Chương 110: 109. Cube-Shaped Carnage

Kelly nudged a boot against a soldier's crumpled armor.

"He dead?" she asked, her voice filtered through the helmet.

"Looks pretty dead. Nice crater." A gloved hand clamped on her shoulder, pulling her back. Ren's voice was a low growl in her ear.

"Don't. They implant them. Near death, systems auto-induces a coma. Full stasis. Life signals and grid coordinates get transmitted on a continuous broadcast."

"So he's a beacon."

"If he's still breathing, he's a beacon. Command, corporate security, Venus's crew—they'd all get the ping with with exact coordinates. We haven't seen many survivors. The two of us are the exception. That means we give anything that still has a pulse a very wide berth."

"Rescue teams," Kelly said, not a question. She watched a gout of plasma sear the air high above, silhouetting a diving figure.

"With Venus up there playing distraction, soaking all the return fire, it's the perfect window for a snatch-and-grab. They'd be stupid not to."

"They're not stupid," Ren confirmed.

"Stay sharp." A new signature blazed on her helmet's threat display, a hulking thermal outline.

"Who's the big guy?" Kelly asked, tracking the figure as it moved with a ground-shaking stride, firing wrist-mounted cannons into a crumbling façade. From what she could see he looked like a small building that decided to go for a walk. Or an very ambitious, overgrown panda.

"That's Vector," Ren said.

"You know him. Overclocked. High-end assault power suit." Another relic from her past. The closer she got to her goals, the more her past seemed to resurface. So that explained the mech's beer belly; it was the fat man. Ren continued.

"Venus hired his black-ops group for ground support. For this op, he's her second. His loyalty is to Obsidian first, Venus second, and Vaughn third. I checked the files this morning."

"Fun. Looks like he brought friends." Above, the three aerial fighters supporting Venus broke formation, streaking towards different sectors of the shattered grid.

"Right on cue," Ren muttered.

"Her support team is hitting the deck. They'll be sweeping for those coma beacons, extracting anyone with a flicker."

"Makes the ground suddenly very crowded."

"It does. We are going 'no contact.' Zero engagement. We reduce our signal to nothing, we move, and we do not give them a reason to look our way." Isolated in the sky, Venus's movements lost their last shreds of restraint. With her team racing across the ground below, scouring it of survivor-signals, she didn't have to worry about frying her own men in the crossfire.

The air cracked as twin Rail Cannons materialized along her arms—barrels the width of tree trunks, humming with a charge that made the hair on Kelly's neck stand up. Kelly's enhanced perception caught the glare, and her brows arched, impressed. An E90 Rail Cannon. Hypersonic, beyond magnetic payloads with a charge that could light a district for a week. It was a weapon that made her mouth water and her survival instincts scream in equal measure.

"Well, she's done playing," Kelly said, already moving. Ren was a shadow beside her. Their target was the center of the maelstrom: the Magical Cube, its surfaces a crawling mosaic of thousands of glowing runes, its interior holding so many juicy secrets and possibilities. The battle above was a blur of light and kinetic fury. All present were moving fast. Too Fast. From the moment they'd stepped into the dome, maybe twenty seconds had bled past. It was enough. The world became geometry of death.

Kelly moved stealthily, but stealth against this was dodging the rain in a hurricane. Kelly had to periodically slow time, dodging the worst of the fallout—chunks of molten pavement, shrapnel moving faster than sound, concussive waves that would liquefy organs. She stayed conscious of the extremely deadly fallout just outside her path.

She used a mix of her Fortress titles to tank glancing blows, her gravity field title to anchor herself when the ground erupted, her shadows to slip through gaps in the debris, and time-skips combined with perfect loop-honed timing to avoid the attacks. She was trying to circle the machine, looking for a clean approach without getting spotted. Stolen novel; please report. Her timing was perfect, a rhythm carved from countless loops.

It was a mix of perfect prediction, muscle memory, automated reaction, and the chaotic, pragmatically hacked magic of someone treating city-leveling firepower as a very inconvenient traffic jam. She no longer watched the battle above. She navigated its garbage. All while keeping her profile zero, a ghost creeping towards the prize.

"Those rail cannons are overcompensating for something," Kelly muttered, her voice low and unheard inside the helmet.

"But it's a beautiful weapon. Horrifying, but beautiful." Kelly sidestepped as a round shattered a building corner fifty meters away, turning it into a cloud of powdered concrete and rebar. Kelly triggered a half-second time-skip. The world stuttered. A line of hypersonic slugs passed through the space her head had occupied a moment before. She reappeared, slightly out of breath, already running low behind a folded slab of street.

"She's enthusiastic, I'll give her that." The magical cube was exactly where she remembered it was, which was a miracle in a day full of divine tantrums and corporate warfare. No extra butterflies or ' go to hell's' from a universe that already hated her. Kelly and the old man, Ren, finally stood before it. The thing was both a cube and a monument to someone's god complex—larger than it should be, towering, heavy, and humming with power.

Its metal was strange, not quite solid, not quite liquid, and covered in dense, glowing script that shifted and swam like restless eels. Kelly kept every stealth system in her suit running hot—the jammers, the dampeners, the works. She only killed the light-bending field, the part that made her invisible to the naked eye.

"Light-bending's off," she said, her voice flat.

"Shadow's live. Everything else is still jamming any signal stupid enough to look for us." Ren's grunt came through her helmet comm.

"Just get the damn thing. We're on borrowed time." This was the tricky part. A solid, dark shadow pooled at her boots. From that shadow, a compact drone slipped out, hovering silently. It rose a few feet, a tiny lamp on its underside flicking on. Her shadow stretched, growing long and deep, a pool of absolute dark big enough to swallow a large car.

"Alright, grandpa. Heave-ho time." Ren moved without a word, planting his boots. They both put their shoulders to the monument. It didn't budge. Kelly pushed, her augments flaring. Her muscles burned, the synthetic fibers in her arms straining. For a second, she felt utterly, hilariously normal. This was what it must feel like to be a single mother with no augments trying to shove a minivan full of screaming kids out of a ditch. The thought almost made her laugh, which turned into a grunt of effort.

The cube groaned, then slid an inch. With a final, grating shove, the massive weight of it overbalanced and fell into the darkness. It didn't make a sound as it vanished. Her shadow snapped back to its normal size.

"Lights out," she said, and her suit bent light around her again. She was a ghost once more. At that exact instant, above them, the Angel Verrisimir paused in mid-air. His wings stilled. He erected a dense, shimmering shield around himself, breaking off from the fight. His head turned, staring down directly at the spot where the cube had been. Then, slowly, his gaze shifted—and locked right on Kelly's position, even though she was invisible.

"Uh oh," Kelly whispered. His wings arced, and he rocketed downward—a blur of divine anger aimed straight at her. But Cain intercepted him in a clash of light and force, shoving him sideways. Freya was already tangling with Venus elsewhere, keeping her occupied. On the ground, Venus's soldiers formed a wide, confused circle around nothing, rifles scanning empty air. Kelly and Ren stood stone-still, right in the middle of them. A towering figure in a pitted, obese mechsuit stomped into the circle. The Fatman.

His helmet speakers crackled, broadcasting an argument he was having with himself.

"Thermals are clear! Nothing!" his own voice yelled, raw and frustrated.

"That's your solution for everything! You drained a city block last time!" The Fatman let out a strangled growl as his arm jerked, temporarily losing control, a beast arguing with its master.

"Fine! Do it! Everyone, switch to DME, scan for the weird shit! Happy?" A low hum emanated from his suit. Well, fuck, Kelly thought. She knew exactly what those scanners would find. She shifted her weight, her hand drifting to the bracelet on her wrist. She glanced to where Ren had been. He was gone. Vanished. The old ghost had melted away without a sound. The Fatman's scanners whirred. They didn't ping Ren at all—the old man was a void, a professional.

But Kelly, whose body was a permanent, seething reservoir of absorbed mana, lit up their screens like a supernova made of pure, chaotic energy. One soldier stared at his wrist display, then at the seemingly empty space where Kelly stood.

"Something's here," he hissed.

"Bio-sign is… what is that?" Another peered at his own screen, face pale under his helmet.

"Is that a… girl? What the fuck?" Another adjusted his helmet visor.

"It's not human. Look at the mana density. It's off the scale. It's one of the skeleton freaks."" Hey." Kelly resented that. Skeleton freak? Her voice came out distorted through her helmet's modulator." I have bones, same as you. They're just better reinforced." Guns swung up, and they opened fire.