The temple floor gave way beneath me—another damned pressure plate. I caught the crumbling ledge, my satchel of Ptolemaic artifacts swinging wildly. “Jones! The ankh!” shouted Elsa from above, her torchlight dancing over hieroglyphs that shouldn't be moving. The sandstone serpent uncoiled with a grinding shriek. “Yeah, noticed that!” I jammed my boot into its stone gullet, feeling ancient gears snap. The artifact burned through my shirt like dry ice. Somewhere behind us, Schmidt's goons started shouting in guttural German. Elsa tossed the rope. “Stop showing off and climb!” The walls began bleeding mercury. Archaeology was cleaner in textbooks.
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The wet cobblestones reflected neon like spilled ink as Lee flipped backward over the butcher's cleaver—his nunchaku already whirling into the thug's solar plexus with a wet crack. Old Man Chen's apothecary reeked of tiger bone ointment and fear. The Triad boss lunged, his butterfly knives glinting poison-green under the streetlamp. Lee's grin turned feral. “Aiya, too slow!” His heel connected with the man's jaw in a move Bruce himself would've called “goddamn excessive.” The alley cats scattered. Another night, another corpse. Time for noodles.
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The quantum stabilizers screamed like gutted animals as the dreadnought’s hull peeled back—revealing the thing squirming in the reactor core. “Oh hell no,” growled Kovacs, slamming fresh rounds into his plasma carbine, “we didn’t sign up for Lovecraftian shit.” The AI’s voice crackled: “Containment failure imminent.” Brilliant. A rookie grabbed my arm, his pupils blown wide. “Is that… singing?” The melody hit—chromatic, wrong, peeling sanity like rotten fruit. My HUD flashed crimson: 47 seconds to mandatory neural quarantine. Kovacs racked the slide. “Time to go loud.” The walls started bleeding. Typical Tuesday.
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The mob's roar outside Parliament was a living thing, throbbing against the stained-glass windows like a malarial fever. He adjusted his cravat with fingers still sticky from sealing those damning letters with wax—black, of course. “You've a talent for making enemies, my lord,” sneered the Chancellor, his rheumy eyes tracking the dagger-shadows on the wall. A half-smile. “Only way to know you're moving forward.” The pistol in his desk drawer weighed heavy with its single silver bullet. The first rock shattered a window. “Ah,” he murmured, watching the bloodied cobblestones below, “right on schedule.” History, after all, was just violence with better lighting.
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The teahouse trembled as his jian met her shuang gou, sparks skittering like drunken fireflies. “Ten years,” she spat, her blade a silver blur, “and you still fight like a concussed mongoose.” The scent of oolong and blood hung thick. He grinned, teeth red—her last strike had grazed his ribs, just as he'd planned. Outside, monsoon winds howled through Kowloon's neon canyons. Her footwork faltered; the poison in her liuyedao finally working. “Should've checked your cup, mei mei,” he sighed, watching her knees buckle. The old master's parchment burned in his sleeve—one less secret in this wretched world. The rain began. Perfect for washing away corpses.
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The safehouse stank of cordite and betrayal. My contact lay slumped over the table, a single bullet hole between his eyes—too neat for amateurs. “Well, scheisse,” I muttered, flipping the bloodstained dossier. The pages were coded in a cipher even my scarred hippocampus couldn’t parse. The window shattered. No gunshot—just the phut of a suppressed round embedding itself in the wall beside me. I dove behind the couch, palming my Walther. “You’re getting sloppy, Schakal,” a voice purred from the shadows. Vienna accent. Her. My ribs ached where she’d slipped a stiletto last time. “Missed you too, Liebling,” I growled. The lights died. Game on.
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The static on the comms was worse than usual. “Lieutenant, are you sure these readings are right?” I muttered, squinting at the flickering holo-display. The ruins stretched beneath us—twisted metal and fractured domes, all covered in that weird bioluminescent moss. “Positive, Captain,” she replied, voice tight. “Life signs, but... not human. And they're moving.” My grip tightened on the rifle. Then the ground trembled, and the moss pulsed—like it was breathing. The lieutenant sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, hell. They know we're here.” The shadows between the ruins shifted. Watching. Waiting. I exhaled. “Time to go. Now.”
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The thief's fingers froze an inch from the relic when the dragonbone crown began whispering in High Elvish—a language dead for centuries. “Oh hell,” muttered the rogue, just as the skeletal sentinels stirred in their alcoves, their hollow eye sockets glowing ember-red. The wizard backhanded his shoulder. “I told you touching cursed regalia was a bad career move!” From the shadows, a dry chuckle rasped—probably the lich they'd forgotten about. The rogue sighed and reached for his daggers. “Worth it.”
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The tavern reeked of cheap wine and blood as the masked swordsman leaned against the bar, his blade still dripping. “You really had to pick a fight with all of them?” the bartender muttered, eyeing the dozen unconscious thugs scattered across the floor. The swordsman chuckled, spinning his dagger lazily. “What can I say? They insisted.” Outside, the wind howled like a vengeful spirit, and the lanterns flickered—too late, he noticed the shadow creeping along the wall. Not a man, not a beast, but something in between. The bartender paled. “You’ve got death on your heels, stranger.” He tossed back his drink and stood. “Yeah, well. Death’s about to learn how fast I run.” The shadow lunged.
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The alarm blared as the ship’s AI, CAL-7, flickered to life with a tired sigh. “Captain, we’ve got a problem. The gravity drive’s acting up again—third time this week.” I groaned, rubbing my temples. “Yeah, no kidding. Feels like the whole damn ship’s held together by duct tape.” Outside the viewport, the void stretched endlessly, pitch-black and humming with something... else. Then the whispers started. Not through comms, not even in my head—more like they vibrated through my bones. CAL-7’s voice turned staticky. “Uh, boss? You hearing this too?” I swallowed hard. “We’re not alone out here.” The lights dimmed, and the shadows moved. Wrong.
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