Chương 47: Fallen Angels

The sky was filled with war and blades, wings and gunfire—a constellation of death, all crashing toward one individual. Despite everything she had been through, part of her was still that overworked intern—a 'nobody' who had spent every spare hour since childhood clawing her way through desperate opportunities and hopeless application queues, all for a chance to prove she belonged anywhere near a cutting-edge, world-leading project, even as a research intern. That had once been her greatest achievement.

She had barely left New York. [Title Equipped: Death's Foe (III)] Which is why, as her Title brought the high-speed world into focus, the sight of a skyscraper-sized battle tearing through the skyline felt wondrous; less like horror and more like watching a high-functioning body destroy itself to evolve. It felt like she was watching hundreds—no, millions—of complex cells divide across biology, machinery, and systems in real time—systems of combat, of defense, of augments and magic.

Systems of life and death, each slamming into the next with so much raw data she could've taken notes for weeks. It was so much more than an opportunity to observe and experiment; it felt like the battle she was witnessing contained infinite opportunities to test herself for pure, unfiltered potential—and growth. Was this war? Was this what the Augment Wars looked like? The AI coups? The war in the stars?

Was this what soldiers and idiot explorers saw when they crash-landed into first contact, opened with "we come in peace" while loading weapons, and negotiated with the first and only nonhuman species in the oldest wars? And if it thrilled her— really thrilled her— did that count as a problem? Discovery always made sense. But maybe combat did too. Perhaps that was why she found something that stretched into the clouds and detonated across itself beautiful.

Maybe she was beginning to understand why some people chose war and exploration on purpose. It could be that she'd enjoy both. Her thoughts on the idyllic nature of war and space gigs were put on hold when a few hundred rapidly firing human combatants and another few hundred razor-winged undead dropped close enough for her to spot the stylized helixes, V's, and various insignias patched into cloth.

They were close to impact—milliseconds from eviscerating everything within reach and turning her into an anatomical exhibit. Reacting quickly, Kelly snapped her wrist. Her chain blade darted forward, the links flashing under the light of gunfire and burning clouds. It drove through the chest of the closest angelic zombie, the impact snapping its ribs and sending a tremor through its massive frame. The weapon spun again, curling like a live thing and tearing into the wing of another that swept too close.

The force of the hit folded the wing back on itself and dragged the creature off course, its pale feathers scattering into the air. She missed. She'd been aiming for their heads. But of course, they were too fast. Their speed bent her strike away, yet she'd already accounted for it and that movement, her mana-enhanced eyes tracking every sudden shift and measuring the space they would fall into, then changing the weapon's configuration.

Both caught themselves mid-motion and twisted to evade, yet the chain wrapped around them tighter, binding them mid-flight. They hung there for a heartbeat of frozen time, pinned by their own inertia, suspended and useless, wings thrashing wide enough in panic to shake dust and ash from the chaotic descent, achieving absolutely nothing but noise and debris. Their vaunted speed, so impressive a second ago, had turned them into dangling ornaments once entangled. Perfect dimensional anchors for Kelly.

A corpse hit the ground at her feet. Kelly stamped down on its chest before it could twitch, and a wall of bone tore up from the street in a jagged half-circle, thrown between her and the shadow dimension's pull. The wall was meant to stop her anchor from being dragged in. Her mana dipped sharp, then refilled before her next heartbeat, rushing back through her arms and legs. The wall needed more corpses or it would be about as useful as a tissue in a rainstorm. It made her feel better.

With two of the nearest angels incapacitated—exactly as she'd planned—Kelly jumped into her shadow, a partially blunted chainblade still lodged in the undead anchors thrashing outside, and disappeared into the fold without a trace. She hoped the chain would hold long enough for the impact to finish the job. If it didn't, well—she'd be stuck in her shadow dimension without a tether, perhaps permanently, conducting the first shadow entrapment study in recorded history.

In the darkness of her shadow space, kill confirmations came in the form of rewards. [Elite Title: 'Angel Killer (I)' gained!] The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. [Title: Giantbane Grade III → IV] [Title - Angel Killer (Elite, I-Grade): Killed four angelic beings at least four sub-Ranks higher than the title bearer in a single blow. When facing angelic or holy beings, all attacks deal slight demonic energy damage; antithetical and poisonous to holy energy. While equipped, this title will mark you as an enemy of the divine and ally of the demonic to any member of each group within your immediate vicinity.] She killed four? How did that work? Maybe the two she'd entangled had grabbed others in some awkward mid-air wrestling match before impact. Nice, she'd take it. She read the title again, slower, gleaning the clues it held. Demonic mana. Holy mana. Demonic beings. Divine beings. Newfangled energy types and, potentially, new races.

Equipping the Angel Killer Title was confirmation that killing four higher-level angels in one strike would make her a target for anything divine and a tool for anything demonic, which meant if she used it, both groups would know exactly where she stood the moment she arrived. Kelly wondered why the system still classified zombies as angels. They shambled and groaned, still trying to chew faces; none of that hinted at holiness. Perhaps they were supposed to glow? Who knew.

There had to be some other element she was unaware of. For all she knew, angels could bounce back from zombification with a quick scrub. She had nothing solid to work with, so she dug through mythology. That ended quickly. Across every culture that ever produced a spooky myth—Faust, the devil, Beelzebub—demons ran soul business and infernal paperwork. Their talent was convincing unlucky humans to sign disastrous deals, like trading their souls for a faster horse.

Their primary talent involved provoking divine beings who probably had better uses for their time. They hated each other, and the title provided Demonic Mana—whatever that meant—which now came bundled with her hits. Holy beings wouldn't enjoy it: a slow, toxic pain under the ribs. Slight, yes, but poison could kill if you had time. She'd experiment with it later.

[Title: Giantbane Grade IV→ V] [Additional Effect: Grants a 200% increase in speed when engaging an opponent of a higher Rank, every subsequent Rank difference grants an additional 15% speed increase, capped at 300%.] Grade Five was a shattered wall that hit her like a ton of bricks. It always did. It only showed up when she pulled off something so impossible reality vetoed. Kelly shook out the tingling burn in her limbs.

The Giantbane upgrade was a clear reward for going after enemies far stronger than she was, where a six sub-Rank gap meant instant death, and the speed increase changed nothing except how fast she got there. Neat. Satisfied, Kelly waited in the darkness for the flying men and undead to kill each other.

After a few minutes of waiting in the darkness of her pocket realm and wondering which side would win the fight on the other side, and concluding that the local church would have to update its pamphlets either way, she emerged from her shadow into the real world and saw a street torn apart by impact. She returned to a warzone. Flying combatants moved fast through the street, both human and reanimated corpses, weapons and limbs firing and swinging as they passed.

Ground combatants moved faster than vehicles, tearing across the street in bursts, ripping through walls or flipping wrecks to kill anything behind them. Corpses littered the area, falling from the sky, with more added each second, crushed or split or halfway through both. And the most peculiar of all—something she hadn't noticed before but now found impossible to miss—was a large metallic console of sorts in the distance, surrounded by rubble and destruction a few blocks away, that towered above it all.

It was a strange thing that blazed in her vision, shaped without elegance, technology, or human design, surging with enough mana and energy to spike her augmented ocular feed like a signal flare.

It was so bright to Kelly's new energy-reading lenses that she had to look away, just in time to see a group of armored human warriors moving on foot in tight formation, shifting through the less intense parts of the wreckage as corpses fell from the sky, stepping between the limbs of defeated undead and smashing anything still intact enough to twitch or stand. A few of them looked like soldiers, wearing camo with American flags fixed to their shoulders.

Others raced around in corporate militia gear, some in Vaughn black, their oversized Vs stamped across the pectorals, and the Genecorps ones had their helix front and center, polished and smug. Kelly was briefly confused.

That diverse lineup of unfriendly factions should have triggered some kind of third skirmish or armed slapfight for first dibs on whatever that giant magic box in the center was, but the fact that everyone was still breathing and working together meant someone upstairs was holding a very long leash.

Unless they'd suddenly decided to sing Kumbaya and Kelly had missed the memo, she could count on one hand the number of people capable of such influence—only a major government or one of the larger colonies had a leash big enough. She scanned the few men stacked with flags and medals, checking their badge counts, and spotted the person barking orders. Ugh. U. S. military. Their captain looked built to block exits—or punch through walls if needed—and walked as if the floor should move for him.

He stood taller than the partially destroyed truck behind him, with shoulders that looked as if they'd been designed by someone trying to win an arms race against buildings. His fists matched the full size of her head and moved as if they'd tested that comparison more than once, one fist blurring as it struck a passing figure clean out of the air.

Biomechanical joints ran down both arms and linked into reinforced strips bolted along his spine, which clicked into place as he aimed and fired—either by design or from battle damage. A brace wrapped around his neck, humming with each step as posture turned into a weapon. Some of the bulk came from actual mass—altered genetics, maybe. The rest came from parts that didn't believe in subtlety. Kelly's scan read 26. 7 EQ, mostly dumped into perception. That was the part she found funniest. Why perception?

A man with fists that could pulp a turret had spent a fortune upgrading his attention span. Maybe he'd just paid top-tier rates to watch things die in high resolution? As she emerged, he immediately locked onto her like a searchlight and walked toward her without signaling his squad. Displaced air followed him like a fan club.

"Who are you?"