Rain rarely fell on Xylos-4 rarely but when it did it usually wasn't a good thing. It was a slick, oily deluge that tasted of copper and industrial exhaust, screaming as it whipped through the narrow alloy canyons of the Lower Ward.
Elara's breath was a ragged whistle in her lungs. Her left side was a ruin of heat and jagged agony where a kinetic bolt had tore through her environmental suit. Every step was a gamble against the slick bioluminescent moss coating the pavement. Behind her, the rhythmic clack-hiss of pressurized hydraulics grew louder—the sound of something heavy, something metallic, and something very hungry.
Metal feet. Servo-assisted strides. Voices filtered through voice-masks, flattened and distorted by cheap modulation chips. Hunters who didn't bother to hide the pleasure they felt in the chase.
"Slow down,little bird" one of them called in a mocking tone. "You're leaking."
She bit down on a scream as her knee buckled. The world tilted. She caught herself against a wall scabbed with old holo-ads and graffiti tags—resistance slogans layered over corporate logos, a history of anger baked into brick and steel. Her vision tunneled. The pain in her ribs felt sharp enough to cut thought in half.
She forced herself forward.
Three meters.
Two.
Her foot slid. She went down hard, shoulder-first, the impact driving the air from her lungs in a broken gasp. The taste of copper flooded her mouth.Elara spun around, her back hitting the cold metal, fingers trembling as she fumbled for a heat-knife that she knew was already dead.
Footsteps closed in as three silhouettes rounded the corner.They weren't men anymore; they were Grafts—walking graveyards of black market tech and twitching muscle. Their optical sensors flickered a predatory crimson in the gloom. The leader, a mountain of hydraulic pistons and scarred synth-flesh, raised a massive forearm. The air hissed as a flechette rack slid into place.
A shadow fell over her—broad, angular, mechanical edges catching the light. A hand reached down, not gentle.
"End of the run," a voice said.
She squeezed her eyes shut, a teardrop rolling down her cheek as she pointed her knife to the approaching Graft.
Clack.
The sound that followed wasn't a gunshot or a blade.
The sound was sharp, solitary, and entirely too calm. It sounded like a polished heel meeting the wet pavement, something which sounded totally out of place.
A pressure wave slammed through the alley, knocking dust from walls and rattling loose debris from overhead conduits. A hunter was ripped backward, lifted clean off his feet, and smashed into the opposite wall with bone-cracking force. The ferrocrete fractured outward like ice under a hammer.
Elara's eyes snapped open.
A man stood between her and the others.
He hadn't been there a heartbeat ago.
He wore no visible armor, no glowing exoskeleton or corporate insignia. Just a long, dark coat that fluttered despite the still air, its fabric threaded with faint, shifting patterns that drank in the light instead of reflecting it. His boots were plain. His posture was relaxed, almost bored.
His right hand was raised, fingers splayed.
The air around it shimmered, as if reality itself had become a naughty child who forgotten how to behave.
"What," one of the hunters breathed, "the hell was that?"
The man turned his head slightly, as though only now acknowledging them. His face was sharp, composed, eyes a calm, unsettling gray that seemed to measure distance, mass, probability—all at once.
"I must say," the man's voice drifted through the storm, silky and laced with an infuriating boredom, "the acoustics in this alley are absolutely dreadful. All mid-range. No soul whatsoever."
The remaining three hunters spread out instinctively, weapons coming up. One had a compact rail pistol, its coils whining as it charged. Another extended mono-blades from his forearms, the metal singing softly. The third adjusted something at his temple—combat stim, the girl realized dimly.
"Who the hell are you?" the lead Graft growled, his targeting laser painting a red dot on the stranger's chest.
"Me?" The man pulled out a weird sphere from his pocket and began tossing it up and down.The sphere shimmered as it went up causing ripples in the fabric of space. "I'm the critic. And I'm afraid your performance is... derivative. The 'thug in a dark alley' trope? It's been done. To death."
"Step away," the lead Graft said. "This doesn't involve you."
The man smiled.
A vein popped up angrily on the head of the lead Graft.
"Kill him," the Graft barked.
Two of the mercenaries lunged. They were blurs of chrome and malice, their Vibro-Claws screaming as they tore through the rain. They moved with the terrifying speed of overclocked nervous systems.
The man didn't flinch. He didn't even unbutton his coat.
As the first blade whistled toward his throat, he moved—not a dodge, but a subtle, choreographed shift of weight. He caught the attacker's wrist with two fingers. There was no struggle, no grunt of effort. A faint, high-pitched hum emanated from his glove, and suddenly, the Graft wasn't moving forward anymore. The mercenary's own momentum seemed to turn inward, his body twisting violently as if grabbed by an invisible giant.
The rail pistol fired.
The projectile crossed the alley in less than a millisecond.
The man tilted his head.
The slug curved.
Not ricocheted—curved, bending away as if nudged by an invisible hand, tearing a molten groove through the wall behind him instead. The shooter froze, shock bleeding through his mask.
The man stepped forward.
The ground beneath his foot fractured in a perfect radial pattern.
He moved too fast.
One moment he was standing; the next he was inside their formation. His hand closed around the blade-wielder's wrist. There was a sharp, localized crack—not bone breaking, but something denser, deeper. The mono-blades flickered, then died, their molecular edges destabilized into harmless slag.
The man didn't slow.
He pivoted, driving an elbow into the stimmed hunter's chest. The impact compressed armor, flesh, and cybernetics alike into a concave ruin. The hunter lifted off the ground, slammed into the pavement, and didn't move again.
The last one, the leader screamed and opened fire wildly.
The air thickened.
Bullets slowed, visibly, as if swimming through syrup. The man walked through them. Each step sent ripples through the slowed projectiles, deflecting them aside. He reached the shooter and placed two fingers against the center of the man's forehead.
The stranger appeared in front the leader and tapped him on the chin—a light, playful flick. The Graft flew backward thirty feet, hitting a dumpster with the force of a high-speed mag-lev train.
The leader roared, his forearm gun shrieking as it unleashed a cloud of flechettes.
The man didn't duck. He didn't run. He simply held up the silver sphere.
A shimmer erupted in front of him—not a glowing shield, but a warp in the air that looked like oil on water. The flechettes hit the distortion and simply... stopped. They lost their shape, turning into a fine gray mist that drifted harmlessly to the ground like wood ash.
"My turn," the stranger said. His eyes flashed with a brief, terrifying violet light.
He was gone.
Elara didn't see him move; she only saw the aftermath. He reappeared behind the lead Graft, his hand resting lightly on the giant's reinforced spine.
"Your heart is running on a Mark IV Ion-Pump," the man whispered into the Graft's audio-receptor. "Terrible for the blood pressure."
He closed his fist. A localized thrum shook the alley, a vibration so deep Elara felt it in her teeth. The giant Graft stiffened. Every red light on his body turned a blinding, electric white. Sparks showered from his joints, and then, with a wet, mechanical wheeze, he collapsed. The massive frame hit the ground like a fallen monument.A neat cauterized hole appeared where his heart used to be.
Silence returned, heavy and thick with the smell of ozone.
The stranger turned to Elara, the violet glow in his eyes fading into a dark, mischievous spark. He looked her over with the critical eye of an art collector.
"You… you killed them," she said, the words dumb and inadequate.
"You're bleeding on your jacket," he said, clicking his tongue in disappointment, while blatantly ignoring her question. "That's going to be a nightmare to get out. Synthetic silk is so temperamental."
Elara stared at the bodies, then at the man who was currently checking his reflection in a shard of broken glass. He hadn't broken a sweat. He hadn't even messed up his hair.
"Who... what are you?" she managed to choke out, clutching her side.
"Caspian," he said. "Collector of oddities, traveler of the Great Void, and currently, a man looking for a decent cup of caffeinated sludge. This planet is charmingly miserable, isn't it?"
He crouched, coat folding smoothly, and pressed two fingers lightly near her ribs. The pain spiked—
Then eased.
Warmth spread through her side, not numbing but stabilizing, as if microscopic hands were knitting torn tissue together from the inside. She gasped, clutching his wrist.
"What—what is that?"
"Field-mediated cellular alignment," he said. "Temporary. You'll still need proper treatment."
She swallowed. "That's… that's impossible."
"Not really." He stood, offering a hand. "Just expensive. And illegal."
She took it. His grip was firm, steady. He pulled her to her feet with effortless strength.
He began to walk away, his boots clicking rhythmically against the metal floor as he hummed a melody in tune.
"Wait!" she called out
Caspian stopped, glancing over his shoulder with one arched eyebrow. "Yes? If you're going to thank me, a simple 'bravo' will suffice. I don't do autographs."
"I don't want an autograph," Elara said, her voice shaking but hardening with a sudden, desperate clarity.Elara had notices something when Caspian helped her up.She could see faint lines along his skin near the temples—interfaces, old and well-integrated. Not corporate-standard. Something custom. Something far beyond what she'd ever seen.
She looked at the scrap metal that used to be the Syndicate's best hunters. "I want to know how you did that. I want to be able to do that."
Caspian tilted his head and sighed theatrically."I'm sorry but a magician got to keep his secrets."
"I want to follow you," she explained.
"Why were they chasing you?"
She hesitated. Then reached into her jacket and pulled out a thin, broken-looking disc, its surface crawling with light despite the damage.
The man's eyes narrowed.
"Where did you get that?"
She hesitated. Then reached into her jacket and pulled out a thin, broken-looking disc, its surface crawling with light despite the damage.
Caspian's eyes narrowed.
"Where did you get that?"
"So you do recognize it," she said, a hint of triumph bleeding through her fear. "They wanted it. Corporate retrieval squad, off the books. I wasn't supposed to survive the grab."
"Clearly," he said. "You shouldn't have taken it."
"I didn't take it," she snapped. "I built it."
That did it.
For the first time since he'd appeared, Caspian looked genuinely surprised.
She straightened despite the pain, lifting her chin. "Prototype neural lattice. Self-evolving architecture. It doesn't just process data—it learns how to learn, reshapes itself at the quantum level. I was trying to break the bottleneck. Make something that could keep up with what's coming."
"And you succeeded," he said slowly.
"I succeeded enough to scare them," she replied. "Not enough to protect myself.I have the drive they wanted. I have the data. But I'm a target. If I stay here, I'm dead. If I go with you... maybe I can become something more than a bird in a cage."
Caspian looked at her, and for a second, the mask of the bored aristocrat slipped, revealing something ancient and sharp underneath. He flipped the silver sphere into the air and caught it.
The rain on Xylos-4 didn't fall; it hunted. It was a slick, oily deluge that tasted of copper and industrial exhaust, screaming as it whipped through the narrow alloy canyons of the Lower Ward.
Elara's breath was a ragged whistle in her lungs. Her left side was a ruin of heat and jagged agony where the kinetic bolt had chewed through her environmental suit. Every step was a gamble against the slick bioluminescent moss coating the pavement. Behind her, the rhythmic clack-hiss of pressurized hydraulics grew louder—the sound of something heavy, something metallic, and something very hungry.
"Don't trip now, little bird," a voice rasped, distorted by a malfunctioning vocal synth. "We've got a long night ahead of us."
She lunged into an alleyway, her boots skidding on a pile of rusted scrap. Dead end. A massive, sealed blast door blocked the path, its surface scarred by decades of atmospheric corrosion. Elara spun around, her back hitting the cold metal, fingers trembling as she fumbled for a heat-knife that she knew was already dead.
Three of them rounded the corner. They weren't men anymore; they were Grafts—walking graveyards of black market tech and twitching muscle. Their optical sensors flickered a predatory crimson in the gloom. The leader, a mountain of hydraulic pistons and scarred synth-flesh, raised a massive forearm. The air hissed as a flechette rack slid into place.
Elara closed her eyes, bracing for the sting of a hundred needles.
Clack.
The sound was sharp, solitary, and entirely too calm. It was the sound of a polished heel meeting the wet pavement.
"I must say," a voice drifted through the storm, silky and laced with an infuriating boredom, "the acoustics in this alley are absolutely dreadful. All mid-range. No soul whatsoever."
Elara's eyes snapped open.
Perched atop a stack of dented shipping crates was a man who looked like he'd stepped out of a high-society fever dream. He wore a long, charcoal coat made of a fabric that seemed to drink the light around it, blurring his silhouette against the neon grime. He was casually tossing a small silver sphere, catching it with the bored grace of a man waiting for a bus.
"Who the hell are you?" the lead Graft growled, his targeting laser painting a red dot on the stranger's chest.
"Me?" The man hopped down, landing without a sound, the heavy gravity of Xylos-4 seemingly failing to register. "I'm the critic. And I'm afraid your performance is... derivative. The 'thug in a dark alley' trope? It's been done. To death."
"Kill him," the Graft barked.
Two of the mercenaries lunged. They were blurs of chrome and malice, their Vibro-Claws screaming as they tore through the rain. They moved with the terrifying speed of overclocked nervous systems.
The man didn't flinch. He didn't even unbutton his coat.
As the first blade whistled toward his throat, he moved—not a dodge, but a subtle, choreographed shift of weight. He caught the attacker's wrist with two fingers. There was no struggle, no grunt of effort. A faint, high-pitched hum emanated from his glove, and suddenly, the Graft wasn't moving forward anymore. The mercenary's own momentum seemed to turn inward, his body twisting violently as if grabbed by an invisible giant.
With a sickening crunch of reinforced titanium bone, the attacker was slammed into the pavement. He didn't just fall; he vanished into a crater of shattered concrete, pinned to the earth by a force that made the ground groan.
The second attacker hissed, swinging a jagged blade in a wide arc. The man stepped into the strike, his hand sweeping through the air in a graceful semi-circle. Invisible ripples distorted the rain. The Graft's arm suddenly jerked upward, his own blade burying itself in his shoulder as if the air itself had become a series of pulleys and levers.
The stranger tapped him on the chin—a light, playful flick. The Graft flew backward thirty feet, hitting a dumpster with the force of a high-speed mag-lev train.
"Physics is such a stickler for the rules," the man remarked, buffing a speck of dust off his cuff. "I simply prefer to edit the fine print."
The leader roared, his forearm gun shrieking as it unleashed a cloud of flechettes.
The man didn't duck. He didn't run. He simply held up the silver sphere.
A shimmer erupted in front of him—not a glowing shield, but a warp in the air that looked like oil on water. The flechettes hit the distortion and simply... stopped. They lost their shape, turning into a fine gray mist that drifted harmlessly to the ground like wood ash.
"My turn," the stranger said. His eyes flashed with a brief, terrifying violet light.
He was gone.
Elara didn't see him move; she only saw the aftermath. He reappeared behind the lead Graft, his hand resting lightly on the giant's reinforced spine.
"Your heart is running on a Mark IV Ion-Pump," the man whispered into the Graft's audio-receptor. "Terrible for the blood pressure."
He closed his fist. A localized thrum shook the alley, a vibration so deep Elara felt it in her teeth. The giant Graft stiffened. Every red light on his body turned a blinding, electric white. Sparks showered from his joints, and then, with a wet, mechanical wheeze, he collapsed. The massive frame hit the ground like a fallen monument.
Silence returned, heavy and thick with the smell of ozone.
The stranger turned to Elara, the violet glow in his eyes fading into a dark, mischievous spark. He looked her over with the critical eye of an art collector.
"You're bleeding on your jacket," he said, clicking his tongue in disappointment. "That's going to be a nightmare to get out. Synthetic silk is so temperamental."
Elara stared at the bodies, then at the man who was currently checking his reflection in a shard of broken glass. He hadn't broken a sweat. He hadn't even messed up his hair.
"Who... what are you?" she managed to choke out, clutching her side.
"Caspian," he said. "Collector of oddities, traveler of the Great Void, and currently, a man looking for a decent cup of caffeinated sludge. This planet is charmingly miserable, isn't it?"
He began to walk away, his boots clicking rhythmically against the metal floor.
"Wait!" she called out, scrambling to her feet despite the fire in her ribs.
Caspian stopped, glancing over his shoulder with one arched eyebrow. "Yes? If you're going to thank me, a simple 'bravo' will suffice. I don't do autographs."
"I don't want an autograph," Elara said, her voice shaking but hardening with a sudden, desperate clarity. She looked at the scrap metal that used to be the Syndicate's best hunters. "I want to know how you did that. I want to be able to do that."
Caspian tilted his head. "You want to learn the art of being impossibly difficult to kill?"
"I want to follow you," she said. "I have the drive they wanted. I have the data. But I'm a target. If I stay here, I'm dead. If I go with you... maybe I can become something more than a bird in a cage."
Caspian looked at her, and for a second, the mask of the bored aristocrat slipped, revealing something ancient and sharp underneath. He flipped the silver sphere into the air and caught it.
"I'm a very busy man, girl," he said. "My itinerary involves breaking into high-security vaults, outrunning interstellar armadas, and occasionally insulting planetary governors to their faces. It is loud, dangerous, and I rarely stop for lunch."
"I can skip lunch," Elara countered.
A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth—a sharp, dangerous thing.
"Very well," Caspian said, his coat billowing behind him like a shadow come to life. "But I warn you—my 'magic' is nothing of the sort. It's simply the universe's way of saying 'yes' when everyone else says 'no.' If you want to learn it, you'll have to learn to see the world as a series of locks waiting to be picked."
He started walking again, faster this time, heading toward the neon glow of the spaceport.
And suddenly- Caspian vanished, not in a flash, but in a subtle distortion, space folding inward like a thought collapsing into certainty.
His voice drifting in the air and she could hear the gloating in his voice
"Keep up, little bird. We have a ship to catch, and I believe the port authorities are currently under the impression that I've stolen their favorite shuttle."
"Show-off," she muttered
Elara didn't wait for a second invitation. She took a breath and ran into the rain. Running deeper into the future than she had ever planned.