His hood felt… wrong, like hitting a coarse, jarring note in a song that had already seeped into your bones.
I climbed up the portal. I waved. He didn’t—but his gaze lingered. Recognition?
At this point, I was certain he was one of them—almost 80 percent.
PAT! Alyce slapped my hand down. It stung a little.
Wow. That was _impressively_ stupid, trying to alert the whole world that you have zero experience.
Don’t look the devil in the eye. Almost everybody knows this.
Green Leaf—Blondy pouted.
Piggy buzzed like a broken file, his voice loud and shrill. “Oh my GOD, did you actually do it?! Do you _want_ to get us killed?! The next thing you know, he tunes his coordinator to our location and tries to kill us. GREAT.”
“Have some balls.” Ratz turned his wrist. “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
I raised an eyebrow. How does that relate to what we’re saying?
"He has no coordinator," I said matter-of-factly, pointing at the hooded figure.
“He could be hiding it,” Piggy retorted.
Coordinators were tuned to beacons outside the walls, preventing random teleportation into space. If you used the teleportation rings legally, you wouldn’t need one.
You had to be brave or really stupid to do that—you would wind up in any place that “fate decided.”
Blondy adjusted her glasses like she was copying me. “Fate? What a load of crap.”
Alyce adjusts her waistband. ''But I get what you’re…''
The place around me blurred like water disturbed on a lake.
Time didn’t wait for our conversation to end. We were thrust in.
---
My gun disturbed the silence.
The magazine slid into place with a cold, metallic _click_. A sharp pull—the slide snapped back, exposing the chamber’s yawning mouth before slamming shut.
Seven moved as one, boots sinking into the damp loam. Flickering torchlight cast long shadows that danced like restless spirits. The moon was a weak silver eye behind a quilt of storm clouds.
I adjusted my glasses, pushing them higher up on my nose. The frames felt heavier.
“Imagine if we slayed a dragon,” the twins whispered, moving in unison.
“Even Suspended would be looking for us.” Their matching dark cloaks barely made a sound as they stepped carefully.
“Slayed dragons? What world do you kids live in?” Blondy burst into laughter, forgetting she looked just like them. She clutched her enormous breasts before doubling over as if she feared gravity would lug them off her chest. When she stood up straight, there were tears streaming down her face.
“Let’s just kill the crudes—the goblin types—and leave. I’ve been studying some chemistry.” She smiled. “Okay, so technically, the media makes it seem like since the laws changed during the wars, no one can study them. Well, there is some truth to that.” She adjusted the straps of her leather armor and grinned. “I am a statistical exception. I think I might be able to make something really nice, sell it, and invest in my business before I blow.”
“We’d better find something worth it. I didn’t come all this way for scraps.” One of the twins twirled his dagger expertly between his fingers, the blade gleaming in the dim light.
“Shut up. Why are you all so loud? Focus.”
_Ratz, you’re loud, too._ Nothing had happened since we arrived. No insane display of skill. Everyone was normal. Had I just wasted my money hiring these people?
Ratz moved like a machine. His hands flexed, servos grinding, metal plating sealing into place. No hesitation. Just the hum of hydraulics and the scent of oil.
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He rambled, then shut up: “Look, get in, get out. We break them down, just like we did last time.”
“I heard the last group screamed—”
“Not all at once. In pieces.” Piggy gulped.
“Cowards scream. We don’t.”
“Ratz, just shut up. Look around.”
Alyce’s laughter was a soft, unsettling thing, like a breeze stirring an old, forgotten grave. She didn’t need to yell to make you feel the weight of her words.
Red dot. Eyes were looking at us. Surrounding us.
“Well.” Her red hair fell to the side. “Isn’t it interesting . . . the way you cling to hope, like it’s some kind of shield? How quaint.”
Redline injector flooding into her bloodstream.
The twins slid into their suits in unison, movements smooth and effortless. As if the battle wasn’t happening around them but was a performance they had rehearsed.
Ratz raised his arm. The two blondes—their spelltech glowing. My gun leveling down.
I kept my pace steady, deliberately calculated. Too slow, and I’d give myself away. Too fast, and I’d look like a fool. Every step measured. Every breath, a thought ahead.
A part of my form was being used from the moment we blinked, my mind living fifteen seconds in the future. But my body was fully in the present—so much computational power was being used to keep at it and think normally.
A blur of fangs, dark and slick, flashed in the night. Its red eyes burned like embers, a hunting beast in the dark. The air split with the crack of my railgun—_Bang!_—and the creature’s skull shattered. But there were more. Always more.
Ratz was a blur—steel and fury. He struck first, his metallic fist connecting with a beast mid-pounce. The creature crumpled, but another, faster one lunged. Its claws scraped through the gap in his armor. Metal groaned. A piece of it fell away—his arm was hanging on by ligaments. The beast didn’t stop.
“Ahhh.”
The beast’s chest caved inward with a sickening _crunch_. He whirled, caught another by the throat, and squeezed. Hydraulic pressure. The spine snapped like dry twigs.
The twins had already vanished into motion, their robotic suits shifting, blurring them into streaks of blue plasma. One slid under a beast’s swipe, twin blades slicing through tendon and fur. The other leapt, twisting midair, firing a high-voltage round that hit center mass. The creature convulsed, fried from the inside out.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Their suits were already breaking apart.
Alyce’s smile never wavered, cold as it was. She reached into the oversized pouch at her side, her fingers brushing past the shimmering rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three, pressing them into her injector. Her eyes gleamed with something far too dark to call enjoyment.
Her veins pulsed, BTD surging through her bloodstream
Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. She was screaming, rising, screaming—figure one crumpled, fading, twitching. 2. 3. Figure ten is the same. Eighty the same.
She danced through the chaos, her knife catching the throat of a monster, twisting effortlessly to avoid a snapping jaw. When she exhaled, it sounded like a sigh.
Then, the two blondes. Spelltech. One deployable side. The others bow animated arrows as she pulled it.
Boom.
Fire weaved through the battlefield.
One murmured a word.
A beast was _ripped apart_.
More red eyes in the dark.
Alyce’s grin widened. “Oh, good. I was getting bored.”
"The fight was over. Or so we thought. One by one, we caught our breath, wiping off the sweat, the blood. The countdown flickered on our HUDs.
4.14. 4.15.
Piggy never reached 4.16."
Alyce didn’t flinch. She stayed there, half-bent, eyes locked on the horizon, as if she were watching something far worse than the monsters we had just fought. She wasn’t bothered by the blood. She never was. And I realized then—_she enjoyed this._
Blood spattered in the air. Alyce threw a rock—one, two—so close to the sound barrier that the air itself trembled.
Piggy said nothing—no time for even a grunt. The stone struck. His head split open. Something oozed out, turning red.
_So she was skilled enough._ My heart beat faster Too much of a wild card.
That speed—impossible.
I’d factored in the redline injectors, the dermadisks. I knew she was fast. But this? This wasn’t human. Even drugged bodies had limits. Alyce had just ignored them.
The way she moved—like she already knew where the gaps would be, like she was operating on instinct too fast for her own mind to process.
Was this a variant of the drug? Or was she using something beyond 100% efficiency?
No, it didn’t make sense. Her body should be breaking apart under that much strain. How was she still smiling?
I was looking for a punchline first, but—oh well." Her smile and how it blended with the outburst.
One. Two. A glint of steel—Alyce’s knife slipped through the cracks in the twins’ suits.
"But I can’t really find one, so—oh well." She took a deep breath.
A knife from under Blondy’s head. Uppercut with a knife.
"I knew you were a bitch." Ratz closed his eyes, his arm powering to life.
"Where is your hon—"
"I''m coming."
She moved.
Wait. I pushed my glasses up.
Time slowed. The echo of sound before it rang.
Her knife went through the air, slowly, cutting it.
Straight for Ratz’s eye.
Her demonic smile expanded.
A faint glow.
**Tick.**
---
Her legs tensed just moments before she blitzed through the air
I knew they felt that off feeling.
She looked at me like she’d rip my face—and my smugness—clean off.
**Bloodlust.**
Ratz too. A little pale. I was sure he had seen it—Alyce’s dagger about to slip into his eye.
But his face was stoic. No hint of fear.
My blood was boiling. I had caught his movement too.
Incredible.
An enhanced and a regular human matching him.
I laughed. _A wild card indeed._
"I clear my throat. ''What I just did was an en-passant. I rewound time—your minds, too. What do you think?''"
Please don’t make me do it ag—
She moved.
I pushed my glasses up and turned to face her.
My hand left her head—her frozen body.
_The thing about my power was you had to be smart. You couldn’t stop time at a moment’s notice. You could only set it to go off in places. And if it was triggered, the better the effect._
Who could match my genius? I hadn’t found one yet. This scene was set to loop once more, even without my intervention.
My Coz had long been depleted. This whole thing—it drained my lifespan. But it was worth it.
I took a deep breath.
"I have a proposition for you. You too, Ratz." I looked over my shoulder.
"Do you hate Suspended?"