He lands spine-first on the concrete, the crack of bone echoing off the tile. He gasps, eyes wide, paralyzed by the impact. But before he can draw breath, the Magnemite’s hum jumps half an octave, and a yellow bolt lances through the air and buries itself in his chest. His body seizes, heels drumming the floor, arms splaying out in a deadman’s T. The stink of ozone is instant, a metallic reek that singes the inside of my nose.

  I’m behind him, the grunt’s body propped up as a shield, his vest still smoking. The Magnemite didn’t mean to kill him—there’s a twitch of confusion in its eye, a stutter in its hovering, but it recalibrates fast. It doesn’t care who the target is anymore. It charges again, gathering a corona of yellow at the tips of its magnets.

  I shove the dead grunt off me and scramble back, hands searching for something solid. There’s the abandoned riot shield on the floor. I grab it, jam my forearm through the straps, and drag it up just as the Magnemite’s next shot arcs through the room. The impact flares blue on the surface, an increasing spiderweb of micro-cracks radiating out. I feel the heat through my sleeve, the plastic softening under the blast. My teeth rattle.

  Luna is up, a streak of orange fur, blood smeared across her cheek. She doesn’t roar or howl—she just launches, silent, a chunk of broken tile in one paw, and slams into the Magnemite with everything she’s got. It’s not a show of force, not even a proper attack. It’s desperation and momentum, thats all. The tile explodes against the Magnemite’s hull, shards ricocheting off the wall. The steel ball jerks, floats uneven for a second, then whips around and slams Luna with a pulse of static that sends her flying into the kitchenette. The glass of the microwave door shatters around her.

  The second Plasma grunt is trying to peel Muse off his shin. The Lotad has both front paws locked around the man’s leg, his leaf-hat pressed flat against the fabric. The grunt kicks, once, twice, but every time the foot lands, it gets weaker. I see it now: a mess of sickly green lines crawling up from Muse’s mouth, up the grunt’s calf, branching under the skin like roots searching for sun. The man’s face goes waxy, his lips blue at the corners. He gurgles, drops to one knee, and then slumps sideways, dragging Muse with him.

  The Magnemite is losing patience. With its trainer dead, the light of its eye changes, deepens—there’s a cold, ugly logic in its algorithms, a binary decision to finish this fight before it runs out of targets. It draws itself in, spinning, the ends of its horseshoe magnets grinding together as it charges up a third shot.

  I brace the shield, but my arm is cooked. The first hit numbed my whole side, the second half-melted the padding on the forearm strap. It probably won’t hold many more shots.

  The air gets sharp. There’s a high-pressure tick, like the start of an engine, and then the ceiling caves in.

  Not a cave-in, not exactly. It’s Metang, forced down through the concrete by the weight of a body clinging to its back—Liepard, its claws sunk deep into the seam where Metang’s arms meet its carapace. The whole mass slams to the floor, ten feet away, and the impact splits the linoleum, a shockwave that pops every light bulb in the room. The ceiling is a jagged hole, rebar and insulation drifting down in slow motion.

  Metang tries to right itself, but the Liepard’s got a lock, tendrils of shadow smoking off its coat. The darkness is more than an attack—it’s an infection, a viral haze that saps the shine from Metang’s hull and makes its eyes dim. The glow in its lens is almost gone.

  I don’t need the relay to know Metang is out of psychic tricks. It’s running on raw, animal code now, fighting with the body, not the brain.

  The Magnemite looms in the air, crackling with charge, and fixes its eye on me.

  There’s no time for tactics. I plant the shield and get low, ready for whatever happens next.

  Luna is already up, battered but running. She skids under the Magnemite, grabs it with both paws, and tries to pin it to the tile. The thing weighs nothing, but she’s not fighting physics—she’s fighting the attack cycle, jamming it, forcing it to redirect. The shot goes off anyway, wild, a bolt that smashes into the wall a foot from my head. Chunks of tile and plaster explode across the room, dust snowing down.

  Luna clamps her teeth around the Magnemite’s lower half and bites down. The metal creaks, but she can’t even dent it. Instead, the Magnemite fires its next attack straight down, point-blank, and the blast knocks Luna back like she’s been shot from a cannon. She hits the cabinet, goes limp for a half-second, then drags herself upright, blood running from her ear.

  She’s still moving.

  On the far side of the room, the second grunt is barely alive. He’s slumped against the wall, head tipped back, mouth open, tongue lolling blue. The green lines—chlorophyll, or whatever passes for it in Muse’s biology—have run all the way to the man’s jaw, branching up into the cheek and around the eye socket. Muse is still latched on, but the colour in his body is different: his body a lighter green, his leaf larger and waxier. He’s… growing.

  A tremor runs through Muse’s body. He spasms, not in pain, but in something closer to ecstasy. He opens his mouth, exhaling a mist of vaporized moisture stolen from the man's lungs. It clings to the walls, the ceiling, turning the air swamp-thick.

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  The grunt’s head lolls, and the eyes, when they open, are not the same. They are glassy, frog-bright, unfocused.

  Muse releases him, slides backward, and plops onto his ass. His body is already different—wider, the legs longer, the leaf hat thicker and creased with veins. He’s evolving, right here, right now, under the worst possible circumstances.

  There’s a bang, and the riot shield in my hands stings hot. I look up. The Magnemite is still in the air, a foot from my face, and it’s building up for another attack. There’s a whine that builds and builds, a note so loud I can feel it in my teeth.

  I go flat, roll left, and the shot streaks over my head, incinerating the top layer of the shield and burning a stripe into the wall behind. My jacket sleeve is melted at the edge. I don’t wait for another— I grab the rim of the shield and use it as a paddle, swatting the Magnemite out of the air and into the countertop. It bounces, hits the floor, and rolls, landing next to Luna.

  She pounces. It’s not a clean hit, but it buys a second.

  The ceiling is still raining dust. Metang and Liepard are locked in their own orbit, trading body blows. Liepard’s claws are in deep, hooked under the plating, but Metang just uses the mass—slamming the cat into the floor, the wall, anything it can. There’s a crunch, and one of the Liepard’s legs goes limp. It hisses, still clinging, still pumping that shadow into Metang’s frame.

  Metang’s eyes flicker. For a second, I get a ping—barely a word, but it’s there, in the relay:

  Survival probability: 23%. Prioritize: Muse. Window: sixty seconds.

  I look at Muse, still spasming, body rippling as the evolution completes. The hat is now a full dome, fringed with a mane of green. The mouth is wider, the arms longer. He blinks, once, twice, then croaks, a low, warbling sound that vibrates the air.

  Luna’s still up. She’s limping, but she’s not letting go of the Magnemite, batting it back and forth across the tile, keeping it off its game.

  I crawl, fast, over to the grunt’s body, the one Muse drained. His belt is loaded—Poké Balls, a taser, a riot grenade. I rip the grenade off, thumb the safety, and lob it at the Liepard. It bursts in a cloud of pepper and foam, catching the cat right in the face.

  Liepard yowls, claws retracting from Metang just long enough for Metang to break free. It slams the cat down, pins it with a claw, but its field is flickering—there’s a haze of black around the carapace, and I know it’s not winning this.

  I hear the crackle of static. The Magnemite has Luna cornered against the cabinets, sparks chewing at the tile underfoot. I grab the shield, get low, and bull rush the Magnemite from behind. I slam it with the edge, and it goes pinwheeling into the open hallway, trailing sparks and smoke.

  I plant the shield in the doorway, just as the Magnemite charges another attack. The first bolt slams into the face of the shield, but this time, I’m ready: I brace the rim against the floor, channel the force down my legs. The impact is so strong it blisters my palm. The world smells of burned plastic and electricity.

  Luna sprints up beside me, her face wild, one eye crusted shut with blood. She tugs at my pant leg, like she wants to say something, but there’s no time.

  Metang is down, Liepard still latched onto its back, both of them leaking fluids— blood, and something black. I don’t know if it can get up again.

  I look at Muse. He’s standing now, body stretched, a new weight in his legs. His face is older, heavier, and his eyes are different: less glazed, more aware.

  The clock in my head is running out. The Magnemite is trying to melt its way through the shield, and I can see the first holes forming in the plastic.

  Sixty seconds, Metang had said.

  The next actions happen in a stretch of time so thin it shouldn’t exist. There’s a freeze—one, two, three, everything in the world down to the last twitch of fur and drop of blood—then the dominoes start to fall.

  Lombre is the first to move. He’s not fast. If anything, the evolution has made his body sluggish, the extra mass at odds with the tiny fire in his nervous system. But his aim is true. He slides between the Liepard and the wall, arms raised, and slaps his webbed hands together once, the noise a wet crack that cuts through the madness. The sound isn’t loud, but it’s a pressure wave, a sonic pop that hits the Liepard in the face and stuns it just long enough for Luna.

  Luna doesn’t roar, doesn’t scream. She goes in low, a blur of orange stained black, and rakes the Liepard’s throat with both sets of claws. There’s no pause, no hesitation, no drama. The line is surgical, straight through the soft, unarmored patch under the jaw. The carotid goes open, a spray of blood painting the floor. The Liepard doesn’t even make a noise. Its mouth opens, eyes already glassy, and it drops, legs kicking, all the darkness leaking out of it as quickly as it entered.

  Lombre’s hands are still in the air. He doesn’t follow the kill with another move. He just looks at me, and his eyes are the same as Muse’s, even though the body is wrong now, too big, too heavy, too stretched for the room. The sadness in the look isn’t for the cat, or the enemy, or even the cost to himself. It’s for the fact that this is the only way the world lets him protect his family.

  He stands there, frozen, blood spattering his legs, and then he inhales—a slow, deliberate breath. I know what’s coming. I know, because we’ve done it before, in alleys and ditches and the filth of a hundred places the League doesn’t care about.

  I turn, get between the ruined admin door and the main corridor, and dig my boots in. The riot shield is useless, so I use it as a wedge, shoving it into the frame to keep the hallway clear.

  There’s a scrape behind me. The Magnemite is coming back through the corridor, its hull dripping with residue and scratched to hell, but its eye is fixed on Lombre, the pupil so narrow it’s almost not there. There are deep scratches down its side, impact marks where Luna and the debris hit, but the machine doesn’t care. It’s not alive in the way the others are. It’s just a program running to completion.

  Lombre doesn’t hesitate. He brings his hands together again, and the air in front of his face gets heavy, full of static. Then he opens his mouth, and the world goes strange.

  The first thing is the sound: not the bubbling nonsense of a happy cartoon, but a hiss like compressed gas through a pinhole. The water that erupts from Lombre’s mouth isn’t a “beam.” It’s a bullet. Each “bubble” is a sphere packed with water so dense it punches air out of its way, the surface tension holding until the last possible second. The first orb slams into the Magnemite and the hull caves, metal crumpling with a sharp, ugly whine. The second and third hit the same spot, and the case splits open, wires and coolant gushing out like a burst artery.

  Lombre doesn’t stop. The pressure is too much for the new body, the muscles not made for this torque. The webbing at the corner of his lips splits, but he keeps firing, each shot slamming into the Magnemite with enough force to drive it backward, sparking and leaking.

  The Bubblebeam isn’t a move. It’s an industrial accident.

  By the time Lombre stops, the Magnemite is a mess on the floor, not even sparking, its eye a blown fuse.

  I look at Lombre. His hands are shaking, his mouth bleeding where the webbing tore, but he’s upright. He looks at me, and again, there’s nothing but regret in the eyes.

  Luna limps over, drops down at my side, and presses her face into my palm. She’s shaking too, but it’s a low, vibrational shudder—like she’s trying to resonate with the only heartbeat she’s got left.

  Behind us, Metang still hasn’t moved. But the relay pops to life, the voice now barely more than a rumor: “Countermeasures effective. System will reboot in ten minutes.”

  I sit, the warmth of the blood and ozone and wet concrete the only thing left in the world.

  Lombre drags himself over, sits beside me. He doesn’t sing. He just looks at the Liepard, then at Luna, then at me.

  I nod. “You did good, Muse.”

  He closes his eyes, and for a second, the world is still.

  The corridor is silent. The air tastes of copper and plastic, but we’re alive.

  I sit there, with the two of them, and realize that this is the new baseline: every day, a new trench. Every day, a new gray. There’s no black and white, not anymore. Not for people like us.

  Luna nuzzles closer, fur sticky with a thousand injuries, and Lombre leans into the side with his heavy, wet head.