The building groaned. A low, metallic sound that vibrated through the floorboards, up the legs of Su Yuan's cheap plastic chair, and into his teeth. It wasn't the usual sigh of ancient concrete settling; it was a hungry, deliberate vibration, like a vast machine moving beneath the earth.
Su Yuan didn't need the external sensors. He didn't need the flickering orange warning on his screen that read: **[ EXTERNAL THREAT: PROXIMITY CRITICAL. ]**
He felt it.
The SoulNet, even with its sensory filters engaged, hummed with a primal anxiety from the nodes in Sector 9. An echo of dread, a collective shudder transmitted through the invisible threads linking them all. They knew Kael. They knew the Black Steel Gang was coming.
Su Yuan pressed his back against the peeling wallpaper. His breath hitched. He had emptied his stomach hours ago, leaving nothing but a sour ache in his gut. His hands, still stained with copper dust from stripping wires, trembled on the keyboard.
He looked at the apartment door. It was a flimsy slab of particle board, painted a faded industrial grey, with a lock that could be opened by a stiff breeze. Behind it, the stairwell was quiet. Too quiet.
Then, a new sound. Not the distant rumble of the city, but something closer. A rhythmic *clank-thud, clank-thud*, ascending the final flight of stairs. It was the sound of heavy, reinforced footsteps. Not just one set. Many.
Kael. And the Spiders.
Su Yuan's mind raced. His meager Soul Energy, barely 0.12 units, was useless for a direct confrontation. The *Void Shell* would hide his signature, but it wouldn't stop a bullet. Or a piledriver. He was a brain. Nothing more.
*No.*
He wasn't *just* a brain. He was the Administrator.
The *clank-thud* stopped right outside his door. A shadow fell across the crack beneath it.
"Apartment 404," a voice grated through the thin wood. Kael. No speakers now. His actual vocal cords, modified by cybernetics, still carried the sound of grinding metal. "The trace ends here."
A dull *thump* against the door. Not a knock. A test. The door frame shuddered.
Su Yuan reached for the mouse. He pulled up the network map. Fifty active nodes. Forty-two in Sector 9, seven recovering, and one—Li Wei—in the wind. But even the recovering ones were still *connected*. Still contributing.
The blueprint for the *Soul-Harvester Array* glowed on his secondary monitor, incomplete. He hadn't had time. The sirens had started just as he began stripping the wires.
He was trapped. A rat in a forgotten cage.
But the System had called him a Queen. And Queens had privileges.
"The Administrator is busy," Su Yuan whispered. His voice was dry.
Another *thump*. Harder this time. The door bowed inward slightly. A crack appeared in the cheap paint.
"We know you're in there, hacker," Kael's voice. Closer. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be."
Su Yuan's fingers hovered over the keyboard. He looked at the prompt: **[ ADMINISTRATOR PRIVILEGES ]**. It was a hidden menu, a sub-directory of the Genesis Protocol, something he had glimpsed during the *Overclock* but hadn't dared to explore.
He remembered the System's warning during the swarm attack: "*Override requires Administrator Privileges. Taking direct control of Motor Functions causes severe neural degradation in Hosts.*"
Neural degradation. For the Hosts. Not for him.
He slammed his hand down, hitting the 'ENTER' key.
The screen exploded in crimson. Not text. Not a menu. A flash of pure, violent data.
**[ ADMINISTRATOR MODE ACTIVATED. ]**
**[ PRIMARY COMMAND: Physical Strength Augmentation. ]**
**[ SOURCE: All 50 Active Nodes. ]**
**[ DURATION: 10 Seconds. ]**
**[ QUANTITY: 10% of total physical strength per Node. ]**
**[ WARNING: High Risk of Musculoskeletal Trauma to Host. ]**
Su Yuan didn't read the warning. He felt it.
A sudden, overwhelming surge of raw physical energy. It hit him like a lightning bolt, not through his nervous system, but through his very cells. His muscles screamed. Every fiber of his being, long atrophied by neglect, woke up with a jolt of unnatural vitality.
He gasped. His vision blurred, then sharpened, colors bleeding at the edges. His heart hammered against his ribs, not with fear, but with impossible power.
The door buckled. The lock groaned, then *snapped*. A splintering crash of cheap wood.
Kael stood in the doorway, his silhouette framed by the flickering hall lights. Behind him, three Spiders, less armored than Kael, but still hulking, their faces grim. Kael's right arm still hung limp, sparking, but his left manipulator claw was open, ready to tear.
"Got you," Kael grated. He stepped inside. His red eye swept the room.
Su Yuan pushed himself out of the chair. It scraped backward, hitting the wall.
He felt his shirt tear. The cheap, thin fabric stretched and ripped across his chest, unable to contain the sudden, explosive expansion of his muscles. His biceps bulged, cords of steel under pale skin. His shoulders broadened, his neck thickened. His legs, once weak and spindly, felt like pilings driven deep into the earth.
His eyes burned. He felt the data streams flowing behind his pupils, a visible glow in the dim room. He could see Kael's internal schematics, the weakness in his left shoulder joint, the depleted power cells. He saw the Spiders' individual stress points, their clumsy stances, their inefficient movements.
He felt the combined rage of Li Wei. The desperate survival instinct of Node 017. The raw, animalistic aggression of all fifty connected souls, channeled into his own starved frame.
It was intoxicating. A drug unlike any other.
"Ten seconds," he heard his own voice say. It wasn't his voice. It was deeper, resonant, laced with a cold, metallic edge.
Kael paused. His optical sensor focused. He saw the man, not the scared programmer he expected, but a figure of impossible, sudden mass. He saw the glowing eyes.
"What in the hell...?" Kael began.
Su Yuan moved.
He didn't think. He didn't plan. The movements flowed from him, pre-calculated, efficient, brutal. It was the combined combat experience of every SoulNet user, distilled, refined, and poured into his veins. He felt the phantom memory of countless brawls, knife fights, pipe swings. It was a torrent of perfected violence.
He didn't run. He lunged.
The first Spider, a brute with a rebar club, raised his weapon. Su Yuan met him mid-swing. He didn't block. He *parried*. His forearm, solid as stone, knocked the rebar aside with a ringing *clang* that vibrated up the Spider's arm, dislocating his shoulder with a wet pop.
Before the Spider could scream, Su Yuan's other hand shot out, open-palmed. He didn't punch. He *pushed*. The *Primary Shockwave* technique, amplified by fifty souls, wasn't a hit; it was an internal explosion. The Spider's ribs collapsed inward. His eyes bulged, and he fell backward, twitching, a gurgle of blood in his throat.
Two seconds gone.
The second Spider, smaller, quicker, darted in with a salvaged vibro-knife. He aimed for Su Yuan's gut.
Su Yuan swayed. It wasn't a dodge; it was a fluid shift of mass. He felt the blade whistle past his skin, the cold air disturbed by its passage. He wasn't faster than the blade; he was simply in the wrong place for the knife to land.
His hand lashed out, gripping the Spider's wrist. He squeezed. The sound of snapping bone was sharp, sickening. The Spider cried out, dropping the knife.
Su Yuan spun, using the Spider's momentum against him. He slammed the man's head against the door frame. *CRACK.* Bone against wood. The Spider went limp.
Four seconds.
Kael roared. "You're just a hacker! A glitch!" He raised his functional arm, the manipulator claw snapping open and shut. He lunged, a seven-foot-tall war machine, piston-driven fury.
Su Yuan met him head-on.
He felt Kael's strength, the sheer torque of the cybernetic arm. But he also felt its limits, its vulnerabilities. He wasn't trying to match Kael's strength. He was trying to break it.
He ducked under the swipe, sidestepping the claw that would have ripped him in half. He drove his shoulder into Kael's chest. It wasn't a tackle. It was a battering ram powered by fifty souls.
Kael stumbled. The servos in his legs whined, struggling to maintain balance against the impossible force. His ocular implant flickered, registering an overload of unexpected input.
"What is this?" Kael gasped, his voice cracking.
Su Yuan didn't answer. He brought his knee up, not with a martial arts kick, but with the brutal, pragmatic power of a construction ram. It slammed into Kael's midsection, targeting the junction between his torso and lower chassis.
*CRUNCH.*
The internal dampeners failed. Kael's armored spine, designed to withstand anti-tank rounds, buckled. A high-pitched shriek of dying hydraulics filled the small apartment. Kael's legs gave out, and he folded, crashing to his knees.
Six seconds.
Su Yuan grabbed Kael by the head. His fingers, now thick and powerful, closed around the cold steel of Kael's skull, digging into the exposed plates. He felt the hum of Kael's internal processors, the frantic panic of his failing systems.
He lifted Kael. The Lieutenant, seven feet of black steel, hung suspended, his legs dangling uselessly.
"You wanted the Administrator?" Su Yuan grated. His face was inches from Kael's optical implant. His eyes blazed with the raw data of the SoulNet. "You found him."
He didn't kill Kael. Not directly. That would be messy. And inefficient.
Instead, Su Yuan closed his eyes. He reached out with the SoulNet, a tendril of pure, focused intent. He didn't just touch Kael's mind; he *rewrote* a small, crucial part of it.
**[ PROTOCOL: PSYCHOLOGICAL SEED INITIATED. ]**
**[ TARGET: Kael's Visual Memory Cortex (Facial Recognition). ]**
**[ COMMAND: Obfuscate Administrator's Identity. ]**
**[ EFFECT: Administrator's face will register as a blank canvas, an unrecallable blur. ]**
It wasn't a command. It was a suggestion, a forced glitch in Kael's organic memory banks. A deep, psychological block that would prevent Kael from ever truly seeing, processing, or remembering Su Yuan's face. He would know a figure was there, an impossibly strong figure, but the details would be erased, replaced by an irritating, maddening void.
*Your memory will fail you, Kael,* Su Yuan thought, his intent bleeding into the cyborg's neural pathways. *You will know a phantom. A programmer who was never there.*
He felt a faint resistance, then the block settled, solidifying. A part of Kael's mind was now a locked room, the key melted.
"You won't remember me," Su Yuan said, his voice dropping to a low, chilling whisper. "You'll just remember the feeling. The phantom."
He released Kael.
The Lieutenant fell. He landed with a heavy *thud*, his shattered chassis folding onto the inert body of a Spider. He lay there, twitching, his red optical implant sweeping the room, frantic, confused. He saw the bodies. He saw the shattered door. He looked at Su Yuan, his gaze passing right through him, unable to anchor on a face.
Kael tried to remember. He tried to process. But the mind-numbing blankness was all that remained.
He saw a blur. A silhouette of impossible power. A ghost.
Eight seconds.
The overwhelming surge began to recede. Su Yuan felt the titanic strength draining from his limbs, like water rushing out of a burst dam. His muscles screamed with residual pain, a thousand micro-tears, a hundred snapped tendons. His knees buckled.
He fell to one knee, gasping for air. The raw strength was gone, leaving him hollow, exhausted, but alive.
The cheap shirt, what remained of it, hung in tatters around his frame. His eyes still glowed faintly, the data streams flickering before dimming to normal.
The final Spider, hiding behind the open door, saw Su Yuan fall. He saw the return of the sickly, pale man he expected. He looked at the chaos, at Kael twitching on the floor. He looked at Su Yuan, a skinny man who should be dead, and the terror in his eyes was absolute.
The Spider didn't try to fight. He turned and ran. He stumbled down the stairs, his footsteps echoing a desperate retreat.
Ten seconds.
**[ ADMINISTRATOR MODE: DEACTIVATED. ]**
**[ Soul Force Recalibration in Progress... ]**
**[ WARNING: Musculoskeletal Trauma: Severe. Neural Fatigue: Extreme. ]**
Su Yuan lay on the cold floor, panting. His body felt like it had been run over by a freight train, then patched back together with string. Every joint ached, every muscle fiber screamed in protest.
He was alive.
He looked at Kael. The Lieutenant was trying to push himself up, but his cybernetic spine was broken. He clawed at the air, his damaged optical implant scanning, seeking a target it could not find.
"Phantom," Kael rasped, his voice filled with a desperate, impotent rage. "You... you were a phantom."
Su Yuan coughed. A taste of blood in his mouth. He had pushed his body to its absolute limit. And he had won.
He pulled himself up, using the desk for support. He looked at the wreckage of his apartment. The shattered door. The crumpled Spiders. The ruined Lieutenant.
And he felt... nothing. No triumph. No relief. Just a cold, analytical satisfaction. The calculation had been correct. The gamble had paid off.
**[ Soul Force Output: -0.08 Units (Severe Drawback). ]**
**[ Genesis Protocol: Observation. ]**
**[ The Queen has defended her Hive. ]**
**[ Assessment: Effective. ]**
Su Yuan stumbled to his window. The sirens were closer now, a chorus of rising and falling despair. They were coming for the mess. But Kael wouldn't be able to tell them what he saw. The Phantom Programmer. An urban legend born in ten seconds of impossible violence.
He looked at his hands. They trembled, but it wasn't from fear. It was the aftershocks of borrowed power.
He had saved his life. He had protected his network.
But the cost. The price in physical agony. The price in others' minds. And the price in the growing emptiness inside him.
He was a monster. A mechanic of souls. And he had just discovered a new tool in his arsenal: Administrator Privileges.
He closed his eyes, leaning his throbbing forehead against the cold glass. He had won the battle. But the war had just begun. And the next time, he wouldn't just be borrowing strength. He'd be building it. One soul at a time. The hum of the city outside sounded less like a lament and more like a feeding frenzy.