The rain in Sector 9 didn't wash things clean; it just made the grime slicker. It was a heavy, acidic downpour that hissed when it hit the hot asphalt, smelling of sulfur and old copper.
Lieutenant Kael didn't mind the acid. His skin was mostly gone anyway, replaced by sheets of matte-black carbon steel that drank the light. He stood in the mouth of the alleyway, the servos in his knees locking with a hydraulic *thud*.
At his feet lay three members of the Iron Spiders.
They weren't dead, but they wished they were. One was curled around his own stomach, vomiting a pink froth. Another was trying to stand, but his legs were vibrating uncontrollably, nerve damage firing misfires into the muscle.
Kael looked down. His ocular implant whirred, cycling through vision modes—thermal, night-vision, structural stress analysis.
"Report," Kael said. His voice bypassed his vocal cords, emerging from a speaker grille in his throat. It sounded like gravel tumbling inside a dryer.
The vomiting man looked up. "Ghosts, Lieutenant. Just... ghosts."
Kael didn't like metaphors. Metaphors were inefficiencies in data. He stepped on the man's hand. He didn't stomp; he just applied four hundred pounds of pressure.
"Physics," Kael corrected. "Who did this?"
"Trash," the man wheezed, tears mixing with the rain on his face. "Beggars. Scavengers. They didn't have guns. They had pipes. Just pipes."
Kael zoomed in on the man's chest armor. The ceramic plate was intact, but underneath, the heat signature showed massive soft-tissue trauma. The capillaries had burst in a starburst pattern.
*Impact resonance.*
Someone had hit this man with a frequency that bypassed the armor and liquefied the meat underneath.
"Show me," Kael said.
He grabbed the man by the collar and dragged him upright. The Spider whimpered, his boots scraping uselessly against the wet ground.
They walked deeper into the slum. The neon signs here were erratic, flickering skeletons of dragons and koi fish that cast epileptic shadows on the walls. The residents—huddled masses wrapped in plastic tarps—scatted like roaches when they saw the black steel silhouette of the Lieutenant.
They knew the Black Steel Gang. They knew that when the Lieutenants came down from the upper tiers, people stopped breathing.
"There," the Spider gasped, pointing a shaking finger toward a retrofitted warehouse near the drainage canal. "The distribution center."
It wasn't a center. It was a hole in the wall where the desperate lined up to trade their life force for a chance to hit back.
Kael dropped the man. He walked toward the warehouse.
His internal threat assessment algorithm remained silent. It classified the area as 'Low Hazard.' Just flesh and bone.
The algorithm was about to be proven wrong.
***
Inside the warehouse, Li Wei was holding court.
He sat on a crate of expired munitions, looking older than his sixteen years. His left eye was still swollen from the beating two days ago, but his posture was rigid. He looked less like a rat now and more like a coiled spring.
"Line forms at the pillar," Li Wei said. His voice was hoarse.
There were twenty of them tonight. The word had spread. The 'Developer's Patch' worked. If you slotted the chip, you didn't just learn to fight; you learned to win.
A man in a torn grey jumpsuit stepped forward. He held out a handful of credits—greasy, physical coins that were almost extinct in the upper sectors.
"For the chip," the man said.
Li Wei took the coins. He didn't count them. He just gestured to the girl by the decoder unit. "Flash him."
The girl, the one with the big eyes and the skin infection, plugged a jack into the man's neck.
Kael tore the blast door off its hinges.
The sound was like a bomb going off. The heavy steel door flew across the room, crumpling a metal shelf unit like it was made of tin foil.
Dust rained down from the rafters. The twenty customers froze.
Kael stepped through the dust cloud. He was seven feet of industrial violence. His left arm was a standard manipulator claw; his right was a heavy-bore pile driver. The red light of his ocular implant swept the room, tagging faces.
*Target 1: Malnourished.*
*Target 2: Diseased.*
*Target 3: Addict.*
Worthless. All of them.
"Who is the provider?" Kael asked.
Silence.
The residents of Sector 9 were used to abuse, but this was different. This was a predator from a different food chain.
Kael raised his right arm. The pile driver piston retracted with a sharp *clack*.
"I ask once."
Li Wei stood up.
He didn't want to. His legs wanted to run. His bladder wanted to empty. But the connection in the back of his mind—the silver thread that linked him to the Administrator—hummed with a cold, terrifying disapproval at the thought of cowardice.
"Me," Li Wei said.
Kael turned. The red eye focused.
"You." Kael sounded disappointed. "A child."
"I'm the node," Li Wei said, using the words he didn't fully understand but knew carried weight.
Kael crossed the room in three strides. He moved with a speed that defied his mass. He backhanded Li Wei.
It wasn't a punch; it was a dismissal. Li Wei flew backward, crashing into the crate of munitions. Wood splintered. He tasted copper and felt a rib snap.
Kael picked him up by the throat.
"Where is the tech from?" Kael asked. He squeezed. Not enough to crush the windpipe, but enough to make the cartilage groan. "Who wrote the code? This isn't Sector 9 garbage. This is military grade."
Li Wei scrabbled at the cold steel hand. His vision swam. Black dots multiplied.
"The... Administrator..." Li Wei choked out.
"Name," Kael demanded.
"He... sees..."
Kael tightened his grip. "He sees nothing. You are alone, rat. And you are going to bleed until you give me an IP address."
***
**Sector 74. Apartment 404.**
Su Yuan woke up because he felt like someone was crushing his own throat.
He gasped, clawing at his neck, falling out of his chair. The phantom pain was acute, a sympathetic echo of a node in critical distress.
He scrambled up and hit the keyboard.
**[ ALERT: Node 001 (Li Wei) - Critical Physical Trauma. ]**
**[ Heart Rate: 160 BPM. Oxygen: 75% and dropping. ]**
**[ Threat Detected: Class-C Cybernetic Organism. ]**
Class C.
Su Yuan's blood ran cold.
The Iron Spiders he had calculated for were thugs. Class E at best. Just meat with some metal grafted on.
Class C was fully integrated combat chassis. Sub-dermal armor. Reflex boosters. That was a Lieutenant. That was the Black Steel Gang proper.
"He cracked the encryption," Su Yuan whispered. "Too fast."
He brought up Li Wei's sensory feed.
It was a nightmare. The view was tilted, obscured by tears and hypoxia. A face of black steel filled the frame, a single red eye burning in the center.
*...going to bleed until you give me an IP address...*
The audio feed was distorted by the pressure on Li Wei's larynx.
Su Yuan stared at the screen.
If Li Wei talked, the game was over. They would trace the signal. They would send a hit squad to Apartment 404. Su Yuan had no combat ability. He was a brain in a jar, and the jar was made of cheap drywall.
*Cut the line,* his logic suggested. *Fried his brain remotely. Initiate the Neural Shock Protocol. Dead men don't give up IP addresses.*
His finger hovered over the **[ EXECUTE ]** key.
It was the smart play. The safe play. Li Wei was just a tool. A beta tester.
Through the feed, Su Yuan heard a sound.
Li Wei was laughing. It was a wheezing, broken sound, bubbling through blood.
"You... loose," Li Wei sputtered at the cyborg.
"Lose?" Kael's voice grated. "I am holding your life."
"Not... my... life," Li Wei gasped. "His."
Su Yuan pulled his hand back from the kill switch.
The kid wasn't breaking. The kid was doubling down. He believed in the myth Su Yuan had built. He believed the Administrator was a god who wouldn't let him fall.
"Damn it," Su Yuan hissed.
He couldn't kill him. Not now.
But he couldn't fight a Class C cyborg. The math didn't work. The *Primary Shockwave* was an F-rank skill. It relied on biological leverage. Against steel plating, it was like throwing eggs at a tank.
Unless.
Su Yuan looked at the other indicators on the map.
There were twenty-one dots in that warehouse. One was Li Wei. Twenty were the customers.
They were weak. Malnourished. Untrained.
But they were connected.
"System," Su Yuan said, his voice trembling slightly. "Distributed Computing Override."
**[ Warning: Override requires Administrator Privileges. Taking direct control of Motor Functions causes severe neural degradation in Hosts. ]**
"I'm not asking for a debate!" Su Yuan shouted at the monitor. "Access the *Genesis Protocol*. Requesting authorization for... for a Swarm Attack."
The screen flickered. The grey text dissolved into a deep, bloody crimson.
**[ Proposal Accepted. ]**
**[ Mode: OVERCLOCK. ]**
**[ Burning Adrenal Reserves... ]**
**[ Synchronizing Nodes... ]**
Su Yuan grabbed the headset and jammed it onto his ears. He closed his eyes.
He didn't dive into one mind this time. He dove into twenty.
***
In the warehouse, the air pressure changed.
Kael felt it. His sensors picked up a sudden spike in bio-electric activity. It wasn't coming from the boy in his hand. It was coming from behind him.
He turned his head.
The twenty beggars were standing up.
They didn't stand up like people. They stood up like puppets being yanked by a single string. Their movements were perfectly synchronized. Twenty spines straightened at the exact same millisecond.
Their eyes were rolled back, showing only whites. Their jaws hung slack, but their breathing was a unified, rhythmic hiss.
*Hiss. Hiss. Hiss.*
It sounded like a steam engine revving up.
"What is this?" Kael muttered. He dropped Li Wei. The boy hit the floor, gasping for air.
Kael raised his pile driver. "Back off, trash."
The swarm didn't flinch. They didn't feel fear. The part of their brains that processed survival instincts had been suppressed by Su Yuan's override.
They were just meat guided by math.
**[ Command: DISMANTLE. ]**
The thought wasn't spoken. It was broadcast.
The swarm screamed—not a human scream, but a singular, flat note of aggression—and charged.
They didn't run wildly. They flowed.
Three of them dove for Kael's legs. Kael smashed the first one aside with a backhand, shattering the man's jaw. The man didn't stop. He didn't even register the pain. He latched onto Kael's knee servo with the bite strength of a hysterical madman.
"Get off!" Kael roared. He fired the pile driver.
*BOOM.*
The piston punched a hole through a woman's chest. She dropped instantly.
But two more took her place.
They were everywhere. They were climbing his back, grabbing his arms, jamming scrap metal into his joints.
Su Yuan, sitting in his chair miles away, was sweating blood.
The sensory feedback was horrific. He felt the woman die. He felt the jaw shatter. He felt the impact of steel on twenty different bodies.
*Pain. Focus. Ignore the pain. Calculate the stress point.*
He saw the schematic of the cyborg through the eyes of the swarm.
*Right shoulder. Piston housing. Exposed cabling.*
"Tear it out," Su Yuan whispered.
In the warehouse, four men grabbed Kael's right arm. They didn't try to overpower him—that was impossible. They used the *Shockwave*.
They began to vibrate.
They channeled every ounce of their meager soul power into their hands, creating a feedback loop of kinetic energy. It burned their muscles. It snapped their tendons.
But the vibration traveled into Kael's arm.
*WRRRR-EEE-EEE.*
The cyborg's internal gyroscope went haywire. The black steel casing around his shoulder began to heat up.
Kael panicked. For the first time since his conversion, he felt legitimate fear. These weren't people. This was a virus made of flesh.
"Reset!" Kael yelled, trying to trigger his emergency discharge.
Too late.
One of the swarm, a small boy with a rusty screwdriver, saw the opening Su Yuan highlighted. He jammed the screwdriver into the vibrating gap in the shoulder armor.
Sparks showered the room.
Kael's pile driver fired involuntarily, blowing a crater in the concrete floor. The arm seized, dead weight.
"Li Wei!" Su Yuan shouted, his voice projecting through the speakers of the warehouse's dead security system, hacking the audio feed.
"RUN."
Li Wei, coughing on the floor, looked up. He saw the nightmare—the pile of bodies swarming the steel giant. He saw his neighbors being broken and discarded like toys, yet still fighting with blank, white eyes.
He scrambled to his feet. He grabbed the girl with the infection.
"Go!" Li Wei screamed.
He bolted for the rear exit, the sound of tearing metal and wet thuds echoing behind him.
Kael roared, shaking three people off his back. He revved his leg servos and stomped, crushing a man's pelvis. He was winning—he was a tank, they were infantry—but he was bogged down.
By the time he cleared the last of the "zombies" from his chassis, snapping the neck of the man biting his knee, the rear door was swinging shut.
The warehouse was quiet, save for the groans of the broken.
Kael stood amidst the carnage. He was covered in blood that wasn't his. His right arm was sparking and useless. His cooling fans whirred frantically, trying to dump the excess heat.
He looked at the bodies.
They weren't soldiers. They were nobodies. And they had almost taken him apart.
"Administrator," Kael grated, the word tasting like acid.
He touched the side of his head, activating his long-range comms.
"Command. This is Kael. Sector 9. We have a Situation Level 5. Send the Spiders. Send all of them."
***
Su Yuan ripped the headset off.
He leaned over the side of his chair and vomited until his stomach was empty.
His head felt like it had been split open with an axe. The feedback from the *Overclock* was receding, leaving behind a hollow, shivering cold.
He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
He looked at the screen.
**[ Connection Severed. ]**
**[ Active Nodes: 48 (7 Critical, 1 Deceased). ]**
**[ Administrator Energy: 0.12 Units. ]**
He was almost back to zero. The burst had cost him everything he had saved.
And a woman was dead. He had felt her heart stop. He had spent her life like a coin in a vending machine to buy Li Wei five minutes of lead time.
Su Yuan stared at his reflection in the dark monitor. He looked pale. Ghostly.
"I saved him," Su Yuan whispered. He needed to hear it. "I saved the asset."
**[ Genesis Protocol: Analysis. ]**
The text appeared slowly, pulsing with a faint, violet light.
**[ The Host demonstrates acceptable ruthlessness. ]**
**[ The Swarm tactic is valid. ]**
**[ However, the physical shell is weak. If the Queen dies, the Hive falls. ]**
"I know," Su Yuan rasped. "I need to move. They'll find a way to trace the surge."
**[ Incorrect. ]**
Su Yuan paused. "What?"
**[ The surge was masked by the chaotic discharge of twenty souls. You are hidden by the noise. ]**
**[ But you cannot hide from the hunger. ]**
**[ New Feature Unlocked: Soul Smithing. ]**
**[ You have broken bodies to save a Node. Now, you must build better bodies. ]**
A blueprint appeared on the screen. It wasn't a technique. It was a schematic for a device.
**[ Item: Soul-Harvester Array (Prototype). ]**
**[ Function: Automates the collection of remnant energy from the recently deceased. ]**
**[ Range: 50 meters. ]**
Su Yuan looked at the blueprint. It required parts he could scavenge from a standard computer deck and... copper wire.
He realized what the System was suggesting.
If he had this device active during the fight in the warehouse, he wouldn't have lost energy. He would have gained it. The woman who died... her remaining potential would have been harvested.
"You want me to eat them," Su Yuan said. "Not just their computing power. Their souls."
**[ Waste is inefficient. ]**
Su Yuan closed his eyes.
The Black Steel Gang was coming. Kael would not stop. The Corporation monitored the energy spikes.
He was trapped between the wolves and the void.
He stood up, his legs shaking. He walked to the corner of the room where his toolbox lay.
He took out the wire cutters.
"Fine," Su Yuan said to the empty room. "If they want a monster, I'll build them a monster."
He sat back down and began to strip the wire. Outside, the sirens began to wail, a mournful song rising up from the depths of Sector 9, signaling the start of the hunt.