Kelly looked up. Two people were leaving through an opening in the dome.

  Demigods.

  Upper Echelon.

  Her body froze. It was a pure animal reflex in the presence of things that could unmake her with a thought. She let out a sharp, angry breath. Stupid, hardwired survival instincts. She wrestled control of her body back through sheer will and stepped forward, watching as the dome's ceiling finished closing with their exit. The tension in her chest broke.

  "A-class assholes. Prometheus wannabes," she muttered, the words tasting sharp and satisfying. Her body was finally listening to her again.

  She stared at the now-sealed ceiling. A real, functional exit. A way out. Her grin returned, wider this time, all teeth.

  "Now we're getting somewhere interesting."

  Then, she finally looked at her surroundings.

  The sight inside the stadium sized dome wasn’t what she was expecting to see.

  Bodies were everywhere, piled as if someone had attempted interior decoration with cadavers and lost interest halfway through. Some wore military colors. Plenty more bore corporate insignia that screamed ‘our quarterly earnings depended on your suffering.’

  Whatever happened here had not been a fight; it had been an industrial-scale catastrophe masquerading as a battle. Something so big, so over-the-top, that even Kelly, who routinely died for fun, had to admit the scale was impressive. It dwarfed the skirmish in the sky by several magnitudes of “oh, that’s bad.”

  The US alliance forces had technically won.

  If you counted “not being the larger pile of corpses” as winning.

  The dome itself appeared personally insulted by several catastrophe-tier combatants. Honestly, the real shock was that the entire structure remained standing. The ceiling seemed to wait for an excuse to fall dramatically.

  Three figures stood in the wreckage, a landscape of dead combatants and dead G.I’s

  The first was a Tüin. Pale, almost bald, robed. A member of the only other sentient race humanity ever found—a race of war-obsessed maniacs, which made this a statistically bizarre day. Its anatomy was a butcher's diagram: four shoulders, four thick arms, inverted legs, a dense pack of muscle under the robe, and a long ponytail flowing from its cranium. This particular Tüin had badges and symbols she vaguely recognized. An ambassador, probably. Just her luck.

  The second man was wiry, hauling a sniper rifle with the bore of a tank barrel. A familiar helix insignia marked the orbiting shield on his back.

  The third was Adrian freakin' Ward.

  Son of Genecorps CEO. Heir to an entire pillar of the corporatocracy if the old war legend ever finally croaked. A war hero from the off-planet Tüin skirmishes—conflicts that started centuries ago and were a source of fame for the genetically-altered scion. Adrian wasn't a full Demigod. He was the next best thing: a pseudo-upper echelon corporate prince, direct descendant of a relic from the Augment Wars that rebuilt humanity.

  Why was a corporate scion, a guy who should have been lounging on a private orbital station doing whatever the top zero point one percent did with their genetically perfected afternoons, slumming it down on Earth with the rest of us?

  Simple. He was not the only heir in the lineup. He had siblings, a whole litter of them, and his ambition was a rabid thing he kept on a very short, very expensive leash. He always smiled for the cameras, always vied for more power. And his dad was functionally immortal. Succession was a meaningless concept when the king planned to live forever. Judging by the way Adrian tirelessly worked his public image, polishing it like a sacred weapon, he always seemed like the type who would get tired of waiting and just start taking things into his own hands.

  Adrian, the war hero, had his hands attached to a device planted on the massive cube. A circlet sat on his head, trailing wires that connected to a bound and dazed goblin shaman doing the same. The setup was a large rack, a collection of little green torsos strapped down and tied together. A life support system kept them alive, blinking. Each head showed the brutal marks of fast brain surgery, each wearing a matching circlet.

  Kelly’s brain snapped the pieces together. He was hacking their goddamn minds.

  "Mind control.” She breathed in shock. “That is so illegal it would get you permanently erased from the gene pool," she muttered.

  "Then again, magical invaders probably don't get a lawyer."

  Kelly was aware of the hypocrisy she’d tried the same thing herself—mind controlling goblins in her home lab—but she was an exceptional case! She had the loops, obviously. Adrian? His actions could carry consequences of a more permanent kind.

  Kelly had tried it through a handful of her earliest and least sane loops. It was the most obvious workaround to incompatibility. She died every time. A small fraction of goblins developed resistance. Probably a skill, she thought. Most of the time, her source had snitched, and she had been executed for purchasing and using highly illegal mind control tech.

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  A look of concentration upon the man’s face as he essentially controlled twenty brainwashed flesh puppets to magically mess with the magic cube.

  Total mind hijacking. Mental puppetry. A capital crime on every decent world. And Adrian, the celebrated war hero, was wrist-deep in the process, his own brain patched into a rack of lobotomized goblin shamans. Their twitching fingers traced weak, glowing patterns in the air, a rudimentary magic he was forcing through their stolen nervous systems. He was making them claw at the mana terraforming cube's operating principles.

  Through her mana scanning lenses, Kelly watched thick ropes of raw energy writhe and snap between the captive goblins and the cube's crystalline surface. Adrian himself was a complete void, a black hole in her vision. Mana actively recoiled from his skin. But by mentally puppeting the shamans, their bodies screaming with stolen power, he found a brutal workaround.

  "He's trying to shut the cube down," she muttered, watching the mana geyser stutter. It was filling the sky with torrents of mana so dense it had made her ears bleed, before her titles kicked in. "And he’s reversing the flow, stuffing it back into the box. Starving the geyser filling the sky."

  The fight coming up hit her with a jolt, a raw craving for discovery and destruction. Her brain clicked into motion, mapping her moves, reading theirs. The thrill swelled, then she toggled back to cold calculation with a satisfying snap. She’d once inverted the very properties and nature of mana's building blocks. It blew up a few planets.

  He wasn’t going that far. He twisted the flow of mana, not its foundation, compressing it until it imploded at a crawl. Mana formed from the clash of dark energy and matter. He tampered with the floor, not the building blocks. Even that could blow up in all of their faces in a heartbeat.

  "Amateur hour," she muttered. "You're just nudging the pipe. I rewrote the plumbing code." The whole setup was a tremor away from vaporizing this entire sector.

  The Alien-man spotted Kelly and stepped forward with a wicked smile, his grin stretching too wide. He raised a strange alien weapon filled with glowing fluid that looked like water, floating and sloshing around his arm as if alive, and aimed it directly at Kelly.

  The immortal intern didn't even blink. "Nice toy," she muttered.

  The Alien-man’s eyes observed Kelly, sharp grin spreading wider across his face. “So this is the scholar who forced us to reveal ourselves,” he said, voice low at first, then rising into a booming laugh. “I saw the footage. That fight… against that little meat demon. Impressive. Few humans would survive that long, and fewer still would hit like you.” He stepped closer, fluid weapon coiling around his arm. “Humans waste so much time chasing peace. You study and plan, and here prove a scholar can strike as hard as any warrior. I respect that, and we honor it.”

  He straightened, chest swelling with pride. “I am Ithili, the end of all races, Warchief of the üoon bloodline. Speak your name, scholar, before we see whose strength deserves to decide the day.”

  “That thief is intern Kelly Voss. Frog—kill her; take her alive only if it’s clean. If you can’t, keep the corpse and brain intact—we’ll need them for study.” Adrian said this without lifting his eyes from the cube, his hands steady on the interface as the bound goblin shamans twitched under the pressure of his control, every ounce of focus poured into whatever precise, dangerous working he was channeling through the bodies wired into the apparatus. “I’d handle it myself, but a single mistake here will wipe out districts,” he added, jaw tight, mana snapping around him while he forced the stolen power back into the cube.

  Ithili’s grin dissolved into a scowl. “You humans and your haste. You would deny a warrior the courtesy of a named death? This one has earned that. You, with your two weak bi-manous arms, understand nothing of glory.”

  He pointed. “She destroyed your father’s house. Half your people are in chaos because of her. You rush to kill at every opportunity. I will take my time.”

  "Seriously," Kelly called out. "I can hear you planning my murder. Group etiquette is clearly not a prerequisite for demigodhood."

  Adrian completely ignored her, his voice was a low, focused growl, his attention locked on the unstable cube. "I am not paying you for glory. I am paying you for a corpse.”

  Kelly interrupted, waving, "Hey, remember me? The ‘worthy foe?’ Hello? Rude." She leaned against her weapon, tapping her fingers. “Watching workplace drama is honestly the best part of my day. You two really should resolve this.”

  Adrian’s head tilted, his tone dangerously calm, his hands steady on the device. "She is a loose end. You are a tool. The tool will complete its function. Kill her"

  "Wow," Kelly said, her voice dripping with sympathy. "A tool. He really doesn't respect you at all, does he?"

  Ithili’s four fists clenched as he snarled at her. "You dare—"

  Kelly let out a low whistle. "He’s not even looking at you when he says it. Whoa. Boss just called you a frog in front of everyone. That’s… management style or abuse? You're really taking that from him?“

  Ithili took a heavy step, toward Kelly, but his head tilted toward Adrian with a low, guttural sound. He seemed almost… Scared? No—that wasn’t quite what it was. Intimidated. The giant was intimidated by Adrian. The sniper shifted his weight, his hand moving subtly toward his rifle. Adrian’s gaze remained fixed on the cube, but his jaw tightened.

  Kelly snorted. Why was Ithili, a four-armed battle-sage from the Tüin wars, putting up with Adrian's barking? They had been on opposite sides of planetary skirmishes centuries ago, and now they stood within melee range where Ithili could easily overpower him, yet he was taking orders.

  Kelly shook her head in dismay. "He didn't even let you finish. Just 'remove her.' Like you're the help. Which, I guess you are. A very expensive, four-armed errand boy."

  Ithili’s eyes cut towards her, sharp and cold.

  “You will die slowly for that.”

  He kept his strange liquid weapon prime and aimed at Kelly, and he moved.

  Kelly wasn’t ashamed to admit that genuine fear seized her—a raw, thrilling first in over a thousand loops. She acknowledged the sensation with a sharp, eager focus.

  As the alien ran, his strange liquid weapon solidified into what looked like a translucent glass rifle. Kelly saw no light and heard no sounds of gunfire, but before she knew it, her hand jerked up subconsciously—some lizard part of her brain sensing danger, switching on her defenses. Her shield took two blows, denting and forcing her to slide back a step—it felt like being hit by tank shells. Then the alien reached her, and his weapon briefly turned to translucent water before splitting in two, shaping itself into massive glass axes. Before she knew it, her composite shield was cut straight through, and her neck was almost dismembered—if not for a narrowly timed evasion.

  The blow lifted her feet off the ground.

  The force launched her through the air. "Okay," she coughed, "that's a problem."