Lord Turtle the First

030

Ray activated his Z-Dragger, not for speed of movement—but for speed of thought. The neural accelerator surged through his synapses, compressing complex decision-making into mere milliseconds. Time, for him, seemed to stretch, to dilate into crystalline, slow-motion threads, each second becoming a vast landscape of possibility, of calculation....

029

He suddenly stood up, his movements sharp, decisive. He carefully, silently, walked out of his small apartment and headed towards the groaning, unreliable elevator. Pressed the button for the ground floor, the parking garage. He walked with a new, cold purpose to the secluded corner where he’d stashed the Kamigami Strike-Z and hopped on. The e...

Pictures

028

Johnny rubbed at the unfeeling knuckles of his prosthetic hand.

When that kid puts his mind to something, nothing can stop him. A familiar, weary thought. But what if that path, this path, ends the same damn way James’s did? The thought was a cold shard of ice in his gut.

He stared out the rain-smeared window, che...

027

"Then, a few months later, after many more nights of shared silence and occasional, surprisingly profound conversations, he asked me to marry him," Lina said, her voice pulling them both gently, irrevocably, back to the present, to the small, dim apartment, to the weight of memory.

Ray sat quietly, his gaze fixed on the cracked photo frame...

026

He swallowed, the lump in his throat sharp, painful. "Doesn’t mean it hurts any less, Mom," he said, his voice thick with unshed tears he could no longer physically cry.

She nodded slowly, her eyes filled with an infinite, maternal sadness. "No, it doesn’t. But it’s okay to hurt. You carry so much, Ray. So much on those young shoulde...

025

Ray groaned, his body shaking, as he tried to piece together more of the broken, chaotic memories of Rex. “I’am… never… doing this… again,” Ray whispered, his voice a ragged, broken rasp, as he stared, unseeing, at the filthy, refuse-strewn ground. The others he had consumed, their minds relatively intact at the moment of de...

024

Later that day, after a quiet, blessedly normal meal with his mother—during which he recounted a heavily edited, significantly less gruesome version of his junkyard adventure at the municipal landfill, which actually made her laugh, especially the parts involving Arty’s unique hazmat fashion sense and his theories on sentient tea dispensers�...

023

Despite himself, despite the stench and the sheer, overwhelming wrongness of it all, Ray cracked a smirk. For all his certifiable insanity, Arty had a strange, undeniable way of making even the grimmest situation feel… lighter.

And so, Ray’s first ‘treasure hunt’ began. He stepped cautiously over rusted, discarded piping and shatte...

022

Johnny was there in an instant, charging, his shotgun lowered, ready for the kill shot. Ray rolled desperately behind another pillar. He knew what Johnny was doing—he was trying to force him into close-range combat, where Ray, without his nanite advantages, had no chance of winning against Johnny’s raw power and decades of experience. He dre...

021

“Good choice,” Johnny said, a hint of approval in his tone. “She’s a professional. Cold as ice when she needs to be, but fair. And she definitely knows her shit.” Johnny stood then, his massive frame unfolding from the chair, and walked to a nearby reinforced steel cabinet. He opened it and pulled out two sleek MemStream headsets. They...

020

Ray charged forward. He slid in beside Johnny, his pistols firing in perfect, deadly sync with Johnny’s own assault rifle. Together, they cut down the remaining, terrified Red Obsidian guards in a brief, brutal fusillade of controlled fire. Dalen, his face a mask of grim determination, moved in and emptied his entire magazine directly into the...

019

Ray stepped forward, into the center of the room, his spine straight, his gaze unwavering. “Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, Johnny,” he said, his tone firm but not confrontational, addressing his boss but aware that everyone was listening. “I planned to explain everything after we got the package back. I didn’t expect Monica to get pu...

018

Ray stepped closer, a sense of unease prickling at the back of his neck.

 “What is it? Where did you get this?” Julia asked, her voice suddenly taut, strained.

“Someone I met this morning. A… tech enthusiast. Why? Is it infected?”

“No... it’s clean. Very clean, actually.” She hesitated, a strange, almost ch...

Witched

Tiana

Selene