11:31 A.M. — Sector 20 Ruins
The third drone's aether core detonated with a sound like the sky tearing open.
Mags was already moving—not fast enough.
The blast was conical, designed to punch through reinforced steel rather than flatten a radius.
A precision tool, not a blunt weapon.
It sliced through the apartment's rotting walls like a scalpel, leaving the surrounding structure eerily intact.
But heat bled beyond the calculated vectors, licking at Mags' exposed skin as she threw herself behind a collapsed coffee table.
For a heartbeat, the world was white.
Then the smell hit—burnt insulation, vaporized plaster, and beneath it, the acrid tang of her own seared flesh.
Her left shoulder screamed where the heat had kissed it, the armorweave there blackened and fused to blistered skin.
No time to assess. No time to hurt.
Cinder's voice cut through the settling dust, singsong and mocking: "Tch. Still alive? I told Blaze these drones needed bigger payloads."
Mags' fingers found the tanto at her hip.
The blade was warm—not from the explosion, but from the Razor glyph Pen had gifted her.
Its edge hummed against her palm, hungry.
Outside, boots crunched on debris.
Closer now.
Too close.
The explosion's aftermath clung to Mags like a second skin—heat still radiating from the shattered walls, the air thick with the stench of scorched metal and her own seared flesh.
Every breath tasted of burnt wiring and drywall dust.
Behind the overturned coffee table—its surface now blackened and splintered—Mags' fingers tightened around Nex's shotgun.
The pump-action slid back with a whisper of oiled steel, then clicked shut.
Loaded.
Ready.
Boots crunched on broken glass outside.
Closer.
Cinder's voice, dripping with amusement: "Come out, come out, Silent Killer. Or do I have to—"
Mags moved.
She surged upright, the shotgun already braced against her shoulder.
Two deafening blasts tore through the smoky air—boom, boom—buckshot chewing into the doorway where Cinder's silhouette had been half a second earlier.
No time to check for hits.
Then she was sprinting toward the blown-out window, boots kicking up debris.
The building's edge rushed up beneath her—
—and she leapt.
Wind screamed in her ears.
For a heartbeat, she was weightless, the gap between the two buildings yawning beneath her.
Then her knees slammed onto the adjacent building's fire escape, the impact jolting up her spine.
She rolled through the rusted railing, shotgun already coming up to scan for drones.
No breath.
No hesitation.
Just the next move.
Mags hated the taste of being ambushed.
It wasn't the pain—she could compartmentalize that.
It wasn't even the tactical disadvantage, though that gnawed at her instincts like a trapped animal.
No, it was the mockery that scraped against her nerves.
Cinder wasn't just hunting her; she was performing.
A sniper who announced her presence with taunts, who moved like she wanted to be seen.
Stupid.
If their roles were reversed, Mags would have put a round through Cinder's skull before the woman even registered the threat.
No words.
No warning.
Just the inevitable click of a trigger, the wet punch of impact.
Efficiency.
Respect.
But this? This was a game.
Mags' fingers tightened around her conduit as she activated the comms unit.
Static hissed in her ear before Karen's voice cut through—sharp, alert.
"Status."
No greeting.
No preamble.
Karen knew silence was its own report.
Mags exhaled through her nose.
One tap: compromised.
Two taps: engaged.
A pause, then three rapid clicks—Scorcher.
Karen's curse was barely audible. "Fall back. Now."
Mags almost smiled.
Too late for that.
She could already hear Cinder's boots on the fire escape below, the creak of rusted metal under deliberate weight.
The woman was humming—some jaunty Spire pop song Mags vaguely recognized from Nexus-era radio.
Unacceptable.
Mags palmed a flash charge from her belt, thumb hovering over the activator.
If Cinder wanted a performance, she'd give her one worth remembering.
Mags' ears still rang from the explosion, but silence could be deceptive.
Just because she couldn't hear the drones didn't mean they weren't there—hovering, watching, waiting to strike.
As if on cue, Cinder's mocking voice dripped from above: "Where are you going, my little silent killer?"
Mags didn't flinch.
Didn't look up.
She knew.
The streets should have been empty—just crumbling concrete and open sky.
But instincts honed through hundreds of kills screamed at her: Wrong. Something's there.
Her hands moved before her mind fully processed the threat.
The shotgun rose, its barrel nearly brushing the Rank 2—Kinetic Spread glyph she'd deployed mid-air.
The spell flared blue as she pulled the trigger—BOOM—and the buckshot tore through it.
The effect was instant.
Pellets that should have dispersed in a wide cone instead multiplied, the glyph accelerating them into a hyper-dense storm of hypersonic shrapnel.
They shredded the empty air above her—
—and sparked against invisible alloy.
Not one drone.
Not even a dozen.
The sky rippled as the shots connected, revealing a swarm of cloaked drones—dozens of them, packed so tightly their optical camouflage glitched under the barrage.
They filled the air like a plague of mechanical locusts, their repulsor fields humming in dissonant harmony.
Mags' blood turned to ice.
This wasn't a hunt.
This was a showroom.
Cinder's laughter rang out, bright and unhinged: "Surprise!"
***
11:37 A.M. — Sector 20 Border
The sky hung low and heavy, gray clouds clotting the horizon like a bruise.
Pen adjusted the strap of her monofilament wire dispenser, her boots kicking up dust as she moved between the scattered Talon operatives.
They worked in grim silence—checking ammunition, priming charges, the occasional metallic click of a safety being disengaged cutting through the humid air.
Then her comm unit crackled to life.
Karen's voice was all sharp edges and urgency: "Pen. Drop everything. Take your team and support Mags—immediately. She's engaged a Scorcher near the border." A pause, the faintest hitch of static. "Last ping puts her right on top of you."
Pen's fingers stilled on the wire spool.
Around her, the Talons had frozen mid-motion, heads tilting toward their own comm units as the same message echoed through the channel.
She didn't waste time with questions.
"You heard the boss," Pen barked, slamming a fresh cartridge into her launcher.
The weapon whined as it charged, its targeting HUD flickering to life across her retina. "Mags doesn't call for backup unless shit's gone fully sideways. Move!"
The Talons moved as one—a well-oiled machine of violence snapping into motion.
The veterans surged forward first, their modified trucks roaring to life as they tore through the ruined streets, kicking up plumes of dust and debris.
Heavy weapons rattled in their mounts as the vehicles bounced over broken pavement, the gunners already scanning rooftops for targets.
But Pen was faster.
With a practiced flick of her wrist, she launched her monofilament wires skyward.
The razor-thin cables hissed through the air before biting into concrete, finding purchase on a ledge.
Then came her favorite glyph—Rank 1—Hook—purchased from a back-alley dealer and painstakingly modified with her tinkerer friend.
The spell flared blue along the wires, not just reinforcing them but pulling, adding kinetic force to her swing.
The world became a blur as she launched herself upward, the wind screaming past her ears.
For a heartbeat, she was weightless—then her boots slammed onto the rooftop, her knees bending to absorb the impact.
She didn't pause.
Another wire, another swing, another rooftop.
She moved like a ghost, her path a zigzagging arc across the skyline.
Below, the trucks rumbled on, but she was already ahead, cutting through the ruins with lethal grace.
Then she saw it.
The sky ahead wasn't empty.
Black dots.
Dozens of them.
No—hundreds.
Of Drones.
They filled the air like a swarm of mechanical locusts, their optical camouflage flickering in and out as they shifted formation.
The sheer scale of it made her stomach drop.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Pen muttered, her grip tightening on her wire launcher.
Somewhere beneath that storm of metal and malice was Mags.
And Pen had a front-row seat to the chaos.
Pen didn't slow down.
The drones shifted like a living thing, their formation rippling as they detected her approach.
A dozen broke away—streaking toward her in perfect synchronization, their repulsor fields humming in eerie harmony.
She grinned.
"That's more like it," she muttered, and yanked hard on her wires.
The Hook glyph flared brighter as she changed trajectory mid-swing, her body arcing sideways just as the first drone opened fire.
Superheated rounds punched through the space she'd occupied half a second earlier, melting concrete into glowing slag.
Pen landed in a roll, her fingers already dancing across her conduit.
The Rank 2—Razor Edge glyph ignited along her monofilament wires, turning them from tools to weapons.
She didn't wait for the drones to reorient.
With a whip-crack motion, she sent her wires lashing outward.
The enhanced strands sliced through the first two drones like they were made of wet paper, their severed halves sparking as they plummeted to the streets below.
But the others adapted.
They scattered, their movements becoming erratic—no longer a formation, but a swarm of angry hornets.
One clipped her shoulder as it darted past, the impact spinning her halfway around. She tasted blood—she'd bitten her tongue.
"Annoying," she spat, recentering herself.
Below, the Talon trucks screeched to a halt, their heavy weapons swiveling upward.
"Pen!" someone shouted, his voice distorted by the sudden burst of gunfire as the mounted turrets opened up.
The sky became a storm of tracers and shrapnel.
Pen didn't waste the distraction.
She launched herself toward the heart of the swarm—and Mags.
Pen's arms locked around Mags' torso just as the drones converged.
The monofilament wires screamed under their combined weight, but the Hook glyph held—barely.
They swung through the air, the swarm's shadow swallowing them whole.
Below, the Talon trucks' gunfire carved momentary gaps in the mechanical storm.
Rook's rifle boomed, punching through three drones in a single shot.
But for every one that fell, two more took its place.
Pen's grip tightened as they cleared the rooftops. "Who are we fighting?"
Mags didn't waste breath. "Cinder."
The gunfire below stuttered—whether from shock or tactical reassessment, Pen couldn't tell.
Then the swarm shivered, every drone freezing mid-pursuit.
Cinder's laughter crackled through the drones' speakers, amplified into a grotesque chorus:
"Woah, is the party already starting? I still haven't prepared my dress!"
The swarm reconfigured in a blink.
Drones folded into perfect hexagonal grids, their undersides glowing as Rank 3—Flare Flechette glyphs ignited across the formation.
A hundred barrels hummed in unison.
Pen's blood turned to ice.
She wrenched open the comms. "TAKE COV—"
The world turned white.
Superheated rounds fell like hellfire.
The first volley turned the lead truck's engine block into molten scrap.
The second punched through reinforced plating like it was wet cardboard.
A rookie—Kass, maybe, Pen never learned her name—had half a second to blink before a flechette vaporized her skull above the eyebrows.
Her body stood upright for three heartbeats, finger still on the trigger, before collapsing.
Cinder's voice sang through the carnage: "VectorTech Anopheles Mk.IX! Or—ugh, that's a mouthful. Let's just call them my V-Tech Mosquitoes."
The drones rotated, barrels cycling fresh glyphs.
Pen counted twelve Talons still standing.
Against a thousand guns, Pen moved on instinct.
Her monofilament wires lashed out like a fisherman's cast—not to kill, but to tangle.
The razor-thin strands wrapped around a drone's repulsor array, and with a vicious yank, she sent it careening into its neighbor.
The collision sparked a chain reaction, three more drones spiraling out of control in a shower of shrapnel.
A momentary reprieve.
Just enough for the surviving Talons to drag their wounded behind overturned trucks and shattered walls.
Mags didn't waste the opening.
The pump-action of her shotgun clacked like a death knell—shell loaded, chamber locked.
Covert ops were her specialty, but Mags had learned long ago: sometimes silence wasn't an option.
Sometimes the only way out was through.
Pen's teeth ground together as she calculated their odds.
Regroup.
They needed to—
The comm unit crackled before she could voice the thought.
"This is bad," Rook's voice boomed, the usual gravel in his tone sharpened to a blade's edge.
Static couldn't hide the strain beneath. "We're down to fifteen in seconds. Regroup at Point Sigma—now."
A drone's carcass exploded nearby, showering them in molten alloy.
Pen didn't flinch.
"Sigma's too far," she snapped back, already scanning the ruins for cover. "We'll never make it through that swarm."
Mags ejected a spent shell.
It hit the ground with a ping.
Then, quietly: "Sewers."
Pen's head whipped toward her.
The old maintenance tunnels—narrow, maze-like, shielded. Drones couldn't follow.
Cinder's laughter echoed above the carnage, shrill and unhinged. "Running so soon? But the fun's just start—"
Mags' shotgun roared—but the barrel wasn't pointed at the drones.
It was aimed at a rookie Talon's corpse.
The rookie lay sprawled near the wrecked truck, his unseeing eyes still wide from the flechette that had punched through his throat.
Strapped to his back: a cluster of Vey's homemade incendiary charges, primed but never used.
The blast tore through the swarm like a vengeful god.
Fire rippled outward in a shockwave, consuming drones in a chain reaction of detonating aether cores.
The heat scorched Pen's face as she threw herself behind cover, the force of the explosion sending a pressure wave through her ribs.
For three precious seconds, the sky was nothing but flame and falling shrapnel.
Cinder's scream of rage cut through the chaos—"You bitch!"—as half her swarm became a storm of molten debris.
Pen didn't celebrate.
She grabbed Mags' arm and yanked her toward the nearest sewer grate. "Move! That bought us minutes, not hours!"
The surviving Talons didn't need orders.
They were already running, dragging wounded comrades through the smoke.
Rook covered their retreat, his rifle picking off straggler drones with mechanical precision.
But as Pen's boot hit the grate, she saw it—
A single intact drone, its carapace blackened but functional, hovering at the edge of the inferno.
Its lens focused on them.
Recording.
***
11:43 A.M. – Sector 20 West Side Warehouse
The warehouse thrummed with chaos.
Red Dogs shouted over each other, their voices sharp with frustration as they hauled crates across the concrete floor.
"This is bullshit!" A wiry scout kicked a loose bolt across the room. "No warning, no explanation—just 'move everything now' like we're their damn pack mules!"
"Shut up and lift," growled another, hefting a crate marked with explosive warnings. "You wanna complain to Gideon? Be my guest."
Echo pressed herself against the rough wood of a supply crate, her breathing slow and controlled.
The stench of oil and sweat clung to the air, masking her presence as she listened to the discontent ripple through the ranks.
Good.
Angry fighters made mistakes.
The charge nestled beneath the ammunition pallet was no ordinary explosive.
Echo's fingers had worked quickly, weaving the Rank 1—Thermite Glyph into the compound's core just like what Vey instructed her to do.
The design was brutal in its efficiency—a marriage of old-world chemistry and modern glyphcraft.
At its heart, the thermite mixture would burn hot enough to melt steel, but the glyph's purpose wasn't just to ignite it.
The spellwork acted as a force multiplier.
Where standard thermite might scorch a three-meter radius, this variant would amplify the blast wave—pushing the superheated reaction outward in a cascading ring of destruction.
The glyph's intricate loops and angles weren't just for show; they formed a carefully engineered pattern to direct the energy, ensuring maximum structural damage to the warehouse's support columns.
Echo checked the timer.
Five minutes.
Plenty of time to plant the second charge—and escape before the Red Dogs realized their supply hub was about to become a funeral pyre.
A perfect chain reaction.
Then—
BOOM.
The south side of the district lit up in a fireball, the shockwave rattling the warehouse walls.
Dust rained from the ceiling as every Red Dog head snapped toward the sound.
What the hell was that?
Echo's gut tightened.
That wasn't Talon ordinance.
Too big, too messy.
If their operation was already going sideways—
But the distraction was undeniable.
As the Dogs surged toward the windows, shouting questions, Echo melted deeper into the shadows.
The second charge slid into place near a stack of fuel canisters, its timer synced to the first.
She didn't know if the explosion was a blessing or a curse.
But she did know one thing—
When these charges blew, the Red Dogs would have far bigger problems than missing supplies.
Echo moved like a shadow between the stacks of crates, her body hugging the blind spots between flickering lumen lights.
Every step was calculated—boots avoiding loose debris, hands never lingering too long on surfaces.
Her eyes tracked potential security points: the rusted camera in the northeast corner mostly defunct, the motion sensor above the fuel depot, probably active, but with a three-second blind spot between sweeps.
She was halfway to the final support column when the warehouse's alarm system erupted in a deafening wail.
Shit.
Red lights strobed across the concrete floor as the alarm blared.
Echo's muscles tensed—but she didn't freeze.
The intel on Tenn had been frustratingly vague: "Mechanical genius. Specialization: unknown."
Now, seeing how the alarm had triggered without visible sensors, Echo suspected the Red Dogs' engineer had woven glyphwork directly into the building's infrastructure.
No time to wonder.
Only to act.
She lunged for the final target—a load-bearing pillar near the eastern exit—and slapped the last charge into place just as shouts echoed from the warehouse entrance.
"The hell's setting it off?!"
"Probably that damn explosion tripped the system—"
"Or we got rats in the walls."
Echo melted behind a stack of crates as the Dogs fanned out, their weapons sweeping the shadows.
The thermite charges' timers ticked down in sync: 2:47 remaining.
Close.
Too close.
Her fingers grazed the Rank 1—Silent Step glyph on her conduit.
It wouldn't hide her from direct sight, but it would muffle her retreat—
Then the eastern door creaked open.