The lattice didn't seal.
Mid-whip, the gold geometry folded on itself, panels of light knitting into a half-cage that swept for her ankles like a closing jaw.
Lina dove sideways, boots skidding on dust-slick pavement. The cage snapped shut on empty air, its facets sparking, a frustrated hiss rolling across the street.
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. Her vision smeared at the edges, like her body was lagging behind her will.
But what came through the comm next hit harder than the fall. Still sprawled on the ground, her chest tightened.
"What the hell does that mean? 'Don't go back?'" she snapped. "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, "You need to listen. Your base is under attack."
Her pulse jumped. 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."
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 panted. Sweat and blood glued her half-loose braid to bruised skin.
"Kai's not answering?" she asked. "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 numbed fingers barely held a grip.
And that voice: "Don't go back to the base."
"Someone will come."
She didn't trust it. Not fully.
Lina's grip tightened onto the final grenade. She didn't breathe, didn't think. She pulled the pin, shoulder twisting for the throw.
The shot cracked across the square.
A pulse slammed into her wrist, blunt and focused, like a hammer of compressed air. Her fingers spasmed open. The grenade slipped from her grip, pin half-pulled, skittering across the ground.
A warning shot.
She cried out and dropped to one knee, blood blooming fast over the shredded edge of her glove. Her right hand hung limp at her side, nerves burning and bone likely splintered.
It took her a second to register where the shot had come from.
Not the one that had been deploying restraint fields, it hadn't drawn a weapon until now.
Another one—stationed far off to her left, half-shadowed beneath the broken awning of a collapsed storefront.
The Seraph stepped into view, its blade sliding from its chassis with a soft hum, raised in a defensive stance. The other two didn't move. They just stood there, sensors tracking every twitch. 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. Her vision swam.
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.
From its wrist, the Seraph deployed a restraint field. Thin filaments of light forming an arc in the air, scanning for motion, calculating the moment of containment.
No chains. No weight.
Just inevitability, humming with quiet precision.
And then, with a snap of motion, she yanked the last grenade from her belt with her left hand and threw it, fast and 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 let out something that wasn't quite a laugh, more a cracked breath through grit.
"Still here, you shiny bastards. One hand's all I need."
She stared at the sword, lying just out of reach.
Everyone knew weapons like that were built for augmented bodies. The kind of people who'd traded flesh for chrome, bone for alloy. Not for someone like her, all blood and bruises and stubborn human limits.
Even on her best day, with both hands intact, she wouldn't have been able to lift it.
And now, she was bleeding, half-conscious, her dominant arm broken. It should've been impossible.
She reached out anyway. She just wanted to go down swinging.
If this was her last moment, she'd make it count.
Her fingers closed around the hilt.
Metal seized her, not welcomed her; the grip fused to her palm with a snap of white fire. A current speared up her arm, vertebra by vertebra, until it punched the back of her skull. Reflex screamed to drop the blade, her fingers would not unclench.
The world blinked.
For half a heartbeat everything washed to sterile white: the ruins, the smoke, even her own skin‑tone. In that impossible stillness an iris of light unfurled above her, its pupil a lattice of whispering code.
∴ HANDSHAKE? ∴
The glyph seared across the inside of her eyes. Blood hissed from her nose, atomised before it could fall. She never chose yes or no; the sword decided for her.
Pain hit like a second detonation, bones cracking, re‑welding around silver filaments, nerves being threaded with liquid glass. She loosed a feral scream, bit it off, copper flooding her mouth. Pale circuitry spider‑webbed beneath her skin, bright enough to shine through grime.
The sword answered, blazing awake. Somewhere deep in the system, a protocol flared: ∴ UNAUTHORIZED ACTIVATION ∴ A shockwave of white‑gold light rolled over the square.
Gravity disintegrated. Lina found herself hovering in a hushed void, the ruined plaza shrunk to a glowing glyph beneath her feet. Far ahead—so distant the geometry bent—rose an obsidian citadel of circuitry: Aurelion's data‑spire. Around its impossible height coiled thousands of fibre‑optic tendrils, each siphoning torrents of shimmering code toward a single eye set in the sky. The iris dilated, an ocean of tessellated numerals, then swivelled, locking directly onto her. Its focus felt physical, a lance of arctic dread that knifed down her spine and froze the breath in her lungs.
Voices bled from the data streams. Images flickered behind her eyes, memories ripped loose and reordered. The base. Kai's face. Coordinates she'd never spoken aloud. Laughter, weeping, hymn‑chant, death‑rattle. Too many to belong to any one city. The sound stacked until it became a pressure wave that threatened to split her skull.
She spun, yet had no body to spin with. Only a spectral after‑image of nerves and silver filaments connected her to the sword gripped in phantom fingers.
The eye flickered. Vision fractured into panes of live footage: the resistance base under siege. She saw the hangar door blown inward, Kai hauling a wounded scout across pooling blood; saw Tess braced behind an overturned Mule‑drone, one arm hanging useless. Every muzzle‑flash strobed red across their faces. Walls ruptured. Someone screamed her name before white noise swallowed the feed.
Terror surged, raw and instinctive. She reached out, but the panes collapsed, reversed into a single brilliant point that detonated behind her eyes.
Across the rubble the three Seraphs recoiled, visor apertures dilating.
A dull itch knitted along the broken ulna, and bone fusing faster than pulse.
Somewhere behind her eyes a clock skipped, seven seconds vanished. She found herself upright, lungs sawing, blade raised. She could not remember standing.
"Organic anomaly… unscheduled link," one Seraph murmured, modulation glitching. "Observing."
Somewhere beneath the circuitry a dull itch crawled through her broken arm—the kind of itch that meant bone was knitting, wrong and fast.
Its partner tilted its head, sensors twitching. "Impossible," it whispered. "Direct neural interface… without grafts." A stutter of static, then—"Her limb is… restoring." Doubt, in a machine's monotone.
They did not understand her. Neither did she.
Heat branded the hilt against her palm, each pulse mirrored in her carotid. She tried to release—the sword refused.
Black static flooded the edges of sight. Her knees collapsed; she pitched forward, still shackled to the weapon, leaving only the blade's cold insistence.
She fell. Yet her body kept moving.
Dragged rather than walking, she staggered a step, then another, as though reeled along an unseen track. Dust skimmed her boots; the paving stones on the square were tilting like loose tiles.
The Seraph missing its sword hesitated, drawing a dark combat knife in confused precision. A bleeding human, half‑dead—and still advancing.
Before it could strike, her captive arm jerked on its own. The blade carved downward, brilliant and absolute.