Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #4: In The Shadows

Pancho scratched a counter-script into the floor, paw flicks quick as sparks. "He's learned the plain. He's writing maps under us."

"Then we burn the map," Nocturnal said, and surged.

⸻

Chapter 26 — Cassiel's Defiance & Breaking the Map (combined)

The street crushed inward. Cassiel stayed tall.

"Gods don't hide behind birds," she said evenly, and walked her shots up Remnant's torso—three center mass, one snapping the jaw, one clipping shoulder servos. He lurched; laughter fizzed into a snarl. A crow detonated at her boots, static racing up her legs like shackles—and her anchor yanked her back, chains snapping off in showers of code.

She reloaded without looking. "I've seen your kind with different logos. You all bleed."

Nocturnal took the opening—low feint, rising cut—biting through Remnant's chestplate. Sparks. Ozone. Two predators locked: visor glow to skull-gleam, blade biting, claws grinding.

The false stalls groaned. Cassiel swung her rifle like a pry bar, jamming its stock into a seam where illusion met ground. "Pancho—jam it."

"On it!" The rat's tiny tool sparked; the seam spidered, the market collapsed, and the world snapped back to the base black floor. The three of them skidded, and the wires above went still, listening.

Remnant rolled to one knee, breathing hard through steel. "Better," he admitted. "Proof you're worth taking apart."

"Try," Cassiel said.

⸻

Chapter 27 — Titans Under a White Sky (combined)

They hit like storms.

Nocturnal's exo sang through muscle and bone; Remnant's Project Fly chassis answered with brutal leverage. Air-rounds cracked past the half-skull; claws screamed against titanium; a knee found armor; an elbow found a servo gap. Footwork wrote scars in the floor.

The sky itself spoke.

BUILD. BURN. REPEAT.

The voice wasn't sound so much as pressure. The hanging wires bowed toward it. Remnant's head tipped, rapture leaking through steel.

"He's watching," Remnant breathed, and shoved Nocturnal back with a burst that cratered the floor. "Good. Let him see me rise."

Cassiel's optics flared. "Eyes on me," she snapped, and stitched a line across his mask. He flinched out of sheer physics; Nocturnal slipped inside the guard, blade slashing through the insignia patch on Remnant's jacket and into the servo beneath.

Remnant answered by warping the plain again—but subtler. Not a market. A corridor of pale walls and chemical light: Hypertech memory facsimile. Restraint frames hung open like ribcages; the floor shone clean in ways that only lies shine.

"Home," he said, almost tender.

Nocturnal tore through a frame with one backhand. "Grave."

The corridor contracted, doors coughing out shadow doppelgängers—thin, tall, blank-faced—each holding a calibration blade. Cassiel's anchor pulsed hot; she put them down with disciplined bursts, even as the hallway tried to argue her into a different childhood. Pancho scrambled ceiling to wall—tiny claws scoring counter-glyphs that made doorways forget how to open.

Remnant vaulted off a restraint rig, scissoring both cyber-arms; Nocturnal rolled under the cross-cut, planted a palm, and kicked—right through Remnant's sternum plate. The half-skull cracked wider; metal teeth flashed.

They crashed back onto black steel again, memory fleeing like a heartbeat that doesn't belong to you.

The wires trembled. The white sky leaned.

⸻

Chapter 28 — Pancho's Gambit & the Wirefall (combined)

"Time to level the floor," Pancho hissed.

He leapt for a sagging wire—thin as a finger, heavy as a law—and bit into it with his micro-exo. Voltage slammed through his frame; his eyes burned bright in a way animals' eyes shouldn't. The wire sang and then dropped, lashing into the plain, driving a spike of real into the imagination. For a radius of thirty paces the Grid stopped obeying Remnant and started obeying physics again.

"No more map," Cassiel said, raising her rifle. "Just ground."

Remnant snarled and came hard—a blur of weight and speed—counting on the old rules. Nocturnal met him with the new ones, timing perfect: parry, elbow, pommel-smash to jaw, blade down the arm seam. A cyber-limb blew at the bicep in white sparks; one claw hung limp, twitching.

Remnant staggered, then laughed—short, ugly. "I brought three lives," he said, tapping the sternum where echoes lived. "Try again."

"Gladly," Nocturnal said.

Cassiel tagged the remaining arm joint; Nocturnal chopped; the second claw clanged to the floor. Pancho's tether glowed like a fuse; the stabilizing circle shrank. Remnant's crows spun into a cyclone, trying to rewire the wire itself.

"Finish it!" Cassiel barked.

Nocturnal drove the blade through the chest and into the plain. The shock buckled the ground. Remnant convulsed, alloy jaw clattering—then stilled.

For a heartbeat, silence.

Then the sternum lit. A backup bloomed—echo mind overflowing into body. Eyes behind the mask rebooted. The half-skull turned.

"Two left," Remnant said softly.

The white sky shuddered. The Architect's voice dropped like a weight:

SHADOWS MUST KNEEL.

The command hit all three like gravity.

Nocturnal's knees almost buckled; Cassiel's anchor screamed hot and held; Pancho sparked and yowled, still clamped to the wire. Remnant's head jerked as if something bigger had seized the back of his skull—and for the first time, his laugh cracked on fear.

"Not... to you," he spat upward.

The plain detonated into light. The wire whipsawed. Their anchors burned white. And the Grid, insulted by disobedience, did what it always does when rules break:

It threw them out.

⸻

Chapter 29 — Exit Wounds

Ejection was never a door. It was a cough.

Cassiel hit wet concrete two districts from the Markets, shoulder blazing. Her anchor smoked in her fist. Above, a single crow watched—and then burst into static ash as if something far away had crushed it.

Pancho popped into being on a rooftop garden, still fused to a now-dead wire that looked like a melted antenna. He shook himself, tiny chest heaving, and sent a ping that tasted like copper. "Alive—where?"

Nocturnal dropped to a knee on a museum mezzanine open to the night, cloak steaming, blade hot enough to haze the air. In front of him, carved with surgical neatness into the marble rail, was the insignia:

HALF-SKULL OVER CROW'S WING.

And beside it—fresh, wet, written with a fingertip that had bled code:

NEXT TIME, WITHOUT CHAINS.

Nocturnal's visor dimmed to a cold ledger line. The city below hissed with rain. Somewhere, the Grid hummed. Somewhere else, a god adjusted a wire and listened for the next disobedience.

He closed his hand around his burned anchor and stood.

"Round one's over," he said to the night. "Round two we choose."