The smiley grenade burned spots into Barry's vision.
He hit the floor behind a crate stack, shoulder slamming metal. The bang went off on the other side, sound knifing through his skull. The audio band screamed, auto-damped, came back with a muffled howl of overlapping noise:
Gunfire. Boots. And that voice.
"Friendly! Hey, friendly, you down there, limper?"
Riggs.
"Eyes," Lena snapped, already sliding to the far end of the crate row, putting cover between herself and the angle of the last throw.
"High catwalk, left," Kade said. His voice had that flat calm that meant he'd already found targets. "Three. One's him."
Barry sucked air, blinked hard. The blur became shapes: overhead gantries, shelves, pipes. The load test overlay had welded Field 3's industrial guts onto 4's warehouse spine, turning it into a three-layer killbox.
Another white canister clinked onto a lower shelf.
"Kick," Barry hissed.
Lena flicked it aside with a boot. It popped harmlessly in open air, flash washing over metal.
Riggs laughed.
"C'mon, rat," he called. "Wanna talk about my fan art?"
"He's trying to bait you into standing," Lena muttered.
"I know," Barry said, though his pulse jumped anyway.
"Two with rifles, one with the toys," Kade said. "Riggs has the toys."
"Of course he does," Lena said.
Barry thumbed the noise pebble in his pouch.
"Throw?" Kade asked, reading the motion.
"Yeah," Barry said. "He likes sounds."
On Kade's count, Barry rolled the pebble toward the far right aisle.
It bounced twice, then played its script: sharp footfalls, the clack of a bolt racking.
Riggs took it.
Gunfire raked the empty aisle. One of his goons moved with him to cover that flank.
Kade's shot cracked. One goon lurched, armor sparking, dropping against the rail.
"Two," Kade corrected. "One and a half."
Riggs swore. "Okay. Okay, I see you brought the quiet one."
The remaining goon opened up wild, sprays stitching toward where Barry and Lena had been.
Metal burst. Shards bit Barry's cheek.
Lena popped around the left of the crate, two precise shots. The goon folded.
"Last," Kade said. "Catwalk center. Mask off."
Barry risked a look.
Riggs stood on the overhead walkway, rifle on sling, pistol in his good hand, grin too wide. Blood at his shoulder from Kade's earlier graze, old bandages, new bruises. Rat-in-crosshair sprayed on his armor.
And he was looking straight at Barry.
"There he is," Riggs crooned. "My anomaly."
Barry's collar buzzed, as if annoyed by the word.
"Don't talk to him," Lena said. "We're not giving him a monologue."
"He's stalling," Kade said. "Boss, call it."
Boss. That was new.
Barry set his jaw.
"Take his legs," Barry said. "I don't want him standing near a rail with grenades."
Riggs heard it. Barked a laugh.
"Oh, we are friends," he said, and put two rounds into the crate near Barry's head.
Concrete dusted his hair.
Barry moved, switching cover, trusting Lena to track him, Kade to keep the high line honest.
Load test chaos rolled on in the distance: bots barking orders, red-eyes shrieking, explosions chewing other people's problems.
Here, the world narrowed.
"Let's trade," Riggs called. "You, me, open. You're god's little bug, yeah? Let's see if He cites you."
"Shut him up," Lena said.
Kade's shot hit the rail at Riggs' knee.
Riggs juked, pistol barking back. Kade had already shifted.
"Pinned," Kade said. "Flush or leave."
Barry's heart hammered. This was it. The thing that'd been scratching outside their door. The half-heard "friendly" on every bad corner.
"If we walk," Lena said, "he follows. Next event, next gate, always more rats on your name."
Barry knew she was right.
"Fast," Barry said. "Before the test gets cute."
He broke from cover, sprinting low toward a better angle under the catwalk. Riggs snapped shots after him, bullets chewing concrete. One nicked his vest, punching the breath from his ribs.
"Barry!" Lena barked.
"I'm fine," he lied, slammed into a new stack of crates.
Kade punished the muzzle flash, sending another round that clipped Riggs' thigh. Riggs stumbled, caught himself on the railing.
"Fuck," Riggs snarled. "You bring a sniper to a duel, rat? Rude."
"You brought grenades to 'friendly,'" Barry called back. "Fair's fair."
Lena had moved up, using Barry's push as distraction. She planted herself behind a forklift carcass, pistol locked in.
"Peek me," she said.
Barry popped his head just enough to make Riggs swing.
As Riggs tracked Barry, Lena took the shot.
Bullet smashed through Riggs' pistol wrist. Gun spun away, clattering off the catwalk.
Riggs howled, clutching his ruined hand.
Kade's voice: "Now."
Barry surged out, pistol raised.
Riggs glared down at him, eyes feral.
"Go on then," Riggs spat. "Be the hero. Do it in front of your patron."
Barry's collar buzzed hard.
For an instant, his HUD flickered:
HUMAN NODE: RIGGSRISK: HIGHRECOMMENDATION: REMOVE
Cold.
Barry fired.
One shot to the knee. Riggs dropped to one side, leg folding.
Second shot to the chest, center mass.
Third caught him in the throat as he tried to curse.
Riggs choked. Stared down at Barry with something like shock that it was him, the limper, the rat, not some random Hobo, that did it.
Then he went over.
He hit the warehouse floor hard. Didn't move.
Silence, for half a beat.
HUMAN NODE: RIGGSSTATUS: TERMINATEDLOG: ACCEPTED
Scrolled across Barry's vision and vanished.
"I hate that," Lena said.
"Yeah," Barry said.
Then the world remembered it was losing its mind.
A flamer drone roared past the open end of the aisle, spewing fire at something not them. Somewhere, a red-eye shrieked as it died.
T+16:42
"We're done," Kade said. "Route to extract."
Barry wanted to stand there. Mark the moment. Breathe.
Couldn't.
He swallowed it and moved.
"Mid extract," Barry said. "Not south. Riggs' boys'll still be circling his favorite."
They cut away from the corpse, deeper through the welded maze. The load test parameters gnawed at the edges:
Blue-Eyes more aggressive against Locals.
Red-eyes ricocheting between targets.
Hazards ramping—steam vents staying on longer, arcs of stray electricity dancing along rails.
Twice, bots hesitated when their scan cones hit Barry.
Twice, his HUD flashed tiny anomaly notes and cleared.
Lena saw one of them.
"Your machine friend happy with Riggs?" she asked, breathing hard as they ducked a vent blast.
"It logged him 'terminated, accepted,'" Barry said.
"Of course it did," she muttered.
Kade dropped a runner who decided to test their backs. No commentary.
They pushed down a stairwell into a sub-level corridor leading toward the mid extract: a collapsed metro entrance NEXUS had stabilized with its sickly green shimmer.
Barry's audio band picked up something new there.
A low, building hum.
"Anyone else hear—" he started.
"Yeah," Kade said.
Lena frowned. "That's not standard extract noise."
They hit the last corner before the tunnel and stopped.
Mid extract sat ahead, field active.
Two Blue-Eye pods hovered.
Above them, in the exposed ceiling, NEXUS hardlight projectors—units Barry had only ever seen offline—flickered to life.
Text ghosted across his HUD, faint, blinking:
ZONE STABILITY: DEGRADEDCORRUPT SIGNATURES: HIGHANOMALY CLUSTER: PRESENTSTERILIZATION: PENDING (CONDITIONAL)
"Okay," Barry breathed. "That's… a hint."
"Bots are pulling back," Kade said quietly.
He was right.
The Blue-Eye pods drifted away from the field's outer edges, like they didn't want to be near what was coming.
"Option one, we hit this extract now," Lena said. "Option two, we pretend we didn't see that and go find another and probably die on the way."
"Timer?" Kade asked.
T+18:03
Plenty. Too much.
Barry thought of Jay: If bots pull back, if sky brightens wrong, you run.
"Feels wrong," Barry said. "This is more than x3 payouts."
"Agreed," Kade said.
"Agreed," Lena echoed.
NEXUS wasn't waiting. More lines overlaid his vision, maddeningly calm:
AWAITING TRIGGER: STERILIZATION THRESHOLDINPUTS: CORRUPTION / HUMAN HOSTILES / ANOMALY RESPONSE
"You see that?" Barry whispered.
"Yeah," Lena said. "Looks like a test to me."
"Us," Kade said. "We're the variable."
For the first time that Round, Barry felt cold all the way through.
"This is where we walk," he said. Voice hoarse. "Liss' rule. Jay's rule. We don't play along."
Lena exhaled. "Finally some sense."
Kade nodded once. "Alternate exits."
Barry pulled the map overlay. North extract, further, dirtier, but no hardlight spools yet.
"North," he said. "Now."
They turned.
Behind them, up in the rafters, more projectors whined to life.
NEXUS' watcher thread logged:
ANOMALY CLUSTER: CHOSE RETREATRIGGS: REMOVEDSTERILIZATION: RE-EVALUATING
The system had wanted to see how the anomaly behaved with a knife at its throat.
The anomaly had stepped back.
For a second.
Then the load test rolled on, and the meters climbed anyway.
As Barry, Lena, and Kade pushed toward the alternative route, the hum in the walls followed, like something had decided that if its lab rats wouldn't stay in the maze corner, it might just have to move the fire.
After they lost, killing a monster like Riggs was only half the job.
The other half was surviving long enough to realize the bigger monster had been watching the whole time—and didn't like the answers it was getting.