The Rot-Front was a memorial to a city's indifference. Where the gleaming spires of the Corporate Sector dumped their physical and human waste. The buildings weren't just dilapidated; they were consumed—eaten by aggressive polymer-rust and patched with sheets of corroded alloy. The air was a visible haze, heavy with metallic particles and the sweet-rot stench of chemical breakdown. Kaelen moved through the canyon-like streets like a ghost, his grey maintenance overalls now just another shade of grime.
The disposable comms beacon was a cold patch on the inside of his wrist. The Lady's words echoed in time with the pain in his side. "Do not assume it wishes to keep you alive…" Every breath was a grating reminder that he was being remade from the inside out. The bony plate was a part of him now, a crude, biological armor that made his movements stiff and lurching on his left side. He was a broken toy, hastily glued back together by a frantic, inhuman child.
He found the location—a former auto-fab plant. Its massive roll-up doors were sealed and scarred with blast marks. The few high windows were opaque with filth. According to the Lady's schematics, Silas operated from the reinforced manager's office on the third-floor mezzanine. The ground floor was a kill box.
He circled the block, his senses straining. The thrum in his bones was quiet, a dormant serpent. He saw no lookouts. That was wrong. A man who poached fighters and dealt in experimental chems would have security. Unless he was confident his security was invisible, or already deployed.
Kaelen found a secondary entrance—a personnel door rusted partway open, leading into a cavernous, dark space that smelled of old oil and ozone. He slipped inside, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Abandoned assembly skeletons loomed like the bones of prehistoric beasts. High above, a strip of flickering light bled from under a door on the mezzanine. Silas's office.
He moved between the hulking machines, his footsteps silent on the oil-slick concrete. Halfway to the metal staircase leading up, he froze.
A low growl, more mechanical than animal, vibrated through the floor. From the shadows between two press-drills, a shape emerged. It was a dog, or had been. Now it was a nightmare of augmetics. One side of its skull was plated in steel, a single red photoreceptor glowing where an eye should be. Its jaw was reinforced with serrated metal, and one foreleg ended in a clawed hydraulic piston. Saliva, thick and chemical-blue, dripped from its maw. Its other eye, still organic, was clouded with pain and rage.
A guard dog. Not a lookout, but a hunter-killer. Cheap, brutal, and deniable.
It charged. No bark. Just the hiss of pneumatics and the rapid-fire clack of claws on concrete.
Fear, clean and sharp, shot through Kaelen. The thrum awoke, not as a focused tool, but as a panicked jolt. He stumbled back, his stiff side robbing him of grace. The beast leapt, metal jaws gaping for his throat.
He threw up his arms in a useless cross-block. The Porcelain Finger was forward.
The beast's metallic jaw clamped down on it.
There was a shriek of tortured metal. The dog's reinforced teeth did not pierce the finger. Instead, where they made contact, the metal bloomed. A swift, grey corrosion spread from the bite points, transforming polished steel into flaking, brittle rust. The dog yelped, a digital-static sound from a vox-box in its throat, and recoiled, shaking its head. Flakes of its own jaw rained down.
But the momentum carried it forward. Its piston-leg, designed for crushing, slammed into Kaelen's chest.
It hit the bony plate.
CRACK-THUD.
A sound like a hammer on an anvil. White light exploded behind Kaelen's eyes. The impact didn't break his new armor—it resonated through it, a shockwave of concussive force that drove the air from his lungs and sent him skidding back five feet on the slick floor. Agony, deep and sickening, radiated from his fused ribs through his entire torso. He gasped, vision swimming, sure something vital had finally shattered.
The dog recovered, its damaged jaw hanging slack, but its piston-leg re-cocking with a hydraulic hiss. It prepared to stomp.
Death. The concept was a cold clarity. His power reacted not to the command of his mind, but to the verdict of biology. The shockwave from the piston-hit was still echoing in the cavern of his chest, a trauma threatening to stop his heart.
Adaptive Resurrection engaged. But he wasn't dead. So it didn't resurrect. It improvised.
The resonance from the impact was captured, analyzed, and repurposed. The thrum in his bones became a focused vibration, localizing in the bones of his sternum and the fused plate. It didn't try to dissipate the energy. It learned to store it.
The dog stomped.
Kaelen, still on his back, did not roll away. He brought both hands up, crossed over his chest, palms out. An instinctual, warding gesture.
The piston-foot slammed down onto his palms.
The force was immense. It should have shattered every bone in his hands and arms.
Instead, the stored vibrational energy in his torso answered. It discharged backwards through his skeletal structure, down his arms, and into his palms in a single, concussive PULSE.
It was not a manipulation of solidity. It was Kinetic Redirection. A cheap, brutal mimicry of Aegis's own power, born from the memory of broken ribs and the immediate threat of pulverization.
BOOM.
The sound was a thunderclap in the enclosed space. The hydraulic piston-leg blew apart in a shower of shrapnel and leaking fluid. The dog was thrown backwards, end over end, crashing into a press-drill with a final, metallic crunch. It did not get up.
Kaelen lay there, panting, his hands numb and ringing. He slowly sat up. His palms were red, swollen, but unbroken. The ache in his chest was different now—not just pain, but a strange, saturated feeling, like a battery swollen with charge. He had not just adapted to a blow; he had incorporated its principle.
He stared at his hands. He was stealing the alphabet of violence, letter by painful letter.
A slow, sarcastic clapping echoed from the mezzanine above.
"Bravo! Truly! A Null—no, an anomaly—that turns my best cyber-mastiff into scrap and learns new tricks on the fly!"
A man leaned over the railing. Silas. He was gaunt, dressed in an expensive but stained silk shirt, his hair thinning, eyes wide with a manic, avaricious glee. He held a needler pistol casually in one hand.
"The Lady sent you, didn't she? That dried-up harpy always had an eye for interesting tools." He gestured with the gun. "Come up! Let's talk bid. Whatever she's paying you, I'll triple it. I have clients who would pay fortunes to study a power that evolves. We could run tests… controlled death scenarios, stress inductions… the data alone would be priceless!"
Kaelen climbed the metal stairs, each step sending jolts through his saturated bones. He reached the top. The office was a nest of squalor and high-tech—disposable injectors littered the floor next to sophisticated biomonitors, crates of glowing combat chems were stacked beside a cheap cot.
"I'm not for sale," Kaelen said, his voice raw.
"Everything's for sale," Silas sneered, his greed overriding caution. He kept the needler trained on Kaelen's center mass. "Especially things that don't know their own worth. Now, you can come willingly, or I can fill you with neuro-paralytics and ship you in a crate. Your power might adapt, but it can't beat synaptic shutdown."
Kaelen assessed the distance. Ten feet. He could try to rush him, but the needler would fire. He could try to use his new kinetic pulse, but it was untested, unfocused. It required an impact to charge it. He was a reactive weapon, useless without a trigger.
Think. The Lady wanted Silas alive. His power needed a threat.
"You poison fighters," Kaelen said, taking a step forward. "You burn them out for credits."
"I give them purpose!" Silas spat, taking a step back, his finger tightening on the trigger. "The system grinds them up. I at least make the grind profitable! Stop moving!"
Another step. "You're a parasite."
"And you're about to be a lab rat!Last chance!"
Kaelen was eight feet away. He saw Silas's knuckle whiten. The threat was imminent, lethal, but not physical yet. His power thrummed, confused, waiting for the impact of the needles.
He needed to control the terms of the threat.
He took a final, deliberate step, and then slammed his Porcelain Finger, pointed like a blade, into the metal railing beside him.
He poured his will, his fear, his hatred for the man before him, into a single, focused command: TRANSFORM. CONDUCT.
He wasn't trying to crumble the railing. He was trying to change its property. The thrum shot down his arm, a spear of intent.
The railing didn't turn to dust. At the point of impact, a patch of it the size of a dinner plate shimmered and turned a deep, glossy black—the perfect texture and electrical conductivity of industrial-grade synthetic carbon.
At that exact moment, Silas fired.
Three crystalline neuro-needles, propelled by magnetic coils, shot from the pistol in a quiet hiss-whine.
They struck the transformed patch of railing.
Carbon, unlike the steel around it, was highly conductive. The needles' delicate internal guidance chips, upon striking, short-circuited. With tiny pops, they shattered harmlessly against the black surface, releasing their paralytic payload in a useless mist.
Silas's eyes bulged. "Impossible—"
Kaelen was already moving. He closed the distance in two limping strides. His power, now buzzing with the success of its defensive adaptation, offered a new solution. Not brute force. Efficiency.
As Silas tried to bring the needler to bear again, Kaelen's hand shot out and grabbed the man's wrist. Not with the Porcelain Finger. With his normal hand.
The thrum delivered a new command, learned from the cyber-dog's jaw and the security orb: DECAY. FRAGILITY.
It was a whisper, not a shout. A targeted, miserly use of energy.
Silas's wrist didn't turn to dust. The small, delicate bones of the carpal tunnel didn't crumble. But the ligaments and tendons holding them together lost their tensile strength in a localized, instant atrophy. They became as weak as rotten string.
Silas screamed, a high-pitched sound of shock and agony, as his hand went completely, uselessly limp. The needler clattered to the floor. He collapsed to his knees, cradling his floppy, undamaged-but-useless hand. "My hand! What did you do?!"
Kaelen looked down at him, breathing heavily. The stored kinetic charge in his chest hummed. The new knowledge of conductivity and decay sat in his mind like stolen software. He felt heavier. Stranger.
"I adapted," Kaelen said, his voice empty.
He retrieved a zip-tie from Silas's own cluttered desk, bound the man's good hand behind his back, and hauled him to his feet. Silas whimpered, babbling offers, then threats, then pleas.
Kaelen ignored him. He activated the beacon on his wrist. A single, pulsed signal.
The extraction was swift and silent. A windowless, beat-up cargo van slid up to a loading door as Kaelen emerged, dragging Silas. Two of the Lady's grim-faced operatives—the woman with oil-slick skin and the stone-knuckled man—bundled the sobbing broker into the back without a word. One of them tossed a heavy duffel bag at Kaelen's feet.
"The Lady's compliments. Your advance."
The van door shut, and it melted back into the gloom of the Rot-Front.
Kaelen stood alone in the chemical twilight. He opened the duffel. Inside were fresh, dark-grey urban-camouflage clothes, a basic med-kit, a box of high-calorie ration bars, a burner comms unit, and a stack of low-denomination, untraceable credit chits. Not a fortune. A stipend. A tool kit for an asset.
He looked at his hands. One pale and potent. One stained and human. He was no longer of the Tower. He was barely of himself.
He had passed the test. He had become a weapon that could be aimed.
As he turned to find a shadow to disappear into, he knew the Lady's promise would now come due. A real target. Someone whose stain couldn't be scrubbed away.
The thought didn't bring fear. It brought the cold, quiet hum of a power settling into its purpose. The hunt was no longer for his survival. It was for his definition.
He slung the duffel over his shoulder, the weight of it feeling like the first true thing he'd ever owned, and vanished into the rust.