The morning in the High-Spire district was, by design, perfect.

  Located far above the smog and industrial churn of the lower hive, the air here was scrubbed clean and scented with synthetic jasmine. Sunlight—real sunlight, filtered through the atmospheric dome—bathed the plaza in a warm, golden glow.

  At a corner café, a young couple laughed over cups of recaf, the steam rising in lazy spirals. A maintenance servitor swept the pristine white tiles of the promenade with a rhythmic swish-swish. Near the central fountain, a group of children played with a gravity-ball, their shrieks of delight echoing off the marble facades of the administratum buildings.

  It was a picture of order. A testament to the peace the Imperium promised but rarely delivered.

  Then, the coffee in the couple’s cups stopped rippling.

  For a heartbeat, the liquid didn't move. Then, slowly, impossibly, it began to rise, floating out of the ceramic mugs in perfect, amber spheres.

  The laughter died. The children stopped playing as their ball hung suspended in mid-air, refusing to fall. The maintenance servitor froze, its logic circuits jamming as the gravity sensors registered a localized inversion.

  The silence that followed wasn't peaceful. It was the inhalation of a predator before a roar.

  BOOM.

  There was no fire. There was no smoke. There was only force.

  A shockwave of emerald energy erupted from the center of the main avenue, expanding outward with the speed of a thought. It hit the buildings not as a wind, but as a command to cease.

  The plaza buckled. The pristine white tiles shattered into a million diamond-dust fragments that shot upward into the sky. The gravity disruption hit the administratum tower to the east; the massive structure didn't crumble—it was ripped from its foundation, groaning like a dying beast as it was hoisted ten, twenty, fifty feet into the air, suspended by the violent whims of a technology far older than humanity.

  People screamed, scrambling for cover as the laws of physics dissolved around them. Debris didn't fall; it orbited.

  In the center of the chaos, walking calmly through the storm of floating concrete and twisted rebar, was a girl.

  She looked entirely out of place. She wore no power armor, no void-suit. She was dressed in a simple, elegant coat, her hair flowing behind her as if caught in a gentle breeze that existed only for her.

  Ravager stopped in the middle of the ruined plaza. She looked at the devastation she had caused with the mild interest of someone rearranging furniture.

  "Subtle," a voice deadpanned behind her.

  Knight climbed over a slab of floating pavement, her trench coat flapping wildly in the gravity distortion. She kept one hand on her hat and the other on her revolver, looking around at the floating buildings with wide, terrified eyes. "I told you to create a diversion, Minka. Not rewrite the laws of physics."

  "This is the most efficient route," Ravager replied. Her voice was calm, audible even over the groaning of the suspended buildings. "The Archivist’s facility is three miles down. digging is... tedious."

  "So you're just going to—?"

  Ravager didn't let her finish. She raised her right hand. It was a delicate movement, the gesture of a conductor cueing the orchestra.

  She brought her hand down in a sharp, vertical slash.

  The sound that followed was not an explosion. It was the sound of the world tearing open.

  The earth in front of them split. A fissure, razor-straight and glowing with green arc-lightning, raced down the avenue. It sliced through the plaza, through the foundation of the district, and down into the darkness below. The ground shuddered violently, pushing apart as if afraid to touch her.

  In seconds, the pristine High-Spire was bisected by a canyon two hundred meters wide, revealing the layered, rusted guts of the under-hive below.

  Ravager walked to the edge of the abyss she had just carved. She looked down into the dark, smoke-filled depths where alarms were already blaring.

  "Found it," she said.

  The descent was less a stealth mission and more a natural disaster.

  They moved through the exposed underground tunnel network, the ceiling above them open to the sky where Ravager had split the crust.

  The Archivist’s defenses were active. Turrets popped from concealed bulkheads, their targeting sensors locking onto the two intruders. Servitors armed with heavy bolters flooded the corridors, a wall of meat and metal designed to stop armies.

  Knight took cover behind a pillar, leveling her revolver. "Contact front! We've got heavy suppression—"

  Ravager didn't break stride.

  She walked down the center of the corridor, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. A heavy bolter round, the size of a fist, screamed toward her face.

  Just before impact, the air around her shimmered. The bullet didn't ricochet; it simply ceased to exist, atomized by a molecular disassembly field that hummed just millimeters from her skin.

  Ravager looked at the turret. She flicked her finger.

  The turret crumpled inward, imploding as its own mass was suddenly increased a thousandfold. It became a dense ball of scrap metal in the blink of an eye, dropping from the ceiling with a heavy thud.

  A squad of elite shock-troopers charged around the corner, weapons raised. They shouted commands, their discipline holding for exactly three seconds.

  Ravager looked at them. Her yellow eyes flared.

  She didn't use a weapon. She reached out with her mind, tapping into the reality-warping engrams Trazyn had inscribed into her necrodermis cortex. She grabbed the space occupied by the soldiers and twisted.

  The corridor warped. The floor became the ceiling. The soldiers were slammed into the walls with the force of a freight train, their armor crumpling like paper. One of them fired a plasma gun in panic; Ravager caught the bolt of superheated matter in her bare hand, crushing it into a harmless spark.

  She swept her arm to the side. The remaining soldiers were swept away by an invisible tide of force, smashed through the reinforced ferrocrete walls as if they were made of wet cardboard.

  Knight followed in her wake, stepping over the bodies and the ruined machinery. She hadn't fired a single shot. She looked at her revolver, then at the carnage in front of her, and holstered the weapon.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  "Remind me never to piss you off," Knight muttered, her face pale.

  "You are an ally," Ravager said, not looking back. "You are safe."

  "Yeah," Knight whispered, looking at the way Ravager’s human-looking hand was currently glowing with enough energy to level a city block. "That's what I'm afraid of."

  They reached the end of the line. The tunnel widened into a massive, subterranean antechamber.

  In front of them stood a vault door. It was titanic—fifty feet high, made of adamantium and reinforced with shimmering void-shields. It was designed to withstand orbital bombardment. It was the gate to the Archivist’s inner sanctum.

  Ravager stopped before it. She looked small against the massive metal slab.

  "Here," she said softly.

  She placed her palm against the cold metal of the door.

  "Is he in there?" Knight asked, her voice echoing in the sudden silence.

  "Yes," Ravager replied. She could feel the hum of energy on the other side. She could taste the data-streams. "And he knows we are here."

  Ravager didn't search for a control panel. She didn't look for a key. She pressed her hand flat against the adamantium.

  Disassemble.

  Green lightning arced from her fingertips, spreading across the surface of the door like ivy. The metal groaned, turning translucent, then brittle. With a sound like shattering glass, the ultimate defense of the Archivist disintegrated into a pile of glowing dust, revealing the darkness beyond.

  Ravager stepped onto the dust of the destroyed door, her yellow eyes burning in the gloom.

  "Knock knock," she whispered.

  The dust from the disintegrated adamantium door settled slowly, coating the floor in a shimmering, metallic frost.

  Ravager stepped into the vault. She didn't raise a weapon. She didn't scan for traps. She simply walked in, her heels clicking rhythmically against the polished obsidian floor.

  Knight followed, her revolver raised, sweeping the room with the paranoid precision of a veteran mercenary. But what she saw made her lower the gun slightly, confusion furrowing her brow.

  It wasn't a fortress. It was a laboratory.

  Rows of pristine, glass stasis tanks lined the walls, filled with bubbling green fluid. Data-slates were scattered across messy workbenches. In the center of the room, sitting on a simple stool with his back to them, was a man.

  He didn't look like a monster. He didn't look like an Overlord. He looked like a soldier.

  He wore simple fatigue pants and a white tank top that exposed arms corded with lean, dangerous muscle. His skin was a map of scars—burns, lacerations, bullet holes that had healed over decades of war. On the table next to him rested two simple, curved blades.

  He was reading a book.

  "You're loud, Minka," the man said. His voice wasn't the metallic rasp of a Necron. It was deep, human, and tired. He turned a page, not looking back. "I expected you to knock. Or at least use the doorbell."

  Ravager stopped in the middle of the room. "The door was locked. I removed it."

  "I noticed," the man sighed. He closed the book and placed it gently on the table. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to source pure adamantium in this sector? That door cost more than the city above us."

  "It was inefficient," Ravager stated flatly. "Where is he?"

  The man stood up. He turned around, revealing a face that Knight recognized from history books and grainy war footage. It was a face that belonged on a recruitment poster from twenty years ago. Sharp jaw, rugged stubble, and eyes that had seen too much.

  "The Legend," Knight whispered, her grip on her revolver tightening. "John Kranich."

  "That was the name of the meat," the man said, tapping his own chest. "The vessel. A fine specimen. Fast. Durable. A bit prone to joint pain in the knees, but I fixed that."

  He smiled, and the expression was wrong. It didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were burning with a psychic emerald fire that belonged to a being far older than humanity.

  "Hello, daughter," the Archivist said.

  The anticlimax hung in the air like smoke. There was no screaming, no grand declaration of war. Just a father in a stolen body, disappointed in his child's manners.

  "You stole his remains," Ravager said. It wasn't a question. "You desecrated a hero."

  "I recycled a legend," the Archivist corrected. He picked up the two curved blades, testing their weight with a casual, terrifying familiarity. "He was rotting in a grave, Minka. Wasted potential. I gave him purpose again. Just like I gave you."

  Ravager’s yellow eyes narrowed. "You made me a monster."

  "I made you perfect," the Archivist snapped, his calm cracking for a fraction of a second. "And this is how you repay me? By breaking my door and bringing a stray dog into my lab?" He glanced at Knight with utter disdain.

  Knight bristled, raising her gun. "This 'stray' is about to put a bullet in your—"

  Ravager raised a hand, silencing her. "No. He is mine."

  The Archivist chuckled. It started low, a rumble in his stolen chest, and grew until it shook the glass tanks on the walls. "Yours? You think you can unmake me, child? I wrote your code."

  He dropped into a stance—the dual-blade stance of the Legend, perfect and fluid. But around him, the air began to scream. Purple lightning crackled from his skin, defying gravity, lifting the debris from the floor.

  "Let's see if the upgrade outshines the original," he whispered.

  Then, the world broke.

  He didn't move; he arrived. One moment he was by the table, the next he was inches from Ravager's face, the twin blades sweeping toward her neck in a scissor-cut that would have decapitated a Space Marine.

  Ravager didn't dodge. She caught the blades.

  Her synthetic hands clamped around the razor-sharp steel. Sparks showered the room as the kinetic energy of the impact shattered the floor beneath them, creating a crater five meters wide.

  "Adequate," the Archivist noted.

  His eyes flared. A blast of pure psychic force, heavy as a collapsing star, hammered into Ravager's chest.

  She was thrown backward, smashing through a workbench, through a support pillar, and slamming into the far wall with enough force to shake the city above.

  Knight fired—Bang! Bang! Bang!—three shots, dead center into the Archivist’s head.

  The bullets hit. The head snapped back. Blood sprayed.

  But the Archivist didn't fall. He simply tilted his head back forward. The bullet holes in his forehead bubbled with flesh and bone, knitting together in seconds. He spat out a flattened slug.

  "Rude," he muttered.

  He waved a hand at Knight. The gravity around her inverted instantly. She screamed as she was flung upward, slamming into the ceiling and pinned there by a crushing, invisible weight.

  "Now," the Archivist said, turning back to the pile of rubble where Ravager had landed. "Let's try that again."

  The rubble exploded.

  Ravager rose, glowing with green radiation. She looked at the Archivist, and for the first time, she looked angry.

  She clapped her hands together.

  The air in the room split. A shockwave of disassembly energy rippled out, turning the stone floor into dust, vaporizing the glass tanks. The Archivist threw up a psychic barrier, a shimmering wall of purple witch-fire, but the force of Ravager’s attack pushed him back, his boots carving deep trenches into the bedrock.

  They clashed in the center of the room. It wasn't a duel; it was a natural disaster confined to a box.

  Green lightning met purple fire. The sound was deafening, a continuous roar of tearing reality. Ravager warped the space, trying to crush him into a singularity. The Archivist countered, using his stolen body’s legendary speed to weave through the distortions, his blades slashing faster than the eye could follow, carving deep gouges into Ravager’s necrodermis skin.

  Her skin healed instantly. His wounds closed just as fast.

  Ravager punched him, her fist glowing with matter-anti-matter energy. The blow connected with his ribs, blowing a hole clean through his torso.

  The Archivist didn't even flinch. He laughed, blood bubbling in his throat, and slammed a palm onto her chest, unleashing a psychic storm that fried the sensors in the room and turned the air into plasma.

  The blast blew the roof off the vault.

  Knight, still pinned to the ceiling debris, fell as the gravity normalized for a split second, tumbling into the corner of the room. She looked up, gasping for air, and saw them.

  They were floating in the center of the ruined chamber, surrounded by a tornado of debris and energy. Two gods of their own making, locked in a stalemate of annihilation.

  "Is that all?" Ravager asked, her voice calm amidst the screaming wind.

  "I'm just warming up the body," the Archivist replied, wiping blood from his mouth as his chest knit itself back together.