Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #6: Crossfire

The crows drove the picture into his skull: A at the frame. Distance fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve. His arms unfolded into exactly the tools needed to take apart a man and a ledger at once.

"Write this—" he began, and lunged for the kill.

The Command

The city blinked.

Not lights—priority.

The white sky that wasn't a sky pressed its ear to the world, and the Grid breathed in just above the river. Wires the size of hair and ships hung there at once, not seen so much as felt. The command dropped not as sound but as gravity:

SHADOWS MUST KNEEL. HOLD.

Remnant hit the word like a wall he could not break.

He felt it as a hand on the back of his head and in the hinge of his jaw and in the servos of his arms, as if the architecture of him had always been listening for this one note. He froze mid-lunge, one boot on rust, one claw a breath from A's throat. The crows went silent in a ring so sudden the night had to learn a new kind of quiet.

A didn't blink. Training. He didn't breathe until breathing returned.

Remnant's eyes burned behind the half-skull. "Not him," he hissed to the space that had stopped him. "You told me to write this chapter."

White pressure answered with patience that cut like a clean knife:

PRIORITY: WIRE-BEARER.
PRIORITY: OBSERVE THE KNIFE AND THE FLAME.
BUILD. BURN. REPEAT.
NOT THE WATCHER.

He could move his tongue. Everything else was a cathedral pinned with scaffolding.

Across the frame, Nocturnal slowed from a sprint to a halt so sharp it was surgical. He raised his blade, held, didn't overreach. Cassiel's rifle found Remnant's left optic and stayed there like a decision not to tremble. Maku held the ring of ground he'd pulled from the air and felt blood run warm over his lip.

Pancho's mind-voice came tiny and iron: Don't touch him.

"Wasn't planning on a hug," Cassiel murmured.

Remnant tried to laugh and it came out as a breath hard with hate. He angled his words around the command like a prisoner learning a cell. "You save the watcher," he said to the god that bent him. "You cage me for their story."

The world pressed closer. For an instant they all saw its blueprint—tram teeth woven into veins, rooftops knitted to constellations that weren't stars, the empty air ladders waiting to be dropped. Through that web ran a dark river labeled INTENT.

The crows shuddered as if they'd been told a secret and hated it.

A stepped back carefully from the claw that could move again when it was allowed. He didn't look down; he looked at Nocturnal and at Cassiel and at Maku, the three people who had not let him die—and who might, on a different day, arrest him, recruit him, or ask him to hold a line he didn't believe in.

"New chapter," he said, too soft to carry, and holstered a shaking hand.

The pressure eased. Not gone—banked.

Remnant's servos returned one by one like teeth clicking back into a jaw. He did not strike. He had learned the specific weight of the word HOLD and knew the cost of disobedience: the Grid itself could unmake a body and leave the mind screaming in a wire.

He stepped back from the frame as if of his own will, because pride survives gods. The half-skull canted in a parody of a bow toward A. "Another time."

He turned his mask to Nocturnal. "You keep saving people. I keep needing parts."