Every surface inside the APC disappeared under a uniform sheet of black.

  Shadows swallowed the entire interior in a single breath, thick and total, swallowing the dash lights and the reflection off Ren’s gauntlet.

  Kelly reached for the weapon rack without hesitation and pulled down a heavy rifle built to punch through plated beasts and distant vehicles. She shoved its sling across her chest tight and stepped into the aisle. “Everyone to the rear. Close together. I need the center clear.” She pushed one of them by the shoulder plate to tighten the formation, eyes tracking the ceiling and the floor at the same time. “You want to keep your organs? Closer.” The darkness was an obvious impending attack. Probably an unavoidable one that would skewer her bodyguards. Reggie’s beloved goons definitely wouldn’t survive.

  When they were compressed near the hatch, she focused and skipped the entire APC forward in time—about seventy inches in front of them. The vehicle displaced in a clean, literal jump—metal hull, dashboard, weapons, everything relocating forward in one precise cut of time. The group suddenly found themselves out in the open, landing hard, exiting in the same motion as the metal clipped, stuttering frames.

  Kelly moved with it and stepped out in the same motion as the APC settled into its new position, boots hitting pavement as the metal brick finished its relocation.

  Ahead of them, the APC rumbled with a heavy internal impact, metal groaning from whatever had just arrived in the space they had occupied.

  Kelly adjusted her stance, rifle up, eyes on the armored brick. “Good,” she said evenly. “You missed.”

  Kelly swept her gaze across the street and registered everything wrong with it in a half-second. This part of the city should not have dark streets, not with the skyscraper lighting and the glow strips and the thousand years of engineering that went into making sure pedestrians could see where they were stepping after sunset. But the skyscraper's shadow fell across them like a physical weight, and the darkness underneath it was wrong—both an absent light and a present darkness, a void that made the edges of things blur and retreat, as if someone had reached into the world and turned down the brightness while boosting every shadow into something with mass.The worst possible place to be standing. The luminescent strips embedded in the ground that should have lit up the whole road were smothered underneath swaths of black that had no business being there, unnatural cover spreading across them like a hand over a mouth.

  Everyone's augmented eyes instantly switched to various forms of night vision, from cheap commercial models that painted everything in washed-out green to high-end military grades that made the street look bright as day, full color, burning in high-definition.

  One of the goons—the one with the metal seams lining his jaw—pointed and yelled. "There! It's coming through the side!"

  The voidling stepped through the shadow-covered APC's metal frame like the hull was dark water, like solid steel was just a suggestion it had decided to ignore. One second it was inside the vehicle, the next it was half-emerged from the side, darkness pouring from its body as it pushed through.

  Reggie and his goons switched weapons and opened fire. The street lit up with muzzle flashes from weapons that cycled through thousands of rounds per second, caseless ammunition, Reggie's hand lighting up with another weapon that sent something across the street that cracked against a storefront. Goon One and Goon Two emptied magazine after magazine into the thing's center mass, rounds passing through shadow and smoke and sparking off the APC behind it.

  Kelly joined them. She aimed her directed energy weapon at the creature and let it rip.

  Ren just watched.

  Bullets and projectiles passed through the creature like it was made of air, rounds tearing through shadow and smoke, but when Kelly's directed energy beam crossed the space between them, the thing twisted sideways and let it go wide.

  ”Wait a minute,” she muttered under the storm of gunfire.

  Kelly glanced down at what she’d grabbed, gave it a quick once-over, then huffed a sharp breath through her nose. It was D.E.W.

  DEWs were Directed energy weapons—rifles that fired focused energy instead of bullets or missiles, moving at light speed and roasting anything unlucky enough to be in the beam. They hit instantly, carried more shots than anyone could track, and shredded swarms while making conventional ammo look pathetic.

  “Look at that,” she muttered. “I close my eyes for two seconds and still pull the good stuff.”

  Kelly spun around and planted herself between the creature and the firing line, arms spread wide. "Cease fire on my new pet. Don't kill it—capture only. I need this thing in one piece for science and also because I've always wanted one."

  She looked at Ren when she said it, making sure the old man noted she was being serious about the capture part, less serious about the pet part, but the capture part was the one that mattered.

  Then she turned to Reggie and his goons who were still hosing the voidling with enough rounds to fund a small war.

  "Swap to light guns, that's the only thing that annoys it. Reggie, juice yourself up to eleven, do that lightning puppet man thing you do but make it fast and make it bright, max voltage, focused, compressed, the whole show."

  Reggie's hands dropped from his weapon. "How the hell does she know about that?”

  Almost instantly Reggie used his biological electromagneticism to pull wires and metal from an abandoned vehicle. The components shredded free and bent mid-air, twisting into a crude shape with limbs, a thin pipe for a torso, another for a head—a stick figure built from scrap. Then he poured lightning into it, condensing until it held form. The puppet ignited, so bright and concentrated it hurt to look at. It looked like a man made of pure light, and Kelly knew it wasn't Reggie's most powerful trick, but it was definitely his most focused—a puppet of pure directed energy, compressed and contained, blazing in the middle of the street.

  Everyone's various night vision implants adjusted to the sudden light, iris shutters slamming closed, filters dropping into place. Reggie's puppet caused a small sphere of the surrounding darkness to recede just a few inches, an unnatural ring of light pushing against the black, and beyond that ring, a swath of pure deep black that covered the entire street.

  “And ‘don’t kill it?’” Reggie repeated, incredulous. “The hell I won’t.”

  Reggie's lightning puppet zipped at the creature, closing the distance in a blink, and his goons finally stopped panic-firing long enough to grab the weapons they'd been polishing and fitting during the ride—from the APC's weapon rack, the ones they now knew actually worked against things made of shadow. They reached into sacks at their sides, pulled out hardware that looked expensive, and opened up. Lasers cut through the dark, focused beams and directed energy hitting the voidling from three angles. The stuff disrupted it, made it flicker and shrink back, but didn't kill it. Nothing they had killed it.

  Then it vanished into the ground like it had never been there.

  Reggie's goons lost it. Goon One spun in a full circle, rifle tracking shadows that weren't moving. Goon Two aimed at the ground, then the sky, then a storefront, then back at the ground. "Where is it? Where the hell did it go?!"

  "It went into the ground! It went into the fucking ground!"

  Reggie's voice cut through the panic. "She's the package, the job, circle up now."

  The goons moved, putting themselves between Kelly and the darkness, backs to her, weapons tracking every direction. Reggie stood with them, aiming his weapon as the lightning puppet zipping to and fro.

  Kelly felt it through her mana attunement before she saw anything—a gathering at a spot twenty feet to the side, mana pooling and shaping itself into something with mass and intent. She tracked the shape of the creature re-forming, felt the energy centering at its throat, building, and she was already aiming when the voidling rose from the ground and screamed.

  A wave of dark mana burst from it, visible even to mundane eyes, a rippling front of pure black that washed over all of them in a clear attack. Reggie and his goons braced, Ren's weight shifted onto his back foot, and then it hit them and did nothing. They blinked. Reggie said "What was that?" like he'd walked through a cobweb.

  Kelly felt it in her bones. Pure raw darkness seeped into her, blinding her organic vision from the inside, weakness draining her strength like a fever sucking the life out of her systems. Her limbs went heavy, her internal augments blazing alarms across every display, and worst of all—strongest of all—fear gripped her.

  Not tactical caution or a healthy respect for a threat. Fear, sudden and feral—irrationally crushing her being. It filled her chest, stole her breath with the sick certainty that something was about to end her, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Kelly wobbled, woozy and light on her feet, stumbling slightly before she caught herself. Reggie and his goons stared at her like she'd grown a second head. Ren raised a brow.

  Her body absorbed mana now, which meant mana could affect her now, and the fact that Ren, Reggie, and his guys felt nothing when that wave hit them confirmed it—purely mana-based ‘fear aura’—an attack, probably a lesser version of her Slaughterer of Men Title or some Skill with a weaker effect. She wondered how many humans it had killed to get that thing running.

  Kelly equipped Fortress of Vitality and felt the Title burn through her systems, powering through the life drain, pushing the weakness back. She stood straighter.

  As for the fear? She was used to fear. She spent months in nothing but fear during the loops, and years of it before that. Fear incited action, a response as extreme as the fear itself. She learned in the outskirts that when you were afraid, you acted—you ran, you hid, or you tossed a stone to knock over a crate in a crowded market, tricking a pair of loan sharks into arguing over it and leaving enough credits for a week's worth of rations within reach. Fear made you move.

  She hadn't felt raw fear this powerful in a long time. It would have to try harder than that.

  If anything, it just motivated her. For anyone from the outskirts, fear was fuel.

  The fear seeping over her reminded her of the first days of the loops, when she was a helpless young intern who couldn't die but felt every bit of pain, surrounded by monsters, alone, with nobody who remembered what happened yesterday or would remember what happened to her tomorrow. Pure fear had drowned her for weeks on end. It had been much worse back then.

  So it could cast darkness and fear and drain life. So what?

  She slowed time, cranked her mana sensing ocular lenses to full output, one hundred percent opacity, and equipped the Mimic Hunter title. Her eyes surged with mana, tracking every subtle shift in the dark.

  There. A ripple in the darkness where the voidling was re-forming.

  "Shoot there. Right there."

  Everybody aimed and fired. Reggie's condensed lightning puppet zipped forward and hit it, fast enough that the air cracked where it passed.

  [Uncommon title: 'Dauntless (I)' gained!]

  [Title - Dauntless (Uncommon, I-Grade): Overcame fear based attacks without protection—while active, the bearer gains minor resistance to mana induced fear. Skills or magical effects of higher grades may still affect the Title bearer.]

  Kelly slot it in right away, and though the fear didn’t vanish, it eased up.

  The creature was hurt now, visibly hurt, and it didn't like that. Darkness rose from the ground around it, from the shadows of buildings and vehicles and the spaces between streetlights, all of it flowing into the wounds, knitting them closed while the thing stood there taking hits.

  Then it adapted. The creature opened holes in its own body, shadow gaps that let the lasers pass straight through, nothing for the light to hit, nothing to disrupt. The holes shifted as the beams moved, always open where the fire came from, always closed everywhere else, and the shadows kept rising, kept healing it, kept making more.

  Kelly was all eyes and excited ramblings, soaking up every detail with scientific curiosity.

  "It's detecting exactly where each beam's aimed and opening holes that line up perfectly with the incoming light. Does that mean it's sensing the energy signature before the beam fully forms? The apertures position so the lasers pass through without touching anything solid. So Voidlings can do that. And the regeneration's pulling shadow material from the environment, absorbing darkness off the ground and buildings and weaving it straight into damaged tissue. Active construction. It's manufacturing new body out of whatever's lying around. Does it need a constant shadow supply to keep going, or can it store what it takes in?"

  Then the creature did something else that made her jaw drop. Ren's brows rose a fraction. Reggie and his goons screamed, roared, and opened fire, and Reggie's puppet was on the creature.

  The creature raised both hands and the darkness answered.

  Every shadow in the street pulled toward it, sliding across the ground like oil drawn to a drain, pooling at the voidling's feet in a thickening mass of absolute black. The street reappeared under normal light for the first time since the attack began—glow strips flickering back to life, storefront signs casting actual illumination, the sudden exposure making everyone blink. And from that pooled darkness at the creature's feet, something rose.

  A dragon. Massive, winged, made entirely of the darkness that had covered everything moments ago. Its eyes were voids within the void, its scales shifting like smoke given form, its jaws opening wide enough to swallow large vehicles whole.

  "Heads on target! Don't let it breathe!" Reggie's voice cut through the gunfire. "Hit it with everything!"

  The voidling slipped into the ground like it was water, disappeared completely, and rose again from the dragon's back, standing between its wings.

  Shadows ripped out of the ground—spikes punching up from the street that forced Goon One and Goon Two to dive sideways, spears of shadow aimed at their chests. Then the shadows around them bulged and from that darkness came smaller shadows, muscular little bodies with the proportions of children and faces full of teeth and empty eyes. Shadow goblins. Evil shadow toddlers.

  "What the fuck are those?!" Goon One sprayed them with his rifle, rounds passing through shadow and sparking off the street behind.

  "They're everywhere! They're coming from everywhere!"

  Reggie's puppet lunged at the creature but the shadow toddlers swarmed it, dozens climbing its legs and torso, tiny hands tearing chunks of light from its shape. The puppet threw two off—they dissolved, re-formed, and jumped back on. More kept coming, smothering it in a mass of writhing black bodies. The puppet flickered, one arm falling away into sparks, the head caving in as three toddlers chewed through its face, the torso collapsing under clawed hands. The last of it guttered out and died, swallowed by the swarm.

  The lesser constructs attacked—spikes ripping through pavement, toddlers scrambling at Reggie and his goons with empty eyes. Reggie and his goons opened fire, lasers cutting through shadow stuff that dissolved and re-formed and kept coming. Ren watched, arms crossed. Then from every shadow on the street—Reggie's, Goon One's, Goon Two's, Ren's—dark spikes rose to strike them. Only Kelly's shadow stayed flat against the ground, untouched.

  “Spears, spikes, evil children, a dragon. Could I pull that off with my shadow storage? What happens if I cut one open and see how the mana moves it?

  Kelly watched all of this in the fraction of time she'd borrowed from the rest of the world, the creature and its constructs moving like they were swimming through honey while her personal time raced ahead.

  She considered the problem. Option A: capture a piece of the creature. Option B: capture the whole thing, or at least one of the things it summoned for study. Problem: it couldn't be contained. It moved through shadow like water, and while concentrated directed energy beams harmed it, it had already adapted to them. She could probably destroy it with a full-power blast, but then she'd lose the sample. No sample, no data, no point.

  "Genecorp sampled one of these things. If those corporate clowns could pull it off, so can I."

  Experimentally, with time moving at a crawl, she aimed her directed energy weapon at one of the lesser shadow goblins scrambling toward Reggie's position. A precise beam, surgical, and the goblin's arm separated at the shoulder. She switched out the Dauntless title, felt Giantslayer flood her systems, and raced forward at over two hundred percent speed, crossing the distance before the arm hit the ground.

  Her hand closed around it. For a second it felt solid—hard as metal, cold, dense—and then naturally, as it touched her palm, it burst into formless smoky shadow and sank into the ground, gone.

  Kelly grinned. "Success."

  She hadn't been trying to catch it. She'd been trying to touch it.

  Her mimic skin activated, and where the shadow had touched her palm, her hand transformed—pure construct of shadow now, the same material as the goblin's arm, solid and dark and hers. She flexed her shadow fingers. They moved exactly like her real ones.

  So the things the voidling summoned from shadow weren't alive. It was controlling them, puppeting them, same as Reggie did with his lightning puppet. That meant the intelligence was in the main creature, not the constructs.

  "That makes this so much easier," she muttered.

  Kelly pulled a drone from her own shadow dimension and mentally commanded it to shine a light directly on her. She time-skipped the drone into various positions around the street, watching her shadow stretch and sweep across the ground as the moving light shifted in the world's most aggressive light show—under every shadow goblin still scrambling, under every construct, shadow-spike and spear, over Reggie and his goons and Ren. The constructs hit her shadow and kept going, sinking into it as if they'd found a new home and decided to move in without asking, disappearing one after another until the street was just pavement and light and four very confused humans standing in it. The voidling still sat on its massive dragon overhead, wings flapping, looking down at an empty battlefield where its whole army used to be.

  The voidling looked at her. Kelly couldn't see its face through that matte black void where features should be, but in the way its silhouette shifted, the way its head tracked her, she got the distinct impression it was pissed. Probably recognized what she was. Definitely noticed its army was gone. She'd have been annoyed too.

  The dragon opened its mouth and fired a beam of darkness shot through with sickly grey and nasty-looking mana, a column aimed right at her chest. Kelly equipped Disciple of Deflection and slapped it with her shadow hand like it was an annoying fly. The beam veered off and hit a parked car, which stopped existing.

  Her mimic hand exploded into shadow vapor. She looked down at the stump of darkness where her hand used to be. Experimentally, she dipped it into her own shadow, the one still attached to her feet, and pulled it back out. The hand re-formed, solid and dark, flexing on command. Huh. Interesting. Same trick the voidling's constructs used. Good to know.

  [Title: Disciple of Deflection Grade III → IV]

  [Additional Effect: Deflection gains reflection. Successfully deflecting an attack sends back 120% of its original force.]

  The dragon fired again, thicker beam, more charge behind it. Kelly deflected with her shadow hand and an instant shield for backup, and this time the beam bent off her and shot back at the dragon with extra force—slightly off target, but close enough to clip its wing. Dark shadow-stuff sprayed across the sky. The dragon reeled.

  Her shadow hand exploded again. She dipped the stump into her shadow and pulled out a fresh one.

  Kelly flexed her new shadow hand, watching the darkness ripple where knuckles should be. She looked up at the dragon circling above, then at the voidling riding it. Was the dragon alive? Like actually alive, with thoughts and feelings and a desire not to get stolen? Or was it just more puppetry, same as the goblins and the spikes and everything else she'd already vacuumed up? If it wasn't alive, how wide would she have to stretch her shadow to fit something that size? She'd need a lot of light. A lot of angle. A lot of shadow real estate.

  She turned to Reggie and his goons, still standing there with their weapons and their panic and their complete lack of ability to contribute to what came next.

  "Stay out of this one. This part's mine."

  She equipped Mana Vacuum and felt the Title settle into place, hungry and ready. Her molecular switch weapon reconfigured in her grip, internal runes slipping in and out of alignment with a sound like a knife being sharpened on its own edge. She summoned an instant shield under her foot, stepped onto it like it was a staircase that hadn't been there a second ago, summoned another above it, and climbed.

  Shield after shield after shield, racing up into the sky, leaving the ground behind before anyone could argue.