NANITE

Ray waited, his gaze steady, unimpressed. The silence stretched, taut and uncomfortable.

Red sighed, a sound of theatrical impatience, then tapped his datapad. A holographic map blinked onto the small screen, lines of tactical data flaring to life in the dim interior of the car. "There." He pointed a finger at a thin, barely visible alleyway tucked between two hulking, windowless warehouse buildings. "It leads to a maintenance door. Hidden. No cams. No motion sensors. I tested it myself this morning. Clean entry."

Ray studied the projected path. Tight and vulnerable. A perfect kill box if things went wrong. But, he had to admit, it was possible.

"Are you sure it's clear? No surprises?"

Red smirked, a flash of teeth in the green glow. "As clear as it gets in this city, Ray. Trust me."

Ray didn't respond right away. Trust Red? The thought was almost laughable. Too many unknowns. Too many variables. His gut, an increasingly unreliable human instinct, churned with unease. If things went south, he'd be the first to bolt. He owed Johnny enough to try and get the package back, to make amends for his earlier failure. But not enough to die for it. Not again. Johnny wouldn't expect that. Would never ask for that kind of blood sacrifice.

Ray exhaled, slow and quiet, the air tasting of old synth-leather and Red's cheap cologne. He glanced again at the shadowy figures of the guards, the oppressive darkness of the alley, the faint, flickering neon of the gambling den. Then he nodded once, a curt, decisive movement. "Let's do it."

Without another word, they moved through the shadows, a silent, tense quartet, armed and alert. Red carried his signature crimson-accented sniper rifle, its polished barrel gleaming faintly even in the dim light. The two other men, Red's hired muscle, held rugged, post-collapse pistols, their expressions grim and unreadable. Ray's hand never strayed far from the cold, reassuring weight of the Glock tucked beneath his coat.

The alley was narrow, suffocating, soaked in the pervasive stench of rot, rust, and chemical runoff. Red stopped beside a dented, overflowing trash bin, shoving it aside with a grunt to reveal a hidden, recessed trapdoor in the cracked ferroconcrete beneath.

"This way," he muttered, his voice a low growl. He pulled the trapdoor open, revealing a dark, uninviting descent.

They descended one by one into a tight, dimly lit corridor. The air thickened with every step—colder, heavier, the silence so profound it felt like the walls themselves were holding their breath. Ray's instincts, honed by years of street survival and now amplified by his nanite-enhanced senses, clawed at the back of his skull. Something felt profoundly off. Red, moving with a predatory confidence, motioned for silence as they approached a heavy, reinforced metal door at the end of the corridor.

Ray hesitated for just a fraction of a second, his newly acquired Glock already half-drawn, his senses screaming a silent warning.

Red, oblivious or uncaring, slid the door open with a soft hydraulic hiss and stepped inside. The room beyond was pitch black, a void that swallowed the faint light from the corridor. One by one, Red's goons followed him in. Ray went last, every nerve ending alight, hyper-aware of every creak, every breath, every subtle shift in the stale air. He listened, his enhanced hearing sifting through the silence for any hint of a threat.

The door slid shut behind him with a final, mechanical hiss, sealing them in.

The lights flared to life, harsh and blinding.

Red stood directly in front of him, not ten feet away, his crimson sniper rifle raised, already aimed, the barrel pointed squarely between Ray's eyes.

Time slowed, stretched, became a thick, viscous fluid. Ray barely had time to register the betrayal, to open his mouth to shout a warning or a curse.

Ptchk.

The suppressed gunshot whispered through the suddenly silent room like death's kiss. The bullet struck Ray directly between the eyes, smashing through his skull with horrific force and embedding itself in the metal door behind him. He dropped like a marionette with its strings abruptly cut, his body hitting the cold concrete floor with a sickening, final thud.

No sound. No resistance. Just… impact.

His eyes stared up at the flickering fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Lifeless. Wide. Empty.

Red exhaled slowly through his teeth, a sound of immense satisfaction. "God, that felt good." His voice wasn't angry, or even triumphant—just profoundly, deeply relieved.

"Finally," he said, slinging the sniper rifle across his back with a casual, almost nonchalant movement. "He's dead." He turned and walked towards a door at the rear of the room, not even glancing back at Ray's fallen form. "Take care of the body. Make it disappear." The door clicked shut behind him, leaving Ray with the two goons.

One was tall and bald, his scalp gleaming under the harsh fluorescent light, a jagged scar running across one eyebrow like a poorly drawn map. His right arm, from the shoulder down, was a crude, bulky cybernetic replacement, all exposed pistons and unshielded wiring. He looked like he'd done this before, many times. The younger one, his face pale and sweaty, kept glancing nervously at Ray's body, as if he expected it to suddenly reanimate and scream.

The scarred, cyber-armed man grabbed a thick, industrial-grade plastic trash bag from a nearby hook and dragged it towards Ray's corpse. He paused, his one good eye narrowing.

No blood. No pooling crimson on the concrete. The entry wound on Ray's forehead… was gone.

"Uh... hey—" the scarred man began, his voice suddenly uncertain.

Ray's eyes moved. Then blinked. And in a blur of impossible motion, he sat up.

"What the—?!" the younger man gasped, stumbling back, his eyes wide with disbelief and sudden, abject terror.

The cyber-armed goon didn't hesitate. He yanked a heavy, wicked-looking machete from a sheath on his belt and charged, roaring. The blade, aimed to decapitate, hit Ray's shoulder with brutal force.

It sank in… and vanished. Devoured by a ripple of shifting, silver-black metal. Ray's arm twisted, his flesh flowing, gleaming like quicksilver as it transformed, hardening into a long, razor-sharp blade.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

In one fluid, inhuman movement, he sliced clean through the charging man's torso. The upper half of the goon's body slid to the floor with a wet, sickening sound, his eyes still flickering with confusion and dawning horror.

The second man, the younger one, turned to flee, a choked scream dying in his throat. Too late. A silver arc. A crimson flash. His head hit the floor and rolled, coming to rest against the far wall, eyes wide and vacant.

Then, stillness. Heavy. Crushing. Absolute.

Ray stumbled back, his body suddenly wracked with tremors, and collapsed to his knees, panting, though he no longer needed to breathe. His arms—still transformed into lethal, blood-drenched weapons—dripped crimson onto the concrete. He looked at them, horrified, a wave of nausea threatening to overwhelm him. He tried to vomit, to expel the horror, the wrongness. Nothing came. No stomach. No bile. No normalcy left to expel.

"Did... did I do this?" he whispered, his voice shaking like broken glass, unrecognizable even to himself. His arms melted back into flesh, the transition seamless, terrifying. He touched his forehead. Smooth skin. No wound. No trace of the bullet that should have ended his life. Just the searing memory—Red's face, cold and triumphant. The glint of the rifle. The betrayal.

He looked down at the gore, the broken, butchered bodies around him. They'd tried to dispose of him like so much trash. Now they were the mess. He was… alive. Breathing, though he didn't need to. And they weren't. He didn't even know how he'd killed them. He just… did.

Ray heard the thud of heavy boots striking concrete from beyond the far door, the one Red had disappeared through. Someone was coming. Fast.

His eyes darted around the small, blood-soaked room. No corners to hide in. No furniture to overturn. Nowhere to run. The door. Or the bodies. His gaze jumped between the two, his mind racing, adrenaline – or its nanite equivalent – flooding his system.

The door slid open with a pneumatic hiss. A silhouette stepped through, framed by the dim light of the corridor beyond. Average height, wearing a scuffed, heavy-duty trench coat and mirrored glasses that caught the harsh ceiling lights like chrome fangs. His face was obscured beneath a deep hood, his voice a low, gravel-thick growl when he spoke.

"What the fuck happened here?" he muttered, his hidden eyes narrowing as he took in the carnage, the sheer, brutal efficiency of the slaughter. He stepped cautiously across the blood-slicked floor, his boots squelching with each step, examining the dismembered bodies one by one. He knelt beside Ray, who lay still, feigning death. The man frowned, a flicker of suspicion in his posture. Something buzzed softly, an almost inaudible electronic hum. He leaned in closer, reaching for Ray's coat.

Ray didn't move. Not yet.

The man's fingers brushed against the fabric of Ray's jacket.

A blade, impossibly fast, punched through the man's chest from beneath, erupting from his back in a spray of crimson. The man wheezed, a choked, gurgling sound, tried to scream—but it was too late. Ray twisted the nanite-forged blade, severing arteries, destroying organs. The man slumped forward, impaled, dead before his body hit the floor.

Ray pushed the fresh corpse aside and rose to his feet, his movements fluid. Blood, not his own, trickled from the blade as it receded, melting back into his skin, leaving no trace. He stepped over the body and placed his hand on the door's locking panel. The mechanism chirped as it sealed, plunging the room back into a temporary, blood-soaked sanctuary.

He was alone again. With the dead.

His boots squelched with each step, the sound obscene in the sudden quiet, thudding against the gore-drenched floor as he made his way toward the door they'd entered through. He paused mid-stride, a new, cold thought crystallizing in his mind.

"I need to kill Red," Ray murmured, his voice flat, devoid of its usual inflection. It wasn't revenge, not entirely. It was a necessity. If Red found out Ray had survived a direct, point-blank sniper shot to the skull, it wouldn't end with one bullet next time. Red would hunt him, relentlessly. And Red talked. He'd tell others.

Nobody survives a shot like that. But he had.

He turned, his gaze falling upon the corpses. His nanites... they hadn't just devoured metal and plastic. They'd consumed organic matter. Fed on it.

His jaw clenched, a muscle twitching in his cheek as he approached the last man he'd killed.

He knelt. Placed a hand on the dead man's chest.

A dark, silvery liquid, viscous and shimmering, oozed from Ray's palm, seeping over the corpse like sentient oil. The man's flesh twitched, convulsed, as the nanites spread, breaking down tissue, absorbing, cataloging.

Ray's eyes rolled back in his head. And then—visions. A chaotic, overwhelming flood of alien memories, not his own. Flashes of light. Screams. Laughter, harsh and cruel. Faces, unfamiliar yet intimately known. A childhood spent in the grimy, polluted industrial slums of some forgotten city sector. A first, crude mod implant at thirteen, the pain and the thrill. A life of blood money jobs, petty betrayals, constant, gnawing fear. The taste of cheap, synthetic noodles and stale stim pills. The last image: Red's face, grinning, handing him a small stack of NEX credits, a down payment for a job.

Ray gasped, recoiling as if burned, falling backward onto the floor, his breath ragged, his mind reeling from the psychic intrusion. For a terrifying second, the grief, the anger, the fear bubbling in his chest didn't feel like his own. It was the dead man's emotional residue, clinging to him like a shroud.

"What the hell am I becoming?" he whispered, his voice raw with a new kind of horror. But the silence of the bloody room offered no answers.

Ray slowly, unsteadily, stood up. His body shimmered, twisted, bones and flesh reshaping, until the man he'd just consumed stared back at him from a cracked, blood-spattered metal panel on the wall. Same height. Same build. Same scars etched into the skin. Even the man's worn, bloodstained jacket now stretched over Ray's transformed frame.

His insides weren't spared. The nanites reconfigured, assimilated. Data pinged through his mind like static clearing from a radio transmission. Before his eyes, his internal HUD flickered, displaying a new set of information:

DETECTED MODIFICATIONS INTEGRATED:

- BIO-MONITOR (ACTIVE)

- NEURAL LINK (BASIC - DAMAGED)

- MOD SOCKET (LOW-TIER - COMPROMISED)

- PAIN EDITOR (UNSTABLE - MALFUNCTIONING)

- SUBDERMAL ARMOR (LOW-GRADE - PATCHED)

Despite the number of mods, they were junk-grade. The kind bought in fly-by-night alley clinics, crudely wired in by shaky, unqualified hands. The pain editor crackled erratically in his mind, half-functional at best, its feedback loops weak and distorted from degraded wiring. The subdermal armor wouldn't stop anything higher than a standard 9mm round, and even that was debatable. Black market garbage. Cheap up front. Costly in the long run. Often fatal.

Ray didn't flinch. With a grim determination, he consumed the other two corpses. The nanites, efficient and relentless, melted them down, absorbing flesh, bone, and even drawing in the blood spattered across the floor and walls, leaving the room eerily clean, sterile, as if death itself had never touched it. The other two were no better in terms of cybernetics. Junk-tier mods slapped into meat, designed to intimidate, not to genuinely protect or enhance.

One of them had possessed a crude cybernetic arm. As Ray absorbed it, his own right limb shimmered, flesh momentarily replaced by gleaming, articulated metal. He flexed the new appendage. It moved as if it had always belonged to him. He could feel through it—pressure, heat, texture. No lag. No loss of fidelity. Then, with another thought, it shifted back, seamlessly restoring his original skin.

He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers. He wasn't just mimicking. He was evolving. Adapting. Becoming something more.

His gaze lifted to the door at the far end of the room, the one Red had used. Ray checked his internal resources. The interface pulsed in his vision. The gray bar—representing absorbed matter—was full. Stable. The same as when it'd first woken up in him. But the blue one—energy—had crept significantly upward. The percentage shimmered faintly in the corner of his vision, a silent testament to his gruesome feast.

Without hesitation, a cold, predatory calm settling over him, he stepped forward. He moved through the back halls of the gambling den, a ghost in another man's skin. The memories of the goon he had absorbed and now impersonated guided his every motion—how he walked, where he looked, even the subtle way he nodded in greeting to a passing, heavily armed guard. He didn't just look like him. In every way that mattered to an outside observer, he was him.