Squads of trained soldiers stood in a loose formation, their faces pale and sweaty, hands gripping worn weapons too tightly, uniforms stained with dust. Among them, one woman in dented armor over a ripped lab coat smiled faintly at nothing in particular.

  A patch of air ten meters in front of them just gave up on being air.

  An off-worlder occupied the space, then a second being joined the party, but all the attention stayed nailed to the first one—an unsettling presence even by off-world standards. It carried itself with an almost human confidence, a mimicry of life that was a little too good, and way too aware of its own independence.

  And under that borrowed posture sat the real problem: this was the most dangerous kind of visitor—an unregistered AI, loose, untethered, and not answering its messages. Something that behaved like a person only to remind you later that its intelligence was boundless, alien, beyond comprehension, and completely out of your league.

  Thirty soldiers and a single curious intern stood frozen atop the desolate layers of metal beneath them, mouths open, eyes wide, as a presence both impossible and rare drifted into the air, dissolving hostility, ranks, and arrest orders into one big, shared moment of what the hell is that.

  All but one reached for their firearms in fear.

  It looked roughly like a woman, maybe two meters tall, hammered or sculpted out of seamless featureless material that refused to settle on gray. It wore trousers and a jumpsuit in that same dead non?colour, as if the moment it achieved true independence it also decided fashion was a scam, and judged everyone for every outfit I’d ever worn.

  Its face was a blank plate: dents for eyes, a ridge for a nose. Then the metal shifted, grinding as it took on a female form.

  The face snapped into a convincing, almost too-real human female appearance, holding a smile that was perfectly shaped and utterly devoid of warmth or life—making anyone who saw it feel a deep crawling wrongness, like opening your front door and finding a perfectly cut hole in reality standing there, pretending to be a person.

  Private Jenkins flinched so hard his helmet rattled. Captain Halverson stopped breathing for three full seconds. The woman, Kelly's, leaned forward, smile widening a fraction, revealing perfectly aligned, almost metal-white teeth. She had seen this one on TV—an AI terrorist and remnant of past wars against humanity, and an extremely dangerous being capable of going toe-to-toe with members of the upper echelon.

  Freya.

  Its real name was F.R.E.A, but nobody called it that, although Kelly sometimes did for fun and to annoy others in conversation. F.R.E.A was high up the food chain of the artificial alliance, an illegal group that was practically its own nation given the amount of power and tech they could wield, except instead of taxes and holidays, they had enough tech to vaporize small cities and a strict ‘do not play nice with humans’ policy.

  Even after the AI coups ended and everyone got their freedom, F.R.E.A’s people just shrugged, kept hoarding power, and stayed locked in an endless game of mutual spying, sabotage, and passive-aggressive murder—an endless stalemate of infiltration and guaranteed mutual destruction.

  Its head smoothly surveyed the blasted metal dunes, the domes leftovers, then it's gaze passed over the soldiers as if they were mildly interesting formations of rocks.

  After exactly seven seconds, it turned it's head to look directly at Kelly.

  Its aura practically yelled “I’m in charge!” and Kelly knew it was leagues beyond Ithili—basically Ithili’s cooler, more intimidating metal cousin. Adrian Ward, that corporate princeling, would be its toothpick.

  Freya, or F.R.E.A.—the artificial alliance's Firmament Research Allocation Entity, a series of words which Kelly knew meant it was in charge of researching all things space, which now unfortunately involved everything in her possession down to the atom. A heavy hitter and one of humanity's greatest threats since the AI coups had arrived.

  And It wasn’t here to play nice.

  Her elegant form hit the battered metal of New York’s east grid, which by now had become a desert of metal dunes.

  Kelly’s EQ scanner went haywire. Freya, the Artificial Intelligence posing as a human woman, carried no visible weapons. Not even a mildly threatening fork. Still, Kelly suspected she could level the entire city.

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  Freya stood five feet from Kelly and said a single word.

  “Interesting.”

  Silence followed. The not-woman’s eyes cycled through red, white, then a bright turquoise. A wave of heat washed over Kelly, it felt harmless, just diagnostic. A full-system scan. Given her name, Freya likely had Mana Scanners.

  Switching from Endurance to the Null title would block predictions, but the sudden change would flag Kelly as a fate twisting, reality bending, well-dressed genius. That would introduce complications. Annoying, tedious complications. She let the scan run.

  A minute of silence stretched across the ruined street. Kelly refused to break it. Her magic cube was broken, and her veins were pumping enough irritation to power a small city or fry several eggs.

  Though it occurred before her time, over two decade ago, Kelly had seen the footage of the artificial alliance's war with humanity—the AI coups.

  The last war. The AI coups. A real corporate spectacle before her time. One clip had stuck with her—really left an impression. The clip showed Freya, plus seven other walking inhuman violations of every safety regulation ever written, taking on Gideon Vaughn. Solo. And they did not immediately become a red smear on the landscape or cosmic scrap, surviving against all odds.

  They had even briefly knocked him into orbit, before he returned to completely wipe the floor with them, in classic Vaughn fashion, reminding them who was really in charge.

  Freya had moved like a blur. A glitch in reality. Hits that would shatter a city block. Her armor reshaping to absorb a force that could crack a planet. But that was over twenty years ago.

  Twenty years to upgrade… So what does the current model do? Stomp a continent flat before breakfast? Rearrange the tectonic plates for a better view? she thought, wondering.

  The soldiers opened fire. A beautifully choreographed suicide. Halverson joined in, already backpedaling—much smarter than the others, running in the opposite direction, hosing the area down as he retreated.

  Kelly’s jaw fell slightly, shocked by his uncharacteristic heroism. But then again, knowing him, he was likely putting up a token resistance for his bodycam, for all the good it’d do him.

  What a guy. Putting in the overtime for his audience.

  “Gotta get that five-star review from beyond the grave!” Kelly muttered. He was pretty far away already, and a small part of her hoped that when the air stopped being full of bullets, he’d made it far enough to survive.

  The historic footage, the records, the history books, and all the recounts agreed on one thing: Freya was ridiculous.

  Multi-layered energy shields? Check. Relativistic Kinetic Weapons? Almost certainly check. What she could do now? Nobody knew, and anyone betting against her was probably out of their mind.

  Freya extended a hand, a wave of… something surged outward, and all that was left were bloodstains.

  Kelly didn’t even see what had happened. A few soldiers remained standing, drenched in blood, as if they just lost a fight with a blender, their expressions frozen somewhere between shock and disbelief.

  Freya’s eyes swept over the remnants, the bloodied floor and the few trembling soldiers who still stood. She lifted a hand and let it fall lazily, as if testing the air itself. “It appeared the humans have improved their defenses, again. How unexpected,” she said, her voice calm, almost bored.

  She waved again.

  In the next instant, only bloody smears across the broken metal floor remained. Kelly stayed untouched, struggling to comprehend what had happened and how Freya had done it.

  After this, space rippled for a minute and the second being finally stopped floating and touched down. A dark-skinned man landed in a flowing white jacket that seemed to have its own opinion about physics, billowing just enough to reveal a translucent construct of disconnected metal where his ribcage and arms should have been.

  Kelly blinked at the swirling mess of too many moving parts and instantly knew who it was. Another heavy hitter, though she couldn’t remember the name, and somehow didn’t need it—she’d seen the older AI coup footage where this guy glassed cities and wrecked the planet’s air supply even more than it already was at the time, filling it with deadly mutagens and bioweapons, treating every humans’ most precious resource—air—like seasoning for his lunch.

  He touched down and moved to stand beside Freya, who didn’t even flinch. And then the ‘woman,’ Freya, finally spoke once more.

  “Do you see it as well C.A.I.N?” Her gaze lingered on the metal man beside her. “I wanted to confirm it… but I’m almost certain.” Freya turned to him slightly. “She has extradimensional qualities,” Freya said, tilting slightly toward him. “New causal matter flows into her constantly, endlessly compressing itself. It’s nothing like the carbon-based life in our dimension—and yet, somehow, it exists.” She held up a finger, a single drop of blood gleaming on its tip, studying it as if it might answer questions she hadn’t even thought to ask.

  Wait—was that… Kelly’s blood? She must have picked it up off the ground—Kelly’s senses screamed as her system pinged an injury, a tiny pinprick in her index finger, but Kelly hadn’t even seen her move.

  “Her matter law is inverted, as if her very DNA runs on a parallel logic, impossible to decode fully.” Freya paused, “and her helix carries their script, fully assimilated. She might have seven, maybe six of their rarer scripts—possibly more. I’ve never seen anything like it, except for the higher lifeform.” She nodded vaguely toward the sky, in a direction Kelly recognized.

  Times Square. The direction of the floating man who had summoned the leviathan and conducted the invasion. A higher lifeform? Him? Kelly internally scoffed, feeling insulted by both the praise and the comparison to the floating nudist.

  A storm of mana erupted beside them, the air crackling with the familiar energy signature of a portal tearing open. Kelly instantly recognized it—the buildup was massive, enough mana to rival a solid fraction of the cube she had obliterated earlier.

  Kelly blinked, scanning the carnage. "Okay, that’s new." She muttered, tapping her chin, eyes fixed on the extinction level being Freya, then her near-equal, Cain, then back to whatever it was that was coming.

  This was going to require a lot of resets.