Silas stared at his reflection in the transport window, teeth grinding as he replayed the encounter with the Lucent Deity. The moment of his ascension to Sequence Five should have been triumph. Instead, the God had looked at him with something between contempt and amusement.

  Corrupted, the Deity had called him. An aberration.

  Your ascension is unnatural, and therefore you deserve an unnatural path.

  The words still burned. Silas pulled up his HUD, examining the powers the Deity had given him in lieu of what he'd spent years preparing for.

  [Weight of Light]: Imbue SHARD FRACTURE projectiles with immense gravitational force. Shards that strike a target "pin" them in place, tripling baseline mass. Duration: 10-15 seconds. Targets with superhuman strength can break free with effort.

  [Kinetic-Imbue]: Coat extremities in photonic momentum. Strikes deliver catastrophic kinetic transfer. Targets get launched shattering defenses.

  [Relativistic-Perception]: Three-second overclock. Optics and processing accelerate. The local environment drops frames to an absolute crawl. Allows casual evasion of ballistics or high-volume strike saturation. Sixty-second reboot cycle. The nervous system lags during the cooldown phase.

  [After-Image-Flurry]: Move so fast you leave behind solid-light after-images that persist for two seconds. You can create a flurry of these phantoms to attack from multiple angles at once.

  He dragged a hand across his temples. The neural accelerator shunts throbbed under the synthetic dermis. It wasn't that they were horrible abilities—objectively, they were powerful. Devastating, even. But he'd spent a fortune on equipment designed for precision light manipulation, beam attacks, photonic constructs. Years of study, preparation, visualization exercises. Everything he'd meticulously acquired over years of careful planning.

  All of it useless now.

  The resale value on his pre-purchased gear had been devastating. Fifty percent losses across the board, sometimes worse. Dealers in the lower districts had smiled sympathetically as they'd offered him pittances for equipment worth fortunes.

  Market's flooded with standard Lucent gear, they'd said with practiced regret. Everyone wants the same builds these days. Specialty modifications though? Those fetch a premium.

  So he'd scraped together what credits he could, sold family heirlooms, taken questionable loans from even more questionable people, and hunted for cybernetics and weapons that could work with his "unnatural path".

  The Temporal Neural Accelerator was a brutal install. A spinal shunt that hijacked sensory input and overclocked the synaptic firing rate via parallel networks. The procedure had taken six hours and left him unable to walk for days. He spent the downtime screaming into the mattress as his nervous system rewired itself. But the hardware sliced the Relativistic-Perception lag in half. Sixty seconds of latency dropped to thirty.

  The Graviton Anchor Nodes followed. Micro-fractal implants slotted into his palms and digits. They spawned localized gravity wells via quantum manipulation. The installation had been excruciating. Anesthesia would have interfered with the neural bonding process. He'd bitten through three leather straps during the procedure. But now when he fired shard projectiles, they automatically gained the Weight of Light property without conscious effort. He could even manipulate pinned targets slightly, rotate them, press them harder into surfaces, create localized gravity traps. The tiny matrices glowed purple whenever he activated them, veins of violet light spreading up his forearms like living tattoos.

  The Momentum Gauntlets had been easier, at least. Heavy chrome shells laced with kinetic amplifiers across the knuckles and palms. Every joint housed a micro-generator that stripped photonic energy and output pure kinetic payload. When Kinetic-Imbue went live, the gauntlets scaled the momentum by one hundred and fifty percent. It upgraded baseline strikes into structural demolition. More importantly, they prevented feedback damage. Without them, he'd shatter his hands the first time he threw a serious punch. The sleek silver gauntlets had glowing blue energy channels that pulsed brighter when active, creating tracers of light with each movement.

  The Prismatic Reflex Suite had required another procedure. Leg augmentations with light-bending micro-projectors and enhanced muscle fibers woven with photonic thread. The chrome leg plating showed rainbow refractions along the edges, leaving light trails when he moved at speed. The hardware scaled his baseline velocity by forty percent. It made the digital echoes uncomfortably real. The projections mimicked respiratory cycles and the exact physics of his coat shifting in the slipstream. It also allowed short tactical bursts without rendering an echo for stealth runs. A mode he'd discovered by accident while trying not to wake his neighbors.

  And then there were the weapons.

  Silas locked his jaw thinking about the Dawn Cleaver. A five-foot greatsword made of layered crystallized light. It was broad, brutal, and utterly inelegant. The edge was as wide as his chest. It demanded a custom magnetic harness just to haul the dead weight. Everything he'd spent years training to avoid. He'd wanted a rapier, something refined and precise that matched his image of what a Sequence Five should wield. Instead, he compromised on a glowing sledgehammer suffering an identity crisis.

  It was the only high-grade Lucent weapon he could afford after liquidating his original arsenal.

  The blade worked with his new abilities, he couldn't deny that. With the Momentum Gauntlets and Graviton Anchor Nodes, he could swing it one-handed if needed, charge it with gravity mid-strike, create shockwaves that cracked pavement and shattered windows blocks away. Consecutive strikes inside a ten-second window stacked a twenty percent damage buff. Five stacks meant he was carving through mil-spec bunker bulkheads. When Weight of Light went live, the blade shifted to a bruised ultraviolet. Local space warped around the edge. The craters bled residual gravitational energy that lasted for hours.

  It was effective.

  But gods, it was ugly.

  He'd tested it once in a private training facility rated for Domain users. The Dawn Cleaver had obliterated the combat dummy completely.

  The Mirror-Edge Chakrams mounted on his spine were a minor aesthetic patch. Four rotary discs of hardened photons. They actually looked civilized. He could throw them with Weight of Light to pin enemies or ricochet them off surfaces. Combined with Relativistic-Perception, he could calculate throws that would make physics professors weep, bouncing them off seven surfaces to hit a target behind full cover.

  And for close-range, the Cascade Knuckles—reinforced gauntlet attachments with retractable photonic claws that extended six inches from each knuckle. When he'd tested them with Kinetic-Imbue active, the training dummy had been vaporized, leaving only a shadow burned into the wall behind it. The claws could launch individual segments as Weight of Light ballistics and then regenerate over ten seconds through photonic reconstruction. The talons burned like frozen starlight, leaving wounds that refused to heal properly.

  Silas looked down at his gauntleted hands, flexing his fingers. The graviton matrices throbbed violet in his palms. They generated micro-singularities in the dead air. The Temporal Neural Accelerator vibrated along his vertebrae. A persistent alert pinging his new reality.

  The loadout was brutally effective. In pure combat terms, he was probably more dangerous now than he would have been with his original planned equipment.

  But he hated every piece of it.

  "It's a sledgehammer cosplaying as a sword," he muttered to his reflection. "No finesse. Just brute force wrapped in chrome and disappointment. Exactly what that bastard Deity thought I deserved."

  The transport shook as the thrusters angled for Void City's industrial perimeter. Beyond the glass, the neon grid dissolved into the dead sectors. Zones where people disappeared and questions weren't asked. Abandoned factories loomed like tombstones, their broken windows reflecting nothing but darkness.

  “You on another soap box party because your Deity is angry at you?” Cassius shouted from the pilot's seat, not bothering to look back.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "I won't lie, Silas," Livia added from where she sat sharpening her kuna. "I'm not one to let emotions affect me, but the dark cloud you've been carrying is actually starting to bring me down. It's like traveling with a thunderstorm that learned how to sulk."

  "Imagine preparing for years for your power set," Silas retorted, his voice tight with frustration, "studying every advancement guide, memorizing every synergy, only to be left without a single clue what's coming around the corner. At least you two have some expectation of what your next sequences will bring."

  "Yeah, yeah, save the pity party for someone who hasn't heard you whine about it for the millionth time," Cassius interrupted, banking the transport sharply enough to make Silas grab a support rail. "We're coming up on the facility. According to the files, they moved Subject 23 here after the lab breach.”

  "Subject 23," Silas mused, checking his gauntlets. "The one who survived the forced advancement experiments."

  "Survived is generous," Cassius replied grimly. "The readings I saw... her symptoms were getting worse. Reality distortions, temporal anomalies. They had to move her somewhere isolated." His swarm buzzed restlessly around the cabin. "Going to put her down half a mile out. This place might have detection grids."

  The transport's engines shifted to whisper mode. Through the window, Silas could see the facility—a converted industrial complex, deliberately nondescript. No corporate logos, no obvious security. Just weathered concrete and rusted metal that could have been abandoned for years.

  "Too quiet," Livia observed, her voice carrying that hollow quality it got when she was reading ghost-data. "The digital signatures here... there were screams encoded in the network traffic. Deleted, but the echoes remain."

  "Everyone recall the plan?" Silas asked, already knowing the answer but wanting confirmation.

  "We go in fast," Cassius said, his swarm already beginning to separate into specialized units. "My wasps will scout, beetles will breach any hardened doors. Livia, you handle electronic security. Delete their alarms before they know we're there."

  The transport touched down in a cleared area between two abandoned buildings, landing struts hissing as they absorbed the weight. The cargo door opened revealing the industrial wasteland beyond. The air tasted like static and cold iron and something else, something that made reality feel thin.

  Cassius's swarm spread outward like a metallic, viscous tide. Hundreds of metallic beetles and murder-wasps flowed across the cracked asphalt toward the facility's perimeter, splitting into disciplined streams that vanished into vents and under doorways.

  "Perimeter fence is still electrified," he reported, his voice carrying that peculiar dual-tone that came from speaking while distributed. "But the charge is irregular. Fluctuating between 10,000 volts and nothing. Like the power grid's having seizures."

  Livia knelt beside a maintenance access panel, her fingers hovering over the corroded metal. Ghost-data flickered across her vision, traces of deleted information that left scars in the digital substrate. "The facility's network… Someone wiped the servers already. We should assume hostiles already inside."

  "Someone already started the party without us huh?" Silas’s hand instinctively moved to the Dawn Cleaver's grip.

  They moved toward the fence, Silas taking point. The main gate hung open, its electronic lock sparking intermittently. The security booth beside it was dark, the bulletproof glass starred with radiating fractures.

  Cassius sent a cluster of glimmer-moths through the booth's ventilation.

  "Guard's dead," he reported. "But not recently. Throat's cut. But here's the interesting part, the wound's cauterized. High-intensity light weapon. Lucent Domain."

  “Just who the hell has infiltrated the research facility.” Silas breathed.

  “No clue, but they came through here like a tornado.”

  They passed through the gate, entering the facility proper. The main building loomed ahead. Fiber optic cables ran along the exterior walls like exposed veins. Sensor arrays dotted the roofline, but they hung limp, their lenses cracked or melted.

  The maintenance entrance door was ajar, just as Cassius had reported. Fresh blood on the handle. Still wet. Still red. Not oxidized yet.

  "Recent," Livia observed.

  Silas's neural accelerator flared hot against his spine. The world lurched, then slowed.

  The blood spatter froze mid-drip, individual droplets suspended like crimson beads on an invisible wire. He counted them. Seven. Each one angled fifteen degrees left of the door frame.

  The door hung ajar, hinges still trembling from recent movement. The frame was intact. Pulled from inside, then.

  Scuff marks on the threshold. Boot treads, military issue, dragging right to left. Someone had stumbled backward through this doorway while bleeding.

  The world snapped back into motion. Blood completed its fall, spattering the floor. The door creaked to stillness.

  "Someone was dragged through here. Alive but wounded. The blood pattern shows arterial spray. Whoever it was, they didn't have long."

  They entered the maintenance tunnel, Livia's silence still wrapped around them. The corridor should have been industrial standard. The exposed pipes, junction boxes, emergency lighting casting everything in harsh red.

  Instead, it was a war zone.

  The walls were reinforced concrete, five feet thick according to Cassius's beetles. Or they had been. Now sections simply weren't there, spherical voids carved into the structure like bites rendered into the walls. The edges were smooth, textureless gray where reality had been deleted.

  "Void Domain," Livia identified, her voice hollow. "Null-zones. Someone tried to fight back here."

  But that wasn't the only damage.

  Monofilament lacerations mapped across the entire grid. Bulkheads, conduits, and junction boxes were sliced clean. Every incision was molecularly thin and perfectly linear. They bypassed steel and concrete with zero resistance. A few cuts bisected multiple surfaces on vectors that mapped a three-dimensional trap. A razor lattice had deployed across the entire volume of the shaft.

  Cassius's beetles examined a severed pipe. "The cut's molecular-level clean. Nullstrand Domain. Two defenders, different specializations."

  "They put up a fight," Silas observed, following the damage patterns. The monofilament web was defensive, hastily deployed, covering retreat angles. The void deletions were scattered, desperate. Someone trying to create obstacles, slow pursuers.

  Sixty feet in, they found the first body.

  The Nullstrand lay against the wall, surrounded by their own failed defenses. Monofilament threads still drifted in the air like spider silk, creating a gossamer cage that had been bypassed. Their cybernetic ports, fingers, wrists, spine, leaked severed filaments.

  The killing wound was a cauterized hole through the skull. The photon-beam had entered through the right eye, cooking the brain instantly.

  Scorch marks on the floor showed where photon attacks had been deflected by monofilament webs. Chunks of concrete had been carved away by razor threads trying to reach an enemy who'd stayed just out of range.

  "They never got close," Silas said. "The Lucent attacker kept their distance, picked him apart with light-beams."

  Deeper in the corridor, they found the Void Domain.

  This one had put up a fiercer fight. Spherical deletions pockmarked everything, walls, ceiling, floor. The Void Domain had tried to erase their opponent, creating null-zones to swallow photon attacks.

  But it hadn't been enough.

  The body showed multiple wounds. Flash-burns across the torso, the second Lucent’s work, overwhelming force rather than precision. The killing blow had come from behind: a photon-lance strike through the spine that had severed them completely in half. The edges of the wound were fused, no blood.

  "Two attackers," Livia concluded, reading the combat flow. "The Void guard didn't even realize the second one had circled behind before it was too late."

  Cassius's swarm was analyzing the deletion patterns. "The Void Sentry tried Vacuum Crush at least five times. See these implosion marks? The Lucent assailants avoided them all. They knew the attack was coming, moved before it fired."

  "Experienced," Silas agreed. "They've fought Void Domains before. Knew the tells."

  The corridor told the story of a completely one-sided fight. The facility's guards had been Sequence Fives, powerful, well-equipped, defending their territory. It should have been a close battle.

  Instead, it had been an execution.

  The two Lucent assailants had simply... dismantled them.

  "These aren't ordinary operatives," Silas said quietly. "This is elite-level combat. They cut through these guards like they were training dummies."

  They continued forward, passing through the devastated corridor.

  Blood trail resumed ahead—not from the guards, but from one of the Lucent attackers. Fresh. Recent.

  "One of them got hit," Cassius observed.

  "Good," Silas said grimly. "Means they bleed."

  They continued deeper, following the maintenance tunnel as it angled downward. More bodies appeared, maintenance workers, technicians.

  "Someone's cleaning house," Cassius observed, his swarm form coalescing briefly before dispersing again. "This isn't a retrieval op. It's a purge."

  They reached Sublevel One, emerging into what had been the security station. The smell hit them first, burned flesh and ozone, the distinctive scent of photonic weapons discharge. Three guards lay dead, each killed differently.

  Silas examined the first body. "Flash-burned from the inside. Looks like they released a beam of energy from within the body somehow."

  Livia checked the second. "This one's different. Multiple small puncture wounds, light-blades that had pierced through armor gaps. "

  The third showed no visible wounds at all.

  Cassius's beetles crawled over the third body, analyzing. "Heart stopped. Internal photonic damage. Someone reached inside with light itself and just... turned him off."

  A radio on one of the bodies crackled with static. Silas picked it up, rewinding the recorded buffer. A terrified voice emerged:

  "Contact with unknowns, Lucent Domains, we need—"

  The transmission cut off.