Reina sits cross-legged on a filthy tile floor, a synaptic implant throbbing behind her ears. The headache nearly buckles her vision. When she finally stands, the world has changed — she can perceive individual frames of her own movement. She slices through a pack of Model Threes like they're standing still. The killing feels inevitable. But the real shock comes when she reaches the basement shelter to find her own father's corporate logo on the security system: he disabled the shelter's defenses to store his stolen goods. She bypasses his locks with hacker-tech purchased from Artymis, and the civilian survivors cheer. One guard with a claw scar on his neck shakes her hand with bone-crushing force. She tells him to burn anything suspicious inside. The shelter door slams shut, sealing safety behind her, and she realizes her father has been actively sabotaging anti-antithesis infrastructure for profit.

A Model Five squad pins her inside a synth-leather boutique with poison spines that punch through body armor. She has no ranged option, hates guns, and the door is buckling. Artymis drops a compound bow and monowire arrows into her hands. The first arrow turns a Five into paste — the expanding wire strands slice every direction, reducing the creature to a fine red spray. She buys multispectral glasses next, learns to see through walls, and shoots the remaining Fives through drywall without exposing herself. When she steps outside, a nanite golem two stories tall is stomping antithesis into pulp in the street. It melts into a woman in a tight metal suit: Grey Goo, an experienced samurai. Grey offers Reina a ride to the command center, a juice box, and the first hint that this incursion is worse than normal. Reina is carrying her grandfather's ashes in a backpack. She hands them to a PMC sergeant for safekeeping.

A Model Seventeen command unit hunts them. It sets an ambush outside the Tanaka Industries sales office — a Model Fourteen bursts through a wall while hundreds of lesser antithesis flood the street. Reina's squad is cut off from the APC. Bulldog finds a maintenance door, but the lock is chained. She slices through both chain and door with her new monomolecular blade, and the APC skids around the corner, ramp already down. The Fourteen chases them across a parking lot, but the truck is faster. Reina collapses onto a bench, gasping. The Seventeen, she learns, uses neural strands to control two dozen other models directly and can coordinate entire swarms through those puppets. It is not a brute. It is a planner. Skyler, her lawyer girlfriend, was nearly killed by it earlier. The thing is now hunting them specifically.

The pet shop's seed pod punched through the shelter roof. Sevens — zombie worms — have infested every person inside. The civilians are dead, their bodies puppeted by the parasites. Reina sees them shambling toward her through the camera feed, glassy-eyed, reaching for her. She floods the pod with enzyme catalyst, dissolving the biomass and the worms inside. Two survivors remain — the parasites haven't fully taken them yet. Skyler injects healing nanites into the base of one boy's skull. He will live, but the other must be put down. Bulldog carries the woman's body to a pile while Reina turns away. She cannot save everyone. But she finds one small tawny kitten, backed into a gap on a bookshelf, hissing with tiny paws. She names it Lala and carries it in a cat carrier backpack the rest of the incursion.