I didn't reach for anything dramatic.
The table adjusted as I placed both hands on its surface, panels drifting inward, formulas decelerating—as if they were no longer being commanded, but consulted.
The domain wasn't asking what I wanted.
It was asking why again.
I ignored it.
"Stay there," I said to Lina without turning.
"I'm not touching your nightmare science." She lifted both hands. "What are you even doing?"
"Buying time."
I focused inward.
Not power.
Process.
Alchemy had never been about creation. It was arbitration—convincing reality to accept a version of itself it hadn't authorized yet.
I selected a narrow intervention.
A correction.
The alignment reacted immediately.
[Action detected.]
[Outcome deviation—]
I muted it.
The domain didn't.
A thin ring formed above the table—not glowing, not radiant. Defining. Inside it, symbols resolved into a single premise:
Stability requires redundancy.
I exhaled.
My target wasn't an object.
It was an event chain.
Not shielding. Not reinforcement. Too obvious.
I altered failure pathways instead.
Gas lines that wouldn't rupture fully.
Electrical surges that tripped early.
Structural stress that redistributed before collapse.
No prevention.
Just delay.
Enough time for decisions to be revised.
The ring pulsed.
The cost arrived quietly.
Pressure behind my eyes—not pain, but compression. Like multiple futures being folded together and stacked where only one should exist.
I grimaced.
Lina noticed immediately. "Neo—"
"I'm fine," I said. "This is expected."
"That's not comforting."
The symbols shifted.
Cost required.
I swallowed. "Take it."
Something left me.
Not strength.
Not memory.
Margin.
The distance I kept between myself and consequence shrank—measurably.
[Warning: personal risk threshold reduced.]
The domain accepted payment.
The ring collapsed.
Silence followed.
Then confirmation.
Not words.
A loosening sensation. Somewhere distant.
I stepped back.
Lina stared at the empty table. "…You didn't make anything."
"No," I said. "I made catastrophe inefficient."
She shivered. "That's worse."
"Yes."
The panels dimmed slightly.
Too slightly.
The domain noticed something else.
[Witness present.]
[Outcome bleed: minimal.]
I turned to Lina. "This is why you can't stay. Observation changes cost."
"And if I leave?"
"…Then the next one is cheaper," I said. "That's how this place ruins people."
She looked at me differently then. "You bent reality to protect one person."
"Yes."
"And Justice thinks he gets to decide who deserves that."
I nodded.
That was when I realized something was wrong.
Not alarm wrong.
Quiet wrong.
Hours passed.
Not evenly.
Time inside the domain compressed when calculations mattered and stretched when they didn't. I ran secondary alignments. Tertiary redundancies. Cross‑probability dampeners.
Judgment should have reacted by now.
It hadn't.
The alignment remained calm.
Too calm.
Then—
A disturbance.
Not local. Global.
The table froze mid‑calculation.
[External Saint‑level activity detected.]
[Source: Justice.]
[Status: Non-convergent.]
Non‑convergent?
Lina felt it. "Okay—no. That wasn't subtle."
I frowned.
Judgment wasn't aligning.
It was… hovering.
Waiting.
That's when the secondary feeds updated.
I hadn't been watching them.
Because Justice wanted me right here.
The table flashed again.
New data.
Different vector.
[Multiple anomalous signatures detected.]
[Classification: Autonomous assets.]
[Targets: Military infrastructure.]
I went still.
Lina followed my gaze. "Neo?"
Justice hadn't escalated Judgment.
He'd declared it.
That was the difference.
A spectacle. A pressure campaign.
While every government froze, argued, broadcast, and panicked—
His subordinates moved.
Not armies.
Anomalies. Humans I would assume he recruited through shady government ways— just like how they almost got me. I guess it's like that in every country.
These anomalies were Specialized. Silent. Purpose‑built.
Facilities went dark.
Research vaults. Prototype hangars. Black‑site servers.
Not destruction.
Acquisition.
I laughed once. Softly.
Lina stared. "That's not the reaction I was expecting."
"He never intended to judge anyone today," I said.
"What?"
"Judgment is expensive," I continued. "Messy. Final."
I looked at the cascading reports.
"He just needed us watching. He needed us on our toes about something entirely different."
The domain stirred—not anticipation.
Recognition.
[Primary threat reassessment complete.]
[User misdirection confirmed.]
And it worked.
For hours.
Across the world, something irreversible was already changing hands.
Lina whispered, "How bad is it?"
I closed my eyes.
"Enough that the next war won't be fought with soldiers," I said. "Or laws."
The table pulsed.
[Alchemy Domain recommendation:]
[Strategic redirection advised.]
I placed my hand back on the surface.
Justice had made one mistake.
He assumed I'd keep playing defense.
"No," I said quietly.
The alignment paused.
[Alternative?]
"Yes."
I smiled—thin, sharp.
——
The first base did not fall.
It was emptied.
At 02:14 local time, a convoy passed through the southern checkpoint under valid clearance. Three vehicles. Correct weight. Correct authorization chain. Nothing flagged.
Inside the lead transport sat a man in a regulation uniform, hands folded, breathing slow.
His bio‑mark was active.
Not visibly. Not dramatically.
His heart rate never spiked.
The mark worked deeper—rewriting muscle efficiency, accelerating neural throughput, collapsing hesitation into decision.
Anomaly designation: Logistics‑Grade.
He didn't command the convoy.
He was the convoy.
At 02:19, internal locks disengaged in sequence—not because they were overridden, but because their tolerance margins shifted microscopically. Bolts accepted new definitions of "closed."
At 02:22, the communications wing entered a scheduled maintenance state that no one remembered authorizing.
At 02:24, the anomaly with the technician badge arrived at the vault.
She was human.
Twenty‑six. No criminal record. Recruited three years earlier under a civilian research grant.
Her bio‑mark specialized in information convergence.
She didn't copy files.
She absorbed them.
Schematics, protocols, failure tolerances—compressed into neural structures that would unfold later, when needed.
No trace remained.
Across the base, another anomaly stood in the armory.
Combat‑Grade.
He didn't touch the weapons.
He evaluated them.
Which ones mattered. Which didn't. Which were worth future iteration.
Justice didn't want hardware.
He wanted direction.
By 02:31, the base was functionally unchanged.
Lights on. Power stable. Personnel unaware.
Only one thing was missing.
Future advantage.
⸻
THREE HOURS LATER
A different country.
Different base.
Same result.
No alarms.
No resistance.
Anomalies moved through infrastructure the way surgeons moved through a body—never cutting more than necessary, never damaging what would be needed later.
Every operation followed the same doctrine:
Acquire knowledge, not materials
Elevate humans, not machines
Leave the world intact long enough that no one noticed it had lost something
By sunrise, five facilities across three borders had been visited.
Not attacked.
Harvested.
⸻
CUTTING BACK TO THE ALCHEMY DOMAIN
The table went silent.
I hadn't noticed at first.
I was still adjusting delay matrices, still watching Judgment refuse to converge.
Too clean.
Too controlled.
The alignment finally updated.
Not a warning.
A correction.
[Judgment classified: Strategic Distraction.]
[Primary operation: Ongoing.]
[Status: Irreversible progression.]
That took me by surprise, oh boy— I would never get us to saying that, I guess it comes with trying to have a normal life… that's if I can call this normal.
"…Show me," I said.
The domain responded—not with images, but understanding.
Patterns. Absences. Futures that no longer branched the way they should.
Tech breakthroughs that would now occur elsewhere.
Military doctrines that would shift without public explanation.
Human capability curves bending upward—quietly.
Justice hadn't stolen technology.
He'd reassigned where it would be born.
Lina felt it too. She hugged her arms. "Neo… what did he take?"
Now that was a question I wish didn't need to answer, cause it's not good.
"Time."
"Leverage."
"And the assumption that wars are fought after they're announced."
The table pulsed again.
[Assessment complete.]
[Justice lead established: Human anomaly network.]
I leaned back slowly.
All the hours I had spent preparing to stop Judgment.
All the care.
All the precision.
Justice had never intended to judge today.
He'd intended to prepare tomorrow. Arghh, this would never happen back in my past life, I know I didn't want to be that powerful anymore but, it's so frustrating getting out smarted by a Saint I easily dealt with— looks like I still had my ego. Sigh.
Lina whispered, "Can you undo it?"
Unfortunately I lost here, big time, I hated it.
"No, but at least no one will be dying today. At least for now." I had to be honest to Lina.
——
The reports came in slowly at first.
Then all at once.
Command centers lit up with alarms and chatter, but the signs didn't match any known breach. Doors had opened without authorization. Vaults emptied silently. Data cores were copied and removed with surgical precision. Surveillance showed human movement—but no force, no violence.
The analysts stared at the feeds, blinking in disbelief. "How… how is this possible?"
The executives exchanged tense glances. They had spent hours, days even, monitoring Judgment—tracking every anomaly, every broadcast, every ripple of influence. And while their attention had been fixed on the world's eyes, Justice's operatives had moved unnoticed.
"Cross-check all logs," Director Hale barked. "Every checkpoint, every security node, every personnel record. I want to know who authorized entry!"
"They are anomalies," another voice muttered, almost too quietly to be heard. "but their bio-marks… they're… enhanced."
Command chains scrambled. Teams were deployed to verify what had been taken. Every facility, every vault, every research wing that had been touched was accounted for—or rather, noted missing, contents gone before any alarm could trigger.
"This isn't a theft," Elias Harrow said quietly, eyes fixed on a world map dotted with red alerts. "It's a relocation. Someone planned this while we were watching Judgment. While we were distracted."
Minutes became hours. Investigators, analysts, and field agents moved in tandem, trying to trace the invisible footprints left by humans who had never intended to be caught. Every second confirmed the truth: Justice had not just acted. He had occupied the field while they were blind.
And the question hung over them all, unspoken but impossible to ignore:
What exactly had been taken—and how could it be recovered?
The government had no answers. Only urgency.
And a growing, chilling certainty that Judgment had been the distraction, not the threat.
The investigations began in every available wing.
Analysts poured over security logs, data streams, and surveillance feeds. Every discrepancy, no matter how small, was cataloged, timestamped, and cross-referenced.
Yet the anomalies had left almost no trace.
Vaults had been opened with keys that never existed. Doors had unlocked in perfect sequence, no sensors triggered, no alarms tripped. And the human operatives? Gone before anyone could report seeing them.
One team ran simulations on the missing assets. Prototype weapons, adaptive armor schematics, advanced AI cores—everything had been copied, downloaded, or relocated in ways that should have been impossible.
"We're not looking at theft," Elias Harrow repeated his statement again, this time voice tight. "This is… coordinated extraction. Someone prepared for this at least weeks in advance."
Director Hale nodded grimly. "And Judgment kept us busy. We were watching the wrong thing the whole time. Where is Blake Roger?"
"he was deployed to one of the neighbors of the names in judgement, just incase." an official responded.
Another screen lit up: biometric scans. Duplicate personnel signatures. Patterns emerging from anomalies who had entered each facility. Each one human—but each one enhanced, bio-marked, capable of interacting with technology and infrastructure at impossible efficiency.
"They're not just stealing hardware," a tech specialist said, voice barely audible over the buzz of servers. "They're upgrading themselves while they do it. And we can't predict how far this goes."
The room went silent. Even the director paused.
"Every facility touched," the lead investigator said, "needs to be assumed compromised. Start a full audit: prototypes, weapons, AI systems, research personnel. Everything."
Minutes stretched into hours. Maps were updated with red markers where assets were missing, lines drawn to track the movements of the anomalies, but each path ended in nothing—ghosts who never existed in the logs.
The council's official statement went out:
Investigations into all missing or compromised assets were underway.
Security protocols were being immediately revised.
All personnel were instructed to report anomalies or unexpected system behavior.
No one mentioned the scale of the human factor. Not yet. They still hadn't fully processed it.
And their orchestrator—Justice—was still free, already calculating the next step.
The government was reacting to the past. Justice was already shaping the future.