before the world smeared into slow motion. Gun barrels, too many of them, swiveled toward her. Even in dilated time, the streams of fire were fast, converging lines of hypersonic light. She dropped into a crouch that became a sideways roll, composite shields flaring into existence for a microsecond to deflect a trio of rounds before winking out. Chips of shattered pavement hung in the air around her like frozen rain.

  She landed in a roll, coming up behind a scorched delivery van.

  “You’re over-engineered!” she yelled, popping up to loose a three-round burst from her rifle at the suit’s knee joint. The rounds sparked off the armor. A minor distraction. “Built for a dragon! I’m not a dragon! I’m a Time-god! A baby one!”

  It was a masterpiece, and he was using it for Skeet Shooting. She could work with that.

  He could’ve won if he ditched the suit. Let the AI fully pilot. Close the distance, forget shooting, and just grapple—just grab and hold. Smother her. Nobody ever tried that. She had no Titles or Traits against being pinned. It was always beams and bullets and explosions. Sometimes the answer was a really big, really strong hug. She don’t have a ‘get out of hug free’ card. Not yet. A simple, physical solution would’ve worked.

  Instead, Vector announced his presence. He turned the fight into a grand military spectacle. Kelly saw the desire: to prove the mech, to prove himself. Likely to Venus and whoever watched the recording later, perhaps to further cement his position as someone who could be trusted to Vaughn and the higher ups in the Echelon. Vector, the ambitious weapon, trying to graduate from temporary bodyguard to a piece on the strategic board. He needed a flashy win. A dominant, terrifying display. So he was using the loudest, brightest options in the arsenal.

  “Fucking monster!” The mech’s external speakers boomed, Vector’s voice distorted into a godlike proclamation. “—your body will make us untouchable, with what you can do… the Echelon will be studying you for years!”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Kelly actually blinked. “He’s doing a voice.”

  An ambitious bodyguard. Auditioning for a promotion in the middle of a firefight. That’s how you get everyone killed.

  For a second, Kelly felt it—a pang of something almost like pity. It was a cold, analytical thing. Here was a guy who’d probably been told he was a weapon his whole life. Now he had the ultimate weapon wrapped around him, and he had no control. No autonomy or free will. His augments were using him, and he was using the suit to beg for a better spot at the table. He was screaming, ‘Look what I can do!’ to people who only cared about what he did. His ambition was a trap he’d built himself. He was lonely inside all that metal. And nobody could save him.

  The feeling lasted about half a second.

  Then she remembered. The old files Ren had grudgingly confirmed. And her personal experience. Before the systems started eating his mind, Vector’s service record wasn’t for protecting others. It was for sanitization. Whole blocks, quiet, quick, and clean. No witnesses, no questions. Women, children, elderly, even pets. He had a penchant for psychological torture, even before he lost control. Whole family’s brutalised for corporate and state interests. His reality was much worse than her memory. The man inside the machine had been a stone-cold exterminator long before he became a spectacle.

  Her sympathy iced over, solid and final.

  “Yeah,” she said, the word quiet and final in the helmet. “Never mind. The guy’s a real piece of work either way.”

  Kelly sped herself up and slowed time around her. She was immediately annoyed that he could keep up. Vector’s eyes clearly couldn’t track her—she noticed a slight lag, a stumble in his gaze as it tried to follow her through the thickened air. But his suit’s brain could. It tracked her perfectly, even as she moved five times faster than she had any right to. The machine was compensating for his weak little fleshy, non-super-speed brain. Kelly sighed, the sound lost in the time-dilation.

  “This is gonna suck,” she said.

  Then she time-skipped her entire body,

  Her body stuttered. One moment she was mid-stride, the next she was anchored to the mech’s broad back, her stealth suit’s boots magnetized to the armor plating. The position felt familiar. She’d spent maybe ten loops, in the early days—when she’d just started looping and was too scared to face the creatures outside—trying to learn how to build one of these things. The schematics were a desperate ghost in her memory.

  The idea of a mech suit had seemed appealing to a far less experienced, far squishier Kelly. A big metal shell between her and the world. The dream died faster than it arrived. She gave up on the whole ‘mech lady’ idea because mechs were both too expensive and too fragile. Cash-intensive pi?atas if you knew where to cut.

  “Case in point,” she muttered.

  A quick slice from her weapon, and the suit's primary and secondary spine was severed along with most of its back and extra arms. The forearms fell to like stringless puppets, electrical jolts coming out of the damaged parts as the suit hissed smoke and electricity.

  She had sliced through the main control bundles, like cutting the tendons and nerves in a wrist. The parts that told the arms how to move and the legs how to balance were gone. The suit’s brain could no longer talk to its limbs, and the systems that amplified Vector’s strength and speed were offline. It was now just a very expensive brick that was about as useful as a broken toaster.

  “What’s this, performance issues?” Kelly mused, exhausted from the full-body time skip, but still standing thanks to her training. She ran towards the nearest wall and yelled back. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

  “You aren’t funny, monster!” Vector complained through his armor’s loudspeakers, clearly jealous of her peerless wit. “You're dead!”

  The mech's two remaining arms ran on a third skeleton and power source she couldn't reach with one swing, and continued to aim and fire at Kelly.

  “Just… DIE! Fucking abomination!” Vector screamed. As his large frame ejected from the otherwise immobile mech and retaliated with another volley of bullets, Kelly turned and ran. The full-body time skip left a buzzing exhaustion in her bones, a hollow feeling her training and augments immediately began fighting. She dilated time and rushed to the nearest wall of the dome.

  It was now or never.

  Without his mech boosting his capabilities, Vector’s eyes couldn’t even follow her, with time slowed as it was and Kelly sped up to insanity. Thanks to Giantbane and the idiots still battling in the sky being an excellent distraction, she could make it. Ren had probably already vanished through the heavily guarded hole in the dome she’d made earlier. So Kelly slowed time further and moved to carve a new one on another, presumably less guarded, side.

  She didn’t look back.

  As Kelly raced for the edge of the dome, the sky decided to have a disagreement with itself. Venus was performing about as well as anyone could while stuck in a four-way aerial brawl against an angel and two overpowered inhumans.

  Somehow, through the spectacular display of mutual attempted murder, Venus, Freya, and Cain all stopped trying to kill each other for a moment. Their combined fire shifted, converging on a single glowing target: the angel, Verrimisir.

  A dry chuckle escaped Kelly. “Would you look at that. A team-up. How wholesome.”

  There was no response from Ren. He was already gone, having vanished sometime during the initial exchange. She was alone inside the dome. But in almost two thousands loops, Kelly had grown used to voicing her thoughts aloud. She found herself to be good company.

  “Did the overgrown pigeon flap his wings too loud and offend all three of them at once?” she mused, watching a pulse of gravity from Freya warp the air around the angel. “Or is he actually strong enough to make them put the ‘mortal enemies’ thing on hold? I’m really hoping it’s the first one. I have plans that don’t involve a competent angel.”

  The battle wrote itself across the burning sky. Freya used directed energy weapons that carved glowing scars in the atmosphere and gravity pulses that made buildings below shudder and collapse—the sort of hardware you’d point at a starship and hope for the best. Cain’s weapon-swarm was a cloud of shifting, glittering malice, forms flickering between whirling blades, concussive launchers, and lances of pure force.

  And Venus. Venus Vaughn. She fought with her speed, her strength, and a lot of weapon augments. Each shot she fired was a thunderclap that arrived a moment before the sound, projectiles moving so fast they punched through the superheated air and kept going. One shot missed the angel, streaked upward, and vanished into the opaque dome high above. Kelly tracked its probable trajectory and realised it could definitely poke a hole in something sitting in orbit.

  In retaliation, that damned magical asshole Verrimisir kept throwing fireballs. Not little campfire pouches. He hurled massive, swirling spheres of incandescent fury that flew with the rumbling, inevitable arc of small meteors. They landed with things you couldn’t call a ‘bang’, but a whump that swallowed city blocks in an instant, unfolding into lakes of white-hot fire.

  The East Grid inside the dome was no longer a city. It was a hellish inferno with a structural integrity problem, and the main attractions were busy redecorating it from the top down.

  Kelly’s mind automatically started filing reports. She recognized some of Venus’s augments. High-end experimental, bleeding-edge corporate wetwork—things not yet available to any military. The Vaughn R&D overview files she’d scoured had been very thorough.

  Venus had very small, miniature gravity drives in her that gave her near limitless adaptability in flight. She had to—the visible thrusters in her back and feet were nowhere enough for those kind of logic defying movements.

  Those arm-cannons weren’t standard issue, either; they were prototype hybrid systems, likely railguns with extra power sources, boosted by a secondary directed-energy stage to keep the projectiles from vaporizing in mid-air. Hypersonic delivery. The missile pods on her back would be launching micro-munitions, each one a smart seeker with a bad attitude and a payload that could make a city planner cry.

  But cataloguing the angel’s magic was like trying to read water. The fireballs had a stubborn coherence, a structure that fed on what it consumed and burned too bright and too hot for anything that obeyed natural laws. She squinted, her perception enhancements straining. The underlying energy kept shifting, refusing to settle into a pattern she could lock down. It was annoying.

  As Kelly ran, she watched Venus fire a full-power shot from her right cannon. The recoil visibly staggered the woman in mid-air, and her flight path stuttered for a half-second as she corrected. “There. She’s got the firepower of a battleship grafted onto a human-sized barrel. You push past enhancement level thirty, your systems have to pick a main function. Hers picked ‘artillery.’ Means she can’t brawl and shoot the fun stuff up close. She has to angle herself, plant her feet, and let the big guns talk.” It was an educated guess, pieced together from stolen corporate design philosophy documents. And paired with paired with Freya and Cain’s offensive, it meant the angel was surrounded by assaults from all sides.

  Even backed into a corner, three-on-one, the angel wasn’t just taking the beating. He unleashed a blistering whirlwind of searing light, trying to shred their formation and carve out some breathing room. But the three of them just tightened the noose—Freya warped the space around the attack to diffuse it, Cain’s swarm absorbed and scattered the energy, and Venus put a railcannon round through the gap. “Teamwork makes the dream work, I guess, even if the dream is murdering a magical, annoying, man-shaped pigeon.”

  He wasn’t actually a pigeon, of course. But picturing him that way always improved Kelly’s mood.

  When time finally resumed, Kelly had managed to reach the outside of the dome. Her reward for that bit of effort was a dozen wires whipping out from the opening, each one weaving itself into what promised to be a profoundly inconvenient and inescapable net. Just her luck.

  Figures emerged through the smoke. Vector’s men, the ones who had left earlier. They’d decided to come back, and they’d brought their guns, all of which were currently aimed in her general direction.

  And then the main event arrived. The fat man himself emerged from the hole behind her, riding some military vehicle Kelly didn’t recognize—a grotesque cross between an armored motorcycle and a racecar. He held weapons in each arm, his forearms riddled with miniature holes that looked an awful lot like smart missile ports. His cold killer eyes landed on her with a disdain so pure it was almost artistic. The holes on his arms began to spin with a mechanical whirr, and his eyes started to glow. He’d brought a party.

  Kelly didn’t waste a thought. She equipped Mana Vacuum and time-skipped beside him, her gun reappearing already pressed directly against his temple. He’d been on her to-do list, after all. Letting someone with mind abilities just wander around was terrible long-term planning.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Her finger didn’t budge. Her failsafes didn’t trigger.

  In response, the large man’s eyes glowed with an intense, punishing golden light. Both of them, machine and man, shared the same horrible idea. Kelly felt a sharp tingle of pain stitch itself into the meat of her skull. A telepathic lobotomy, express delivery.

  Kelly froze. Just for a heartbeat, shock short-circuited her system.

  Vector didn’t need a longer invitation. He exploited the opening, an arm swinging at her with the speed of a shot round. Suffering from the strain of overusing her time abilities, the immortal intern couldn’t slow time or skip through it. She managed to switch to Fortress of Flame as the payload connected. The pain in her skull intensified, a hot, drilling pressure, as both his eyes glowed a brighter, more aggressive gold. He was really putting his back into it.

  The remaining soldiers saw their moment and took it. They tackled her from the side, a coordinated heap of enhanced muscle that threw the mad scientist through a landscape of debris and smoke. She hit the ground with a force that punched the air from her lungs and kicked up a thick, choking cloud of pulverized concrete and ancient ash.

  “Shush, it’ll be painless if you don’t fight it, little monster.”

  Vector leaned through the pile of enhanced men pinning her down. He whispered to Kelly, the words coming from his mouth and also from a new, unwelcome voice that had set up shop inside her mind. It felt like needles digging into the surface of her skull, scraping around for a purchase to begin a full intracranial hijack.

  But it was distant, muted—like a man shouting from another room, or across the street—as if it hadn’t, and couldn’t pierce whatever natural defences her mind had. It was far weaker than what Verrimisir had achieved. Kelly was moments away from abandoning the loop and forcing a reset either way. The nuclear option was looking polite.

  “Just let me in. Don’t fight it, creature.” The large killer’s voice sounded. “Then I can look beyond the surface and see why you believe so adamantly that you’re one of us.”

  Ah.

  So that was it. She had anticipated this, kept her distance the entire time, tried to kill him the first chance she got. The ambush, however, had not been a part of her calculations. Someone had changed the rules mid-game.

  It was a mutation. Vector had a mutation that let him feel the emotions of others. That was the whole thing, supposed to be useless for anything but mild spying. His ‘overclocked’ nature had twisted it beyond mere ‘empathy,’ letting him project and communicate emotions and neurons onto others. He could manipulate emotions. Thoughts. But it was far from flawless.

  It appeared she needed to be held down and immobile for it to work. Which explained why he hadn’t used it until now. Kelly hadn’t known about that weakness, but of course such a mutation would be kept secret behind layers of corporate secrets and paranoid op-sec. A trade secret for psychic bullying.

  Kelly had heard his mutation could use pheromones to drastically alter the emotions and moods of others. Mess with brainwaves. Until his men held her down, he hadn’t even given her a minor headache. Now, her thoughts were blooming into the world’s worst hangover, precisely because she was laying still. Comfort was a vulnerability.

  Yeah. If the genuine, physical danger of his attempts at ending her life up until now hadn’t caused Kelly to feel murderous animosity towards the gluttonous operative, the intrusive telepathy—no matter its physical limitations—sealed the deal. It was the corporate pettiness of a mind invasion that really grated.

  “Drop the mind games, Vector,” she warned, her voice cool and measured, in contrast to the psychic violence. “I won’t ask twice.”