Echo watched from behind the twisted remains of a forklift, her conduit warm and trembling in her grip.
She saw the radiant, leaden-grey bands of solidified kinetic energy snap around Nail's limbs and torso, saw him strain against them, the Mass Driver glyph on his knuckles flaring uselessly against the unyielding force.
The plan, such as it was, had relied on Nail's mobility.
On him being the bait, the herder, the unpredictable brawler.
Now he was a statue.
A target.
Her mind worked frantically.
She couldn't break the shackles.
Not with the pitiful aether left in her conduit.
But she didn't need to break them.
If the prisoner can't move…let's just move the prison.
It was a stupid, desperate idea.
It was also the only one she had.
Ignoring the screaming protest of her overtaxed core, she poured the last of her conduit's charge into a single, focused command.
Rank 2—Kinetic Surge.
She didn't aim at Nail.
She aimed at the ground beneath his feet.
A wave of invisible force, more shove than blast, erupted from her position.
It didn't strike the shackles.
It struck the cracked concrete and frozen earth in a three-meter radius around Nail.
The earth itself buckled, then lifted, tearing free in a single, ragged slab with Nail—still shackled, still straining—standing atop it like a statue on a rising pedestal.
The plan was crude, violent, and simple: yank the anchored man and his anchor out of the kill zone.
Ember's helmet snapped toward the movement.
Her systems registered the environmental disruption, the sudden displacement of her immobilized target.
A flicker of something almost like irritation crossed her focused calm.
She didn't hesitate.
With a hydraulic hiss, she became a crimson blur, dashing not toward Echo, but on an intercept course toward the rising slab of earth and the man trapped on it.
Her fist, already primed with a follow-up strike, began its arc.
From his hidden perch, Rook saw it all through his scope—the rising earth, Ember's lightning dash, the inevitable conclusion.
He exhaled, half the breath.
His finger rested beside the trigger.
He didn't aim for Ember.
A round against that armor was a spark against a vault door.
Instead, his crosshair settled on the shimmering, grey energy of the Kinetic Shackle around Nail's right ankle.
He wasn't a glyph-caster.
He didn't understand aetheric harmonics.
But he understood force, material stress, and precision.
Everything has a breaking point. Probably even 'that'.
He fired.
The high-caliber round didn't pierce the energy.
It struck it with the concentrated impact of a speeding hammer.
The shackle flared, its structured field shuddering under the violent, localized kinetic intrusion.
For a nanosecond, the perfect circuit of the spell fractured.
It was enough.
Nail, feeling the constriction on his ankle vanish, threw his weight sideways with a roar.
The remaining shackles groaned, overstressed.
He couldn't break free, but he could fall—toppling off the rising slab of earth just as Ember's piston-driven fist shattered the space where his chest had been.
He hit the dusty ground hard, still partially bound, but moving.
No longer a static target.
As he fell, another figure moved.
Mags, using the chaos and the thunder of Rook's shot as cover, activated the Invisible Steps glyph on her boots.
To ascend.
The air around her feet shimmered, and she pushed off not from solid ground, but from solidified air itself.
Two silent, impossible steps carried her vertically up the side of a corroded storage container, granting her a sudden, commanding vantage point over the entire courtyard.
Her shotgun came up, not aiming at Ember's impenetrable core, but tracking her limbs, her joints, the spaces between armor plates.
The Talons were no longer fighting one-on-one.
They were fighting as a single, desperate entity.
Echo disrupted the battlefield.
Rook snipes the spells.
Mags took the high ground.
And Nail, even shackled, was back in the fight.
Ember straightened from her missed strike, her helmet panning slowly from the shattered earth-slab, to the now-prone-but-freeing Nail, to Mags high above.
The data stream across her vision updated, recalculating threat priorities, movement vectors, predictive outcomes.
A low, soft hum vibrated through the Aegis-frame—the sound of systems cycling to a higher state of readiness.
Vey, watching from the shadow of a collapsed scaffold, allowed a dry, humorless snicker to escape his lips.
Ingenuity born of desperation.
His good eye tracked the play—Echo's reckless earth-shove, Rook's impossible shot, Mags's vertical flank.
It was messy.
It was risky.
It was the first real coordination they'd shown.
But he also saw Nail's heaving chest, the tremor that was no longer just rage but exhaustion in his arms.
The kid was running on fumes.
They couldn't build a strategy around a frontliner about to crater.
"Second team," Vey growled into his collar comm, his voice a low gravel-rumble.
"Sync with the front. We're shifting from containment to pressure. Her attention's divided. Make it more divided."
Across the yard, two of his demolitionists shifted from their concealed positions.
Their movements were economical, deliberate.
They weren't brawlers; they were technicians of chaos.
One began assembling a compact, multi-barreled launcher from components on his harness.
The other started etching a small, precise glyph onto a shaped charge—a Rank 1—Sonic Catalyst, meant not to explode, but to vibrate whatever it touched into structural failure.
Echo stared at the conduit in her hand.
It was dead, dark, and warm—a spent shell. It had only moved the ground a few feet.
But a few feet had been the difference between Nail's chest and a crater.
She shoved the useless piece of tech into her pocket and turned, her voice sharp.
"Conduit. Now." She held out her hand to the cluster of Talons huddled behind her cover.
One, a younger fighter with wide eyes, wordlessly passed over his own battered device.
It was low-spec, its battery half-drained, but it was live.
Echo checked the charge, her mind already discarding complex glyphs.
She had a pistol on her hip, but against that shimmering orange barrier, it would just be a noise-maker.
Above, Mags fired again.
BOOM.
The shotgun blast washed over Ember's shoulder plate.
The barrier shimmered like heat haze, dispersing the energy effortlessly.
No scratch, no dent.
Mags knew it couldn't pierce.
But every flare of that barrier was a micro-second of processing power, a flicker of the suit's attention.
If she could be the constant, gnawing distraction, the itch it couldn't ignore, she could blunt its focus.
"Nail, don't move!" Rook's command cut through the din.
Another crack of his rifle.
This time, the round struck the Kinetic Shackle binding Nail's left wrist.
Again, the magical construct flared and shuddered under the brute-force impact.
The bind didn't break, but it loosened, its grip faltering for a precious second.
Inside the crimson helm, Ember's lips pressed into a thin line.
A click of her tongue, muffled by the internal dampeners, echoed her rising irritation.
The fly above kept buzzing.
The sniper kept chipping at her spells.
The grounded fighter was wriggling free.
And she could feel the weight of unseen eyes—the demolition team—calculating, moving, preparing something worse than shotgun fire.
Her internal display highlighted an option, glowing with restrained potential: Rank 2—Force Shockwave.
A hemisphere of concussive force.
It would swat Mags from her perch like a bug.
It would stun Nail into oblivion.
It would clear the immediate board.
Her finger hovered over the mental trigger.
But the cost… The spell's effective radius was limited.
It would drain more aether.
And in the heartbeat of its activation and the seconds after, while systems recycled, she'd be vulnerable.
Not to Nail or Mags, but to the bombers.
To the men who didn't fight with fists or bullets, but with collapsed buildings and shaped charges.
She gritted her teeth, the smooth alloy of the helm feeling suddenly tight.
No.
Not yet.
Swatting the flies would open the door for the wasps.
She had to control the chaos, not escalate it blindly.
They were forcing her to.
And for the first time in the fight, that thought didn't feel like a constraint.
It felt like a challenge.
***
On the rooftop of a commercial building overlooking the rally point, a figure in a plain gray hoodie stood perfectly still.
The wind tugged at the loose fabric, but she didn't seem to feel it.
Her face was pale, her eyes the color of murky milk—no pupils, no irises, just pools of swirling, pearlescent white that drank the light without reflecting it.
She had hurried here, drawn by the column of fire and the deepbore concussion that had shaken dust from the sky minutes before.
It had been a fascinating interruption to the quieter, more intimate cruelty unfolding back at the Red Dogs base.
The one in the pink dress could keep playing with her new, rage-filled toy.
This promised a different kind of spectacle.
Below, the chaos was a living diagram.
The crimson armor—a polished corporate pawn—danced a violent waltz with the scrappy, desperate insects trying to sting it to death.
Glyphs flickered.
Shots rang out.
A man was pinned by ghostly chains, then freed by a sniper's impossible shot.
It was messy.
It was brutal.
It was entertaining.
A faint, almost imperceptible smile touched her lips.
"Is there some festival happening today?" she murmured, her voice a dry rustle, addressed to the empty air. "No one sent us an invitation."
Her milky eyes tracked the movements below with a detached, analytical hunger.
The spectacle of violence—raw, unscripted, and desperately human—was something she had only ever witnessed secondhand, rendered in sterile data-feeds and clinical simulations within white rooms that smelled of antiseptic and silence.
This was different.
The crunch of concrete, the shimmer of mismatched glyphs, the shouted curses swallowed by the wind—it was messy.
Illogical.
Beautiful.
She couldn't help but feel mesmerized by this strange, yet eerily familiar, scene.
A faint tremor ran through her hand, resting at her side. It was a subtle, unfamiliar vibration.
A feeling she hadn't encountered since the day Zero had carved them both free from that place—the day the screens went dark and the real, unfiltered world rushed in.
Is this… excitement? she wondered, turning the concept over in her mind like an unfamiliar artifact.
No.
That was too simple.
This was a more complex, layered sensation—a tightness in her chest, a cold prickle at the base of her neck, a compelling urge to lean closer.
It felt almost… nostalgic.
And utterly alien.
Inside the simulation, violence had been a vector, a variable, a outcome.
Down in the rubble, it was a language.
Every dodge, every desperate shot, every strained glyph was a sentence in a story she was only beginning to parse.
Each person in that brutal, dancing struggle carried a history in their eyes, a motive in their gritted teeth, a world on their shoulders.
For now, she was just watching.
That was the rule.
The thin, necessary line between observation and interference.
But as the glyphs flared below, a thought, quiet and undeniable, surfaced in her perfect, analytical mind:
Rules, as my sister so often demonstrates, are such flexible things.
***
Nail felt the numbness in his left arm begin to recede, fading into a hot, prickling ache—the feeling returning like blood to a limb that had fallen asleep.
It was a small, brutal mercy.
He could move it again, though it felt heavy and clumsy, a foreign weight at his side.
He forced his weary body into another swaying, graceless dodge as a piston-driven fist hissed through the air where his ribs had been.
The rhythm of the fight had changed.
Before, it had been a desperate, almost primal dance—fist against alloy, momentum against momentum.
Now, he could feel the shift in the air, in the suit's movements.
It wasn't just reacting anymore.
It was layering.
A punch was a feint for a glyph.
A dash was to reposition for a restraint bolt.
The crimson armor was thinking several moves ahead, herding them, controlling the space. It was applying pressure like a vise, tightening incrementally.
And yet… for the first time, Nail felt a strange, counterintuitive sensation: the armor itself was being forced into a corner.
Not by strength, but by numbers.
By the relentless, scrambling ingenuity of the people it was trying to crush.
Every time it adapted, they adapted in turn.
Echo's earth-shoving glyphs, Rook's spell-sniping, Mags's aerial harassment, Vey's bombers lurking on the periphery—they were like a hydra.
Cut off one head, and two more bit from a different angle.
The suit was powerful, but it was having to trouble to divide its attention.
To calculate for multiple, simultaneous, unpredictable threats.
It was being forced to fight not just a brawler, but a network.
Nail spat a wad of blood and dust onto the frozen ground, a grim smile touching his cracked lips.
You're not just fighting me anymore, he thought, bracing for the next onslaught.
You're fighting the whole damn Junkyard.
Feeling sensation return to his hand, Nail gritted his teeth and surged forward again.
He couldn't stop.
He was the anvil.
He had to keep the pressure on, to be the constant, throbbing threat in her face.
But Ember didn't meet his charge.
Instead, she dashed backward, creating space with a hydraulic hiss.
Even as she retreated, her left palm snapped open.
The air above it shimmered, and the same, grimly familiar glyph began to etch itself into reality—the angular, leaden lines of Rank 1—Kinetic Shackle.
Nail's eyes widened.
He wouldn't be caught twice.
He planted his lead foot and threw his weight into a hard, sliding stop, already beginning to pivot away from the point where the ghostly chains would materialize.
From his perch, Rook saw the glyph form, saw Nail's reactive shift.
His crosshair, already trailing the armor, didn't waver.
He didn't aim at Ember.
He aimed at the patch of ground just ahead of Nail, where the shackles would erupt.
One shot.
To disrupt the spell at its birth.
But Echo was faster.
Conserving the meager aether in the borrowed conduit, she didn't waste power on a complex counter.
She replicated her only useful trick with brute efficiency.
Rank 2—Kinetic Surge.
Another wave of invisible force erupted, not at the shackles, not at Ember, but at a chunk of shattered masonry and rebar near Nail's feet.
It wasn't a lift this time—it was a violent, horizontal shove.
The debris shot upward like a ragged, improvised barricade, intersecting the space where the Kinetic Shackles were meant to form.
The leaden-grey bands of energy snapped into existence—and wrapped themselves tightly around the flying chunk of rubble instead.
The spell, confused by the sudden, solid mass in its target zone, anchored itself to the barricade with a series of concussive thumps.
Rook's finger relaxed on the trigger.
A low, appreciative breath escaped him. "Damn. Good timing."
Vey, watching the interplay, felt a surge of grim satisfaction.
The timing was good.
It was also a perfect distraction.
"Second team," he growled into his comm. "Fire. Now."
From two different angles, three compact, homemade charges arced through the dusty air.
They weren't aimed to miss.
They were on a converging trajectory, meant to bracket Ember in a triangle of concussive force she couldn't dash out of.
But Ember had already anticipated the follow-up.
The shackle had been a probe, a trigger for their predictable reaction.
As the charges flew, a new, more complex glyph ignited around her—a shimmering, concentric ring of force.
Rank 2—Force Shockwave.
She didn't wait for the charges to land.
She triggered it.
A hemisphere of visible, distorting energy exploded outward from her in all directions.
The air itself became a solid, concussive wall.
Above, Mags saw the air warp.
She abandoned her vantage point without a second thought, kicking off from her invisible step into a desperate, sprawling dive away from the expanding blast zone.
Nail had no such escape.
The shockwave hit him like a runaway truck.
It didn't burn; it bludgeoned.
The air was torn from his lungs as he was lifted off his feet and hurled backward, crashing through a brittle metal fence before skidding to a stop in a cloud of dust and twisted wire.
The three converging charges met the outward-rushing shockwave in mid-air.
They detonated.
Not on target, but prematurely, their shaped fury colliding with the wall of force.
The simultaneous explosions lit up the yard in a deafening, fire-tinged roar, the directed energies scattering chaotically, tearing gouges in the earth and shredding the already ruined facade of a nearby shed.
The ground shook from the aborted impact.
When the light and sound faded, Ember stood at the center of a cleared, scorched circle, unharmed.
She had swatted the flies.
And, for a moment, the board was clear.
The shockwave's thunder still echoed in the bones of the yard.
Dust settled in a perfect, scorched ring around the crimson armor.
Nail was a motionless heap in the wreckage of a fence.
The air itself felt bruised.
In an instant, their hard-fought momentum—the coordination, the pressure, the desperate ingenuity—had been reversed.
By sheer, overwhelming technology.
A single button press had reset the fight.
Vey's good eye narrowed.
A cold, heavy feeling settled in his gut.
It wasn't despair.
It was the grim arithmetic of a demolitions expert staring at a foundation that wouldn't crack.
"…How do we compete with that?" he muttered, the words swallowed by the ringing silence. "It's a cheating weapon."
It had everything.
Durability that laughed at bullets and buckshot.
Speed that made dashes look like teleportation.
Power that could clear a city block with a thought.
And now, restraint glyphs to control the battlefield.
It was a mobile siege tower with the reflexes of a viper.
His hand drifted to the reinforced pouch at his belt, feeling the hard, lethal shapes of the three Deepbore charges through the fabric.
His best work.
His answer to robust problems.
His thumb traced the edge of one casing.
Should I use one now?
He shook his head.
The Deepbore wasn't a grenade.
To work, it needed a clean shot at a static or predictable moving target.
It needed the armor committed, its barrier down or flickering, its attention locked elsewhere.
Right now, Ember was alert, centered, and surrounded by his own people—Nail was too close, Mags was repositioning, Echo and the others were scattered in the periphery.
Firing now would be a gamble.
The blast was focused, but the concussive backwash and shrapnel cone were still lethal in a ten-meter radius.
He'd be painting his own squad with the same brush.
He needed a crack.
A moment of true vulnerability.
And the woman in the armor had just shown she could create those moments for herself, while denying them to everyone else.
He watched her slowly turn her helmet, scanning for the next threat.
The game wasn't just stacked against them.
The deck was made of the same unbreakable barrier as her shell.
From a numb arm to numb ears—Nail's world had dissolved into a high-pitched, metallic whine.
The shockwave hadn't just thrown him, it had stuffed his head with static.
He pushed himself up on trembling arms, the world tilting and swimming like oil on water.
The twisted fence wires bit into his palms, a distant, muffled sensation.
He blinked, trying to force the blurry shapes around him into focus.
Where… am I? A ring?
His disjointed and heavy thought surfaced.
The circular clearing, the haze, the distant, distorted figures moving at the edges… it felt familiar in a way that chilled his gut deeper than any frost.
From somewhere far away, he saw Rook's mouth moving behind his scope, shouting.
But no sound reached him.
Nothing but the endless, screaming ring.
It was worse than silence.
Silence was empty.
This was a cage of noise.
And in that sensory void, a memory, long buried and greasy with shame, shouldered its way to the surface.
Not a Junkyard's ring.
A different kind of pit.
The cold fluorescence of an underground fighting circuit.
The smell of stale sweat, cheap stimulants, and blood not quite washed from the mats.
He was younger.
Angrier.
Throwing fists not for territory, but to feel something other than the creeping disgust that lived in his house.
His father's face flashed in his mind—not the weary Junkyard scavenger he became, but the man in the sharp, corporate-adjacent uniform of a Nimbrix Security Reclamation Unit.
A glorified title for a clean-up crew.
Asset Recovery and Neural Re-calibration.
Protection under the guise of confinement.
Nail had learned the truth young.
He'd seen the intake logs left carelessly on a dataslate.
Not just criminals.
Dissidents.
Whistleblowers.
The inconvenient.
His father's job wasn't to protect.
It was to erase.
To use the neural-scrubbing and turn people into blank, compliant husks before they were repatriated into corporate service or quietly disposed of.
The memory wasn't of a fight.
It was of the night he confronted his old man, the words hot and ugly.
The cold, defeated look in his father's eyes—not of denial, but of acknowledgment.
"It puts food on the table, son. It keeps the lights on. It keeps you safe."
The moral filth of that safety had been the first thing Nail had ever tried to punch his way out of.
Now, ears bleeding metaphorically from a corporate weapon's blast, half-deaf and disoriented in another ring, the irony tasted like copper and bile.
He'd run from one kind of corporate crushing to end up getting flattened by another.
He shook his head, a painful, jarring motion.
The ringing began to recede, replaced by a throbbing ache and Rook's voice, now filtering in as if through thick water.
"—UP! NAIL, GET THE HELL UP!"
He wasn't in that old, hated pit.
But the fight felt the same.
The enemy was just wearing a different kind of uniform.
But then, Nail felt something touch his shoulder.
Not a shove.
Not a grab.
A light, almost tentative contact, like the brush of a falling leaf.
"Are you okay?"
The voice was calm, clear, and utterly alien.
It cut through the receding ring in his ears with a strange, neutral clarity.
Nail thoughtlessly grunted, "No."
The word was out before his brain caught up.
Then, a cold jolt of wrongness shot through the fog in his head.
He didn't recognize that voice.
It wasn't Rook's gravel, Vey's sharp tone, or Echo's urgency.
It wasn't any Talon he knew.
Slowly, painfully, he turned his head to look sideways.
A figure knelt beside him in the dust and twisted wire, clad in a plain, loose-fitting gray hoodie.
The hood was drawn up, casting deep shadow over the wearer's face.
He couldn't make out any features, just the faint, pale curve of a chin and mouth.
Who?
The question screamed internally, louder than the tinnitus.
No one should be here.
No one could just walk into the middle of this kill zone.
Had he been thrown further than he thought?
Was this some scavenger, some insane civilian who hadn't fled?
Or worse—was he still concussed?
Was this a fragment, a hallucination spun from shock and old memories?
He blinked, hard, trying to clear the swimming from his vision.
The figure remained solid and real.
The touch on his shoulder lingered, light and unsettling.
He was either looking at a ghost, a lunatic, or something he couldn't even begin to name.
And in his current state, he couldn't tell which was more dangerous.