The instant they opened fire, the world as she knew it slowed down to a crawl. It was no technique of hers. In fact it wasn’t even a particularly difficult thing to do. With her high mind, the greatest of all her attributes, a thought was all it took to overclock her mental cognition—highlighting everything around her in crisp detail.

  Each flash of light a blooming aurora.

  Every sound a base thrumming, frequencies more felt than heard.

  The languid rise of smoke from cherry-red barrels. The arcing, crackling procession of thousands of energy beams sprouting from thousands of energy rifles. Brilliant bars of artificial lightning penning her in on all sides. Distorting, obscuring everything else with their collective radiance.

  Everything, that is, but the high-speed projectiles that, even now, rain down from above like a deadly hailstorm—too fast for even her boosted cognition to fully observe. More blurry suggestion than item of real substance, each nevertheless held deadly promise—more and more of them appearing all the time. They would be upon her in fractions of a second. And yet, when every second could be drawn out into seeming eternity…? In the end, it left her with plenty of time to think.

  Setting all speculation aside, as—no matter how it felt she didn’t actually have all the time in the world—what did she know? She knew that she’d been tricked yet again, though how he’d done it was still unclear. She also knew that her body had been returned to her. Not the sickly abomination she’d cobbled together out of necessity, but her very own flesh and blood. What else? Her cultivation… still there… but no, there was something more. Something she was missing.

  The blurry hail of projectiles had inched their way a dozen paces closer, before she finally put her finger on what was bothering her. Her shackles. They were gone! That inescapable presence. The pervasive manifestation of constellation law.

  The system of checks and balances—like a blade constantly poised above her neck—that’d informed her every decision since she’d been appointed the position as planetary steward. The eerie sensation of constantly being watched, that’d been somewhat blunted while within her artificial spirit realm. Here, in this place, it was entirely absent. Just… gone. Which could only mean…

  By the time she’d convinced herself that, no, she was not, in fact, dreaming, the quickest of the projectiles were beginning to boil the air a scant few inches from her skin.

  That settles it then. This is real. It must be.

  And so, with a thought she propelled herself into the upper atmosphere, outpacing beam weapon, railgun, and sound barrier alike with a thunderous crack of displaced air.

  Whoops. Too far.

  Course correcting, she rapidly readjusted her altitude until she came to hover a mere hundred paces above the ground, as opposed to several tens of thousands. Surveying from on high the small pocket of greenery—an insignificant blotch of color amidst a monochrome metropolis—she found the actual forces arrayed against her were looking smaller than ever.

  Pitiful, really.

  Better for everyone she stamp out the fading embers of resistance here and now, rather than let them go on thinking they were hot stuff indefinitely. It wasn’t healthy, developing an overinflated opinion of yourself. It stunted growth! And quite severely at that. Well, so did getting dead, but she couldn’t very well help that now could she? The feeling was like slipping into an old coat she’d long since misplaced, without even the hope of their ever being reunited, only to find that it fit her just as well as it always had.

  |Substantive Law of Kinesis|

  Kinetic Authority

  No words accompanied her working. She’d long since grown past the need for such things. Mantras, martial kata, self affirmations, they were all the same. Simple training tools that helped one contemplate the dao. Transcending to the realm of ascendancy, however—wherein her body, mind, and soul were so steeped in mysteries of concept and law, as to be otherwise indistinguishable—meant she needn’t bother with all that blather any longer.

  Now, all it took for her to evoke change on a fundamental level was but a thought. A minor hint of dissatisfaction with the status quo, and the very fabric of this reality practically leapt to obey.

  Her alignment gave it structure, while her spirit gave it form. Resonance making the world take heed of her instruction.

  Kinetic force geysered out from her outstretched palms—draining a full sixteenth of her spirit reserves in an instant—as if a raging torrent of liquid mercury were given a shifting pearlescent sheen. Well, that was how she’d always perceived it, anyway. To anyone else, she suspected it might’ve appeared as nothing more than an invisible force. It crashed down upon the well-manicured lawn like the fist of a falling titan. In an instant, the entire park sank by several inches. Trees were flattened, platforms plummeted, and men screamed in either rage or agony.

  Hmm…

  Nialla frowned. Not nearly as potent as she’d been expecting. She’d brought an army to its knees, yes, and a choice few of those machines looked the worse for wear, true, but the much larger machines? And those hovering islands besides? Barely a scratch on either!

  Unacceptable.

  Kinetic authority pulsed out from her in a roiling wave. Her efforts meeting stiff resistance, though not from the outside. It felt as if she were flexing a muscle she had not used in decades. Which, now that she really thought about it, was a fairly accurate assessment. Yet another wall of force impacted the kneeling army just as they were getting to their feet. The staccato sounds of breaking bones accompanying their screams.

  Agony. Definitely agony that time.

  Unfortunately, the larger of the automata stubbornly refused to quit. Worse yet, they continued with their senseless barrage. It was a minor effort to sidestep the sizzling lances of unstable particles, though an effort it was all the same—her body, as always, lagging just that smallest bit behind her hyperactive mind.

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  Again, she compelled a wall of force to press down mercilessly. The sounds of more broken bones resounded, though fewer screams accompanied them this time around, strangely enough. The shrieking sounds of metal under extreme duress soon followed, as the shorter of the automata were crumpled into jagged balls of scrap.

  Sparks flew from the looming metal giants, and she thought she saw one of their knees buckle, ever so slightly, but that was the extent of it. Frowning even deeper now, she focused the whole of her attention on those five in particular. Reaching out for them, in body, mind, and spirit, she commanded they break. Pulling on her understanding of stress, she undermined their structural integrity. Exerting her control over a key aspect of force, she capitalized on that weakness with extreme prejudice.

  Nialla clenched her fists, and reality answered.

  All five heavy duty mechanized battle suits imploded, collapsing instantaneously to one fifth their original size. Power cores detonated simultaneously, five perfect spheres of blinding white energy swelling rapidly to consume everything in their path.

  The warped remains of their predecessors first and foremost.

  Entire stories of the closest buildings at the last—leaving naught but spherical bites taken out of glass and steel. As if a god had scooped massive chunks out of each. Five miniature suns born at the heart of a metropolis. The screams, this time, were many, if distant, and were promptly overwhelmed by a cacophonous roar as several tons worth of mortal arrogance were summarily reclaimed by gravity.

  Perhaps that was why. The sights and sounds of a city in turmoil rousing her morbid fascination. Or, conversely, it might have been the warm glow of accomplishment, the joy of a beloved practice picked back up again after so long without. Who knows? It could have been something else entirely. Whatever the reason, she blamed it for her lapse of attention. After all, it couldn’t possibly be her fault she didn’t spot the beam in time.

  The pillar of crimson energy split the sky down the middle with a howl like that of a hundred-thousand banshees shrieking in harmony. And in that moment the entire world, it seemed, was dyed a bright, cherry red. The temperature spiking so astronomically that the sweat beading his brow was flash fried in an instant.

  And then it was gone.

  Leaving naught but a trail of smoke to waft from one oversized barrel—notable even from its position atop one of the prodigious sky carriers—and a hole burned straight on through sixteen consecutive penthouse floors, to mark its linear passage. The scary tentacle god queen, most notably, nowhere to be found.

  “Think we got her?”

  As if in response, a bevy of writhing green tentacles burst onto the scene—surging forth from the furthest perforated penthouse with the agitated ferocity of a kicked hornets nest. Whirling appendages the size of train cars tear a path of destruction through one grand edifice after another—the projectile spray of rebar and concrete a sort of celebratory confetti, if the heavy, serrated, deadly kind.

  Explosions rock the city skyline, glass and stone sent every which way. The unrelenting path first scored by the beam cannon revisited in earnest, if in reverse—raining chunks of debris down on hapless citizens when the narrow confines of the smoking tunnel prove too tight a fit for their prodigious bulk.

  And in the aftermath of each messy beheading, the teetering crowns of buildings topple one after another. One colliding with the next in a long string of disasters, like some cataclysmic game of dominos.

  Sucker laden appendages continuing onward, until, at long last, they burst from the first of many bore holes, to strike at the origin of their mistresses displeasure. Eighteen gigantic tentacles spear through the belly of the floating carrier as if its reinforced hull were made of tissue paper.

  There is yet another series of explosions—a shockwave of force and heat nearly picking Jun off his feet—as one or more of its propulsion engines is compromised. Then, the behemoth of a battle cruiser is wrenched from the sky entirely. Dragged from heaven to earth in one fell swoop.

  I believe it’s safe to say we did not.

  With a thunderous crack, Nialla appears precisely where she had been moments before she was so rudely interrupted. That had actually hurt, damn him! Granted, Kraken’s Regeneration made it so that any minor injuries she had sustained would’ve long since healed to nothing by now, but that wasn’t the point.

  It was the principle of the thing!

  She may as well be a god to this impudent runt, and yet, not for the first time, he’d managed to sting her. It was infuriating. By this point, the warm glow from her powers’ resurgence had long since evaporated. She was done playing games.

  |Martial Law of Weaponized Ancestry|

  Spearing Deep-Sea Terror

  Burning an entire fourth of her remaining spirit reserves, Nialla released the bottomless rage of a fully grown kraken on the brother to the ship that had dared to strike her—wrestling it from the sky in a tangle of twisting limbs. Turning away from the burning wreck, she focused the whole of her attention on her lone ascendant boon.

  |Ascendant Boon|

  Ranger Archetype: Sphere of Omniscience I

  In an instant, everything within a certain radius of her person came into perfect focus. Every dust mote, every texture, every minute detail seen with absolute clarity. It was a disorienting influx of sensory information, the likes of which had taken her many years to master. It had been quite some time since then. It took but a second to locate the one she sought.

  CRACK!

  And it wasn’t much longer than that before she was standing in front of him, fingers wrapped snuggly about his scrawny neck.

  “You…!”

  His uncomfortably loose, scrawny neck. The shockwave born of her faster than sound travel reached her then—tugging at the boys hair and rocking his eerily limp body side to side. It was only then, in her hyper cognitive state, that she noted the way he stared glassy-eyed into the far distance. That, and how he didn’t appear to be moving.

  Damn. Did I come on too strong?

  This was the last thing she thought before her world too went dark.

  The very first thing she heard was bird song. Nialla’s eyes shot open, the bright light of a cloudless blue sky leaving her feeling disoriented and confused. For a time, the world existed as an indistinct series of colorful smears. And then…

  With a start, the world came into sharp relief, and Nialla was allowed her… second glimpse of the army arrayed before her?

  What…? What the fuck…?!!