Electrolytes, synthetic endorphins, and military detox nanites flooded in. The good stuff.
"Morning," Jess mumbled next to him, still half asleep. "You look like shit in every reflection."
"Feel worse than I look," Cole admitted, sitting up slowly. The world was still too bright, each surface a window into another angle of his suffering. "Need to check my stats before I forget what I can actually do."
He focused on the silver-blue rune on his hand, willing his interface to appear. Cool light projected into the air, forming clean lines of text that hurt less to look at than the room's surfaces.
USER PROFILE:
NAME: COLE WALKER
AGE: 22 YEARS
DOMAIN: LUCENT
CURRENT SEQUENCE: SIX (TRUTH REFRACTOR)
CORE PURIFICATION: 0.35% (REQUIRES 100% FOR SEQUENCE ADVANCEMENT)
ACTIVE ABILITIES:
[SHARD FRACTURE]: Transform body, partial or full, into weaponized glass shards. Shards maintain supernatural durability—capable of piercing armor and attacking from multiple angles simultaneously. Can fire shards as projectiles or use for close-combat strikes. WARNING: Consciousness fragmentation risk if full-body transformation maintained >30 seconds.
[HARD-LIGHT PROJECTION]: Generate semi-solid photonic constructs. Maximum duration: 20 seconds before dispersal. Energy cost: Moderate.
[REFLECTION STEP]: Instantaneous travel between reflective surfaces within line of sight. Range: 200 feet.
ADVANCEMENT NOTICE: Each Sequence requires 100% core purification before moving onto the next Sequence.
NEXT SEQUENCE: SEQUENCE FIVE (PHOTON KNIGHT) [LOCKED] REQUIREMENTS:
- Core of Two-Horned Repeater (Rare - Time-distortion class)
- Core of Angelic Illusionist (Rare - Divine-corrupted)
HUNT DIFFICULTY RATING: EXTREME
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 41%
"Gods," Jess said, reading over his shoulder. "Those monsters sound charming. What's a 'Two-Horned Repeater?'"
“According to the bestiary, it's a void-touched creature that manipulates light and kinetic energy." Cole pulled up an image on his neural display, sharing it to her implants. The image was just a shimmering, man-shaped blur of static. "The bestiary says it can fire concentrated beams that erase matter, and it echoes any kinetic impact it receives."
"So you can't even hit it?"
"Worse. You have to fight something that turns your own attacks against you. The last one spotted killed three Sequence Sixes. They tried to overpower it and failed, because you can't out-punch a mirror that hits back twice as hard."
"Then how do you kill it?"
"That's the trick. You have to do something it can't reflect, or catch it between cycles. You have to break the pattern."
"And you need two of these nightmare things just to reach Sequence Five?" Jess shook her head. "The math doesn't add up. How is anyone supposed to advance?"
"No one said this would be easy." Cole said, dismissing the interface.
[ALERT: CONTRACTUAL VIEWING PERIOD INITIATED]
The words erupted across his vision in aggressive neon yellow. Cole groaned.
"Ad break?" Jess asked sympathetically.
"Discount eyes," Cole muttered. "At least they don't trigger during combat. Had a friend whose cheap implants started showing him furniture ads, mid-fight with a Phase-Viper. He lived, but barely."
His vision filled with targeted advertisements, the audio piping directly into his auditory implants playing commercials, some which were suited to him and others not so much:
"Experiencing Domain side effects? Seeing double? Quadruple? Mathematical formulas demanding blood sacrifice? Whispers from dimensions that shouldn't exist? Ask your medical provider about REALITY ANCHOR?! Warning: Reality Anchor may cause temporary existence failure, spontaneous void manifestation, chronological displacement, murdering loved ones, and in rare cases, awakening things that should not be. Do not take Reality Anchor if you are pregnant, planning to become pregnant, or exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously."
"Feeling lonely? Come visit Bella’s Exquisite Decadence, where our synth girls and guys will make your wildest dreams come true."
"They get worse every month," Jess said, watching his eyes flicker with reflected advertisements. "Remember when they just sold us beer and body mods?"
"Simpler times," Cole agreed as the ads finally ended.
Cole touched the rune on his hand, preparing for morning prayers—not to any god he believed in, but to the entity that kept him sane.
"To the Watcher in Glass, the Truth that Refracts," he intoned, pushing a thread of divine energy into the mark. "Grant me clarity to see through illusion, and strength to bear what cannot be changed."
The world went white. For a moment, he stood again in that space between mirrors, the god's billion eyes examining him with cold curiosity. A sensation like ice water through his veins scoured away the mental static left by the monster core's integration.
Then he snapped back, gasping. The prayer had cost him, and he could feel his new divine energy deficit like a missing tooth.
It was a prayer of maintenance.
"How many times can you do that?" Jess asked, genuinely curious.
"Four times a day, max. Like selling plasma, except I'm trading divine energy for sanity." Cole rubbed his temples. "Skip it for a week, and the core corruption starts eating your mind. Knew a guy who thought he could tough it out. Found him trying to crawl into his own reflection, screaming about the 'real him' being trapped inside."
"The gods really are parasites, aren't they?" Jess stretched, her metallic spine casting blue light patterns on the wall. "Give us power, then make us dependent on them to keep it."
"It's a protection racket with extra steps," Cole agreed, pulling on his jacket. The armored leather was scarred from yesterday's hunt, but still functional. "Speaking of rackets, I need to find some quick credits. Bank account's at zero, and I need food and fuel before meeting my new 'friends.'"
"Lia said 1400," Jess reminded him, glancing at the wall display showing 0747. "You've got time. Sure you don't want to come back to bed? I promise to make it worth missing breakfast."
"Rain check," Cole said, genuinely regretful. "But take my leftovers from Romano's, as an apology. Real meat, not synth."
Jess's eyes widened. "The garlic lamb? You beautiful bastard, all is forgiven." She practically leaped toward the fridge, tangling in the sheets and crashing to the floor with a yelp.
Cole laughed, helping her up. "Try not to die while I'm gone."
"Try not to get killed by whatever desperate bounty you're about to chase," she shot back. "Remember the Delacroix job? You said it would be 'easy money,' right before that cyborg accountant nearly took your head off with a plasma cutter."
"You're never letting me live that down, are you?"
"Not until you stop saying things are easy. Nothing in this city is easy." She grabbed his arm, making him look at her. "Seriously, Cole. Be careful and don’t get cocky. You’re not invincible. First week with new powers is when you’re most likely to do something stupid and get yourself killed."
"I'll stick to normal criminals," he promised. "No monsters, no Domain’s. Just regular assholes who jumped bail."
"Famous last words," Jess muttered, but kissed him goodbye anyway.
Cole's neural display flickered to life as he grabbed his gear, the credit balance in the corner a mocking red 'zero.' He blinked it away, but the number stuck in his head like a bad hangover.
He snagged his weapons on the way out. A military surplus SMG with armor-piercing rounds and his vibro-sword. He'd chosen the combination deliberately: the SMG for mid-range suppression, the sword for close work when bullets weren't enough. Most bounties didn't warrant both, but Cole had learned the hard way that 'most' almost got you killed.
As he waited for the elevator, he caught his reflection in the polished steel doors. For just a moment, he could have sworn his reflection moved before he did, turning to look at something he couldn't see.
Cole pressed his palm against the cool metal, watching his image match the movement perfectly. Real. Solid. Just his imagination running wild with new senses he didn't fully understand yet.
He shook his head. First week with powers. Everyone saw things that weren't there.
Probably.
The noise of the elevator’s arrival snapped him out of his thoughts.He headed into the garage, straight for his bike. He'd inherited it from his grandfather. It was a vintage machine from a bygone era of combustion and steel. Custom chassis shaped like a raptor's head, blood-red paint job, chrome that caught the lights just right.
He fired it up. The engine roared, bouncing off concrete walls. Nothing like the silent hover-cars the corpo types drove. This thing had teeth.
Scanner chirped. 'Have a productive day, Citizen Walker.' The AI's tone was insufferable.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Smug bastard, Cole thought.
Cole emerged onto the rain-slicked streets of Forge City's middle tier. His world became a cascade of data as his eyes constantly scanned faces, cross-referencing them with the city's bounty network. Names. Crimes. Credit values. Green text scrolling past like the world's most depressing slot machine. Most were petty: 50 credits for vandalism, 100 for theft. He needed bigger prey.
He passed massive steel buildings scarred with industrial grime, their facades covered in holographic ads that shimmered like ghosts in the morning haze. A hover-car glided past. Through its tinted windows, he caught a glimpse of the passenger, a woman with a flawless chrome face, her expression as cold as her augmentations. Probably some Corporate Senior VP, off to brunch.
Crossing the Ashfall Bridge, Cole looked toward the city's center. The Forge City Chapel owned the skyline, second tallest building around. All white marble and gold spikes stabbing at the clouds. Made to look holy next to Nexus Dynamics' black glass tower that beat it by a few dozen floors.
The Chapel didn't make sense if you thought about it too hard. Curves and angles that hurt to look at, like someone had bent space wrong and called it architecture. Every few seconds, rainbow light pulsed from the top. The shield. The only thing keeping the monsters out.
The city might be full of people trying to kill you, but outside? Outside was worse. Much worse.
Then, a chime in his ear. A match.
A red outline solidified around a figure half a block away. Target acquired: Jack Stevens. Wanted for armed robbery of Obsidian Dynamics executive. Bounty: 2,000 credits. Threat level: Standard human, no Domain detected.
The man wore a grey utility shroud that covered his body and head, leaving only his face exposed, a common fashion among the city's lower working-class. It offered basic weather protection and minimal armor.
"Dude must be desperate or stupid," Cole muttered, "robbing a corp exec without even basic facial obscuration." A simple chrome mask would cost maybe fifty credits at any street vendor. Hell, even a bandana would have been better than nothing.
Cole killed his engine, letting the bike coast. He tailed Jack for two blocks, watching the man's movements. No nervous glances, no checking for pursuit. He was either supremely confident or, downright oblivious.
Jack ducked into an alley beneath the transit bridge, a canyon of rust and shadows where water dripped from corroded pipes overhead. Perfect. No civilians, no cameras, just the constant rumble of mag-trains overhead to mask any noise.
Dismounting, Cole’s did a final weapons check: SMG loaded, vibro-sword humming, new powers thrumming beneath his skin like electric current.
Stepping into the alley's mouth, Cole kept his voice calm and measured. "Jack Stevens. You have an outstanding bounty for 2,000 credits. We can walk to the station, or I can drag you out of this alley. Your choice, but either way, this ends the same." He raised his hand, letting his Lucent rune pulse with silver-blue light, a universal sign of Domain power.
"Why would I make it easy?" Jack's voice came out rough, like he was enjoying this. "You think that little light show means something to me?"
"It means I'm a Domain and you're not," Cole stated. "I don't want to hurt you, but…"
"Oh, I know exactly what you are."Jack cut him off, raising his right arm slow. "But you have no idea what I have."
Jack's arm convulsed, the shroud's sleeve bursting apart as flesh and bone reshaped themselves, with the sound of something hard splintering beneath and rending tissue. Muscle fibers unraveled and rewove, skin splitting and regrowing. From the ruins of his human arm emerged a living weapon of yellowed ivory and pulsing crimson tissue. The blade portion was three feet of serrated organic matter that looked like a spine crossed with a chainsaw. Thick veins pulsed along its length, pumping something dark and viscous that dripped onto the ground, hissing where it landed.
The smell hit Cole like a physical force: rotting meat and something sickeningly sweet that made his stomach turn. Static filled the air, the alley's power lines and neon going haywire from whatever energy this thing was bleeding.
Cole’s calm evaporated, replaced by a cold dread.
This wasn't an easy payday. Not even close.
"That's… that's Flesh Domain weaponry," Cole breathed, taking an involuntary step back. "You're not even a Domain! That thing will consume you from the inside out!"
Jack's laughter was unhinged. "Life’s short in this hellhole, anyway. What's a bit of madness and organ failure, if I can score enough credits to actually enjoy what's left?" He flexed his transformed arm, and the weapon responded, sprouting additional bone spurs along its edge. "Bought this beauty off a Sequence Five Chimera Logic. Cost me five years of savings, but look at it!"
He didn't wait for a response.
Jack lunged with predatory grace, the bone-blade leading like a living spear. Cole's reflexes saved him. He triggered Reflection Step, his body shattering into a thousand points of light, just as the blade carved through his previous position.
He materialized twenty feet back, his heart hammering, and saw that the permacrete where he'd stood was already mutating. The weapon's ichor was mutating everything it touched, causing tiny mouths to erupt from the surface and newly formed eyeballs to swivel and track him.
"First mistake, bounty hunter," Jack snarled, his neck now showing pulsing veins that matched his weapon's rhythm. "You assumed I'd be easy money."
Cole raised his SMG and fired a controlled burst. The armor-piercing rounds should have torn through flesh and bone, but Jack's weapon moved, the blade morphing into a shield of interlocking bone plates that absorbed the impacts. The bullets disappeared into the organic mass.
"Hardly felt that." Jack slammed his weapon into the ground.
The alley floor responded like living tissue, waves of hardened bone-spikes erupting from the asphalt in a racing line toward Cole. He fired again, shattering the first few spikes, but they kept coming, a tsunami of organic devastation.
Cole jumped backward, leaping to a puddle's surface near the alley entrance. He landed hard as more spikes erupted where he'd been.
"Running already?" Jack taunted. The weapon was clearly feeding on him now. His skin was going pale, dark veins spreading up his neck like a disease. "This baby's got enough juice for another ten minutes. That's nine minutes longer than you'll last."
Cole needed to think tactically. The weapon was adaptive, responsive, almost intelligent. But Jack was still human underneath, still vulnerable.
He triggered Hard-Light Projection to generate a perfect duplicate of himself, and both Coles raised their weapons to create a crossfire.
Jack's response, however, was horrifying in its efficiency. The bone-blade split mid-swing, becoming three whip-like tendrils of serrated organic matter. Two lashed out, one shattering the hard-light clone into cascading photons, the other wrapping around a support pillar to anchor Jack as he pulled himself forward with inhuman speed.
The third tendril came for Cole's throat.
He ducked, feeling it pass inches overhead, taking a chunk of concrete from the wall behind him. The arm was a living arsenal, limited only by Jack's imagination and how much of his life force he was willing to burn.
Cole's SMG clicked empty. No time to reload. He drew his vibro-sword, the blade humming as it came alive.
"Finally, something interesting!" Jack laughed. His weapon shifted back into a blade made of bone and meat.
They clashed in the alley's center, vibrating steel meeting living bone in showers of sparks and organic matter. Each impact sent shockwaves up Cole's arms. Jack was stronger than he should be. The weapon was enhancing him, flooding his system with combat hormones and adrenaline.
But it was also killing him. Cole could see it now. Jack's eyes were shot to hell, blood running from his nose. The weapon was consuming him from within.
"You're dying," Cole said between strikes. "That thing is eating you alive."
"We're all dying!" Jack roared back. "At least I'm going out swinging!"
The bone-blade suddenly sprouted dozens of tiny pores. They expelled a swarm of palm-sized beetle-things made of twitching muscle and exposed nerve endings. They scuttled toward Cole on too many legs, their single red eyes locked onto him.
Cole backpedaled, his sword a blur as he slashed and parried the creatures that leaped for his face. But it was a losing battle. For every one he destroyed, two more seemed to spawn from Jack's weapon, forcing him steadily back toward the alley's dead end.
"Nowhere left to run, Domain boy!" Jack moved forward, his movements now jerky, puppet-like, as if the weapon was controlling him, rather than the other way around.
Cole's back hit the wall. The beetles were almost on him. Jack raised his weapon for a killing blow.
Cole made his choice.
He threw his vibro-sword.
The blade spun end-over-end through the air, its trajectory obvious, straight at Jack's head. Jack casually sidestepped with a contemptuous laugh.
"That's your big move? You missed, you amateur—"
The sword embedded itself in the wall behind Jack with a resonant thunk, its polished surface still vibrating, still reflecting.
Cole was already moving. He locked eyes with his reflection on the sword's surface.
Jack's laughter cut off as Cole vanished from against the wall. In the same instant, he burst from his sword's blade, materializing in mid-air directly behind Jack's unguarded back.
He overclocked the servos in his arm, metal groaning as vents hissed, and heat bled out in ribbons of red light. The plating split along the seams, pulsing brighter with each ratcheted twist as he drew the charge into his fist. The glow built to a molten corona, arcs snapping across the knuckles. Then he dropped like a meteor, the kinetic discharge cracking the air as his fist smashed into the crown of Jack’s head.
The resulting blast was a contained explosion of pure force. Jack's eyes rolled back into his head, and he crumpled to the ground, unconscious. The living bone weapon on his arm spasmed violently before receding back from his flesh with a final wet squelch, leaving his arm looking like chewed meat. The beetles melted into puddles of organic sludge.
Silence returned to the alley, broken only by the drip of water and Cole's ragged breathing.
He stood over Jack's unconscious body, his legs shaking from the effort.
He retrieved his sword, wiping the gore off and sheathed it. Then pulled out his comm and punched in the Enforcer frequency.
"This is Freelance Hunter Walker, ID-7739," he said, exhaustion creeping into his voice. "Bounty acquisition complete. Jack Stevens apprehended, sector seven under-bridge. Send a med-team. He's going to need bio-reconstruction on his right arm. And… bring a hazmat unit. There's organic contamination."
The dispatcher's response was routine, bored. Just another day in Forge City.
A moment later, his neural display chimed.
[BOUNTY CONFIRMED: 2,000 CREDITS TRANSFERRED]
[BALANCE: 2,000 CR]
[RENT DUE: 1,200 CR]
[FUEL ESTIMATE: 50 CR]
[FOOD BUDGET: 150 CR]
[REMAINING: 600 CR]
"Better than 'zero,'" Cole muttered, looking down at Jack's unconscious form. "Where the hell did you even get a Flesh Domain weapon? Had to be the black market. Trafficking that kind of tech to a normie is an executable offense."
He glanced down at the weapon barely attached to Jack’s arm and pulled it off what remained of the arm.
"At least I can sell this for a few extra credits," he said to himself, opening a side compartment in his motorcycle and placing the weapon inside.
The sirens approached, harsh, discordant warnings that Enforcement was inbound. Cole gave his statement to the first officer, a bored-looking woman with hazel eyes who'd seen it all before.
"Flesh weapon, huh?" she said, making notes on her datapad. "That's the sixth one this month. Someone's flooding the market with Domain weapons. Way above my pay grade to care why."
She was mid-sentence when a vacuum of absolute silence swallowed her words.
Cole thought his audio implants had malfunctioned, but then he saw the officer's face drain of color, her chrome eyes reflecting pure terror, as they focused on something behind him.
He spun around.
A Rune Control Enforcement vehicle descended from the sky, a jagged obsidian splinter that looked less built and more carved. It made no sound because sound had ceased to exist in its presence.
"You have got to be kidding me," Cole tried to say, but no words emerged. The absence of sound was absolute.
The patrol officer was already in her vehicle, peeling out in silent terror, her tires throwing up sprays of water that made no splash.
Then the world exploded with warnings:
[EMERGENCY ALERT - RUNE CONTROL DESIGNATION]
[DOMAIN: SILENCE]
[SEQUENCE: FOUR - ABSENCE WALKER]
[STATUS: UNSTABLE - REALITY BREACH IMMINENT]
[CIVILIAN DIRECTIVE: EVACUATE MINIMUM 1.5MI RADIUS]
[OBSERVATION MAY RESULT IN PERMANENT COGNITIVE DAMAGE]
[MESSAGE: THE SILENCE SPREADS. DO NOT OBSERVE. DO NOT REMEMBER.]