The first thing that hit Lena was the chaos.
Explosions painted the sky like bruised sunsets, cascading oranges and reds that mirrored her latex-clad form. The wind screeched past her ears as she sprinted across a surreal battlefield of towering reflective spheres, each one distorting the maelstrom around her into nightmarish fragments. It was impossible to tell what was real and what was a reflection, but none of it mattered. The voice in her headset crackled with urgency.
“Lena, you’ve got thirty seconds before the next pulse. If you’re not out by then—well, let’s just say it won’t matter what color your hair is.”
Lena rolled her eyes, her mismatched pigtails—dyed crimson and sapphire-blue—bouncing against her shoulders. “Relax, Hayden. I’m not that easy to kill.” She vaulted over a shard of debris, boots skidding on the smooth sphere-like surface beneath her. The latex suit clung to her form like a second skin, its alternating red-and-black pattern catching the faint light and shimmering against the strange metallic landscape. It was armor and artifice all at once, making her blend into this chaotic world while standing out like a living splash of vivid rebellion.
The air shimmered as another pulse began to build, a low hum reverberating through the spheres. They vibrated ominously, reflecting her figure in grotesque permutations—sometimes taller, sometimes shorter, sometimes fractured into a kaleidoscope of Lena’s grinning face.
“Twenty seconds,” Hayden’s voice reminded her dryly. But this time there was an edge of fear. “The barrier’s destabilizing. You need to reach the entry point now.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your goggles on,” Lena shot back. Her voice was all bravado, but her heart hammered like a war drum that didn’t know the tune was over. She ducked sharply as a projectile whistled past her, carving a molten arc through the air. Twisting, she caught a fleeting glimpse of her pursuer—a hulking enforcer clad in sleek, obsidian armor, his face obscured beneath a mirrored helmet. Behind him, a cadre of drones hovered like hovering vultures, their violet searchlights sweeping the surreal terrain.
“Right,” Lena muttered, exhaling sharply. “No pressure.”
Her surroundings were alien and yet eerily familiar. This wasn’t Earth anymore—at least, not the Earth Lena had grown up on. The reflective spheres were relics of an advanced civilization long gone, vast monuments that hummed faintly with forgotten energy. They floated weightlessly over an abyssal chasm that seemed to stretch into eternity. Above, the sky churned with dark, thunderous clouds that looked more digital than natural, as though they were coded rather than weathered. This was Exile-9, a dead world at the fringes of humanity’s reach, salvaged only by opportunists and scavengers like her—or hunted by the enforcers who were programmed to guard it.
The enforcer’s distorted voice rang out across the plane, amplified by the spheres. “You cannot escape, rogue. Return the artifact, and your sentence may be reduced.”
“Oh, sure!” Lena shouted over her shoulder, reaching into a satchel slung across her chest. The artifact—a pulsating, fist-sized crystal—was warm to the touch, almost alive. Its light pulsed to the rhythm of her heartbeat. “I’ll just give this super-important alien doodad right back to you, big guy! Totally reasonable!”
The enforcer gave no reply. Instead, he raised his arm, and Lena watched as a strike drone veered toward her, its twin plasma cannons swiveling into position. She felt the heat shimmer against the rubbery surface of her suit a second before she dove to the ground. The burst seared past her, impacting the sphere to her left, which burst like a soap bubble filled with shards of liquid mirror. The alien terrain fragmented further, a cascade of silver cascading into oblivion.
“Ten seconds,” Hayden hissed in her ear.
Lena vaulted upright again, her boots connecting with the slick surface of the next platform. Her muscles screamed with exertion, but she couldn’t stop—not now. She could see it up ahead, the entry point marked by a faint green glow: Hayden’s makeshift portal. Freedom was within her grasp.
Another hum. The pulse was coming.
“Right then,” Lena muttered to herself. A manic grin spread across her face, and for a moment she looked every bit the chaos-bringer her outfit suggested. With a sharp tug, she reached for her belt, unhooking two small, explosive capsules. “Let’s dance, tin man.”
She hurled them both toward the enforcer and didn’t wait for the impact. Instead, she sprinted headlong toward the portal, her surroundings vibrating uncontrollably as the pulse wave grew louder—closer.
Behind her, the crack-boom of explosions lit the world for a fraction of a second. The enforcer’s drones screeched in alarm, their violet lights flickering, briefly distorted in the falling mirrored fragments. Hayden’s voice barked in her ear as she reached the glowing entry field.
“Three seconds! Jump!”
Lena didn’t hesitate. She leapt forward, twisting in mid-air to make eye contact—reflection to reflection—with the enforcer one last time. He froze, his mirrored helmet catching her manic grin in a fractured kaleidoscope. Then she fell through the portal just as the pulse wave consumed Exile-9 in a deafening maelstrom of light and sound.
There was silence. Then the smooth hum of the universe realigned itself.
Lena stumbled onto metal flooring, collapsing in a heap. Around her, the sterile white light of Hayden’s ship illuminated tight engineering panels and displays scrolling alien computations. She coughed and waved a hand. “Well. That was fun.”
Hayden—a gangly technician with perpetually grease-streaked glasses—burst into the room, his face a mix of relief and frustration. “Fun? You call that fun? You nearly died!”
Lena held up the glowing artifact triumphantly, her grin as unhinged as ever. “Yeah, but I didn’t. And now we’re rich.”
Hayden groaned, kneeling next to her. “This thing better be worth it, Lena. Next time? I’m leaving you behind.”
“Admit it,” Lena teased, dusting herself off as she stood, the red-and-black latex a little scuffed but still intact. “You’d miss me too much.”
“Like a migraine,” he shot back, though the corners of his mouth twitched upward.
And with that, the ship’s engines roared to life, propelling them away from the dying world below—two rogues with a penchant for trouble and a treasure worth whatever chaos came next.
Genre: Sci-fi Adventure
The Source…check out the article that inspired this amazing short story: Red and Black Latex Harley Quinn Cosplay: Your Ultimate Guide to Mischievous Glam
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