The armored figure's utter dismissal of him was a physical sting, a deliberate insult sharper than any blade.
Nail's jaw clenched, his teeth grinding with a low, grating sound he felt more than heard.
The raw, impotent anger that had been boiling in his gut since Pen fell now had a new focus.
But then he saw it.
A blur of motion from Echo, a glyph flaring, and the multi-ton chunk of the main gate was hurled upward like a child's toy.
It slammed into the crimson armor with the force of a tectonic shift.
The shield flashed, a violent star of orange light in the dusty air, but the sheer, brutal mass behind the blow was undeniable.
The invincible specter was swatted from the sky, crashing into the mess hall wall with a deafening crunch of buckling metal and shattered concrete.
A savage, primal satisfaction surged through Nail.
It was a small thing, a fleeting victory in a losing war, but it was something.
It was proof the monster could be touched, could be moved.
His eyes, wide and frantic, snapped from the settling cloud of debris to Blaze.
He searched the pyromaniac's face for a crack in that maddening composure—a flicker of surprise, a twitch of anger, anything.
There was nothing.
The grin was still there, plastered on his face like a permanent mask.
It was as if he'd just watched a mildly interesting card trick, not the violent downfall of his partner.
The sheer, chilling indifference made Nail's blood run colder than any fear.
These people weren't just monsters; they were alien, their connections as incomprehensible as their power.
A heavy certainty settled over him.
She's not done.
A swat like that… it's like trying to kill a roach with a book.
And the crimson armor certainly isn't a roach.
The thought was still forming when his comm unit crackled to life, Rook's voice a low, urgent growl in his ear, cutting through the ringing silence and distant groans.
"Nail! We need your Mass Driver!"
For Nail, the sight of the armored figure crashing into the wall was a spark in the dark.
It wasn't the end of the fight; it was the first, true crack in their enemy's invincibility.
The beginning of their counterattack.
He didn't understand the specifics of Rook's plan, but he didn't need to.
The command in his leader's voice was enough.
His hands, already curled into fists, tightened.
The worn brass of his knuckles was a cold, familiar comfort against his skin.
He was ready.
If that crimson monster so much as twitched, he would meet it head-on.
Across the yard, Rook's mind was a cold engine, analyzing the data of the impact.
The shield had held, yes.
It hadn't failed.
But it hadn't negated the physics of a multi-ton slab of metal hitting it like a freight train.
The barrier stopped energy, dispersed heat, but it couldn't erase momentum.
The thing inside could still be thrown, still be shaken.
His tactical mind identified the glyph Echo had used—Kinetic Surge.
It was a common enough spell app, the kind of thing you could buy from any half-reputable vendor in the Neon Bazaar.
He'd seen Karen use it a dozen times to effortlessly stack crates of their prized "goods."
But using it as a weapon, to hurl something that heavy with that much force... that wasn't a simple task.
The aether cost would be staggering.
It was a desperate move, a sledgehammer where a scalpel was needed.
And that's where Nail came in.
Rook's gaze locked onto the younger man.
Nail's augment wasn't for flashy explosions or esoteric effects.
It was brutally, beautifully simple: the Mass Driver.
Upon impact, it would momentarily multiply the mass of his fist, turning a punch into the equivalent of a wrecking ball.
It was a bludgeoning tool, perfect for a job that required pure, concussive force.
They couldn't pierce the armor.
But maybe, just maybe, they could rattle the person inside.
How did Rook know all of this?
Because Nail himself had no idea how his own glyphs worked, and he made that everyone's problem.
Nail treated the arcane science of glyph-casting with the deep-seated suspicion of a man who trusted only what his own two hands could break.
To him, it was all "magical bullshit"—a mysterious, finicky power that, if poked the right way, made him stronger.
The 'why' and 'how' were irrelevant; the result was all that mattered.
Rook had borne witness to the chaotic, often destructive, experimentation that followed.
He'd seen Vey and Nail in the training yard, applying the Mass Driver glyph to anything they could get their hands on.
They'd tried it on knives, which became too heavy to throw effectively.
They'd tried it on rocks, which then hit with the force of small cannonballs.
They'd even tried it on bullets, only to find the effect was minimal—doubling or tripling the mass of something that small didn't change the outcome much against a hardened target.
The most telling lesson had come when they tried to apply it directly to a spare mechanical augment.
The result was a catastrophic, expensive failure.
The enhanced mass placed a catastrophic strain on the machinery itself; the force it was meant to deliver was also applied inward, and the augment had shattered under its own new, impossible weight.
It was through this process of elimination—this trail of broken tools and empirical data—that Rook understood the glyph's true nature.
It wasn't a sharpener.
It was a bludgeon.
And Nail's fists, backed by his own formidable strength, were the perfect, living weapons to wield it.
He wasn't casting a spell; he was turning his own fist into a flesh and blood wrecking ball.
For a single, disorienting second, the world was a blur of violent motion and shattering concrete.
The world became a violent, tumbling blur.
One moment she was ascending, a predator chasing her prey through the air.
The next, an unimaginable force slammed into her, a freight train made of pure momentum.
There was no pain, the armor saw to that, but the disorientation was absolute.
Her vision swam with impact warnings and spiraling gyroscopic readouts as she was thrown sideways, the crunch of her body smashing through sheet metal and concrete a deafening roar in her audio pickups.
Then, stillness.
Dust plumed, settling on her crimson visor like dirty snow.
Her systems recalibrated, and her view cleared.
Lying a dozen meters away was the twisted, multi-ton mass of the main gate, surrounded by shattered barricades.
That was what hit her.
Not a laser, not a bullet.
A glorified sledgehammer.
A flicker of hot, professional annoyance sparked within her.
She pulled up the barrier's internal log.
The data stream scrolled across her display.
Integrity: 99.8%.
Energy drain from impact: 0.4%.
It had performed exactly as designed, dispersing the energy that would have vaporized a tank.
It had not, and could not, negate Newton's laws.
A flicker of orange light on her display replayed the moment a small piece of debris had pinged off the barrier after the initial impact.
It was still active, still humming.
The system was functioning perfectly.
It was the situation that was bullshit.
A low, guttural sound escaped her, filtered by the vocal emitter into a flat, synthetic murmur.
"What a bullshit is this."
The world swam back into focus as Ember pushed herself up from the crater in the wall.
A sharp ping echoed through the armor's frame, and the barrier flickered again in her peripheral vision.
Her gaze snapped to the source: Mags, already repositioned, her shotgun leveled with a sniper's calm.
The woman's composure was an insult in itself.
If not for the invisible shield, that runt would have already put a shell between her eyes.
To be fair, Ember mused with a cold detachment, she had just turned three of their comrades into abstract art.
A fresh wave of frustration, hot and sharp, washed over her.
It wasn't just the attack; it was the entire situation.
The truth was, she was fighting with one hand tied behind her back.
No one had given her a manual.
No one had sat her down for a tutorial on the Aegis-frame's full capabilities.
This was her first time inside the damn thing.
The mission parameters from her corporate handlers had been clear, and condescending: they wanted to see how a "normal" human operator, a baseline product of the Junkyard's harsh evolution, would utilize the suit's systems under live-fire conditions.
They weren't interested in a trained pilot; they were interested in raw, adaptive instinct.
They were treating her like a lab rat set loose in a maze with a new, overpowered tool, and her current humiliation was just another data point for them to analyze.
Every fumble, every surprised impact, was part of the experiment.
And that knowledge burned worse than any bullet.
A gnawing certainty took root in Ember's mind.
This suit, this masterpiece of engineering, had to be capable of more.
The raw power she'd felt in the actuators, the hum of energy in its core—it felt like a roaring engine with a governor set to a low, cautious purr.
She was right but didn't know.
A majority of its systems—advanced targeting suites, integrated weaponry, defensive countermeasures beyond the simple barrier—were locked away behind layers of encrypted software, their status indicators dark on a control panel she couldn't even access.
The logic of her corporate masters was a cage in itself.
The investors and the higher-ups, safe in their distant spires, were terrified.
They feared what a lowly human, a creature of impulse and grit from the undesired part of the city, would do with such absolute power.
Would she turn it on them?
Would she break their expensive toy?
Their paranoia demanded she be kept on a tight leash.
Yet, in a staggering act of irony, they also demanded more data.
They wanted to see her struggle, to see her innovate and push the limited tools she was given.
They wanted the fruits of her desperation without trusting her with the means to truly harvest them.
This control was so absolute, she didn't even know who was pulling the strings.
Back at the Red Dogs base, during her first, fumbling tests, the repulsor boosters had suddenly activated, allowing her that first, shocking leap.
She had assumed it was Blaze, with his newfound corporate access, granting her a new toy.
She was wrong.
It had been AiM, the silent custodian in the machine, coldly and autonomously deciding she was ready for the next variable in the test.
Frustration was a luxury she couldn't afford.
Ember abandoned the mental search, shutting down the flickering menus in her mind's eye.
Her own conduit was useless, sealed away inside this shell of metal and glyph-code.
In the end, stripped of corporate toys and locked-out functions, all she had was the bedrock she was built on: her own brutal strength and the street-smart wit that had kept her alive this long.
A low, hydraulic hiss escaped the suit's joints as she flexed her arms, the servos whining with pent-up energy.
It was a predator's stretch, a coiling of immense force before the spring.
Across the yard, Mags saw the shift in posture.
There was no hesitation.
The familiar, reloadingof her shotgun echoed as she loaded solid slugs, her expression grim.
She was preparing for a hammer blow, not birdshot.
With a roar of repulsors, Ember shot forward.
This time, her charge was different—still blindingly fast, but controlled, her helmet twitching slightly, sensors scanning the periphery for any movement, any flicker of a glyph that might signal another large object being hurled her way.
Her focus was a laser on Mags.
But the threat didn't come from the front, or from a thrown barricade.
A blur of motion on her left flank registered a split-second too late.
A young man, face contorted in a raw shout she couldn't hear over her own systems, was charging perpendicular to her path.
He wasn't aiming to block her; he was aiming to intersect.
And on his fists, brass knuckles glowed not with the orange of kinetic energy, but with a sharp, aggressive white light she didn't recognize.
The same young man she had dismissed as a non-threat, the one whose defiant shots had been nothing but sparks on her chest, was now charging directly into her path.
A flicker of cold assessment crossed her mind.
Was this bravery, or the pure, unadulterated idiocy of a gnat flying into a forge?
She abandoned her pursuit of Mags, her repulsors flaring to kill her momentum.
The suit settled with a heavy thud, turning to face this new, foolish distraction.
She saw him plant his feet, his body coiling.
He was actually going to try and punch her.
It was almost laughable.
She met his charge not with a glyph or a weapon, but with the most basic, contemptuous response: her own armored fist, launched with the suit's enhanced strength to swat him aside like the insect he was.
Their fists connected.
The impact was wrong.
It wasn't the sharp, final crack of his bones shattering against her alloy.
It was a deep, resonant THUMP that traveled up her arm, a concussive wave that felt less like a punch and more like being hit by a runaway cargo container.
Her barrier flared, dispersing the energy, but the sheer, raw force behind his blow was undeniable.
It wasn't sharp or piercing; it was overwhelmingly, impossibly heavy.
Her own punch was stopped dead, the suit's arm jarred violently to a halt.
The stabilizers in her torso whined in protest, and for a single, disorienting moment, she was thrown off balance, forced back a half-step.
Her systems registered no damage, no breach.
But the physical fact was undeniable.
This... this boy... with his glowing knuckles, had just matched the force of her armored strike.
Surprise, cold and sharp, cut through her focus: What in the hell was that?
The world seemed to freeze in the instant his fist connected.
A silent, screaming question erupted in Nail's mind, drowning out the chaos of the battlefield.
What in the world just happened?
He had thrown a punch, the same way he'd thrown a thousand punches.
He'd expected to feel the sickening, familiar give of flesh and bone, or the unyielding, final resistance of armor that would shatter his own hand.
He had braced for either outcome.
He had not braced for this.
The impact was a deep, jarring THUMP that traveled from his knuckles all the way to his shoulder, rattling his teeth.
It felt like he'd punched a mountain, but for the first time, the mountain had shuddered.
The crimson armor, the untouchable specter, had been forced back.
Not by skill or finesse, but by the raw, brutish physics of his blow.
How? Why?
The questions were a tangled knot in his head.
The magical bullshit on his knuckles wasn't supposed to do this.
It was just supposed to make him hit harder.
But the why and how didn't matter.
The proof was right in front of him.
The monster had flinched.
He shoved the questions aside, a grunt of effort escaping his lips as he dispelled the confusing thoughts like so much smoke.
His mind, never one for complex strategy, narrowed to a single, primal point of focus.
As long as it works.
From behind cover, Rook's voice boomed, sharp with a fierce, rising hope. "Good Nail! Continue!"
Nail dropped his center of gravity, his body remembering the footwork of a hundred back-alley brawls.
He wasn't a soldier in a formation; he was a fighter in a ring.
He shot forward, low and fast, aiming for the armor's midsection—its "pocket"—where he could deliver his punishing, mass-driven blows.
Across from him, Ember mirrored the movement.
But where Nail's was a practiced, human motion, hers was a product of terrifying engineering.
Her lunge was a piston-fast slide, impossibly precise and balanced, the servos emitting a low, aggressive whine.
The mismatch was absolute, a fact as cold as the alloy she was encased in.
For Nail, this was a fight on a razor's edge.
A single, clean hit from that crimson gauntlet—a blow that could pulverize concrete—would not just knock him down.
It would erase him.
It would be the wet, final sound that had ended the others.
He had no armor.
No shield.
Only his speed, his fists, and the strange, heavy power in his knuckles.
And yet, as he closed the distance, a wild, electric thrill coursed through his veins, so foreign he almost didn't recognize it.
It wasn't the dull heat of rage, or the cold grip of fear.
This was something else.
This was the pure, undiluted high of defiance.
For the first time since the gate blew in, he wasn't just a target.
He was a threat.
He was in a fight, and for this one, desperate moment, that was all that mattered.