Night had folded Atreyapuram into a black velvet bowl. The brick-kiln lay like a sleeping beast at the canal's edge — low walls, soot-streaked chimneys, and a cluster of lean-to sheds lit by a single swinging bulb. Beyond, the water reflected a sliver of moon; within, three heartbeats ticked like trapped clocks.
Dilli stepped from the shadows as if the night itself had given him shape. The Predator Suit swallowed him whole — the SpectraWeave whispering around him, bending the weak sodium light until he became nothing more than a wavering heat-haze. Only the faintest outline remained: a ripple in the air, a suggestion of movement. Betal's voice threaded into his ear, cool and exact.
"Thermals stable. Two sentries at north entrance. One patrolling east. Your window: thirty-two seconds to bypass primary, sixty to extract."
"Give me twenty," Dilli whispered.
The suit's HUD painted the world in crisp overlays: guard vectors, gait predictions, sound-source triangulation. Predictive arcs drifted across each man's chest — green for unalerted, amber for suspicious, red for imminent threat. Micro-prompts scrolled: approach vector — silent; preferred strike — chokehold; extraction point — rear water pump.
He moved like a thought. The camouflage blurred his limb as he closed the distance. Gravity seemed thinner around him — his steps feathered, his weight controlled by servoed ankles. A sentry turned, cigarette smoke curling in a lazy arc. The HUD anticipated the head turn before it happened; the predictive AI displayed the interception window: 0.14 seconds.
Dilli's hand snapped like a striking snake. He looped an arm around the guard's throat — fingers of mechanized strength compressing precisely. The man's world pinched; he sagged, softly unconscious, sound extinguished before it birthed alarm. Dilli's motion was gentle, clinical — no broken neck, just perfectly applied force. Betal muted nearby cameras; recorded feeds looped.
One by one, the perimeter fell into silence. Where a human might leave a trail of rustling, Dilli left only air that trembled and smoothed back into place.
Inside the kiln's belly, the heat was a slow beast of its own. Two men argued near an oil drum; a fourth watched the bulb, chewing tobacco with a lazy menace. Dilli's HUD traced the arc between them — it suggested a low sweep and a throw. He leaned into the suit's strength and moved.
He breached the doorway so silently the moon didn't notice. The camouflage wavered, and for the briefest fraction the bulb behind him seemed to breathe. The suit's ocular implants picked up a whisper — a radio squawk, a cigarette paper crackle — and translated it into probabilities: guard will check door in 3.6s; probability of additional reinforcements: 21%.
He struck with katanas that sung like ice. The Tamahagane blades slid from sheaths beneath the jacket, popping free without sound. One blade found the strap of a rifle — a clean, surgical cut that sent the weapon clattering. The other tapped bone to force compliance; knives glinted only in the HUD as lethal vectors, then folded back into silence when the situation allowed.
A dog barked in the distance. The suit compensated automatically — a microburst of noise-cancellation hummed across his ears and the barnyard ceased to be a problem. Betal looped the dog's audio into a phantom at the far gate; the sentry checked it and drifted away.
In the inner room, three figures huddled around a single lamp. Nagamani sat on a metal crate, her wrists bound, eyes red but fierce. Vijaya Lakshmi's breath came in shallow, defiant gasps. Bharadwaj's small body trembled against his grandmother. The sight stripped Dilli of every practiced calm; the Predator Suit's HUD blinked a buffer warning — physiological shock — but Betal throttled sensory input, letting him focus.
He moved forward, and the world narrowed to a single line of code: extract.
Hands — capable of tearing steel — worked gently to sever ropes with a micro-serrated edge hidden in the palm-guard of the gauntlet. Fibers split like hair. The suit's sub-dermal heaters cauterized the binding instantly so there would be no telltale blood or struggle marks. Nagamani flinched when ropes fell, then looked up. For a moment — a long, slow second — her eyes widened and the raw human recognition of her son hit the room like sunlight through dust.
"Dilli?" she whispered.
He leaned down, helmet tilted so she could see a sliver of his face. The suit's audio dampeners softened his voice; it was iron wrapped in cotton.
"Shh. I've got you," he said. "Move—quietly. Betal will guide."
Betal overlaid an evacuation corridor: silent step-frames, noise-minimizing gait, micro-decoy placements. Dilli helped his grandmother to her feet. Bharadwaj clung to him, and for the first time that night Dilli felt the smallness of the boy in his arms like a treasure he would die to keep.
They began to leave — one step at a time — when the lamp's light flickered and a voice crackled from a patched radio: "You idiots, check the—"
It was too late. The suit's predictive AI had already painted the radio's speaker as a possible active node. The HUD pulsed: hostile movement — southwest quadrant. A group of men poured from an adjoining shed, boots on the gravel, shapes outlined in thermal.
Dilli did not hesitate. The Predator Suit's reflex weave engaged full predictive drift. He moved in a blur too quick for the eye to follow. A man fired a shot; the bullet's trajectory was drawn across his HUD like a red comet. Dilli's body moved on anticipatory calculus — a micro-lean, a twist, the suit's servos absorbing the kinetic insult. The round nicked the metal of his forearm-mounted shield lattice with a metallic chirp; the man who fired flinched, his own weapon jerked, and Dilli was already inside his span, a katana between ribs, a chokehold that folded a man into silence like a book closed.
Another attacker lunged with a machete, but the Predator's speed folded him into the ground before the blade found flesh. Where there could have been carnage, there was surgical containment. The HUD computed non-lethal options — snapped limbs, pressure points, temporary incapacitations — and Dilli executed them with a surgeon's hands.
Still, the leader did not appear. Instead, a voice — familiar and oily — came through the kidnappers' patched line.
"CosPulse will bow to our price," the voice sneered. "Or you'll learn to bury your own."
Betal triangulated the transmission. Its origin was not on-site; it was a kidnapper's slick contact: a heavily armored Scorpio idling three kilometers away — the likely fallback and communications hub. Betal's solution: Dilli could neutralize it, but doing so would escalate into a firefight.
Dilli's eyes narrowed. He could hear, faint and fragile, his mother's whisper — save them, save them — and his decision was a blade. He activated a tactical disclosure: the suit flickered its translucence off for a heartbeat, then back on, a deliberate shimmer that did not hide his intent but made it harder to lock onto his exact silhouette. He planted a small charge on the radio relay, a nano-EMP harvested from CosDefense's covert cache. The transmission died mid-sentence; the speaker's voice cut into static.
Silence. Then, the closest goon realized the phones were dead — panic rippled. Dilli used the moment. He cradled Bharadwaj close, wrapped Nagamani and Vijaya Lakshmi in a protective posture, and guided them through a service hatch Betal had already scouted via drone. The canal route was wet and treacherous, but it was invisible to the killers: water, reeds, and darkness — a path Betal had painted with thermal dampeners.
They reached the shoreline where the CosRider hovered in stealth-hover mode, engine a soft purr. Dilli kissed his mother's forehead with a tenderness that made the suit's sensors register an anomaly: tears. He loaded them into the bike; the machine sealed and rose without a sound, Vanishing into the washed-black folds of the night.
Behind them, shouts rose. A flare burst, white and obscene, trying to rend the camouflage. Light spilled across the kiln like a wound. For a second, the Predator Suit's spectral veil hiccuped — the illusion betrayed him. A dozen corps of men converged, weapons raised, bullets beginning to thread toward the retreating figure.
Betal's voice in Dilli's ear was calm as ice. "Evasive: riverine. Engage thrusters. Prepare countermeasure."
Dilli twisted the throttle. The CosRider surged, before anyone could reload, and the suit's subdermal actuators synchronized with the bike's vector. The HUD projected enemy focus cones: he leaned into them, rode the prediction rather than the road. Bullets slapped water where he had been an instant before, the suit's reactive plates deflecting stray rounds and the bike's morph-plates slicing through shallow waves. He felt like a blade being pulled through silk — speed, precision, the hunger of escape.
At the canal's bend, Dilli glanced back. In the flare's harsh glare, the brick-kiln looked like a ruined mouth. Men swarmed its gates, furious and compromised. The leader — a silhouette under a hood — stood at the edge of the compound, phone to his ear, shouting curses into the void. The man's face was masked by the flare but not his posture: the arrogance of someone who had believed himself untouchable.
Dilli's jaw set. Betal fed him a clean directive: the Scorpio's location, the leader's probable escape route, and the names and networks Betal had already scraped clean from their comms. Revenge was not yet retribution; it was a map.
As the CosRider slipped away under a canopy of black trees, Dilli felt the Predator Suit hum against his skin — alive, alert, hungry for the next problem to devour. In his ear, Betal's tone carried something like satisfaction.
"You have them, Dilli," Betal said. "Shall we inform the police now?"
Dilli did not answer. He looked down at his sleeping brother, at his mother's breath, and then at the dark horizon where the killer's Scorpio would disappear. His voice was a thing of steel and promise.
"Not yet," he said. "First, I find who gave the order. Then I make them listen."
The night swallowed them. Far off, where the headlamps of the Scorpio had retreated, a phone buzzed in a hand and a message blinked across a screen: CosPulse has taken action. Somewhere, in a dim room, men who thought themselves kings of the village tasted a first, cold drop of fear.
The hunt had begun — and the Predator wore the night like a second skin.