Chapter 28:- The Law of Probability
(First Person POV – Kaiden)
We were moving through what used to be a financial district. Now, the skyscrapers leaned toward each other like rotting teeth, their glass facades long ago replaced by crystalline Void-growths that hummed with a low, dissonant frequency.
My left dagger felt heavy. Not because of its physical weight—0.48 kilograms, perfectly balanced—but because the air itself was getting thicker. The "Void-Fog" was no longer just a mist; it was a pressurized sea of violet static.
"Keep your intervals! Five meters!" I hissed over my shoulder.
Jax was stumbling behind me, clutching his standard-issue long-range kinetic rifle. The kid looked like he was one loud noise away from a heart attack. His face was ghostly pale, and his hands were shaking so hard I could hear the rattling of the rifle's internal firing pin.
"K-Kaiden, the scanners... they're flatlining," Jax whispered. "I can't see anything past ten meters."
"I told you, scanners are for people who want to die surprised," I snapped. I stopped, my boots silent on the obsidian street. I closed my eyes.
Perfect Weapon Mastery didn't just tell me about my blades; it allowed me to read the "intent" of the environment. I felt the vibration of the wind hitting the jagged edges of a ruined spire. I felt the subtle displacement of the fog four hundred meters up.
"Above us," I growled.
"What?" Jax looked up, squinting into the gloom.
From the high ledges of the leaning skyscrapers, they dropped. Sky-Screamers. They were leathery, multi-winged horrors with elongated necks and talons that could peel the armor off a tank. There were six of them, falling like terminal-velocity stones.
"Jax! Target the one at twelve o'clock! Now!"
Jax didn't look like a soldier. He didn't even look like a man. He looked like a shivering wreck. But as he shouldered the rifle, something happened to his posture. The shaking didn't stop in his knees, but his hands... they became as still as the grave.
Jax's talent wasn't "Precision." Inany sense of the word itself but his talent was Absolute Vector Alignment make him so in sense of the word. In the slums, they called it the "100% Hit Rate." It wasn't about him being a good shot; it was about the universe refusing to let him miss. If Jax pulled the trigger with the intent to hit a target, the laws of physics bent until the bullet found its home.
Crack.
The first Screamer was three hundred meters up, diving at over two hundred kilometers per hour through a crosswind of fifty knots. A shot that should have been impossible.
The kinetic slug tore through its central eye-stalk. The beast didn't even have time to shriek. It folded in mid-air and slammed into a wall, its momentum painting the obsidian glass with violet ichor.
Crack. Crack.
Two more. Jax wasn't even using the scope. He was firing from the hip, his eyes wide and tearing up from the wind, his breath coming in jagged gasps. He looked terrified, but the rifle was an extension of a cosmic law.
"Three down!" Jax whimpered, his finger already squeezing again.
The remaining three Screamers realized the danger. They began to "Phase-Shift," their bodies flickering in and out of the physical plane to evade the slugs. They were moving in a chaotic, non-linear pattern that would baffle any targeting computer.
I stepped forward, my daggers out. "Jax, the two on the left. Leave the big one to me."
"I-I can't see them clearly! They're phasing!" Jax cried out, even as he fired.
The bullet left the barrel, hummed through the fog, and curved.
I saw it with my own eyes. The slug hit a pocket of high-density Void energy, deflected at an angle that should have sent it into the dirt, and instead ricocheted off a crystalline spire to pierce the throat of a Screamer that was currently three-quarters "Ghost."
The beast tumbled.
"Five," Jax sobbed. He was actually crying now, the recoil of the rifle bruising his shoulder, but the 100% law didn't care about his pain.
The final Screamer was on top of us. It was huge—a matriarch with a wingspan of ten meters. It shrieked, a sound that felt like glass shards being driven into my ears. It lunged for Jax, its talons extended like obsidian scythes.
Jax panicked. He tripped backward, falling onto his rear, and the rifle went off accidentally as it hit the ground.
The bullet struck a piece of jagged rebar, bounced twice off the ruined pavement, and traveled upward through the Matriarch's open maw, exiting through the back of its skull.
The beast's massive body slid across the glass, stopping inches from Jax's trembling boots.
Six targets. Six shots. Zero misses.
I walked over to Jax and offered him a hand. My daggers were clean. I hadn't even had the chance to swing.
"Get up," I said, my voice softer than usual. "You did your job."
"I... I didn't even aim, Kaiden," Jax whispered, his voice cracking. "I just... I just wanted them to stop."
"That's the difference between you and the Elites, kid," I said, pulling him to his feet. "They think they're gods because they can hit a bullseye. You're a god because you can't hit anything else."
I looked toward the sector where Squad Delta was moving. The pressure in my ear was still there, but now it was joined by a new sensation. My Mastery was comparing Jax's "Absolute Law" to the "Ghost" ahead.
Jax was a cheat code in the system. He was a fixed variable.
But May Blackheart? She was the one who wrote the system.
I looked at my daggers. They felt inadequate again. Against a 100% hit rate, you could hide. Against a Sovereign, there was nowhere to go.
"Epsilon, move!" I shouted to the rest of the dazed recruits. "We're trailing Delta by forty meters. If Jax can clear the sky, I can clear the street. But if we run into the Blackheart... God help whoever gets in her way."
As we moved deeper into the Bone District, I kept one eye on the sky and the other on the girl in the distance. The ruins of London were a graveyard, but today, they were something else.
They were a throne room. And we were just the court jesters watching the queen take her place.
(AUTHOR'S NOTE:- I wouldn't be uploading for few weeks because of collage and stuff. It be nice if some of you commented some ideas about the new chapters.)