The world had shrunk to the hum of conduits and the taste of concrete dust.
Around Echo, the Talons who were still standing moved with a grim, shared purpose.
In their hands, they held the era's most common, yet most controlled, artifact: the conduit.
To the corporate world in their spires, a conduit was a necessity, as ubiquitous as the air they breathed.
It was the successor to the smartphone—a sleek piece of hardware that interfaced with the very fabric of reality.
But here, in the grime of the Junkyard, it was a lifeline, and a chain.
Humanity had long known of the dark energy they now called aether—an inert, background radiation of the universe, useless and undetectable without the right tools.
But the Aether Incident had been the spark that lit the fire.
It had flipped the world on its head, revealing that this energy could be programmed, its fundamental rules rewritten to suit a need.
Aether was the blank slate; glyphs were the code that gave it purpose.
And that code was the most tightly controlled resource on the planet.
Almost anyone could get their hands on a conduit.
They were scrap, salvage, legacy tech.
But the power to use them?
That was locked away.
Magic was licensed.
Every spell app, from a simple light glyph to a complex barrier, required a monthly subscription, a digital leash leading directly back to a corporate server.
Unauthorized glyph-coding wasn't just illegal; it was a thought-crime, punishable by the terrifying finality of a neural scrub, leaving the offender a hollowed-out husk.
The Steel Talons lived in the shadows of that system.
The spell apps humming in their conduits weren't the pristine, stable versions used by corporate security.
They were cracked, jury-rigged, and unstable, bought from back-alley dealers like in the Neon Bazaar.
They were lower-tier, inefficient, and prone to generating dangerous waste heat or catastrophic backfire.
A Talon didn't just cast a spell; they wrestled with it, forcing a stolen power to obey.
It was why they avoided the Aether Nodes that dotted the more civilized sectors.
Those black voided pillars were the corporations' method of control, broadcasting authentication signals and updates, a constant reminder that the very air they used to fight was owned by someone else.
Out here, in the ruins of Sector 20, they were off the grid, running on stolen code and sheer desperation.
Echo's voice was a low, sharp command, cutting through the ringing silence left by the armored figure's impact with the mess hall wall.
She wasn't shouting.
She was weaving a net.
"All Talon elements, sound off," she said into her comm, her eyes never leaving the settling dust cloud. "Conduit users only. If you have an offensive app—Kinetic Surge, Thermal Lance, anything that can push or punch—converge on my position. Now."
One by one, ragged voices and static-laced confirmations crackled in her ear.
It wasn't an army.
It was a handful of men and women, their faces pale with fear and streaked with dirt, their conduits glowing with illicit, flickering light.
They were hackers in a war against gods, and Echo was gathering them for one, coordinated strike.
They had moved the monster.
Now, they had to break it.
A wide, unnerving grin was plastered across Blaze's face, a stark white slash in the dust-choked air.
He stood with his arms crossed, a spectator at his own private performance, his gaze sweeping the ruined yard like a conductor surveying his orchestra.
His eyes, sharp and augmented, missed nothing.
They tracked Mags—a flicker of grudging respect in his chest at the sheer, stupid bravery of the woman.
She stood her ground, a sparrow facing down a hurricane, her defiance a beautiful, futile spark in the gloom.
Then his attention snapped to Nail.
A dry, amused sound escaped him.
The boy's boldness was a sudden, unpredictable flare, like a firecracker going off in a quiet room.
It was clumsy, raw, and utterly fascinating.
He wasn't following a script, he was writing his own with his glowing fists, and Blaze found he rather enjoyed the plot twist.
His gaze drifted to Rook, the mountain refusing to crumble.
The man's tenacity was a dull, constant pressure, like a grinding stone.
It wasn't flashy, but it was relentless.
Blaze could feel it, a stubborn heartbeat of resistance that refused to be silenced, and he admired the sheer, brute-force will of it.
Finally, his focus settled on Echo.
Ah, Echo.
The planner in the shadows.
He saw the subtle hand signals, the way the remaining Talons with conduits were shifting, coalescing around her like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
She was the cold, sharp needle trying to thread them all together into a weapon.
He could almost see the gears turning in her head, the desperate calculations.
It was the most interesting performance of all.
To him, this wasn't a battle.
It was the middle, chaotic act of a brilliant play.
The bravery, the boldness, the tenacity, the planning—it was all just… emotion.
Raw, beautiful, and utterly delicious.
He was savoring it, storing the sensation away.
He knew this was a fleeting gift, these last few hours of chaos before the corporate leash yanked him back into the silent, sterile hell that awaited.
He was a connoisseur of fire, and this was the finest burn of his life.
Then his eyes go back to Nail.
Nail's body was a single, coiled spring of intent.
He threw his weight into a telegraphed, heavy punch with his left, the air humming around the glowing brass knuckles.
It was a move meant to be seen, a loud declaration of attack.
Ember's systems tracked it, her weight already shifting to counter the obvious trajectory.
It was a feint.
The real threat was the right.
A shorter, faster jab that snapped forward like a piston while the left was still a phantom.
It was clumsy, born of back-alley instinct rather than formal training, but it was fast.
Her augmented reflexes screamed a correction.
The Aegis-frame's servos whined in protest at the sudden, jarring shift in momentum.
She twisted her torso, the crimson armor sliding back a bare inch.
The mass-driven fist grazed the barrier with a deep, resonant screech of tortured metal, not a clean impact, but a hit all the same.
A spray of brilliant orange sparks erupted from the point of contact, dazzling in the dim light.
Behind the visor, Ember's eyes widened for a fraction of a second.
A cold, analytical thought cut through the combat data streaming across her display.
Without the suit's enhanced speed forcing my body to move faster than thought... that would have connected.
The realization was a quiet shock.
Not a dangerous one, not yet, but a clear mark on a previously blank slate.
He was faster than he looked.
Stronger.
She had been underestimating him.
Severely.
But as they fell back into the rhythm of their brutal dance—his wild, powerful swings against her precise, armored deflections—another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
His experience in a real fight, the kind fought with fists and fury in cramped, dirty spaces, wasn't that much greater than her own.
She could see it in the way he overcommitted, in the wasted motion of his recovery.
A grim, familiar understanding settled in her gut.
She knew this kind of fighting.
It was her native language.
Ember's true style, the one carved into her soul long before this polished shell encased her, was the dirtiest of them all.
It was a fight without rules, a symphony of gouged eyes, shattered knees, and strikes below the belt.
Victory was the only aesthetic that mattered, survival was the only prize.
The only reason her movements were now so clean, so direct, was the silent, corporate observer she carried with her.
Every block, every counter-punch, was a data point.
She was gauging the suit's capabilities, testing its limits and its responses, treating this life-and-death struggle as a live-fire drill for her new corporate masters.
But the boy's surprising resilience was a flicker of heat on kindling.
The leash of professionalism felt thin.
The old, vicious instincts, the ones that had kept her alive in the slums' gutters, were stirring, pressing against the inside of the armor, waiting for a reason to break clean.
The air around the crimson armor changed.
It was a subtle shift, a drop in pressure that Nail felt in his bones more than he saw.
The suit's previous, almost clinical defense vanished.
It lowered its center of gravity, becoming a rooted, predatory thing.
A fist whistled past his ear.
Then a leg, a piston-kick that shattered the concrete where his foot had been a moment before.
The attacks came now in a combined storm, punches and kicks weaving together, forcing him to defend high and low at once.
The rhythm was breaking, becoming unpredictable.
He was still managing, his body moving on pure instinct, deflecting a blow off his forearms and twisting away from a kick.
But he was being pushed back, his world shrinking to the next incoming strike.
Then, the armor sped up.
It was like a video skipping frames.
One moment it was there, the next it was closer, its fist already halfway to his face.
He flinched back, dodging too fast, too early—a rookie mistake born of pure survival panic.
It was a feint.
The real attack was the other fist, already coiling and hurtling toward his temple on a path he couldn't possibly avoid.
He saw it coming, a death-sentence made of polished alloy.
CRACK.
The sound was different.
Not the deep thump of Nail's impacts or the screech of metal on metal.
It was a sharp, hyper-sonic snap.
From behind his cover, Rook's finger had squeezed the trigger the instant he saw the armor's shoulder dip for the feint.
He had learned their new, frantic tempo.
As the bullet left the barrel, a simple, orange glyph—Rank 1 – Accelerate—flared to life around the muzzle.
The spell was a brute-force tool, a stolen app that did one thing: it poured raw kinetic energy into anything that passed through its field.
The bullet, already supersonic, became a blur.
It didn't aim to pierce; it aimed to shove.
It struck the armored fist not with a spark, but with a concussive thwack of displaced air, knocking it just a few inches off its deadly course.
The alloy gauntlet whipped past Nail's face, the wind of its passage stinging his cheek.
The helmet of the Aegis-frame snapped toward Rook.
The featureless visor held no expression, but the sudden, absolute stillness of the body conveyed everything.
It was a pure, unadulterated annoyance, the look of a master artisan whose chisel had been tapped off-line by a thrown pebble.
The interruption was an insult.
The calculation had been perfect, the execution flawless, and it had been ruined by a simple, clever trick.
A hot, professional fury ignited within Ember.
The calculations were perfect, the target was locked.
Her repulsors whined, building to a scream as she prepared to launch herself across the yard and smash the interfering sniper into paste.
She had forgotten.
This wasn't a duel.
It was a battlefield.
"Oh no," a raw voice growled from beside her, thick with effort and defiance. "Don't you f*cking dare ignore me again."
Nail's body was already in motion, his dominant right fist, humming with the heavy white light of the Mass Driver, coming around in a wild, powerful arc aimed at her side.
Annoyance sharpened into cold focus.
She didn't dodge.
She pivoted, her left arm coming up in a blur, not to block, but to deflect.
The flat of her armored forearm met his wrist, redirecting the brutal momentum just enough to send the punch whistling past her torso.
In the same fluid motion, her right hand shot out, her gauntleted fingers closing like a hydraulic vise around his forearm, trapping it.
Bone and metal groaned under the pressure.
He was caught.
From the periphery, a shadow detached itself.
Mags, who had been circling, her shotgun useless with Nail in the line of fire, moved.
There was no hesitation.
In one smooth draw, the tanto was in her hand. Her thumb found the activation glyph on the hilt.
Rank 1—Razor.
A low, angry buzz filled the air as the blade began to vibrate, thousands of times per second, becoming a shimmering blur in the dusty light.
It wasn't a finesse weapon anymore; it was a powered saw.
Mags didn't aim for the body.
She lunged forward and brought the vibrating tanto down in a short, brutal chop directly onto the crimson alloy of the arm that held Nail.
There was no tell-tale shimmer of orange hexagons.
No spark of deflected energy.
The barrier, for a reason she couldn't fathom, didn't activate.
The shrieking blade met the armor.
For a heartbeat, it screeched, spraying a fan of brilliant orange sparks.
Then it bit deeper.
It wasn't a clean cut, but a savage, grinding tear through the advanced alloy, a violation of the suit's perfect, inviolable shell.
And then—blood.
A dark, shocking red, welling up from the gash in the metal, stark against the crimson paint.
It wasn't a gush, but a seep, a confirmation that something living, something that could be hurt, was inside that terrifying shell.
The crimson armor's grip on Nail's arm went slack for a single, stunned second.
Rook's mind, a cold engine even in the heat of battle, processed the two events in a single, stark flash.
First, his own Accelerated round.
The bullet had struck the armored fist.
The barrier had not flared.
Now, Mags's vibrating tanto.
The blade had bitten into the alloy forearm.
Again, no shimmer of orange hexagons.
No defensive response at all.
His tactical logic, honed by a hundred desperate fights, connected the points, drawing a line through the impossible.
The barrier wasn't just a switch the pilot turned on and off.
It had rules.
A logic of its own.
And he was starting to see it.
The first rule was clear: The shield did not activate during an attack.
It was a purely defensive system.
When the fist was moving to strike Nail, when the suit was the instrument of violence, it was vulnerable.
It could not be both sword and shield in the same moment.
The second rule was now terrifyingly obvious: The barrier did not protect against what was already inside its perimeter.
The shield existed at a distance from the armor itself, a bubble of protection.
But once an object—a grabbed arm, a point-blank blade—crossed that invisible threshold, it was inside the fortress walls.
The shield was designed to stop incoming threats, not to save the armor from a point-blank betrayal.
It wasn't an invincible skin.
It was a castle wall.
And they had just found the gate.
The knowledge was a live wire in Rook's mind, a desperate key to a lock they had thought unbreakable.
But it was useless if he was the only one who held it.
He needed Echo.
Her precision, her timing, her ability to turn a single piece of data into a killing blow.
His eyes scanned the ruined yard, finding her instantly.
She was a coiled spring in the shadow of a collapsed wall, her conduit held ready, her gaze locked on the crimson armor.
She was waiting for an opening, a chink in the armor they had just proven existed.
He couldn't shout.
The roar of the sporadic gunfire and the hum of the armor would swallow his words.
A comms message was too slow, too clumsy.
She needed to understand now.
He caught her eye, a brief but deliberate flick of his gaze.
He saw her focus sharpen, her head tilt a fraction in question.
His hands moved.
He didn't use formal battle-sign.
There was no time.
He used the raw, universal language of the Junkyard.
First, he mimed a punch, his own massive fist cutting through the air.
Then, he held up a single, thick finger. One.
He then pointed directly at the crimson armor, and slowly, deliberately, brought his other hand up as if to grab his own punching wrist.
He shook his head.
No shield on the attack.
He saw the understanding dawn in Echo's eyes, sharp and cold.
Next, he pointed at Mags, then at the gash on the armor's arm.
He then held his hands close together, palms facing each other, indicating a tiny, intimate distance.
He shook his head again, more emphatically.
No shield at point-blank range.
He finished by pointing at her, then at the armor, and making a single, thrusting motion with his hand.
A command.
You have to get inside.
You have to be close.
The entire exchange took less than three seconds.
A silent sermon delivered in the heart of a storm.
He saw her give a single, sharp nod.
The planner had the final variable.
The trap was set.
Now, they just needed the monster to take the bait.