Adi hitched her messenger bag higher on her shoulder and pivoted smoothly out of the refuse-choked doorway. A brief burst of static crackled through her earpiece, nothing more than electromagnetic interference from a nearby black-market comm tower.

Her neural net and Threat Assessment Program continued their passive scans while her own eyes swept rooftops, upper balconies, intersections, and darkened windows. Searching and calculating always. Her TAP never stopped scanning.

Condition Yellow.

She took the next corner wide, following a longer dogleg toward Rena's building while searching for tail markers, movement, or anything that broke the neighborhood's rhythm. It wasn't a true surveillance detection route. She lacked sufficient time or space for proper execution. What she had managed would probably shake a determined amateur, or a lazy professional, but anyone truly skilled would still be behind her.

Four blocks out.

Then the pulse hit.

It wasn't physical.

It was wireless.

A sharp electromagnetic ripple struck her neural net like a digital slap. An instant later, the icon cluster along the top of her HUD flared amber as several peripheral augments briefly desynchronized before automatically reestablishing sync. The disruption lasted less than a second, but it was long enough.

Someone had just tried to bulldoze a handshake into her cyberware.

Fuck.

In her TAP, her threat index spiked.

Condition Red.

Only a skilled operator, or a high-end intrusion AI, could attempt a high-power electromagnetic probe in a neighborhood this crowded without lighting up the spectrum like a neon sign. The signal hadn't come from her front or rear. Her neural net had already triangulated the angle.

Off-axis.

Top left.

Rooftop.

Second or third story.

Her neural overlays fed her data thread by thread, parsing the signal through real-time refraction analysis.

Subtle.

Sophisticated.

Expensive.

This isn't some street ganger trying to earn their stripes, she thought.

A decision tree branched through her mind.

Stay in Condition Red and burn the bastard down? 

Or drop to Condition Orange, gather intelligence, and determine who or what was probing her augments?

She eased sideways beneath the overhang of an abandoned vending kiosk, its casing buried beneath decades of dust, trash, and gang graffiti. Turning her back to the reinforced wall, she adopted the posture of someone idly inspecting the machine.

Her eyes settled on the cracked, bullet-pocked, heavily scratched polychrys display while her attention remained everywhere else.

Her hand settled around the grip of her Shadowfury, drawing reassurance from the familiar weight. The heavy rifle still hung across her chest, its underslung 50 mm grenade launcher within easy reach.

For a heartbeat, she considered solving the problem the Marine way.

Drop a high-explosive frag grenade on the bastard.

When in doubt, frag out.

The old Marine saying surfaced unbidden.

She dismissed the idea just as quickly.

She didn't know who else occupied the rooftop. Civilians. Gang lookouts. Someone's kids. Maybe no one at all. Uncertainty was the enemy of high explosives.

Lobbing a mil-spec grenade in the Lower City was an excellent way to escalate the response, summoning every heavy Robbie within several kilometers. High explosives almost guaranteed a Robbie response.

If I start lobbing mil-spec grenades, I might as well tie an actinic flare to my ass and dance in the street.

The first Robbies on the scene would probably be the bipedal patrol units. Aerial over-watch would follow them within minutes.

If things got ugly... The tracked Robbies would come.

Nobody wanted the tracked Robbies. The tracked, tank-like police machines tolerated gang wars, drugs, and the occasional murder. High explosives were another matter entirely.

Her passive scans continued cycling.

No active targeting lasers.

No radar locks.

No nearby drone signatures.

Whoever was out there knew exactly how to keep a low profile.

Hunting.

Watching.

Waiting.

Then she caught it.

The faintest shift at the edge of a distant rooftop. Barely more than a silhouette moving against the industrial haze before becoming motionless again.

Professional. More importantly... They weren't disengaging.

The electromagnetic probe hadn't been a precision attack. It had been a broad-spectrum sweep, designed to provoke a response rather than score a hit.

Somebody was fishing. They knew her general area. They just didn't know exactly where she was.

Unknown to Adi, one of Soren Dregovic's masked surveillance drones ghosted along behind her, maintaining enough distance to remain outside her passive detection envelope. Its unconventional low-observable system suppressed the usual thermal, electromagnetic, and optical signatures her neural net might have noticed.

Adi missed it.

Kane's stealthed overwatch drone didn't.

High above the street, Kane's drone isolated the faint anomaly, tracked it for several seconds, then fired a tightly collimated microwave pulse. The burst punched through the hostile drone's electromagnetic shielding and overloaded its flight-control electronics without producing so much as a visible flash.

Soren's drone simply stopped flying. Its rotors went slack and the machine tumbled silently between the buildings, disappearing into the darkness several blocks behind her.

***

"Dregovic's drone is good," Kuro said.

"Was," Kane said.

The other drone vanished.

"Show-off."

"You're the one who fired."

Adi reached into a pouch and pulled out a piece of kit she'd hoped never to use.

Rat had supplied the wristwatch-sized device years ago for a previous job. She'd carried it ever since, saving it for the day things went spectacularly sideways.

That day had apparently arrived.

She strapped it to her left wrist and remembered Rat's explanation.

"Personal chameleon field," he'd called it.

The device generated a localized stealth field that bent and scattered electromagnetic radiation across multiple wavelengths around her, warping both visual and electronic signatures. To cameras, sensors, and anyone unlucky enough to be looking in the right direction, she'd appear as nothing more than a shimmering, indistinct blur.

Night favored the technology. A moving blur was far less conspicuous in darkness than it would have been under full daylight.

Until she reached the brightly lit entrance to the pachinko parlor.

Rat had promised the field would last about five minutes.

Adi hoped, for once, the old bastard hadn't been exaggerating.

Adi thumbed the activator.

The device—if it even had an official name, Rat had never bothered to mention it—hummed softly against her wrist as warmth spread beneath the strap.

That was it. No status light. There is no confirmation. No reassuring beep. She had absolutely no idea whether the damned thing was working. 

Peering through the invisible field surrounding her, she frowned.

How the fuck am I supposed to test whether this piece of shit works?

She snorted.

"Well... no hope for it. Get your ass in gear, Marine," she muttered.

Adi deliberately slowed her pace. 

Rat had only emphasized one limitation.

"Move nice and easy," he'd said. "Fast movements tear holes in the field. Then you're just an asshole wearing a very expensive wristwatch."

The electric glow of Rena's pachinko parlor emerged ahead. The three-story building stood like an island of light amid the surrounding darkness, its neon kanji signs buzzing softly, promising fleeting luck to factory workers, street hustlers, and anyone else desperate enough to believe.

Adi remained in the shadows across the street, taking her time before committing to the crossing.

Condition Yellow.

Sliding toward Condition Orange.

Her TAP issued a soft ping not an alarm, just a whisper at the edge of her awareness.

Something was wrong.

The street was too quiet, even for this part of First City.

Garbage heaps lay undisturbed. No scavs slipping between alleyways. No drunks shouting at one another. No hushed drug deals beneath flickering LED lights. No prostitutes working the corners.

Even the rats and cockroaches seemed to have vanished.

Her eyes cycled through the Shadowfury's vision modes again. Telescopic.

Empty rooftops.

Wait.

Fuck.

A faint shimmer, barely perceptible, rippled across the second-floor balcony of a crumbling prefab opposite Rena's pachinko parlor. It shifted almost imperceptibly against the background, like heat haze where there shouldn't have been any.

Fuck. They must've tagged where I landed and are running an expanding search pattern. Or they'd posted watchers overlooking the major streets. It's been over a year since I was here. I doubt Rena's on any current contact list.

Stealthed overwatch.

Probably thermoptic camouflage.

Better than mine.

Definitely not local gangers. Nobody in the Lower City could afford gear that sophisticated, and even if they could, they'd never be able to maintain it.

Her TAP quietly advanced to Condition Orange.

She switched briefly to the Shadowfury's UV mode.

Faint traces glimmered in the darkness.

Line-of-sight optical communications.

Someone was coordinating.

Fucking mercs.

Her gut tightened as the pieces fell into place. This wasn't a pack of opportunistic street thugs. It was a freelance snatch crew.

They knew who she was.

They just didn't appreciate exactly what she was.

She studied the approaches to the pachinko parlor, looking for the next layer of the trap.

Ambush point near the entrance?

It made tactical sense. Funnel her toward the brightly lit doorway. Box her into a confined kill zone. Overwhelm her before she could go full Myrmidon on them.

That also explained why the overwatch hadn't engaged.

They were giving her room.

They wanted her to close the distance.

She wasn't going to play their game.

Adi remained crouched at the mouth of the narrow alley, letting the messenger boom bag settle comfortably against her back.

She brought the Shadowfury's optics up again, feeding the UV scan through her neural net to correlate thermal signatures with movement profiles.

Two heat blooms.

Twenty meters ahead.

Hunkered down behind a burned-out vendor cart.

Low fighting positions.

Short-barreled rifles or SMGs.

Maybe a shotty.

Adi grimaced.

Her subdermal armor would stop most common shotgun loads.

Stop didn't mean ignore.

Fuck, those hurt. I can't afford to take that kind of damage.

The repair bill alone would bury me... assuming the shotty doesn't kill me first.

Another signal reflected off the broken display window of a derelict shop.

Higher.

Rooftop cover at her ten o'clock.

A fourth shooter was still missing.

She could feel them.

Good snatch teams deployed four or five operators. This crew was sloppy, but not completely incompetent.

They were betting she'd take the obvious route.

She tightened her grip around the Valkyrie's handle without drawing it. No sense escalating until she had no other choice.

The Shadowfury rested against its retention sling across her chest. The less-than-lethal ArcSpiker rode in the holster on her left thigh.

She drew it instead.

The heavy baton extended with a sharp, satisfying snap.

A plan began to take shape.

If she shifted laterally now, away from Rena's front entrance, she'd force the team to reposition. Movement created mistakes.

With a little luck, she could eliminate their floater before the rest of the net closed around her.

Condition Orange. Sliding rapidly toward Red.

"Let's see how committed you assholes are," she muttered, barely above a whisper.

She slipped into motion.

Low.

Slow.

Not toward Rena's pachinko parlor, but diagonally across the narrow street toward a recessed loading bay steeped in the stink of spoiled soy-synth meals, stale piss, and lingering ozone.

I really hope this fucking piece-of-shit camouflage thing is working.

A faint breeze briefly took the edge off the oppressive nighttime heat.

Every step was deliberate.

Every movement controlled.

She was presenting a false vulnerability.

The kind of bait most mercs couldn't resist.

They'd react soon.

Then she would.

The shadows stretched across the narrow boulevard as Adi emerged from her last patch of cover, a few chin-chin crumbs still clinging to her lips. Ahead, the three-story neon glow of Rena's pachinko parlor pulsed softly, warm and inviting—a beacon of normalcy in a city where normal barely existed.

She caught the familiar scent of old hydraulic oil, ozone, and cheap incense.

Rena's signature.

Then the air changed.

A tickle crept across the base of her skull.

Her neural net whispered.

Thermal bloom.

High right.

Just a fraction too warm.

The sharp, metallic tang of ozone followed.

Fast.

Mercs.

Her breathing never changed.

Neither did her pulse.

Myrmidons didn't panic.

She kept walking as though she'd noticed nothing, letting the snatch crew believe their ambush remained intact.

Her ARD came alive.

TarAcq ghosted faint silhouettes across her vision.

MSI spun up.

The familiar pressure bloomed behind her eyes as MSI synchronized with ARD and TarAcq. 

ARD. MSI. TarAcq. Three hungry bastards chewing through glucose and oxygen.

Every heartbeat burned a little more oxygen, every second another payment against the calories she'd have to replace later. The extra processing load tugged at the edges of her consciousness, a reminder that running MSI was never free.

Her neural net began fusing visual, thermal, UV, and lidar returns into a single coherent picture.

Three mercs. Maybe four.

Heat signatures moving across the sagging rooftops.

Another.

Low.

Closing on her six.

Her temples throbbed. The combined load of the ARD, MSI, and TarAcq pressed against her augmented nervous system like a vice. She could sustain it for a while, but not indefinitely.

Found the fucking floater.

They weren't bad.

Not Kane-grade professionals.

But they weren't street trash either.

Adi casually adjusted the Shadowfury's sling across her chest.

She didn't reach for a weapon.

Didn't quicken her pace.

Didn't break stride.

Let them commit.

The trap sprang halfway between her and Rena's pachinko parlor.

A short-range flashbang launcher barked from behind a derelict food stand.

The grenade arced toward her.

"Down on the fucking ground! Now! Hands out!"

Well... so much for being fucking invisible.

I wonder if the godsdamned thing even worked.

The flashbang detonated.

Her ARD flared for an instant before the auto-filters crushed the bloom. Audio dampers clamped down on the concussive crack, reducing it to a dull thump.

Civilians screamed from apartments overhead.

Somewhere, a baby began wailing.

Good.

Somebody would call it in.

Not that the Robbies would hurry. They rarely bothered with quick responses in this neighborhood. They might not bother responding at all.

Adi's MSI had already sorted the shouting. Five distinct voices. Too many.

Professionals kept their mouths shut. These fucker had too little noise discipline.

They didn't know who they were hitting.

They didn't know this wasn't a random stretch of turf.

They didn't know what she'd do to keep Rena's family out of it.

The Shadowfury came off her shoulder in one practiced motion as she slipped her head through the sling. The heavy pulse rifle settled vertically against her back, clear of her arms. The messenger boom bag remained secure.

Her right hand drew a kukri.

She thumbed the activation stud.

The blade gave a faint shiver as its monomolecular edge engaged, its impossibly thin edge briefly catching the spill of flickering neon.

Her left hand was already moving. The baton cleared her thigh holster.

A twist.

A flick.

Snap.

The heavy spring baton locked open with brutal finality.

Condition Red.

No fucking shit.

Thanks for the update, TAP.

Five mercs.

Light mesh armor.

Not powered.

No helmets.

One carried a fully automatic scattergun with a drum magazine.

Two had suppressed carbines.

One idiot was armed with a monoblade and a shock stick.

The last carried a net gun.

They actually thought they were taking me alive.

Adi grinned.

"You fucked up," she said, her voice low and even.

Then she moved.

No subtlety.

No hesitation.

Like the Myrmidon she was.

No badges. No gang colors. No corporate tags.

Freelance crew, then.

Smart enough to stay outside obvious engagement range.

Dumb enough to think they could box her in.

Ahead, the cracked ferrocrete sidewalk dipped around a burned-out tuk-tuk buried beneath trash and windblown refuse. Her 'net immediately flagged the dead space behind it as a probable ambush position.

Clack.

The sound echoed behind her.

Poor discipline.

Another merc had just stepped off a twisted, sun-blasted fire escape, landing with all the subtlety of a sack of wet bricks.

That one deserves to die on principle alone. Too fucking stupid to live. Definitely in the wrong profession.

"You only brought six?" Adi said, her voice low and almost disappointed. "That was fucking stupid."

She exploded into motion. Her left foot whipped around in a savage low kick, smashing into the ambusher's knee hard enough to cave the joint sideways. Bone splintered with a wet crack.

No ghetto chop shop armor on their chests, but they forgot about their legs.

The merc screamed as his leg folded beneath him. He never reached the ground.

Adi's spring baton crashed into his ribs with a meaty thud. She felt ribs give beneath the hardened striking surface.

The backswing caught him across the collarbone.

Crack.

Only the third strike triggered the shock core.

One precious charge vanished as one hundred fifty thousand volts arced through his body. Every muscle seized at once, freezing him in the middle of his collapse before gravity reclaimed him.

He struck the ferrocrete like a felled tree, one leg bent at an angle no human joint was ever meant to achieve. His chest was visibly caved in. Out of the fight. Maybe forever.

Before the merc hit the ground, Adi was already moving again, her 'net tracking the remaining attackers as her eyes searched for the floater and the overwatch.

"Well..." she muttered, "at least he'll be fucking unconscious while he bleeds out from the internal injuries. I'm assuming the Robbies and the meat wagon get here before he dies."

A small icon blinked in the corner of her HUD. Spring Baton: 4 charges remaining.

The merc on the left broke cover with a flechette SMG.

Cheap.

Heavily modified.

A knockoff, if Adi had to guess.

The first burst caught her center mass.

Her motorcycle suit reacted in milliseconds, its electrically active layers stiffening almost instantly. The flechettes flattened, skipped, and deflected away with enough force to stagger her, but not enough to penetrate.

Didn't know about the suit.

Good.

Adi drove forward, staying low.

The rest of the burst sailed harmlessly overhead.

Fucking idiot.

Spray an' pray.

Spring baton in her left.

Kukri in her right.

The baton arrived first.

It slammed into the merc's elbow with a brutal sideways arc.

Pop.

The joint folded in a direction elbows were never designed to bend.

The SMG flew from suddenly useless fingers.

Adi was already pivoting on her right heel.

Her hips turned.

The kukri flashed upward.

The monomolecular edge slipped beneath the man's chin and out through his open mouth. She deliberately checked the stroke before it reached the brainstem.

Not a killing blow. Not immediately. The merc's scream dissolved into a wet, bubbling gargle.

He collapsed to his knees, both hands flying to the ruin of his face as blood cascaded over his body armor. His lower jaw hung at an unnatural angle, his tongue nearly severed. The soft palate had probably been opened too.

He wasn't fighting anyone again.

"Another poor bastard who'll probably bleed out before the Robbies or the meat wagon get here," Adi muttered, already searching for the next target.

The third merc tried to get clever.

Their optic-cam cloak shimmered as they broke wide, attempting to flank her. In her peripheral vision, Adi caught the rest of the team shifting to exploit the opening.

Too late.

She planted a boot against the still-bleeding second merc and shoved off, launching herself laterally. She hit the ferrocrete hard, absorbing the impact without breaking stride.

The flanker froze.

Chrome-colored eyes widened.

He hadn't expected her to close the distance that fast.

Adi's spring baton whipped through the air.

Crack.

The first blow shattered his collarbone.

The return stroke smashed into his hip.

Crack.

The pelvis fractured—possibly the femoral neck. Either way, he wasn't running anywhere.

The merc staggered backward, somehow managing to draw an old Mars military surplus service pistol.

Adi snorted.

"Brave..."

She stepped inside the weapon.

"...but stupid."

The kukri's monomolecular point punched into the outside of his upper thigh. She checked the thrust with practiced precision, deliberately missing the femoral artery while driving through the femur.

Bone gave way.

The merc collapsed, screaming.

Before he could even think about pulling the trigger, Adi brought her boot down on his wrist.

Bones and reinforced polymer crunched beneath the heel.

The pistol skidded across the ferrocrete.

His scream changed instantly.

No longer deep with pain.

Now it was high, ragged, and almost animal.

The first merc—the knee-shattered idiot—was still in the fight.

Somehow.

He fumbled for a pistol with his good hand.

"Damn fucking tough bastard."

Adi didn't hesitate.

With a practiced flick of her wrist, she trapped the spring baton beneath her left arm and drew the ArcSpiker. The twin-pronged dart struck him square in the gap between his body armor and the base of his neck.

Blue-white arcs crackled across his body.

The neuromuscular shock slammed him flat against the ferrocrete, every muscle locking in violent spasm before going limp.

Non-lethal.

Technically.

Barely breathing harder than before, Adi surveyed the scene.

The remaining three mercs had already decided they wanted no part of her. They turned and ran, abandoning their wounded teammates without so much as a backward glance.

Those were the smart ones.

She took stock.

Three down.

One unconscious.

One bleeding and moaning.

One still twitching on the pavement like a squashed bug.

None of them dead.

Yet.

The only blood on the street came from deliberate, controlled strikes. She hadn't endangered Rena's pachinko parlor. She hadn't turned the neighborhood into a war zone. And with her motorcycle helmet still concealing her face, there was a chance the surviving mercs still didn't know exactly who she was.

Though I probably matched the security images the city AIs have plastered all over their fucking network, she thought. Assuming they bothered to look before taking the contract.

Her threat matrix eased back to Condition Orange.

Not safe. Just no longer immediate.

She flicked her gaze across her HUD, then swept the area through the Shadowfury's optics, cycling from standard vision to telescopic, infrared, ultraviolet, and back again.

Nothing. That didn't mean much.

Probably still a stealth drone hovering somewhere overhead. Kane.

She had no proof.

Just a feeling.

"Kane," she muttered, her voice little more than static inside her helmet, "you'd better be paying attention."

Adi crouched beside the merc with the shattered hip. He was still conscious, eyes wide, babbling incoherently through clenched teeth.

She wasn't interested in his pain.

Using her kukri's monomolecular edge, she sliced through his load-bearing gear and searched him with quick, practiced efficiency. No command-and-control equipment. There are no unique tattoos. No unit patches, tags, or tactical accessories suggesting rank.

Nothing. Just another freelancer with mediocre equipment, an inflated ego, and shitty reconnaissance.

She didn't waste time asking questions. Anyone willing to ambush a Myrmidon for a paycheck either didn't know enough to matter or would not talk while conscious.

The search turned up exactly what she'd expected.

The weapons were mostly mediocre knockoffs, maintained just well enough to function. A handful of unmarked credit wafers occupied one pocket. She briefly considered taking the credits. Another held loose ammunition. A third contained several doses of unidentified drugs in cheap plastic vials.

Investigating the other two mercs showed comparable findings. No more credits, though.

Disappointing.

Not surprising.

She left everything where she'd found it.

"I'll let you keep the credits," she said, looking from one broken merc to the next. "You're going to need them to pay for your medical care."

She paused.

"Assuming the meat wagon crew or the locals don't pocket them first."

She wiped her kukri clean on the shattered-hip idiot's tac vest, slid it back into its sheath, and stepped away without another glance. The messenger boom bag tugged reassuringly at her shoulder, still intact and securely strapped in place.

After she departed, the injured offered future prospects.

Within minutes, someone would strip them. They would steal, trade, or scavenge anything that wasn't bolted down. Not my problem.

Probability of the Robbies showing up? Slim to none.

The fight hadn't lasted long enough or generated enough noise to earn their attention. The meat wagon might roll through before morning. She hoped the mercs were still alive when it did.

No sirens. No pounding boots.

Only the heavy Chendiurian silence. The kind thick with broken neon, half-seen eyes watching from behind cracked shutters, and the smell of despair baked into sun-blasted ferrocrete.

Adi slipped around the next block, pulling the Shadowfury back across her chest into a ready carry.

She ducked into a recessed service alley and approached a wide, heavy steel door. Years of dust, heat, and wind had faded the paint to a dull, chalky gray. Beside it, a weatherworn keypad waited beneath a scratched biometric reader.

She keyed in her access code.

Then she peeled off her right glove and pressed her thumb against the scanner.

Still got my prints in your memory?

Her neural net quietly prepared a parallel brute-force attack on the lock's encryption if the biometric check failed.

One heartbeat.

Two.

The status light changed from amber to green.

The lock clicked open.

Huh. Somebody still wants me here.

She paused in the doorway's shelter; her TAP holding at Condition Orange as she gave her back trail one last deliberate sweep. ARD, TarAcq, and a brief use of MSI found nothing out of place.

Nothing obvious.

Satisfied for the moment, she eased the heavy door open.

Heat, noise, and the unmistakable smell of a packed pachinko parlor rolled over her like a physical wave. Hundreds of conversations blended with the clatter of machines, electronic jingles, laughter, stale tobacco, cheap perfume, ozone, hot electronics, and frying food.

Adi hesitated.

Maybe she should have used the rear service entrance instead.

Last time she'd been here, Rena had kept a large armed security drone watching the back alley.

The clatter of thousands of steel pachinko balls echoed through the building, blending with the metallic tang of overheated machines. Layers of tobacco smoke, flick sticks, and stranger recreational drugs hung beneath the stale air, mixed with an undercurrent of unwashed bodies, cheap perfume, cloying cologne, and a dozen other scents Adi couldn't identify.

She silently cursed the Marine Corps all over again for giving her a better sense of smell.

She slipped inside, pulling the heavy door shut behind her.

The dark, narrow service hallway was another world.

Fine orange-yellow dust lay thick across the ferrocrete floor. The house's sensors likely detected the door's opening, triggering the ventilation system, which then released the aromas of aged soy oil, old grease traps, hot electrical wiring, and neglected upkeep.

Nothing moved. Nothing spoke. Only the quiet hum of aging wiring accompanied her soft footfalls.

The place radiated a familiar tension.

No immediate danger.

The sort that settled into walls over decades, lingering like old smoke.

Adi exhaled slowly through her nose and looked up at the security camera mounted in the corner. Still operational. Good. She gave it a little wave.

She tapped the side of her helmet twice, transmitting the short encrypted burst she'd used countless times before.

Rena's security protocols mean someone upstairs is now aware of her presence.

And if not... well, she still had four ArcSpiker rounds. And she hadn't even drawn her Marine fighting knives yet.