Anyone who's lived a few decades has at least one memory burned into their bones:
The terror of being cornered.
A mistake you could never undo.
The burst of impossible strength in absolute desperation.
Most mercs, after surviving something like that, swear they'll never let themselves be pushed into that kind of dead end again.
The man whose skull was now flooded with static suddenly hallucinated.
He saw his grandmother.
Back then, they'd still been farming in a small village in Eastern Europe—until SovOil's armored divisions rolled in and declared the land nationalized, reassigned to corporate agricultural management.
National interests were sacred.
So the fields that fed his family had to serve the Soviet Federation.
He'd been seven or eight.
The hollow confusion of losing home had been crushed under the suffocating experience of a peasant family swallowed by an industrial megacity.
Years later—after he learned to shoot and kill men just like himself, after betrayal, after nights drowning in booze, braindance, and cheap sex—
Only then would he sometimes remember:
Farming had been exhausting, miserable—
But at least it felt stable.
He saw his grandmother covering his eyes.
Through her fingers, he saw his grandfather screaming—
"You can't take my land, this belongs—"
The tank treads flattened him before he finished the sentence.
The memory detonated.
Old trauma fused with rage and loss into a violent neural surge.
V was accelerating through the air when she felt it.
Her target suddenly stomped into the wall—absorbing all forward momentum instead of chaining upward like before.
Then—
He pushed back.
Not a retreating motion—
A reversal.
Force erupted from the full-body frame, beyond safe limits. Synthetic musculature strained. Reinforced pistons screamed.
The sudden change in vector made V's stomach drop.
Bang.
A precision projectile was launched at her face.
She parried with her mantis blade.
The impact shoved her arm off-line. A data cable snapped taut and whipped across her shoulder.
Her bike fishtailed, smashing toward the borg's midsection. The cable cracked against her armor.
"You—can't—take—this!"
His camo skin flickered.
Through the pixelated disguise, V saw his mouth open—
Which was wrong.
Eclipse headframes didn't have mouths.
Boom.
The booster flared.
Flame shot into the ruptured seams of his chassis, igniting him from within.
Systems failed. Torque collapsed.
The Boomsteed dropped.
A slight miscalculation in the descent vector—
Thud.
The bike slammed onto a skybridge. V's head rang.
That was when Leo realized something was very wrong.
The Mackinaw didn't slow.
It blasted out of the alley—
And immediately, a Valentino truck flew head-on across its path.
The cab was drenched in blood.
A Samson frame was welded into the driver's seat, one massive hand gripping a shattered skull and steering wheel alike.
Sensors flared.
Crash.
The vehicles collided.
The Samson leapt onto the Mackinaw's hood, ignoring Jackie's counterattack entirely.
Its forearm reconfigured mid-swing into a penetrator-launch system.
A superheated armor spike discharged point-blank—
Bang.
The spike punched clean through the Croni-Titan plate.
The penetrator casing split, exposing the explosive core.
Leo's nerves spiked—
Little Octopus reacted instantly.
A tentacle rammed the plate outward.
Boom.
Most of the detonation vented externally.
The Samson took the blast head-on and kept moving—
Its arm is reforming for a second spike—
Bang.
Jackie fired four rounds into its head.
Samson's skull detonated in chrome fragments.
Jackie stared.
"What the hell—why are they not dodging?"
Leo's side was scorched—skin blistered.
"I'm fine," he muttered.
Little Octopus swapped tools mid-motion, sealing exposed wiring with fresh clamp claws.
The blast had been partially external, but the detached armor plate left a gap. Superheated air still lingered inside.
It would've been catastrophic for most people.
Leo didn't have time to care.
Something had changed.
Electromagnetic interference?
"Yee—ha!"
Another full borg dropped from the sky, clutching an RPG.
Thwack.
V descended like a guillotine.
The Boomsteed's tire crushed his lower half while the blade pinned him mid-fall. The bike shredded him before he hit ground.
She grabbed the RPG mid-spin and fired behind her.
Boom.
The pursuing vehicle spun out and slammed into a Valentino truck.
The Valentinos didn't hesitate.
Tech rifles lit up the wreck with clean extermination bursts.
The Boomsteed hit ground.
V clung to the window frame.
"You still alive?!"
"Alive," Leo answered, swapping Little Octopus' claws again. "But something's wrong."
Boom—
The suicide attacks weren't limited to the Mackinaw.
The Valentino convoy was getting butchered.
When full-body conversions are committed fully—
They weren't manageable anymore.
Samson and Eclipse—strength and agility builds—working in tandem—
Valentinos were street soldiers, not elite chrome operators.
Then another Centaur unit joined.
It charged straight through Tech fire.
Shield forward.
Plasma blade ignited.
Its jump was monstrous.
Treads hit the wall, shield scraping sparks across concrete, blade carving through vehicle hulls like heated butter.
One entire Valentino unit disappeared.
Leo injected an extra surge of Lizard serum.
Burned skin regenerated.
The Sandevistan spiked again.
Time slowed.
Leo saw the Centaur pilot clearly.
He was shaking.
Micro-seizures.
Jaw slack. Oil and saliva leaking from his mouth.
He looked cognitively impaired.
But his combat movements were flawless.
His optics glowed blue—
Then flickered—
Then bled red.
Blue: AI constructs humans could perceive under the Ihara–Grams protocols.
Red: native signal layers humans could not interpret.
[Bryce: zzt…]
[Bryce: AI signature… located…]
[Bryce: Hold—zzt.]
Crack.
In Leo's HUD, phantom red arcs crawled along damaged circuitry.
Then all the lighting died.
Only a faint crimson overlay remained in perception—
Like parasites threading every conductive path.
The glow dimmed.
Only the Centaur's blade burned red—
And the cyberpsychos' optics flared brighter.
Then—
A voice.
Lower than Mackinaw's.
Colder.
Emotionless.
"Soul-infused blade—"
"Now, shine."
It sounded like metal being torn in half.