Sixty thousand credits for a night of standing around looking intimidating. After the past weeks, might as well be a vacation.
Cole surveyed the penthouse suite on the 90th floor. Bubble of luxury floating above the rain-lashed streets below. The windows were programmed to show some serene beach that was probably glassed decades ago. Holographic waves lapping gently while thunder rattled the building's bones.
This was how the ultra-rich lived now, wrapped in simulations of a world that no longer existed. Paying a premium to forget the apocalypse.
"I hate these jobs," Lucius grumbled, pacing. He was running low-level current through his new chrome legs. Each step sparked against the expensive wood, leaving scorch marks that self-healing nanites immediately erased. Even the floor was fighting his restlessness. "All this quiet. It's unnatural. Gives me a headache."
"The quiet is the point," Senna said, interfacing with the building's security network. Schematics of the penthouse defense grid floated beside her, all green lights and optimal patterns. "This suite is a Faraday cage wrapped in ablative armor. It's designed to be the most boring, secure room in the city."
"Then why hire us?" Cole asked, fingers tracing the reflection-proof coating on the walls. Someone had specifically designed this place to neuter a Lucent Domain's abilities. Made him feel half-blind.
"Insurance," Lia replied, ejecting her magazine to check the custom rounds again. The bullets caught the light, each one inscribed with microscopic fractals that seemed to shift when you looked straight at them. She'd spent days forging them, infusing each with specific molecular disruption patterns. "Corporate deals this big always have a chance of going sideways. The fact they're meeting in person instead of through proxies means whatever's in that case can't be trusted to digital transfer."
Their client, Kincaid, had barely acknowledged them. He wore a tailored suit and had a face that looked surgically sculpted to project arrogance. The kind of executive who thought money made him bulletproof. His cologne was so expensive Cole's HUD actually identified it: Extinction Event by Voided Dreams, 500 credits per ounce. He was more concerned with the temperature of his whiskey than the heavily armed Domains in his room.
"Just stay out of sight and try not to break my furniture," he'd said, dismissing them with a wave. "This is a simple business transaction, and your presence is merely a corporate insurance policy."
"Insurance policies don't usually have a combined kill count in the triple digits," Lucius had muttered under his breath.
Standing by the windows Cole began to notice the holographic beach was starting to glitch, the perfect blue sky occasionally flickering to reveal the swirling grey outside world. The simulation was failing at the edges, reality bleeding through like ink through wet paper. Story of the whole damn city. Pretty lies painted over ugly truths, and the paint was always peeling.
Cole watched Kincaid pour another whiskey, his third in twenty minutes. The executive's hands had that subtle tremor that came from too many neural boosters, too many sleepless nights pushing deals that moved billions while the world burned. These corporate types were all the same—riding the edge of chemical enhancement and calling it productivity.
"His heart rate's at 95 BPM," Cole subvocalized to the team. "Either he's on stimulants or he's nervous about the deal."
"Probably both," Lia replied through the comm. "These corpo types are always wired on something."
Then, a soft chime. The elevator had arrived.
"Showtime," Lia murmured into their comms.
The Void Forge Labs team consisted of nine security guards in standard corporate tactical gear, they moved through the doorway in practiced formation. The guards were clearly just enhanced humans with good training and decent cybernetics, but no Domain signatures. Behind them, Dr. Aris Thorne shuffled forward, the dark circles under his eyes suggested he hadn't slept in days, and his hands, clutching a heavy case, shook with exhaustion or fear. The case was covered in warning labels and what looked like containment runes. Someone was hedging their bets against whatever demon spawn they'd cooked up in their labs.
Cole's internal diagnostics immediately flagged the case.
[UNKNOWN ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED. BIOHAZARD WARNING. RECOMMEND MINIMUM 10-FEET DISTANCE.]
"The package has a pulse," he subvocalized into the team's comm channel.
"Confirmed," Senna's voice replied instantly. "I'm reading a bio-signature from the case. Multiple signatures actually, they’re overlapping. It's like something's been stitched together at the genetic level. And Dr. Thorne's cortisol levels are through the roof. He's terrified."
"Of his own product?" Lia asked.
"Or of what someone might do with it," Cole suggested.
Kincaid and the Void Forge representative began their negotiation, their words a dance of corporate doublespeak and veiled threats. The representative was a thin man in an expensive suit.
"The prototype is untested in field conditions," the Void Forge suit was saying. "Our asking price reflects the risks involved."
"The risks are why Sentinel is willing to pay," Kincaid countered smoothly. "We have… applications for the weapon."
A weapon. Cole exchanged a look with Lia. This just kept getting better.
Dr. Thorne's eyes darted around the room, nervous. When they landed on Cole, the scientist's expression shifted. Not quite pleading, but clearly uncomfortable with whatever was going down.
Before the deal could close, a new voice filled the room. The penthouse's pleasant AI cracked, distorted, then reformed into something deeper. Military register.
"Security alert. Unscheduled lockdown initiated."
Heavy blast shields slammed over the windows. Deafening clang. The room plunged into emergency red. The beach hologram vanished, replaced by flashing warnings: LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED.
Doors hissed shut. Magnetic bolts driving home, echoing in the sudden silence.
"What the hell?" Kincaid shouted, whiskey glass shattering as he stumbled back. "This is my penthouse! I didn't authorize any protocol!"
The Void Forge guards moved to defensive positions around Dr. Thorne. Training kicking in despite confusion. One guard's voice crackled over local comm: "Someone's hijacked the building."
"Form a perimeter!" their squad leader barked. "Unknown threat! Protect the package!"
"Senna, what the hell?" Lia demanded.
"It's not me!" Senna's voice tight with strain, golden tattoos flaring brighter as she fought for system control. "Someone's in the building's network. They have admin privileges I didn't even know existed. Military-grade backdoor codes, at least ten years old. They've triggered hard lockdown and... shit, they're activating internal defenses."
Right on cue, the minimalist art pieces split open. Automated turrets emerged, swiveling. Their targeting lasers painted the room in deadly red lattice work.
"Those are targeting all of us!" One of the Void Forge guards dove behind cover as the turrets opened fire.
Kincaid screamed, scrambling behind a marble table. "Has to be OmniCorp! Those bastards knew about the meet!"
"Lucius, those turrets!" Lia commanded.
"On it!" Electricity coursed through Lucius's neural pathways, pupils dilated. "Finally, something interesting!"
Blue energy erupted around him as his form split into overlapping possibilities as the turrets fired. High-caliber rounds tore through expensive furniture, punching through mahogany, shredding designer couches. But they were always shooting where Lucius had been a microsecond before.
"Can't hit what doesn't technically exist yet!" he laughed. One version diving left, another rolling right, a third running up the wall itself.
He slammed his hand onto the floor, cracking it as he discharged. Massive surges of lightning erupted from the room's own outlets. The building's electrical grid became his weapon. Electricity arced in a beautiful chain reaction, leaping turret to turret. Their ammunition cooked off in the magazines, turning them into improvised grenades.
"That's what I call a hostile takeover!" he crowed.
Cole picked up the distinctive whine of a breaching charge. "East wall! Incoming!"
The wall exploded inward. Shower of reinforced concrete and twisted rebar. Through the smoke, figures in sleek armor poured in. They were OmniCorp tactical teams, their weapons already firing. But with them came something worse.
The first was a Flesh Domain, Sequence Five by the way reality seemed to recoil from him. His name was Carrion, according to the biometric tag Cole's optics pulled from a criminal database. He was wanted in three cities for "aggressive biological terrorism." His skin showed shadows of other forms moving beneath, like passengers trapped under ice.
The second made sounded off alarms within Cole’s ears.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
[SILENCE DOMAIN DETECTED. OMNISONIC PROCESSORS COMPENSATING. WARNING: PARTIAL AUDIO LOSS IMMINENT.]
Her tactical gear bore no identification, but the way she moved, deliberate and patient, marked her as a professional. Two slender blades hung at her hips. Cole’s bounty hunter software flagged her as Nyx Voss.
Lia already drawing her custom-forged sidearm shouted. "Two of them, both Sequence Five!"
Nyx’s hand moved. Gray reality-static materialized in her palm, coalescing into a sphere. The bomb pulsed with conceptual absence.
"Incoming!" Cole shouted.
She threw.
The Silence Bomb arced through the air and detonated mid-flight. Gray energy expanded in a fifteen-foot sphere that engulfed three Void Forge guards. Heat vanished from the zone. Frost erupted across their armor in an instant—moisture in the air crystallizing, their breath freezing in lungs, body heat deleted from existence.
The guards collapsed, their bodies locked in ice, hypothermia hitting them in seconds.
Carrion stepped forward. His tactical vest strained against a frame that was too broad, muscles moving beneath the fabric.
His voice came from a throat that split into five separate vocal cords, creating a wet harmonic: "Sentinel's little corporate party looked lonely. Thought we'd crash it. Name's Carrion. I'll be your extinction event this evening."
One Void Forge guard opened fire, rounds punching into Carrion's chest. Carrion looked down at the wounds. His torso rippled. The bullet holes closed, the tissue reorganizing around the foreign objects and ejecting them like splinters.
The pristine penthouse became a warzone.
Lia fired, her custom round ringing out as it impacted an OmniCorp soldier's chest plate. The bullet unraveled the armor, the metal aging a thousand years in a second, rust spreading like cancer before the entire plate crumbled to red dust.
"Neat trick!" Carrion hissed, his attention turning to Lia. "Let's see how your bullets handle this!"
Metal ports along his vertebrae opened. A serpentine head emerged from his right shoulder, scales gleaming black and red, its jaw lined with crimson fangs.
The serpent-head lunged on a muscular neck that extended six feet. It caught a Void Forge guard mid-reload, fangs closing around his torso. The bite crushed through armor and ribs like tin foil, dropping the guard in a crumpled heap. Blood painted Kincaid's floor, mixing with spilled whiskey to create patterns that would haunt whoever survived this.
Senna had taken cover behind an overturned couch, her golden threads whipped out, wrapping around an OmniCorp soldier's throat. She jerked her arm sideways. The monofilament passed through kevlar and flesh without resistance, and his head rolled away from his shoulders. Before the body hit the floor, she lashed out again. A second thread punched straight through another guard's reinforced visor. He dropped instantly.
Cole tried to engage, his Fractal Blades coming up. But Carrion's body was already shifting, his left arm elongating, bones cracking and reforming, the limb becoming something between a tentacle and a whip, lined with hardened bone spurs.
The tendril lashed out. Cole dropped low, his Fractal Blade coming up in a rising slash. The edge carved through the appendage, splitting flesh and exposing the bone beneath.
The severed section regrew, tissue weaving itself whole in seconds. Worse, nine new tendrils burst from the wound, each one lined with hardened bone spurs, all nine whipping toward Cole simultaneously.
He shattered before they connected, glass fragments exploding outward. He reformed ten feet back, breathing hard.
Lia fired a custom round that grazed Carrion's shoulder. The impact point began to freeze into a brittle lattice. Carrion screamed and slammed the frozen section against the wall, splintering it against the concrete. New tissue was already growing to replace the loss.
Lia's hands ignited, forge-fire racing up her arms. She grabbed one of Carrion's tendrils as it whipped past. The flesh sizzled and blackened instantly, the smell of charred protein filling the air.
Nyx had drawn her nullblades, twin daggers that radiated gray static. She moved through the battlefield like smoke, each slash leaving trails of conceptual absence in the air.
Lucius's lightning arced toward her. She raised one blade. The lightning struck and was deleted mid-flight, the electrical energy erased.
Dr. Thorne was cowering behind his Void Forge guards, clutching the case. One guard tried to escort him to the sealed exit, but Carrion's serpent-head struck, catching the guard's arm. The bite injected something that made the limb swell and burst like overripe fruit. The guard's scream cut off as shock took him.
Cole's perspective sharpened as adrenaline kicked in. The fight was fracturing into chaos. Lia engaging Carrion's left flank while his serpent-head whipped toward Senna, Lucius weaving backward from Nyx’s advancing blades, and Cole himself trying to find an opening.
"Senna, web!" Cole shouted, his voice cracking with urgency.
She understood immediately. Her monofilament threads erupted from her fingertips, filling the space between overturned furniture with a lattice of invisible razors. Nyx stepped into the trap and her boot heel caught a thread.
The wire sliced clean through her tactical boot, drawing blood. She hissed and raised her nullblade, the gray static expanding to delete the concept of "cohesion" in a five-foot radius. Senna's web dissolved into falling threads, each one dropping like a severed nerve.
But it had bought Cole the second he needed.
The blood-soaked floor became a mirror surface, reflecting his desperation back at him. Cole stabbed one Fractal Blade into it. The weapon sank like it was piercing water.
The blade emerged from the mirrored surface of a shattered champagne bottle near Carrion's feet, the prismatic edge carving upward into his calf. The cut was deep enough to see bone, white against red. Carrion roared, his regeneration already knitting the wound closed.
Lia was there, her conceptual hammer manifesting in her hand. She'd forged it from the concept of "weight," and when it connected with Carrion's knee, it hit like a collapsing building. His leg buckled. The floor cratered beneath him.
"Lucius, now!" Lia shouted.
Lucius gathered the ambient static in the room, his whole body crackling with barely contained power. His hands blurred, electricity arcing between his fingers as a containment field. The air pressure in the room dropped sharply.
"Hey, Spooky!" Lucius yelled at Carrion. "Catch!"
He thrust his hands forward.
The vacuum sphere hit Carrion center-mass just as he was trying to stand. The effect was catastrophic. The sphere imploded violently, atmospheric pressure rushing inward to fill the void. Carrion's torso compressed, ribs cracking audibly, the force crushing him with the weight of the surrounding air.
Blood exploded from his mouth, painting the ceiling in arterial spray.
His regeneration screamed to compensate. Bone fragments realigned, compressed organs inflated, but the damage was severe enough that his body prioritized survival over offense. The tendrils retracted, the serpent-head withdrawing into his spine to redirect biomass toward critical repairs.
"That's what I'm talking about!" Lucius grinned.
But Nyx wasn't standing idle.
She'd been weaving between Senna's remaining threads, her nullblades leaving trails of deleted friction in their wake. When she reached Lucius, she moved with zero resistance, her blade accelerating mid-swing.
The strike came from his blind spot.
Cole saw it and his heart stopped. Using the reflection from Lucius' cybernetic legs, he shattered reforming between Lucius and the blade, his Fractal Blade coming up to intercept.
The nullblade met prismatic crystal with a sound like breaking reality. The impact traveled up Cole's arm. His blade was holding, but barely.
"Back up!" Cole grunted, tasting blood.
When had he bitten his tongue?
Lucius didn't need to be told twice. He kicked off the floor, using a burst of magnetism to pull himself toward a metal support beam. Nyx’s second blade came for Cole's throat.
Senna's thread wrapped around her wrist, jerking the strike off-course. The blade slashed past Cole's cheek instead, close enough that he felt the deleted air, a cold nothing against his skin.
Nyx yanked her arm, the monofilament cutting into her wrist—but her armor's phase-shifted weave kept the wire from severing bone. She spun with the pull, using the momentum to slash at Senna.
Senna released the thread and dropped flat. The nullblade passed inches over her head, leaving a crescent of deleted light in its wake. Cole saw strands of Senna's hair erased where the blade had passed.
Lia had shifted to her Full-Body Plating, bio-metallic armor flowing over her skin like liquid chrome. She vented kinetic force from her elbows, launching herself at Nyx with the speed of a fired bullet.
Nyx raised her nullblades to block, but Lia's Conceptual Edge was already manifesting. She focused on "Inevitability", the concept that some things simply had to happen. Her forge-crafted gauntlet became something that couldn't be stopped, couldn't be deleted, because its impact was already a foregone conclusion.
The gauntlet met the nullblade and kept going. Nyx's eyes widened, the first emotion Cole had seen from her, as her unbreakable defense failed. The punch caught her in the chest, launching her backward into Kincaid's aquarium. Glass shattered, exotic fish flopping on marble as water cascaded across the floor.
Cole's heart was hammering. They were fighting two Sequence Fives simultaneously, and it showed. Every exchange was razor-close, every mistake potentially fatal.
Carrion was standing again. His torso had restructured, the crushed sections now reinforced with plating. His right arm split open. A lamprey-mouth creature emerged, its circular maw pulsing with red light pointed at Senna.
Cole drew his photon gun.
The photon round hit the lamprey-creature directly in its glowing throat sacs. The concentrated light met concentrated bio-energy and the reaction was explosive. The creature's head detonated in a spray of burning tissue. Carrion howled, the stump already trying to regenerate, but the cauterized flesh was slowing it down.
Nyx pulled herself from the ruined aquarium, water and blood dripping from her gear. She moved like she wasn't hurt at all, but Cole caught the slight favor to her left side. Lia's hit had done damage. Her hands moved, forming twin Silence Bombs.
When she threw them the penthouse plunged into absolute darkness and silence simultaneously.
But Senna in the darkness had spread her monofilament threads. She could feel every vibration through the threads, mapping the battlefield by touch alone.
Her threads contracted. In the darkness, someone screamed, or would have if sound existed. When the zones collapsed fifteen seconds later one of the remaining OmniCorp soldiers was standing perfectly still, red lines appearing across his body before he fell apart in neat segments.
Lightning erupted from Lucius’s Storm-Strider Greaves as he kicked off the ground. The electricity chained, jumping from the water on the floor to Nyx’s soaked tactical gear. The air turned purple-white with discharge.
Nyx convulsed, muscles locking as thousands of volts coursed through her. But even seizing, her training held. An echo clone materialized beside her. The clone grabbed Lucius and detonated, deleting "Balance" in a fifteen-foot radius.
Everyone in the zone immediately lost equilibrium. Lucius crashed to the floor, his inner ear no longer functioning. Cole stumbled, his reflexes useless without a sense of up or down. Even Carrion's serpent-head was weaving drunkenly.
Lia fired rounds at Nyx but she projected a sphere of negation which the bullets phased harmlessly into.
As the balance deletion ended, everyone scrambling to their feet like newborn colts, Carrion had the Serpent's head launch at Lia.
Cole raised his gun and fired another photon round at the serpent's head. The photon round caught the creature mid-lunge. Its skull became a lantern, glowing from within before the entire head disintegrated into ash and light.
And just as they were adapting to the two-sided battle, a new sound cut through the turmoil. The high-pitched whine of hover-bike engines, getting closer.
"Sentinel's backup!" one of the Void Forge guards shouted. "Finally!"
But something was off. The bikes weren't slowing down. Their weapons were aimed at everyone, not just the attackers.
"Those aren't Sentinel's people," Cole realized. "Third party. They're here for the case too."
"You've got to be kidding me," Lia growled. "Who else wants a piece of this?"
Carrion laughed, his body still regenerating from the photon wounds. "The more the merrier! I haven't had a proper feast in months!"
Nyx was already forming new Silence Bombs, her expression never changing.
Cole looked at his team.
Just another night for them.
What to expect:
- Arrogant, power-obsessed protagonist
- Intricate magic
- Cruel academy
- Fighting cosmic horrors
- High-stakes dungeon farming
- Sci-fi system
- Ability crafting
First book is finished!
Launch December 6 with a 10-chapter drop
Daily releases for 3 weeks after
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