August 6th, 2026
Back in Cremont City
2:01 AM
The 9th District was a wound that never healed. Night here had the texture of wet ash, smoke and steam rising from grates like breath from an animal that refused to die. Buildings leaned over the streets in collapsed, jagged teeth; iron and concrete lay in great carcasses. The air tasted of oil and old blood, heavy and metallic, and every light seemed to bend away from what the district tried to hide.
Farther in, fire painted the ruins orange and black. Men moved inside that light like insects in a lantern, darting, choking, dying. The clash between Castellan men and Cartels had started as a riot and become something older: ritualized extermination.
The Castellan men fought with trained, cold efficiency, precise volleys, controlled advance, bodies dropped with minimal noise. The Cartel fought like possessed animals: they screamed, they bled, and when they could not shoot cleanly they hacked. The street became a theater for two truths, one surgical and cruel, the other messy and obscene. Limbs were rent. Bones cracked like dry twigs. The fog swallowed screams and spat them out somewhere else.
Rio watched through a narrow slit of window, the glass spidered with dirt and blood. He was bound in more ways than one. A coarse rope looped around his torso and wrists, cinched tight to the bench; the iron handcuffs clamped behind his back, their chain threading through the rope so that both metal and fiber kept him immobile. Every breath hit the rope, and every instinct he had pulled against the metal.
Outside, he saw Ursula crouched at the second van's open hatch, rifle biting the dark. Her silhouette was a monument of muscle and motion; she fired in short, precise bursts, then reloaded with the ease of someone born to violence. Blood spat on the silk of her dress, dried into stark, horrible patches. She did not look away. She could not.
Then, he saw a group of Cartels charging towards his van. Frenzied and bloodthirsty.
Outside, the four men who had been guarding the van became a theater of collapse. The first went down without sound, a hand pressed to his throat as something cold and brutal found the artery. The second was lifted by a pack of Cartel men and collapsed on the pavement, ribcage opened with a practiced, terrible movement. The third's rifle clattered and he screamed, a high, surprised sound, then he was gone, torn where curled metal met soft flesh. The last one fought like a man who would not be remembered kindly; he fought with the blind courage of someone trying to buy time. They fell like cut trees. The street around them was already a slick map of red.
Rio's hands ached. He had to move. The first opportunity was small and filthy: a Cartel man stumbled close to the van, boots slipping in melted candle wax and pooled blood. He smelled of cheap tobacco and rot. When the man saw the bound soldier through the shattered window he snarled something in English, full of hard consonants and contempt.
"I'm gonna fucking gut you like a pig and we'll take your skin off and hang it on our fence, pendejo." He grinned with black teeth.
Rio's voice came out low, his jaw raw. "Come at me then" he said. The words were too calm in the storm. The man laughed, heavy and cruel, and shoved the van door with reckless force.
The hatch gave. A limb plunged in. A blade flashed.
Rio moved because he had to. He curled his shoulders, rolled, used the rope's give like a spring. The blade nicked his cheek, a hot line of pain, but he ducked and shoved. He drove his shoulder into the attacker's chest, took him off-balance, and slammed him into the metal wall. The first impact loosened the rope's twist against the cuff chain; fibers squealed. The attacker tried to swing again, but Rio had learned to use weight and angle, a soldier's reflex sharpened by captivity. He stuck a knee into the man's ribs, grabbed an arm and snapped it backward. The man howled.
Another attacker reached in, knife raised. The chain at Rio's wrists rasped and then, with a thin, impossible sound, the rope gave, a clean slash from a discarded blade that one of the Cartel men had brought in. The restraint that had compressed the muscles in his back uncoiled a fraction. He was still cuffed, still far from free, but the new looseness bought him an instant, long enough.
He used that time like a hammer. He spun, snatched the fallen machete from the pavement, and drove it into the first man's throat. The blade sank with a wet, immediate sound. Blood sprayed his forearm and ran down the handle. The second man lunged, surprise widening his eyes; Rio shoved the machete into his gut, wrenched and rolled. The third came with a shout; Rio met him knee-to-chest and brought the butt of the blade down on his temple until he stopped moving.
There was no room for mercy. The van filled with the stink of work done quickly. He killed while cuffed, while bleeding, while every nerve screamed. When the last of the small group fell, Rio found breath that did not belong to him and looked up.
A woman's scream cut through the district, thin, raw. He turned and saw the outline of her pinned against a cart: one of the Castellan men, her uniform torn, her hands clawing uselessly. Cartel men clustered over her, faces turned to something else, the frenzied urgency of a pack that has smelled vulnerability. The scene refracted into slow-motion in his head: the ripping of fabric, hands where hands should never be, the animal sound of men taking liberty.
Rio felt something cold and blind blossom in his chest. He did not hesitate.
He charged.A man swung a machete at him and the blade arced through the air. Rio blocked the blow with his forearm, metal biting bone, searing pain, and answered with a shove that sent the man stumbling into his fellows. He drove the machete up under ribs, felt the give of flesh and the sudden, hot spray of blood over his face. He did not stop to be careful. He moved through the circle like a force, each step a calculation of survival.
One attacker came at him from the side; Rio spun, grabbed the man's wrist, and tossed him aside, found a knife on the ground and used it to cut the chain that looped his cuffs to the rope. Sparks flew; the chain seared his skin. A hot, white pain flared. The cuff still bit, metal cold and unyielding, but at last his wrists had a centimeter of leverage. He swung and the knife slipped; he cursed and pressed the blade down, feeling resistance. Finally the clasp cracked with a small, serrated scream. His hand slid free.
Free will swell into a dangerous thing. Rio did not savor it. He took the machete full-handed and turned back into the swarm.
The attackers came like waves, but Rio had been sharpened by the army and honing by hunger. He parried with the flat of the blade, used his hand to snap necks, threw elbows into faces, and punched until the world tunneled. A Cartel man rushed him with a chain; Rio tripped, wrapped the chain and snapped the man down, bashing his head on the curb until the fight went out of him. Another tried to drag the female soldier away; Rio leapt and sank the machete into his shoulder, then pulled him down and shoved the blade into the other's throat.
When it was over the street stood like a set of bodies arranged by an indifferent hand. Rio's clothes were spattered with blood, his lungs burning. He sank to his knees, hands slick. Somewhere a siren wailed, a distant, impotent sound.
The woman on the pavement stared at him in a kind of disbelief. Her hair stuck to her face, skin pale under the grime. Her uniform was shredded, boots scuffed, mascara streaked like from a rain of ash. She clutched what remained of her shirt, trying to hide what had been done. She could not speak. She could only look.
Rio's chest tightened as he looked at the woman's expression. Memories, sharp and unwanted, cut across his mind.
It was not the moment he left for the barracks that returned, not the departure at dawn or the packed bag. It was the smaller, more private fracture: the night he told his family he was going abroad to send money home.
He remembered seating at the dinner table with Isabela, Janus, Alessandra, Marcella, and Selene. He held a brochure for army recruitment in Vortania, and his three sister's face as he said the words out loud. He could see it now as he saw the broken women before him: a look of terrified pleading, the same wide, raw eyes, the same lip bitten so hard the skin whitened. They all had the same expression. They had said nothing, had only watched him, as if the idea of his leaving stripped them down to the bone. The sight had been so intimate it felt like betrayal; it had been love laced with fear. He had left anyway.
The moment's echo slapped him with all the force of the present. That same terror, pleading, hollow, looked up now from the ruined uniform. Rio's throat tightened.
He had saved the female gothic goon, but he had not saved his father. He had not stopped the rot. He had come back to find the world worse than he'd left it.
Amidst the fight, the street swallowed her at first in a sheet of smoke and hot, copper light. Gunfire stitched the air into useless, beautiful rhythms; the bodies of men and machines lay in tangled design under flickering flames. Everything smelled of oil, wet ash and the iron of fresh blood. For a heartbeat Alessandra stood still at the threshold and the madness inside her cohered, not an absence of thought but a sharpening, a clarity that felt like hunger.
Her dress was torn at the hem, dark velvet clinging to the shape of a woman who had learned how to move like a blade. The two pistols she drew from beneath her skirt were small, black, and absurdly elegant, Castellan sigils engraved along the slides like tiny promises. She held them the way one might hold a prayer or a verdict, thumbs brushing the cold steel before the world began to tilt.
She tasted something on her tongue, metallic, sweet, and laughed, a sound too bright for the cratered street.
Men rushed at her in waves, silhouettes against the blaze. Alessandra did not aim the way a soldier aimed. She fired. She fired again. Bullets stitched holes through shirts and through throat and through the hollow space between a man who was and a man who would be. Her shots were not neat; they were punctuation marks thrown at a sentence of violence. A Cartel soldier jerked and folded where he stood, the red bloom at his chest an ugly, immediate bloom. Alessandra cursed, not in sympathy but in exultation, each syllable a small cutting sound.
"Fucking die," she spat.
"Fucking rot," she hissed.
"Stain and remember."
She moved like a woman in a trance, skipping between cover and ruin, her double pistols barking with desultory accuracy. The cadence of her shooting was almost musical, the echoes answering from the broken facades around her. Men fell at her feet, and she almost stepped over them with the polite, quick dispassion of someone who tidies after a storm.
A Castellan soldier ran into her line of fire, panicked. Her finger twitched before her mind could react, two bullets, clean through the shoulder and chest. The man stumbled, choking, confusion in his eyes.
"Mistress…" he gasped.
Alessandra stared, just stared, before turning away and shooting another Cartel in the face.
No hesitation. No apology.
The scream of her dying subordinate followed her like a ghost. It should've pierced her. Instead, she felt alive.
She crouched behind a broken car, reloading, whispering to herself. "Calm… composed… fair… firm…"
The words trembled out of her mouth like a mantra she no longer believed.
She looked at her blood-slicked hands and smiled.
"You were those things once," she murmured. "Now you're free."
A Cartel charged, swinging a pipe. She sidestepped, pressed the barrel to his temple, and fired. The back of his skull painted the pavement.
Alessandra closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, savoring the smell of gunpowder and blood
Her lips curled upward. "Free…"
When she opened her eyes again, there was no trace of the woman she used to be. No trace of the nurturing sister who smiled at Rio when he brought her coffee. When she gave him advices. When she taught him how to cook.
Then the world narrowed and a wet sound cut through the staccato of bullets: a groan, then a single surprised cry that was not Cartel at all. Through the smoke, another Castellan man, one of her own, stumbled into her line of fire. The muzzle flash struck his shoulder; he spun, hands up, eyes wide and young, and then went down, motionless, the dark bloom spreading. For a second the street went thin with a soundless vacuum.
Alessandra's fingers tightened on the grips. The instinct that had moulded her into a compassionate woman told her to stop, to order medics, to kneel. A different voice, softer, reasoning, rose in the place where cruelty usually lived.
Then she heard herself laugh.
It wasn't hysterical. It wasn't madness.
It was release.
It was small at first, then larger, a raw edge of triumph. She did not look away from the fallen man. She did not even step. The corpse was an inconvenience, a stain to be noted; if something had to be sacrificed, then sacrifice had been made toward a larger, hungrier end. The blood on her knuckles was not his blood but the indicator of movement, of progress. The world had narrowed once more to the sound of her breath and the rhythm of the triggers.
She cursed the next Cartel as a benediction. The word tore from her throat like a vow. She fired three times, then stepped forward and fired three more, and when men that had been hulks in the smoke folded like ragdolls she spat at them as if they had spat on her honor. Every fatality felt deserved, immediate, like a right being restored.
"Come on!" she screamed, stepping over corpses. "Come on, you filthy dogs! COME ON!"
She fired until her magazines were empty, dropped them, and drew two more from her garter belt, reloaded with a flick of her wrists. Her movements were wild, reckless, yet fluid. Every kill sent a jolt of pleasure through her veins, something she'd never felt before. Not like this.
The old Alessandra, the composed, calm, nurturing, and firm sister would've been horrified by this version of herself.
But that Alessandra was gone.
Around her the fighting grew sloppier. Men screamed and lunged and fell; lines blurred. Yet she kept a rhythm of her own. Her left hand answered the right in a machine of cruel choreography, and the pistol slides clicked with the cadence of a metronome. She did not give orders, did not rally or retreat, she wheeled and hunted.
At one point a man stumbled from the smoke clutching a rifle. His face was a mask of raw hatred. He screamed in a language thick with curse and hunger; Alessandra's answer was a flash and then hot air where his chest had been. He slumped forward and hung over a crate, the sound of his body a dull punctuation that pleased her as a bell pleases a temple. She whispered something to him, a private benediction: "You chose this."
Halfway through, as the smoke thinned and the corpses lay like an ugly constellation, a sudden ache flared at the back of her mind, a small, ridiculous echo. A lean man in a uniform; a word like goodbye; the way someone had looked at her when he had announced he was leaving. For a breath she felt something close to guilt edge the mania. Then another shot rang, closer by, and the thought evaporated. The old softness had no place in the shape she had become. It was irrelevant, weak. She smoothed the crease of her sleeve and vanished the memory as if smoothing dust from a rug.
Casualties from both sides collected at her boots. A comrade, moving to shield a wounded subordinate, stepped into her line as she spun and squeezed; metal bit cloth and flesh and the man went down with a choked sound. She saw his eyes flicker toward hers, full of the shock of betrayal, not by an enemy but by his Mistress. For a second, something flickered: recognition? Regret? Then it was gone. Alessandra did not kneel. She did not reach. She moved on, speaking through clenched teeth, an exhibition of triumph and prayer and profanity all at once.
When at last the smoking settled into an ashen hush, she found herself standing on a carpet of bodies, pistols still warm in her hands. Her breath came in ragged, shallow pulls; sweat and soot streaked her cheeks. Her dress hung tattered and dark around her. She tilted her head, as if listening, and the sound that came back was her own heartbeat and the distant cries of the city.
She smiled then, small and private, a smile that might have been affection if it had been aimed at a lover, instead aimed at the ruin she had made. It was not regret. It was not sorrow. It was intoxication.
"You see?" she murmured to the dead and the smoke and the empty air. "You see how tidy it becomes? How it obeys?"
She let the pistols fall to her sides. The echoes hummed away. A hand, a gloved hand, spattered, brushed at the side of her mouth as if wiping the taste of the night free. Her chest rose, the ecstatic tremor slowly ebbing.
By the time the smoke thinned, the street was an open graveyard. Castellan and Cartel bodies lay in mangled heaps. Her pistols still smoked. Her dress was soaked with blood, not all of it her enemies'.
A trembling gothic goon, one of her own, looked at her in horror. "Mistress… what have you done? You...you killed your own...men."
Alessandra tilted her head, hair sticking to her cheek, and smiled faintly.
"What I had to," she said softly. "What I was born to."
The goon backed away.
She didn't follow.
She turned toward the burning street instead - the inferno painting her silhouette in gold and scarlet.
She holstered her pistols and walked forward, boots squelching in blood, her eyes distant and bright.
The Alessandra who once fought with grace and principle was gone.
Back at Rio.
He stood, palms slick, and felt the sudden, stupid urge to vomit. He had no words, only the weight of what he had done and what he had failed. Around him, the remaining Cartel men either fled into the smoke or lay still on the pavement, lifeless. The Castellan soldiers beyond the wreckage regrouped, shouting, tending wounds, piling bodies into the gutters. Somewhere a radio barked orders. The district kept breathing its bad breath.
Rio walked over to the ruined woman and crouched down. He moved slowly, hands trembling, and offered her the sleeve of his suit to cover what she could not cover herself. Her hands closed over the fabric like a child. She did not look at him with gratitude, only with an emptiness that matched the one he felt blooming inside.
"Can you stand?" he asked quietly.
She nodded, voice a thin thread. "I... I don't know."
He hauled her, carefully, and helped her to her feet. Her weight was small; her fear was immense. He kept his grip firm and unhesitating. Above them, the sky above the 9th District burned and then turned to ash. The sounds of the city crept back in, far-off shouts, the rattle of distant engines, the damp, steady patter of rain beginning to fall.
Rio let his breath out slow and long. He looked at his hands: cut, bruised, the machete nicked and sticky. He felt no triumph, only the low, volcanic churn of guilt. The same faces, her three sister's wide, terrified eyes, had haunted him at the threshold of his life. Now, they stared at him from a stranger who might never speak his name. He had not fixed the past. He had only survived the present.
He straightened, the rain beginning to clothe him in cold. The 9th District did not forgive. It only remembered.
Gunfire still echoed faintly somewhere in the distance, like dying thunder rolling through the graveyard of Cremont's 9th District.
Rio stood still. For the first time in what felt like hours, he could hear himself breathe.
The air was thick, dense with gunpowder and decay. The smoke had settled low, hugging the ground. It reeked of iron, oil, and something rotten, the unmistakable scent of death in bulk. All around him, the street was strewn with bodies: Castellan men, Cartel men, limbs, shell casings, broken weapons, splattered crimson. The asphalt gleamed with blood beneath the dim glow of dying fires.
He felt the burn of handcuffs against his wrists. His arms trembled. His lungs burned.
But he was alive. Alive enough to escape Alessandra's madness.
He instinctively looked to the other side. A free road leading to his escape. All he had to do was run and never look back.
"You should go." The female gothic goon said.
He then turned to his side, the female gothic goon he'd saved has blood running down her shoulder and thigh. Her pale face was streaked with dirt, her once-black lipstick smeared into a dull bruise. She tried to sit up, wincing.
Rio stepped closer. "You're bleeding. You need to.."
She cut him off, voice ragged but firm. "Don't bother. I've… had worse."
Her eyes, sharp even through pain, met his. "Go. Escape from the Mistress."
Rio blinked. "What?"
"You're free," she rasped. "I won't tell the Mistress… or anyone. You saved me."
She coughed, spitting blood onto the pavement. "That's my exchange. Letting you go."
Rio froze.
Free.
The word felt foreign in this place, alien, fragile.
He looked at his hands, still trembling, blood on his knuckles, a broken machete hanging loose from his grip.
He wanted to believe her.
He wanted to run.
His eyes drifted to the road ahead, an open lane littered with shattered glass and spent cartridges. Smoke curled from a burning van at the intersection. Beyond it, he could see the faint outlines of buildings untouched by fire. The path of escape.
His breath quickened.
This is it, he thought. My chance.
He turned slightly, hesitating.
"Why are you letting me go?" he asked quietly.
Her gaze softened for a brief second. "Because you didn't have to save me. Men like you don't risk their lives for our kind. You could've run, but you didn't."
She looked down, gripping her torn dress. "That's rare here."
Rio's jaw tightened. He looked at her one last time, the faint flicker of humanity in this ruined place, and nodded. "Okay."
He took a step back, then another.
The air around him seemed to loosen. The weight began to lift.