Cole looked across the battlefield. The toxic fumes had dissipated enough to see through now, the chemical fire below finally burning itself out.

  He saw Sarah on a rooftop. Her remaining blades orbited around her in a defensive pattern while her rifle tracked Ashley's center mass.

  Ashley was in trouble. Her body vanished, reappearing at a different Ricochet-Mote then was gone again, materializing at another angle. She moved in rapid jumps between the floating mirrors, her form flickering in and out of existence. Sarah's blades pursued relentlessly, adjusting after each jump, forcing Ashley into defensive patterns.

  Ashley's hands came up, light coalescing in her palms. A continuous beam of photonic energy unleashed from them, sweeping across Sarah's position. The beam carved through concrete, melted steel support beams, forced Sarah to dodge.

  But Sarah's blades were already repositioning. Two curved around Ashley's left side while three came from above. Ashley's form dissolved into light, pulled into the nearest floating mirror. She materialized behind Sarah.

  Sarah's face twisted in frustration as her blades stabbed at where Ashley had been, finding only empty air. "Stop running," Sarah snarled, her rifle sweeping in arcs, trying to predict the next jump.

  "Make me," Ashley shot back, but Cole could hear the exhaustion in her voice.

  Ashley reappeared behind her, bayonet blade slashing. The cracked blade caught Sarah's shoulder plating, carving through weakened chrome. Blood sprayed as the blade bit into flesh beneath.

  Sarah spun, firing. The reality distortion round hit Ashley's chest plate—the armor held for a second, then cracked.

  Ashley vanished again, pulled into another mote. She reappeared at a new angle, her palms already glowing. The continuous beam of light swept from her new position, catching one of Sarah's blades mid-flight. The weapon glowed orange and then melted into slag.

  Four blades remaining.

  Sarah adjusted her tactics. She stopped trying to predict Ashley's movements and instead fired into the Ricochet-Motes themselves—if she destroyed Ashley's reflection points, she'd trap her. A reality distortion round struck one of the floating mirrors.

  The mote shattered, its indestructible properties overwhelmed by conceptual erasure.

  Four motes remaining. Ashley's mobility options were shrinking.

  Sarah fired again, another mote targeted. Ashley vanished just before the round hit, forced to jump to a different mirror. Sarah's blades were already converging on that position, waiting.

  Ashley tried to dodge, but one blade caught her damaged armor. The shoulder where the conceptual spear had struck earlier. The blade drove deep, tearing through the breach in her plating.

  Ashley’s scream spiked the comm link. Cole clocked the visual. Her armor was throwing violent sparks. Systems cascaded into the dark. The photonic routing that powered the chassis flickered and flatlined.

  The servos locked. Her movement dragged. The suit stopped being a mechanical advantage and turned into a tomb. It was dead weight anchoring her to the deck.

  He caught the pneumatic hiss. Emergency seals blowing out. Explosive bolts detonating in a hard sequence. Ashley was manually purging the shell.

  The armor detached in chunks. Chest plate. Vambraces. Greaves. It all impacted the rooftop in a pile of dead alloy.

  What remained was Ashley in the basic bodysuit underneath. Arterial red painted her entire left side where the spear had cored the shoulder.

  She was still in the fight. The bayonet was a fractured mess of alloy. She clutched it anyway. Her legs shook. Three reflector nodes held an orbit around her. It was the only edge left on the board.

  Sarah's blades spread out, surrounding Ashley in a diamond pattern. Her rifle locked onto Ashley's unprotected center mass.

  "You should have stayed in the Grand Mirage," Sarah said.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The distortion round chewed the distance in a microsecond.

  Cole's body shattered.

  His chassis fragmented entirely. The architecture broke down into weaponized silica. A swarm of razor-shards detonating on every vector. Shrapnel punched through the chemical fog. Others curved around buildings, using windows and chrome surfaces as reflection points to attack from.

  The localized storm collapsed on Sarah.

  Sarah's blades tried to defend—spinning, intercepting, blocking shards mid-flight. But there were too many, from too many angles. The blades could only cover so much space. Glass slipped through the gaps, cutting through her armor, her flesh, her augmented limbs. Dozens of lacerations scaled into hundreds. She screamed. The Full-Body Plating ran emergency patches. Liquid chrome flooded the breaches. He could see the desperation in her eyes as she tried to seal a hundred leaks at once.

  Ashley threw a hand up. A hard-light wall rendered in the airspace. The distortion round met the photons. The construct collapsed.

  It bought a fraction of a cycle. Ashley threw herself lateral. The round grazed her airspace. The atmospheric distortion washed over her chest.

  Sarah spun, her rifle tracking the storm of glass, trying to find Cole's center. She fired on full automatic. The bullets sprayed in all directions, erasing chunks of the rooftop, erasing everything they touched.

  One round barely missed Ashley. Another caught her leg below the knee.

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  The limb erased from reality as if it had never existed at all.

  Ashley's scream tore through the night. She collapsed, unable to stand on one leg, hitting the rooftop hard.

  Cole acted on pure instinct. His remaining three Graviton spheres shot forward toward Ashley. They positioned themselves beneath her in a triangle formation, their gravitational fields lifting her, cradling her, becoming her mobility.

  She couldn't stand. But she could float. And she could still fight.

  Ashley's hand found her rifle where it lay beside her. Despite the agony, despite the missing leg, despite everything, she pulled the weapon to her shoulder. Her hands were shaking, movements mechanical, but they didn't stop.

  Her rifle's scope glowed, she activated her God's Eye ability, designed to acquire targets five miles away. Targeting lasers erupted from the weapon, dozens of them, guidance beams meant for extreme-range precision.

  She aimed at Sarah. Every laser acquired the target. The overlapping data streams built a web of telemetry. Saturation tracking.

  The rifle's chamber cycled. Ashley was dumping every remaining photon charge into a single shot. The barrel began to fracture. The thermal load was too high. Fractures spread through the weapon the tip of the rifle glowing hot with energy.

  "Eat this." Ashley ground the words out.

  She fired.

  The discharge blinded the optics. A pillar of raw photons scorching the oxygen. But it delivered a secondary payload. The lasers had painted Sarah with corrupted telemetry. The main beam pushed the data package. Every frequency. Every algorithm. Every protocol. They all screamed conflicting admin privileges into Sarah's neural mesh.

  The overkill was a work of art.

  Sarah's face distorted. Locomotion scripts jerked into random spasms. The beam washed over her chest plate. Armor cooked under the laser. The chrome plating across her body sparked and locked up. But the physical damage was only part of it—the beam overloaded every augmentation, every neural mesh connection, every cybernetic interface with contradictory commands. Her body's systems were trying to execute thousands of conflicting orders simultaneously. Forge-ports along her spine flared, then died. Her rifle wavered, unable to track, as if every safety mechanism in her body had failed at once.

  Sarah gasped, smoke rising from her augmentation ports. "How—"

  She stood exposed, systems overwhelmed.

  Cole reformed, his consciousness snapping back together like elastic under tension. The disorientation from being scattered hit him.

  He stepped through the polished surface of Sarah's own chrome armor, reappearing inside her guard. His damaged Fractal Edge arm was already moving, already striking.

  The cascade impact hit her rifle first. The weapon shattered, reality distortion chamber rupturing, exotic materials scattering like shrapnel.

  The cascade continued. Through her ribs, bone fragmenting. Through her augmented spine, chrome vertebrae splitting apart. Through the forge-ports along her back spilling liquid metal into her body cavity.

  Each impact echoed through her, multiplying, spreading.

  Sarah's mouth opened in a silent scream. Blood bubbled on her lips.

  She collapsed, falling to her knees, then forward onto the rooftop.

  Her armor flickered, liquid chrome trying desperately to flow over wounds, to repair, to save her. But there was too much damage. Too many systems failing simultaneously. The chrome retreated, flowing back into her forge-ports draining away, leaving only human flesh behind.

  It revealed a woman who looked too young to be this powerful, too human to have done such inhuman things. Silver hair, pale skin, and eyes that held something between rage and resignation.

  Cole stood over her, his damaged arm sparking, but he didn't strike again. Something in her expression made him wait.

  "The data," she managed, blood staining her teeth. "You don't... know what... it contains."

  Ashley, floating on the Graviton spheres nearby, her face pale and drawn from blood loss, managed to focus on Sarah's words.

  "Don't care," Ashley replied, her voice hard despite her injuries.

  Sarah laughed. A ragged, broken sound that became a cough, more blood spilling. "You must think this is just about the Corpos. It goes beyond them, beyond the churches... the Domains... they're not what..." She shuddered as forge-ports sparked and died one by one. “They’re coming. And we're... not ready..."

  Her hand reached up, grasping at nothing, fingers closing on empty air as if trying to catch something invisible.

  She died with her eyes open, staring at something beyond the neon-soaked sky.

  Cole and Ashley exchanged a glance. Who’s coming back?

  The battlefield fell silent except for the distant wail of sirens and the crackling of dying fires below. Cole and Ashley sat in silence for a moment, processing Sarah's final words. Processing the fact that they were still breathing. The sirens grew louder, emergency services finally brave enough to approach now that the combat had stopped.

  "We need to go," Cole said, forcing himself to his feet.

  "Yeah," Ashley agreed, her voice tight with suppressed pain.

  They both shattered, their forms dissolving into light and glass respectively, moving across the reflective buildings in a series of rapid jumps. Each transition was harder than the last, their Domain powers pushed beyond exhaustion. They eventually reformed at ground level, mixed in with the crowds gathering to gawk at the carnage from the fight.

  "I can call a taxi," Cole said, swaying slightly on his feet.

  "A taxi would work. Or…" Ashley gave him a look that was somehow both sheepish and mischievous despite her injuries.

  "Or what?"

  "Don't be mad."

  "Why would I be mad?"

  Cole saw a familiar flicker of light in Ashley's eyes, the telltale sign of a neural summon command. A moment later her pristine Seraph Linea pulled up, its chrome finish gleaming under the streetlights.

  She gave a coy smile.

  “You said it was in the shop and that’s why we had to use my Ryzen.” Cole stated bitterly.

  "Yeah, I lied. I figured something like this would happen and yours costs less. It would be cheaper for me to replace it."

  Cole shook his head, mouth slightly agape. "You calculated that we'd get into a life-or-death aerial battle and lose a car?"

  "I calculated that trouble follows us like a bad habit," Ashley shrugged, then winced at the movement. "I was right, wasn't I?"

  "Come on, let's get in," Cole said, helping her in. Her missing leg made everything awkward, and they both tried not to look at the space where it should be. "And just know you're getting me a top of the line upgraded version."

  "Sure thing." Her voice was softer now, the adrenaline finally fading.

  They entered the vehicle, the autopilot kicking in.

  "Chrome dock? I know a guy," Cole offered.

  "Won't be needed. I have replacement parts at home and also…" she pulled out two injectors. "Premium nanobots, these things will clear all the broken bones and internal bleeding within the hour."

  Cole took one of the injectors, pressing it against his neck and feeling the immediate relief. Cool numbness spread from the injection site, the nanobots already beginning to heal the fractures and the hundred other injuries he'd accumulated. His arm's chrome was cracked in a few places and a chunk of his cybernetic shoulder was gone, but still functional for now.

  The car glided through the city as it lifted off, ascending through the traffic layers toward the upper districts. The battlefield shrank below them, emergency vehicles swarming the devastation like insects on a corpse.

  "Help me up to my place first, then meet me at the apartment bar? We both deserve a few shots."

  "After what we just survived?" Cole laughed, though it hurt. "We deserve the whole damn bottle."