The transit hub erupted.
Not with alarms.
With panic.
Kreel's men felt it before they saw it—the distortion crawling through the concrete, the sensation of gravity hiccupping for half a heartbeat. Cameras froze. Feeds stuttered. Time itself seemed to misalign.
Then Netoshka was inside.
She didn't enter through a door.
She skipped.
Reality fractured in short, violent bursts as she blinked from catwalk to floor to ceiling, each reappearance marked by blood spraying against rusted walls. Gunfire chased afterimages. Bullets hit where she had been—never where she was.
"CONTACT—!" someone screamed.
He never finished.
Netoshka passed through him like a phantom, spine snapping sideways as she tore the weapon from his hands and buried it into another guard's throat mid-motion.
Kreel ran.
The moment he realized who it was, he bolted for the lower tunnels, shoving his own men aside. He had contingency plans. Escape routes. Paid patrols.
None of that mattered.
Netoshka followed—not behind him, but around him. She glitched through walls, floors, ceilings, collapsing distance until pursuit became inevitability.
He fired blindly behind him.
She appeared in front of him.
Kreel screamed and skidded to a stop, tripping over his own feet as she seized him by the collar and slammed him into the tunnel wall hard enough to dent reinforced plating.
"WAIT—!" he shrieked.
"I CAN PAY—"
Netoshka pinned him there effortlessly.
"Where are the others," she said.
He shook violently.
"Y-You're too late! They moved! Split locations—no overlaps—"
Her grip tightened.
"Names. Places."
He sobbed.
"South dock refinery… tower district safehouse… old cathedral—"
She let him finish.
Then she broke his legs.
Slowly.
Kreel collapsed, screaming into the concrete.
Netoshka leaned down, eyes cold.
"You sold those children," she said.
She glitched once.
When reality reassembled, Kreel was no longer screaming.
Above ground, the sector descended into chaos.
Gang members scattered as Netoshka tore through the slums again, her movement no longer precise—but feral. Entire blocks fell silent in her wake. Drones tried to track her and failed, feeds desyncing as her glitches corrupted their timestamps.
Secret Police units mobilized.
Too slowly.
Netoshka stopped atop a ruined overpass, blood dripping from her hands.
Three locations.
Three more bosses.
Her eyes glitched harder now—longer distortions creeping into her vision as rage threatened to overwhelm calculation.
She exhaled sharply.
Focus.
She chose one.
The tower district.
The moment she moved, sensors across the city screamed in protest.
"Unregistered anomaly accelerating," an automated voice intoned somewhere far away.
Netoshka vanished.
And somewhere in a fortified high-rise, another member of the Gang of Five looked at his security feed just in time to see the timestamp desynchronize.
Then the screen went black.
The pursuit had escalated.
And Netoshka was no longer hunting quietly.