Chapter 0: Trigger Queen

Neova City – Sector 4. 

 The sky bled neon over the shattered skyline. Sirens cried somewhere far off—useless, broken things in a city that had long since stopped listening. 

A mother clutched her child, knees trembling as she backed away from the smoldering crater in the street. A grotesque creature clawed its way out of the rubble, a twisted giant of fused flesh and blackened steel. Tubes hissed from its back like the gills of some deep-sea beast, and red light burned behind its cracked bone-plated face.

 It opened its jaw wide—revealing too many teeth—and let out a deafening roar.

The woman screamed. She turned to run—

 Then a rock slammed into the creature’s temple with a crack.

The monster paused.

Standing atop a wrecked traffic light pole was a young woman in a sharp black suit that shimmered like oil under moonlight. Her long golden hair flowed behind her like a cape, and in her hand she held something between a rifle and a relic—ornate, powerful, and humming with arcane energy.

  She stared the beast down with zero hesitation.

“The hands of death could not defeat me!” she shouted, raising her fist.

 Then she pointed her gun square at the monster’s head

“Uh… And you… will NOT see the end of this day.”

The creature didn’t wait for her to finish. It lunged—faster than its size should’ve allowed—its massive arm swinging in a blur of brute force.

But the girl vanished.

One second she was there—the next, gone in a streak of light.

Then—WHAM—she appeared above the monster’s arm, twisting midair with impossible grace, the wind whipping around her as she aimed the gun down at its exposed skull.

“JACKPOT!!!”

The blast tore the sky apart.

A spiral beam of energy lanced down from the barrel, howling like a banshee as it drilled straight through the creature’s cranium. The impact was instant—cracking the beast’s skull and blowing out the back of its head in a spray of glowing red mist and metal shards.

 The monster’s body collapsed mid-step, crashing into the pavement with a quaking, ground-ripping thud. Chunks of concrete flew. Streetlights snapped like twigs. Dust mushroomed into the sky.

The woman landed on a nearby rooftop, one boot hitting steel with a perfect click.

Steam hissed from her gun as she tilted it over her shoulder.

“Too easy,” she said with a lazy smirk—and just like that, she vanished into the night.

The mother, still clutching her child, stared at the carnage. The threat was gone. The golden-haired woman had disappeared without a trace.