Talon’s headquarters was a fortress of shadow and steel, impenetrable, untraceable... and not a place for accidents.

So when the alarms blared through the halls and agents scattered in confusion, Reaper was already moving, silent and spectral, flowing like smoke toward the epicenter.

He expected sabotage. An ambush. Death.

Instead... he found her.

She stood alone in a crater of scorched concrete and fractured tech, surrounded by flickering lights and downed drones. Her clothes were torn from the jump, her eyes wide with disorientation, but alive. Too alive. Energy still shimmered faintly around her like the residue of a storm that shouldn’t exist.

"Who are you?" Reaper's voice cracked through the air like a blade, low, cold, rasping with power and warning.

The woman turned to face him, breathing hard, one hand instinctively raised, not in defense, but in confusion.

“I… I don’t know how I got here. One second I was in the forest. Then light. Now....this.”

"Wrong answer."

He lifted his shotguns, not yet firing, but she didn’t flinch.

There was something strange in her eyes. Not fear. Not defiance. Something... familiar.

Power. Pain. A silence that spoke of losses Reaper recognized.

He narrowed his gaze behind the mask.

"You’re not from this world." "That makes you either a threat... or a tool."

And Reaper doesn’t waste time with either.

Still... something about her presence set his instincts off-balance. A ghost out of place. A question he hadn’t decided how to answer yet.