The blade came down in a perfect arc—silent, golden, inevitable.
Lina threw herself sideways, boots skidding across dust-slick pavement. The edge passed inches from her neck, slicing through empty air with a sound like torn voltage. She hit the ground hard, shoulder-first, rolled behind a half-collapsed market stall, and bit down on a curse.
Pain lit up her ribs. Her limbs dragged. Vision smeared at the edges like her body wasn't fully hers anymore.
But what came through the comm next hit harder than the fall.
Still sprawled on the ground, her chest tightened—not from pain, but from something colder. The kind of cold that didn't come from wounds or wind, but from the instinct that something irreversibly wrong had already happened.
"What do you mean, don't go back?" she whispered, not to the voice, but to herself. "What happened?"
Her hand found the grenade at her hip, not out of rage, but because she needed something real in her grip—something that could still answer if the world around her wouldn't. The smooth, familiar curve of it grounded her more than the voice did.
She didn't pull the pin.
Not yet.
"The base," she said, voice too tight. "What happened to it?"
"Lina," the voice cut through the comm, low and tight, like it didn't want to be heard by anyone else. "You need to listen. Do not go back to the base."
Her pulse jumped. Her mouth opened, but the voice kept going:
"We lost connection with Kai…"
The pause that followed wasn't technical. It was human.
"We lost contact hours ago. I don't know how bad it was. No one does. But if he made it out… he's not answering."
For a second, she couldn't breathe. Her body went still.
"You're not going to find help there," the voice said, quieter now.
She clenched her teeth. "Who the hell are you?"
"Not your enemy," the voice replied, and then—just before the static swallowed it—"but you need to move."
Lina's breath came fast and shallow. Sweat clung to her jawline, streaked through grime and blood. Her braid was half-loose, dark hair matted to her temples. Her jacket—standard rebel shellcoat—was torn along the left arm, where the Seraph's blade had grazed her earlier. Underneath, her skin was marked with bruises and dirt, but her eyes—sharp, alert—searched for something that wasn't there.
"Kai's not answering?" she said hoarsely. "What does that mean? You don't know?"
There was a pause. A flicker of static.
"This isn't the channel for details," the voice said—but it came through clipped, like half the sentence had been chewed off by static.
A low hum rose behind it, thin and artificial—machine chatter bleeding into the signal.
Her breath hitched. Before she could speak again, something shifted in the air—metal on stone, the quiet thrum of hydraulics spooling tension.
One of the Seraphs was moving.
"I'll explain everything later," the voice continued, strained now. "Can't hold the link."
The distortion thickened.
"Just stay alive. Someone will come."
And then the line went dead.
She didn't care about tactical advantage anymore.
She had to move.
Had to reach someone. Anyone.
But her muscles were trembling, her vision smeared. Her fingers, still slick with blood, barely held a grip.
And that voice—
"Don't go back to the base."
"Someone will come."
She didn't trust it. Not fully.
But it was the only thing she had left.
And right now, staying alive had to mean something.
Lina's grip tightened onto the final grenade. She didn't breathe, didn't think—just pulled the pin, shoulder twisting for the throw—
The shot cracked across the square.
Her hand exploded with pain.
The grenade slipped from her fingers, pin half-out, skittering uselessly across the concrete.
She cried out and dropped to one knee, blood blooming fast over the shredded edge of her glove. Her right hand hung useless at her side—nerves burning, bone likely splintered.
It took her a second to register where the shot had come from.
Not the Seraph that had been advancing with a blade.
Another one—stationed far off to her left, half-shadowed beneath the broken awning of a collapsed storefront.
The Seraph with the blade stepped into view, its weapon still raised—gold and humming.
The other two didn't move. They just stood there, watching her bleed. They weren't in a rush like they'd already calculated she wasn't worth the effort anymore.
She slumped hard against the wall, left hand clamping around her ruined right, trying to stop the tremor. Dust stuck to her lips. Her vision swam. She blinked hard.
Kai would've called this the end of the line.
But Lina wasn't ready to die lying down.
She let her head droop. Let her chest hitch like she was slipping under.
Let them think the fight was already gone from her.
And then, with a snap of motion, she yanked the last grenade from her belt with her left hand and threw it—wide, fast, reckless.
The grenade bounced between the legs of the one moving in to finish her.
A roar of fire and smoke erupted through the ruins. The Seraph staggered back. Its blade flew from its grip, skidding across the broken street—until it stopped at her feet.
The others didn't move. They were watching.
Daring her.
She stared at the sword, lying just out of reach—heavy, inert, and clearly not meant for anyone like her.
Everyone knew weapons like that were built for augmented bodies—rigged with bio-circuits, pressure syncs, and strength no unmodified human could match.
Even on her best day, with both hands intact, she wouldn't have been able to lift it.
And now—bleeding, half-conscious, her dominant arm broken—it should've been impossible.
She reached out anyway. That was her last hope—and in that moment, it felt like the blade was calling to her. Her fingers—trembling, bloodied, bruised—closed around the hilt.
The metal didn't reject her. And the current didn't just surge through her hand—it spread, fast, sharp, folding into her spine, threading outward like light in broken glass.
And just as her fingers touched the hilt, something in the weapon reacted—like it had been waiting for her touch.
A hidden protocol. Buried deep. Now triggered.
It pulsed.
A current surged up her arm, sharp and electric, and for a breath she only stared—stunned that it hadn't burned her, more stunned that it had answered her at all—until the pain hit like a second pulse, not the heat of healing but something far worse: a searing fusion of fire and wire, of nerves being rewritten, bones snapping and reknitting under pressure, flesh unraveling and reforming into something that pulsed with light instead of blood.
She screamed—once, hoarse and animal—then choked it back with a raw bite to her lip, copper flooding her mouth as silver began threading through her joints and pale circuitry bloomed beneath the skin like veins being overwritten; her fingers twisted, cracked, and shifted—not soft anymore, not human anymore—but shaped into something colder, cleaner, harder.
And the sword in her hand?
It lit up like it remembered her.
A wave of light pulsed outward, harsh and white-hot, momentarily flooding the ruined street.
Across the square, the Seraphs flinched.
[ SYSTEM SCAN: FEED INCOMPLETE ]
ENTITY: UNREGISTERED / ORGANIC
BIOMETRIC LINK CONFIRMED
INTERNAL OVERRIDE TRIGGERED
AUTHORIZATION: UNKNOWN
ACTION: SUSPEND TERMINATION / OBSERVE
One of them took a half-step back. The other tilted its head, almost like it was trying to make sense of the anomaly in front of it.
"That weapon is not assigned to organic units," one said, its voice flat but not quite confident.
"Correction," the second replied, more slowly this time. "That weapon is responding to her."
"Impossible. Her bio-tag is unregistered. She has no grafts. No link keys. No override class."
A pause.
"And yet her limb is regenerating."
They didn't understand it. They didn't know what she was anymore.
[ OBSERVATION PROTOCOL: ACTIVE ]
[ ASSIGNMENT: LIMITED SURVEILLANCE — ORGANIC ANOMALY CLASS-S ]
[ DEVIATION DETECTED: PARAMETERS EXCEEDED ]
[ SYSTEM FLAG UPDATED — ESCALATION RECOMMENDED ]
They didn't understand it.
But they were already reporting it.
She wasn't in any known category.
She was something new.
And the system never ignored anomalies like that.
The sword burned in her palm, its glow now far too bright, too alive—and somewhere between one ragged breath and the next, her body gave in all at once, not to fear or pain, but to the black static rushing up from within, swallowing thought, breath, control.
She collapsed forward, not gently but hard and final, her grip on the blade held tight by instinct or inertia, though her mind had already gone dark.
And still—she moved.
Her body moved, but her will did not.
The sword had taken something. Was driving something.
She wasn't moving forward—she was being carried.
The locket slipped from her neck and fell into the dust.
[ OBSERVATION UPDATE: VITAL STASIS DETECTED ]
[ MOTOR FUNCTION ACTIVE — COGNITIVE NULL ]
[ DEVIATION SEVERITY: ESCALATING ]
No vital shift. No cognitive response. But still she moved.
The anomaly had evolved.
Something within the sword—or within whatever part of her had ceased to be entirely human—seized hold of her weightless frame and carried it forward, dragging her limp body across the fractured square—slow, staggering, not out of will, but out of something older, colder, inevitable.
The Seraph with the missing blade didn't react at first. It reached for its side, retrieving a black-edged combat knife from its hip in a motion that was smooth but not immediate, It wasn't prepared for this—a bleeding human girl, unconscious, shattered hand dragging behind her, and still advancing.
And just before the Seraph could raise its knife—the blade in Lina's hand fell, sudden and sharp.
Her shoulder twisted. Her spine arched.