The sight in front of Skyler blanked his brain for a beat. Giant spaghetti turning into a basilisk—he could have handled that if this were a game or a dream. But this was real. And what Roxy had just done was—snap—finger-snap a legendary monster into dust—nothing, just gone.
"This is getting ridiculous," he tried to keep the thought inside. Failed.
"Sky…don't forget to decode," Zoe snapped him back to the mission.
He blinked twice, shook off the daze, and dove back into work. Pixels resolved into drifting digital numerals that hovered around them. Skyler did what he did best—twisting, squeezing, flipping, shuffling the code as though solving a Rubik's cube made of pure neon, suspended in the air. The numbers clicked into place until a perfect pattern formed. He pressed his palms together; the digital cube flared, then folded into a transparent card with a glowing script inside.
The first Sacred Key.
He stared at it a moment, then slipped it into the thigh vault—secured by his DNA. No one opens that but him…unless someone literally removes his legs.
They pushed forward into the firewall's second layer.
On the surface, everything remained outwardly the same. But the scent changed, the cold sharpened, and a queer prickling crawled under the skin—an atmosphere not quite right.
Something sticky gripped his ankle. Skyler glanced down. Black slime erupted from the floor, snaking up to bind him tight.
"What the hell now?" he tugged, but his foot wouldn't budge.
A clear, metallic chime rang, sharp as steel on glass. …Roxy walked on air, every step cutting crisp, heels on glass.
Clack… clack… clack…
She took two more beats, paused in a position that was obviously deliberate—designed to look good.
He watched the slime start crawling up Zoe's calf. Zoe didn't panic. Instead she narrowed her eyes at Roxy, every bit the period-drama villain sizing up a rival.
Was she…reading Roxy's trick? Evaluating the move? Skyler couldn't tell. Whatever the reason, it wasn't his call—because the redhead was standing on top of every physics textbook he'd ever read and rewriting the margin notes.
This wasn't gravity-glove tech or a gadget trick. It was raw, organic power—pure Dimension-class energy. In the old lectures Valentine gave him, Skyler remembered: dimension powers are rare, second only to time control. They aren't fixed; they form in the image of the user—their mind, temperament, inner architecture.
'If your heart was stone, the dimension would be hard and razor-sharp. If you were soft, it would cradle you like a warm towel fresh from the dryer.'
What Roxy did went beyond personality. She performed authority—an exacting, artful demonstration, the deadly elegance of a piano solo played in the chaos of a battlefield.
Skyler had never seen someone so steady with power. She wasn't merely using it—she was designing it.
Roxy thrust her palm forward. A massive pull blossomed, gathering the black slime as if it were a school of carp circling for bread. Dimension-glass threaded into the ooze, quiet but more lethal than a thousand bombs.
She toyed with it—slow, deliberate—wrist turning, a modest whirl, and the mass writhed into a coiling black helix. It rose midair, a thrashing wave, then—without ceremony—she slammed it down.
BOOM.
The slime smashed, fragmenting into swarms of digital numerals, slow-motion confetti drifting through the air.
Skyler's jaw dropped so hard a fly could have filed minutes in there.
"Okay, seriously—talk about stealing the scene," Zoe muttered, equal parts sour and impressed.
He snapped back to the task, hands moving through the pattern: swipe, twist, pinch, weave. The numbers folded, fused, and materialized into a second translucent card pulsing with dark script.
Sacred Key number two—secured.
He stowed it and thought, absurdly: If Roxy's here, this mission isn't so impossible.
Then the other, more honest part of his brain sneered: That is, unless she decides to kill me halfway through.
Crossing into the firewall's third layer was…too easy—the digital equivalent of strolling through a coffee shop door. And that made Skyler more jittery, not less.
This was forbidden ground—uncharted digital territory. No one had ever touched it before. And now he was strutting through it with the swagger of a series convinced it was getting renewed.
"Zoe…what do you think we'll run into next?" he asked, just to fill the dead air. And that alone was new. She was never quiet. Zoe usually burned with more emotion than an air fryer on turbo.
Then came the sound. A high-pitched frequency,thin and sharp—the sterile scream of a lab experiment.
Before he could pin the source, Zoe vaulted forward—onto thin air.
Yes. You heard that right.
A ripple of translucent waves shimmered under her feet before exploding outward in a surge of plasma. Out of the void above her shoulder, something solidified. Her small hand gripped it. Sparks scattered in golden flakes.
A katana. Traditional. Black hilt, silver blade, gleaming with the same lethal beauty as its wielder.
"Zoe—watch out!" he shouted on instinct. Not that she needed warning.
More lines of plasma fired at her. She kicked off invisible footholds with zero effort, blade sketching arcs of light. Each cut was playful grace—as though Tinkerbell turned sword-dancer in a digital warzone.
Holy hell… she's gorgeous.
A whisper brushed Skyler's ear. "What are you staring at? Need me to hold your hand? If you drop a single digit, you're finished."
Roxy's breath skimmed his neck. Not helping with concentration.
His pulse spiked—an engine forced to restart again and again. Threat or not, he hated to admit it, the words thrilled him.
God. Do I…have a kink for this?
He cursed himself silently, shaking his head hard enough to knock the thought loose. Focus. He had to focus. His hands moved, piecing together the sacred code. The third key was nearly complete. His fingers trembled, partly from adrenaline…partly from something else he didn't dare name.
The last beam shattered into a spray of plasma dust. Zoe landed, weightless as a feather, not a gasp, not a sweat,just strolling, an idol girl who'd casually saved the universe.
Her katana still burned faintly before she spun it once and slid it into its sheath—except it didn't. It vanished, folding into a radiant ring of compressed space at her hip.
Skyler finished the sequence, locking the lit-blue keycard into his thigh vault with the other two. The dim light glinted off his dark outfit, the whole scene framed with the moody cool of a vintage spy film.
Zoe bounded back, eyes sparkling. "Sky—did you see me flip midair? If I'd twisted just a little more, the pose would've been perfect, right?"
He stammered, unable to recall the number of spins. Truth was, he'd been too stunned to count—almost forgetting this was the same chaos gremlin who had trashed his research room in ten minutes flat.
"Your sword…it's beautiful," he deflected.
Her grin said she'd been waiting for that line forever. "I know, right? I had to time-jump back centuries to get it—special mission, super rare steel balance with—"
And here came the lecture. The blacksmithing TED Talk nobody asked for.
What era did this girl even crawl out of…?
The fourth layer felt like a different world. Cold seeped straight through Skyler's cyber-hood—an unspoken message that this place didn't want them here.
"Roxy…have you ever broken into this firewall before?" he asked, mostly to kill the silence.
No answer. Just that dismissive posture—the kind that made him want to file a complaint with HR.
Roxy stood to his left; Zoe moved ahead on the right. Skyler glanced at Zoe—she was too focused, too serious for someone normally as loud as a turbo air fryer.
Maybe she wanted to prove she was better. Or maybe she was just overcompensating.
Then the ground shivered without warning. Massive steel pillars slid out of the walls from every direction, the chamber reconfiguring itself into a living 3D puzzle. One shoved Zoe forward—alone—no option to refuse.
"Zoe! Watch—" he started.
Before the word left him, another pillar slammed into Roxy from the side. She slammed into him, colliding chest to chest.
Worse followed: pillars punched out to block every axis—front, back, left, right, top, bottom—completing a six-sided mechanical trap.
"Oh, perfect," he said, bouncing off metal. Not funny.
Roxy's hand shot up. Dimension-glass bloomed from her fingertips—an invisible cube forming around them, a transparent prison that took the hit from the walls. The cage didn't shatter. It also didn't let them go.
Skyler held his breath. Claustrophobia wearing a familiar suit of panic crawled up his spine—forget-place, forget-self—the whole script threatening to play out.
They were stuck—inside a death-box.
He fumbled for the comm band. "Zoe…you hear me? You okay?" His voice came out softer than he wanted—afraid that fear might leak into the signal.
The pink-haired darted and spun through the chaos, every move fractured and dazzling, a human kaleidoscope with walls shuttering and pillars popping around her.
"I'm…okay…what's your side?" she panted into the band.
No reply. Just a faint crack—the sound of glass spidering under pressure.
Bad sign. Real bad. They were running out of options.
Zoe pushed herself to cosmic levels, pupils catching flecks of emerald energy. She ripped a quick direction change, even though the corridor ahead was a graveyard of collapsing floors, swinging pillars, and falling ceilings. There was almost—almost—no gap to thread through.
One small misstep and she'd be headline material in the multiverse crime feeds. But she didn't miss.
She dropped into her trademark superhero landing, autopilot perfect. Before her loomed a tamaar—vault-door huge—its green runes swirling, a curse given form, hanging in the air with no support.
"Found you," she breathed.
A ripple of dimensional energy pulsed beneath her palm. The katana ripped free of the floor and stabbed toward that infernal eye without waiting for permission.
She ghosted through it in a heartbeat. A soft thwump followed—the thing shivered a fraction, then knit itself back together, seamless, as though untouched. Zoe's blade carved a cross-cut—the thing split with liquid ease, then snapped back whole.
Frustrating? Yeah. Pretty infuriating, actually.
She lifted the katana and peered into its own edge, inhaled, and ran her hand along the silver with the tenderness of waking an old friend from slumber. Particles glittered—prismatic dust drifting off the metal.
She swung in a horizontal arc—fast enough to shave an electron in half. Crescent flares stabbed through the oni's eye. The runes jittered, then detonated from the inside.
Ffff—
A tiny flash flared, then vanished—the silence after a candle is snuffed in a vast cathedral.
Not done.
A pinpoint of green bloomed midair and then ballooned fast, green swelling outward with the menace of a spreading malignancy. Zoe planted the blade before her—the absurd sight of an umbrella held up to stop a nuclear blast. To anyone else, she might have looked pitiful—just a kid with a sword. But the energy parted around her as if she were nothing at all; not a hair moved.
What remained were green digital numerals, fluttering in the air—pollen of data birthed from quantum-level destruction.
—
Skyler came to and realized he was lying—on Roxy's lap. Her eyes pinned him with no softness to them.
"How long do you plan to lie there?" she asked.
He shot upright akin to he'd been scorched. Roxy pushed herself up slowly; fatigue flickered in her gaze, in the rhythm of her breath—obvious, but never admitted. She didn't say tired. She said, flat and ordered, "Get back to your job."
Skyler saw the green codecards hovering everywhere, waiting to be sorted—and he was the one they were waiting for.
Great. I wrecked her—again.
Guilt gnawed quietly as he began decoding the fourth Sacred Key. Pulling open a defensive dimension of that scale wasn't a parlor trick, especially with two people holding the seal. The energy demanded doubled; you had to scale the dimension to match time. For a normal person, this wouldn't just drain them—it could break them, permanently.
Then the familiar noise and volume returned—Zoe's bright voice booming, "Too bad you missed the full glory of my entrance!" She cartwheeled in with all the pomp of circus royalty, then flicked her hair at Roxy.
Zoe tried to explain her fight in a quick, breathless stream of onomatopoeia—fwizz…ping…thwack…boom!—which made almost no sense to Skyler, still fuzzy from blacking out. Roxy, though, listened with the clinical focus of a profiler dissecting a suspect.
Wait—she's hitting three power types? She thought.
The air-walk, the weapon-pull from a pocket dimension—that's Dimension, no doubt. The way she tracked position and motion midair—that's Space. If the particles she wrapped around the blade before slicing the oni's eye were what they looked like, that was Gravity.
People who command more than two types? Fewer than 0.02%—which felt both rare and wildly undercounted.
She re-evaluated Zoe on the spot. The pink prankster wasn't just a menace—she was a contender.
Skyler clenched the fourth glowing key with the reckless finality of a gambler going all-in, then slid the green card into the vault at his thigh.
One left. This time—I will not miss it.