PAST

  I was only six years old when Bram, my older brother, found me playing in the backyard. He'd gotten ahold of some blue-colored piece of coal from somewhere, and he looked like he'd been lit from the inside.

  "Do you know what this means, Microtek?" he asked, holding it out like it was proof of something.

  I shook my head. "No."

  His grin didn't even try to be subtle. "I'm going to be a Superstar. You remember what a Superstar is?"

  It clicked hard enough to make me sit up straighter. "Oh! Like Dante! He won!"

  "Yeah," Bram said, the word thick with admiration. "He's a Supernova now. And I'm going to be just like him." Then his voice dropped, and his eyes flicked toward the house. "But don't tell mom and dad."

  I frowned, confused by the sudden secret. "Why?"

  "They might not want me to do it," he said. "Say I'm too young."

  I looked at him; ten years old, taller than me, already acting like he could argue the universe into changing its mind. "You not too young," I told him. "You're ten!"

  Bram's laugh came out quick, like he'd just won something. "I know, right."

  Bram was always headstrong. No matter what anyone told him; shouldn't, couldn't, not allowed, he pushed anyway. Sometimes it worked out for the better. Other times, not so much. But watching him chase that idea with both hands gave me something solid to build on. Twenty-nine years later, when I became a Superstar too, I could still trace it back to that moment in the yard and the blue coal in his palm.

  PRESENT

  Tarshira and Gharshira, my beloved sister Syncs, had me posted up in the prep bay of my streamjet while they ran a final sweep on my Sho-Tek suit. They moved with the familiar efficiency of people who'd helped me build something brilliant.

  The suit looked like simple black garb; light, flexible, almost modest. Which was the point. Antian layers sat beneath it, tougher than they had any right to be. Still, "tough" wasn't the same thing as "immune." In a room full of Superstars, even the weakest one could get lucky and tear through me with the right super attack and a bad angle.

  Van Black didn't help.

  The SRC file gave me a neat little bundle of labels: strong, fast, aura of low-frequency radiation. Which sounded comforting if you believed the SRC couldn't be nudged, sanded down, or outright rewritten. I'd built half my life on data. That didn't mean I trusted whoever got to publish it.

  Gharshira's eyes flicked over my shoulder seal like she was inspecting a cheap hem. "I'm still voting for the Chumaki," she said. "It's the one that doesn't come with a complimentary funeral."

  I kept my arms out while Tarshira checked the underlayer at my ribs. "Have you seen the size of this guy? If he decides to be strong at me, my skeleton's going to file a complaint about choosing the wrong Sho-Tek."

  Tarshira didn't look up. "Strength is his highest attribute. That is not an opinion. It is the chart."

  Gharshira made a face and tapped a diagnostic line on my forearm housing. "Also: his body emits radiation. Which is adorable. He's like a walking hazard symbol."

  "Low-level radiation," I said. "The Shomaki screens it. I designed it to chew through that frequency range."

  "And if he decides to stop being 'low-level'?" Gharshira asked, sweetly, like she was offering me a dessert menu.

  I caught my reflection in the dark panel of a storage locker, forehead antenna, eyes too sharp, mouth doing its best "sure, this is fine" impression. "Then we add prayer," I said. "Possibly yelling. But yeah, definitely prayer."

  Outside the bay, Roxy's voice started up, bright and practiced, turning bloodsport into a party trick. My omniband clamped tighter around my wrist and threw a countdown at my ears: 60 seconds.

  A minute.

  My hearts, both of them, went from steady to sprinting like they'd just seen the exit sign.

  I pulled my mask on. The internal screen lit up with clean confirmations: systems stable, power steady, seals ready. Everything green. Everything sharp. The Sho-Tek wasn't just state of the art; it was my best answer so far. Three builds over a year, each one smarter and meaner than the last, and this one was tuned by my Syncs until it fit like it belonged.

  Tarshira pressed her hand to my shoulder, quick, grounding. "Good luck."

  Gharshira's smile was all teeth. "Don't die or we die."

  "Relax," I said, and gave them my most confident smile. "I've done the math. I'm only mostly doomed." Then, softer: "I got this."

  The countdown kept dropping.

  Somewhere beyond that door, Van Black was waiting; strong, fast, glowing just enough to be a problem.

  And in sixty seconds, we were going to find out how honest his file really was.

  The Coalition's teleport always announces itself like a bad joke; pins-and-needles across my skin, a half-second of vertigo, then the slow insult of those two full seconds where you're nowhere and you know it.

  Mine doesn't do that. Mine is instant. Clean. Professional.

  Theirs dropped me into water.

  Cold pressure wrapped around my suit and tried to remind me I had lungs. My antenna twitched under the mask as the shock hit, like it was offended on my behalf.

  "Damn it," I said into empty comms, because if you don't complain, the universe assumes you're fine.

  Nature's Teeth. An eerie glow washed the space in bluish light, turning fish and drifting life into silhouettes that looked cut from paper. No horizon. No surface. No seafloor in sight yet. Just water and motion and the thud of my own hearts deciding this was a great time to be dramatic.

  I snapped up a holographic keyboard. Neon keys floated in front of my visor while curious sea life swam straight through the projection like it wasn't there; because it wasn't. I ran a quick fix on my orientation, then pulled distance-to-target.

  Casino Island: 6,400 kilometers.

  Jonah's speed: seven times sound.

  I did the math before my CPU finished being smug and posting the answer anyway.

  Thirty minutes.

  Thirty minutes underwater with a mystery man hunting me.

  My teleportation was still the fastest tool I had, but it came with its own petty limitation: it wouldn't take inorganic matter with it. Which meant I couldn't just grab a rock, tag a location, and blink my way out with an anchor. I could move me. Not the world around me. The universe loved rules when they were inconvenient.

  I fired the boot thrusters and cut through Aphlis's thick water like I owned it. The suit adjusted; micro-jets compensating for drag, stabilizers correcting my angle. A year of building these things and it still felt weirdly intimate, like the armor knew what I was about to do before I did.

  Survive thirty minutes. That was the only objective that mattered. Everything else was style points.

  I moved forty feet off the drop point and planted the Backfire arrow launcher, locking it to a stable patch of rock I could barely see through the haze. I tagged Van Black's profile as the only valid target. The system accepted the constraint with a little green confirmation that said: I will not shoot the fish. Great. My suit was more ethical than most people I'd met.

  A warning ping flared on my HUD: water spout formation, two hundred fifty meters to my left.

  "Tornado field," I muttered. "Hard pass."

  I angled down another fifty feet. The pressure climbed. The light thinned. The ocean stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a closed fist.

  I unclipped the gravity well generator from the housing near my left shoulder blade and set it to float in place. Easy to miss if you weren't looking for it; and I was hoping Van Black was the kind of opponent who made "How'd I miss that?" his whole personality.

  A red indicator blinked across my view: OPPONENT LOCATED.

  I followed the arrow and toggled enhanced scope with infrared overlay. The seafloor resolved into dark shapes and harder edges. And there he was.

  Van Black stood planted on the ocean floor like the water was his air; head to toe in a skin-tight black suit, mask smooth and eyeless. No expression. No tells. Just mass and intent. The kind of stillness that wasn't calm so much as stored violence.

  He didn't chase the way normal people chased. He waited, as if the chase was inevitable and he didn't need to hurry.

  My stomach tightened anyway.

  "Of course," I whispered. "A living shadow with muscles."

  I couldn't tell if he was facing me or simply angled in my direction, but the hair on my arms lifted under the suit like it knew. If his mask had the same kind of augmentation mine did, he could be tracking my heat signature, my thruster wash, the tiny changes in pressure I left behind. If he didn't...

  Then he was worse than the file suggested.

  I held still, letting the sea swallow the noise of my systems, and watched him for one extra beat; long enough to confirm he hadn't reacted to my last trap placement.

  Then I started moving again, slow and deliberate, because the first rule of surviving a predator was simple: Don't be the most interesting thing in the water.

  A school of fish slid across my sightline; their silver bodies, obscuring my vision like a living curtain. It lasted maybe a second, but it was enough.

  Van Black was gone.

  My eyes couldn't find him, but my sensors didn't need eyes. A warning line snapped across my HUD: INBOUND. FAST. DIRECT.

  "Of course," I muttered, and reached for the one thing on my belt that always felt reassuring right up until you actually had to use it.

  I yanked my kinetic hammer free. The handle telescoped out with a clean mechanical click, extending until it matched my height, the weight balancing as my suit compensated for the water's drag. It looked solid in my grip. It felt... theoretical.

  I didn't like that feeling.

  I'd left the gravity well generator behind as a trap. I'd done the math. I'd done the prep. And still, watching that red marker eat up distance, my confidence started doing what confidence always does when it meets reality: it tries to hide.

  Did I choose the right Sho-Tek?

  The file called him the Death Hand. No explanation. Just a name that sat in the mouth like a threat. And right then I couldn't stop thinking about Gharshira and her "wear the Chumaki" face, like she could see the headline and she didn't like my odds.

  Van Black closed in, a dark mass cutting through the water with purpose, and something in my brain unspooled a memory I hadn't asked for.

  Not helpful, brain.

  Bram was always prepared for danger. Being heir to our parents' corporation meant competitors hired kidnappers. Hitmen. Quiet problems with loud consequences. Cycloids died carelessly all the time; people who thought money was armor. That's why most top execs used liv-tek decoys. Because a realistic copy was better than a funeral; but not cheaper.

  Van Black surged closer.

  And I remembered the day I thought assassins had finally gotten to Bram.

  PAST

  It was right after I figured out how to create backfire energy.

  The triangular container I built was small enough for my child hands to wrap around, but the green swirl inside it wasn't small at all. It fed on itself, stable and hungry, a loop I'd designed to keep running. The kind of power that could keep our modest home lit forever; no favors owed, no bills, no "sorry, we're cutting you off."

  The first person I wanted to show was Bram.

  I padded into his room with the container held out in front of me like a prize.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, shirt off. The blue coal hung from his neck on a cord, resting against his chest like a charm.

  And he was covered in blood.

  My brain tried to make it not real. Tried to turn it into paint, or a prank, or a nightmare you could wake up from.

  Then I saw the cut on his forehead, deep, raw, and it split wider right in front of my eyes. Fresh fluid ran down his face in a slow line that didn't care about my denial. His arms were mottled with bruises. Cuts crossed his torso in angry tracks, each one leaking. Blood had pooled under the fabric of his workout pants, dark and spreading.

  The container slipped in my grip.

  I screamed. Full lungs. Full terror. The kind of sound that doesn't belong to language.

  Bram's eyes snapped open.

  My scream climbed higher as I bolted from the room.

  "Micro-tek! Wait!" he shouted.

  I ran and not the brave kind. Not the kind you tell people about later. Just six-year-old panic with legs, because Bram had been bleeding in a way that didn't look survivable and my brain couldn't find a safer plan.

  Mom was in her hover chair on a conference call; her voice smooth, like nothing in the universe could interrupt her. I burst into her line of sight anyway.

  "Mom-"

  She glanced at me and kept talking. A silencing force field snapped around her chair, neat and absolute. My words hit it and vanished.

  Fine. Great. Helpful.

  I pivoted and sprinted for Dad.

  Most Cycloids were obese, around ninety percent, easy, so tech did the walking for them. Mom was no exception. Dad could still move under his own power, but slowly, like his body negotiated every step. I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him, babbling, pointing, making sounds that weren't sentences.

  He saw my face. That did it. He called for Mom, calm but edged, the way he spoke when he expected to be listened to.

  Mom ended the call at Dad's urging. Not mine. She drifted into the living room with that controlled calm people mistake for kindness.

  Bram was already there.

  He had a bloody towel in his hand and he was pressing it to himself like this effort alone could make him look normal. He stood straight, shoulders tight, trying to sell the idea that everything was fine.

  He failed.

  "Did I look that bad?" he asked, like we were discussing a bruise.

  "You looked dead!" I blurted, and my voice cracked because the word was too big.

  Dad's eyes swept Bram fast, taking in the damage. "Son, what happened?"

  Bram opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

  "I will call the doctor," Mom said, hands already moving, already choosing.

  "That's not necessary, Mom," Bram said quickly. "Really. Please stop."

  "Ok, Bram," Mom replied.

  Which sounded like agreement if you didn't know her. Mom didn't become C.O.O. of Vel Metal by doing what other people wanted. She became it by promising to, then doing whatever she'd decided anyway.

  Dr. Ria arrived ten minutes later. His hover chair seemed barely able to hold his girth afloat, stabilizers whining softly as he floated into the room. He didn't waste time asking Bram how he felt. He looked at the injuries and went straight to the point.

  "I have encountered these types of injuries plenty of times in my career, Mrs. and Mr. Nova," he said. "Your son has bonded to a soul coal."

  Mom's composure snapped like a wire. "What!!!"

  Dad's face tightened. "Oh, Bram."

  Bram leaned forward to bargain with the moment. "What? I'm okay, right, doc?"

  "Yes," Dr. Ria said. "Now after I grafted your skin together. But you need to lie down. You lost a lot of blood."

  "It's cool," Bram said, trying for a grin he didn't earn. "I'm always making more."

  "This is no laughing matter, young man," Dr. Ria cut in, voice sharpening. "You are only ten. I've seen what happens to full grown adults. Only death awaits you down this path."

  Bram's jaw set. "People do it all the time."

  "Bram, that's enough!" Mom's voice hit hard. "Where is the soul coal?"

  Bram held it up by the rope, letting it hang like it wasn't the reason my stomach still felt hollow. Mom didn't reach with her hands. A tractor beam snapped from her hover chair, ripped it from his grasp, and crushed it into blue powder right in front of him.

  Dad's tone stayed steady. "Your mother's right, son. You are much too young to be doing something like this."

  Bram's control finally cracked. "But time moves differently there! Those cuts were fifteen days old! The monsters couldn't touch me after that! I was kicking so much bu-"

  "Bram Nova!" Mom snapped. "You will be silent this instant! You will not be getting your hands on a soul coal ever again!"

  He went quiet. Even at six, I knew he wouldn't listen.

  He was grounded for two weeks, no friends, no martial art practice, nothing. Three days later, Bram had another soul coal.

  Present

  I flexed my toes and the boot thrusters answered, nudging me backward through the water like I'd just remembered something I left at home. Van Black followed.

  Sixty feet and closing.

  I could've pushed harder. I didn't. Not yet. If you show your ceiling early, you spend the rest of the fight living under someone else's plan. I held at about eighty percent thrust, enough to look like effort, not enough to tell the truth. He still gained.

  I brought my kinetic hammer up across my body, a defensive line in a place where "defensive" was mostly wishful thinking. Van Black ate the distance and then he was on me, throwing a punch like the ocean was empty. No drag. No hesitation. Just speed and intent.

  My mind flashed to Bram, because it always did when something hit hard.

  I'd based my hammer on his Bamma Slamma. My brother also fancied himself a poet, which was the generous way of saying he named techniques like he was trying to win a contest nobody else had entered. His mallet had been no bigger than a standard tool, and it could halt any attack and drop anyone he tagged with it.

  Mine wasn't that. Mine was the best I could build without being Bram.

  I met his punch with the hammer head. Metal hit knuckle with a thud that I felt through my gloves. The meter-long handle lit up, glow skittering along it, electricity crackling as the suit drank in the impact. Kinetic capture into conversion. Conversion into backfire. Backfire into payback.

  I swung again, two hands, full suit strength, pouring everything I had into momentum.

  The hammer absorbed the energy from motion, his, mine, the shove of water-and routed it into my systems. My suit translated it into backfire energy and fed it back into the weapon, stacking the charge like I was building a bomb in real time.

  Van Black caught the handle mid-swing. One hand with no strain. He locked it in place like I was a child having a tantrum. Then he went for my head with his other fist.

  I boosted, hard, skating over the blow and up above him. My shoulder harness pulled, trying to keep the weapon aligned. I yanked back, expecting leverage to do something.

  He didn't move.

  My Shomaki Sho-Tek was designed for high-level strength matchups. In it, I could crush concrete slabs into pebbles. I'd tested it. Re-tested it. Broke my own equipment proving the numbers were real.

  Van Black stopped my two-handed swing with one hand and didn't even look the least bit stressed. I might've chosen the right suit, but it still might not be enough.

  My thrusters added force to my pull. He pulled too. For a split second, it was humiliatingly simple; a tug of war over my precious weapon, like we were children fighting over the last good thing in the room.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Then my ears rang, not from sound, but alarm.

  A radiation warning flared across my HUD, urgent red chewing at the edge of my vision. I didn't have time to isolate the type or map the profile. All I had was the message: worse than expected.

  I made a decision that tasted like losing and shoved it down anyway. I let go.

  The moment my fingers released the handle, I rocketed away, straight toward where I'd planted the second trap. Van Black could have the hammer for now. A weapon in his hand didn't matter if I could turn the field into a problem he couldn't muscle through.

  "Okay," I muttered into my own suit, because apparently I enjoyed narrating my bad choices. "Gharshira was right. Again. I hate that."

  The Chumaki had been made for this; for opponents who generated massive amounts of energy. For bodies that emitted hazards as casually as heat.

  New strategy. Stay away. Keep moving. Make him spend. Make him commit.

  Wait for my Mek-Tek to arrive.

  My CPU flashed the updated countdown: 26 minutes, 55 seconds.

  I didn't need it. I felt every second in my blood.

  The gravity well generator was about forty meters northeast of me. I headed that way, casual drift, controlled thrust, like it was coincidence and not the only plan I had left that didn't involve begging.

  He followed.

  The radiation coming off him had climbed again in the last half-minute. My HUD kept screaming about it in angry red, like it was offended I hadn't already solved the problem by being less alive.

  I needed him watching me, not reading the water.

  I popped the right-thigh compartment and pulled a spare converter, then snapped it onto the cable routed under my bicep and down my right side. One quick re-route and the power budget feeding my suit's right arm diverted into the converter instead. I clicked it into the focal lens assembly in my gloves.

  Instant high-intensity laser. The kind no law enforcement agency would sign off on unless they were also planning a cover-up. The catch: aiming at something super fast in dense water is basically "hope with math."

  I fired and a white burn tore through the blue-lit gloom. Van Black slid aside, which was fine, because hitting him wasn't the point. I wanted his attention pulled outward while his body drifted inward.

  He rose above my eye level, just enough to make tracking awkward. My visor chased him, laser trying to bracket his movement, my arm lagging a fraction behind every change in direction.

  Then he dropped. One moment he was high, the next he was lower and closer, my range collapsing before I could re-center. His kick drove into my solar plexus.

  Pain punched through me, clean and immediate. The suit didn't fail, but it didn't lie either; I felt it. Antian was durable and expensive, pulled from deep Winsker rock and refined until it could be molded. Vitalized, it moved like cloth and still took punishment like metal. We'd pressure-tested the Sho-Tek beyond anything reasonable.

  Reason meant nothing to Van Black.

  I held together. I also learned exactly where the bruise was going to bloom later. He followed with a left strike.

  I slipped it, faster than he expected, and answered with a kick, tight timing, using the water's resistance to hide the snap. My foot hit his ribs and it felt like I'd just kicked a wall that lifts weights.

  His knee slammed into my midsection and I used the impact as propulsion, letting it shove me out of his immediate reach before he could chain it into something worse.

  He didn't give me space, fist homing in. I dodged and dodged again. The next one I blocked, and the force still sent me flying back, armor stabilizers fighting to keep my body from tumbling head over feet.

  He kept throwing. Fast. Focused. Like he had a reason beyond "win."

  My breathing started to roughen. I could feel the suit compensating, but my body was still doing the part where it remembers it's underwater and gets dramatic about it.

  Is he just trying to end this quickly? Or does he want me?

  He was from Quil, my world's main competitor in manufactured goods, which meant grudges came with invoices.

  My sensors fed me two updates at the same time: the gravity well was close, and the radiation in the water around us was pushing into hazardous.

  I waited for the first clean opening, when his angle meant he'd be watching my retreat instead of scanning the space I was leading him through. Then I pushed off at a diagonal, careful to keep the trap out of his direct sight.

  He surged after me, exactly as predicted.

  As soon as we entered range, I triggered the generator.

  I let my posture sag a fraction, let him think he'd timed it perfectly. Let him commit to the straight, brutal line that had been working so far.

  At the last second, I thrust under his path, tight, quick, no wasted motion. The gravity field snapped alive and Van Black drove straight into it.

  Tek isn't like regular tech. It doesn't run on "good enough" parts and wishful thinking. It needs three things to even exist: a focus that can be persuaded to express the right property, a power source strong enough to force the effect into reality, and a casing that won't split when you ask it to contain something that wants to tear free.

  My Sho-Tek runs on backfire energy, the loop I created when I was six. It still feels wrong that something I made with child hands powers armor that can keep me alive.

  My gravity gear is worse. The focus for it is a miniature black hole, stabilized in the pack on my back. Carrying it that close used to spike my anxiety, I thought my hair would fall out. I keep doing it anyway. So far, I've been lucky.

  Van Black hung in the water with his fist still outstretched, stock still. Bits of flotsam drifted past him like he was the center of a slow, harmless snow globe. It looked like my machine had trapped him inside a cube of water; one tight pocket held rigid while the rest of the ocean behaved like nothing was happening.

  I smiled.

  No Mek-Tek. No last-second save needed. I'd done it with the tools I already had.

  Roxy's holographic form dropped in from above, bright and too cheerful for the setting, zipping around him and inspecting the frozen shadow from every angle.

  "Superstar Van Black has been immobilized! As per the rules, he has until the count of ten to escape or Superstar Narshira is the victor. One... two... three... four... five..."

  A giant orange hand appeared over my generator and crushed the device down to the size of a of soul coal.

  "Damn it."

  He'd been trapped a full five seconds before she even started counting. And now he was free.

  The enormous hand pinched the ruined ball between its thumb and middle finger and flicked it at me.

  I dodged and pushed back hard, keeping distance as Van Black advanced. The moment the hand showed, my radiation alarms escalated, hazard radius expanding to about ninety meters. My suit's analysis spat out the particulate profile: protons, and multiple forms of hydrogen nuclei.

  Okay. That wasn't comforting, but it was usable.

  This plan was dangerous and might go sideways fast, but his strength and radiation output were already past what the SRC said, past what I'd prepared for. If I stayed on the same track, I'd lose.

  So: new track.

  First, I had to reach the first trap I'd set. I needed the arrows inside it, because the launcher itself was probably about to become another casualty of "Van Black is too powerful." The arrows were the part I could repurpose.

  If I could modify the energy output they produced while avoiding his hits, I could give him a taste of his own ability.

  I did the math; minimum: forty-two seconds. And Van Black was still coming.

  That orange radiation hand shot toward me, too fast for something that big, and for a heartbeat my brain stalled on the mismatch.

  My CPU did the math for me this time; if that thing closed around me, my Sho-Tek would last under thirty seconds.

  I'd last under a tenth of that.

  I slapped the tri-shaped button on my chest and triggered the repellant field.

  The Tek behind it was almost annoyingly simple in concept: vitalized titanium for structure, a small run of esire vines as wiring, backfire energy as the power source. The nightmare part was the focus. You need something small enough to carry and strong enough to impose a property that wouldn't crack under no amount of pressure.

  Metal wasn't reliable. The strongest metals, except vitalized zantinum, which I can't get, can be pierced if someone brings enough force to the party and doesn't care what it costs. So I went mineral instead. Milo diamond. Ultra-rare, only found on the water world Earth, and it had exactly what I needed.

  My electromagnetic shielding snapped into place a split second before contact; quadrilateral, full enclosure, clean geometry wrapped around my body.

  The hand wrapped around it and stopped cold.

  It didn't push through. It didn't dent. It just met a wall that might as well have been a law of nature. With the density tuned to Milo diamond, the only thing I could picture punching through it was another Milo diamond moving at the speed of light, and Van Black wasn't throwing that...yet.

  The hand tried to constrict anyway. The orange brightened, red streams ran inside it, and those streams flowed faster as it tightened, like the color was part of the mechanism.

  Van Black gestured and the hand flung me hard toward a cluster of waterspouts.

  "Nature's Teeth," I spat because I didn't have a better word for the universe deciding to add unscientific weather to the murder.

  Tek has one advantage over its predecessor that I appreciate more every time someone tries to turn me into paste: it doesn't malfunction, doesn't go obsolete, doesn't need recharging. I could leave the shield up for two years if I wanted.

  But "stay inside a bubble forever" isn't a win condition.

  I kept it on anyway as I entered the first set of undersea tornadoes. The funnels hammered me from multiple angles, spinning and shoving, the kind of violent randomness you'd normally only see in a kid holo game, except this one came with mind numbing terror and consequences.

  When the spouts dumped me into a small clearing, I dropped the shield and checked my sensors. A radiation front was coming after me, fast enough that calling it super swift felt like lying.

  I didn't wait to study it. I torpedoed deeper into a fresh set of forming spouts, forcing the water to do some of my fighting for me.

  As I cut through, I caught glimpses of the source: jagged fissures in the rock below venting air that fed the spirals. Aphlis didn't just have an ocean; it had features that acted like they'd been built to punish anyone who needed a stable environment.

  I knew almost nothing about this planet beyond what my instruments could scrape together mid-panic. It wasn't just unfamiliar, it was actively strange.

  My suit counted eleven waterspouts within fifteen meters, with more turbulence building beyond. One of them tugged at me hard enough to shift my trajectory, the pull trying to commit me to the spin. I kicked thrust higher, bought a few seconds, and angled away before it could grab my whole body.

  I didn't know the destructive power of waterspouts in general, let alone here. I wasn't interested in finding out. So I kept moving, deeper, faster, and just unpredictable enough to make Van Black work for every meter.

  My sensors flagged the hand's incoming strike before my eyes caught up. My CPU flashed an advised route like it was scolding me for being slow, and I followed it on instinct; cut left, drop, then snap right.

  The radiation fist hit the rocky outcropping that fed the spouts with a punch that felt like a bomb going off in a locked room. The stone shivered, water surging, the whole area got angrier.

  I told my suit to locate the edge of Nature's Teeth. Van Black didn't let the calculation finish.

  He was suddenly right there, close enough that he felt like my shadow about to kill me. His mask was blank black, featureless. No nose ridge, no mouth line, nothing. It wasn't intimidation so much as erasure. I couldn't read him because there was nothing to read.

  Can he see through it? Or is he blind and tracking me with something else; pressure shifts, heat, the electrical signature of my suit? If he didn't need eyes, then I'd been giving him the wrong distractions since the start. He is a Soul Style user, after all. They have all kinds of tricks.

  He came in swinging.

  Underwater gave me extra angles, extra ways to slip away, and I used them. I avoided most of his hits by cutting sideways and letting the water steal just enough speed from his strikes to make them miss. A few I couldn't dodge fast enough, so I blocked.

  One impact ran straight up my right arm and left it numb from elbow to fingers. Another punch was already incoming when a waterspout erupted between us like the ocean decided it wanted a turn.

  The currents grabbed everything; me, Van Black, fish, debris, and spun us hard. I toggled autopilot and let the suit do what it was built to do: get me out. It ripped me free of the funnel in a sharp, controlled vector that left my head spinning and my right shoulder screaming where the twister had wrenched it.

  I kept rising, fathom by fathom, dodging spouts until I cleared the field.

  My sensors pinged the arrow trap: a little over twenty meters.

  I hit the boosters and shot for it.

  Van Black cleared the spouts a heartbeat later and stayed on my tail.

  The orange hand returned, full size again, fingers spread as it surged forward to grab, melt, and crush. I couldn't stop. Stopping meant getting held. I could only snatch the trap in passing.

  I was already bracing to trigger my shielding when, a blade buried itself into the giant palm.

  Ten meters long. Four meters wide. It punched through the hand like it had mass rules and the construct didn't. The handle was as wide as I was tall, and a chain, eight inches thick, ran off into the distance; one hundred fifty yards of ugly intent ending in a wrecking ball scavenged from some dead construction machine.

  The chain snapped tight and blade split the orange hand clean in two.

  The weapon retracted fast, yanked back to wherever it had launched from, leaving the hand to shred apart and dissolve into the water like a bad idea realizing it wasn't welcome.

  Something huge drifted down between me and Van Black.

  He stopped short, first real hesitation I'd seen out of him, looking the newcomer up and down like he'd just met a problem he couldn't brute-force immediately.

  My backup had arrived. And his name was Jonah.

  Twenty-five feet of frog-shaped Mek-Tek, built for underwater combat; big frame, built to push through pressure and chaos. The hatch in his back opened invitingly.

  I didn't hesitate. I swam inside and sealed it. Don't need the arrows now.

  "Time to rock!"

  Past

  "Time to rock" was Bram's way of announcing the conversation was over and the outcome belonged to him. He didn't say it when he was confident. He said it when he'd decided he was done being reasonable.

  I'd heard it the loudest during the Final Bout of the 98th competition-Bram versus Loque, a Klugh who'd gone undefeated the entire tournament with water-based Soul Style techniques that made other water style users look like they belonged in the kiddie pool.

  I'm not proud of this, but I didn't know if Bram could take him. Loque was that good. His control was so precise he could influence the water inside a living body. The first time they faced off, Bram's Sync died in his place.

  I remember the way my stomach stopped working after that. The way my thoughts slowed down like someone had throttled them. I saw my brother die. But it wasn't him, just his lookalike. It still made me feel queasy.

  By the Finals, the tournament had moved to the space station Galaxy, parked around one hundred million miles from the Papuru Star. The arena was a big round slab of stone with a self-contained atmosphere sealed over it, and we spectators sat excited around the edge like we were ringside at an execution disguised as sport.

  I was wedged between my parents, who were suddenly, publicly happy to have a Superstar son. They didn't even try to hide the way their mood tracked with Bram's win rate. Both their companies saw profit spikes that year, the kind of gains that made boardrooms purr. Bram had exceeded their expectations, which meant they'd started treating him like an asset they loved.

  In that moment, though, he looked like he was running out of time.

  Bram was bloody and burned. He'd already spent his Aura Cloak. A wall of boiling water chased him across the field while Loque closed the distance behind it, clearly aiming to get close enough to touch Bram and superheat the water in his tissue.

  I was days shy of my sixteenth birthday and all I could think was: this is going to be my present. A bloody headline. A silence where my brother used to be.

  Steam lashed the station's force field ten feet above our heads as Bram used his Soul Style's Quickening to stay ahead of the wave on the arena itself. When I glanced at Loque, he looked more focused than before, like maintaining that much water was costing him something real.

  I looked back to Bram and my brain stuttered.

  He was rising, floating high above us, past the boundary of the conjured atmosphere and into open space like it was a summer breeze.

  That didn't make sense. The station's artificial gravity in the fight zone was triple our home planet's. It never seemed to bother Bram, but he'd never shown any ability to defy gravity outright. Not like that.

  The gasp started with my parents and spread outward in a ripple of disbelief.

  And then I saw what was behind him.

  The planet Yon filled the space past his silhouette; barren desert, sun-scorched mountains, all harsh geometry and unforgiving light. It was so huge in that frame that it made Bram look small for the first time in his life.

  Now I understood why Loque was struggling. His wave wasn't just water anymore. It was weight. It was drag. It was fighting the station and the planet's gravity.

  The video feed shoved up close; catching Bram, all blood, burn marks and stubbornness, looking down with the sternness I come to associate with doing what he needed to get what he wanted

  "Time to rock!" he said, almost remorsefully.

  We only heard Bram because Soul Style has something called Sustenance. His omniband carried his voice even out there in vacuum; some not-quite-scientific trick about the body recycling its own oxygen long enough to do the unthinkable.

  Yon filled the background behind him like it owned the sky. Even so, the Papuru Star's deep-violet light still leaked through; until it didn't, something vast sliding across the light.

  At first my brain refused to name it. Then it resolved into a silhouette so enormous it made the arena feel like a coin on a table. A volcano range, one peak the size of my home city, drifting through space like it had been cut loose from reality and told to find a new home.

  It moved past Bram and came to a stop over the arena and the audience. Galaxy Station still dwarfed it, technically, but the range made me feel microscopic; a dust bug in a room where gods were rearranging furniture.

  All around us, faces went slack with awe. Even Loque froze, his focus breaking for the first time in the entire tournament. His awe turned to terror, clean and immediate, as lava started dumping from underneath.

  I can't properly describe what it does to you, watching hundreds, maybe thousands, of tons of molten rock fall toward your head. I don't know what Loque felt, but I felt my soul trying to leave my body, which was frozen with fear.

  The magma hit the station's force field and the barrier flared into white static, swallowing a huge portion of our view as the fire poured like a fountain. The sound in the arena became one solid scream, mine included, completely wasted.

  Galaxy Station was the most sophisticated and well defended installation in the galaxy. It could probably take an assault from the entire 108 fleet, all while keeping the gift shop open.

  We never saw Loque again. He vanished inside the fire, and that was that.

  It took Bram less than an hour to return the lava flow, the volcano range, and the planet back to where they belonged, and showed up at the victory ceremony when it was done.

  I ran to him and hugged him so hard I honestly thought I'd reopened every injury he'd already suffered.

  "Nice to see you too, Microtek," he said, voice rough with amusement. "You didn't actually think I'd lose, did you?"

  "There were moments I thought you were dead," I said, and my voice came out sharper than I meant, part relief, part accusation.

  Bram laughed, because Bram always laughed at danger. "Me too."

  I pulled back just enough to look at him properly, like my eyes could confirm he was still real. "Did you really drag Yon all the way here with your powers?"

  "I got lucky," he said, suddenly more serious. "It orbit was close enough to arrive in time to matter."

  I stared at him, trying to fit that sentence into my understanding of the universe. "Soul Style is... insane."

  "In its purest form," Bram replied, and there was a weight in it I didn't understand.

  That was when our parents arrived to claim him. They were smiling the way people smile when something they own is about to pay its weight. They started guiding him away toward the Controllers of Cy, already talking about holographs and appearances like the ceremony mattered more than what we'd just watched.

  Bram glanced back at me. He promised he'd see me at my birthday party in a couple of days and I'm almost sure that was the last time I ever spoke to my brother.

  Present

  I only needed a glance at Jonah's control system. If anything was off, my Syncs would've been yelling in my ears before the first warning light.

  Gharshira's voice came through the internal speakers with that polished edge. "Should've worn the Chumaki."

  Even filtered through Jonah's audio, I could hear the smug. She'd earned it. I didn't have the energy to fight her and Van Black at the same time.

  "I will pretend I'm learning from this," I said.

  I switched to manual control. No matter how many simulations I run, a living brain reads chaos better than a digital one. At least my brain does. Not bragging. Just... statistically supported.

  I slammed the focus emitters to one hundred percent and felt the pilot seat hum as the system came fully online. If Van Black wanted maximum problems, fine. I'd stop being polite.

  He didn't hesitate. Jonah's size didn't intimidate him for a second. He drove a strike straight into Jonah's frog face. We slid back maybe ten feet, but the vitalized plating held.

  I pulled and pressed the sequence that brought Jonah's modified chain weapon online; the wrecking-ball end swinging out and circling with a heavy, patient momentum. The design started as an Earth chain-sickle concept, but I'd ditched the curved blade for a straight one.

  Van Black came again, and the water around Jonah started to move differently, faster, twisting around his metal body like something invisible was stirring it. A yellow fish slapped into my forward camera lens. I felt bad for one second. Then Van Black entered striking range and my priorities snapped back into place.

  This time I let him think his hit was landing. I jerked the controls and Jonah shifted, huge body gliding aside with a speed that made me very proud. The wrecking ball swung through the space I expected Van Black to be.

  It hit him dead-on.

  Bubbles exploded from the impact. His masked head snapped back and his body vanished into the gloom with a satisfying violence I felt in my chest, like a breath returning.

  Not a knockout. I wasn't that optimistic. But it was a real hit. A reminder that he wasn't the only one that hits hard. He came right back in, same speed, same aggression, no visible damage. Like the wrecking ball had been a suggestion.

  Aura Cloak. "Right. Of course you have that."

  If he'd burned it there, it was out of the way now. I hoped. I pushed the emitters again, solidifying sections of water into tri-shaped projectiles. Old Cycloid throwers, brutal little geometry built to punch through armor when our ancestors didn't have better options. They launched toward him in a tight spread.

  They didn't reach him because the orange hand returned, this time in a set.

  "Are you serious?" I said, and it came out a laugh.

  The two fists swatted my tri-stars apart faster than I could make them, breaking them into tumbling fragments that dissolved back into the sea.

  I triggered the shoulder jets. Jonah vented foaming bubbles in a thick bloom, turning the water into a white mess that hid both of us. My sensors kept Van Black tagged.

  But could he still find me?

  I didn't wait to learn the answer. The moment visibility went, I moved, straight up. One of the fists plunged down through the foam, knuckles first, aiming to crush.

  I flipped Jonah into slashing mode. Two fast arcs of his left arm and the fist came apart into four chunks before it dissipated. Great. I'd just shredded irradiated matter into the ocean like confetti. Sorry, fish.

  The second hand reached out of the foam for Jonah's right leg.

  I activated shielding a split second before contact. Sparks flared as radiation met particle defense, the ocean briefly lit by our collision. The hand strained, failed, and withdrew. I followed with a wrecking-ball swing and broke it apart mid-retreat.

  For a moment-an actual moment-things looked manageable.

  Then I couldn't find Van Black.

  Gharshira's voice cut in, sharp enough to make me flinch. "He faded. Invisibility. The viewscopes can't track him either."

  Tarshira followed, calm and dreadful in the way she always was. "It's possible he's bending the light produced by the geodome."

  "I realize that," I said, grimly.

  Jonah's external gauges started climbing, temperature rising in a ring about a hundred yards out in every direction. Micro radiation. A perimeter.

  He wasn't hunting me, he was building an oven.

  Dead fish drifted upward. Bubbles rose, steaming.

  "He's going to cook me in here," I said, mostly to myself.

  I didn't trust the shielding against this much electromagnetic output and I wasn't interested in learning its failure point.

  Jonah could hit Zach-1 underwater, three thousand miles per hour. I coaxed every ounce of thrust out of his propulsion and ran.

  The radiation box stayed with us. No matter the direction, the heat followed. The shielding sparked. Alarms started screaming.

  Fine. If he wanted the whole ocean to be a weapon, I'd oblige.

  "Time to stop running," I muttered, and cranked Jonah into a hard spin. I fired the emitters while rotating at speed. The water around us solidified into a twisting ring, our own spinning shell, a forced whirlpool.

  Under normal conditions, water is decent at absorbing radiation. Under these conditions, we'd need to be absurdly deeper to get the shielding effect we wanted. Without that pressure, radiation breaks water down into reactive oxygen compounds before it recombines, dumping energy as it goes.

  Energy that can detonate.

  I held the spin, extended the field, and then ignited the buildup, hoping Van Black was close enough to regret it.

  The explosion wrapped around us.

  For a beat, I was grateful I hadn't tried this with my backfire arrows earlier. In my head it would've been elegant. In reality it would've been elegant and my death.

  Jonah lurched. The cockpit shook hard enough to rattle my teeth. A control panel to my left spat sparks, then another burst snapped above my head. The restraints bit into my shoulders as I got thrown back, and the flicker of light, bright, jittery, hit my brain sideways.

  Birthday candles.

  Bram.

  Past

  My birthday is the second-to-last day of the year. Bram's victory the day before had everyone glowing. For once, the family wasn't a battlefield. We were actually enjoying each other's company while we waited for him to show up.

  Aunts I didn't know we had. Uncles I hadn't seen since I was a toddler. More cousins than any sane person should be expected to tolerate, all floating, rolling, or crawling on expensive high-tech chairs that looked like luxury and sounded like money.

  They asked the usual questions, the ones that pretend to be friendly while digging for weakness.

  What's it like having a brother like Bram? Why are you so thin? And my personal favorite, delivered with that curious little tilt of pity: "You can't control your technology telepathically?"

  A rare birth defect that affects .012 of Cycloids. Statistically interesting. Socially exhausting. Who cared? Not me.

  The first time there was space to disappear without it becoming a scene, I slipped away to Bram's room.

  I spent a lot of time there when I wasn't in the lab. Bram had moved out at sixteen. Now I was sixteen too, and I was ready to be on my own as well. I'd planned to tell our parents that night, but I wanted Bram on my side first.

  Where was he? My pad beeped. I answered before the second tone could hit.

  Bram's three-dimensional head sprang out of the hololens, brown hair, tussled, grin already in place. Just seeing him made something in my chest unclench. I laughed, loud and real.

  "Happy birthday!" he said.

  "Bram!" I leaned in like he might disappear any moment. "Where are you? Everyone is here."

  "I'm still on Unity," he said, like it was a minor delay and not my entire night cracking in half. "The Coalition won't let me leave until I've completed some of the terms of my contract. Meeting important delegates and the sort." Then, brighter: "Hey, I even met Dante! He's here now!"

  "Oh..." The word came out thin. "You promised, Bram. I can't handle my family without you, bro. Come on."

  "I'm sorry, Narshira. I can't today." He said it gently, like gentleness could replace presence. "I promise to be by in the next couple of days."

  He glanced to his left, then back at me. Quick. Automatic. Like someone else was in the room with him.

  I wondered what my face looked like in that moment. If something was wrong in it, Bram didn't notice.

  "I'm going to call the house holo," he said. "Get the fam off your back for a little while. Happy birthday. I love you."

  Then the image winked out.

  I stood there, pad in my hand, waiting for the feeling to finish forming into something manageable.

  It didn't.

  The family cheered.

  I heard it from the hall, loud and sudden, and my stomach went cold. I opened Bram's door and stepped into the gaudy decorated corridor that led to the reception area.

  It was packed. Drunk Cycloids in expensive chairs, pressed close together, faces turned toward the wall where Bram's hologram had appeared; bigger, brighter, and treated like a holy event.

  He introduced Dante and the room erupted again. I stayed where I was, not moving, because my brain had snagged on one detail it couldn't let go.

  The Bram who'd just called me had called me Narshira, not Microtek. No way that was Bram.

  Present

  Jonah's systems were still up. No failures. No warnings. Green across the board. I build them tough.

  The water cleared enough for me to see I was alone. For a second I wondered if the blast had actually taken Van Black out.

  Sonar answered: incoming. Big. Fast.

  A boulder the size of a hoverbus came at me. I fired a missile from Jonah's left thigh and splintered it into smaller rocks.

  I turned Jonah toward the direction it came from and dropped all six depth bombs as I moved. They deployed from Jonah's rear ports. My Syncs giggled over comms like they'd been waiting all day for that.

  I didn't laugh. Van Black had me tense as hell.

  Sonar caught him, torpedo-fast, cutting through the disturbed water where the bombs had gone off. I pushed Jonah forward and spun the chain weapon, blade on one end and wrecking ball on the other. Water condensed around the ball as it rotated, hardening into a sheath.

  I threw the wrecking ball at him. The hardened water whipped ahead of it and speared fish on the way.

  First the hardened water, then the ball connected. Van Black didn't slow. Because he'd just used his Aura Cloak, damnit.

  The orange hand returned, avoided the water whip, and grabbed the chain. It pulled with strength that didn't make sense for a disembodied hand. Jonah pulled back. The cockpit shook.

  Rear cameras lit up, Van Black had already flanked to my six.

  I fired a missile at the hand while turning to face him. It missed.

  The hand surged forward and rammed the wrecking ball into Jonah's sword arm, bending it at a sick angle. The blade dropped into Van Black's grasp.

  Small man, huge sword. Not funny. The blade lined up toward the cockpit.

  "I lost," I said. "I'm dead."

  Then everything snapped.

  One second I was strapped in; the next I was sitting on cold metal, naked. A thermal blanket wrapped around me before I could get a word out.

  "What- Jonah!"

  "Calm down, Narshira," Tarshira said. "We saw the battle was lost and got you out."

  I blinked and oriented. My streamjet's observation deck. Gharshira stood at the holoview, watching.

  On-screen, two giant orange hands hammered Jonah with his own weapons.

  "My baby..." I said, and hated how it sounded.

  Both Syncs hugged me. I hugged back. I was alive. I could rebuild Jonah.

  Gharshira tilted her head, pure attitude. "Admit it. You designed the teleporter this way because you look good naked."

  I laughed despite myself.

  Over the holoview, Roxy's voice cut through. "Winner of Battle 5: Superstar Van Black!"