An atomic clock measured time with a precision that made every other method look like throwing darts in a dark room. It counted the vibrations of atoms with the judgmental focus of a bored god.

  That count became time.

  It was the most accurate measure ever built, a referee for the universe's most chaotic game. When it said a second had passed, a second had passed, and it would argue with you about it.

  An atomic clock wasn’t a physical clock a person could see or touch—it was just a form of measurement, a concept with an attitude. Like the speed of sound. Or a centimetre. Or an ounce. Or like measuring your self-worth by calculating how many armoured, tactical-geared clowns you could take in a fair fight before the floor got too slippery. It existed to define, to measure, to pin something slippery to the wall and label it before it could stab you.

  Time was not universal. Each object carried its own clock, a little personal timer that depended entirely on where it stood and how fast it was running from its problems. An atomic clock just measured that personal time exactly as it was, then let whoever was measuring that time, decide exactly where to shoot.

  Kelly had made a discovery. When she had levelled her Time-Attunement to the second grade, she hadn’t been slowing down the world.

  She was speeding up her personal time, making it sprint ahead of everyone else’s.

  Kelly thought of it like this: in extreme circumstances, time didn’t move the same for everyone. Most people needed FTL engines the size of a house, or enough speed augments to fund a small nation’s collapse. But Kelly? She could speed up her own personal clock while the rest of the world crawled along—she was a hyper-caffeinated toddler zooming past sleepy pensioners; like she was the only one who’d gotten the memo that the race had started while everyone else still yawned at the starting line—the world felt about one-fifth normal speed. She called it “personal time acceleration.” It was like living in permanent bullet time.

  In their last match, Kelly had dilated time to a slow motion crawl, about twenty percent the usual speed. Her own time raced ahead, making one minute for everyone else feel like five minutes to her.

  And they had both still been moving so fast, fast enough that, anyone observing would have had a migraine. The halls systems kept blaring red, speed readings shooting off the charts.

  Kelly almost couldn't believe Ren could still follow her movements, even as her personal time accelerated and she turned time itself into thick syrup. It had been the most grueling session yet, and worst of all, even when he reacted whilst time was slow enough to see individual motes of dust hang suspended, or see drops of blood split mid-air, a part of her could instinctively feel that he was still… holding back.

  Just who—no, what the heck was this old guy?

  Kelly hit the floor hard, dust and debris puffing around her. Sparks rained off the broken ceiling panels, and a smoldering drone skittered past her feet. She rolled over onto her back, arms behind her head, letting the smoke curl over her like a welcome blanket.

  Ren stood near the center of the hall, his posture perfectly still, augmented arms relaxed. The hall still held traces of ozone, gunpowder, and excessive violence. He glanced at the wreckage with an expression that could only belong to someone who had seen worlds burn.

  Ren adjusted a gauntlet that looked older than Kelly’s life count and said, “Not bad. Solid improvisation.”

  Kelly laughed, dragging her blade out of a dent in the floor that had never existed before. “Improv is my middle name. Actually, I don’t have a middle name, but that’d be my middle name.” She twirled the weapon and let it snap into its rune-bracelet mode.

  Her ribs were singing a chorus of complaints, a tune titled Centuries of Augmented Veteran Experience Versus One Smartass. She peeled herself off the dented floor panel, the world’s mana humming through her as her natural Troll regen patched the worst of it. Across the cratered floor, Ren didn’t have a scratch on him. He didn’t even look warm.

  He flicked a shard of what used to be her reinforced tactical shield off his shoulder. “The sonic shadow weaponry was notable,” he said, his voice a gravel quarry. “For a Thresholder.”

  Kelly spat a bit of heavily modified blood onto the corporate logo etched into the floor. “Thanks. I was going for ‘utterly terrifying,’ but I’ll take ‘notable.’ Helps with the intimidation budget.” Her last batch of summoned shields was probably in a dozen pieces right now. She made a mental note to bill Haider for it. The fact that it cost her nothing to make them was not the point.

  “Capitalism baby,” Kelly muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. You want to head to the dome, right? The cube. Are you going to help me steal it?” Kelly really hoped his answer would be yes. The universe already hated her. She had destroyed it and herself in cascading waves of entropy quite a few times before the resets erased the damage. But more than that, she had broken its fundamental rules. If she got her hands on the Cube? The things she’d be able to do with the magic tech would give the universe a heart attack.

  Ren didn’t respond, but started walking, a tectonic plate in motion. Kelly fell in step, her body already stitching itself back into perfect condition with the ambient mana she was illegally siphoning from the universe. The man had to be pushing 80EQ. Was he a peak Elite? A pseudo-Demigod? Or the real deal? A bonfide member of society’s top enhancement levels? Fighting him was like trying to arm-wrestle a collapsing starship.

  The two of them stepped outside. The city was in full-scale apocalypse mode. The streets were clogged with fighting, screaming, or dying in combinations Kelly didn’t have time to catalog. Dimensional portals yawned over the skyline, vomiting creatures that had no respect for local ordinances.

  Kelly immediately headed for the last place she’d seen a valet take her beloved truck.

  “Hold it.” Ren raised an palm. “The vehicle we’ll be taking is in the lower bay,” he stated, as they moved through the heavily guarded, militarized grounds of his organization’s mansion-like complex.

  The lower bay was a cathedral of war machines. They stopped by what looked like a poorly disguised armored personnel carrier—a metal brick with a grudge, barely legal for civilian roads. Reggie and his two guys—one bald and thick, one wiry with a network of old burns on his neck—stood by the open rear hatch, already there, doing that thing professional guns do: checking things that didn’t need checking, just to have something to do with their hands.

  Ren just looked at it.

  “What, no chauffeur?” Kelly asked, sliding into the driver’s seat. The controls were standard military-spec, as an overeager intern, she’d memorized most of the publicly available controls and product details. As a being stuck in a time loop, she’d memorised how to subvert or rig them, should the need ever arise. Kelly immediately started rerouting power from non-essentials, like the climate control and the passenger-side massage function, to the forward plating and engine boosters.

  Ren was already a monument in the passenger seat. Reggie slid in, followed by the two large shapes who knew how to fill a doorway. He gave a short nod. “Heard you needed a ride. Brought the fare.”

  “Reggie. You bring the snacks, too?” Kelly asked, turning slightly.

  “Snacks are extra.” He took a seat behind Ren, his crew filing into the back, the suspension settling under the weight of them and enough firepower to start a small heist. Goon One had a jaw that looked like it had been used to test industrial vices, metallic seams lined his jaws and eyes, a clear fashion statement intended to intimidate women and children. Goon Two was just a lot wiry, thick muscle in a tactical harness. And he was tall, so tall his head almost brushed the ceiling. They didn’t sit so much as occupy space.

  Ren thumbed a scanner in the seat beside her, the entire section groaning as it accommodated his mass. “Drive.”

  Kelly gunned it. The engine hummed to life, a sound that promised motion but not necessarily safety. The building’s bay doors opened onto the end of the world.

  As they rumbled into the city, Ren spoke with aged authority.

  “We’ll be heading to the east-grid’s dome. I’d suggest retrieving any weapons you have still with us. The route is contested.”

  “Contested.” Kelly snorted. “That’s one word for it. I saw a three-story lizard breathing purple fire at a news helicopter on the way in. The traffic report was fascinating.”

  One of Reggie’s men, Goon One, nodded vigorously, his metal-lined jaw faintly shifting. Apparently, he’d seen it too.

  “Main road along the river is gone,” Reggie’s voice crackled through his gas mask—which was new for this reset. He continued, “something big tore it up. We’re going through the streets.”

  “Fine by me,” Kelly said, revving the engine. It burned and rattled harder. “The scenic route’s more entertaining anyway.”

  For a few minutes, the only sounds were the rigged engines growl, the crunch of debris under tires, and the metallic shick-shick of someone cycling a weapon’s action.

  Then Reggie’s much taller, almost-giant, muscular merc, the one Kelly had mentally dubbed ‘Goon Two,’ spoke up, his surprisingly calm voice cutting through the serenity.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “You see that? That whole block was just empty. Some of the cars just have bloodstains. No entry wounds or nothing.”

  Kelly had noticed earlier, as she aimed for a gap between a flipped car and a fountain that had sprayed something ichorous.

  “You hear other talk?” The shorter bodyguard with a seam lining his jaw chimed in, “about people going missing clean. Whole streets just emptying out. Kinda looked like that,” he shuddered at the thought.

  “Yeah, man—it’s weird is what it is,” the muscular mercenary chimed in, his voice earnest. “It’s not just in one place, either. In Montauk, the end of Long Island. Poof—people just disappear. Over in the Garment District, too. No bodies or nothing. Just… gone. Like dust.”

  “It’s the apocalypse,” Kelly said, steering around a crater. “People go missing every hour. Maybe a fresh batch of idiots saw a low-hanging portal and thought ‘free holiday.’ There’s a new Darwin Award every minute.”

  Reggie snickered into his gas mask.

  “No.” The wiry one, Goon Two’s, denial was instant and absolute. “This is different. Saw a clip north of the greenzone. Those bat-locust things had a militia unit cornered in a pharmacy. Then… the light got wrong. A blur in the air. The locusts started falling in halves. And two of the guys pinned behind the counter… they were just not there anymore. Their buddy was still screaming into his radio for them to fall back."

  The air in the cabin went tight.

  Ren broke it, his voice the low, steady rumble of a landslide heard from a distance. "Battlefield rumors. I have heard the same stories in every war. Fear and superstition. People start dying too often, too strangely… that’s when men see ghosts."

  He shifted, his armored shoulder brushing the window. "The practical answer is a hyper-specialized black-ops team. One of the remaining black-budget units, or a corpo testing new stealth retrieval systems in a live-fire environment.” He paused. “In other words, they are using the chaos to practice silent takedowns and evidence-free extraction."

  He paused. "Or worst case, it’s whatever the creature equivalent of an efficient killer is."

  A black-ops team would be tricky—if they were Elites. Their tech would be booby-trapped, their knowledge compounded. But a creature? A new form of efficient, unseen, stealthy predator that could pluck lives from a firefight without a sound or a single witness? As she drove to the east-grid, Kelly turned the idea over in her head. A perfect killer. That was a specimen. With a set of working principles Kelly could isolate, study, and take apart on a slab. She hoped it was a creature. She really, really did.

  The heavily armed group rolled out into the kaleidoscope of the end times. Through the reinforced viewport, Kelly watched a squad of National Guard troops pour fire into a shambling mound of animated and clearly sentient gelatinous substance, filled with street signs and concrete. “Traffic’s a nightmare,” Kelly observed.

  Kelly knew the drill. When the sky ripped open and monsters started eating the subway, it wasn’t the fancy Army from the planetary wars that showed up first; it was the National Guard, called up by some panicking governor to try and put a cork in the apocalypse with traffic cones and rifles. Their job was the messy, local work—securing areas from singular hostile or identifiable groups, herding civilians, propping up hospitals, and occasionally getting eaten on live TV.

  The real U.S. Army was probably stuck in some legal red tape, waiting for a president to sign a form so they could maybe lend a truck. Kelly knew the form had been signed the moment it all started, except it was a form that sent all the trucks and heavy weaponry treasure hunting in the east grid. For the dome. The cube. It was a system designed for kill orders and hurricanes, not hell-portals, and watching it try to adapt was a unique and unfortunate display of human greed and messy, violent project management.

  The APC bounced over a severed arm still gripping a riot shield. Kelly didn't slow down.

  Goon Two braced himself against the hull rib. "That was a person."

  "Was," Kelly said. "Past tense. We're in the present."

  A portal opened thirty yards ahead, discharging a creature that looked like someone had tried to sculpt a horse from wet garbage and given up halfway. It hadn't decided how many legs it wanted. Kelly aimed the reinforced plow at its uncertain center mass.

  Reggie watched the impact shake through the bulkhead. He didn't stop cycling the bolt on his rifle.

  "You always drive like this?"

  "Like what.”

  Kelly threaded through the city’s wounds. Headed in a single direction.

  Along the journey they saw survivors. National Guard units held intersections and fired into armored beasts pushing out of glowing portals. A five-man fire team in matte unmarked urban gear moved through the intersection ahead. Blank squared patches on the shoulders. They worked in perfect rotation—suppressing fire, reload, advance. One of them put three rounds through a creature’s knee joint. It folded sideways.

  The rest had a creature pinned behind a burned-out flatbed. Three contractors worked the flanks while a fourth stepped out, planted his feet, and put a controlled bursts through the thing’s skull. The thing stopped twitching. Another contractor swept the adjacent rooftop. Reggie raised two fingers off his rifle grip. Kelly gave them a courtesy blip of the horn. It didn’t matter if it was a short-order cook or a death squad. Competence looked the same. Kelly liked watching competence. Even the outskirts sign twirlers were fun to watch. There was something relaxing about watching other people be extremely competent at violence. It was like a cooking show with more gore.

  Portals the color of bad meat and every drug imaginable pulsed in the gaps between skyscrapers. Kelly wove the modified APC through it all. Through the buildings. The smoke. Through the bridges that hadn’t fallen, their crisis-ready suspension cables catching the orange glow of something burning on the other side of the river, peaking over it all like a second, darker, metal sun. Then, she saw it.

  The dome appeared.

  It rose behind the skyline, a polished steel hemisphere covering the entire east grid. Through the gaps in the burning towers, the Dome resolved on the horizon. It sat there like a stadium dropped from orbit. The military blockade around it was tanks, barriers, and guns pointed in every direction. Kelly aimed for the checkpoint.

  Reggie stopped cycling his bolt. His hands went still. Reggie stopped maintaining his weapon and stared at the structure ahead. Goon One’s head turned. His jaw seams caught the reflection of the dome’s surface as he looked up. Goon Two said nothing and lowered his rifle, looking at the Dome with open awe, his mouth slightly open. Both Goons leaned forward between the seats.

  Even Kelly tilted her head. She had seen the Dome plenty of times, up close, and the background of a hundred news broadcasts, but standing in its shadow, a small part of her brain appreciated the sheer craftsmanship. The scale. An entire district under a bowl. Engineering to shrug off demigod tantrums. For a second, nobody spoke.

  Ren grunted and said, “Back in the Augment wars, we put these up to keep the public from seeing the worst of it and to stop whole neighborhoods from getting wiped out. Two enhanced people would start fighting and by the time it ended, thousands could be dead. So we covered it. Kept the civilians out. Kept the damage in. Stopped them seeing something they shouldn’t.”

  Kelly said, “I heard of them. Saw footage of one being used in Chicago last year. Saw one once from so far away it barely counted.”

  Back then she’d already been so far away it may as well have been a gazebo. Before the resets, outside of online videos and news, she had never seen a civilian safety dome up close and personal. In the face of her countless plans and two very primary goals, Kelly had forgotten its scale, but witnessing it with others had reminded her of something she’d taken for granted.

  A small, present moment.

  Surrounded by everything she was trying to control, she stopped, slowed time to a fraction of its speed, and appreciated the moment down to the second.

  Reggie whistled in appreciation.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  With her personal time already sped up, Kelly saw it happen in exact detail.

  Every shadow inside the modified APC warped in a microsecond.

  The shadows along the interior shifted and stretched, twisting, separating from their owners and converging across the reinforced walls and ceiling. They peeled away from boots, from rifles, from Reggie’s jaw and the thick necks of his mercs. Only her shadow did not move.

  Her shadow rippled and wavered, then snapped still, resisting.

  Then the mass of shadows erupted outward in sharp spikes, driving forward to skewer everyone present like meat on sticks.

  Reggie was frozen in slowed time, a credit between his fingers and a gun in his free hand, unaware of his rapidly approaching death. His eyes widened by degrees. Goon One stared out the window, metallic seams along his jaw rigid, oblivious. Goon Two leaned forward between the seats, massive hands braced on the metal, attention fixed outside.

  Only Kelly and Ren moved.

  Kelly grabbed Reggie by his collar and vest and ripped him backward, hauling him out of the spike’s path. Ren moved with the same acceleration, dragging one merc down and yanking the other sideways with efficient, practiced force.

  The spikes smashed into the APC’s reinforced interior. Steel plating dented inward under the impact. The upgraded lining absorbed the rest. The spikes fractured against it, splitting apart and recoiling back into the mass.

  The shadows thickened instead of dispersing.

  They gathered in the center aisle and rose.

  A humanoid torso pushed upward first, shifting between muscular and gaunt in uneven pulses. Skin stretched tight over sinew, then thinned and marked itself with scars, ash tones, and vein-like dark patterns crawling beneath the surface.

  Thick horns curved back from its head, bigger and meaner than any animal’s, ridged and heavy.

  Its eyes gave off a faint glow, set deep under a heavy brow. Glowing orbs in cold shades—violet, pale blue, distant points set in a pitch-black face.

  Its mouth stretched a little too wide, filled with sharp teeth, some long enough to count as fangs.

  Its legs were built like a goat’s, packed with muscle, ending in large cracked hooves that sparked when they hit the APC’s metal floor.

  Dark, rough fur covered it from the waist down and crept up its back.

  A long tail lashed behind it, thin and whip-shaped, ending in a hard, pointed tip.

  Its flesh was living shadow and smoke. Skin, muscles and perhaps bones of pure darkness instead of anything solid.

  The edges of its body blurred grey and came apart, then pulled back together in the deepest smoky black.

  Its hands ended in claws instead of normal nails.

  Its arms and legs ran a little too long, throwing off its overall shape.

  Something shifted slowly inside its body, and thin glowing cracks sometimes split across it before sealing shut.

  Beyond the eyes, its face had no clear features. A mouth or nose showed only when the shadow shifted enough to suggest them.

  Its flesh was a creature of living shadow. With dashes of drifting smoke.

  To Kelly, its surface looked matte, light-absorbing.

  It’s skin had no reflection—light just hit it and disappeared.

  In slowed time, Kelly felt a subtle familiarity in her chest. It caused excitement and scientific curiosity to bubble inside her like a volcano. Meeting the creature felt like meeting a very distant, very genetically regressed and psychologically demented nephew. Instantly, she knew exactly what she was looking at.

  Oh my god. No way.

  “It’s a voiding!”

  The timing was perfect. With the dome and the cube closer than ever, her shadow was long overdue for upgrade.

  Kelly opened her mouth, intent on telling them that no matter what, they should not kill it.

  Everyone in the truck except Kelly and Ren snapped at once.

  “What the hell is that?!”

  “Shoot it!”

  Rifles went full auto inside the APC. The cabin erupted. Brass casings bounced off the metal floor and skittered under boots. Goon One leaned over the seat and emptied half a magazine in a single pull. Goon Two shouted something incoherent and kept firing anyway.

  “Kill it! Kill it!”

  Rounds tore into the creature at point-blank range. The interior filled with recoil, smoke, and the violent rhythm of panicked trigger discipline falling apart.

  Reggie didn’t bother with his rifle. He shoved his hand forward and opened his palm. A torrent of lightning ripped out of his fingers, then his palm, white and vicious, crawling across every metal surface it could find. It slammed into the creature and kept going, racing along the ceiling, across the dashboard, through the wiring.

  As the creature stood amid the torrent, unharmed, the radio popped and died in a spray of sparks.

  Kelly watched the dashboard fry and felt the irritation settle in her chest like a splinter. Of all the things in this truck, he picked the one she actually needed.