Her taunt and shout were not born of false bravado. She wasn't going for a sneak attack—no walking towards them, no cautious approach. The play was to act arrogant, to surprise them with her gains, her skills, her Class, and her fully-functional Orc body against their malfunctioning cybernetics.

  Jake was the only one who'd been a real threat, she reasoned. If they couldn't level and had no Class, the best way to make him—to make all of them—make mistakes was to act too cocky.

  "Miri? Give me my odds and try to scan for them."

  "Too many variables for certainty. Tentative chance to beat three D-class threats... 95%. Nobody is in my scan range at the moment, Phantom. Just some hiding villagers. Heartbeats indicate a strong fear response."

  Good. That was what she liked. Estimates based on bad data had burned her in the past, but it always felt better to make sure you gambled in a smart way.

  "Keep scanning for any new arrivals until I cancel the order."

  Jess cracked her neck and stepped forward, letting her full height and bulk fill the village path. The burning house cast flickering shadows across her green skin and scarred face. "You hear me, Jake? Or did those fancy cybernetic ears glitch out too?"

  Her enhanced vision scanned the scene in a heartbeat. Roxy was on a rooftop, flanking the main road, a sleek modern composite bow in her hands—too sleek, too clean for this world. Bad. They’re amateurs by my standards, but not newbies. Where’d they get that? Litos, bless his reckless heart, was peeking from behind a stack of firewood. He seemed to recognize the bow, his face a mask of horror.

  Jake emerged from the shadow of the longhouse, dragging a massive, limp form behind him by one leg. It was a beastman.

  This world had furry beastmen, she stared at it, more baffled by the fur and bear looking being than that Jake had overcome the local power house and likely given his bow to the red haired bitch.

  A mountain of muscle and fur, now still. Jake dropped the leg, the thud final in the tense silence.

  "VILLAGE HEAD! WHAT DID YOU DO TO UNCLE VORGAS?" Litos screamed, his voice breaking.

  Jake’s head swiveled, his cybernetic eye a baleful red lens. "Jess. Tell the brat to shut up, or I make him."

  "Litos," Jess said, her voice a low, iron command without looking away from Jake. "Run. You promised you would. Don't come back before evening."

  The boy trembled, his eyes darting from Jess to the monstrous form of Vorgas.

  "NOW!" she roared.

  He fled, a small blur into the maze of huts. Roxy tracked him with her bow but didn't loose. Her priority was clear.

  Jess pushed forward, putting herself squarely between Jake and the boy’s escape route. "One on one, Jake. Orc to gearbox. Let's see if your platinum augment can handle a relic."

  Jake’s grin was a jagged, predatory thing. His cybernetic eye flickered, a jagged red line of corruption cutting through his HUD. "Should’ve known you’d adapt like a roach." He rolled his shoulders; servos whined in protest. The plasma igniters on his fists crackled to life, sputtering and uneven, casting a sickly blue light on the dirt. "Fine. Let's see if that thing you’ve become can bleed."

  He lunged. It was a blur of augmented speed, a piston-drive straight aimed to crush her sternum. A day ago, it would have shattered her.

  Jess didn’t dodge. She met him.

  Too Close For Comfort. The world seemed to thicken around her. The lethal corona of his plasma fist wavered, its energy bleeding into the air before impact.

  Her own fist, wrapped in tattered biosuit, met his in a concussive CRACK that echoed through the square. Dust exploded from the ground at their feet. Jake’s expression of confident fury froze, then cracked into pure shock.

  She wasn't just holding. She was pushing back.

  His servos screamed. Her Orc muscles, denser and stronger after the level-up, corded and bunched. With a grating of metal, she forced his arm down, stepping into his guard.

  "This goes way beyond your file!" he grunted, his free hand coming around in a wicked, plasma-coated backfist.

  Jess took it on her raised forearm. The biosuit blackened and smoked, and the skin beneath blistered, but the force was halved, blunted. It stung. It didn't break.

  "You've seen nothing yet," she growled.

  Bash.

  The skill ignited in her core. Her next punch, a brutal uppercut aimed at his jaw, carried the weight of a falling starship.

  Jake’s head snapped back with a metallic clang. He staggered, his HUD flickering wildly. A thin line of hydraulic fluid and nano-dust hissed from a ruptured seal in his neck.

  "You always think with your fists, Phantom!" Roxy’s voice rang out from the rooftop. "The reports were right!"

  An arrow whistled down. Not plasma. Physical. Fast. It was a black streak—tungsten, Miri supplied instantly. It struck Jess high on the temple with the sound of a hammer hitting an anvil.

  She saw a flash of white, felt a hot line of blood immediately well and trickle down her green skin. The impact rocked her, a ringing filling her ears.

  But she didn't fall. The arrowhead had pierced skin, scraped bone, and stuck. It hadn't penetrated her skull.

  Roxy’s triumphant shout died in her throat. "HAHAHA— wait, what? How?!"

  "The green bitch went crazy! Did she buy some noble’s lavishly modified body behind our backs?" Xero’s voice came from somewhere to the left, near a smoking hut.

  "Seems my fists think better than your head," Jess spat, copper-green blood staining her teeth. She ignored the arrow, a mere distraction. Jake was recovering, his systems rebooting.

  Her eyes caught a flicker of movement in a doorway—a small, soot-streaked face, a little girl hiding behind a shattered barrel. Terrified.

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  Rage, cold and clean, washed through Jess. This was the "securing the area" she’d been afraid of.

  She closed with Jake again. He was ready this time, a flurry of engineered strikes—jabs, hooks, knee drives. Each one landed, but each was blunted, softened by her passive and body. They hurt. They bruised. They did not cripple.

  Her own style was cruder, heavier. She wasn't trying to out-point him. She was trying to dismantle him.

  Bash recharged. She feinted low, then drove her forehead into his already-damaged jaw. Cartilage crunched. He reeled.

  "What did you find out there, Jess?" he snarled, spitting coolant and blood. "What did you gain?"

  Not falling for it. No monologue. She went for the next punch, aiming to cave in his ribs.

  Before she could connect, the calculated curiosity vanished from Jake's eyes, replaced by cold focus. Fake. I knew it.

  "Nice try," she muttered.

  Jake, still staggering, made a sharp, deliberate hand gesture to the side.

  Something small and cylindrical rolled out from behind the house where Xero’s voice had been. It was matte gray, unassuming.

  A stun grenade. Low-tech. Reliable.

  Jess had a half-second. She could dive away, expose her back to Jake and Roxy. Or…

  She braced, turned her head slightly, and squeezed her eyes shut.

  Too Close For Comfort.

  The world didn't just thicken; it concentrated. The grenade’s blast was not just light and sound, but concussive force. The flash was a hammer-blow of photons against her lids. The bang was a physical wall hitting her entire body.

  It deafened her. It blinded her. It sent her stumbling back a step, disoriented, the world a roaring, white-grey mess.

  But she didn't drop. She didn't seize. Her nervous system, shielded by the metaphysical buffer of her skill, absorbed the worst of it and shook it off. The ringing in her ears from the arrow was now a symphony, but her balance held.

  Through the blur, she saw Jake’s triumphant smirk dissolve into disbelief. He’d counted on that moment of vulnerability. He’d gotten a heartbeat, not an opening.

  And in that heartbeat of his surprise, Jess charged.

  He was still mid-stride, coming in for what he thought would be the finishing blow on a stunned opponent. He met a hurricane.

  She plowed into him, all her weight and enhanced strength behind her shoulder. They crashed through the wattle-and-daub wall of a hut in an explosion of dust and splinters, landing in a tangled heap of limbs and wreckage inside.

  Now it was dark, close, and utterly her element.

  The interior of the hut was reduced to a cloud of choking dust and splintered wood. Jess landed atop Jake, the impact driving the air from his lungs in a synthetic wheeze. Her knees pinned his glitching plasma arms to the dirt floor.

  "This is no one on one, Jake," she growled, driving a fist into his armored ribcage. The composite plating held, but the servos beneath shrieked in protest. "Did nobody teach you to count?"

  He bucked, trying to throw her. "As if you're for fairplay, Phantom!"

  "Surprisingly, I'm fair." She shifted her weight, avoiding a desperate knee strike. "Or I have been so far."

  His cybernetic eye flared, scanning her face point-blank. She saw the jagged red diagnostics reflected in its lens. He was looking for a weakness, a seam in her biosuit, a tell. He wouldn't find one. Her advantage wasn't gear. It was integration.

  Bash was ready again. The cool potential of it sat in her core. But she needed precision. The chaos of the collapse had bought her a moment alone with him. She had to use it.

  "Miri," she thought, her eyes never leaving Jake's straining face. "Overlay the break points on his joints. My cooldown is ready. It's just us two now."

  Across the room, Jake snarled at the empty air. "Ai! Film it! Encrypt a data packet and send it out! Record her insubordination!"

  Jess laughed, a short, harsh sound. "You want to file a report? Threaten me with it? Go ahead. I don't care for corporate. I quit the mercenary thing. I found a new game."

  "Game?!" he spat. "Ai, give me something on her! Anything!"

  "You can't solve what you don't understand," Jess said, her voice dropping to a venomous calm. "No matter the computation power. Standard spec AI is always an issue with cybernetics like yours. Always afraid it hijacks your body, so you keep it factory fresh. Not that it knows enough to bail you out."

  "Phantom, I have it."

  Miri’s voice was a soft, certain whisper in her mind. A schematic, beautiful in its clarity, superimposed itself over Jake’s thrashing form. Green highlights glowed at critical stress points: the reinforced polymer elbow joint, already leaking fluid; the primary actuator bundle in his right thigh; the magnetic clutch in his left shoulder.

  Jess just smiled.

  She didn't aim for his face. She drove the stiffened fingers of her right hand, all her Orc strength behind them, into the glowing green point just below his left elbow.

  There was a wet, crunching pop, not of bone, but of carbon-fiber and hydraulic lines failing. The plasma on that fist died instantly. Jake’s scream was part pain, part system-failure alarm.

  "XERO! ROXY! THIS IS AN ORDER! SUPPORT NOW!" he bellowed, his voice raw.

  No response came through the dust. The hut ruins were a perfect obstruction. To help him now, they’d have to wade into the dark, blind, against an enemy who had just dismantled their leader. Jess knew their calculus. Her smile grew wider.

  "Whelp," she said, circling his now-limp left side. "You should have gone with me when the bird came. Smartest guys are often the biggest morons."

  Bash.

  Her next kick wasn't a sweep. It was a piston-driven stomp, curving in to strike not the kneecap, but the side of the joint, where Miri’s overlay showed a dense cluster of artificial ligaments. The impact was brutal, a sound of shearing metal and ceramics. His leg buckled sideways at a nauseating angle.

  He collapsed, scrambling back on his one good arm, his back hitting the collapsed remains of a clay oven. "We can split the reward! We have the tech! We are the best bet to get you off this planet and back to orbit!"

  He was looking around, his good eye wide. Looking for an escape that didn't exist. He was realizing it now.

  "I no longer care, Jake," Jess said, advancing slowly. "I'll figure it out on my own. Not going to give you a second chance. Being too soft on your enemies is being harsh on yourself."

  "The money! I'll give you half of my part!" Panic edged his voice. Good. Real or fake?

  "Fake panic," she declared.

  His one functional arm shot forward. A telescoping mono-blade, hidden in his palm, snicked out with lethal speed, aiming for her jugular.

  She was ready. Her left hand, moving faster than he could track with his glitching systems, caught his wrist an inch from her throat. Her fingers, strong enough to crush stone, tightened. The metal of his forearm casing groaned, then cracked. The blade retracted with a pathetic whirr.

  She hauled him up, his feet dangling, using one hand clamped around his neck. He was heavier than any natural man, a lump of alloy and synthetic muscle. She lifted him until they were eye-to-eye.

  "Any last words?"

  With a final groan of failing timber, the last standing section of the roof gave way. Daylight and swirling dust crashed in, exposing them in the center of the wreckage like actors on a ruined stage.

  She was still making up her mind. A part of her, the pragmatic Phantom, whispered that he was right. They had the orbital tech, three more AI chips. Xero was the most skilled person in anything from digital warfare to terraforming. Jake had the highest rank with the conglomerate and the knowledge of the ship's access codes. Her new path of levels, classes and skills was powerful, but unknown.

  "The Skyborn Fist of Corporate," she mused, looking at his dangling, broken form. "Black-grade mercenary."

  He got her. It was a decision she might regret, but death was a finality she didn't have enough information for, not yet. Can't close or lose access to them.

  "Miri, can you sneak a data package into his damaged systems? Just an insurance. A brief disable trigger."

  "Yes, Phantom. It would last for seconds and it will require another moment of direct contact with the broken components."

  She threw him. He crashed into the remains of the far wall and slid down into a heap of splinters.

  "I'll go get the other two," she said, brushing dust from her shoulders. "Don't run away."

  Not that he could. She walked over and, with a final moment of contact, delivered one more precise, Bash-fueled stomp to his remaining functional knee. The finality of the crunch was answer enough.

  She stepped out of the shattered hut, squinting in the sudden light. Roxy and Xero were there, but they were farther back than they'd been when the fight started, near the village's smoking gate. They hadn't moved to help. They'd been waiting to see who walked out.

  Jake, Jake, Jake, she thought, a cold pity in her heart. What did you think? That they'd come for a heroic rescue?

  They were survivors. Just like her. And they'd just seen which way the wind was blowing.

  "Miri, how long until the data on the target is unlocked?"

  "Twenty minutes, Phantom. I register life-signs. Thirty individuals."

  "From the east? Returning hunters or help?"

  "Negative. From the west gate—the direction of the wall and the cities the civilian adolescent claimed exist there. Unconfirmed data but judged credible."

  "IN THE NAME OF THE CITADEL OF RIAS AND THE SENTINEL CORPS, SHOW YOURSELVES, CRIMINALS!" A booming voice echoed through the settlement.