Mana fell in silence, not for want of noise, but because the ice world beneath her had muted the universe. Her armor cocooned her in zero-sheen white, edges scored with black carbon—stealth paint over thermal mesh, optimized for heat bleed and subsonic resistance. She plummeted at terminal velocity, arms tight to her sides, knees already locked for the shock. The world was a laceration of cold, cutting upward to greet her.

Through the neural link, Fox’s voice trickled in—a digital pulse, threaded and silver: “Wind shear approaching maximum; correct by one-point-seven degrees east. Heat gradient: minus one-ten Celsius, falling. Expect glide window in five.”

Mana flexed her hands, feeling the suit articulate the micro-adjustments, feathering her posture until the rush of descent gave way to a sickening smoothness. She squinted through the visor, letting the filters highlight the landscape. Below: a field of obsidian knifing through milky frost, every shard a dagger set for her heart. No clouds, no sky, only the stark blue hush of vacuum and the ghostly glimmer of stars above.

"Trajectory aligned," Fox said, "in three, two—"

Impact. Her boots struck the crust, shattering a meter-thick slab of ice. For a split second she cratered, knees absorbing the violence, then bounced to the surface, trailing powder like a comet’s tail. The force left her breathless, ribs tight, Core spiking dopamine to keep her vision from tunneling.

She landed in a crouch, fist knifing into the ice for balance. The microfractures fanned outward—a perfect spiderweb, instantly frost-welded by the moon’s endless night. Fox’s voice, again: “Welcome to Zenith. You have ninety seconds until they triangulate your position. Move.”

Mana stood, orienting herself. Ahead, the Erben archive loomed, a black monolith erupting from the wastes. It had the geometry of a knife, every line exaggerated by the way starlight refracted through the frozen air. The archives were older than any war, maybe older than humanity itself. The surface wriggled with sensor ghosts—infrared signatures, neural spikes, the crawling persistence of an apex predator closing in on a wounded animal.

Three Jäger squads, per the briefing. Probably more. She scanned the perimeter, letting the suit’s AI overlay the expected approach patterns. The enemies were careful, but never subtle. She felt them before she saw them: the tremor of coordinated footsteps, the faintest percussion of claws on glass-hard ice.

Mana drew her katana. The hilt was already warm in her palm; the blade ignited with a whisper, blue-white and pure, a line of frost cutting through the spectrum.

“Contact,” Fox intoned, his bandwidth now clipped and sharp. “Twelve on the near side, splitting into pairs. Secondary group at your two o’clock, holding at distance.”

She didn’t answer. The first Jäger dropped from the overhang above, jaws wide, claws extended. Mana sidestepped, let momentum do the work; she split it at the clavicle, plasma searing through flesh and bone. The air filled with the smell of burnt resin and something almost floral—the smell of Jäger blood, already vaporizing in the cold.

A second attacker landed behind her, blades out. Mana spun, blade low, severing both knees in one sweep. The Jäger toppled, torso folding in on itself, and she finished it with a reverse cut that sent half its skull spinning into the snow.

Three more closed in, moving as a single organism, arms outstretched for a pincer. Mana feinted left, ducked under their reach, and stabbed upward—directly into the soft plate beneath the sternum. The katana hummed as it met the power cell, and the resulting cascade of energy blew the creature’s ribcage outward in a shower of frozen splinters.

Fox’s voice: “Three down. Five. Seven.” Every word punctuated by another death, another arterial spray that crystallized midair.

Mana moved through the chaos with detached economy. Each strike wasted nothing: she parried, riposted, always moving forward, never yielding ground. Her breath came slow and even, every motion calculated before she finished the last. She didn’t see them as adversaries so much as obstacles, the way a child hopping stones over a stream would not pause to consider the stone’s suffering.

Her visor flagged a new signature, larger than the rest. She pivoted, finding the squad lead—an alpha unit, taller and heavier, exoskeleton reinforced with dense plating, sensor clusters glowing faint amber. It advanced, arms held wide, and bellowed a shriek that set the air vibrating. Mana’s suit dampened the worst of it, but her teeth rattled anyway.

She waited until it lunged, then dropped to one knee. The katana sliced an arc through the alpha’s left thigh, then rebounded up to catch its jaw. The plasma edge bit clean, and the alpha’s head spun away, still shrieking. Its body tottered, nearly toppled her, but she sidestepped and let it fall.

A pause. The remaining Jäger—five, by her count—hesitated, realigning their formation. Mana wiped the blade clean against her own leg, then snapped it off, letting the cold finish the sterilization. Steam rose from the cauterized flesh, a brief, spectral column in the night.

“Squad one neutralized,” Fox said, voice low, almost reverent. “Seventeen seconds. A personal record.”

Mana stood still, scanning for the next threat. Her fingers found the familiar seam at her hip—three traces right, three traces left. The snow was now mottled pink and black, jagged with bodies. Above, the archive glittered, untouched and waiting, while her hand continued its ritual, a silent metronome against her suit that left microscopic scratches in the finish.

The world was quiet, again.

She checked the charge on her katana, ran diagnostics on the suit. Everything green, except her pulse, which had barely shifted.

Fox’s voice: “Second squad is holding back. They may be coordinating with the third. Suggest approach with caution.”

She didn’t move, not yet. She let the cold creep in, let her heart slow. Above her, the pale blue stars winked in and out of the haze, as if watching her with cold amusement.

Mana exhaled.

She counted down, in her head: ten, nine, eight. At seven, the world would start up again, and she would be ready.

At six, the second squad moved.

They came not as a swarm, but as a logic puzzle, each unit spaced precisely, their footfalls in harmony. The air grew colder in their wake, as if they brought entropy with them. Mana watched them approach, noting the subdermal glint of neural ports. The Mimics. She had seen their work in shattered blackboxes, in the way dead hands sometimes curled into her own signature grip.

“Mana,” Fox said, and for the first time in months, his voice carried a tremor. “They are not baseline. Mimics—tuned to your combat pattern. Do not repeat moves inside a twelve-cycle window.”

Mana cocked her head, watching the Jäger spread to encircle her. Each mirrored her posture, adjusting stance by millimeters, watching for the next shift. The closest one twitched its left shoulder; so did she, and instantly all six followed, the movement propagating like a disease through their ranks.

For a moment, Mana tested them. She raised her blade, flicked it left—every Mimic did the same, forming a perfect reflection. She let her weight shift, softening her knees, and the pattern rippled through the group. It was uncanny, like fighting herself in a funhouse mirror.

“Recommendation: improvise,” Fox said. “Go wild.”

Mana inhaled, found the familiar anchor in her spine, and dropped into a stance she had never used in combat. Street fight, old Earth. She let her right arm dangle loose, left leg forward. The Mimics hesitated—fractional lag, but there. She swung the katana low, blade nearly dragging the ice. The nearest Mimic recalculated, countered high. Mana's face remained as still as carved ice as she feinted the slash, and with her left hand—bare, unarmored—she punched straight into the Jäger's throat.

Cartilage shattered under her knuckles. The Mimic reeled, not with pain but confusion, and Mana followed with a brutal knee to its helmet. The Jäger toppled, its neural port leaking dark, viscous fluid. The rest responded instantly, adapting her new pattern, but Mana was already moving, already thinking past it.

She ran through a dozen styles, none lasting more than two exchanges. Boxing into capoeira into a fencing move she'd seen once on a training sim. The Core struggled to keep up, spike after spike of pain lancing up her back, but Mana pushed through it, muscles operating at peak efficiency, her mind registering only the clean satisfaction of a problem being systematically solved.

The Mimics fell, one by one. Sometimes they outpaced her, sometimes they met her blow for blow. But each time, she changed. The last two came at her in perfect unison. Mana hurled her katana skyward, the blade spinning in the frozen air. Both Mimics tracked it, their neural processors calculating trajectory. As one raised its fists to mirror her empty hands, Mana's palm slid to her thigh holster. The shotgun cleared leather before the katana reached apex. The Mimic's fist connected with empty air as the weapon's report cracked across the ice—a sound like planets colliding. The first Mimic's chest cavity erupted in crystalline fragments; the second barely registered the shift before the second barrel emptied its skull.

Fox's voice crackled through her neural interface, a mix of admiration and exasperation. "Did you just throw a six-million-euro plasma katana into the air as a distraction? Christ, Mana. Effective, though. Very effective."

Mana blinked away the phantom sensation of sweat that her body remembered but could no longer produce. Her optics recalibrated with a soft click as she scanned the horizon, the suit's density regulators keeping her dry despite the exertion.

“Third squad’s approaching,” Fox said, softer now. “They’re not running attack posture. Weapons holstered.”

The leader was easy to spot. Taller, with a line of scarred flesh across the right cheek—tissue regenerated but the old wound still visible, as if worn on purpose. The squad marched in deliberate lockstep, but kept a respectful distance. The leader stopped, raised both hands, palms open.

Mana kept the katana low, but ready.