Cole revved his motorcycle, the roar of its combustion engine a defiant growl in a city of silent electric vehicles. Pedestrians shot him dirty looks. Their neural implants tried to block the noise, but Cole knew it wouldn’t kill the rumble completely.

  He weaved through traffic, still getting used to the speed. Still getting used to everything.

  The new Zyntech optics were something else, turning the world into a crystal-clear stream of data. He could see the stress cracks in the mag-lev track overhead, the heat bleeding off a vendor's food cart, and the trajectories of a thousand raindrops at once. Each reflection showed him twenty ways through traffic, probability numbers floating in his peripheral like ghosts.

  It was incredible. It was also splitting his skull open.

  Dammit, I'm running late, he thought, pushing the bike harder.

  During the procedure, as Al was swapping out his optical implants, opening his chest cavity, and fusing Zeta nodes onto his skin, he had passed out from the pain. One moment, he was staring into a surgical laser with his brain interpreting every color as a new kind of agony; the next, he was woken up an hour later by an injection of adrenaline and Al telling him to get up for a client that had come in.

  "Payment starts next week," Al had said, pressing a bottle of neural stabilizers into Cole's hand. "Take two every six hours, or your new optics will give you seizures. Your brain needs time to adapt."

  He'd glanced at the time and ran out of there.

  His Neuro-Link buzzed.

  A message from Lia: You're late. Stop sightseeing and get here. We have work to do.

  Not a good first impression, he thought, banking the bike hard around a corner, the city's neon lights smearing into long, seamless lines.

  As he finally arrived twenty minutes late to a discreet service entrance beneath a mag-lev station, he could already tell everyone was pissed.

  The safehouse was just a maintenance hub someone had cleared out. Bare concrete, pipes everywhere, smelled like dust and old machinery.

  Lucius was leaning against a large crate, arms crossed, static electricity crackling between his fingers in an unconscious display of irritation.

  Senna was studying a holographic schematic, but her focus was clearly divided.

  Lia was pacing, her forge-ports glowing a dull angry red.

  Yeah. This was gonna be fun.

  "Sorry, I had something that held me up a bit. Won't happen again."

  "Time's money, Cole, and we're not here to babysit," Senna said, glancing up from her datapad. "We can’t have you dawdling around."

  Lia walked up, her face a mask of tempered steel, but the tight set of her jaw betrayed how pissed-off she was. Her eyes, the impossible pink of a master Forge user, scanned him from head to toe. The air around her shimmered with heat distortion as her anger literally raised the local temperature.

  "New eyes. And a thoracic implant; Zeta nodes, too, by the looks of the energy signature. Still got surgical gel in your hair." Her anger seemed to melt away, replaced by a grudging respect. "Just get those? I'm surprised you're walking, let alone riding a damn motorcycle. At least you have somewhat of an excuse and you were doing something productive. Let me guess, Kai sent you to Al? How in the hell did you afford those?"

  "Got lucky on a bounty," Cole replied. "The moron had a Sequence Five Flesh Domain weapon on him despite not having a Domain."

  Lucius let out a low chuckle, pushing himself off the crate. "Living weapon on a normie? That's not brave, that's assisted suicide." His storm-touched arm crackled with ambient electricity. "Even though he wasn't a Sequence Six, gear like that on a newbie like you… well, you're lucky you got out of that without a scratch on you."

  "'Lucky' would've been finding him passed out. This was more like controlled mayhem with a side of pure terror." Cole admitted, the memory of the Absence Walker's casual destruction still fresh in his mind. "It happened in the same area as the rampage this morning."

  "The Sonya Chen incident," Senna said, her tattoos seeming to shimmer as she accessed the data. "Almost 250 dead, tens of millions in damage. You were right in the middle of it."

  "You saw it and you still showed up?" Lucius's voice carried new respect.

  Cole nodded. "Saw a Sequence Three Vacuum Saint delete six floors like he was hitting 'Backspace' on reality. Really puts your mortality in perspective when you realize you're basically a typo they could erase."

  "Can see why you got the chrome, then," Senna said, "but next time, schedule elective surgery after the mission briefing."

  "Point taken," Cole replied.

  "Still have that thousand-yard stare a bit," Lia said, a faint, knowing smile on her face. "I've seen that myself in the mirror. First time you see gods fight, it changes you. Makes you realize how small you really are." She paused, considering something.

  "It never really goes away. I used to live in Flesh City, creepy as hell place, by the way, where the buildings grow like organs and the streets pulse with veins, but amazing beaches, as the deity resides near the coastline. About five years back, a Sequence Two Axiom God of the Pattern Domain went berserk and lost control."

  Senna tilted her head, her focus finally pulling away from her datapad. "You never told me this," she said, a hint of genuine curiosity in her monotone voice. "Chances of survival within a Sequence Two incident radius is—"

  "I know the fucking numbers, Senna," Lia cut her off, her tone sharp. "The sky started… pixelating. Like reality was buffering—trying to load, but failing. Mathematical equations began appearing in the air, golden chains of numbers that wrapped around buildings, people, everything. The sound of the ocean became a synchronized, repeating mathematical loop. Every seventh wave was identical, down to the molecular level. The Axiom God stood on the shore, and he wasn't screaming or raging. He was just… calculating. His body was perfectly symmetrical, unnaturally so. Even his breathing followed a mathematical pattern. He took out twenty city blocks before Rune Control finally put him down. My family with it. I left the city the next day and ended up here."

  A heavy silence fell over the room. Even the ambient electrical hum seemed to quiet.

  "Wow, who knew mathies could be so dangerous," Lucius chimed in.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "At Sequence Two, any Domain is dangerous," Senna replied to Lucius, her gaze turning back to Lia. "Though, I am curious. At that Sequence, people are heavily monitored. Mandated neural scans every 48 hours, behavioral prediction algorithms, chemical inhibitors. Most have endless workarounds to keep sane by then."

  "Yeah, the investigation said he had apparently lost his wife in a Rift incident. She was torn apart by a Chaos Beast, nothing left to even bury. He tried to come up with some mathematical 'axiom' to bring her soul back into a synth body. Thought he could solve death like an equation. He played in the wrong sandbox," Lia replied, her voice going somewhere else.

  The room went quiet. Cole watched Lia's hand drift to a chain around her neck, hidden under her armor. Small piece of obsidian at the end, worn smooth from touching it. Looked like rubble from something that mattered once. She gripped it for a second. Steadying herself.

  "That's putting it lightly," Senna replied, her voice losing its usual detachment. "It's the one hard rule: you don't mess with death. It's not a problem you can solve. Trying to force it… you don't get them back. You just break yourself against something fundamental. It's a surefire way to go mad, no matter how powerful you are."

  "Love makes you do dumb things," Lia replied, shaking her head as if to clear the memory. She rolled her shoulders. Cole heard her servos resetting. "Anyways, back to the task at hand."

  "Right," Lucius ran a hand through his hair. "Time to make some money."

  Lia tapped the silver data slate on the central table, and a holographic map of the Project Chimera facility popped up. The building looked like a monument to corporate paranoia. The kind of building where janitors probably needed DNA scans just to mop floors. Security markers glowed red at every entrance, and the basement levels were marked with biohazard warnings.

  "Nexus Dynamics' pet project," Lia began, her voice shifting to mission mode. "Thirty floors down, quantum-locked vault, and something inside that three different corps want badly enough to pay us a fortune for."

  "So," Cole asked, watching his reflection fragment across the hologram's surface, "what exactly are we stealing?"

  Lia's smile was sharp as a blade. "That's the fun part. We don't know. The client provided an encrypted energy signature and a custom cryo-case. Thing's military-grade, lead-lined, with reality anchors built into the walls. Whatever we're grabbing, they don't want it teleporting away."

  She tapped the case sitting in the corner, a matte black cube covered in warning labels. "Our job is to get in, locate whatever is giving off that signature, stick it in the box, and get out."

  Cole leaned back. "So we're playing mystery box with something several megacorps want to kill each other over? Could be anything: bioweapon, AI core, someone's frozen head, their CEO's browser history…"

  "Hence the hazard pay," Lucius added cheerfully. "Fifty thousand upfront, each. Another hundred on delivery."

  One hundred and fifty thousand.

  That wouldn't just get Al off his back; it would buy him actual breathing room for the first time in his life.

  "Alright, let's break it down," Lia continued, enlarging the hologram. The building peeled back layer by layer like an anatomical diagram, each floor revealing its own maze of corridors and security measures. "Senna, entry points."

  "Conventional security is Tier-One corporate standard," Senna reported, her fingers gliding across her datapad, syncing it with the main display. Red lines appeared, indicating patrol routes and sensor ranges. She highlighted the defenses.

  "Pattern recognition software, thermal imaging, heartbeat sensors. They're even running brainwave scanners at the main entrances, checking for Domain signatures. Automated gun turrets, biometric scanners, drone patrols on the upper floors. I can spoof the biometrics and create a temporary blind spot in the drone coverage for a ninety-second window. After that, their adaptive AI will notice the anomaly and lock everything down."

  "Ninety seconds to get twenty-five floors down?" Cole asked.

  "No," Senna corrected, "ninety seconds to get past the lobby. Then it gets interesting."

  She highlighted a shimmering, barely visible barrier on the schematic. "Floor twenty-five. That's the Perception Filter I told you about. It's a field of unstable, semi-sentient code. Think of it as reality malware: it infects your perception, makes you see what it wants you to see. The last team that tried to force it—well, their neural logs just end in a loop of them screaming at walls that weren't there."

  "How long were they trapped?" Cole asked.

  "According to the incident reports I intercepted, they're still there. Their bodies, anyway. Minds are gone."

  All eyes turned to Cole.

  "The filter makes you see what you expect to see," Cole reasoned, as he analyzed the shimmering field on the hologram.

  "A soldier sees barricades. A hacker sees a firewall. But if you don't have a single perspective… if you're looking at it from every angle at once…"

  "It can't lock onto a single deception," Cole finished. "It'll try to show me everything and nothing. Might give me a migraine, but I can navigate through it."

  "Can you get us through?" Lia’s tone left no room for excuses.

  Cole met her gaze, a flicker of his reflection in her eyes. "Yeah. I can get us through. It won't be quiet, and it won't be clean, but I can do it. Fair warning, though: I'll be essentially blind while I'm processing that many perspectives. You'll need to watch my back."

  "Good. Lucius, the lower levels. Everything below floor twenty is a killbox. The entire research wing is protected by a network-wide energy scrubber. It's old tech, pre-Domain era. It will drain our shields and the charge on our weapons in minutes."

  Lucius cracked a wide, predatory grin. "Old tech has old weaknesses. The whole system runs through a single primary conduit, probably because when they built it, they never imagined someone could channel enough electricity to overload it."

  His storm-touched arm crackled with anticipation. "I can overload the primary conduit and short out the whole damn grid. It will be loud, draw every guard in the building to my position, and probably give me a hell of a headache. But it will buy you a clean run to the vault."

  "Can you handle that many guards?" Cole asked.

  "I once held off thirty gang members during a territory war. Corporate security?" He laughed. "They're trained to look scary, not fight Domains."

  "That leaves the vault itself," Lia said, zooming in on the final objective. The schematic showed a massive, seamless door. "Intel says it's an adaptive Forge-seal, layered with memory-alloys that reconfigure their molecular structure after every attack. Hit it with a plasma cutter, it becomes heat-resistant. Try to freeze it, it generates its own heat. It learns."

  Her own forge-ports flared with bright, white-hot light for a moment. "Good thing I convince materials they want to be something else. Can't adapt to persuasion."

  "So that's the plan," she summarized, looking at each of them in turn. "Senna gets us in the door from her mobile command center running interference on their security. I'll stick with Cole, we move to floor twenty-five. Lucius, you create a diversion, take out their power grid. In the disarray, Cole and I bypass the Filter, I crack the vault, we grab the prize, and we all meet at the exfil point before the QRF arrives."

  "Quick reaction force response time?" Cole’s military knowledge from watching too many action vids finally useful.

  "Four minutes from the nearest Nexus facility," Senna answered. "But they'll have internal security converging in under two."

  Cole studied the hologram one more time, his new optics catching something others might miss, a blank space in the data, too exact to be natural. "The client didn't just redact the target's identity," he said quietly, pointing a finger that passed through the hologram. "They redacted the guardian."

  The room went cold. Even Lucius's casual electricity dimmed.

  Lia's practiced composure was flawless, but Cole saw the flicker of a dozen reflections of her, each one showing a sliver of unease.

  "That's why the survival probability is blank. It's why the pay is so high. Whatever's guarding that vault, the client doesn't want us to know until we're already committed."

  "Could be an AI defense system," Lucius offered, but his voice lacked confidence.

  "Could be a Domain guard," Senna added. "Corporate security sometimes employs Sequence Fives for high-value targets."

  "Could be worse," Lia said quietly. "Could be one of their Project Legacy experiments."

  She collapsed the hologram with a flick of her wrist.

  "Either way, time to gear up," she commanded. "Full combat loads. Armor-piercing rounds, emergency stims, reality anchors if you have them. Check your ammo, load your programs, and say your prayers. If anyone wants out, now's the time. No judgment."

  Nobody moved.

  "Good," she said, a ghost of pride in her voice. "We move in six hours. And people?" She looked at each of them. "Whatever happens down there, we get out together or not at all. Vertex doesn't leave anyone behind."

  Cole checked his Twin Fractal Blades, their crystalline edges humming with potential.

  Time to earn his place on the team.