Arc City — Old District.
1:17 PM.
The wind swept up dry dust and raked it across the crumbling red-brick ruins of the abandoned factory zone, drawing a low, whistle-like moan from the empty spaces between walls.
Kiana crouched at the edge of a residential building's rooftop. She flipped her phone over; the screen's light flashed briefly in the shadow.
[Absolute Freedom Time Remaining: 4 hours, 43 minutes, 12 seconds]
The numbers pulsed against her retinas like a silent hourglass counting down.
Plenty of time. Enough to finish a hunt, then stroll over to the convenience store and grab a bottle of that godawful bitter melon juice — she hated the taste, but drinking it was a ritual she'd invented to stay grounded in this world.
Directly across from the rooftop stretched a wide dead-end road, flanked on both sides by derelict industrial warehouses, their red-brick walls eaten pale and grey by wind and rain.
At the far end of the dead-end stood a corrugated iron roller door, half-open. Inside sat six modified motorcycles and two sports cars sprayed in fluorescent green.
Someone had spray-painted a lopsided skull above the roller door.
That was the Arc City Night Wraiths — a street racing gang.
The Vigilante APP's entry on them ran three pages long.
In the past two months, they'd caused eleven incidents of reckless driving on the Old District's ring expressway, injuring a food delivery rider and an old lady walking her dog.
The posted bounty was for "intel on their hideout" — three thousand as a reward.
Not enough for a graphics card. Su Yu had been grinding to meet a deadline lately, his GPU fan screaming like a helicopter taking off, and she didn't like watching him suffer like that.
But what if she dismantled the whole nest?
The boss "Throttle" was worth twenty-five thousand. His two lieutenants together came to thirteen thousand. Add in the whole pack of grunts... when she ran the numbers, it was enough to get Su Yu's beaten-up computer a complete overhaul, with plenty left over for pizza.
Decided.
This was today's job.
She stood, brushing the dust off the hem of her jacket.
Twenty-five minutes by shared bike from home. One hour of reconnaissance.
Estimated op time: thirty minutes — facing twelve or thirteen punks with steel pipes and chains, that was already a conservative estimate, and a generous one at that.
Cleanup and withdrawal: forty minutes.
That left two and a half hours of buffer.
This was her survival philosophy now: always leave yourself a way out. Account for every second.
She knew this feeling of waiting all too well.
It was the same as when she'd been a Valkyrie.
Find a vantage point. Crouch down. Study the target structure. Run through every entrance and exit, every window, every possible escape route, every likely position of personnel inside — all of it cycling through your head.
Back then, she'd still had her armor.
The thrusters could carry her off a rooftop and into a power dive straight onto the target, breach complete in under three seconds.
No armor now. No comms unit, and no voice in her ear — that woman who used to say "Kiana, don't be reckless," who worried herself sick over every impulsive thing Kiana did.
But that was fine.
You didn't need armor to deal with twelve to fifteen punks with steel pipes.
Kiana half-lidded her eyes and ran one final comparison between the floor plan on the Vigilante APP and what she'd observed on-site.
The roller door was the main entrance.
Based on the building's structure, the interior was almost certainly a high-ceilinged old factory floor, eight to ten meters tall — most likely already converted into a garage and gathering space.
On the left was a fire door, heavily rusted, hinges visibly loose from the outside, which meant it saw regular use.
Along the right wall, mid-section, ran a row of ventilation windows at roughly four meters off the ground — top-hung tilt-type, some already broken.
The main entrance was wide — built for vehicles, which also meant it was built for rapid mass evacuation.
She couldn't hit through the front.
The fire door was the ideal point of lateral entry.
One kick to blow it open, straight into the factory's flank — use the interior columns and debris for cover, and cut off any escape routes toward the main door.
Kiana's mind was already running at full speed.
Without Su Yu beside her, her IQ hadn't crashed the way he liked to joke it would, like "a laptop losing its external hard drive." If anything, the battle instinct and survival cunning that were a Kaslana birthright had surfaced like a blade freshly honed — sharp and ready.
If Su Yu were here, he'd probably quip: this isn't a Husky at all. This is a snow wolf hunting alone.
Just a snow wolf that hadn't fully grown yet.
Kiana stood, rolling her ankle loose.
The sole of her canvas shoe scraped a soft sound against the rooftop concrete.
She descended via the residential building's fire escape stairwell to the ground floor, then skirted along the shadows at the base of the perimeter wall, circling around to the factory's flank.
1:30 PM.
The sun sat in the sky just past its zenith, tilting west — at this hour, the building's own shadow fell exactly over the western wall's base.
She pressed herself against the wall and moved, her footsteps soundless.
Kiana reached the fire door. She pressed her ear flat against the iron panel and listened.
Two guards at the main entrance.
Six seated in a cluster at the center.
Three at work on modifications deep to the left.
Footsteps from the mezzanine level above... wait. There was a presence up there too — a different quality from the rest of the gang. But it didn't matter.
She glanced at the countdown.
[Absolute Freedom Time Remaining: 4 hours, 31 minutes, 08 seconds]
Plenty of time.
She drew a slow, deep breath. The air tasted of rust, engine oil, and decades of settled dust.
In this moment, she was not the girl who would throw a tantrum over the last slice of pizza in front of Su Yu. She was the Void Drifter. She was Siegfried's wolf cub.
She raised her right foot, aimed it at a point just below the fire door's lock cylinder—
And kicked.
The metal door erupted with a thunderclap. One of the hinges was sheared clean off. The whole door swung inward at a skewed angle and slammed into the inner wall with a hollow boom.
The music inside was still playing.
But every human sound in the building cut off at exactly the same instant.
Kiana stepped over the threshold.
Light poured in from behind her, casting a long, narrow shadow across the floor.
The factory interior was darker than she'd estimated — only a few industrial pendant lights were on.
More than ten pairs of eyes swiveled toward her.
"Where'd this little piece come from?" The bald, heavyset man by the main entrance climbed to his feet, the tattoo on his neck writhing with his muscles.
He was gripping a steel pipe wrapped in red electrical tape. That was "Throttle."
"This is private property. Get—"
He took two steps toward Kiana, spinning the pipe in a casual flourish.
"This is private property. Get out—"
Kiana didn't waste words.
She simply raised her hand slightly, and flicked her fingers.
A one-yuan coin sliced through the air and hit the power button on the Bluetooth speaker with surgical precision.
Silence.
Throttle's pipe was still raised mid-swing, hadn't come down yet — it seemed like that little trick had actually startled him.
Kiana stood in front of him, tilting her head back to look up at him.
"Vigilante."
Her voice echoed through the empty workshop, calm as someone ordering a double-cheese burger.
"Anyone who wants to tie themselves up can skip a couple of hits."
Throttle stared down at the scrawny girl who barely reached his chin, and couldn't help but laugh.
"Vigilante?"
The men seated around him exchanged glances, then started laughing too.
"A fifteen-year-old girl playing vigilante?" Throttle raised the pipe and jabbed the red-taped end toward Kiana's face. "Who lost their kid? Give me an address and I'll drop her off—"
Kiana wasn't looking at him.
Her gaze had crossed over Throttle's shoulder, cutting through the amber light and drifting grease-smoke, landing on a specific spot deep in the factory — the left-hand corner.
The modification bay.
Three people crouched beside a half-dismantled motorcycle.
Two wore overalls stained with grease, tools in hand — a wrench, a screwdriver.
The third stood behind them.
Not tall.
Dressed in a black form-fitting tactical jacket, the fabric noticeably a cut above anything else in the room.
A single ponytail pulled back from the nape of her neck, grey-silver strands catching a cool, metallic sheen in the overhead light.
She was chewing something. Bubble gum.
A pink bubble swelled between her lips, popped with a soft snap, and was reeled back in by her tongue.
Her face.
Kiana's breath stopped.
She could have drawn that face with her eyes closed.
The line of her nose. The curve at the corner of her eyes. Even those cool grey eyes, so flat and indifferent — identical to the girl in her memory who always called her "stupid Kiana."
Bronya?
No.
Not quite.
Bronya's eyes were cold, but beneath that cold was something soft — a clumsy, halting warmth she had taken a long time to learn how to show the world.
This person's eyes were cold too. But it was a different kind of cold. The kind that settles in after growing up on the streets, after seeing too much rot — laced with a little contempt, a little couldn't-care-less.
Su Yu had said it before: this parallel world had a lot of Counterparts.
So this world's Bronya... was a delinquent? A criminal? A street racer tangled up with this pack of human garbage?
A feeling she couldn't name welled up — something between anger and grief.
She watched the figure chewing bubble gum, and felt her fist clench silently at her side.
Even if this wasn't the Bronya she knew — she had an obligation to set this kid straight. That was the thought forming in Kiana's heart.
Throttle noticed her attention had drifted.
He followed Kiana's gaze to the corner, then looked back.
"Hey, what are you staring at?" The pipe pushed forward half an inch, the tip nearly grazing Kiana's nose. "I'm talking to you—"
In the corner.
Brownie moved the bubble gum from her left cheek to her right and squinted at everything unfolding near the main entrance.
She'd only infiltrated this hideout last night.
Using the oldest method, and the one that actually worked — street racing.
Out on the ring expressway, she'd ridden a specially modified motorcycle and taken Throttle's lieutenant with a textbook S-curve drift, then spun Throttle himself into the dust at the off-ramp with a reverse fishtail.
Total elapsed time: four minutes and seventeen seconds. A new internal record for the Night Wraiths' circuit.
When Throttle caught up to her afterward, he didn't throw a punch.
He watched Brownie pull off her helmet, saw a face way too young to belong here, stared for two seconds, then smiled.
"Ride with me."
Simple as that.
In under twelve hours, Brownie had gone from "outside intruder" to "Brownie, the boss."
This gang's combined IQ matched their modified bikes' emission standards — both well below the legal limit.
But she wasn't here for these idiots.
She was here for the Tiger Claw contact she was supposed to meet tonight at eight o'clock, through the Night Wraiths as the go-between.
The Tiger Claw Brotherhood was the real core of the Old District's underground — smuggling, illegal gambling, grey-market supply chains, all of it running through their hands.
The police had spent two years chasing them without ever getting close.
Brownie had spent a month laying groundwork on the dark web — fabricating identities, building trust chains, threading everything together — before she'd found the Night Wraiths as her entry point.
Tonight.
Just tonight.
She was right on the edge of pulling it off — and then this... white-haired freak had dropped out of the sky.
She'd clocked the girl's stance.
Weight on the balls of her feet. Knees slightly bent. Shoulders relaxed but not dropped.
That wasn't how ordinary people looked when they were trying to act brave — when normal people were nervous, their shoulders climbed and their knees locked straight.
This was the natural, settled looseness of someone trained to fight.
But even with training — a girl of fifteen or sixteen, facing thirteen grown men with steel pipes and chains?
Brownie sighed under her breath.
She couldn't just let someone die in front of her.
Her right hand quietly slid into the inner pocket of her tactical jacket. Her thumb found a remote control, barely larger than a lighter.
The frequency was already preset.
Two micro-drones were buried in the scrap heap outside the factory, loaded with flashbang modules and high-frequency sonic emitters.
Enough to strip this whole group of their vision and sense of balance for thirty seconds.
It would blow her cover operation, sure — but this girl looked like she had a screw loose, and Brownie wasn't going to watch her get beaten to death.
But just as her thumb was about to press down, she witnessed something that nearly made her eyes pop straight out of her skull.
Throttle swung the steel pipe down with a whoosh, aimed squarely at Kiana's shoulder.
Hard enough to put a normal person on their knees. Not hard enough to maim.
The pipe came screaming down.
Kiana didn't dodge.
She simply raised her right hand. Five fingers spread wide, palm facing upward — and caught the incoming solid steel pipe the way you'd catch a falling leaf. Casually. Without apparent effort.
Thud.
A dull impact.
The pipe stopped cold in midair. Didn't move a millimeter.
The sneer on Throttle's face went rigid. The veins in his arms bulged as he strained to push down — and it was like arm-wrestling a mountain.
Kiana raised her head slowly. Beneath her cap's brim, her eyes were as cold as Siberian permafrost.
Her fingers began to close.
Creak — groan —
A teeth-grinding shriek of metal tore through the dead silence of the factory.
That was the sound of the pipe's structure giving way.
The solid tube walls caved and twisted in her palm. The red electrical tape split open.
With what looked like a casual turn of her wrist, the weapon that could have snapped a bone was bent — slowly, inexorably — into a perfect U-shape, like a noodle that had been left to boil too long.
Clang.
The deformed pipe hit the floor, bounced twice, and rang out with a hollow, metallic echo.
Nobody in the factory was laughing anymore.
A chorus of sharp, involuntary intake-of-breath sounds rippled through the room.
Brownie's thumb froze on the remote.
She stared at the U-shaped pipe on the ground, and her pupils shrank.
As a rational hacker, her internal CPU was running flat-out: Grade 20 carbon structural steel, three-millimeter wall thickness, yield strength 245 megapascals.
To bend that pipe to this degree by hand — no tools, no impact force, pure static compression — the required grip strength would be approximately—
Brownie nearly swallowed her bubble gum.
Her gaze swept across Kiana.
Vigilante.
Fifteen or sixteen years old.
Female.
Bent a steel pipe with her bare hands.
Something clicked in Brownie's memory.
Two nights ago, she'd seen a report in an encrypted group channel on the police department's internal frequency.
About a B-rank Vigilante who had subdued an armed and wanted criminal at the entrance to the Old City — with her bare hands. The report included a blurry security camera screenshot.
White hair. Eggs in a shopping bag, unbroken.
Captain Lewis had left exactly four characters as his comment in the group chat: "Unbelievable."
The registered name of that Vigilante was — Kiana Kaslana.
Brownie resumed chewing her bubble gum.
At twice the previous speed.
She watched Kiana advance step by step on Throttle, who was staring fixedly at the deformed pipe on the floor, legs trembling, lips moving but producing no sound.
Brownie quietly took half a step back and pressed her shoulders against the wall.
...Damn.
She'd miscalculated.
Brownie watched the white-haired monster casually toss grown men around like they were hand luggage, and the entire "I'm going to save her" thought evaporated from her mind without a trace.
Save her? Save what exactly?
If she didn't explain herself fast and make clear she was undercover...
Would her own head end up bent into a U-shape, just like that steel pipe?
Brownie pressed her back against the wall. Drew a slow breath. Arranged her face into an expression of wholesome, harmless compliance, and raised both hands — very slowly, very correctly — into the air.
Surrendering was a perfectly valid option.
"Excuse me... miss."
She watched the white-haired girl turn her head, eyes sharp enough to eat someone alive, and swallowed.
"If I told you... I'm an undercover agent sent by the police... would you believe me?"
I didn't have a choice before. Now I want to be one of the good guys.
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