Chapter 3: Aliens, Fillings, and a Side of Fries

Chapter 3: Aliens, Fillings, and a Side of Fries

The duel with Lyra had ended, as it usually did, in a brutal, bloody draw. My ribs screamed with the memory of her claws, a deep purple bruise was already blooming across my jaw, and I was pretty sure I’d be picking gravel out of my knuckles for a week. She’d fought with the joyful ferocity of a hurricane, all teeth and leather and raw power. In the end, bruised and breathing heavily under the relentless rain, we’d called it.

As a parting gift—or a taunt—she’d given me a sliver of information. “They leave no bodies,” she’d growled, wiping a smear of my blood from her lip with a grin. “Just dust. Like they were never there. Look for the disappearances the Enforcers can't explain.”

It wasn’t much, but it was a thread. And I knew just the paranoid spider to help me follow it.

“You’re really going out? After… that?” Elara asked, her voice laced with awe and concern. She was dabbing a cheap antiseptic wipe on a cut over my eyebrow, her touch surprisingly gentle. The immediate threat of the Asphalt Howlers had been replaced by the simmering unease of our shared predicament.

“Can’t afford to sit still,” I grunted, shrugging back into my leather jacket. The movement sent a jolt of fire through my ribs. “The dust-bunnies know where I live now. And Lyra’s idea of ‘leaving us alone’ has a very short shelf life. We need to get ahead of this, and that means we need more than just vague warnings.”

I grabbed a small, lead-lined case from a shelf. “You’re coming with me. Can’t leave you and your reality-warping paperweight here alone.”

Her eyes widened, but she nodded, clutching the Chronos Cube tighter. For someone who’d literally fallen into my life, she was learning quickly that standing still was the fastest way to get killed.

Our destination was a shop called ‘Kenji’s Komputers & Konspiracies,’ nestled in the glowing, chaotic heart of Neo-Veridia’s tech district. The storefront was a hoarder’s nightmare, its windows crammed with stacks of obsolete monitors, tangled nests of cables, and faded posters proclaiming ‘THEY’RE LISTENING THROUGH YOUR MOLARS!’

The bell above the door chimed a tinny, 8-bit tune as we entered. The smell of ozone, burnt solder, and stale instant noodles hit me like a physical blow. The proprietor, Kenji, a kitsune with three twitching fox tails and eyes that never stopped scanning the corners of the room, poked his head out from behind a mountain of gutted hard drives.

“Jax! They didn’t get you!” he chirped, his voice a high-pitched buzz of nervous energy. “I saw the chroniton fluctuations on my deep-field sensors. Classic grey alien abduction signature. Let me see your teeth. Did they install any new fillings?”

“No aliens, Kenji. Just assassins,” I said, sidestepping a teetering pile of motherboards. “And I need your help.”

Kenji’s fox ears perked up. “Assassins are just field agents for the Illuminati-Reptilian-Crab People Alliance. Semantics.” He scurried over, his eyes landing on Elara and the cube. “Whoa. Her bio-signature is off the charts. And that… that’s a Tesseract dampener field. She’s definitely been on a ship.”

“She’s a client,” I lied smoothly. “And this is the job. I brought you a present.”

I placed the lead-lined case on the only clear spot on his counter. Kenji’s eyes lit up with a greedy gleam. He popped it open to reveal a shimmering data-slate, its casing made of a polished, non-terrestrial alloy. It was a piece of contraband tech I’d lifted off a Fae arms dealer a month ago.

“A Xylosian dream-wafer!” he breathed reverently. “Military grade! Un-hackable! They say you can use this to reverse-engineer the frequency of the mind-control satellites!”

“It’s all yours,” I said. “But first, I need you to earn it.” I paused, then pulled a greasy paper bag from my jacket pocket. “Oh, and this is for the girls.”

On cue, a trio of tiny, shimmering figures zipped out from behind a server rack. They were pixies, no bigger than my thumb, with dragonfly wings that beat in a furious, glittering blur. The local tech-nymphs. They swarmed the bag, their tiny voices squeaking with excitement.

“Cheeseburgers! He brought the sacred patties!”

“All hail the Bringer of Grease!”

Kenji watched them tug a miniature burger from the bag. “They appreciate the gesture. Keeps them from braiding the fiber-optic cables. Now, what do you need that requires such a generous bribe?”

I laid it out for him. The attack, the grey-robed assassins, the way they dissolved into dust. I gave him Lyra’s cryptic clue about the disappearances.

“Dust, you say?” Kenji’s fingers were already flying across three different keyboards, his three tails twitching in concentration. Screens flickered to life around us, displaying cascading lines of code, news feeds, and Enforcer police reports he definitely wasn't supposed to have access to. “Not a standard disintegration pattern. Not plasma, not acid…”

He muttered to himself, cross-referencing keywords, running spectral analyses from public satellite imagery. “Ah. Got it. A series of missing persons reports over the last two months. No bodies, no ransom notes. The only evidence left at the scenes was trace amounts of an inert, silicate-based particulate. The Enforcers logged it as… atmospheric contamination.”

“Amateurs,” I grunted. “What’s the connection?”

“The victims,” Kenji said, his eyes widening as he pulled up profiles. “A low-level warlock who ran a protection racket. A vampire broker who dealt in black-market blood futures. A Seelie Court diplomat’s son caught dealing pixie dust. All supernaturals. All… messy.” He tapped a final key. “And all of them were last seen within a two-block radius of this place.”

An image flashed onto the main screen. It was a sleek, sterile-looking building of white marble and black glass that had recently gone up in the upscale commercial district. It looked completely out of place amongst Neo-Veridia’s gothic architecture. The sign on the front, in elegant silver script, read: ‘Continuum Corp’.

“A new department store,” Kenji said. “Opened three months ago. Sells high-end temporal chronometers, bespoke reality anchors, designer clocks. Very exclusive. And their corporate registration is a shell company that loops back on itself six times before vanishing into thin air.”

“Epoch Wardens,” Elara whispered from behind me. The name sounded like a curse on her lips.

Kenji’s ears flattened. “Who?”

“The cult,” I said, my eyes fixed on the image of the store. “That’s what she called them.”

“Let’s see what happens when we poke their website with that name,” Kenji said, his fingers a blur. He typed ‘Epoch Wardens’ into a search string aimed directly at the Continuum Corp servers.

The moment he hit ‘enter,’ all hell broke loose.

Every screen in the shop simultaneously went black. A piercing, high-frequency shriek erupted from the speakers, making me clap my hands over my ears. In the center of the main monitor, a complex sigil blazed to life—a serpent eating its own tail, coiled around an hourglass, glowing with the same dead-violet light as the assassins’ blades.

It wasn't just a digital attack. I felt it in my bones. A wave of raw, magical power surged from the screen, a psychic assault meant to fry not just the circuits, but the mind of whoever was snooping.

Kenji screamed and was thrown back from his console, his fur standing on end. The lights in the shop exploded in a shower of sparks. The pixies shrieked, diving for cover in the greasy burger bag.

I felt the pressure in my head, a crippling migraine that threatened to drop me to my knees. But before it could overwhelm me, a wave of cold, silent power rolled out from Elara. The runes on her skin flared, a brilliant, defensive blue. She held the Chronos Cube out in front of her, and the black, obsidian surface seemed to ripple, drinking in the violet energy of the attack. The psychic scream cut off, the sigil on the screen flickered and died, and the shop was plunged into darkness and silence, save for the hum of the emergency power kicking in.

We stood there in the gloom, breathing heavily. The air was thick with the smell of fried electronics and raw magic.

“Okay,” Kenji wheezed, picking himself up from a pile of old keyboards. His tails were puffed up to twice their normal size. “Note to self: the Epoch Wardens have a very aggressive anti-spam filter. They know we’re looking. They felt that.”

I looked from the fried console to Elara, who was staring at the now-inert Cube in her hands. We hadn’t just found a thread. We’d yanked on a tripwire connected to a bomb. We had their name, and we had their base of operations.

But now, they had us, too.

“Well,” I said, cracking my bruised knuckles. “Looks like we’re going shopping.”