Lina ran.
Not because she thought she could escape—she knew better.
But because the silence behind her was worse than footsteps.
Three Seraphs descended without warning. No words. No mercy. Just that clean, awful hum of power charging.
The shockblade missed her by inches.
She dove, hit concrete, lungs burning.
And then—
[ SYSTEM SCAN: LIVE FEED / SECTOR NINE ]
Entity detected: Organic.
Classification: HUMAN
Threat level: negligible.
Exception: Vital pattern instability.
Code anomaly: ∆–LINA–092.
Override required.
They called it a routine purge.
Three Seraphs dropped from the sky in perfect formation, their white plating catching the stutter‑light of broken billboard screens overhead. Their steps made no sound—only the hiss of hydraulic intent and the low whir of scanning optics.
The plaza had no name now. Just broken signage, dust-choked walkways, and power lines long gone silent. Once, maybe, it was a public market. Now, just another dead zone the system sent ghosts to clean ghosts.
They had traced her here—through heat blooms, sound fractures, and a bio-signature they couldn't categorize. That was enough.
Sector Nine didn't scream anymore. It had learned that screaming got you remembered.
Lina ran anyway.
She wasn't fast enough.
The first Seraph's shockblade slammed into concrete inches from her head, carving a deep groove that smoked on impact. She dove behind a rusted coolant barrel, shoulder slamming hard. Sparks lit the air.
She was breathing too hard, too loud.
Too alive.
[ WARNING: BIO-CORE FAILURE ]
[ ACCESS LOCKED. ]
[ UNAUTHORIZED USER. ]
Lina clenched her jaw and slid lower behind the barrel, the taste of rust and blood sharp on her tongue. The three Seraphs stayed wordless— they always did; hardware that precise had no use for conversation. Silent, exact, and coded to judge, they advanced as if executing a flawless script, while she registered as a glitch: unlicensed, human, the kind of slow error the system erased without hesitation.
Even so, purges followed rules, and tonight the rules felt wrong. Three high‑grade units, no public alert, no scanner sweep—everything was happening too fast, too tidy. The realization locked her muscles mid‑crawl: the machines hadn't stumbled onto her; someone had handed them her location.
The thought settled like poison, cold and immediate. She wasn't merely cornered; she'd been scheduled.
When the nearest Seraph raised its shock‑blade, humming gold, Lina didn't pray—no one had ever been listening. She simply understood that tonight the world had marked her line for deletion.
The Seraph's blade cut the air—then every sensor in the plaza spiked.
[ ALERT // CLASSIFICATION FAILURE ]
[ ENTITY ∆–LINA–092 : SIGNATURE UNDEFINED ]
[ THREAT MODEL: REBUILDING … ]
Something flared, not in the open space but beneath Lina's collarbone. The old chain at her throat—Kai's chain, a keepsake from the man who'd raised her—went white‑hot, strobing like a heart that had finally found its rhythm. The light didn't rise off her skin; it punched outward from the metal in sharp, deliberate pulses, as if the necklace itself were breathing.
She tried to scream, but the sound locked in her throat. The brilliance wasn't heat; it carried a rhythm she knew—the crush of familiar arms, Kai's voice threading through the back of her mind, that single, forged command: You don't have to save the world. Just make them regret hurting it.
The words echoed—and something else took over. Her vision tunneled; colors washed pale at the edges. It felt like watching through smoked glass while a different pilot slid into the cockpit.
Power detonated up her spine. Before the thought finished forming, her body moved on borrowed instinct. The nearest Seraph lunged; she stepped inside the arc, left hand bleeding yet unnervingly steady, and caught the shock‑blade mid‑swing. Steel designed to cleave bone split like ceramic.
Her right arm ignited—raw kinetic light traced with sigils she'd never studied but somehow owned. Eyes unfocused yet blazing, she flowed through the Seraph in a single, perfect vector. Its torso discovered it was severed four seconds after gravity did the math.
"One… two… three… four," she heard herself murmur—voice detached, almost curious—as the pieces dropped.
The second unit recalibrated. "Threat recalibrated," it intoned. "Combat class: Mageblade."
"That classification is invalid," the third replied. "Target is human."
Chain still burning against her throat, eyes bright and hollow like a war mask, Lina took another step—a move the system could not predict.
The second unit adjusted its aim. "Threat recalibrated," it announced. "Combat class: Mageblade."
"That classification is invalid," the third replied. "Target is human."
Lina straightened, chain still burning at her throat, and gave them the only answer the system would understand—another step forward.
Lina stood.
Blood dripped from her chin, smoke curling off her right hand where the blade had formed and vanished.
She looked up at them—three now, two intact, one in pieces.
Her eyes didn't glow. Her face didn't change.
But the system paused, and they remain still for more than a second.
She stepped forward.
The second Seraph shifted its stance—not retreating, not attacking.
It was assessing, adapting to its enemy.
From its back, something hissed free.
A long black spear slid from its spine, whirring with folded segments of kinetic steel and violet-lit edge nodes.
Lina didn't pause.
The spear struck first—fast and clean, aimed low. She twisted, blade sparking against it. Metal screamed.
Then the Seraph stepped forward, and she realized:
It wasn't fighting like a machine.
It was fighting like someone who'd learned.
She ducked under the second swing, rolled left—only for the spear to extend mid-slice, catching her jacket and tearing it wide.
Another jab—deceptive, lancing from behind its back like a tail.
Lina gritted her teeth, pivoted inside the arc, and brought her glowing blade up—
Clang.
Shock. Sparks. The impact numbed her elbow.
The Seraph's combat log flashed an engagement efficiency of eighty‑one percent—good enough to press the kill‑routine—and its spear blurred through a practiced sequence: feint, thrust, vault‑strike, all timed to shatter her rhythm. Lina let the opening play out; halfway through her own swing she dismissed the light‑blade, stepped inside the arc, and clamped both hands around the shaft while it was still a silver smear in the air. She pivoted low, ripping the weapon offline, and hammered a fist wreathed in raw kinetic light into the machine's chest plate. Alloy dented with a sharp, metallic cough, exposing the orange glow of its drive core.
The Seraph staggered. Lina called the blade back—short now, a needle meant for piercing—and slipped it into the maintenance port beneath the jaw hinge. A silent flash answered her strike; the core field imploded, lights dying mid‑diagnostic. The unit crumpled in on itself, limbs twitching as though still hunting for a solution it no longer had the power to compute.
The last Seraph didn't move.
It recalibrated.
[ INITIATE: ARC PROTOCOL // DESIGNATION: MAGE-SUPPRESSION ]
[ Status: UNAUTHORIZED ABILITY IN USE ]
[ CHARGING: SIGIL SHIELD ARRAY—70% ]
Blue fire crackled over the Seraph's palm, weaving itself into a glyph—a lattice of algorithmic flame engineered to choke out magical anomalies before they could stabilize. Its other hand unfurled at the same time, layering concentric rings of light into a kinetic shield that was still compiling when the machine spoke in its flat register: "Cease. You do not have permission to exist."
Lina simply tilted her head. The attack glyph locked with a sharp snap, but the shield sat at ninety‑four percent when she stepped forward, lifted a bare hand, and cut—no chant, no flare, just an edge that wasn't there a heartbeat earlier. The glyph splintered like glass, the half‑formed shield unraveled, and the Seraph staggered once before its head slipped off the neck mount, clanged against the floor, and rolled away. The body folded after it, light bleeding out while a drift of ash floated through the space between them.
Lina turned away—not running but striding straight into the first gap in the city's sensor mesh. The star‑shaped pendant at her throat flickered; she brushed it with two fingers. Behind her, the air where the Seraphs had fallen throbbed with residual light, shivered once, and went dark.
She managed maybe ten steps before her knees locked. Dropping to one knee, she let herself sink against a shattered planter tangled in dead vines. The pocket of concrete had once been a courtyard—dust‑coated benches, a lightning‑split tree arching like a broken rib—now only another quiet scar on Sector Nine's face.
Her breaths came quickly and shallow. The blade and the white fire were gone, leaving a faint electrical buzz under her skin and a dull ache behind her eyes, blinking like a low‑battery warning. The haze in her head thinned by degrees, thought‑threads knitting themselves back together. Muscles twitched—not pain so much as latency, as though her body still needed to download what had just happened.
She kept telling herself the flare hadn't really come from her. No training, no command word—only fear, and something else that answered. Fingers found the pendant again, its edges worn smooth by years of habit; the metal was still warm, stubbornly alive.
"What the hell was that?" she whispered.
The wind stirred a patch of dust and dead leaves. No answer—just silence settling over the broken garden like a sheet.
Her fingers slipped from the planter's edge, and suddenly everything—concrete, sky, metal—blurred together in a rush of gray.
She blinked, just once, and for that instant, she caught sight of him.
Above her, standing quietly on a broken scaffold, was a man with a blade strapped to his back.
A vivid blue butterfly hovered around his shoulder, oddly vibrant, completely out of place in the gritty surroundings.
It floated downward lazily, and she tried to keep her eyes on it.
But then her vision spun, and the butterfly vanished into the haze.
A warmth pulsed faintly beneath her fingers at her throat, and then—nothing.