Kelly stopped in front of the dome wall, a sharp edge of curiosity flashing across her features. Her bracelet shifted and unfolded with a sleek hum, the segments elongating as her transforming molecular blade emerged. The wall didn’t stand a chance. The hum of the blade’s power cut through the air as Kelly hacked her way through the dome, making an entrance just big enough for them both to slip through.

  “Ladies first, I guess,” she muttered, stepping inside.

  Once inside, Ren, the ancient war veteran, did his thing. Or, more accurately, he did a ridiculous thing.

  One moment he was just standing there, slightly slouched as if he couldn’t be bothered to care. The next, his arms extended in different directions, and the ground beneath him started to tremble. The surrounding material—the metal, the shrapnel, the very floor—began to shift, rearranging itself as his nanotech visibly consumed everything within reach. What followed was pure insanity.

  Ren’s nanotech began to build. His arms fused, expanding with consumed material, and digging supports deep into the ground. Those nanotech machines? They weren’t just changing shape. They were alive in a way she hadn’t quite seen before. He stood there, half-formed, as the technology around him went into overdrive. A gun emerged—no, scratch that—a cannon the size of a door, then a car, then a freaking truck.

  It was absurd. It was beautiful.

  He turned to face her. "do you remember the direction the cube is located."

  Kelly couldn’t contain herself.

  Her eyes bugged out, practically glowing with the unfiltered excitement of someone who had just met the holy grail of reverse-engineered tech.

  “Wait, wait, wait—hold up! Your nanotech-it comes together to form one massive 3D printer, doesn’t it? Or is each tiny nanobot its own 3D printer?"

  She paused only to inhale.

  “Holy shit,” she muttered under her breath, her voice thick with disbelief. “You’re telling me you’ve got a damn factory inside you? No way… that's supposed to be centuries ahead of us—hell, we’re just barely getting shrink-box tech to even remotely work with space-time. How the hell are you getting them this small? This can't be real.”

  She kept rambling, her voice accelerating with every thought that flashed through her mind.

  “Is this stolen? Reverse-engineered from something? You gotta’ be the only one who has this." Ren wasn’t a tech-head; that much Kelly knew.

  "How? Why you? Who’s the mastermind behind it? Who the hell made this? There's gotta be thousands—How'd they get them so small? This is quantum tech, isn’t it? I mean—holy shit, it has to be. I can’t even...”

  Ren was standing there, not even blinking, arms still extended like some kind of walking experimental weapons tech demo. He sighed in a way that sounded older than he looked, then all he gave her was a flat, deadpan stare.

  "Kelly," he said, voice low but measured, "Which direction is the cube?"

  And just like that, Kelly snapped out of her rambling stupor. She blinked a few times, before muttering under her breath.

  “Fine, fine. Jeez.” She flashed him an apologetic grin, though it was mostly just greed lacing her eyes as she stared at the technology in front of her. Then she sighed, turning away from the gigantic nanotech cannon. "You're no fun, you know that?" She turned her attention to the sky, scanning for the faintest hint of the cube’s energy signature.

  The scanner in her ocular lenses lit up in the brightest shades. Mana was spewing out of the dome’s center like an erupting volcano, or some kind of geyser, pouring into the sky in torrents. It was everywhere. There was a sense of power that made her skin tingle.

  Kelly’s eyes locked onto the source, pinpointing it, and she raised a finger, casually pointing out the spot to Ren. “There.”

  Ren gave a grunt, his usual gruff expression turning into something that resembled brief consideration.

  “Most wouldn’t consider your foreknowledge proof of anything,” he said slowly, turning his attention to Kelly. “Most people don’t even know something as powerful as a time mutation is possible, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have believed it if they didn’t see it with their own eyes. But I believed you, eventually. And now I believe you even more.” His tone shifted, heavy with weight that Kelly barely processed.

  Before she could even form a response, Ren snapped his fingers.

  “Cover your eyes.”

  Before she could even react, a nanotech-generated shield materialized around her, a dense, complex mix of metal and energy, layered with his units. It was seamless, incredibly advanced—if Kelly wasn’t already distracted by the gleam of it, she’d have been in awe.

  And then, seconds later, the air around them tore apart.

  A blast, from what seemed like nowhere, ripped through the dome, its power so intense that Kelly could feel it even through the shield. She shut her eyes tightly, knowing better than to test whether or not her lenses would survive. Warnings flared. Her eyes burned. The entire world was a sheet of static, light, and noise. Even with her eyes shut, it nearly fried her ocular lenses.

  When the blinding spots finally faded, Kelly almost didn’t believe what she was seeing.

  The area in front of them—the size of a large portion of New York—had been reduced to a wasteland. Kelly could see the glowing remnants of glassed earth, warped and broken from the heat.

  The dome, which had been solid, was now in ruin—a massive scar on the landscape. A contained molten path ran through the center, as if the earth itself had been seared and torn open. Kelly’s brain couldn’t even register the full scale of it at first. The devastation stretched across blocks—no, neighborhoods—of New York, lessening in intensity the further it stretched. Ground that should’ve been solid was now glassed over in craters. The impact was immense, but even more insane was what was left behind.

  In the center, sitting pretty, was the cube—surprisingly intact, though glowing molten red.

  She could see charred bodies scattered around it. The one-time combatants from the retrieval force she'd encountered that one reset. One of those corpses was probably Adrian Ward, the corpo heir. A lot of people were going to be pissed. The sniper she’d been dealing with earlier? Gone. Not a trace of him anywhere.

  Looks like someone got obliterated, Kelly thought to herself, her thoughts muted, almost dazed.

  One was completely unrecognizable, blackened to a crisp, a barely-formed torso still twitching weakly on the ground. The other was kneeling, missing limbs, almost entirely burnt to a crisp. Kelly doubted he was alive. At least, not for long. He was half- propped up behind a shield that looked like it was made of molten liquid metal. Despite the charring, she easily recognized both.

  The old war veteran, Ren, Sato the ghost, had completely prevented the explosion and wiped out the remaining retrieval force in a single blow.

  Kelly, dazed, was still in shock. “What... the hell was that? What did you just do?”

  Ren casually looked around the crater of a battlefield, nodding with a very specific old man ‘I’ve-seen-it-all’ brand of calm.

  "Hmm. acceptable," He mused, indifferent, almost to himself. He watched the wreckage, casually brushing dirt from his chest. "It's been a while since I've had to use that. The charge time's still annoyingly long, but I'm glad to see it's still as effective as ever."”

  "Yeah, no kidding," Kelly said, her voice flat as she stared at the wreckage. Kelly blinked. "That's somehow less specific and even more confusing. Love it. Forget I asked."

  Kelly wasn’t known for her restraint, especially when this much tech was in front of her. This was a brand of insanity that made her heart skip a beat. If this was some kind of prototype, she was going to find whoever built it and steal their lunch. Then their lunch’s lunch. Hell, she was stealing the whole damn restaurant.

  She sighed, feeling her hands move almost involuntarily toward the shield. She extended her shadow onto it, and the shadow hardened, sliding her fingers through the dimensional rift that was her personal space. There, hidden beneath her fingertips, she felt the familiar weight of what she'd just stolen. It was small. Almost invisible to the naked eye. Just a little piece of what Ren had, now in her personal storage.

  “Whoops,” Kelly muttered, a mischievous grin creeping across her face.

  Ren’s eyes pursed as he glanced at her. “Give it back.”

  "What?" Kelly asked innocently, pretending not to know what he was talking about.

  Ren’s expression darkened, his voice low. "You know what you did."

  Kelly stifled a wince. Damn it. She hesitated, but only for a moment, before muttering, “Fine. Fine, you can have your little toys back.”

  She reluctantly pulled the nanotech units back from her shadow dimension and handed them over. Ren took them without a word, his expression still slightly exasperated.

  “Don’t do that again,” he warned, his voice gruff.

  Kelly threw her hands up in mock surrender, still unable to hide the satisfied glint in her eyes. "Sure, sure. I wont. Promise. Today i wont."

  Ren said nothing, but the corners of his mouth twitched.

  “Let’s just get the cube.”

  Kelly scanned the tiny, stolen piece—nothing more than a speck, really, drifting to rejoin him. Too small. Too far.

  She couldn’t stop herself from muttering under her breath. "Seriously. Who the hell even is this guy?"

  She’d asked herself that question so many times, it was starting to feel less like a catchphrase. This guy—The ghost—was a walking contradiction. Military-grade weapons, a towering legacy of destruction, but nothing about him seemed to line up with the way the world had unfolded. The guy was... ancient, to put it kindly, but Kelly still hadn’t found a scrap of solid intel on him beyond rumor. What made him tick? What weapon had he just used to annihilate an entire grid?

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  It was always the same question. But Ren? He was some kinda walking answer Kelly didn’t have time to solve. At least for now.

  “What kind of freaky-ass nanotech do you even have?” she muttered to herself as they moved toward the cube.

  There was always something new with him. Something she wasn’t getting. But Kelly, she had a rule—keep your friends close, your enemies closer, your questions closest of all. Especially when the answers were about as comfortable as a high-voltage fence.

  As they walked, Kelly stared at the massive spiderweb fracture that now marred the dome. It was supposed to be some kind of "ultimate protection" for civilians, an impenetrable barrier meant to hold up against just about everything. A thing you’d imagine could survive an artillery strike, maybe even a freaking meteorite. So, seeing the structure cracked like a cheap wine glass was… well, a little daunting, if not somewhat horrifying.

  "Okay. So… that’s insane," Kelly muttered to herself. She turned to regard him.

  "If you’re this strong… why didn’t you just wipe out the invaders yourself, or just take their magical cube for yourself?" Kelly asked, an eyebrow raised.

  Ren, still staring at the cracked dome, didn’t even flinch. He just sort of sighed. “It would upset the people in charge,” he said, flat and unbothered.

  Kelly paused. “Oh, right. Well, guess it makes sense. You’re not the only one capable of destroying things like this, huh? Not exactly the top dog anymore, are we?”

  The Big Four had a few token demigods on the payroll—but they weren’t the full package. They were barely scraping 80EQ, just enough to make some noise, stir up a little trouble—powerful enough to disrupt on a planetary scale, but not enough to truly break the foundations. They could rattle things, tweak the landscape a bit, but they couldn’t bring it all down. A taste. A preview of what could be.

  But then there were the real powers. Humanity’s top four—those who had obliterated the peak of demigod power. Enhancement levels that went beyond the 100EQ-limit, levels no one had ever seen before. Gideon Vaughn of Vaughn Industries, Liu Kang Han from Han Cybernetics, the Ward family at Genecorp, and the Crystal family at Crystal Nanotech. They didn’t even have a name for what they were anymore. No one was willing to say the "g" word, because doing so would be admitting that humanity had gone too far—opened a Pandora’s box that nobody had the guts to look into.

  Ren kept staring ahead. “No,” he said, his voice a little more strained now. “If they got upset, I’d have to come out of military retirement. And that’s a headache I’m not interested in dealing with.”

  Ren just started moving again, leading the way through the wreckage, making a bee-line for the cube that would soon be the most dangerous place in the city. “Let’s go.”

  Kelly followed him, her mind already processing the situation. She was already two steps ahead and did not like the look of the road he was taking her on. “Wait, hold up. I thought you were supposed to steal the thing? The key word being 'Steal.' She took a step back, glancing at the wreckage, trying to distance herself from the bad idea, her thoughts spinning. “The whole plan wasn’t to just waltz in here and—what? Stand there and look impressive while I do the dirty work?”

  "We retrieve the cube before ETA. Standard protocol."

  Kelly squinted, somewhat aghast at his complete disregard for the sanctity and safety of her immortal mind. “Oh yeah, sure. Let's go fight overpowered deity's with no preparation or plan. What do you think this is, a team-up movie?” She paused, glancing over at him. Actually, just this one time, she could use the extra backup. But that plan was still stupid.

  "What’s the plan, Ren? I mean, we’re here, right? You can’t back out now.”

  Ren gave her a sidelong glance, as if he was barely paying attention. “Didn’t you tell me that F.R.E.A. and C.A.I.N. would be arriving soon? Not to mention the winged portal invader possessed by a god of order?” He raised an eyebrow, his tone dry. “And that all three are some of the few beings capable of permanently harming you?”

  Kelly’s lips twisted into an amused half-grin. She raised both hands, palms open. “Oh, yeah—I told you that, didn’t I? Not worried. As long as we avoid the cube for an another hour it'll be fine.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Plus, the dense mana around here’s messing with all the satellite signals. So, you know, this place is probably one of the least surveilled spots on the planet. All the comms lines are busted and open, or so archaic that they might as well be. Which means we can just sit back, let the pretend gods and the artificial gods throw a tantrum, and once they start ripping each other apart—bam, it’s ours. We have my shadow and your stealth. You just have to be a little patient. We’ll steal it right under their noses.” They'd be too busy bloodying each-others noses to even notice it had gone missing.

  Ren glared at her, but she wasn’t phased. That was just Ren for you—hard to please, but that’s what made him fun to proposition. “So, do we wait for the gods to punch each other in the face, or should we just kick the door down and make it real messy?”

  Ren sighed heavily. Like he was carrying the weight of every bad decision that led him to this moment, and Kelly was the most recent one.

  "Okay, fine," he said. "We steal it your way. But we use my tools.” He looked… contemplative.

  “We’ve got time, the monsters have left, and the real monsters aren’t here yet” Ren continued. “I’ve got a package inbound—we’re going to need it for what comes next. You won’t make it out in one piece otherwise.”

  "A gift?" Kelly asked. "Is it equipment? Do I get to keep it?"

  Ren stared at the crater where a building used to be. The one he'd made. It was still smoking.

  "If this goes wrong," he said, "I'm leaving you behind."

  Kelly threw her head back, laughing. “Aww, you’re so sweet. Don’t worry. I’ve got it all under control. You can run if you want, but you’d miss the best part.”

  Kelly stood, some distance away from the target, staring into the back of a covert stealth vehicle Ren had called in, marveling at the expensive tech on display. High-end military covert gear. Naturally, they were stealing the most expensive thing ever, and Ren had really pulled out all the stops.

  All of it would get the job done, as clean and quick as possible. And Ren? Well, he knew how to pick tools that’d actually make a difference.

  “Jesus, that thing’s a beauty,” Kelly muttered, her eyes gliding over the polished, almost-too-slick surface of the gear on display. She considered how each piece could be leveraged. "Huh. I’ll give him this—he knows how to make sure the job doesn’t go sideways."

  As she stared at the equipment, she pulled a spear from the shadows, the darkness just... there, sliding into her hand with an effortless ease. She twirled it casually, the light weight of the thing shifting in her grip, the edges of it smoky and out of focus. Her gaze slid over it, her lips curling into a half-smile.

  "Alright," she muttered, twirling it again. "Neither of us knows what to do with you just yet, huh?" she spun it between her fingers like a very long, and very dangerous coin.

  Then she caught it mid-spin, letting it rest in her grip, then shrugged, letting the shadows cling to her fingertips. "No rush. We'll both figure it out."

  With a thought, her systems pulled the notifications from her latest acquisition.

  [Unique Trait: Lesser Null-Voidling Prime (I) gained!]

  [Lesser Null-Voidling Prime (Unique, I-Grade)]: This being contains traces of Voidling physiology, merged with its Null qualities to create a strain of Voidling that should not exist. As a result, this being passively constructs a layered substrate beneath existence. A second foundation—not underneath space, but folded beside it. Unobservable. Unreachable. As a new manifold substrate with its own laws, it holds potential.]

  [Additional Effect: This being’s passively constructed layered substrate beneath existence has gained an element of its nature, violating universal laws, causing the substrate to interact with mana in ways unique to its existence, passively drawing in the energy, allowing it to exist in space without surface or background. In heightened emotional states, this being can permanently grant the substrate an additional aspect of its Null nature.]

  Kelly stared at the floor, or more specifically, her shadow, feeling for the new capability. She squinted and focused—trying not to curse under her breath at the sheer headache this was giving her. The new trait she'd picked up? The sensation was weird—like waking up a leg that didn’t want to wake up. But worse. Way worse. Concentration was everything, and that wasn’t coming easy.

  A constant struggle, like trying to move a limb that wasn’t really there. If her mimic skin was the equivalent of gaining a new arm, this was like being handed a prosthetic limb that wasn’t fully engineered yet, and it still had a mind of its own.

  “Passive, my ass,” she muttered, sweat dripping down her forehead, the frustration building. Pulling her shadow into 3D space? Yeah, that was an ordeal she hadn’t signed up for. "That’s totally not passive. Feels more like wrestling a ghost that keeps playing dead.”

  She could feel it shifting, resisting, but she forced it up, one inch at a time. “This is gonna suck,” she hissed under her breath. "Why couldn’t it just work, huh?"

  Eventually, she gave up and simply ordered her systems to guide her, and after a full ten minutes of adjusting, her shadow obeyed. It lifted, rising in the air to her height, a perfect replica of Kelly, only pitch-black. Not a clone or alive. Just a shadow—one that didn’t need a surface. And sure enough, it stayed there, feet planted, lines connecting back to her.

  Making it exist was all she could manage, and it was hard as hell to do. In a fight without that working, she'd be better off trying to use a rock as a phone. Not exactly the edge she was hoping for.

  Ren curiously approached and waved his hand through her standing shadow. The surface bent like rubber for a second, then his hand slipped inside before seemingly hitting an impenetrable wall. Her shadow did not let living things enter. Ren was very much alive.

  He withdrew and studied the shadow, then studied her.

  "So it makes your shadow three-dimensional," he said. "But that's all it does. It's just a shadow. It's not very useful, is it?”

  Kelly didn’t respond.

  She just stared at the vehicle’s ceiling for a minute. Not because the ceiling was interesting. It wasn't. It was gray and had a segment shaped like someone tried to draw a map of a small country and gave up.

  She was thinking.

  She couldn't manipulate mana. Her body just soaked it up like a sponge in a bathtub, and her Traits ran on the stuff. That was the whole deal. She had no control or fine-tuning. Nothing. She just absorbed the stuff, and whatever passive effects her Traits decided to do worked on their own. She’d gotten creative with it: found ways to push and exploit—to make passives do things passives weren't supposed to do—but at the end of the day, she wasn't casting skills or spells. She never would be.

  So no. She couldn't do what the Voidling did. Wouldn’t take her shadow and stretch it into something that looked like a miracle and felt like a knife.

  She pulled up the Trait description anyway.

  Null-voidling Prime.

  The name had changed. It was the only trait that ever did that. Kelly had theories. Her best one was that it kept bumping into her Null trait, the empty space where mana went in and didn't come out, and the two of them were having some kind of conversation she couldn't hear. The trait changed because it was interacting with something that shouldn't exist.

  She read it again. Same words as last time. Didn't matter. She was looking for something she might have missed. A loophole. A line of text that meant something different now that she'd seen what a voidling could do with shadows.

  Her shadow dimension has its own laws.

  That sentence wasn't there before. She knew it wasn't there before. She'd read this trait a lot. Like, a lot a lot. That was new.

  She figured it meant the stasis thing at first. Stuff goes in, stuff stops. But that had been there from the beginning. From the first time she pulled up this trait in that loop where she figured out how to even get the thing. So no. That wasn't it.

  She kept staring.

  Her Null trait soaked up mana. Interacted with it in ways no one else could. And her shadow dimension ran on her. On whatever her Null nature did to things.

  So the laws in there weren't normal anymore.

  But what did that mean?

  Then there was the second change. It no longer said her shadow dimension held nothing. That text was just gone. Erased. Up until this point, it had always said her shadow dimension held nothing. No matter what she stored in there. You could pack the thing full of enough guns to start a small war and the Status would still call it empty. Like the time she’d tried to fit a whole store full of vending machines in there. It was a dimension with unreasonably high standards.

  Now it didn't say that.

  What changed?

  Kelly stuck her hand in her shadow and willed something ‘new’ to arrive in her palm. Nothing happened. The new stuff, the fact that the Status considered her shadow dimension no longer empty, was probably because of all the shadow bodies and constructs she had stored in there after the voidling fight. The ones she'd stuffed in there because leaving them lying around seemed like a great way to have problems later.

  She had at least thirty of those things in there. Maybe more. She hadn't counted. Did that mean any shadow constructs she stored in her shadow became hers? Like, they were part of her dimension now?

  Only one way to find out.

  She reached into her shadow and grabbed something. Came out with a shadow toddler. It looked like a demon baby that spent too much time at the gym and had enough teeth to make a dentist cry. Her hand was made of shadow stuff too as she pulled it out, keeping the thing from falling apart. The toddler was just a construct. Not alive. Not even a thing really. A puppet. A spoon. Take your pick. It was frozen. A statue. No animation. Kelly couldn't control mana, couldn't cast skills or spells like the invaders could, so the toddler was just a lump of shadow held together by her shadow hand.

  She turned her mana scanning lenses up to full and started laughing.

  The statue was just sitting there drinking in mana. Soaking it up. She let go. The shadow statue stayed. Didn't dissolve. Just sat there in 3D space. She could feel it.

  Because it was hers.

  She looked at Ren. "Oh this changes everything. Now I really want the cube."