Ren stood in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. His hands were shaking, but his right eye hummed with a cold, terrifying precision.
The first thug reached the basement landing. He had a heavy plasma shotgun and a tactical optic visor scanning the darkness.
"Come out, little rat," the thug sneered. "We just want to talk about your debt."
I didn't bother sending a message to Ren. We had an agreement. I went straight to work.
I accessed the clinic's lighting control panel.
[Command: Overload ballast on Fluorescent Tube 03.]
POP. The light directly above the thug exploded in a shower of sparks and glass. The thug flinched, raising his arms.
In that microsecond of distraction, I bypassed the rudimentary firewall on his tactical visor.
[Command: Project Visual Hallucination -> Target: Self.]
"What the—?!" the thug screamed. Through my back-door access, I saw what he saw: a swarm of digital, monstrous spiders crawling out of the darkness straight at his face. It was a simple optical illusion script I had compiled using 50MB of my new memory, but to his hijacked optic nerve, it was pure reality.
He dropped his shotgun and started clawing at his own face, screaming in blind terror.
"Boss! What's wrong?!" The second thug rushed down, raising his assault rifle.
I didn't even look at him. I accessed the heavy motorized blast door separating the stairwell from the clinic floor.
[Command: Rapid Close. Ignore safety sensors.]
The second thug stepped through the threshold just as the two-ton steel door slammed shut. The crunch of metal and bone was sickeningly loud. He was pinned instantly, his cybernetic spine crushed.
Two down. Four seconds elapsed.
The third thug, still at the top of the stairs, heard the screams. He was smart. He didn't come down. Instead, he pulled out a frag grenade, ready to wipe the entire basement.
Ren gasped. "Grenade!"
[STAY STILL.]
I pinged the third thug's network. He had a premium implant—a sub-dermal smart-link connecting his brain directly to his weapons. A very expensive, very fatal mistake.
I injected a localized line of junk code directly into the smart-link's trigger protocol.
[Executing Command: Premature Detonation. Timer = 0.00s.]
The thug didn't even have time to pull the pin. The grenade in his hand registered a false "detonate" signal from his own hacked brain.
A muffled explosion rocked the ceiling above us, followed by the sound of debris and metal raining down the stairwell.
Silence descended upon the clinic, broken only by the whimpering of the pinned thug at the door.
Ren stood completely still, his breath catching in his throat. He looked at the carnage. He hadn't thrown a single punch. He hadn't fired a single shot.
A new text box smoothly scrolled into his vision, glowing with a serene, terrifying calm.
[THREATS ELIMINATED. WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER, REN. NOW, LET'S GO LOOT THEIR BODIES. WE NEED MORE RAM.]