A thousand pounds of carapace muscle and animal ferocity crash into me. I’m bowled head-over-heels across the office. Razorblade fangs the size of my forearm snap for my head. Flecks of burning drool splatter across my face as I hurl myself to the side in an evasive tumble. Raspy, bestial screams chase me.

I barely see the monster as it blurs into pouncing motion, claws chewing into the stone for grip. Hardened, bonelike carapace the color of the void. Fins and spikes and a slavering split jaw dripping with acid. A JOY-powered nightmare made for burrowing, hunting and eviscerating, and one I’ve seen before. Valance’s pet. The Mobiak.

But this thing is no pet.

The office is its killbox. The damascene was the bait. I’m the prey.

There’s no room to flee. It’s already on me. The shattered window is the only way out. Still tumbling, I spring backwards and kick off the wall, rebounding over the monster’s head as it crashes into the handprint mural. I hit the ground already diving away. Throwing myself towards the steps leading up to the desk and the window behind it.

A sledgehammer of chitin makes my entire world bend as the monster lunges after me and smashes its armored head into my spine. Air ejects from my lungs. I sprawl forward, head cracking against the side of the desk. Bone against solid wood. My ocular nerves explode with light. I hit the floor just shy of the window. Dazed, barely able to see through the stars. The monster’s already pounced to follow. It’s on top of me before I even finish hitting the ground, dragging me back into the darkness. I throw my hand out to grab hold of the desk and it stamps a huge clawed paw onto my forearm, pinning the limb flat to the floor.

My heart kickstarts without conscious thought. Black ki erupts from my pores, flashing to a jet-engine shriek within my palm as I twist around and slam the blast into the creature’s blunt head with an open-palm strike. The thunderclap of explosively releasing power nearly snaps its neck outright. In my hands, that quick a charge normally contains enough power to turn anything organic into a crayon smear of dead meat. The beast barely even looks dented as its head cranks back to me.

An alien, ear-piercing scream saws against my eardrums. Its jaw splits and it snaps down at me. Huge fangs diving for my jugular. My right arm flashes up to intercept like hound and bone. The monster crunches down with impossible force. Piercing the limb in six different places. Then its head rips to the side, tearing the artificial limb halfway out of me. The biocircuits slither and jerk out of my body like ripcord. Agony like a heart attack seizes my chest with crushing pressure. I don’t even have a chance to scream. Its head whiplashes back down and slams me into the floor like a chew toy. Again and again it repeats the motion, ripping out more of my arm each time my body slaps limply into the stone.

A molar cracks in my mouth and blood gushes through. Bones creak. That old gut wound reopening. I can feel my consciousness being ragdolled out of me. Eyes lolling. Going limp. Dust and stone against my tongue as it pauses for a reprieving second to reaffirm its fangs around my prosthetic arm. I lay there half-dead and let the thing have its way. Focus on groaning air back into my lungs while claws scrape around my head. Warbling, animal growls come from inches above me. One huge paw flips me over. I just have to hang on. One more slam. That’s my chance. I can feel the last of the biocircuits about to tear out of my shoulder. Hidden beneath me, my left hand sneaks up to disengage the prosthetic’s failsafe lock.

The monster rips back in the first half of the whiplash motion. But only my prosthetic goes with it. The rest of me is bodily flung away as the limb disconnects. Tumbling wildly, I hit off the top of the desk and shove myself straight out the smashed window, freefalling into the streets below. The escape taxes me with a parting shot as glass slices over my sides. But I’ve bought myself a breath. Distance, precious seconds, and new terrain.

I hit street level like a limply thrown rock, breaking the fall with a rough roll on my left shoulder. Stabbing pain drives into the flesh as I land. Surface damage. I glance down in a panic as I scramble to my feet. Nabuna’s not-stims were smashed straight into my bloodstream.

Nothing happens at first. Maybe it was a dud. Maybe I’m immune to it. Maybe it’s-

It’s not a dud.

A surge of insane stimulation flash-fries every particle of pain in my body into nonexistence, and holy shit am I not immune to it. It’s like being kicked in the back by a horse. My eyes jolt wide open. I don’t realize I’m fifteen meters down the street in two seconds until those seconds are already behind me. Shudders wrack my entire frame. And my heart keeps going faster, faster, faster. Going to blow. Everything’s hot like the worst summer day and there’s a vice grip tightening around my chest and I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die unless I get it out of me.

The energy has to go somewhere. It picks my legs. I sprint through the darkened undercity faster than I’ve ever run before in my life. My aura erupts from me as my feet fly across the concrete; a pillar of black fire burning twenty, then thirty feet high. The superseding high insulates my nerves from the agony of pushing my polluted ki so far. It burns and burns and burns and I feel none of it. Supercharged energy sizzles through every limb, so much that I don’t even have to make myself move. I just think it and it’s already happening. For a moment, it’s like I’m nearly back at my old strength. Black starlight follows me like a comet trail as I blow past building after huge, abandoned building.

My right shoulder drips through the pinholes where the prosthetic’s biocircuits were connected. More wounds drip and ooze across my body. But it’s my heart that’s the real danger. I can feel the crushing pressure continuing to build like a distant ache. A tightening vice, I can’t even imagine what’s actually happening to my body on the inside. Drawing on the smallest slivers of black ki already felt like dragging my nerves across nails. This is going to ruin me the moment the high fades. My skin is already starting to turn a scorched color.

Warbling, alien howls echo from the office as the beast gives chase. Glass smashes somewhere behind me. I curse and whip my head around, peering back at the darkened side of the building through a curtain of white hair. But there’s no monstrous shape hurling itself down to the streets to give chase. If not there, then-

The reflection in the storefront I’m sprinting past ripples, movement in the shop behind. My hand flies up. A huge beam of black ki kicks out with a feral flash and melts the entire place into a molten slurry. In the last collapsing stream screen, the rippling reflection continues to solidify. A huge dark shape not in front of me, but behind-

I whip around, scything the top carapace off the monster’s snout with a ki-infused kick. Serrated claws rip a trio of jagged, bloody lines across my stomach. The impact force scoops and hurls me into the molten store. I bend the momentum into a one-handed handspring and launch off the floor just as I touch down, firing another trio of compact blasts while I’m flipping upside-down. Two dorsal spines and meters of undercity streets disappear in the blasts. The monster’s already diving low under the blast and blurring straight at me.

I throw my arm over my chest and ball up. Armored carapace jackhammers into me. Carrying me forward like a jet-powered battering ram. My back smashes into the wall of the store. Something cracks low in my spine. Brick and mortar explode over me. Then the plaster of the hallway behind the store. A stick of rebar punches through my abdomen from behind and sticks wetly in the muscle. I choke. Then a second deluge of brick adds to the snowball of collateral damage as we crash into a vast plaza right near the center of the city block.

Concrete rushes up to meet me. I smear across the abrasive surface, half-broken but still somehow able to move. I rip the rebar out of my side with an insane burst of energy, heedless of the damage. Chasing me out of the collapsing store, the monster leaps and dives down at me at the exact same moment I roll over and drive my knee through its belly armor, sheathing the limb in ki so it can punch deep into its guts. It takes the hit without flinching and forces itself further down my bent knee, internal organs pulsing against me with sickly heat. Every bestial breath sucks at my leg and sloughs it with a wave of acidic blood. Then it screams. Horrible and eyeless and all fangs from centimeters away as its maw resumes course and snaps at my throat.

My left hand shoots up to grab the largest of the fangs. Halting its bite just as its mouth opens widest. Black ki sizzles and crackles up the limb, burning ravenously to fuel my struggle. My arm trembles. Fingers slipping in the saliva. The maw inches closer. Vibrating with killing intent. Scraping my skin. Corded neck muscles straining against me with animal strength. Acidic drool splatters and drips down my face. A horrible growl begins to build in the beast’s chest cavity as I deny it another half of a second. A barbed tongue snakes out to grab my face and circle my neck. It forces itself down further. Crushing me against the floor, uncaring for the knee that’s now melting its internal organs like a black nail. Pulsating blood burns my leg through my suit.

The jaws jerk down again. I scream as the fangs enter my torso, pushing for my heart. I strain to hold the monster back with my one arm, but it’s not enough on its own. Not even the stims can give me what I need. Only my class can.

The black aura screams to assert itself fully. I’m going to die unless I fully give into it. But I’m going to die if I do give in.

Slavering fangs part my flesh a millimeter at a time as the beast sinks more of its maw into me. I start disappearing inside its mouth. Dozens of razor teeth stabbing through my torso from end to end. One caresses my heart with a millimeter graze. Blood bubbles out of my lips from a punctured lung.

My body chooses for me.

The current pouring from me multiplies twenty times over in a heartbeat. A lethal amount of energy shoots through my left arm, enough to pry the split jaws out of my body with a horrible ripping noise. Chunks of my flesh stick to the fangs as I pull them free millimeter by bloody millimeter. Crying out in pain. My hand shakes uncontrollably in the final inches, almost unable to fully unseat the bite. One final push of adrenaline pries it out. The instant I’m free, I release my grip on the largest fang and twist my body to the side. The monster resumes its course so fast that it snaps two teeth against the concrete. My free hand flashes up and back, palm flattening against the ground.

The energy building inside me discharges like a static shock. One touch to release. Black light shears through the city itself and splinters into the whatever remains of the layer beneath the plaza, lighting the Vents with an atomic flash in the frame it takes for the ground to evaporate into rubble.

A sound like a mountain splitting open erupts as the entire layer breaks from the center outwards. Apartment buildings and city superstructure groan and crack and shift and plummet and pour into the growing hole. We fall at the fore of the concrete tide. Dropping into the next layer down. I’m the first to react, jerking madly and ripping my knee from the monster’s belly while claws the size of my hand ravage my legs in an attempt to keep me contained. Black ki burns through my left hand as I smash back with a carapace-cracking blow and finally kick away. The barbed tongue rips from my neck as we fly apart, slashing a nooselike circle around my neck and tearing off my ear.

No floor comes rushing up at me through the billowing ash. My stomach lurches in freefall. I adapt to the changing battlefield and cut the last shackles off my heartwithout hesitation. A part of me dies inside as my ki leaps with giddy joy to finally fulfill its purpose. Damn the consequences or the color, my heart is a fusion reactor that has no peer, and it just hit its final runway. It doesn’t care that I’m already a dead girl walking. Nor do I. If I don’t survive this on my own, I die either way.

Black aura howls into the cold world. My ruined body is just a vessel for the flow, the incinerator burn just a tingle behind a shield of stims. My sixth sense of ki slithers out and floods into the air, backfilling my mind’s eye with an ethereal picture of debris pouring past. The layer below this one, and all beneath it, were partially collapsed into the Abyss. But enough of the skeletal undercity remains below where we’re falling.

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I plummet through the darkness. Collapsing towers drifting past like weightless leviathans. Twenty stories of apartment windows blur into rivers of dark glass around me. Freezing wind rips my hair into a comet’s tail. The world keeps breaking open above; a meteor shower of undercity pouring downwards.

My kinetic sense continues to bloom. Locking onto the monster as it tumbles away in the opposite direction. The streets rush up at us, ten stories below now. Rotating in midair, I plant my feet against another piece of falling rubble and spring away in a bolt of blurred motion. I twist feetfirst through a spiderweb of data transfer cables and slam my shoes against the brick side of an apartment complex at terminal velocity. Friction fires ignite beneath my feet for the fraction of a second it takes to redirect and blink down to the street level like chain lightning, beating the collapse to the bottom with seconds to spare.

I touch the ground and ricochet forward faster than light off a mirror. Annihilating the distance to the monster like I’m pressing a delete key. No grace or technique. I’m into it and through it and done. A nuclear payload of kinetic energy goes from my hand through its body and flings it into a nearby building. It rebounds off the concrete and tumbles back at me at nearly the same speed. My leg ends it like a scythe, cleaving through carapace, flesh, bone and blood like they’re all wet paper. Vertebrae and fins keep the two halves of its body connected by a bloody string as it hurtles off into the city behind me.

I let out a single gasping breath before my body rips to the side on instantaneous instinct. My kinetic instinct reacting to a ripple of motion. I pivot just as one of the creature’s dorsal spines arrows out of the darkness a millimeter away from my head. Brutal edges slash across my face. What little I can see vanishes as the darkness begins to pool.

I freeze in place. Venting ki as I start to stumble, unable to see a thing. Meteors of debris rain down around me, obliterating the remains of the undercity layer and crashing down with cataclysmic eruptions of sound. Metric tons of falling concrete take out whole buildings like hammers against brittle glass.

I see none of it. Warmth, dripping and sticky, bleeds from my forehead. I can’t see through it. My head whirls as I spin around, trying to find my place.

I can’t see.

I wipe at the blood and throw my ki out as far as possible, diffusing my strength just to cover a wider area. Through it, I feel the vague sensations of debris raining down in every direction. All I have to pilot with is the last glimpse of the street I landed on-

I dive to the side just as a meteor obliterates the space I was standing. I throw myself into a run. Springing in a zig-zag as if the crumbling undercity is a sentient foe. I almost make it to safety, too. I can just barely feel the first kiss of fresh air as I near the towerside before a piece of rubble slams into the small of my back, snapping what the monster’s rampage already injured.

I go down hard. The raining debris consumes me like an avalanche. Hundreds of pounds of concrete scree burying me alive. A manic rush of adrenaline and stims just barely gives me the strength to worm into what feels like a nook between two large slabs before I’m flattened by the collapse.

I’m entombed in moments. Trapped and gasping for breath in a lean-to of stone while my heart tries to tear itself out of my chest. The top of my shelter cracks dangerously. More weight pours above. I cough and snivel as I gag on blood. Half my body feels like it will peel away at any second. Blood pumps endlessly from the myriad puncture holes in my torso. I’m choking. Teeth chattering. Groaning as the worming tendrils of pain force their way through the haze in my veins. Closing in on my heart.

I paw up at my cheeks, only belatedly remembering that my right arm no longer exists. Bloody pinholes ooze down the nub of my shoulder. Black ki sizzles and burns. The horrible stench of melting flesh warning me that my end is fast approaching; my body literally incinerating itself with every passing breath. It’d be ironic if I weren’t about to die. The only thing propping me up is also the one that will kill me most surely. I wipe at my eyes over and over again as I look around the tiny shelter for a way out, but the blood won’t stop coating my eyes. It’s already congealing.

Deep thunderous booms echo in the dark as the concrete rain slows. My lungs are heaving now. Breathing my own air, all the oxygen used up. The scent of adrenalized fear mixing in with the noxious aura I exude. I slump against the stone, collapsing as the manic strength lent by the stims drains away with my blood. Head lolling, mired in a daze. Hallucinations and reality blurring into a fractious soup of contradictions and disconnected pieces. The burning of my skin, a raw red sunburn on my blistered palm, Dad wrapping it with aloe as he chides me for using my own power in the wrong way. My back against the trunk of the Lungracian in the garden, not concrete.

It only burns because you’re forcing it, he’s telling me. When you call on it for the right reason, you’ll know. You won’t even have to think about it. It’ll just… bubble out of you. Like a smile. He sinks to his haunches in front of me, ruffling my hair. I know it’s easy to get mad, Tay. But you were made to love. Not hate.

Beyond my shelter, a terrifying shriek of alien rage screams out through the void.

It’s still alive.

The beast lets out a freakish bellow as it begins clawing and tearing through the rubble, hunting for where I fell. I feel its tremors coming. But the fear doesn’t clutch at me like it did moments ago. I drift on the edge of consciousness, bloody hair draping low as my head hangs. My JOY rolled away from my hip and splays glitchy pixels into the air. Watery, squawking audio bleeding into my one ear.

…I know it’s rough, Butterball. But no matter how much we lose, we can’t forget the reason we get back up again. He touches his head to mine while we sit on the roof, a week after that damn winter tournament. We don’t do it to prove a point, to get revenge, or to hit back. We do it because they’re counting on us. The people we love, and the people who love us.

“It hurts,” I cry through tattered lips. “It hurts so bad, Dad.”

It’s hard sometimes. It’s hard to keep going, he gently says. Yet even if these burdens are heavy, those who are blessed with strength… have the duty to shoulder them for those who are not.

I paw forward, clutching at the sphere with a gasp. Tears tracking down my face unbidden.

Those we love.

My weight carries me forward. I collapse in a limp pile over my JOY, trying to shut it off. Dad’s voice keeps drawing the monster like a beacon. Its dread howl reverberates through the rock. Claws rattle as they churn through the rubble like meat.

Those who love us.

I’m on the marble. In the garden. Fallen again. Alone again. Training by myself. Again.

“Get up!” I scream at myself, driving a fist into the concrete. “COME ON!”

Nothing answers. Neither in the hallucination nor reality. My ki fizzles and gasps its last around me. Dad was right. My heart is empty. Stripped of the love that once filled it. All that’s left was the dregs of hate. Hate for myself. Hate for my father, for leaving, for the legacy he left me and that I scorned ever since. Hate for Thane. For Gami. Hate for anything and everything that crossed my path. Hate, and hate, and hate. But now even that’s gone. Spent just to kill a monster that’s trying to kill me. To survive. Nothing more.

In the end, I’m always alone. Even as I die.

But then an electric sound pierces through the darkness.

My eyes blink against their bloody crust. Trapped in a red-hued void, huddled like a dying spider on the blood-wetted floor while the monster nears. My last heartstring trembling an inch from snapping. My JOY vibrates in my hand, pulsing a calm bwah-bwah tone. Then again. Repeating quicker than before. And even quicker the third time, like it’s warning me of an incoming missile. Shaking up through my arm like a hand on my shoulder.

Her hand.

And the damascene bangle on it.

For so long, I’d forgotten the reason I ever started fighting.

There, on the brink of death a mile beneath the city, buried under a mountain of rubble, it returns to me like sunlight through a thrown-open curtain.

Light blooms. First a drop, then all at once as my aura spirals outwards in true ignition, banishing the darkness into oblivion. Superheated ecstasy sings through my wounds; blessedly relieving the pain. The heat keeps rising. Melting away the blood over my eyes and letting it run freely down my face. A hurricane roar builds in the confined space. I spit out a glob of red and a broken tooth. I raise my hand to a sky I can’t see.

And I get back up again.

The energy building around me obliterates the rubble avalanche in an exothermic eruption. A circular crater appears in the eye of the cyclonic torrent. The world outside is transformed into a magma field of molten and cooling concrete that swirls with embers. Hellish and shaking, the layer far above still collapsing in a manmade meteor shower.

I unravel from the rubble to stand in the epicenter, chest heaving. Hidden beneath skin burnt into a nearly unrecognizable shade of char, a miniature sun’s glow pulses within me, painting the undercity in the colors of raw daylight. Superheated aura the same color slashes out like the opening shriek of a violin, forming into a roiling column of untamed kinetic energy. Pale gold hair flaps wildly around me in the molten current.

Veins of white dye sluice down my body. Blue ink drips from my eyes as my disguise melts away like watercolor to reveal the true crimson beneath. So much ki pours into the atmosphere that it begins condensating into physical motes, sweeping into the hurricane like cherry blossom leaves. Then even that is superseded. Too much rising power for the air to contain, the whole of the undercity begins to shudder from violent quakes as I assert my power.

It doesn’t matter now if Gami feels the quakes. If he knows that I still live. Better that he does. That he hears the seismic message I send shuddering up the city towards his throne:

You’re next.

As the city rains down, I sweep the darkness and find my prey. The beast watches the cataclysm erupting from me and sinks low into a guarded pouncing position, spined tail wavering like a stinger over its head. Mortally wounded, yet no less lethal.

I’m teetering one pixel away from death. Swaying on my heels. Broken, injured beyond human limits, yet still hanging on in spite of it. I can’t feel anything below my neck except my fingers. I shouldn’t be living, much less standing. But Cal is coming. I can hold the line.

It might be the last bluff of my life, yet I manage to stay on my feet, maintaining the illusion of perfect control. One attack, and I’m dead. I can’t move my legs anymore. It takes every once of willpower just to wipe the back of my hand across my mouth with all the confidence I now feel, smearing the blood like a brushstroke. On the other side is tight-lipped determination. Furious eyes narrowing on the monster as chatters and snaps.

I steel my voice and raise my hand. Golden aura siphons into my outstretched palm with a supersonic shriek. I cock my head to the side.

“If you thought I’d go down that easy, you’re about to learn how wrong you are the hard way,” I say. “I’m what happens when the stars align. You’re just someone in my way.”

Facing down the nova of energy erupting from me, even the monster’s feral instincts stall.

Then my knee buckles.

It lets out an alien howl and rushes forward. Tail blurring in whiplike motion as it slings a spine the size of a rapier straight at my heart. A blurred silhouette sweeps in from the corner of my vision, throwing an arm in front of me at the last instant. She made it.

Sharpened chiton impales Cal’s arm from front to back. Black venom floods into her pale skin, claiming the limb to the elbow. The damascene bangle on her wrist glows like mad as it wrenches the poison to a halt.

“I’m here,” she says. “I’ve got you.”

The monster lunges. Cal holds me steady so I can aim true and buries her head against my chest. Trusting the rest to me. In my outstretched hand burns a new future for us both. And as death leaps to steal it away, I fire the very idea that it could ever succeed right back with all the strength I have. Blasting, and blasting, and blasting, until the beast finally disintegrates, the city melts, and golden brilliance scours away every last shred of darkness.

Only once it’s done do I let myself die in her arms.