"Kill?" she echoed, stopping mid-stride.
"That's the plan," Kali said without turning, his pace unbroken.
But her hand shot out, catching his wrist. Her grip was firm, familiar, not aggressive, but not gentle either. "I'm all for killing that scumbag," she said, eyes searching his. "But I'm worried about you, Kali. You're different."
He didn't meet her gaze. "People change."
She frowned, her voice lowering. "Especially after an awakening."
At that, his eyes flicked to hers, and darkened. Something in his jaw tightened.
"Your syllable is Grief," she continued carefully. "The emotional encoding of entropy doesn't just sit in the mind, Kali, it lives in the bones. It's not like the others. It's heavy. It lingers. It hurts." Her fingers relaxed slightly, as if offering him a way out. "Just… promise me you're still watching out for yourself. That the Thought hasn't buried who you were beneath all that pain."
"I'll be fine," he said flatly, trying to move past her.
She stepped in front of him, hand still on his wrist. "Promise me."
Kali stood still, breathing in the stale electric air between them. For a moment, he looked like he might argue, or lie. But then he closed his eyes and nodded once.
"I promise," he said softly, and this time, it wasn't evasive.
She let him go. "Good enough."
The moment passed like a shutter falling shut. She adjusted her coat and walked with him again, the silence between them now holding something deeper than tension, something like trust strained by history. "Now," she said briskly, "what do we know about this Reaper?"
"He's Friction-awakened," Kali said as they turned down a narrower alley lit only by flickering signage.
"I know that," Priene scoffed, rolling her eyes.
"Let me finish," he replied, voice edged with fatigue. "Look, there aren't many Awakened on Theraxis, maybe eleven at most. And each one has to leave a trace. After some digging, I found something… off the record. A few years back, a member of the Mugen clan was charged with murder. Off-world jurisdiction, pretty hush-hush. The family swept it under the rug and smuggled him into one of the fringe worlds."
He paused as they passed under a glowing archway, the sound of a distant rail tram buzzing through the air like an insect.
Priene slowed, her brow furrowed. "The Mugen? I don't know much about off-world institutions, but aren't they the ones with a reputation for extreme sword mastery? Duelists, bloodline fighters?"
"Yeah," Kali nodded. "Some of the finest blade traditions in the sector. And several documented awakenings, Friction, almost exclusively."
She frowned. "So you think Reaper is this scion? The exile?"
"Has to be," he said. "Awakened don't grow on trees, and the way he moved… that swordplay wasn't improvised. He didn't just learn it, he inherited it."
Priene walked in silence for a moment, her boots echoing against the synth-stone beneath their feet. "What I don't get is… what's a noble clan scion doing tied up with a terrorist outfit? What would someone like him want with relics or destruction?"
Kali gave a half-shrug as they approached a shadowed junction where the core lights faded into the ambient gloom of the outer sectors. "Beats me."
"Did becoming a CIB investigator make you smarter or something?" Priene teased, her voice laced with dry amusement as she nudged him with her elbow.
He offered a faint smile, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth. "Maybe."
She tilted her head, reading the name she had seen on his badge. "Senior Inspector Kali Loveau," she announced with theatrical flair. "That last name sounds fake as fuck."
He didn't deny it. Because it was. "Made it up on the fly when I joined," he said flatly. "It works."
"It's got a certain trashy mystique," she admitted, grinning. "Like a noir detective who drinks coffee from ashtrays and keeps his heart in a jar."
He smirked, barely, but kept walking.
The neon veins of Medri thinned as they crossed the last transit sector. Soon, the glow of the city gave way to industrial gloom, and in the distance, lit by harsh security floods and patrolling drones, rose a sprawling freight depot at the very edge of the outer rim.
The place was alive with movement, Syndicate agents everywhere. Few but armed, armored, and organized. Some stood watch on rooftops, others moved cargo or barked orders into comms.
Kali stopped at the edge of a half-collapsed service bridge, surveying the depot through a pair of lowlight optics. "Intel says Reaper's showing up tonight. Probably to collect whatever didn't get seized in the last raid. He doesn't like leaving messes."
Priene's hand drifted toward the machete strapped to her back, fingers resting on the worn grip. "So what's the plan?"
"We wait," Kali said, scanning for movement. Then he pointed to a rusted gantry high above the main platform, half-shielded by a broken billboard, yet with a clean line of sight across the depot. "There. Best vantage we'll get without triggering alarms."
She squinted at the perch and nodded. "You always did like high ground."
"Makes for better sniping," he replied simply.
The waiting stretched long and tense, the kind of silence that felt like it was holding its breath. During that time, Kali meticulously set up Colt's sniper rifle, its matte-black frame cold and familiar in his hands. Every click of a scope adjustment, every slot of a mag, was ritual precision drilled into him over the last few days.
Finally, a convoy of sleek, armored vehicles rolled into the depot under the cover of low noise dampeners. A pair of black grav-cars came first, followed by a larger carrier. Syndicate guards spilled out, fanning across the perimeter with disciplined efficiency.
Then he emerged. A katana rested at his hip, the scabbard bound worn.
"He's here," Kali murmured into the comm bead.
Priene was already in motion. She didn't wait for his signal. She just nodded once, sharp and eager, and leapt from cover like a spark off flint. There was a fervor in her movement that almost startled him, a raw hunger for confrontation. But he wasn't worried. Not about her. The Syndicate grunts were trained, sure, but none of them were awakened.
Only after he Awakened did Kali truly understand what it meant to face one. Delta-class mutants and first order awakened, they looked monstrous on paper, but awakened were different. Subtle. Variable. They didn't follow rules. And the higher their rank, the stranger and more dangerous they became.
He exhaled slowly and found the Reaper in his scope.
Center mass. Adjust. Headshot.
He steadied his breathing, felt his heartbeat sync with the rifle's pulse. Kali had an effective range of 1500 meters, less than what Colt himself had managed while he lived, none of that mattered when he was this close.
Kali squeezed the trigger.
The shot cracked the air like divine judgment. A round forged to punch through plate armor and drop war beasts mid-charge cut through the night, aimed clean at the Reaper's skull.
And then. Clang.
The sound came a fraction before the visual. The bullet fell, severed cleanly in two, each half tumbling to the ground like discarded shells.
The Reaper stood exactly where he had, hand still at his side, blade now unsheathed but barely visible, as if it had moved on instinct faster than the eye.
Kali didn't curse. He just exhaled again.
"Contact confirmed," he whispered. "We're in it now."
Priene dropped into the depot like a falling star, blades drawn, fury ignited. The first guard barely had time to raise his weapon before she carved through him, her machete slicing diagonally in a flash of steel and arterial spray. The second went down with a broken spine, hurled into a shipping crate with such force the metal buckled inward.
She moved like an angry hurricane, swift, precise, and devastating. Kali kept his scope locked, shifting focus from the Reaper to the perimeter squads as the chaos erupted. His fingers worked the rifle's bolt-action rhythmically, and each pull of the trigger felt like punctuation in a brutal sentence. Round after round, guards dropped, slumped over crates, staggered backward into shadows, or flung to the ground mid-sprint. He aimed for center mass and let the recoil carry the rest.
Below, the Reaper moved. Not to flee. To confront.
Kali watched as the dark figure turned toward Priene. There was no hesitation, no grand declaration, just motion. The katana glinted, and then it was a blur.
Priene didn't flinch. Through the commlink, he heard her whisper something, soft, resonant, like a prayer spoken through gritted teeth.
A Vow.
Her aura flared in response, a ripple of shimmering force distorting the air around her. It was her syllable made manifest: Vow, the syllable of structure and will. Where others broke, she became iron.
Their clash began instantly, blades meeting with thunderous force. Sparks bloomed like miniature suns with every strike. They moved through the depot in a violent ballet, destroying crates, shattering scaffolding, sending armed men scattering like dry leaves in a cyclone. Every time their weapons connected, it was like tectonic plates grinding together, each trying to undo the other's existence.
Kali's focus remained steel-bound. He picked off guards that tried to flank Priene, suppressing movements with ruthless efficiency. One tried to raise a plasma caster, Kali's shot found the man's eye before the trigger could be pulled. Another ducked behind cover, only to be dropped by a round that tore through the crate like paper.
And then the grunts were gone.
All that remained now were three figures.
Awakened.
He pulled back from the scope. The rifle was nearly empty anyway. Then stood, slid the weapon onto his back, and drew an automatic from the holster clipped to his side. As he descended the rusted stairwell and dropped into the depot proper, his mind shifted from long-range precision to close-quarters survival.
He racked the rifle, checked the mag, and murmured under his breath. "Let's finish this."