Gideon, Mara, and Bricks stood frozen at the edge of the rubble-strewn hallway, their weapons half-raised, their minds refusing to stitch the scene together.
Before them, in a crater of cracked concrete, knelt Ash.
The Scorcher.
The clean-suit in the tailored jacket who had strolled into their base like he owned the walls.
Now he was trembling, bent forward under an invisible, crushing weight, every muscle corded in a silent scream.
A faint orange haze—a barrier—shimmered uselessly around him, doing nothing to stop whatever was happening inside his bones.
And standing over him, at the crater's lip, was a kid.
A girl.
Small, dirt-streaked, dressed in torn Junkyard hand-me-downs.
Her face was set in a hollow, determined mask, her eyes fixed on Ash with a focus that felt all wrong for a child.
In her hand—glowing with a cold, sterile light that seemed to push back the grime of the collapse—was a conduit.
Long. Sleek. Bone-white.
Pristine.
Gideon's brain stuttered.
That wasn't scavenged tech.
That wasn't patched-together salvage.
That was corporate-grade purity, the kind of thing that never filtered down to the slums unless carried by someone like him—like the man currently being ground into paste by it.
Ash brought two kids, Gideon's memory supplied, a cold drip of understanding.
Gideon was aware of the movements of the Scorchers somewhat.
Jessa and Tink. Hostages. Leverage against this "Lucent".
But this girl… he'd never seen her before.
Was she Jessa? One of the hostages Ash took?
And the Scorchers, with their arrogant, contemptuous efficiency, hadn't bothered to report their every move to the base they were usurping.
They acted like they owned the air.
Of course they wouldn't mention the hostages.
Yet here she was.
Not tied up.
Not scared.
Armed with a weapon worth more than everything in Gideon's armory combined, and using it to do what the entire Red Dogs had failed to do: break a Scorcher.
Something was deeply, terrifyingly off.
The air hummed with a low, sub-audible vibration—the sound of gravity itself being wound too tight.
Ash groaned, a raw, shredded sound, as another wave of force pressed down.
A wet crack echoed in the dusty silence. A rib, maybe.
"Hey, kid."
Gideon's voice cut through the tension, lower than he intended.
He carefully, slowly, lowered his rifle, muzzle pointing at the frost-coated floor.
A gesture of non-threat.
Mara and Bricks didn't move, their weapons still trained, but their eyes flicked between the kneeling bastard and the child holding the leash.
Slowly, the girl's gaze slid from Ash toward Gideon.
Her face didn't change—the same hard mask of anger, etched too deep for a kid.
Her eyes were dark hollows, lit from within by something that didn't feel like her.
Her small hand stayed perfectly steady around the white conduit.
The complex violet glyph at its tip spun slowly, patiently, drinking the light from the room and leaving the air feeling thin and heavy.
"Kid?" Gideon tried again, his voice strained.
He took a single, cautious step forward, hands open at his sides. "Are you… that guy's—"
He jerked his chin toward Ash, who shuddered under another wave of crushing force.
"—hostage? Did he bring you here?"
The girl didn't react.
Nothing.
Not a flicker of recognition, not a shift in her blank, furious stare.
Gideon's mind scrambled, tripping over itself. He was a boss, not a detective.
He knew guns, charges, loyalty, and when to run.
He didn't know how to read a kid with a weapon that shouldn't exist, using magic he'd never seen to crush a man who was supposed to be untouchable.
Is she on our side? Is she one of his? Is she even a she, or just… something wearing a kid's skin?
He couldn't tell.
All he knew for certain was that her enemy right now was Ash.
And Ash's enemy was, technically, his.
That was the only thread of logic in the room, and it was fraying fast.
Feeling exposed and stupid, Gideon took a step back, rejoining Mara and Bricks.
Ash groaned again, a wet, broken sound, as another invisible weight settled over him.
Gideon didn't look at him with pity.
He looked at him and saw a problem he didn't have to solve anymore.
But the girl with the white conduit… she was a new problem.
One he didn't have a manual for.
He kept his rifle lowered, but his finger stayed beside the trigger.
"What the hell is this?" Mara whispered beside him, her voice tight.
Gideon didn't answer.
He just watched, his jaw set, understanding nothing except that the room had gotten colder, and the only thing holding down a monster was a ghost in a child's body.
Bricks shifted his weight, the barrel of his shotgun dipping slightly toward the kneeling Ash.
His voice was a low, gravelly rumble.
"Why don't we shoot him now? He's pinned. Defenseless."
Gideon's instincts fired in agreement.
It was clean.
Simple.
Remove the Scorcher from the board while he was helpless.
One less nightmare to deal with.
But then his eyes flicked back to the girl.
She hadn't moved.
The violet glyph still spun.
Her hollow stare was back on Ash, but Gideon felt a sudden, cold certainty—if they interrupted her work, that stare would turn.
And they had no idea what was behind it.
He imagined it: the crack of Bricks' shotgun, Ash slumping over.
The girl's head turning, slowly.
Those empty eyes landing on them.
The white conduit shifting its aim.
What was her goal?
To kill Ash?
To capture him?
Shooting Ash might not end the fight.
It might just change the target.
Gideon swallowed, his throat dry.
"No," he said, the word coming out harder than he intended. "Don't. Not yet."
Bricks grunted, unsatisfied, but didn't argue.
His finger stayed off the trigger.
Mara's sharp eyes were scanning the rubble-choked hallway beyond the surreal standoff.
A different kind of tension tightened her voice.
"Boss," she said, barely above a whisper. "Where's Arden?"
The question landed like a missing piece of a collapsing puzzle.
Gideon's blood ran cold.
Arden. And Tenn.
They'd been running from Ash.
They should be here.
Or nearby.
Or…
His gaze swept the shadows beyond the crater, the jagged gaps in the walls, the dust still settling from the ceiling's partial collapse.
No signs of movement.
No sounds of struggle.
Just the low hum of the conduit, the ragged, pained gasps of Ash, and the crushing silence where his strategist and augmenter should have been.
They weren't just facing a broken Scorcher and a possessed kid.
They were standing in the aftermath of a fight they'd missed.
And the most important pieces were gone.
Gideon's hand moved to the comm unit on his collar, thumb pressing the transmit switch. "Arden. Tenn. Do you copy? Report your position."
No reply.
Only a low hiss of dead air.
Then, from the rubble-choked darkness beyond the crater—somewhere past the kneeling Ash and the motionless girl—a faint, tinny static echoed back.
The sound of an open channel, muffled under debris.
They all heard it.
A tiny, electronic whispers in the ruined hall.
Mara's breath caught. "Is that… theirs?"
Gideon didn't answer.
He was already picturing it: Arden scrambling, the ceiling coming down, the comm unit torn from his collar or dropped in the panic, landing in the dust just as the world caved in.
"So they were here," Gideon muttered, the pieces clicking together with a sickening finality.
"Just before… this." He gestured weakly at the scene before them—the possessed child, the broken Scorcher.
Bricks nodded toward the static's source, then jerked his chin at the two figures blocking the way. "How do we get past that?"
The path to the comm unit—and likely to Arden and Tenn—cut straight through the silent war between Ash and the girl.
There was no going around.
The hallway was a choked, narrow tomb.
To reach the other side, they'd have to step into the crater.
Into the kid's line of sight.
Into whatever gravitational hell she was maintaining.
Gideon's jaw tightened.
They could shoot Ash.
They could maybe even try to rush the girl.
Or they could become the next targets of that pristine white conduit.
He stared at the static's faint, mocking hiss.
So close.
And completely, terrifyingly out of reach.
The tight coil of dread in Gideon's chest loosened—just a fraction.
The static wasn't a distress call.
It was a sign.
Arden and Tenn had been here, and now they weren't.
They'd escaped the collapse.
They were on the move.
And still breathing.
For now, that was enough.
It had to be.
But the relief was thin, immediately soured by the geometry of their hell.
Going back meant retracing their steps back toward Cinder and her silent, surgical hunting.
Forward was blocked by the living roadblock of a crushed Scorcher and the hollow-eyed child holding him down.
They were pinned.
Not by walls, but by choices.
Both of them bad.
Gideon's gaze swept from the eerie stillness of the girl to the shuddering form of Ash, then back to the dark maw of the hallway behind them.
One path led to a ghost with a gravity glyph.
The other led to a ghost with the unknown.
"They got out," he said, mostly to himself. Mara and Bricks didn't reply.
They understood the same cold equation.
Their people were ahead.
Their enemy was behind.
And between them stood a nightmare they didn't dare interrupt.
Ash, pressed into the cratered floor at the center of the crushing gravitational well, managed to turn his head—a slow, agonizing grind of muscle against impossible weight.
His vision swam, blurring the rubble and the frost-coated walls.
But he could make out shapes.
Figures standing at the edge of the devastation.
Red Dogs.
Three of them.
The boss and his two guard dogs, frozen like statues, watching his ruin.
A hot, desperate fury cut through the pain.
Not at them—at the situation.
At the puppeteer.
At the silence in his ear where Cinder's dry commentary should have been.
His comm-earpiece.
It had been knocked loose in the first tackle, skittering across the floor.
He'd heard the faint tink as it vanished beneath the rubble.
Now it was buried somewhere under him, silent and useless.
Gritting his teeth against the pressure threatening to flatten his lungs, he forced a guttural shout up through his throat.
It came out ragged, splintered with pain.
"F-F*ck! He-HELP ME HERE!"
Gideon's head snapped toward him, eyes narrowed in cold disbelief.
The boss's reply was a sharp, venomous bark.
"Why the F*CK would we help you?"
Ash didn't have the breath to explain.
He wasn't talking to them.
He was shouting at the dead piece of tech somewhere beneath the rubble.
At Cinder, who was supposed to be monitoring, who was supposed to have eyes everywhere.
He was screaming into the static, into the void, hoping the microphones were still live, that the signal could bleed through the stone and reach her.
Hear this, you ice-blooded bitch.
I'm in a hole.
This puppet has a hammer.
Get down here and fix this mess.
But all Gideon saw was a broken monster begging his enemies for mercy.
All he heard was a plea meant for a ghost.
But Jessa who is burning with rage misinterpreted what Ash said.
In her raging eyes he saw Gideon, Mara and Bricks as an accomplice to Ash's cruelty.
Then her eyes slowly moved towards Gideon's group.
Her gaze landed on him, and the borrowed rage in her eyes seemed to flicker, then refocus.
The puppet was reassessing.
New variables had entered the equation: three armed adults.
Potential allies of the target?
Additional threats?
The logic of the borrowed consciousness was cold, simplistic.
If they are with him, they are enemies.
Gideon felt the shift before he saw it.
The air in the hallway thickened, grew heavier.
The dust on the floor began to tremble, then skitter toward him and his crew in tiny, agitated movements.
"Boss—" Mara started, her voice tight.
The violet glyph at the tip of the white conduit pulsed.
Gideon didn't think.
He acted on a lifetime of fight-or-flight instinct.
He threw his weight sideways, shoving Mara hard into the fractured wall, while his other arm hooked around Bricks's harness, yanking him off-balance.
"DOWN!"
The new gravitational field didn't replace the one crushing Ash—it added to it.
A separate, crushing weight slammed down onto the space they'd just occupied.
Gideon wasn't fast enough to clear it entirely.
The edge of the force caught his legs.
It felt like two invisible vices clamped around his calves.
A grunt was punched from his lungs as his knees buckled, his boots grinding into the concrete as he fought to stay upright.
Moving felt like wading through setting stone.
"Kid! Look at me!" Gideon barked, the strain thickening his voice.
He kept his rifle raised, but the barrel wavered under the pressure. "We're not with him! We're just trying to get past!"
The girl's expression didn't change.
No recognition.
No hesitation.
The hollow eyes just stared, and the conduit glowed brighter.
The force on Gideon's legs increased, threatening to snap bone.
"Screw this!" Bricks snarled.
He braced against the wall, brought his shotgun up in one solid motion, and fired.
BOOM.
The spray of frost-coated shrapnel ripped through the dense air toward the girl.
And then, it bent.
Two feet from her, the pellets shuddered, veered off course, and slammed into the ceiling and floor in a harmless shower of sparks and stone chips.
The air around her shimmered faintly, a visible distortion—like looking through heat haze over a furnace.
They hadn't known.
Couldn't have known.
The shield wasn't a barrier of light or hard energy.
It was a gravitational lens.
A wall of twisted physics that made everything avoid her.
From a far-off vent, past the crater and the chaos, a grating scrape echoed through the dense air.
A rusted vent cover was shoved inward, clattering to the floor.
A moment later, a sleek, insectile shape drifted silently into the hallway.
It was the size of a large bird, all matte-black alloy and subtle, whirring joints—an Anopheles Drone.
Its multi-lens eye cluster glinted in the low light as it surveyed the scene, hovering with unnatural stillness.
In her perch high above, Cinder watched the feed from the drone's sensors.
The thermal outlines, the stress signatures, the gravitational distortions—they painted a picture that made her lean forward, her usual icy detachment cracking for a single, unguarded moment.
Her voice, murmured aloud to the empty air around her, was picked up and transmitted faintly through the drone's external speaker, a ghostly whisper in the ruined hall.
"What in the world is happening here?"
She had heard Ash's shout for help—a raw, desperate sound that had cut through the comm static before it died.
That alone had been an alarm bell.
Ash asking for help was… aberrant.
Contradictory data.
He was theatrical, arrogant, prideful to a fault.
For him to openly beg, even through a compromised channel, meant the variables had spun wildly out of his control.
And now she saw why.
The feed showed the Red Dogs boss and his crew pinned under a secondary gravity well.
It showed her own asset, Ash, crumpled in a crater under the primary, heavier force.
And it showed the source: a small, heat-blurred figure holding a conduit with a power signature that made her systems flag it as corporate/restricted.
That child.
With corporate grade hardware.
Crushing a Scorcher.
Cinder's mind, a machine built for clean executions and controlled data, scrambled to process the contamination.
This wasn't in the mission parameters.
This was an unknown.
Probably a rival's corporations move.
A complication.
Her drone shifted slightly, its lenses zooming in on the girl's face, on the empty, rage-filled eyes.
"Identify," Cinder whispered, not to anyone in the room, but to her own analysis software.
But no tag appeared.
No profile.
Just the chilling label: UNKNOWN.
Ash was in a hole.
And someone had just thrown a new kind of dirt on top of him.
There was no way Cinder would risk sending a drone into that gravitational well.
The Anopheles units were expensive, precision tools—not disposable shock troops.
The loss of even one would be deducted from her operational budget, another line item on the debt she was meticulously working to erase.
She could already see the cold, automated report:
Asset loss due to uncalculated gravitational anomaly.
Cost: 120,000 credits.
Deducted from operative clearance.
No.
She'd learned that lesson the hard way.
But the asset—Ash—was being systematically flattened.
His vitals, still faintly transmitting from his suit's biomonitors, were spiking into the red.
Mission failure was one thing; losing a Scorcher was another.
The debrief would be… unpleasant.
Her mind, a vault of cold methodologies, ran the calculations.
The girl's field was a localized distortion of mass.
Countering it required not finesse, but a symmetrical, opposing force.
A blunt instrument.
"No choice but to meet a force with another powerful force," Cinder murmured, the words tasting like ash.
It was inelegant.
It was wasteful.
It was the kind of brute-force solution she despised.
A sharp, metallic click of her tongue echoed in her quiet perch.
Annoyance, a rare and unwelcome visitor, coiled in her gut.
Her carefully orchestrated testing phase with the Red Dogs—the psychological pressure, the data on squad cohesion under drone-based terror—had been interrupted.
Delayed.
Now, it was completely upended by this… this anomaly.
And, as if that wasn't enough, their target package—Arden and Tenn—had somehow slipped Ash's grasp and vanished into the ductwork and shadows.
Her focus was being forced away from a controlled experiment and toward a messy rescue.
It was an insult to her efficiency.
With a sigh that held no warmth, she redirected her attention.
The game with Nino's squad was put on indefinite hold.
The drones circling the frozen lab were commanded to gather.
All processing power, all tactical bandwidth, shifted to the single feed from the Anopheles in the hallway.
The variable had become the main mission.
Mara, shoved hard against the fractured wall, shook off the impact.
Her eyes immediately found Gideon—his legs trapped, buckling under the invisible force, his boots grinding deeper into the concrete as the crater around Ash itself seemed to deepen, pulling everything toward its epicenter.
She didn't hesitate.
Lunging forward, she grabbed the back of Gideon's harness with both hands, planting her feet and pulling.
For a second, he budged an inch.
Then the resistance intensified.
It wasn't just weight; it was a pull.
The gravitational distortion was actively sucking him downward, as if the floor beneath him had become a slope leading into a pit.
Her muscles screamed.
Her boots slid on the dust.
"BRICKS!" The shout tore from her throat, raw and urgent.
Bricks, still reeling from the sight of his shotgun blast curving away from the girl like water around a stone, snapped his head toward Mara's voice.
He saw her straining, saw Gideon sinking, his face a mask of pained concentration.
The shock evaporated, burned away by a deeper instinct: his crew was in the vise.
"Hold on!" he roared, abandoning any further attempt to shoot the untouchable kid.
He slung his shotgun over his shoulder and charged toward them, his heavy frame throwing up puffs of dust.
He didn't try to understand the physics.
He just saw a man caught in quicksand made of air.
Reaching them, he wrapped his massive arms around Gideon's torso from the other side, adding his raw strength to Mara's.
Together, they pulled, muscles cording, boots scrabbling for purchase on the unstable ground.
The force fought back.
It was like hauling against a tide that grew stronger with every heartbeat.
Mara and Bricks hauled with a final, desperate heave, and Gideon's body tore free from the crushing grip of the well.
He collapsed against them, a grunt of agony bursting from his lips.
His legs were bent at angles they shouldn't be, the bones pulped under the immense, localized pressure.
But their escape was a trigger.
Jessa's hollow eyes tracked the movement.
The interference.
The rage, cold and algorithmic, interpreted it as resistance.
The variable was attempting to remove itself from the equation.
Unacceptable.
Her small hand tightened on the pristine conduit.
The violet glyph flared, its light deepening to a violent, bloody crimson.
She pushed the well beyond its designated area.
The radius of the crushing gravitational field expanded outward in a sudden, violent pulse.
The air itself seemed to groan.
Dust, debris, and loose rubble skittered and then shot toward the epicenter where Ash still lay pinned.
Gideon's crew stumbled, the new wave of force slamming into their backs like a hammer.
Their movement, already slowed by Gideon's dead weight, became a agonizing, backward-sliding crawl.
They were being dragged back in.
Then, from the darkness behind them, the hovering Anopheles drone emitted a sharp, rising hum.
Its central lens assembly glowed a fierce, focused orange.
Cinder, watching remotely, had run the calculations.
A precision strike was impossible with the gravitational lens distorting everything.
She needed overwhelming, indiscriminate force—a shockwave powerful enough to disrupt the well's delicate harmonic structure, to blast the very air into chaos.
The drone couldn't muster a true, strategic-grade spell.
But it could channel one of its heaviest, single-use payloads.
Rank 4—Firestorm Blast.
A complex, blazing glyph spun to life in the air before the drone.
From it, a roiling sphere of fire bloomed—a miniature sun, swirling with contained devastation.
Then, with a sound like a collapsing star, the sphere compressed.
It crushed itself down from a meter wide to the size of a clenched fist, a dense, impossible knot of hyper-compressed plasma and kinetic fury.
Cinder didn't know if it would penetrate the gravity lens.
She didn't need it to.
She needed it to detonate.
The target wasn't just Jessa.
It was the space she occupied.
The entire volume of the gravitational well.
The fist-sized fireball shot forward, a streak of incandescent death aimed directly at the center of the distortion.
The plan was brutal, simple: flood the zone with catastrophic energy.
Let the blast wave scramble the gravitational field.
Let the concussive force throw Ash clear, even if it broke more of him in the process.
Cancel one unnatural force with another.
The fireball crossed the threshold of the well.
The air around it warped, shimmered—and then the world turned to fire and thunder.
The drone's aether core shrieked under the impossible load, channeling every last joule of energy into the cataclysmic spell.
The Rank 4 glyph flared one final, searing white—and then winked out.
The small, sleek machine went dark.
Its stabilizing rotors froze.
It dropped from the air like a stone, hitting the frost-coated concrete with a dull, final clatter.
In her distant perch, Cinder's retinal display flickered, then dissolved into static.
The feed from the Anopheles drone cut off abruptly, leaving a silent, gray void where the scene of chaos had been.
She was blind.
The last image burned into her vision was the fist-sized star of plasma crossing into the warped air of the gravity well.
Then—nothing.
No data.
No confirmation.
No vitals from Ash.
No sight of the anomaly.
But there was one certainty: the kinetic barrier currently deployed over Ash before the blast was still active—its status indicator, a faint, persistent shimmer on her now-dark screen, was the only data point left.
Silence, heavy and complete, pressed in on her.
The only sound was the faint hum of her own remaining drones, holding position in the frozen lab far below.
She had spent a high-yield asset.
She had lost her eyes.
And she had no idea if her solution had worked, or if she had just poured more fire into a bottomless pit.
But beneath the tactical frustration, a colder, more personal thread of thought surfaced—one that had nothing to do with Ash's survival or the anomaly's defeat.
If that drone's gets scrap, I swear I'm billing it to his pride.