Shanghai, 9:42 p.m.
Null Boundary Energy – Sub-basement Level 3, shielded server room that officially does not exist.
Lin Kexin stood in front of a wall of monitors, arms folded.
The feeds showed eight different angles of the warehouse district, thermal, infrared, ultraviolet, and three bands no civilian sensor could even detect.
Hassan stood motionless at her right, darkness pooling at his feet like liquid mercury.
They had traced the black Hongqi.
It belonged to a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands, which was owned by a Macau junket, which was owned by a retired lieutenant-general of the PLA Rocket Force named Zhao Wenchang.
Zhao had spent the last decade quietly acquiring lithium claims in Qinghai and Tibet.
Null Boundary's battery made every gram of his spodumene worthless overnight.
He had not taken it well.
"Four kill teams converging," Hassan said, voice flat. "Two ex-Snow Leopard commando, one Russian Spetsnaz freelancer, one that doesn't have a file at all. Rooftop, sewer, cargo drone, and a suicide truck with two tons of HMX parked three blocks north. They're not here to kidnap."
Lin Kexin's reflection in the dark glass looked calm. Inside, adrenaline tasted metallic.
"How long?"
"Seven minutes until the outer cordon is breached."
She opened the definition window. Fingers steady.
Definition – defensive only, local cost:
1. Warehouse 17 and adjacent 500 m radius become a Type-4 Faraday labyrinth: all wireless signals below 3 THz instantly nullified, no EMP discharge.
2. All structural load-bearing members upgraded to mil-spec titanium-aluminium composite, seamless.
3. One hundred autonomous counter-drones, 30 cm wingspan, monomolecular diamond edges, silent, loyal only to me and Hassan.
4. Personal armour for me: adaptive graphene-ceramic weave undersuit, self-repairing, weight 1.8 kg, appears as normal clothing.
Energy cost: random, non-essential, non-biological.
Manifestation.
The lights flickered once. A low harmonic thrum passed through the floor. On the monitors, every phone, radio, and drone link in the kill teams went black at the same instant.
Extraction notice:
Random asset removal:
Complete works of the Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin (1,847 poems, all commentaries, all physical and digital instances worldwide) erased from existence.
Scholars will wake tomorrow believing he never wrote more than thirty fragments.
She felt nothing for the poems. Collateral damage was collateral damage.
"Five minutes sooner than expected," Hassan observed. "They're improvising."
"Let them."
The first breach came from the roof.
Two Snow Leopard veterans, former brothers-in-arms of men she had once dragged out of fire. They rappelled through the skylight with suppressed QBZ-191s, moving like ghosts.
They never saw the counter-drones.
Twenty machines the size of sparrows dropped from the rafters, wings flashing once. Two bodies hit the concrete in four pieces each. Blood painted the battery racks in perfect arcs.
On the sewer feed, the Spetsnaz operator met Hassan.
The Russian stepped out of the drainage tunnel, 210 cm tall, built like a siege engine, dragging a GM-94 grenade launcher. He saw the darkness waiting for him and smiled the way wolves do.
Then the darkness smiled back.
The feed went black for 0.7 seconds. When it returned, the Russian was on his knees, helmet gone, eyes wide, staring at something the camera could not record. Hassan stood behind him, one gloved hand resting lightly on the man's shoulder. The Russian's mouth moved—soundless pleading—then his body folded inward as though every bone had been quietly removed. He was still breathing when Hassan stepped over him.
Lin Kexin watched without blinking.
The fourth intruder—the one with no file—never appeared on any camera.
She felt the temperature drop behind her.
She turned.
A woman stood in the server room that had been empty a heartbeat earlier. Mid-thirties, short hair, wearing a simple grey coat. Eyes the colour of burnt copper.
No weapon visible. No hostility either. Just curiosity.
"You're younger than the file said," the woman remarked in perfect Beijing Mandarin. "And far more ruthless."
Lin Kexin's hand twitched toward a definition, but something—instinct, or the way the air itself seemed to lean away from the stranger—stopped her.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who felt a lake disappear," the woman said. "And a star five million light-years away blink out like a snuffed candle. That kind of silence travels, Miss Lin. It wakes things that were sleeping."
Hassan materialised between them, darkness writhing off his shoulders like living smoke.
The woman glanced at him and smiled faintly. "Easy, old shadow. I'm only the messenger."
"Speak your message," Hassan said. His voice carried the weight of tombs that predate language.
"Certain parties—let's call them the Custodians—have rules. One species, one absolute manifestation engine. Earth already spent its quota forty-three thousand years ago. You're the second. That makes you an anomaly. Anomalies get corrected."
Lin Kexin felt ice crawl down her spine.
"Corrected how?"
"Slowly," the woman said. "Painfully. And with impeccable paperwork. The first hunter teams are already en route. Not human. Not killable the way you understand it. Zhao's mercenaries were just the opening courtesy."
She turned to leave, paused.
"Oh, and the suicide truck? It's still coming. You have one minute forty."
Then she was gone. No ripple, no sound.
Hassan's eyes met Lin Kexin's.
"Orders?"
She looked at the monitors. The HMX truck was accelerating down the service road, 800 metres and closing.
She opened the definition window one more time.
Definition – single target removal:
One fully loaded suicide truck, registration沪A·77K91, and its driver, erased from existence at the quantum level, no explosion, no debris, no trace.
Cost: random, non-essential.
Manifestation.
The truck vanished mid-frame. One instant it was there, the next the road was empty, as though it had never been.
Extraction notice:
Random asset removal:
The concept of the number 7 from all human mathematics on Blue Star for exactly 7 minutes starting now.
For the next seven minutes, every calculator, every equation, every clock that tried to display a 7 would skip to 8. Stock markets hiccupped. Air-traffic control in three provinces briefly lost altitude readouts. The world convulsed in tiny, inexplicable ways.
Then it ended.
Lin Kexin closed her eyes.
"This is only the first night," she said quietly.
Hassan inclined his head.
"And we have many nights ahead."
End of Chapter 5