Kelly stood in the clutter of her home lab, surrounded by printed parts, idle components, and the morning’s get-ready-with-me kit. A pile of jagged mana crystals glowed on the workbench. A box of standard-issue slugs sat beside her half-assembled firearm. Her transforming blade lay next to a set of house keys. She didn’t reach for any of it.

  She just stood there as reality thickened, pulling inward through a force only she could feel. With Mana Vacuum active, her weapon, the crystals beneath her skin, and the runes etched beneath it all synced up. She opened that induced state—time-sense—raw and vertigo-sharp.

  A jagged chunk of crystal vanished from its shelf.

  A sharp crack stung her palm. Shards exploded in her grasp, skittering across the floor in a sparkling mess. She hissed and shook out her hand, then examined her bleeding, rapidly regenerating palm.

  “Okay,” she said, eyeing the damage. “So don’t grab it like you’re trying to crush its soul.”

  She tried again. A single slug this time. Another jarring smack. Deformed metal. She took a break, glaring at the wall until the world stopped spinning. The problem was her intensity—yanking things through time like she was ripping down a barricade. She needed to be a pickpocket, not a battering ram.

  “Control the arrival,” she noted. “Not the journey.”

  On the next try, she didn’t force it. She just… suggested. A calm notion. ‘The keys.’

  A heavy jangle punched into her palm, metal warm from apparently moving very fast, but intact. Skin unbroken. A slow grin spread across her face.

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “That’s the sweet spot.”

  A slug appeared next, landing with a solid, conclusive thump. Then the blade. She focused on it—on the familiar balance, the shape of it wanting to be there. Her intention became a firm, intentional pull. The weapon appeared in her grip, the impact traveling up her forearm. It was solid. Whole. She adjusted her stance against the weight.

  A box of ammunition came next. Then a pistol. One moment her hands were empty. The next, they were full. Each object arrived with a final thud, no shattering or sprays of glittering dust. To anyone watching, it would’ve looked like reality had stuttered—a jump-cut where the boring part of walking and getting stuff like a scrub was simply deleted.

  Even as she collected crystals and weapons, she didn’t need to move a muscle. With Mana Vacuum roaring, boosted by her Absorb rune-filled weapon, her crystal-mimic skin, and the runes growing right beneath her own skin, it all fed into the same pull. At first it had taken hard concentration, near-meditation, and just as many breaks spent glaring at the wall. Combat adrenaline made everything worse. Calm prodding worked.

  The items still landed with force. Sometimes they still shattered on reappearance. She was figuring out the mechanism. The limits.

  Kelly looked from the empty spaces on the shelves to the assembled gear piled in her arms, then back at the undisturbed clutter on the table.

  Needless to say, it was a drastic quality-of-life improvement.

  Kelly had tested the limits of her time-skip and gotten the general idea. After some hands-on field testing—which involved several very confused and then very dead gunmen, like poor Simon, who got a little too chatty too early and looked personally betrayed right before she was forced to put him down for the day—she nailed down the mechanic.

  Then, mid-fight, she stumbled onto the real prize.

  She could do more than teleport. She could pull things to her. Interact with… anything.

  She wasn’t moving through space so much as skipping forward in time. Anything she could theoretically do in a short several-second—move, pull a trigger, grab something, maybe even slap together a sandwich—could just happen. Poof. Frames skipped. Results delivered.

  A gun from across the room could snap into her palm. Skipping frames. Forward hop. The applications were severely open-ended.

  The fun part was imagining the possibilities: arriving somewhere having already unloaded a full clip, finished her coffee, tied her boots—maybe even assembled a working coffee maker from spare parts.

  Or better yet, she could just point at something.

  And mess with it.

  She was still figuring out the how, then she’d move on to the how far.

  The method was a mystery, but the possibility was a fact—like how silence in an elevator felt longer than silence anywhere else on Earth, or how everyone had pretended not to see someone they knew in public because the social paperwork felt too long. Irrefutable.

  All she had to do was look at a thing, get it in her head, and decide with every stubborn corner of her being that she was grabbing it right now. Then it would move through time and crash into her palm. It didn’t matter if someone else was already reaching for it. Her time affinity had a great observer effect. The moment she focused on an item, her intention was the only one that got a vote. Everyone else’s plans were wonderfully overruled.

  The drain was difficult to describe. It felt absolute, like it was yanking on the fundamental glue that kept her being a being—her soul, if she wanted to get spooky and dramatic about it. She noticed snatching an external item to her hand drained her far less. A cheaper application. She could do that a few times. Hopping her whole body forward through time cost more. The bigger the impact she made on the world, the bigger the strain. Trying to use a combat Title during a skip more than once? That was a spectacular way to hit the floor immediately after, her entire being spent.

  If she unleashed an offensive Title in that skipped moment, it would empty her out completely, sucking up every drop of energy she had. She’d have to work on that. But this? This was still an incredible boon.

  She spent two loops doing nothing but straining it, draining and refilling her very being. It was like doing the world’s hardest cardio, but for her soul.

  Her perception got a major upgrade. She could already see and feel the world's mana through her gear and Traits. Now she had a whole new sense to play with.

  Kelly could also sort of sense and see time itself. It wasn't one big river. It was a crowded, messy intersection where everything had its own current pushing against her brain. She could feel the slow, deep grind of a thousand years in the sidewalk. She could see the quick, bright zip of a bullet from the bang to the splat, the whole thing from start to finish. Sometimes, she could spot the ghost of something that just happened and the fuzzy haze of something that might happen next.

  And if she tried really hard, and had an hour to waste sitting in one spot, she could tell if a wall was crumbling from age or from a single, incredibly bad party in 2547.

  This new sense gave her a feeling of huge, complicated depth. She could tell one moment from another by its feel. She could compare how old or strong different timelines were. But it wasn't simple. It was a giant, living web of cause and effect, of what was, what is, and what could be, all shoving at her from every direction. A feeling of huge scale and understanding, like someone had handed her the city's unchangeable blueprints for how things fall apart and crash together.

  And Kelly was the worst person to hand the blueprints to anything.

  So long as nobody scanned her, it would look like some top-shelf corporate tech doing its job. In future loops, she’d need to grab a relic to sell that story—something with unknown features—like the deadtech sphere from the Mistmarket would do the trick. With that acting as a patsy, only Kelly would know exactly what was happening. Only she would know. She was now the one breaking reality, reaching into causality and twisting, obvious and absolute.

  “This is… wild… I feel like a freaking God—well, always have, but now I have something cool to write on the pamphlet.” Kelly let out a short, disbelieving laugh, glancing down at her hands, genuine awe in her chest.

  Then she remembered Ren Sato.

  That totally-not-intimidating, who-even-knows-what-his-limits-are, old veteran ghost. And her sudden hubris simmered to a low hum. She sure hadn't felt like any kind of divinity getting her clock cleaned by that old monster.

  Ren was just... some guy. An insanely overpowered ‘some guy’. But some random guy nonetheless; regardless of his strength, he wasn’t in the Echelon’s leadership. The awe settled, cooled into a solid, measuring weight. "I'm not there yet. I'm not done getting stronger. There’s still a lot more work to do…”

  Kelly had a lot of ground to cover if she wanted to gain the strength to destroy the real monsters.

  “…More people to throw from rooftops."

  She smiled, imagining herself mid-motion. Kelly could already hear her enemies’ free-fall screams.

  Kelly pulled out a thin translucent roll that snapped open into a flawless plastic sheet—her notepad. It was vintage, old-school in that specific way that announced to the world she had superior taste and everyone else was dressed by a focus group.

  With it, she went digging for information on her new teacher, Ren Sato. Understandably, almost nothing came up. There wasn’t even a bare-bones US Army record.

  Then she searched for his moniker, ‘Sato the Ghost,’ and ‘The Ghost.’

  What she found were a lot of historical propaganda, and present-day military forums, military enthusiast forums, historical servers, and entire virtual worlds, all dedicated to one figure—The Ghost—each claiming the mysterious figure had received a scrollable monument of awards that seemed all about a military career that single-handedly justified the existence of medals.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  There were no pictures or facts, only claims, rumors, and scenes of aftermath.

  She scrolled past Medals of Honor, a few Knights Crosses with Oak Leaves, a Royal Order of Ultimate Sacrifice, a ‘Hero of the Human Federation laurel—first class’, and the distinctly unnerving Solar Cross of Valor. There was even a few Hero of the Russian Federation medals.

  The list was a breathtaking tribute to applied violence in the service of humanity. It told her precisely nothing about where her teacher bought his socks or how to beat him.

  It did, however indirectly, give clues about his wars.

  Kelly’s early education wasn’t standard. Other kids went to state schools, private academies, or military prep if they won the lottery. She was homeschooled—by criminals. Her main tutor was a broken unit she carried everywhere; Jennie—a being with an intellect capable of enslaving all life. The downside was she never learned the theme song to any popular cartoons she hadn’t personally scavenged from crime scenes. The upside was Kelly could build things no one else thought to even try.

  An advantage and disadvantage.

  She knew general history as well as anyone else with a non-standard education, maybe a little better. Most of human progress over the many centuries was built on and during wars, or in their bloody, smoking aftermath. Take augmentation, for example, or... FTL travel.

  The problem of faster-than-light travel got solved about seven hundred years ago. Some daring genius found a way to make anything weightless—same as light. Even a massive space shuttle could be reduced to zero mass. FTL became everyone's favorite new toy.

  So humanity did what it does best with a new toy: it expanded. Violently. Off-world colonies, exploration, the whole spectacle. It was the biggest, messiest real estate grab in history. Most worlds were empty, dangerous, or biologically primitive. No one to talk to. Then explorers found a warlike race with better technology. That started the first major species-spanning war of the millennium.

  Humanity picked a fight with the one neighborhood in the galaxies that treated total war as a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. This was universally recognized as the worst possible outcome.

  It wasn’t really a war—more like a never-ending string of brutal skirmishes stretched across centuries. It forced a teeth-gritted almost-alliance: every human nation technically on the same side, still stabbing each other over resources, but also agreeing on a shared group project—stabbing one common enemy. Like a group chat devoted to hating one person, except less sad, less hateful, and somehow heroic.

  Humanity was losing, so it started augmenting bodies—turning people into walking weapons of mass destruction. That forced the war into a strange, strenuous “peace.”

  Then came the Augment Wars that followed. Then came the AI Coups.

  All three conflicts created veterans, elites, and demigods. Each one was a master of war. Their EQ levels were so high they could look at a nuke and make it feel inadequate. A true veteran from any one of those wars would be an absolute monster.

  Ren Sato’s record implied he had been involved in all three.

  A veteran from one war was a monster; a veteran from all three was something else entirely.

  The Vaughn HQ lobby was a bubble of strained normalcy. Staff moved with purpose between security stations. Outside, reality was having a fire sale; the world coming apart. Inside, the lights were on, the floors were so clean you could perform surgery on them, and Jackhammer stood by the elevators, a fixed point of calm and contractual obligation. All thanks to Kelly’s early warning. She was in the company’s good graces—for now.

  Kelly was on a video call, her intern lanyard bouncing in the screen visible only to Jackhammer—she could see the contrast clearly. In other loops, the space he stood in had been a warzone. Her endless war with Payne and his cohort. The explosions. 100 rounds per minute. Her reckless experimentation destroying the universe over and over. Kelly had so much fun here. She remembered this lobby full of bullet holes, scorch marks, and broken drones. Now it was just clean and loud.

  It was the nature of all good things, she mused, to end.

  “Hey. Quick question,” she said. “This is me checking my bearings, not pulling a thread.” She didn’t plan to poke the Jack-shaped bear, but maybe tap the glass of its enclosure.

  Jackhammer’s eyes scanned the main doors once more before settling on her call. “All right.”

  “I keep hearing the same name come up. Sato. People still call him the Ghost.” She tilted her head. “Nobody ever explains what they mean by it—how the name spread, so I figured I’d ask before I assume something wrong.”

  Was this why she’d scheduled an emergency call? A slow, patient breath escaped Jackhammer’s nose. He pinched the bridge of it for a second. He should’ve known better than to accept it. He performed an unspoken, full-body calculation on the cost-benefit analysis of answering her versus the minor chaos of leaving her curious. He chose the path of weary mentorship. He could use the distraction and the break in his calendar. She’d bought him ten minutes.

  “The Ghost. It’s not something you’re missing. That name’s been around longer than anything attached to it,” he said.

  “So it’s not a file I just don’t have access to.”

  “No.” He shook his head slightly. “If there had been something concrete—a service record, a photo, a confirmed op—it would’ve survived. It didn’t. Nothing did.”

  “Then why does it still get mentioned?”

  “Because it worked.” He crossed his arms, his voice low and even. “Back when voluntary enlistment replaced the draft, they needed stories that worked. You don’t get kids from the slums to sign up for orbital drop campaigns with spreadsheets and pension plans…”

  “You do it with legends.” Kelly finished his sentence, the history clicking into place. The Ghost was a recruitment tool. In a world where joining the military was the only lottery ticket that ever guaranteed pay out, where soldiers who survived were the new rock stars and every corporation's logo looked suspiciously like a medal, you needed a good legend. One that was all glory and no inconvenient facts like service records or retirement homes. “So it’s that kind of thing. Propaganda.”

  “Yeah. A useful myth. Easy to repeat. Hard to check. They had a lot of them back then. It’s just one of a few.”

  Basic history of the wars did a lot of heavy lifting. The entire history of human civilization for the last thousand years was just a long, bloody advertisement for why you needed augments, corporations, and an untouchable elite class.

  It justified everything. It was the reason the Echelon existed and why colonies were launched. It was the foundational excuse for economic disparity, social injustice, and a homeworld slowly poisoning itself. That history positioned anyone who served above a certain threshold—and especially those who stood at the peak, like the legendary Gideon Vaughn—as a crucial, untouchable social class. They were the shield. The history said so.

  In Kelly’s feed, Jackhammer glanced at the crowded lobby, at the faces of people who’d grown up in a world shaped entirely by war. “Names like that carry weight in our society—we measure a person’s worth by what they did in uniform. Everyone wants in on military service. It’s the only elevator out. The academies are harder to get into than a colony visa. A lot of people would choose a good academy over a resort colony.”

  War was the foundation of the economy. The military academies were harder to get into than heaven, and the Echelon never let you forget they were the reason your lungs hadn’t melted yet, even if you’d never breathe clean air off-world.

  “So of course the only good legends are the ones you can’t fact-check. And nobody ever had to update it,” Kelly said.

  “Exactly. No face. No age. No confirmed end point. It never expired. It scared our enemies into behaving. People argued about whether names like that was ever real, but they still said the names with respect.” He gave her a look that was more tired than stern. “We have real living hero’s on brochures, too. From my side of things, that never crossed from a story into a real, actionable interest. It stayed where those things belong. Talked about. Never useful.”

  “That’s all I needed,” Kelly said, her tone shifting into something lighter. “I just wanted to know how seriously to take it.”

  “Take it as a story people were taught to recognize. Nothing more. Our boss has much better, realer ones. With video proof.” He was talking about Gideon. He uncrossed his arms, his attention already drifting back to his duty roster. “Now, unless your intern project is auditing three-hundred-year-old propaganda, I’d suggest finding your supervisor. We’ve got enough real problems today.”

  “Got it. Thanks for being so straight about it. You’re lucky to have me.”

  “Of course. Wait—what?”

  She ended the call, leaving him to weave through the busy staff.

  The explanation made perfect sense. In a world built on war, where soldiering was the highest social currency, perfect, untouchable legends were the ultimate recruitment tool. Jackhammer was pragmatic. He was in his forties. He’d fought in arenas with rules and pay-per-view deals. To him, a “covert legend” was like a “dry ocean.” It didn’t compute. If the guy was real, he’d be in a museum or a grave. The fact that he was neither just proved he was a ghost story with good marketing.

  One of many legends about why the powerful people deserved to be powerful.

  To Kelly, who knew the name wasn’t a story at all, it was fascinating.

  Kelly had listened, her face a perfect mask of ‘ah, yes, I see.’ Internally, she was giving the universe a standing ovation. The sheer, breathtaking absurdity of it was glorious. A story so useful it had fossilized fact into falsehood.

  She knew the best part. It hadn’t been manufactured by some historical committee. A real, cranky, horrifically dangerous old man had simply lived so long and done so much that he’d evaporated into myth. His secrecy wasn’t some black-ops protocol. It was probably just his own grumpy preference. A need-to-know secret that, apart from entities like the Haider organization, with their mutually assured destruction NDAs. Almost nobody needed to know anymore.

  She knew. It was the funniest joke in the world.

  The official education pipeline—government, corporate, military academies, the news—was a smooth, recycled slurry of propaganda. It was designed to make the elite and the demigods seem like untouchable myths. It presented the upper Echelon, people with EQ levels skating past 80 or tipping over 100, as historical monuments you’d never actually meet. It was all very clean, very distant.

  Kelly knew they existed. She’d killed one, after all. Okay, technically she’d caused him to disintegrate in a cataclysmic mana-terraforming explosion. Same difference. The point was, demigods could be turned into fancy ash.

  So the idea that someone at Ren Sato’s level could be centuries old wasn’t even weird. Genetics, machines, uploaded consciousness, replacement bodies—the options were a menu for people who could afford to ignore expiration dates. Him being two, three, even five hundred years old was entirely on the table.

  But she remembered his own words—the unspoken horror in them when he spoke about wars, about dying, about being maimed, about the procedures soldiers used to become battle-hardened, which was just a polite term for permanently crazed. It made her wonder if he’d just… checked out. Gone off the grid for a peaceful retirement of simple, easy work. Or as off the grid as a living fossil of war could get. The fact that he was alive, working with a sketchy outfit like Haider’s on the system’s most toxic planetary armpit, clearly wasn’t common knowledge. Not even in the upper stratosphere.

  After a quick remote negotiation with Genecorp—confirming her voluntary participation in their East Grid operations later that day, which was absolutely a excuse to try stealing or draining the Cube—she thanked Dr. Haider’s remotely piloted drone. It buzzed away. Time to move.

  She linked up with Reggie, Reggie’s mercenaries, and her own hired team of aspiring god-killers. The vibe was both a ‘covert departure’ and a ‘rowdy field trip to the end of the world.’

  “We’re all set?” Reggie asked, checking a scanner in his palm.

  “Set as we’re gonna be,” Kelly said, hefting her pack, dipping the entire thing into her shadow, which rippled and absorbed it all like dark water. Everyone present gave her strange looks, then decided it was above their pay grade.

  “Time to go sign my life away to a shady death-wish organization, take their 'please try to die' combat exam, and square up against a brutal grumpy old demigod who operates on a weight class that could crack this city in half. Call it a minor level gap. A small one.” Kelly checked the forms loaded into her weapon. "Only maybe a hundred times my pay grade. Nothing major. A rounding error, really.”

  Reggie raised an eyebrow. “You sound cheerful about it.”

  “I’m always cheerful.”

  Reggie shook his head and yawned, holstering his weapon. "Your funeral. I already lined up the extraction team."

  "See? That's why you're my favorite bodyguard. Always planning ahead."

  “You think they’ll still have lasagna?” Reggie paused, staring at her wrist. He gave her a slow, assessing look. “We still get paid if you die, right?"

  Kelly waved a hand and grinned triumphantly.

  Reggie stared at her wrist. "You're not carrying enough metal to scratch a demigod."

  “I am this time. Better equipped.” She tapped the side of her head, then the fashionable weapon on her wrist. “Brought some special ammo.”

  This time, she wasn’t just showing up with grit and a smart mouth. This time, Kelly had time on her side. Literally.

  It was time for round two.