Chương 104: Titles in the Shadows

"It's a voiding!" The timing was perfect. With the dome and the cube closer than ever, her shadow was long overdue for upgrade. Kelly opened her mouth, intent on telling them that no matter what, they should not kill it. Everyone in the truck except Kelly and Ren snapped at once.

"What the hell is that?!"

"Shoot it!" Rifles went full auto inside the APC. The cabin erupted. Brass casings bounced off the metal floor and skittered under boots. Goon One leaned over the seat and emptied half a magazine in a single pull. Goon Two shouted something incoherent and kept firing anyway.

"Kill it! Kill it!" Rounds tore into the creature at point-blank range. The interior filled with recoil, smoke, and the violent rhythm of panicked trigger discipline falling apart. Reggie didn't bother with his rifle. He shoved his hand forward and opened his palm. A torrent of lightning ripped out of his fingers, then his palm, white and vicious, crawling across every metal surface it could find. It slammed into the creature and kept going, racing along the ceiling, across the dashboard, through the wiring.

As the creature stood amid the torrent, unharmed, the radio popped and died in a spray of sparks. Kelly watched the dashboard fry and felt the irritation settle in her chest like a splinter. Of all the things in this truck, he picked the one she actually needed. Every surface inside the APC disappeared under a uniform sheet of black. Shadows swallowed the entire interior in a single breath, thick and total, swallowing the dash lights and the reflection off Ren's gauntlet.

Kelly reached for the weapon rack without hesitation and pulled down a heavy rifle built to punch through plated beasts and distant vehicles. She shoved its sling across her chest tight and stepped into the aisle.

"Everyone to the rear. Close together. I need the center clear." She pushed one of them by the shoulder plate to tighten the formation, eyes tracking the ceiling and the floor at the same time.

"You want to keep your organs? Closer." The darkness was an obvious impending attack. Probably an unavoidable one that would skewer her bodyguards. Reggie's beloved goons definitely wouldn't survive. When they were compressed near the hatch, she focused and skipped the entire APC forward in time—about seventy inches in front of them. The vehicle displaced in a clean, literal jump—metal hull, dashboard, weapons, everything relocating forward in one precise cut of time.

The group suddenly found themselves out in the open, landing hard, exiting in the same motion as the metal clipped, stuttering frames. Kelly moved with it and stepped out in the same motion as the APC settled into its new position, boots hitting pavement as the metal brick finished its relocation. Ahead of them, the APC rumbled with a heavy internal impact, metal groaning from whatever had just arrived in the space they had occupied. Kelly adjusted her stance, rifle up, eyes on the armored brick.

"Good," she said evenly.

"You missed." Kelly swept her gaze across the street and registered everything wrong with it in a half-second. This part of the city should not have dark streets, not with the skyscraper lighting and the glow strips and the thousand years of engineering that went into making sure pedestrians could see where they were stepping after sunset.

But the skyscraper's shadow fell across them like a physical weight, and the darkness underneath it was wrong—both an absent light and a present darkness, a void that made the edges of things blur and retreat, as if someone had reached into the world and turned down the brightness while boosting every shadow into something with mass. The worst possible place to be standing.

The luminescent strips embedded in the ground that should have lit up the whole road were smothered underneath swaths of black that had no business being there, unnatural cover spreading across them like a hand over a mouth. Everyone's augmented eyes instantly switched to various forms of night vision, from cheap commercial models that painted everything in washed-out green to high-end military grades that made the street look bright as day, full color, burning in high-definition.

One of the goons—the one with the metal seams lining his jaw—pointed and yelled.

"There! It's coming through the side!" The voidling stepped through the shadow-covered APC's metal frame like the hull was dark water, like solid steel was just a suggestion it had decided to ignore. One second it was inside the vehicle, the next it was half-emerged from the side, darkness pouring from its body as it pushed through. Reggie and his goons switched weapons and opened fire.

The street lit up with muzzle flashes from weapons that cycled through thousands of rounds per second, caseless ammunition, Reggie's hand lighting up with another weapon that sent something across the street that cracked against a storefront. Goon One and Goon Two emptied magazine after magazine into the thing's center mass, rounds passing through shadow and smoke and sparking off the APC behind it. Kelly joined them. She aimed her directed energy weapon at the creature and let it rip.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. Ren just watched. Bullets and projectiles passed through the creature like it was made of air, rounds tearing through shadow and smoke, but when Kelly's directed energy beam crossed the space between them, the thing twisted sideways and let it go wide.

"Wait a minute," she muttered under the storm of gunfire. Kelly glanced down at what she'd grabbed, gave it a quick once-over, then huffed a sharp breath through her nose. It was D. E. W. DEWs were Directed energy weapons—rifles that fired focused energy instead of bullets or missiles, moving at light speed and roasting anything unlucky enough to be in the beam. They hit instantly, carried more shots than anyone could track, and shredded swarms while making conventional ammo look pathetic.

"Look at that," she muttered.

"I close my eyes for two seconds and still pull the good stuff." Kelly spun around and planted herself between the creature and the firing line, arms spread wide.

"Cease fire on my new pet. Don't kill it—capture only. I need this thing in one piece for science and also because I've always wanted one." She looked at Ren when she said it, making sure the old man noted she was being serious about the capture part, less serious about the pet part, but the capture part was the one that mattered. Then she turned to Reggie and his goons who were still hosing the voidling with enough rounds to fund a small war.

"Swap to light guns, that's the only thing that annoys it. Reggie, juice yourself up to eleven, do that lightning puppet man thing you do but make it fast and make it bright, max voltage, focused, compressed, the whole show." Reggie's hands dropped from his weapon.

"How the hell does she know about that?" Almost instantly Reggie used his biological electromagneticism to pull wires and metal from an abandoned vehicle. The components shredded free and bent mid-air, twisting into a crude shape with limbs, a thin pipe for a torso, another for a head—a stick figure built from scrap. Then he poured lightning into it, condensing until it held form. The puppet ignited, so bright and concentrated it hurt to look at.

It looked like a man made of pure light, and Kelly knew it wasn't Reggie's most powerful trick, but it was definitely his most focused—a puppet of pure directed energy, compressed and contained, blazing in the middle of the street. Everyone's various night vision implants adjusted to the sudden light, iris shutters slamming closed, filters dropping into place.

Reggie's puppet caused a small sphere of the surrounding darkness to recede just a few inches, an unnatural ring of light pushing against the black, and beyond that ring, a swath of pure deep black that covered the entire street.

"And 'don't kill it?'" Reggie repeated, incredulous.

"The hell I won't." Reggie's lightning puppet zipped at the creature, closing the distance in a blink, and his goons finally stopped panic-firing long enough to grab the weapons they'd been polishing and fitting during the ride—from the APC's weapon rack, the ones they now knew actually worked against things made of shadow. They reached into sacks at their sides, pulled out hardware that looked expensive, and opened up.

Lasers cut through the dark, focused beams and directed energy hitting the voidling from three angles. The stuff disrupted it, made it flicker and shrink back, but didn't kill it. Nothing they had killed it. Then it vanished into the ground like it had never been there. Reggie's goons lost it. Goon One spun in a full circle, rifle tracking shadows that weren't moving. Goon Two aimed at the ground, then the sky, then a storefront, then back at the ground.

"Where is it? Where the hell did it go?!"

"It went into the ground! It went into the fucking ground!" Reggie's voice cut through the panic.

"She's the package, the job, circle up now." The goons moved, putting themselves between Kelly and the darkness, backs to her, weapons tracking every direction. Reggie stood with them, aiming his weapon as the lightning puppet zipping to and fro. Kelly felt it through her mana attunement before she saw anything—a gathering at a spot twenty feet to the side, mana pooling and shaping itself into something with mass and intent.

She tracked the shape of the creature re-forming, felt the energy centering at its throat, building, and she was already aiming when the voidling rose from the ground and screamed. A wave of dark mana burst from it, visible even to mundane eyes, a rippling front of pure black that washed over all of them in a clear attack. Reggie and his goons braced, Ren's weight shifted onto his back foot, and then it hit them and did nothing. They blinked. Reggie said "What was that?" like he'd walked through a cobweb.

Kelly felt it in her bones. Pure raw darkness seeped into her, blinding her organic vision from the inside, weakness draining her strength like a fever sucking the life out of her systems. Her limbs went heavy, her internal augments blazing alarms across every display, and worst of all—strongest of all—fear gripped her. Not tactical caution or a healthy respect for a threat. Fear, sudden and feral—irrationally crushing her being.

It filled her chest, stole her breath with the sick certainty that something was about to end her, and there was nothing she could do about it. Kelly wobbled, woozy and light on her feet, stumbling slightly before she caught herself. Reggie and his goons stared at her like she'd grown a second head. Ren raised a brow.

Her body absorbed mana now, which meant mana could affect her now, and the fact that Ren, Reggie, and his guys felt nothing when that wave hit them confirmed it—purely mana-based 'fear aura'—an attack, probably a lesser version of her Slaughterer of Men Title or some Skill with a weaker effect. She wondered how many humans it had killed to get that thing running. Kelly equipped Fortress of Vitality and felt the Title burn through her systems, powering through the life drain, pushing the weakness back.

She stood straighter. As for the fear? She was used to fear. She spent months in nothing but fear during the loops, and years of it before that. Fear incited action, a response as extreme as the fear itself. She learned in the outskirts that when you were afraid, you acted—you ran, you hid, or you tossed a stone to knock over a crate in a crowded market, tricking a pair of loan sharks into arguing over it and leaving enough credits for a week's worth of rations within reach. Fear made you move.

She hadn't felt raw fear this powerful in a long time. It would have to try harder than that. If anything, it just motivated her. For anyone from the outskirts, fear was fuel. The fear seeping over her reminded her of the first days of the loops, when she was a helpless young intern who couldn't die but felt every bit of pain, surrounded by monsters, alone, with nobody who remembered what happened yesterday or would remember what happened to her tomorrow. Pure fear had drowned her for weeks on end.

It had been much worse back then. So it could cast darkness and fear and drain life. So what? She slowed time, cranked her mana sensing ocular lenses to full output, one hundred percent opacity, and equipped the Mimic Hunter title. Her eyes surged with mana, tracking every subtle shift in the dark. There. A ripple in the darkness where the voidling was re-forming.

"Shoot there. Right there." Everybody aimed and fired. Reggie's condensed lightning puppet zipped forward and hit it, fast enough that the air cracked where it passed. [Uncommon title: 'Dauntless (I)' gained!]