NANITE

The lobby was a collapsed promise of a better past—graffiti-smeared walls, cracked and missing tiles, broken lights humming low and angry. The air smelled of rust, ozone, and something faintly, unpleasantly organic. Ray didn't stop, didn't linger.

He stepped into the lift and jabbed the button for floor 32. The panel spat a weak, reluctant spark. He slapped it, a familiar gesture of frustration. The elevator groaned and creaked its way upward, a mechanical sigh of defeat.

The hallway on his floor was barely lit. One light buzzed overhead like it was trying, and failing, to die. A door down the hall was open just a crack. Someone argued inside—voices slurred with chems and desperation. Another door thudded with the steady, monotonous beat of static-laced industrial music.

Ray reached his unit. He crouched behind the familiar pile of old scrap metal, fished out the access card from beneath a loose panel of peeling metal, then stopped. He stared at the door's lock, a new thought, a new possibility, taking root.

In the oppressive silence of the hallway, with only the building's soft groans and distant city sounds around him, he lifted his hand and pressed it flat against the sensor panel. He didn't swipe the card. Instead, he focused his will, picturing his nanites flowing into the door's circuits, bypassing the lock.

Something inside the mechanism clicked. Spun with a soft whir. The door opened.

He stepped inside, a cold thrill running through him, and pulled the door shut behind him.

His mom sat curled on the couch, her datapad clutched in her hand, the glow of its screen casting a pale, flickering light across her weary, pain-etched face. She looked up the moment she heard the door open, her eyes wide with a familiar anxiety.

"Ray," she said quickly, her voice tight with worry. "Did you hear what happened? A snap… it killed a bunch of people and police officers just a few streets from here. It was on the newsfeeds." She turned the tablet toward him, revealing a sensationalized news article buried beneath a flashing wall of intrusive ads—cheap lottery scams, miracle cures for incurable diseases, predatory payday lenders. The real story, the human tragedy, was suffocating under a mountain of corporate noise.

Ray barely glanced at it. He didn't need to read it. He had been there.

"I heard about it," he said, his voice carefully neutral, and sat down beside her on the worn couch. Leaning back, he let his gaze drift to the stained, cracked ceiling. For a moment, neither of them said a word. Silence, heavy and profound, settled over the small room like a blanket of ash.

Then he exhaled, a long, slow breath he didn't need but took anyway. "Tonight," he said, his voice quiet but firm, "I will go out."

His mother didn't answer at first. But when he looked sideways, her eyes told the story—glassy, red-rimmed, unshed tears trembling in the corners. Ray's chest tightened, a painful constriction. She didn't have to say it. He knew. She blamed herself. If she weren't sick—if her body hadn't betrayed her—she'd be working. Ray wouldn't be running dangerous jobs in the city's shadows. She carried that guilt like a physical chain, a constant, crushing weight.

He reached out and gently, tenderly, brushed away her tears with the back of his fingers. "Mom," he whispered, his voice thick with an emotion he rarely allowed himself to show. "It's okay. I promise I'll come back." He'd said it so many times before. Too many. A lie he told to keep her calm, to shield her from the brutal realities of his life. The city didn't care about promises. It didn't care about sick mothers or desperate sons. It only cared about survival. And just last night—he hadn't survived. He died. Briefly. Bleeding, broken, forgotten in the dark.

But still, she nodded. Slowly. As if she wanted to believe him. As if she needed to.

"I'm done after this," Ray said, more to himself than to her, the words a quiet vow. "I didn't tell Johnny yet, but I'm quitting. No more courier runs."

She turned to him then, her eyes sharp and searching, a flicker of desperate hope in their depths.

He gave her a faint smile—tired, yes, but real. "I'll make it up to him somehow. But I think I figured something out. I have a knack for fixing things now. A real knack." He pictured it—busted mods, cracked interface ports, dead tech no one else cared to salvage. His nanites could restore them, understand them down to the smallest atom. Julia could help him sell the work. Maybe even get him a real, legitimate foothold in the clinics. This could be the way out. A way to a life where he wasn't constantly looking over his shoulder.

No more scraping for meds. No more rationed, synthetic meals. No more risking his life almost every single night.

"I think I can make enough," he said quietly, the hope in his own voice surprising him. "For both of us."

His mom tried to rise, to reach for him, but her legs wouldn't respond. They hadn't, not properly, for some time now. Ray moved quickly, gently helping her sit upright. Her arms, frail and shaking, wrapped around him in a desperate embrace.

Then she wept. Softly at first—the sound muffled in the folds of his worn coat—but the sobs grew, shaped by years of fear, frustration, and a universe of silent, unanswered prayers she never spoke aloud.

Ray closed his eyes and held her close, rocking her gently. He didn't say anything. There were no words. He would have cried, too. Shared her release, her pain.

But he couldn't. His body no longer produced tears. Another piece of his humanity, stripped away.

After his mother finally drifted off to sleep, the soft, rhythmic sound of her breathing a fragile comfort in the oppressive silence, Ray returned to his room. He closed the door with a soft click, the sound unnaturally loud in the stillness, and locked it—a reflex born of habit, not paranoia. He sat on the edge of his narrow cot, the springs groaning faintly beneath his weight.

Then he lay back, eyes fixed on the cracked, stained concrete ceiling. But he wasn't really seeing it. His thoughts spun like overloaded circuits, a chaotic replay of the night's events. The fight—the Asura versus the snap—played over and over in his head, a high-definition loop. He didn't need a video; his memory, sharpened to an unnatural degree by the nanite enhancement, was flawless, each detail perfectly preserved. It was like scrubbing through a high-fidelity MemStream recording, except he was the feed, the unwilling archivist of violence and awe.

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He watched it frame by frame: the snap's berserker rage, a maelstrom of uncontrolled power, juxtaposed with the Asura's surgical precision, its terrifying, balletic grace. Every twitch, every step, every lethal strike. It was mesmerizing. Intimidating. And, in a way that deeply unsettled him, addictive. The raw power, the absolute control…

A soft ping vibrated through his neural interface, a gentle intrusion into his turbulent thoughts. T-minus one hour until his meeting with Red.

Ray sat up slowly, rubbing his temples as if to ward off a phantom headache. His muscles were tense, coiled, but it wasn't fear. Not quite. It was something else, that constant, low-level buzz of his altered physiology, an undercurrent of uncertainty wrapped in a new, unfamiliar steel.

He moved over to the pile of worn clothes near the wall. They were ragged, dated, but serviceable—the uniform of the city's forgotten. He grabbed a few pieces, then concentrated, focusing his will. The nanites in his system responded instantly, a silent, internal hum as they absorbed the fabric, cataloging its texture, its weave, threading it into his memory, his very being.

His outfit began to form—not over his skin, but from it. Threads, dark and shimmering, wove themselves from beneath the surface, darkening, tightening, shaping into fitted, utilitarian pants and a sleek, form-fitting shirt. Gray became a deep, light-absorbing black. Loose, worn folds became crisp, sharp angles. It was a second skin, forged by thought.

Then, with another silent command, it all dissolved—sinking back into his body like smoke in reverse, leaving no trace. He stood bare for a moment, examining his unchanged flesh. No seams. No synthetic sheen. Just skin.

Another thought, and the clothing returned. Just as fast. Just as seamless. He repeated the process. Once. Twice. A flicker of grim satisfaction touched his lips.

"That'll come in handy," he muttered, the words a dry rasp in the quiet room. In the future, if he was ever chased, if he needed to disappear, he could round a corner and reappear in a completely different look. A shadow in motion.

But then he frowned, the momentary advantage overshadowed by a familiar, heavy thought. He wasn't a courier anymore. He'd promised his mother. No more alleyway runs. No more guns to his back. No more dancing on the razor's edge.

Still, the instinct was there. Ingrained. Like muscle memory soaked in years of fear and adrenaline.

His eyes drifted to the battered, ancient laptop on the table.

Gotta get a deck, he thought, a new urgency sparking within him.

A real one. Like the netstriders use.

He'd heard the stories, the whispered and cautionary tales that circulated in the digital underground—some ridiculous, others downright terrifying. One strider supposedly got trapped in a corrupted boot loop and spent three days reliving a simulation of drowning, his mind shattering. Another triggered Reaper Code, military-grade counter-intrusion software, and woke up with his neural interface melted into his jaw. There was even one who claimed to have found a god made of code, a sentient AI dwelling in the deepest, darkest corners of the net. Ray wasn't sure if that last one was high, hallucinating, or had genuinely touched the void—but the story stuck with him, a chilling reminder of the dangers and wonders that lay beyond the mundane.

But tonight, all he had was this scrapyard relic, this piece of forgotten tech.

"Please don't blow up," he muttered, placing his hand on the keyboard, a strange mix of hope and trepidation coiling in his gut. The nanites surged into the machine, a silent, invisible current, gliding through rusted ports and along splintered circuits. The laptop came alive in his mind—the tangled wires, the struggling hard drive, the pathetic little processor gasping for processing power. The screen flickered on, a pale, ghostly light in the dim room.

Ray moved through its functions effortlessly, guiding apps, accessing files, with nothing more than a thought, his mind a seamless extension of the machine. He hesitated. This was new territory. It could crash the ancient hardware. Or worse. But…

Screw it.

The world warped. Letters crawled across his vision, twisting, distorting, becoming alien glyphs. The walls of his small room dissolved into a screaming cascade of static. For a moment, Ray wasn't in his room anymore—he was inside something else, a disorienting, collapsing dataspace made of half-formed code and fracturing geometry.

Then it snapped. Reality slammed back with the force of a physical blow. Smoke, acrid and choking, puffed from the laptop's vents.

Ray scrambled to grab it, swatting at the rising heat like it might burst into flames. Sparks fizzled from the keyboard. The machine groaned, a dying, mechanical sigh. He dropped it to the floor, fanning it frantically with his hand until the sparks faded and the smoke began to dissipate.

Sighing, a sound of pure frustration, he pressed his hand to the cooling shell. The nanites swarmed in, a microscopic army weaving through the damaged components. Circuits reformed, wiring reset itself, melted plastic restructured at a molecular level. Seconds later, the laptop powered back up, its fan whirring with a semblance of normalcy.

Ray blinked at the faint, steady hum. "Definitely need a better rig," he muttered, making a mental note.

He glanced at the bottom left of his HUD.

Time was ticking. He stood slowly, his shoulders stiff, the weight of the coming night settling upon him. This night wasn't done. Red was waiting. And Red… Red was always a question mark, a variable he couldn't predict. Too slick. Too smooth. Ray had known guys like him growing up—charmers who smiled while stepping over your corpse.

He didn't trust Red. Not for a second. But he'd made a mistake, a promise of sorts—and now he had to see it through.

He stepped out of the decaying apartment building and into the familiar stench of the alleyway. A sudden, sharp burst of gunfire echoed off the narrow, grimy walls, the sound shockingly close.

Ray dropped low behind a massive, overflowing trash bin without a conscious thought—reflex, old instinct honed from too many runs that had ended in a hail of bullets and the coppery taste of blood. He instinctively checked the Glock strapped securely under his coat, his fingers brushing over the cool, familiar grip like greeting an old, uncomfortable friend.

Silently, he slipped forward, his footsteps muffled by the filth-stained pavement, until he reached the alley's mouth. He leaned out, just enough to get a look, his senses hyper-alert.

Exactly what he expected—and worse.

A small, twenty-four-hour corner shop, the same one Julia had stopped by earlier for her cigars, was under siege. Its reinforced glass front had spiderwebbed with a network of fresh cracks. Inside, an elderly shopkeeper was on his knees, his hands raised, a crude-looking pistol pressed hard against his temple by a figure hidden partly in the deep shadows.

Two more thugs paced nervously outside, covering the street with twitchy hands and cheap, unreliable-looking pistols drawn. Their tattoos, crude and garish, glowed faintly under the flickering, unreliable streetlights—neonic ink curling up their necks and arms like venomous snakes. One had a snarling, poorly rendered dragon, coiling in what was supposed to be blue fire but looked more like a toxic spill. Another had a tiger, crouched as if ready to leap, its stripes uneven and faded.

But the third... Ray's gaze locked onto the figure with the Oni mask inked in stark black across his throat—fierce, angular lines, sharp horns curling upwards, the mouth locked in a savage, leering grin.

Kuro Yasha. The Black Demon.

Ray frowned. Kuro Yasha weren't petty thieves.

His non-existent heart gave a phantom thud in his chest. Even now—especially now, with his altered senses—he felt it. Not just adrenaline, the familiar chemical rush of impending violence. Something deeper. Resolve.