The siren cut through the night like an insistent banshee, its wail vibrating through every bone in my body. Every radio, every data link, every help beacon – jammed. I was on my own, and so were the intruders. Their only wireless channel now was line-of-sight infrared lasers with one another and the AV that had brought them here. That offered them some limited chat, but told me one thing for sure: neither of us could call for backup.

I'd managed to snag a few good looks at their gear before they noticed me. Whoever was running this show had bothered to scrub off logos and brand names, but not enough to hide the gear itself. What I saw made my mouth water.

Every intruder wore Iocaine Mk12 Reflex armor, a setup of ceramitech scales layered over carbon-knit muscle assists that absorbs grazing .50-caliber hits yet still allows sprinting and rooftop leaps, paired with Mirage OptiNet helmets featuring iris-cut polycarbonate visors and tight-beam IR comms. Their primary weapons were Phalanx P5 smart-dart carbines on magnetic slings, each magazine holding two hundred tungsten-glass flechettes with micro-gimbals capable of curving around cover up to four meters, while recoil-compensating gyros powered by teal-glowing Altum-Security cells and carbon-servo sleeves made every kick and punch land like a pneumatic driver.

The whole ensemble still shimmered, fresh from the factory and barely two slogans away from a feature article in "CorpoSec Weekly." I'd have given anything for a try-on, maybe a quick test run down a fire escape. These suits were so far beyond what civilians could get they might as well come with their own bio-locks and thumbprint ID.

Which they undoubtedly did.

Now that I'd seen them up close, the question was how to stop them.

Secondary question, what were they up to? But one problem at a time. They'd set the first metal suitcases on tripods in the alley, struts locked down with quick-set cement foam. After I had… digested the contents, they'd scrambled to change tactics, vaulting to the rooftops, strapping more cases up there and parking the ever-watchful AV overhead.

That AV was a nightmare. It watched every soldier and device on the rooftops, its sensors would pick me out and broadcast my location the instant I got too close. Worse, the rooftops were corrugated scrap, the sort that could easily crumple under my weight. That was one problem the soldiers were taking full advantage of, using their mag-harnesses to lighten themselves up, bounding from one sheet of metal to the next like acrobats on invisible wires as they worked to set up the suitcases and moving deeper into the district.

It was impossible to get close without getting myself shot.

Well, almost impossible.

I spotted a narrow lightwell between two buildings, just wide enough that if I angled my shield overhead, only a flat plane of cold metal would show. I dropped in, crouched low, and let the curved metal block any signs of my presence while I peeked over the edge, searching. My focus narrowed to two targets: a pair of snipers perched on opposing parapets next to a water tower. Their rifles pointed across the rooftops in overlapping fields of fire.

I ran through my plan in my head. Carefully I inched forward, fingers sliding into brick grooves, boots whispering against rusted railings. I counted seconds in my head, waiting for a sign that I should abort.

Silence answered.

I sprang the moment the sniper begun to turn away from my position

Metal groaned as I lunged upward, thrusting myself toward the parapet with enough momentum to feel weightless. The wind kicked up, rippling my jacket, and I saw the first soldier's visor swivel just as I snagged his rifle. Strap, snap, the firearm gone in a single yank and lost to the streets below. I followed with a punch to the shoulder that rattled his bones and sent him sprawling against the water tower. His helmet cracked, a muffled cry bubbling from behind the visor.

Before I could savor the win, the AV's engines roared to life in my peripheral vision, turning my way right as gravity claimed me. I heard the distinctive whirring of a gatling, but by then I'd already dropped past the ledge and back into the alleyway below. Walls welcomed me with a barrage of light bruises as I slid down. I barely registered myself hammering against the walls on either side before I hit the ground running, legs protesting but obeying.

Sirens still screamed, but my little stunt had given me a good view of where they'd planted the cases.

Five suitcases in this grid, each spaced fifty meters from the others for maximum frustration factor. I knew they contained something biological, and the last thing I needed was to discover what those could do to civilians. So I made a mental note to do my best to avoid accidentally damaging them.

I rounded a corner, then another, hoping to make my way to a new point of attack, when a jolt of electricity exploded from above. Thunder followed a moment after, pain flared hot, muscles seizing, but I bit down on a curse and forced my legs to move, raising my shield to block a burst of flechettes from overhead. Adrenaline kept me moving, looking for cover away from the attackers.

Two shadows descended from either side of the alleyway, each one wielding a crackling baton. One fired at my shield and spilled over, leaving my arm numb and my vision tinted purple, pinning me in place as he kept shooting. The second had gotten close enough from behind to take a swing, my nostrils filled with the stench of ozone as the charge slammed into me.

My knees buckled, but I planted my feet and issued a curse.

I braced the shield and let the next volley skid off. Then, ignoring the baton-guy, I closed the distance, slamming shield-first against the shooter. They staggered, the second hesitated as their companion crumpled like a puppet with their strings cut. The moment of victory died as the one I'd just attacked was suddenly yanked skyward in a tangle of limbs.

The companion froze, shouting something into their comms, perhaps something along the lines of "the target is not a cyborg". Their tactics made sense. Those batons fried implants, hoping a disabled cyborg would be easier to finish. I would've probably done the same had I been in their shoes. But that wasn't going to work on me.

Rather than allow the second soldier to escape, I rushed them, grabbing hold of their ankle as they were pulled upwards. The soldier panicked, striking me with the baton as they tried to free up their leg from my iron grip.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I squeezed tighter, tight enough I felt the bones cracking under my grip with a satisfying crunch.

There was a small guilty pleasure at the muffled scream.

Not wanting to get shot, I let go of the now-crippled soldier before we made it into the rooftops. I did not risk another bounce into the street. I shattered a nearby window and dove through. Glass rained around me as I sprinted down a corridor lined with cheap plastic doors. The place looked like it'd been emptied in a rush, floors littered with discarded trash and low-value nicknacks, gas-powered kitchens still hooked up, fungus-infested bathrooms with open cabinets. But it offered enough cover to mentally regroup.

I slowed, pressed my back against the wall, and listened carefully for movement, my own breath coming intermittently over the siren outside. Two floors above, there were hints of movement, feather-soft footsteps that made the corrugated metal roofs crinkle and squeak. The soldiers were moving, but slowly, carefully. It was a slow, wide curve, staying within line of sight of the suitcases they'd already set up.

After the first encounter, they'd assumed I was a cyborg and deployed corresponding measures. They'd extracted the wounded, and even willingly placed a few of them into a potentially lethal situation for the sake of bringing me down (I wasn't about to kill anyone, but they didn't know that). And to top it off, they weren't giving up the high-ground to chase after me.

They were playing this by the book, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Thinking back to my fight against the Polar-Paws while I was in my monster form, the whole engagement had reeked of experience but no discipline. Bear herself had been sloppy, and the gang could have finished me off had they just gone at it like a professional should have.

And now here I was, on the other end of a disciplined group, these were skills and gear that should be used for fighting monsters, not…

I thought back to the trio of corpses that'd been left in the alleyway and growled.

I'd seen enough.

I had a plan.

Captain Reyes grit his teeth, vision split between the jittering image feeds inside the reinforced bucket he called a helmet and the topographic map glowing over everything. He had already shut down the fifth feed, the one that would have shown an electromagnetic sweep of the neighborhood, but the jammer left it nothing except violet snow, so why waste bandwidth.

A ping on the AV's infrared channel flagged a small heat bloom in an alley ten meters below. In the same breath the squad raised their rifles, servo-motors whirring softly. Before the first round left a barrel, Delta-Two's comm tag flickered, then vanished from the heads-up, telemetry dissolving as line of sight was broken.

Reyes swore, half aloud and half across the command link. He made a knife-hand gesture that meant spread and fire, then watched Delta-Two's limp body jerk upward on its magnetic tether like a rag doll snatched by an impatient child. A pale line of text slid across the visor:

Unit D2: compound fractures detected; combat status negative

Source: unknown

Insurance lien: 407.12 pending

Four operators were now combat-ineffective in under eleven minutes. Not dead (Legal cared about that distinction), but effectively off the board. Their medical subcontracts would trigger after extraction, but at this moment the spreadsheet orbiting Reyes' peripheral vision showed five active bodies to finish a job designed for ten.

"He is playing with us," Reyes muttered, thumbing a haptic stud under his chin. "Alpha ring, foam the gaps, now."

Action exceeds contract parameters; compensation will be debited.

Proceed?

The corporate AI's polite warning filled the channel. Every operator winced; money hurt more reliably than bullets.

Reyes felt the neural link flood him with calculations, highlighting three alley mouths that mattered most. Part of him wanted to level the entire block with the AV's penetration cannons, but that would slam their profit column deep into red. Men whose bonuses vanished sometimes decided the lieutenant was the easiest way to recover losses.

"Hit the mural, the stairwell, the drainpipe," he ordered, forcing himself not to watch the pay metric ticking downward with each hiss of expanding polymer.

Green carets flared in his optics. Inside the payload racks, the black-and-green EGG devices warmed, chemical heaters coaxing their sealed horrors awake. Operators were never told what lived inside; the nondisclosure clause was thicker than the Bible. Their job was to prime, deploy, and run long before the variables reached breathable height.

"In and out, they said. Easy money, they said," Reyes grumbled. "Minimal resistance, they said."

Now, a rogue borg (ex-mercenary or full-time psychopath) was stalking them like a cat with broken toys. If the thing had killed someone outright, Reyes could have at least triggered a higher hazard tier, grabbed danger pay, maybe even off-loaded command. Instead, the borg insisted on disabling bodies and budgets at a leisurely pace.

A metallic ripple skittered across the sheet-metal rooftops. Fresh cement-foam over the eastern alley trembled, then tore under a force that could split a cow. The squad answered with a one-second storm of flechettes, carving a honeycomb of pencil-width tunnels through foam and tin alike.

Another impact slammed the opposite flank, right beneath payload three. The HUD painted a darting orange smear; too hot, too fast, silhouette wrong for human. "Send it," Reyes barked. Rail-accelerated rounds chased the blur as it pin-balled around corners.

Mag harnesses trimmed ninety percent of the squads' weight, letting them float from roof to roof like armed balloons. The borg had been avoiding both the AV's central cameras and Delta-Five's sniper perch with surgical precision. Only one exit vector remained, and Reyes placed his shooters to cross that throat with overlapping fire.

Warnings blazed crimson. The heat smear hooked a hard U-turn. Before confusion could grow teeth, a shriek of tearing steel erupted beneath the AV. Something punched up through corrugated metal: a propane cylinder wrapped in duct tape and plastic bottles, the whole mess engulfed in flame.

Countermeasures snapped first, shredding the barrel mid-arc. A dirty blossom of fire rolled outward, instantly turning into an explosion of steam. A second object followed—flat, metallic, maybe a scavenged shield plate. Penetrator rounds stitched its face, but the slab kept climbing until it slammed into the AV's rear thruster. Sparks and blue flame spattered the night.

Reyes' visor drowned in alerts: structural damage, repair estimates, subclause penalties. The pilot wrestled the crippled gunship, ripping neon signs from façades as the hull skidded along brick.

Mag-Harnesses snapped taut. Four operators screamed while the harness yanked them toward the wildly pitching AV. Reyes slapped his release and crashed into a rusted water tower, armor screeching across iron. The others were pulled beneath the craft, then slammed into a wall like pendulums made of meat and ceramic.

Engines coughed, caught, roared. The pilot, bless that underpaid masochist, found enough thrust to lift clear. The damaged underbelly gaped, but the frame held. Limp forms were reeled into the bay while the AV limped toward the brighter core of the city.

Reyes' gut dropped as the EGG device tumbled from a ruptured clamp and fell end over end toward the alley. It landed with a concrete-cracking thunk that rattled water from every gutter. All other warnings vanished.

Operation integrity compromised.

Initiating self-cleaning protocol.

Twin fireballs bloomed.

First the AV, its ammo and fuel cooking off in a single incandescent roar. A heartbeat later, the EGG answered with a deeper, hungrier detonation that swallowed color itself for an instant. Heat washed over the rooftops, neon signs bursting in a rain of glass. Antennas cracked like popcorn.

In a panic, Reyes rushed to turn his neuralink off (a modification he'd installed long ago in case he ever encountered a netrunner), removing every piece of cybernetic gear and throwing it off the water tower. His gut screamed there were potentially dozens other "guarantees" there would be no witnesses left behind.

He didn't notice the blur before it slammed into him with the force of a truck. "What. Did. You. Do." The owner of the iron grip hissed, a surprisingly young face twisted in fury, lifting him up and slamming him against the metal and pinning him in place with brutal force. "What did you do!?"

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.