The run back to the industrial sector was a blur of grey mud and white noise. The rain hammered, a relentless vertical ocean that tried to drive them into the earth.

  But the pressure pressing against Minka’s skull wasn't psychic anymore. It was tactical. It was the cold, hard reality of a kill-box closing in.

  "Move!" Viola shouted, her voice stripped of all humor. She herded them through the mud, checking angles, checking rooftops, her eyes darting with a paranoia Minka had never seen before.

  They skidded to the blast door of Gunther’s workshop. Viola punched the code, shoved Leanna and Minka inside, and slammed the control panel.

  "Lock the seals," she ordered, her back to them. "Don't open it."

  "Viola!" Minka screamed as the heavy door slammed shut, sealing them inside.

  Inside the workshop, Gunther turned on the screen. He looked terrified. He lit a new cigarette, his hand shaking violently.

  "She doesn't have her gear," Leanna said, panic rising. "She's out there with a pistol and a jacket!"

  "No," Gunther whispered, watching the screen. "She is never without gear. She just hates using it."

  On the screen, in the pouring rain, Viola walked to the scrap pile. She opened the false panel. She stared at the black coat and the mask hanging there. She didn't reach for them eagerly; she stood there for a second, her shoulders slumped, looking like she was about to be sick.

  But then she looked at the blast door.

  She grabbed the coat. She didn't put it on with a flourish; she shoved her arms into it like it was a straitjacket. She strapped the pistols—Sorrow and Silence—to her waist. She picked up a jagged combat knife from the rack, a heavy, rusted chain, and a pouch of flash-bangs.

  She picked up the porcelain mask. She didn't put it on immediately. She held it, her knuckles white, breathing hard.

  Then, the feed glitched.

  It didn't go black. It distorted. Lines of digital static tore through the image as high-grade military jammers flooded the spectrum.

  "Electronic Countermeasures," Gunther hissed, typing furiously to stabilize the signal. "They are jamming the frequency. They are scrubbing the kill zone."

  On the screen, the audio is cut out. The roar of the rain vanished, replaced by an unnatural, artificial silence. The enemy had deployed localized sonic dampeners.

  Then, five distinct red laser beams sliced through the rain.

  They didn't come from the alley entrance. They came from everywhere. Two from the rooftops, three from the shadows of the debris.

  The Black Division arrived.

  They didn't walk; they flowed. They wore advanced, multi-spectral stealth suits that shimmered like oil, blending perfectly with the wet concrete. They moved in perfect, silent synchronization—checking corners, clearing sectors, overlapping their fields of fire.

  No shouting. No posturing. Just a series of quick, sharp hand signals. Breach. Flush. Erase.

  Viola dropped. She didn't scramble; she collapsed into the mud behind a pile of girders just as the air above her head disintegrated.

  Thwip-thwip-thwip.

  Suppressed rounds tore into the metal, chewing through the rust with terrifying precision. They weren't missing; they were suppressing her, pinning her down so the flankers could move in.

  Viola jammed the mask onto her face.

  She popped up, not to shoot, but to throw a flash-bang.

  Whiteout.

  The camera flared. When the image returned, Viola was sprinting.

  She drew Sorrow. The first operator, momentarily blinded, fired a burst that tracked her movement perfectly—his helmet's thermal sensors locking onto her heat signature. Viola slid under the fire, putting two rounds into his chest plate to stagger him, then one through the throat seal.

  He dropped.

  She didn't stop. She holstered the pistol and snatched the falling operator’s custom carbine from the air.

  She rolled over his corpse, coming up on one knee. She didn't check the mag. She didn't check the safety. She knew the platform.

  Thud-thud-thud.

  She fired a controlled hammer-pair at the second operator on the roof. The rounds punched through his cover, pinning him down.

  "She adjusted to the recoil instantly," Leanna whispered, horrified.

  "To her, every gun is her gun," Gunther murmured.

  The Black Division adjusted. They didn't panic over their fallen man. They simply shifted tactics. Target is hostile. Engage Level 4 Aggression.

  A suppression shield deployed from the third operator’s arm—a wall of translucent energy. He advanced, flanked by the fourth man. A moving fortress.

  Viola ran dry. The carbine clicked empty.

  She didn't try to reload. She waited. She let them get close.

  When they were ten meters away, she threw the rifle. Not at them—but at a hanging bundle of rebar above their heads. The rifle hit the release clamp.

  The rebar crashed down. The shield operator braced, deflecting the debris, but the impact broke his formation.

  Viola was already moving.

  She drew the combat knife. she tackled the exposed flanker, driving him into the mud. It was ugly. It was brutal. He tried to bring his sidearm to bear, but she slammed his wrist into the concrete, shattered it, and drove the knife into the soft seal of his neck armor.

  Three down. Two left.

  But the cost was mounting. A round caught her in the thigh. Another grazed her ribs, shredding the coat. She stumbled, falling back against the blast door.

  The Shield Operator dropped his energy wall and rushed her with a tactical tomahawk. He was massive, a juggernaut in black armor.

  Viola couldn't stand. She grabbed the rusted chain she had taken earlier. As he swung the axe, she caught the handle with the chain, twisting it, using his own momentum to pull him off balance.

  He crashed down beside her.

  She didn't use a gun. She didn't use a knife. She grabbed his own tomahawk from the mud and buried it in his helmet.

  He stopped moving.

  Viola tried to stand, but her leg gave out. She fell back against the blast door, gasping, blood leaking from her nose inside the mask.

  The last operator—the Leader—stepped out from the shadows. He hadn't fired a single shot yet. He was watching. Analyzing.

  He held a high-caliber Designated Marksman Rifle. He stood twenty meters away. Outside her effective range for a pistol. Too far to rush.

  He leveled the rifle at her head. A single green laser dot painted the center of her porcelain mask.

  Viola looked at the camera lens above her. She checked Silence. One round left. Sorrow was empty.

  She couldn't shoot him. He would put a bullet in her brain before she could lift her arm.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  She looked at the ground. A discarded pistol from the first dead operator lay in the mud, three meters away.

  She looked at the Leader. He didn't hesitate. He squeezed the trigger.

  Viola threw herself to the side.

  The bullet didn't spark; it punched a hole through the blast door, right where her heart had been.

  She rolled, grabbing the dead man's pistol in her left hand and drawing Silence in her right.

  She lay on her back in the mud, crying out in pain, and fired both guns simultaneously.

  Bang. Bang.

  One shot went wide, kicking up mud.

  The other—from the stolen gun—hit the Leader in the throat.

  He dropped the rifle. He clutched his neck, sinking to his knees. He didn't scream. He just fell face-forward into the sludge, silent to the end.

  The jammers died. The sonic dampeners failed. The sound of the rain crashed back into the alleyway, deafening and real.

  Viola didn't stand up. She couldn't. She sat in the mud, surrounded by five dead men, holding two empty guns that didn't belong to her. She was breathing in ragged, wet gasps.

  She reached up with a trembling hand and ripped the cracked mask off.

  Her face was a mess. Her lip was split. Her left eye was swollen shut. She looked exhausted, battered, and utterly human.

  She looked up at the camera. She tried to smile, but she winced instead. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.

  She didn't wink. She didn't have the energy.

  She just rested her head against the cold metal of the door and gave a small, tired thumbs-up.

  Gunther exhaled, the smoke shuddering out of his lungs. He hit the door release.

  "Get the med-kit," he said hoarsely. "Now."

  Sparks showered from the overhead mechanism as the blast door ground open, fighting the warped metal frame every inch of the way.

  The seal broke with a hiss, allowing the heavy stench of ozone, cordite, and wet earth to invade the sterile air of the workshop.

  Viola collapsed across the threshold. Her legs, having carried her through hell, finally gave out, sending her pitching forward into the room.

  Gunther caught her before she hit the concrete.

  He moved with a desperate speed that ignored his limp, scooping her up into his arms. The black coat was heavy with mud and blood, slick against his hands. Her head lolled against his chest, her breath rattling in her throat—shallow, wet hitches that sounded far too fragile for the violence she had just unleashed.

  "I got you," Gunther whispered, his voice rough with fear. "I got you, V."

  Ignoring the medical cot in the corner, he sank to the floor right where they were, cradling her against his chest. He didn't care about the mud ruining his apron. He pressed two fingers to her neck, his eyes scanning her injuries with terrifying intensity.

  "Leanna," he barked, not looking up. "Trauma pack. Top shelf. Now."

  Leanna snapped out of her shock, grabbed the heavy red case, and slid it across the floor to him.

  Minka stood frozen by the door, clutching her Bolter. She couldn't take her eyes off Viola’s face. The split lip, the swelling eye, the absolute exhaustion etched into her features—it was wrong. The invincible jester was gone, replaced by a broken woman who had fed herself into a meat grinder to keep them safe.

  "Is she..." Minka’s voice failed her.

  "Alive," Gunther answered, ripping open a packet of clotting gauze. He pressed it hard against the graze on her ribs. Viola hissed through her teeth, her hand blindly gripping his forearm tight enough to turn her knuckles white.

  "Sorry," Gunther murmured, brushing a wet strand of hair from her forehead. "I know. Breathe through it."

  Viola cracked her good eye open. She struggled to focus on him, her pupils blown wide. "Did I... get them all?"

  "Yes," Gunther said softly. "You cleared the board."

  "Good," she wheezed, a bloody bubble forming at the corner of her mouth. "Because I am... officially... retiring. Again."

  "Save your breath," Gunther ordered gently. He looked over at Sannet, who was watching from her chair with a dark, knowing expression. "You have field medical training?"

  "I do," Sannet replied.

  "My hands are full holding this pressure," Gunther said, nodding to the bullet wound in Viola’s thigh. "Prep a morphia drip. 15 milligrams. Can you manage it one-handed?"

  Sannet stood up, ignoring the throb of her own shattered arm. "Consider it done."

  For the next ten minutes, the workshop was a blur of quiet, desperate activity. Leanna held the flashlight steady while Gunther worked on the wounds. Sannet moved with grim efficiency, prepping the IV line despite her injury. Minka stood guard at the open door, staring out into the rain-soaked alley where five bodies lay cooling in the mud.

  Finally, Gunther sat back, wiping his bloody hands on a rag.

  Viola was stable. The bleeding had slowed, and the morphia had pulled her under, smoothing the lines of pain from her face. She lay on a pile of blankets Gunther had pulled from a crate, her head resting on his thigh.

  She looked small. That was what terrified Minka the most. Without the jokes, without the movement, Viola looked terrifyingly small.

  "She will sleep now," Gunther said quietly, his hand resting protectively over her heart.

  Minka walked over slowly, placing her Bolter on a workbench. "I didn't know," she whispered. "She never told us."

  "Told you what?" Gunther asked, looking up. His eyes were heavy with fatigue. "That she was a killer? You knew that."

  "Not like that," Minka said. "That wasn't... that wasn't fighting. That was erasure. Who is she, Gunther?"

  Gunther lit a cigarette with one hand, blowing the smoke away from Viola’s face.

  "You know the legends of The Mirage," Gunther said, his voice low. "The assassin guild that doesn't exist. The shadows that walk."

  Minka nodded. "Everyone knows the stories. They’re ghosts."

  "Viola wasn't just a ghost," Gunther corrected. "She was an Adjudicator for The Sovereign Court."

  The name landed in the room like a lead weight. Leanna actually took a step back.

  "The Court?" Leanna whispered. "I thought that was a myth. The people who police the assassins?"

  "It is real," Gunther said grimly. "The Mirage is the guild, but The Sovereign Court is the law that binds them. They don't take contracts; they issue verdicts. If an assassin breaks the rules, if a Governor refuses to pay, if a system needs to be silenced... The Court sends an Adjudicator."

  He looked down at Viola’s sleeping face, brushing a bruise on her cheek with his thumb.

  "Viola was their finest executioner. She was the one they sent to kill the killers."

  He looked at Minka, his gaze sharp. "She left because she got tired of being a weapon for a Court that had no mercy. She wanted to be a person. She found me. She found you. She built that loud, annoying, colorful persona brick by brick just to bury the Adjudicator she was wearing out there in the rain."

  He met Minka’s gaze, his expression stern. "Do not judge her for the mask she had to put back on. She hates it. She only wore it because she loves you."

  Minka felt a hard lump form in her throat. "I don't judge her. I just... I feel like I should have helped."

  "You couldn't," Sannet spoke up from the medical station, clutching her arm. "That was not a soldier's fight, Minka. If you had stepped out there, you would be dead."

  Sannet turned to Gunther. "The Black Division. They are corporate Tier-One. Why were they here?"

  Gunther sighed, reaching into the pocket of Viola’s ruined coat to retrieve a small, encrypted data-drive she had snatched from the Leader's body.

  "Because of this." He slotted it into his portable cogitator.

  The screen flared to life. Code cascaded down the monitor—complex, alien, and glowing with a harsh green light.

  Priority: Recover Gyro-Stabilizer (Serial #X-99). Encryption Key: Dynastic Code // Trazyn-Infinite.

  "My dad sent them?" Minka whispered, a cold pit opening in her stomach. "He sent a hit squad to kill us?"

  Gunther squinted at the screen, typing a few commands to isolate a block of the code. "It looks like him. The syntax is Necron. The authority codes are correct. But..."

  He pointed to a specific line of data that shifted and rippled, eating the code around it.

  "This isn't preservation code," Gunther said, his brow furrowing. "Trazyn collects. He preserves. His code is static, archival. This... this is parasitic. It's rewriting the command structure as it executes."

  Sannet leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. "The Archivist."

  Gunther nodded slowly. "Someone has stolen Trazyn's authority. They are using his resources, his tech, his network... but the goal isn't to collect."

  He brought up a map of the city. Red dots began to appear—hundreds of them.

  "This stabilizer," Gunther said, pointing to the heavy part Leanna had carried in. "It isn't just a flight component. It contains a phase-harmonic core. The Archivist is seeding these cores all over the city, masking them as Trazyn's salvage."

  "To do what?" Leanna asked.

  "To turn the city into a circuit," Gunther replied grimly. "If he connects enough of these nodes, he can override the local reality. He can bypass the physical laws. He isn't just building a network, Minka. He is building a cage."

  Minka stared at the map. "So he's framing my dad? Making us think Trazyn is the villain so we don't look for him?"

  "He isn't just framing him," Sannet said, her voice dripping with cold, hard facts. "Necrons do not have intuition, Minka. They run on logic. The Archivist has duplicated your father’s command signal down to the quantum level. To every machine, drone, and soldier in this city, he is Trazyn the Infinite. And the real Trazyn? To them, he is just an error code waiting to be deleted."

  Gunther looked at the stabilizer, then at Sannet’s arm.

  "Then we have a choice," Gunther said. "I can use this core to fix your arm, Sannet. It is the only thing compatible with the living metal. But if I do... I cannot scrub the link."

  "What does that mean?" Sannet asked.

  "It means you become a node," Gunther warned. "You will be connected to the Archivist's network. He might be able to see where you are. He might try to overwrite you."

  Sannet looked at her shattered arm. Then she looked at the map—at the enemy who was perverting the very technology that had cursed her.

  "Let him see me," Sannet said coldly. "If I am connected to the network... then I can see him too, can't I?"

  Gunther paused, looking at her with newfound respect. "Yes. You would be a listening post inside his own system. A Trojan Horse."

  "Then do it," Sannet said. "Fix me. Make me the weapon that kills him."

  Gunther nodded. He gently shifted Viola’s head onto a folded blanket and stood up. He walked over to Sannet, picking up a bone-saw and the glowing stabilizer core.

  "Bite down on this," he said, handing her a leather strap. "I am out of morphia."

  Sannet took the strap, putting it between her teeth. She glanced at Minka and Leanna.

  "Don't watch," she grunted.

  Minka turned away, her eyes finding Viola again.

  Behind her, the saw whined to life, followed by the wet, sickening crunch of metal meeting bone. Sannet didn't scream, but the guttural snarl that ripped from her throat sounded like a promise of war.