The Reflex Booster didn't grant speed. It stole time.
Jorge exploded onto the rain-lashed rooftops of Old Detroit, his world reduced to a horrifying, crystalline slow-motion. Raindrops hung suspended like glass beads, refracting the neon hellscape below into shattered mosaics of crimson and chrome. The drumming rain was a distorted, monstrous drone. The wind against his face felt thick, viscous. His own movements were puppet-like, jerky, propelled by the blue fire screaming through his nerves. It wasn't power; it was violation.
V.I.K.T.O.R's voice was ice shards grating in his skull:
*"DRONES: THREE. DESIGNATION: VERIDIAN VIPER-CLASS PURSUERS. TRAJECTORIES CALCULATED. THREAT PROBABILITY: 92%. RECOMMENDED ACTION: EVASIVE MANEUVERS."*
The Vipers were sleek, predatory shadows against the smog-choked sky, their insectile forms cutting through the suspended rain with impossible, terrifying speed even in this slowed reality. Their underslung cannons pulsed with malevolent blue light, charging. Taser bolts, crackling ropes of contained lightning, lashed out in slow, lazy arcs, vaporizing raindrops and scorching black scars onto the crumbling concrete where Jorge had been milliseconds before. The smell of ozone and burnt stone was thick, cloying.
Use the terrain, the ghost of Sergeant Ramirez snarled in his mind, cutting through the Booster's chemical haze. Turn their speed against them.
Jorge moved, his body a marionette controlled by the Booster's ruthless algorithms and his own desperate will. He wasn't running; he was falling through frozen time. He vaulted low parapets, rolled behind massive, humming vent stacks radiating waste heat, slid down crumbling fire escapes in terrifyingly slow slides. Each movement sent fresh jolts of agony from his shoulder wound, a dull counterpoint to the Booster's neural fire.
"ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED. WEAPON CHARGE: 98%. PROJECTED IMPACT ZONE: YOUR CURRENT POSITION."
A Viper had flanked him, hovering silently above a skeletal water tower. Its cannon glowed white-hot. Jorge threw himself sideways, picturing the rusted ladder bolted to the adjacent building.
Lurch.
The disorienting cold-water plunge sensation of spatial displacement. He reappeared clinging to the ladder, twenty feet away, as the energy bolt obliterated the spot where he'd crouched, showering the area in molten concrete slag that cooled in slow-motion globules.
"SPATIAL DISPLACEMENT ENERGY EXPENDITURE: 5%. BOOSTER INTEGRATION: 45%. NEURAL DEGRADATION DETECTED. CAUTION ADVISED."
Neural degradation. The words cut through the adrenaline. Brain damage. The price of this borrowed time.
"RECOMMEND OFFENSIVE ACTION. PASSIVE EVASION INSUFFICIENT."
"With what?!" Jorge hissed, scrambling higher on the ladder as another bolt turned the rung below him into vapor.
"OMNI-BAZAAR TRIAL ACCESS: GRANTED."
The spectral marketplace bloomed at the periphery of his vision, superimposed over the frozen chaos of the rooftop chase. It was dizzying, overwhelming. Not stalls, but shifting, impossible geometries – shelves carved from starlight, displays floating in bubbles of liquid void, auctions held by whispering shadows. The offerings:
ADAMANTIUM BONE LACING (TEMPORARY – 1 HOUR): 1 SOUL FRAGMENT
REPULSOR EMITTER (RIGHT PALM – SINGLE USE): 0.5 SOUL FRAGMENTS
PHASE SHIFT (3 SECONDS): 1.2 SOUL FRAGMENTS
The prices pulsed with cold, indifferent light.
"Fragments? How?!" Jorge gasped, ducking as a Viper strafed his position, its cannon fire chewing the building facade into slow-motion dust.
"HARVEST FROM TERMINATED SENTIENT ENTITIES."
A Viper dove, misjudging his displacement, its thruster wash flattening the suspended rain in a wide circle. It was close, too close, correcting its trajectory with agonizing slowness. Jorge saw his chance – a thick, corroded mana conduit pipe, leaking a sluggish stream of violet vapor. His spatial sense screamed. He wrenched.
Not himself. The pipe.
Space bent like taffy around the conduit. One moment it was bolted to the roof; the next, it speared through the Viper's delicate thruster assembly with nightmarish precision.
KA-FLAMOOOOOSH!
The explosion was a silent, expanding flower of orange fire and shrapnel in Jorge's perception. Then came the agony – a white-hot spike driven into his thigh. He looked down. A jagged piece of drone casing, larger than his hand, protruded from his leg, blood welling thick and dark around it, defying gravity to ooze slowly down his jeans. Pain, vast and consuming, threatened to black out his vision.
"CRITICAL TRAUMA DETECTED. FEMORAL ARTERY COMPROMISED. ESTIMATED TIME TO EXSANGUINATION: 3 MINUTES (SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTION). PURCHASE RECOMMENDED: WOLVERINE REGENERATION (1 HOUR). COST: 1 SOUL FRAGMENT."
Amidst the slowly expanding debris field of the destroyed Viper, something pulsed. A tiny, cold ember of pure white light, no larger than a marble. It hovered amidst the frozen shrapnel, radiating an unsettling emptiness. A SOUL FRAGMENT (COMMON).
Harvest. The word tasted like grave dirt.
Jorge reached out, his hand trembling violently. His fingers brushed the ember.
It was cold. Not physically, but existentially. It siphoned the warmth from his fingertips, leaving a hollow ache. Then it vanished. A notification pulsed in his mind:
"SOUL FRAGMENT (COMMON) ACQUIRED. BALANCE: 1.0."
Simultaneously, warmth – deep, alien, and profoundly unsettling – flooded his thigh. It felt like maggots wriggling beneath his skin. He watched, nauseated, as the jagged shrapnel was pushed out of the wound by rapidly knitting muscle and sinew. The flesh closed over, leaving smooth, unblemished skin beneath torn fabric. Only a phantom ache remained.
"PURCHASE CONFIRMED: WOLVERINE REGENERATION (1 HOUR). SOUL FRAGMENT BALANCE: 0.0."
A sigh of relief died in his throat. A new sound tore through the distorted soundscape – a high-pitched, metallic SCREECHING, like reality's fabric being ripped apart. It vibrated his bones, cutting through the Booster's haze and the slowed rain.
The world around him began to warp.
The building beneath his feet seemed to breathe. Concrete rippled like water. The neon sign of a nearby synth-brothel – a pulsing pink heart – melted, its colors bleeding into impossible ultraviolet and sickly chartreuse. The very air shimmered, refracting light into kaleidoscopic nightmares. Gravity hiccupped; raindrops stopped, reversed, then plummeted upwards. A stray cat frozen mid-leap dissolved into a cloud of static snow.
"REALITY DEGRADATION DETECTED. ESCALATING TO GLITCH TIER. LOCATION UNSTABLE. CAUSE: SPATIAL MANIPULATION ENERGY SIGNATURE."
Silas's voice crackled in his scavenged earpiece, distorted and frantic: "Kid! Whatever the hell you just did… stop bending the damn fabric! You're screaming into the void! They're coming!"
They.
Movement. A deeper shadow detached from the melting neon chaos of the brothel sign. It flowed across the warped rooftop, untouched by the distorted rain, its form shifting and indistinct. Eight spindly legs, each ending in hooked talons that scratched noiselessly on the rippling concrete. A body like condensed smoke, absorbing light. And eyes – multiple sets of them, like shards of broken, black mirror reflecting nothing but infinite emptiness. VOIDSTALKER.
Its hunger wasn't physical. It was a sucking vacuum against Jorge's soul, a pressure that made his newly healed leg tremble and his breath catch. It tilted its featureless head, those mirror-shard eyes fixing on him.
"NEW THREAT CATEGORY: VOID PREDATOR (MINOR). ANALYSIS: FEEDS ON REALITY INSTABILITY AND PSIONIC RESONANCE. THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME. PROPOSAL: PURCHASE IMPERIAL LIGHTNING (0.5 SOUL FRAGMENTS)."
Imperial Lightning. The power that had vaporized the first Voidstalker. Jorge's gaze darted to the remaining two Vipers, still maneuvering in their slowed reality, their cannons tracking him. One was damaged, trailing smoke. A soul fragment?
But the Voidstalker was faster. It flowed towards him, silent and inevitable, its mirror eyes drinking the warped neon light. The sucking vacuum intensified, a psychic cold that seeped into his bones. The Booster's fire in his veins felt like the only warmth left in a dying universe.
He had no fragments. Only the terrible offer.
He could run. Displace again. But the warping reality screamed that more displacement might tear this place apart entirely. Or draw more of them.
He could fight the Vipers. Try to harvest another fragment. But the Voidstalker was closing the distance, its presence scrambling his thoughts, making the Booster's calculations flicker.
"DECISION WINDOW CLOSING. VOIDSTALKER ENGAGEMENT IMMINENT."
Jorge's hand clenched. He saw the frozen raindrops, the warped city, the approaching abyss. He remembered the feel of the scalpel in the Peacekeeper's neck, the crack of the Gutter King's spine, the hollow cold of the soul fragment.
Power wasn't a gift.
It was a transaction written in blood and sanity, and the Voidstalker's bill was coming due.
He focused on the spectral marketplace, on the crackling blue-white icon of Imperial Lightning. He had nothing left to trade. Nothing but the Booster's borrowed time, his fragile hold on this reality, and the terrifying emptiness of the fragment he'd already consumed.
"Purchase Imperial Lightning!" The words tore from him, raw with desperation and the dawning horror of the cost yet to be paid.
The Voidstalker SCREECHED – a sound that shattered the slowed rain into crystalline dust – and surged forward, talons outstretched to rend his reality apart.