Raven moved deeper into the warehouse, her footsteps muffled by dust that had lain undisturbed for years. The air shifted slightly as she passed into the next chamber, thicker now, charged with something different. Anticipation, maybe. Or maybe it was just the chemical tang of metal and heat and memory.
She passed under a rusted archway and into a new section. The lighting here was dimmer, cast from a few cracked red emergency bulbs still clinging to life. They flickered overhead like dying stars, casting intermittent glows across the floor and walls. Shadows danced in irregular rhythm.
Then she saw them.
Omni Silencers.
Row after row, box after box. Each one neatly packed in foam, secured in unmarked black crates. Their designs were all too familiar—short, matte cylinders with triple-threaded graphite-coated bases and internal baffling systems.
She stepped closer, pulled one free, and held it up to the light.
This wasn’t just another piece of equipment. It was legacy. Infamy. These silencers didn’t just reduce sound—they eliminated it. No flash. No echo. No trace.
While the world scrambled with suppressors that dampened fire by sixty percent, hers whispered the round out of the chamber without light or heat. Ghost tech. Phantom strikes.
The government had hunted them with increasing desperation. Black sites. Interrogations. Dozens of arrests, and not a single confirmed lead. And they never even suspected that the creator was an eleven-year-old girl, hiding the prototypes beneath a floorboard in her childhood bedroom.
She remembered the first one she built. The way the components rattled in her hands. How she’d scavenged pieces from old printers, irrigation tubing, and a dissected leaf blower. Her father never asked where it came from. He just started replicating it.
Raven replaced the silencer and closed the crate gently.
No wonder he’d invested so heavily in the illegal arms trade. With a daughter like her, how could he not?
But she had never made them for profit. She wasn’t interested in money. These inventions were a byproduct of obsession. Zombie scenarios. Doomsday prepping. Apocalyptic theory.
While other kids planned parties or studied for spelling tests, Raven designed failproof barricades, evaluated canned food shelf lives, and tested firework explosives for payload radius. She was a child doomsday preeper, a perfactly respectable hobby, ask anyone who is eleven years old they will agree with Raven or at least after meeting her fist they will love the hobby as much as she does.
She turned away from the silencers and followed the path toward another row of storage. As the red light buzzed overhead, she stepped into a clearing and saw something that actually stopped her.
Blades.
Mounted neatly on racks, gleaming faintly in the low light, were swords.
Longswords, thick and broad, the kind wielded by medieval knights. Katanas, curved and sleek, black-wrapped hilts aligned in perfect symmetry. A row of Chinese tang swords, slim and precise, built more for grace than brute force. They looked ceremonial—but she knew better.
She ran a finger down the edge of one blade. It bit her glove without resistance.
Banned in thirty-nine countries.
Too sharp. Too lethal. Too difficult to control.
Perfect for decapitation.
Ideal for close-range zombie defense or slicing mutated tissue. And in the silence, where a gunshot could attract a dozen more threats, a sword was a whisper of efficiency.
She slipped a tang sword free from its rack and gave it a testing swing. It moved with no resistance through the air, so light it almost pulled itself. Her eyes narrowed with approval. Then she slid it back and kept walking.
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