"Hell yeah, Cole! I knew you could do it!" Lia shouted from the stands. Though Cole could have sworn he saw her discreetly pass some credit chips to Lucius, who pocketed them with a theatrical sigh of disappointment.

  "You bet against me?" Cole called up, not moving from his position.

  "I bet on the exact outcome," Lia corrected. "A draw at exactly four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Lucius thought you'd last five minutes before losing. Technically, we both won."

  "Your faith in me is overwhelming," Cole replied dryly.

  A smile spread across Iris’s face. It transformed her, chasing away the cold logic and revealing the fierce warrior beneath.

  “I ran a thousand simulations of this fight,” she said, her voice full of something that sounded like pride. “A draw wasn't an outcome in a single one of them. You didn’t just learn the lesson, Cole. You broke the test. You’re ready.”

  "So you two just going to stand there looking dramatic?" Lucius shouted. "Senna! You promised! Iris didn't win, so we head to the weapons shop and I get to choose the car for the excursion!"

  Senna rolled her eyes at the comment but gave a small, conceding nod. "Fine. A draw isn't a win. You found a loophole, Lucius. You can pick the transport. Just try to choose something with actual armor this time."

  "Finally!" Lucius pumped his fist. "I'm thinking something with racing stripes. And a sound system that violates noise ordinances in every city."

  "We're hunting monsters, not entering a street race," Senna said flatly. “You're describing what will turn into our very own hearse."

  "Why not both?" Lucius countered.

  "You know what? Fair point. I'll add 'racing hearse' to the search parameters."

  "Wait, really?"

  "No. But you looked so hopeful I felt bad."

  The first stop was a weapons shop so deep in the city's guts that the air left a chemical burn in your sinuses. The shop, ‘The Gilded Armory,’ was a disorganized treasure trove. Weapons of every description were mag-locked to the walls; gleaming corporate prototypes next to brutal, jury-rigged gang creations.

  A sign by the door read: "We Don't Ask Where You Got The Credits, You Don't Ask Where We Got The Weapons."

  The owner was a four-armed man with a look of profound boredom. His extra arms were clearly black-market; they were different models that didn't quite match, creating an unsettling asymmetry. One was military grade, one looked medical, and the other two were definitely stolen from an industrial loader.

  "Welcome to The Gilded Armory," he drawled, all four hands working on different tasks: polishing a blade, counting credits, typing on a terminal, and picking his teeth with a small knife. "Touch anything without asking and lose the hand. Store policy."

  Lucius was practically bouncing with excitement, dead set on finding a weapon like Veyra's from the arena fight. He had even tried bribing the fighter at the after-party the night before, thinking his charms could work. They didn't. She'd laughed in his face and told him to "earn his own legend."

  He was glancing at the array of weapons offered. His fingers sparked with anticipation, making several nearby display cases flicker. "Got anything unique? Something that matches my personality?"

  The weapons dealer looked at him with a look of disdain. "Loud, chaotic, and likely to backfire? For a personality that loud you'd need a cannon. Or a megaphone that shoots lightning. Actually, I might have one of those in the back... How about a pair of daggers to match your duality instead? They are created by a man named Forge."

  Cole immediately recognized the name. His hand unconsciously went to the photon accelerator on his hip. "Lucius, it's the same guy who made my gun. You should consider it. His work is... unique. And surprisingly reliable for something that seems impossible."

  "So what do they do?" Lucius asked, suddenly interested.

  The dealer grinned, sensing a sale. His jaw clicked as he smiled, revealing teeth that were definitely some kind of ammunition. "A connoisseur's choice. They're made from the bones of an Electric Dual-Horned Colossus. It was killed in the dead zones outside Storm City; it took a full Sequence Five team to bring it down. They are called the Eye and the Hurricane."

  He pulled them from a case that required two different biometric scans to open. The daggers were beautiful in their lethality. One was pearl white with veins of blue electricity running through it, The Eye, while the other was dark gray with a constantly shifting storm pattern in its surface, The Hurricane.

  "In short, they allow a Storm Domain to control their own mayhem. The Hurricane marks a target, focusing your random lightning strikes onto them. Like painting a bullseye that only probability can see. The two daggers have opposite polarities, letting you create magnetic traps. Throw them at two different enemies and watch them slam together at Mach Two. You can throw one to create a 'Probability Anchor,' teleporting one of your clones to its location. And their 'Phasic Edge' lets you attack while you're intangible. The only weapon I've seen that can cut something while technically not existing."

  "That is a lot of words," Lucius replied, his eyes gleaming as bright as the lightning in the white dagger. "But that sounds chaotic as hell. Sign me up." He slapped a credit chip worth 110,000 credits on the counter. "Lia, you should get something here."

  Cole watched Lia examine the weapons display, her fingers twitching slightly as she studied each piece. She kept tilting her head at different angles, and he recognized the look. She was analyzing the metal composition, probably calculating forge temperatures and stress points. Her expression shifted between interest and something that looked like annoyance, the same face she made when someone else cooked for her.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "Got anything else by the artisan Forge? For a Forge Wielder?" she asked the dealer, though Cole could hear the reluctance in her voice.

  The dealer's arms all stopped what they were doing. "You're asking a Forge Domain to buy another Forge Domains work? That's like... theological recursion or something."

  "It's called learning from a master," Lia replied coolly. "I can either be proud and dead, or humble and educated."

  "Right here," the dealer said, newfound respect in his voice as he pulled a massive weapon from a reinforced case that required two of his arms to lift. "We call it the Kiln-Heart Axe."

  It was a massive greataxe forged from a dark, heat-resistant alloy. The head was crafted from a single piece of metal that was simultaneously liquid and solid, constantly flowing yet maintaining its shape. The handle was wrapped in heat-resistant bio-leather from a Salamander Rift-Beast, with grip grooves that would mold to the user's hands.

  "It's a masterpiece of synergy. The 'Forging Edge' lets you reshape materials at a distance. Swing at a wall twenty feet away and carve through it like you were touching it. The 'Unmaking Cleave' syncs with your senses to shatter armor at its weakest point. It creates a weak spot if none exists. The back of the axe is a 'Conceptual Bevel,' anchoring weapons you forge from pure concepts. Pull 'sharpness' from the idea of a razor and manifest it as a flying blade. Its 'Slag Cannon' ability lets you absorb an energy attack and fire it back as a cone of molten slag. I've seen it eat a plasma cannon shot and spit back liquid death."

  Cole watched Lia stare at the weapon, her jaw working slightly as if she was chewing on something bitter. She kept running her fingers along the axe's edge without touching it, her hands moving through the air as if tracing invisible patterns. He'd seen her do this before when studying complex metalwork, but never with such intensity. Her palms flickered dimly, and she had that look she got when someone else's work challenged her assumptions.

  "How much?"

  "105,000 credits. Non-negotiable. Forge doesn't do discounts, says it devalues the art."

  Lia clicked her tongue, her face showing annoyance at the price, "Fine." She transferred the credits with visible reluctance.

  "Nice doing business with you all. Try not to die before you can review us on the net. Dead customers hurt our ratings."

  With that, they headed to the hover-vehicle rental. The van they had been using around the city wouldn't do in the Wastes. Flying might not be a foolproof escape from rift-beasts, but mobility meant options, and the quicker they were in and out, the better.

  The rental agency walls were covered in posters of happy families on hover-car road trips, conspicuously not mentioning that 63% of vehicles that entered the Wastes never came back.

  An AI hologram materialized, a cheerful woman in a pantsuit that flickered occasionally, revealing the code beneath. "Welcome to Skyline Rentals! Where your journey begins! Please note that 'journey' does not guarantee a 'return trip' when entering designated danger zones!"

  "This one!" Lucius said enthusiastically, pointing at a garish, bright orange hover-truck with oversized engines and a ridiculous spoiler. It had spinning rims. On a hover vehicle. That defied both logic and taste.

  "No," the group said in unison.

  "What? Why not?" Lucius asked, genuinely offended.

  "For one, it is orange," Lia said flatly. "Hunting camouflage that is not."

  "Two, it has subwoofers the size of my head that we all know you will abuse," Cole added. "I can literally see the noise ordinance violations waiting to happen."

  "And three, its energy signature is so loud every monster in a fifty-mile radius will track us by the exhaust trail alone," Senna finished. "It's a death trap painted like a traffic cone."

  "You're all buzzkills," Lucius grumbled. "What about that one?" He pointed to a vehicle that was somehow worse, chrome everything, with an underglow that cycled through rainbow colors.

  "I will literally pay you not to choose that," Lia said.

  After much debating, they finally settled on a bulky, black nomad-class hover-vehicle with camouflage technology that could last a total of fifteen minutes. The salesperson, a nervous man who'd clearly drawn the short straw, explained its features with the enthusiasm of someone describing their own funeral arrangements.

  "It has adaptive armor that can withstand most Sequence Six attacks, a top speed of Mach 0.8, and," he swallowed nervously, "a 34% survival rate in Rift-Beast encounters."

  "Only 34%?" Cole asked.

  "That's... actually the highest in its class," the man admitted.

  It was armored, efficient, and most importantly, discreet. The entire vehicle was coated in radar-absorbing material that made it nearly invisible to most detection systems. The downside was it looked like a flying brick, but a very survivable flying brick.

  Cole could see the agent behind the desk debating whether to hand them the keys as Lucius was in the back talking about adding some "sick-ass flames" to the stealth vehicle. The man's hand trembled as he watched Lucius use his lightning to sketch flame patterns in the air.

  "It's a stealth vehicle," the agent said weakly.

  "Stealthy flames," Lucius countered. "They'll be invisible flames."

  "Sir, flames, visible or otherwise, compromise a stealth profile."

  "Only if you lack vision. These would be conceptual flames. The idea of flames."

  "I don't..." the agent looked desperately at Lia. "Please tell me he's not serious."

  "He's always serious," Lia said. "That's the problem."

  They finally did hand over the keys, after Lia paid twice the necessary deposit. And signed a waiver absolving the company of responsibility for "Acts of Lucius."

  "Acts of Lucius?" Lucius read from the contract. "Is that a legal term now?"

  "As of right now, yes," the agent said, adding it to their standard forms. "We're nothing if not adaptable."

  As they loaded into their flying brick, which Lucius had already named "Shadowflame" despite everyone's protests, Cole couldn't help but feel a mix of anticipation and dread. Tomorrow, they'd be hunting creatures that made their recent enemies look like house pets.

  "Everyone ready for tomorrow?" Lia asked, taking the pilot's seat before Lucius could claim it.

  "No," Senna said, already running diagnostics on the vehicle's systems. "But being ready is a luxury. Being prepared is a necessity. And we are prepared."

  Lucius was already fiddling with the sound system, despite there being no sound system. "I can't believe this thing doesn't even have speakers. What if we need to intimidate something with dubstep?"

  "Then we've already lost," Lia said, starting the engine. The vehicle lifted off with barely a whisper, its stealth systems engaging automatically.

  As Storm City shrank beneath them, Cole took one last look at the arena where he'd finally matched Iris. Tomorrow, there would be no rules, no grid, no controlled environment.

  And somehow, despite everything, he was looking forward to it.

  he might actually survive.