Six Years Ago…

“So,” Jean Lyons said, crossing his legs as he looked across the coffee table. “Why is it you want to join the GID, Mr. Peran?”

Eric Peran blinked as he looked back at the Director of the Galactic Intelligence Division. Many reasons battled for Supremacy inside his mind. He knew that he couldn't say very many of them.

I want to get rid of you. I want your job. I want control of the Galactic Intelligence Division. I want to be the one inside the shadows. I want to be the one who makes the decisions.

Only one of his reasons was safe enough to say.

“I want to change things,” he said.

Lyons smiled placidly, scrolling through his script with a pale finger. “Well,” he said calmly. “Your military service is certainly respectable.” He paused, raising a curious eyebrow. “It says here you tried to become a Special Officer. Made it all the way to the end of the Exam, too. Not everyone is capable of that. You made it to the final group and then suddenly… conceded. Why is that?”

Eric clasped his hands together, sweat coating his palms. “By that point, I'd already proven to myself that I could have become a Special Officer if I'd wanted to. Anything after that served no purpose… save drawing attention to myself.”

“And that's something you wanted to avoid?”

He nodded. “I already knew this was the path I wanted to ultimately take. I figured… I felt that too much renown beforehand would be an obstacle here.”

“Well,” Lyons chuckled, putting the script down on the table before him. “Your instincts are sharp enough in that regard. It's true: what I look for is skill without the fame that skill naturally accumulates. It's a rare resource. I'm very happy with what you've brought to me.”

Despite the tense atmosphere of Lyons’ office, Eric found a grin coming to his face. “Then…?”

Lyons nodded. “You want to change things, hm? Very good. That's what we do. We reach into events, seize them where they are vulnerable, and turn them in whatever direction benefits the people of the Supremacy. Is that what you're looking for?”

No. I don’t want us to do that. I want to be the one.

Eric nodded giddily. “Yes, of course!”

“Then I think we'll do great things together, Mr. Peran,” Lyons said, extending a hand. “Welcome to the GID.”

Eric eagerly accepted the handshake. It was freezing cold.

Present Day…

Bang. Bang.

Chicken Punk fired two shots directly at the head of the Shepherdess -- but, as expected, no holes appeared in her skull. Some things were just too good to be true.

“Get up,” he demanded, taking a step back. “I’m not stupid enough to think that killed you.”

The Shepherdess acquiesced, rising from the ruins of the fridge like a vampire emerging from its coffin. Her face was still concealed by the darkness -- but if Punk looked carefully, he could see the bullets he'd fired. He could see them, floating right in front of her forehead, frozen in the moment just before they made contact.

She cocked her head. “Do you know what the most immutable force in this world is, Chicken Punk?”

Chicken Punk narrowed his eyes. “You're gonna say the Supremacy, right?”

“Of course not,” she giggled. “The Supremacy is a grand endeavour, but it's still something made up of people. If it was immutable, there'd be no need for me to run around putting out fires, right?”

“That's what you think you do? Put out fires?”

She ignored him as she continued. “No, the most immutable force in this world… is time,” she said, raising a hand. “No matter how powerful they are, everyone is trapped to it -- locked on the same linear path from second to second… helpless. Escape exists for nobody. Well…”

Pink Aether crackled.

“...nobody but me.”

Leaping back, Punk tapped his hand again, sending the signal to his men to fire. Glass exploded inwards as shots tore into the room. Each and every one was aimed for the Shepherdess’ vitals, and each and every one failed to make contact.

They froze, all around her -- no, everything froze, right down to the tiniest fragments of glass. It all hung in the air like glittering snow. And then…

“Chronodissonance.”

…they began to reverse.

It was like something out of a dream. The shots zoomed back in the direction they'd come, the glass windows reforming themselves as they left. The rubble of the kitchen reconstructed itself. The fridge unbuckled its dent with a screech, returning to its former shape. Even the fallen cereal and spilt milk flowed through the air, back into the reconstituted bowl.

In the span of a few seconds, it was like the battle had never even started.

The Shepherdess' gaze had followed one of the plasmablasts as it had returned to the distant gun, and now a smile turned her lips.

“Four snipers in four locations, with you giving them the signal. You're very thorough. Unfortunately, I now understand how far away they are and what directions they're in. Once you're dead, I won't have much trouble hunting them down.”

Chicken Punk reloaded his pistol. “You're getting ahead of yourself, missy.”

“Yes… I am. I alone have that privilege. Chronodissonance.”

Pink Aether coursed across the Shepherdess' body as she moved, her speed beyond any ordinary Aether-user, as if her body had suddenly been put into fast-forward. Before Chicken Punk could even blink, he'd been struck in the chest, sent flying back into the living room. Before Chicken Punk could even land, he'd been kicked in the back, ricocheted towards the bedroom through an unconventional route.

He smashed through the wall, landing in a heap atop the soft covers. Blood coated his face, already sinking into one eye. His heart hammered in his chest.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Chronodissonance, huh?

The gist of the ability was obvious. Once this woman infused an object with her Aether, she was able to manipulate the flow of time for it. She could rewind, like she'd done to repair the room. She could pause, like she'd done to stop the shots hitting her. Clearly, she could speed up as well, which she was using now to kick his ass.

A scary ability, but not invincible. So long as you had Chicken Courage, nothing was invincible. Chicken Punk slid off the bed as he considered his next action.

Aether wasn't capable of true time manipulation. If it were, the timeline would already be a mess and everyone would be fucked. She talked a big game, but part of that would be a scare tactic. This was an Aether ability that simulated the effects of time manipulation, without actually interfering with the laws of the universe.

Still, though, the effects hurt like hell. Chicken Punk’s whole body throbbed with pain. Even so, he'd been lucky.

His body was too slow to react to the Shepherdess' movements, but Aether moved at the speed of thought. He'd managed to at least mitigate the damage to his chest and his back with infusion -- at least enough to prevent them from being shattered.

“Eyes lost on target.”

The sniper's voice was calm over the communicator. Well, of course he was calm. He wasn't the one in the building with this woman.

He wasn't in the best position right now. Injured, against an opponent with unbelievable speed, with no idea where they were. A thought occurred, though. Why had the attack stopped? Why hadn't the Shepherdess pursued and finished him off?

Ah. I get it.

She'd chosen the wrong room to throw him into. The doors on these bedrooms required a handprint to access -- meaning that this hole in the wall was the only way in. Since there was only a single entrance, there was only one route the Shepherdess could take to enter the room.

That left her open to being intercepted.

Since Chicken Punk had figured that out, it was a given that it was now an impossible strategy. If she was aware of that possibility, she'd use a different strategy. Punk leapt back onto the bed, feet sinking into the cozy mattress. He couldn't risk her punching through the floor and getting him by the legs.

That shouldn't have been his concern. He was worried about her getting through the floor. He should have been worried about her getting rid of it.

Pink Aether sparked from below -- and as it did, the floor of the bedroom crumbled away into dust. The contents of the room, including the bed and the Punk, plummeted down into the lounge of the room below, crashing through a videograph and startling the two people who'd been watching it.

A man and a woman, fairly young, fairly shocked at the Chicken Man and the Chicken Bed that had suddenly appeared before them. The man stood up, shock already becoming outrage. “Who the hell are --”

Pink. Something moving. Chicken Punk's eyes couldn't see it, but his Chicken Sense of movement told him death was approaching. Not for him, not yet, but for…

“Get out of here!” Punk roared, suddenly desperate, but too late --

-- as a shepherd's crook swung through the air twice, far too fast to see, and utterly destroyed two skulls.

Two Years Ago…

“So,” Peran said, looking down through the window at the coffin. “He's really dead.”

Jean Lyons’ corpse had finally been recovered from behind Final Church lines. Of course, the man who'd become Jean Lyons was long since dead on paper, and the Final Church couldn't very well find out what he'd been killed trying to do -- so as far as they knew he was some nameless casualty of the civil war that had just vanished from the morgue.

And here he was, for all his trouble: a nameless corpse in a nameless coffin on a nameless starstation, ready to be fired off into the darkness for his final rest. As far as the galaxy at large was concerned, these things didn't even exist. This wasn't even happening.

Good riddance.

Peran clenched his fists as he glared dismissively at the coffin. It didn't take a genius to see what Lyons had become over his years of service: a man in love with his own ability to make the ‘hard decisions’. There was nothing that had brought him greater joy than to destroy someone else in the pursuit of his mission.

Mr. Lyons, Peran sent the ghost off. Go fuck yourself.

He turned away from the window and began striding down the corridor, his blood already pumping with excitement. A smirk began to tug at his lips -- and as he walked, he dragged his palm across the window, producing a pleasing squeal from the glass.

Since he'd joined the GID, Eric Peran had done his best to cultivate connections within the ranks. He wasn't alone in his wish anymore. He'd found people with the same ideology as his, people who wanted to see the Supremacy move into the future, to see it become more than the bloodlust and brutality that had defined it for centuries.

And now, with Lyons finally gone, it was time for the new Director to be assigned.

It was time for things to change.

Present Day…

Chicken Punk's face twisted in anguish as he saw the corpses of the couple collapsed to the floor, messily decapitated.

“You didn't have to kill them,” he muttered.

The Shepherdess finally stopped moving. Black pumps gently landed atop the bloodstained couch, and their owner smiled down at him. She spun the crook in her hands -- she'd clearly grabbed it from the kitchen upstairs before pursuing him here.

He didn't know if that thing was an Aether Armament of some kind, but it was certainly strong enough to kill a person.

“Legends are strange things,” the Shepherdess said quietly, looking down at him. “Once you can see them, you can touch them. Once you can touch them, you can make them bleed. And once that happens? They're not a legend anymore… so I'm afraid I can't permit true witnesses to exist. You're next, okay?”

Chicken Punk narrowed his eyes behind his broken goggles, hot fury crawling over his brain. This really was her, wasn't it? This was the source of everything.

“I know who you are,” he muttered.

“You already said that,” the Shepherdess replied.

“I know who you are,” he repeated, more forcefully. “Once I had the power… I did everything I could to make the Supremacy change.”

The Shepherdess frowned, but Chicken Punk kept talking.

“I tried to lift up those who could lead us into the future. I tried to bring down those who were holding us back, those who abused their power, those who… those who… those who we didn't need anymore. More than that. I stuck my hands into every event I could and tried to twist them forward.

“But nothing worked. Agents disappeared, files were lost, the -- the people I thought could show us a new way -- they died. Again and again. I started to think that I'd misjudged the world, that I was a fool.”

“Well,” the Shepherdess smirked. “You're certainly right about --”

“But I wasn't,” Chicken Punk snarled, taking a step forward. “Was I? The world had nothing to do with it. It wasn't circumstance bringing our efforts down. Someone was doing it. You were doing it.”

“Like I said,” she replied. “Putting out fires.”

“It's not natural for a nation to remain so stagnant for so long,” Punk raised his fists. “We should have moved on centuries ago -- but we can't, can we?! You won't let us!”

He took a deep breath and finished.

“The Supremacy is bound in shape by thick, heavy chains. That's all you are. You're old chains -- and you've started to get rusty. That's three times you've failed to kill me now.”

The Shepherdess' smile dropped from her face. “You can say what you like, but --”

Chicken Punk leapt forward with all his Chicken Speed, tackling the Shepherdess -- and as he did, he tapped his fingers against his palm three times fast. It was the prearranged signal. Full fire -- and forget about me.

The Shepherdess' ability, Chronodissonance, required her to infuse an object with her Aether before she could manipulate it. That was how she rewound damage, that was how she sped things up, and that was how she froze attacks. But infusion was first-come first-served.

If Chicken Punk infused the plasma blasts with his own Aether as they came in, she couldn't do a damn thing about them. The only problem… was that he'd need to be in the line of fire to do that.

Oh well. These things happened.

Punk squeezed his eyes shut -- and the room was eaten by flames.