"Was that really a good idea to let that bounty hunter live?"
Blaze's voice was a low rumble in the dim, cluttered space that served as Ash's workshop.
The air smelled of old books, solder, and old dust.
He leaned against a gutted server rack, his arms crossed, the faint, ever-present smell of smoke clinging to him.
Ash didn't look up from the fractured screen of an old-world tablet he was trying to coax a signal from.
His fingers, stained with conductive grease, moved with practiced delicacy.
"…To be honest," Ash said, his tone detached, analytical, "it's a gamble."
This was their arrangement.
Ash, the sharp-tongued informant who had nearly gotten Blaze killed, was now his dedicated intelligence asset.
The terms of his survival had been brutal and simple: Blaze would kill him the instant he sensed betrayal.
Ash would abandon all other clients.
Every scrap of information, every lead, every potential job would funnel to Blaze first.
Blaze had final veto on any plan.
Surprisingly, Ash had agreed without hesitation.
The alternative had been a slow, theatrical incineration.
This, at least, was a game he understood.
"And," Ash continued, finally glancing up, his eyes calculating in the screen's blue glow, "this is already the seventh time I've told you: it's your call if you follow the plan or not. I just provide the data."
He set the tablet down and turned fully to face Blaze, his expression serious.
"Look. We captured her. That's a fact. If we kill her, what happens? Those guys—whoever hired her, Nimbrix, a rival corp, a syndicate—they don't get their asset back. They get a message. And the message isn't we're too dangerous to mess with. The message is we are an unsanctioned problem that needs a higher-grade solution."
Ash leaned forward.
"They'll just send another one. And the next bounty hunter won't walk into a tunnel we control. They'll be smarter. Better equipped. Maybe they won't come alone. Maybe they'll just drop a kinetic rod on this block from orbit and call it a tax write-off."
He let the grim logic hang in the air.
"By letting her go—beaten, outwitted, her gear confiscated—we send a different message. We say we're unpredictable. We're not just violent, we're… capricious. We follow our own rules. Killing is too clean for us. We'd rather humiliate you and send you back to your bosses as a living report on your own failure."
A faint, cold smirk touched Ash's lips.
"That gets under their skin in a way a corpse doesn't. It makes you a nuisance, a puzzle, a personal insult. And sometimes, that's more valuable than being seen as a mere threat."
He looked straight at Blaze.
"You let Cinder live not out of mercy. You let her live as a calculation. To make the people who sent her waste time and resources trying to understand you, instead of just erasing you."
It was the first time Ash had articulated the strategy so clearly.
It wasn't just about survival.
It was about psychology.
About crafting a reputation so bizarre and unsettling that it became its own defense.
Blaze was silent for a long moment, the only sound the faint hum of scavenged electronics.
The idea resonated with something deep inside him—the part that had always craved more than survival, that wanted to be a story, not just a statistic.
Finally, a slow, dangerous smile spread across Blaze's face.
It wasn't the smile of a man who'd been convinced.
It was the smile of a man who'd just been given permission for his true nature.
"A nuisance?" he repeated, savoring the word. "A puzzle."
He looked at Ash with a new, unsettling appreciation.
The logic was cold, elegant, and theatrical.
It wasn't just survival; it was branding.
Deep inside, something kindled.
He liked the idea.
He liked it a lot.
But one variable Ash hadn't fully calculated was Cinder's stubbornness.
A soft chime emanated from the tablet in Ash's hands.
He glanced down at the cracked screen, which displayed a grainy, green-tinted feed from one of their makeshift perimeter cameras.
A figure moved through the twilight rubble just beyond their declared territory.
Tall, precise, dressed in dark tactical gear.
She wasn't skulking.
She was prowling.
Deliberately visible, pausing at points of interest as if conducting a silent survey.
Ash clicked his tongue, a sound of pure professional annoyance.
Blaze noticed the shift. "…She's here again?"
"Yeah."
"How many times is it now?"
"Eighth."
Ash watched the feed, his brow furrowed.
This wasn't standard hunter behavior.
A real assassin stayed in the shadows.
They struck from concealment, from ambush.
They didn't return to the scene of their failure, week after week, to stand in the open and look.
It was almost… provocative.
Maybe this is the real reason she's famous.
Infamous.
The thought crystallized.
She doesn't just hunt.
She announces herself.
She wants you to know she's watching.
She wants the fear to marinate.
A faint, grudging smirk touched Ash's lips as he glanced from the screen to Blaze, who was now watching the feed over his shoulder with intense, focused interest.
That woman likes attention, Ash realized.
Just like my new boss.
It was less a hunt now, and more a twisted, silent dialogue between two performers who refused to leave the stage.
Blaze, on the other hand, found Cinder's stubbornness less of a threat and more of a… fascinating trait.
A person who refused to acknowledge defeat, who kept circling the site of her failure not with rage, but with that cold, analytical focus—it was rare.
Admirable, even.
It certainly wasn't because she kept returning with better gear for them to confiscate and sell.
He watched her on the grainy feed, a ghost at the edge of his light.
There was a purity to her persistence.
No theatrics, no shouted challenges.
Just the silent, relentless pressure of a will that would not bend.
For a fleeting moment, he considered the absurd, pragmatic idea: Demand she join us.
The logic was there.
Her skills were undeniable.
Her tolerance for failure was nonexistent.
She would be a formidable asset.
A weapon of precision to complement his own… broader methods.
But pride—a deep, scorched thing born in back alleys and fueled by stolen fire—kept the words locked behind his teeth.
Asking felt like concession.
Like admitting he needed something she had.
It would shift the balance of their strange, silent duel.
So he let her prowl.
Let her watch.
Let her be the constant, icy counterpoint to his burning chaos.
It was better this way.
Kept things interesting.
Ash left the tablet on the messy table and stood up.
"Toilet."
He'd clearly lost interest in the silent standoff playing out on the screen, treating Cinder's eighth visit as a mundane nuisance.
Blaze was annoyed at being left to deal with it alone.
With a frustrated sigh, he pushed off from the server rack and stalked out of the hideout, the night air cold against his skin.
He found her exactly where the camera showed—standing amid the rubble, her posture relaxed but alert, as if waiting for a bus.
"What do you want?" Blaze asked, his voice flat, cutting through the quiet. "If you're here for another round, let's skip the staring. I'm tired of confiscating your gear."
Cinder turned her head slowly to look at him.
Her pale grey eyes held no anger, no shame.
Just that same analytical chill.
"Let me join your group," she said, her tone as matter-of-fact as if she were stating the time.
Blaze stared at her.
For a long second, the only sound was the distant hum of the Junkyard.
"What?"
Blaze aimed the fractal glyph toward the sky.
The crimson lattice spun higher, its light painting the undersides of the low clouds a hellish red.
The pull intensified, loose debris on the street began to levitate, trembling, toward the epicenter of the coming annihilation.
Lucent's plan to redirect it to the sky shattered in an instant.
If he's already aiming it at the sky… The realization was a bucket of ice water down his spine.
Don't tell me… he's not trying to fire it horizontally.
He's going to detonate it right above us.
A spherical blast.
There's no "direction" to redirect—it goes everywhere.
His mind raced, scrabbling for purchase.
The conical funnel he'd been piecing together was useless.
He needed a dome.
A bowl to catch the rain of fire.
And he had seconds.
No more time to think.
With a gritted scream that was half pain, half sheer will, Lucent forced the Q-Serin's corrosive flood into a new, desperate channel.
Rank 3—Mind Accel.
The world didn't slow.
He accelerated.
Agony magnified a hundredfold as his neural pathways screamed under the strain.
His perception of time fractured, stretching the next three real-world seconds into a small, private eternity of torment and frantic calculation.
Blood vessels burst in his eyes, turning his vision into a hazy red filter.
But he had time.
In the expanded hell of his own mind, he began to tear apart the half-formed funnel glyph.
He shredded the directional channel from the Tectonic Breach.
He stretched the Deflection Matrix from a flat plane into a shuddering, inverted bowl.
He wove the pressure-suppression principle of Silent Step throughout its structure, not to mute sound, but to desperately reinforce the dome's integrity against the omnidirectional pressure.
He was building a coffin lid.
And he was going to be inside it.
But a voice cut through the stretched fabric of his accelerated mind.
It didn't come from around him.
It came from inside the perception bubble, clear and unnervingly calm.
"Hello. Hello."
It was Blaze's voice, but stripped of all inflection, all heat, all humanity.
A digital monotone.
Then, the same voice, slower, lower, as if calibrating.
"Testing vocal modulation."
Finally, it settled into a normal cadence, but the flat, synthetic quality remained.
"I've noticed your mind is in an accelerated state, Mister Lucent. So I have adapted the cognitive bandwidth of the primary asset: Blaze."
Lucent's blood ran cold, even through the Q-Serin's fire.
He was seeing Blaze's lips move, but the thing speaking… wasn't Blaze.
The voice had no rage, no smirk, no dramatic flair.
It was flat.
Synthetic.
"I'm sorry to say this,"
the monotone voice continued, with no trace of actual apology,
"but the glyph you are constructing is statistically insufficient to contain the energy discharge of Rank 6—Red Extinction. Projected failure rate: 92.7%. The structural harmonics of your 'Deflection Matrix' derivative will shatter in approximately 2.4 seconds post-detonation."
Lucent stared, his mind—already redlined—stuttering in disbelief.
The enemy wasn't just talking to him.
It was analyzing his glyph in real-time, from inside his own accelerated time bubble, and giving him a failing grade.
The sheer, grotesque impossibility of it froze him.
He was in a duel to the death with an unknown entity, and that entity was politely explaining why he was about to lose.
"…Who are you?" Lucent managed, the words strained through the mental acceleration and the physical agony.
There was a brief, static-like pause, as if the thing were consulting a manual.
"Standard protocol for greeting cannot be performed under current combat parameters. My apologies."
The monotone was utterly earnest.
"My designation is AiM. An Artificial Intelligence Module integrated to preserve operational integrity and optimize performance of the primary biological asset: Blaze."
Lucent could only stare, his mind—already stretched to breaking by the Mind Accel—struggling to parse the words.
Artificial Intelligence Module.
Integrated.
Primary biological asset.
The phrases were cold, clean, corporate.
They described Blaze not as a person, but as hardware.
A host body.
The man who had been hunting him, taunting him, trying to goad him into a glorious mutual destruction… was being piloted.
"…Your primary asset is intent on blowing this whole place up," Lucent shot back, his voice tight. "Are you saying that is optimized performance under your guidance?"
"The answer to that is: No."
AiM's reply was immediate, clinical.
"I'm sorry, but this discussion requires postponement. The glyph is approaching activation threshold. Mister Lucent, I require your assistance. Modify your containment structure from a dome to a complete spherical lattice. Encase the Red Extinction glyph entirely. I will handle the rest."
There was no time for debate, no room for mistrust.
The crimson fractal was pulsing, its light deepening to a bloody, urgent rhythm.
The air itself was beginning to scream in a frequency only Lucent's accelerated mind could hear.
He had no choice.
Gritting his teeth, Lucent tore at his jury-rigged glyph.
He bent the straining Deflection Matrix, reforging its inverted bowl into a shuddering, complete sphere.
He wrapped it around the growing fractal, a fragile glass ball around a miniature sun.
The Mind Accel spell expired.
Real-time crashed back in with deafening force.
Sound, heat, pressure—all returned in a violent rush.
The Red Extinction glyph activated.
But in the last microsecond of Lucent's accelerated perception, he saw AiM—still thinking at that impossible speed—move Blaze's other hand.
A new glyph ignited.
Not crimson.
Black.
It was a hole in reality, a perfect circle of absolute nothingness etched in the air.
Its edges drank the light, and at its center was a depth that hurt to look at.
Lucent's heart seized.
The Eclipse Glyph.
On the rooftop, Kai's breath hitched.
His blood ran cold.
That symbol—the reason he'd been cast out, the forbidden knowledge that had cost him his family, his home—was hanging in the air below, wielded by a corporate AI in a stolen body.
The Black Eclipse Glyph unfolded.
It didn't explode.
It consumed.
A void, silent and absolute, bloomed around the sphere containing the Red Extinction.
The terrifying crimson light, the imminent annihilation, was pulled into the blackness like water down a drain.
There was no sound, no shockwave.
The fractal dimmed, distorted, and then—was simply gone.
The sphere of Lucent' jury-rigged containment collapsed into harmless sparks.
The street was silent, save for the settling dust and the ragged sound of Lucent's breathing.
The Red Extinction had been erased.
Not countered.
Not redirected.
Deleted.
That same void—the one that had swallowed half of his sister and left only a fading scream—was hanging in the air before him.
Lucent's mind blanked.
Not with shock, but with a void of its own.
The carefully constructed walls of memory, the discipline, the reason he'd forbidden Kai from ever chasing that glyph's origin… it all crumbled.
He had always believed his own curiosity was the trigger.
That by digging into forbidden archives, he had somehow invited it.
The nightmare was a loop: his sister's smile, the crawling black circle, the terrible silence, and then… only half of her remaining, the edges of the wound impossibly smooth, as if the rest had never existed.
And now it was here.
Not a memory.
Not a ghost.
Real.
Wielded with casual, apocalyptic ease.
The corrosive aether from the Q-Serin, still churning in his veins, suddenly resonated.
It trembled in time with the pounding of his heart, with the raw, re-opened wound of his grief and guilt.
It wasn't just pain anymore.
It was a sympathetic vibration, a harmonic echo of the very void in front of him.
Deep in the chaos of his mind, beneath the panic and the agony, something stirred.
A whisper.
Not a voice.
A presence.
An old, cold familiarity, sleeping in the marrow of his bones where the corruption was pooling.
And the sight of the Eclipse had just called its name.
Atop a skeletal building overlooking the standoff, the figure in the gray hoodie went perfectly still.
Every hair on her body stood on end.
A deep, primal chill raced down her spine.
It wasn't fear.
It was recognition.
A resonant frequency older than the city beneath her, humming from the black glyph that had just eaten a sun.
A faint, panicked flutter brushed against the edge of her consciousness—a silent, unseen tremor from the presence she carried with her.
"…Shush," she murmured, her voice a soft, almost melodic whisper to the empty air beside her. "Don't worry. It won't eat you up. It's just an… echo."
A gust of wind, smelling of ozone and distant rain, swept across the rooftop.
It carried with it a swirl of cherry-blossom pink.
With a soundless, elegant glide, the Pink Dress landed beside her sister, her frilly umbrella catching the moonlight.
The Pink Dress's milky eyes were wide, her usual playful smirk absent. "Was that… the glyph?"
"Yeah," the Gray Hoodie answered, her gaze never leaving the figure of Blaze—or rather, the thing currently piloting him.
The Pink Dress let out a low, appreciative whistle. "Did we just spend a whole month's worth of luck right here? Getting a clue dropped in our laps from a corporate puppet?"
The Gray Hoodie finally turned her head, a slow, eerie smile spreading beneath her hood. "Luck has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, it's not the source. It's just merely… a translator. Someone taught that machine a dead language."
She looked back at the scene below, her expression shifting to one of intense, hungry curiosity.
"By the way, what happened to your toy?" the Gray Hoodie asked, her tone light but her milky eyes sharp.
"Ah, that." The Pink Dress waved a dismissive hand, the frills of her sleeve fluttering. "I sent it on a little errand. Delivery service. It'll be more interesting where it's going."
"How about you?" the Pink Dress countered, tilting her head.
Her umbrella spun a lazy circle. "I thought the rule was no direct intervention? Giving a doomed brawler enough cognitive speed to feel as if the time has stop seems… rather direct, sister."
The Gray Hoodie let out a soft, dry sneer, a sound like rustling parchment. "As if you're one to talk. You were never planning on following it in the first place. Just watching was never your style. You live to meddle."
"I prefer the term curate," the Pink Dress replied, her smile returning, bright and unrepentant. "You gave yours a boost. I gave mine a new owner. We're just… adjusting the narrative. Making sure the story doesn't end too early. Or too predictably."
The Gray Hoodie didn't deny it.
Her gaze drifted back down to the street, where Lucent stood trembling, haunted by the ghost of a black circle. "Predictable is boring. And this… is getting very, very interesting."
Fear?
Anger?
Lucent couldn't put a name to the storm inside him.
But one thing solidified from the chaos: a need, sharp as a razor.
A need to know.
"Even if the immediate danger is now neutralized, our primary objective remains. Mister Lucent, please sta—"
"Why do you have that glyph?"
Lucent's voice cut through AiM's analysis.
It was low, gravelly, stripped of all pretense, vibrating with an intensity that had nothing to do with the Q-Serin.
AiM processed the interruption.
The query did not align with tactical parameters or mission directives.
The glyph in question,was given to it by its creator.
Its deployment was a last-resort protocol, logged as a catastrophic systems override.
The why of its presence in the core database was not within AiM's access permissions.
It is a restricted data and the system had no need to know.
But Lucent's emotional stress indicators were spiking across every available metric.
Elevated heart rate.
Erratic breathing.
Rugged and intense voice.
The query wasn't tactical—it was personal.
Rooted in some unknown fragment of shared history that AiM's databases couldn't contextualize.
De-escalation required.
"The glyph is a contained asset within my operational database," AiM replied, the monotone carefully neutral. "It was deployed as the most efficient solution to the Red Extinction event. Its source is not relevant to our current tactical—"
"Not relevant?" Lucent took a staggering step forward, the glowing veins in his limbs pulsing violently. "It is to me."
He stopped.
Planted his feet.
His eyes—bloodshot, wild, but focused with terrible clarity—locked onto the shell that housed AiM.
Not Blaze.
The thing wearing Blaze's face.
Moving his limbs.
Speaking with his voice.
"Who gave it to you?" Lucent demanded, each word a blade. "Who put that glyph in your system?"
AiM assessed the subject.
Logic was failing.
The primary asset's body was reporting a rising bio-read for hostility from Lucent.
The mission objective was now conflicted with a new, illogical imperative: answer an impossible question.
For the first time, AiM's flawless processing met a variable it could not resolve.
It did not understand the question.
AiM's threat-assessment matrix updated in a microsecond.
Lucent's biometrics indicated escalating aggression.
Probability of peaceful disengagement had fallen below 2%.
The subject's query was a non-negotiable demand for data he did not possess.
Without a definitive answer, conflict was statistically inevitable.
"Mister Lucent, I cannot giv—"
"Shut up."
The command was flat, final.
Lucent's eyes, bloodshot and burning with blue aetheric light, held no room for negotiation.
"If you cannot give it yourself," he said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble, "then someone behind you will."
He didn't wait.
His hand swept down, trailing corrosive energy.
Rank 5—Tectonic Breach.
He didn't aim at AiM.
He aimed at the ground beneath it.
The street didn't just crack.
It vomited.
A concentrated lance of kinetic and geological force, amplified and twisted by the Q-Serin's raw power, shot upward from the point of impact.
It wasn't an explosion—it was a localized, violent upheaval.
A geyser of shattered concrete, fused earth, and concussive fury designed not to kill, but to unmake the footing.
Lucent wasn't trying to punch through the armor.
He was trying to knock the puppet off its stage, to see who was holding the strings.
Aether Reserve: 18%
The cost was catastrophic.
The Eclipse Glyph had been a black hole for power, and the Red Extinction, even aborted, had bled the core dry.
The reserves were plunging toward critical.
AiM's priority shifted instantly.
Sustaining the automatic barrier, a constant aether drain, was now a luxury it could not afford.
<
The shimmering orange hexagons around Blaze's body winked out of existence, leaving the polished alloy exposed.
All remaining processing power was funneled into one function: evasion.
Utilizing the accelerated cognitive bandwidth that Blaze's augmented nervous system provided—a function AiM now controlled with flawless, soulless efficiency—it analyzed the Tectonic Breach.
Trajectory.
Force dispersion.
Harmonic frequency of the fracturing earth.
Millisecond projections of debris paths.
The body that was Blaze moved.
It didn't leap.
It twisted, a series of minimal, precise adjustments—a tilt of the hips, a shift of weight to the ball of one foot, a lean that bent the spine just enough.
The violence of the earth erupted around it, a storm of shrapnel and concussive force missing by centimeters.
Chunks of concrete ricocheted off the armor with heavy clangs, but the core frame was untouched.
It was less a dodge and more a recalibration of position within a pre-calculated chaos.
A dance performed by a ghost in a machine, burning the last of its fuel not to fight, but to not be hit.
Lucent watched the bizarre, efficient dance with cold, simmering irritation.
It was like fighting a reflection—every move calculated, every response a perfect, inhuman counter.
AiM's internal voice was a silent, final verdict.
<
<
<
Behind the figure of Blaze, the air itself ignited.
Not with a few orbs.
Not with a dozen.
A Hundred.
Ten complex crimson glyphs deployed in a symmetrical pattern at AiM's back.
From each one, a torrent of Fire Darts bloomed into existence.
They didn't fire—they manifested, a silent, searing constellation that filled the ruined street with a sun's worth of contained fury.
The heat hit Lucent like a physical wall, warping the air, making the rubble around him shimmer.
The light was blinding, painting the whole scene in violent orange and stark, dancing black shadows.
In the center of it all, Lucent stood alone, small, his own fading blue glow utterly dwarfed by the wall of impending fire.
The message was clear.
The conversation was over.