Chapter 12: The First Move is a Trap
The hope that had flickered in Valerius's eyes died as he saw the new, deeper horror dawning on Will's face. The air in the shattered apartment grew thick, charged with the imminent arrival of corporate death squads. Will's mind, a fusion of human desperation and cybernetic coldness, processed the situation in nanoseconds.
Nyx's message was not a reassurance; it was a demonstration of power and a constraint. She had Ava, which meant he was on a leash. But she had also given him a target: Omni-Stream. And for now, their goals aligned. He had to move.
"Forget what you saw," Will snapped at Valerius, his voice cutting through the man's confusion. "If you want to live, follow my lead. Now."
He didn't wait for an answer. Grabbing Valerius by the arm, he hauled the larger man to his feet and shoved him toward the broken doorway. The stream was still live, a chaotic, screaming window into his rebellion. He let it run. Let them see. Let Omni-Stream know the monster they created was now hunting them.
They burst into the corridor just as the first security team descended from the ceiling hatch, their black armor making them look like a swarm of angry insects. Stun-bolts crackled through the air.
"Left!" Will barked, shoving Valerius ahead of him. His enhanced senses painted a tactical overlay on the world. He could see their thermal signatures through the walls, predict their firing lanes. He moved not like a man, but like a predator, a blur of motion. He didn't fight to kill; he fought to maim and bypass. A precise strike to a knee joint sent one guard crumpling. A redirected energy bolt slagged another's weapon. He was a scalpel, cutting a path through their brute force.
Valerius, despite his injuries and shock, fell into the rhythm of combat, his years of training resurfacing. He covered their rear, using his bulk to block a corridor, his own stolen side-arm providing suppressing fire. The two of them, the broken enforcer and the corporate-made psychopath, moved in a strange, lethal symbiosis.
The viewer count was astronomical. The comments were a frenzy. They were no longer just watching a stream; they were watching a revolution ignite in real-time.
Will led them on a frantic chase through the arcology's service levels, a labyrinth of steaming pipes and shuddering machinery. He was heading for a place he knew from his janitorial days—a disused data relay junction, a forgotten nerve cluster where he could tap directly into the city's infrastructure. It was the one place he might have a chance to fight back on his own terms.
They crashed through a rusted hatch, sealing it behind them with a twisted metal bar. The relay junction was a cavernous space, filled with the hum of ancient servers and the ghost-light of dormant terminals. For a moment, there was silence, broken only by their ragged breathing.
Valerius leaned against a server rack, his chest heaving. "What now? They'll have this place surrounded in minutes."
"Now," Will said, his fingers already flying across a dusty terminal, "we stop being prey."
He jacked his neural link directly into the system. The world fell away, replaced by the raw, rushing river of the arcology's data-stream. He was no longer a man in a room; he was a consciousness surfing the city's digital bloodstream. He could see everything. The security teams converging on their position. The panic in the corporate sectors. The millions of viewers still glued to his stream.
And he saw it. The tool Nyx had unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, given him.
His live stream. It wasn't just a broadcast. It was a carrier wave. A signal being received by every device in the arcology, flooding the Omni-Stream servers with unprecedented data traffic. It was a digital tsunami, and it was overloading their systems, creating chaos, masking smaller, more subtle signals.
He could work with chaos.
With a thought, he unleashed the virus he had planted in the Nexus. It wasn't a weapon of destruction. It was a key. A skeleton key. It began systematically unlocking every low-level system tied to the central network. Environmental controls. Public transit routing. Power grid regulators for non-essential sectors.
Alarms began to blare across the city, not just in their sector. Lights flickered and died in entire districts. Mag-lev trains ground to a halt. The centralized control that Omni-Stream exerted was fracturing under the weight of his rebellion and his virus.
He had just plunged the entire arcology into controlled anarchy.
He turned to Valerius, a feral light in his eyes. "The game has changed. They're not just hunting us anymore. They're fighting to keep the whole city from collapsing."
But his triumph was short-lived. A new window forced its way to the forefront of his vision. It was a live feed, but not from a public camera. It was from the helmet cam of an Enforcer Dreadnought. The same model that had nearly killed him in the Nexus.
The Dreadnought was not in a corridor or a plaza. It was standing in a sterile, white hallway. A medical hallway. It stood before a sealed door.
On the door was a nameplate. He didn't need to enhance the image to read it.
**AVA CORVIN - ISOLATION WARD 7**
The Dreadnought's featureless helmet turned, as if looking directly at him through the feed. A synthesized voice, flat and final, spoke two words.
"Checkmate."