NANITE

As the snap charged, a long, serrated blade slid from each of his forearms with a pneumatic hiss. Ray's own forearm blade met the assault. He dropped low, intending to drive his blade up into the softer armor of the man's thigh, but the snap was already twisting mid-air.

The blades met with a deafening screech of metal on metal, sparks showering the narrow hallway. The force of the impact was immense, a brutal shockwave that shuddered up Ray's arm. The snap, larger and heavier, pressed his advantage, pinning Ray against the cold concrete. He brought his other blade down, not to stab, but to pin. The serrated edge plunged through the nanite-metal of Ray's shoulder with a sickening shunk, anchoring him to the wall.

Pain had become an abstract concept, but the diagnostic warnings flashing in his vision were concrete. Shoulder Integrity: 34%. Trapped, Ray looked up as the snap lunged, his shark-like mouth aiming for his throat. Ray threw his left arm up as a shield, the chrome jaws clamping down with immense, crushing pressure.

Now. With the man's head locked in place, Ray saw his only opportunity. He activated his Zapper Arm. Blue energy surged, pouring directly into the man's head through his own cybernetic teeth. But the snap just grunted, a flicker of static in his optical sensors the only sign of damage. A non-conductive ceramic coating on the jaw—clever.

The snap roared in fury, a synthesized, bestial sound. He ripped his blade from Ray's shoulder—freeing him only to slam him through the crumbling wall into the adjoining room. Ray crashed onto a desk, the metal buckling under his weight. Torso Integrity Compromised. Internal Systems at 81%.

With the damage came something else. A whisper. A low hum in the back of his mind, a dark and hungry passenger wanting to take the wheel. The override protocol.

The snap was on him again, his Z-Dragger firing in short, unpredictable bursts, turning him into a wraith of black armor and gleaming blades. Ray scrambled back, using the derelict furniture as cover. The room filled with the shriek of tearing metal as the snap's blades ripped through filing cabinets as if they were cardboard.

Ray needed distance. He activated his Enhanced Legs, leaping onto a cabinet and kicking off the wall to create space. He drew Future, firing a three-shot burst that sparked harmlessly off the snap's chest plate. The man just laughed, a sound like grinding rocks, and ripped a heavy metal pipe from the wall, hurling it at Ray. It smashed into the wall behind him with enough force to shatter concrete.

This couldn't continue.

Think. Adapt.

He let the damage reports scroll past, focusing on the tactical data. The snap's one weakness: the Z-Dragger. Powerful, but it put immense strain on his systems. It needed to cool down.

The next time the snap blurred into motion, Ray didn't run. He stood his ground, letting his internal chronometer track the milliseconds. He dropped, sliding across the dusty floor as the snap's blade sliced the air where his head had been. He came up inside the man's guard, his Zapper Arm crackling, not with a full charge, but with a low-level, continuous current.

He didn't aim for the head. He slammed his sparking hand onto the exposed, humming power conduit at the base of the snap's spine—the external housing for the Z-Dragger.

The snap screamed, a real, agonized sound this time. His mod flared violently, then died with a shower of sparks and a puff of acrid smoke. His impossible speed vanished, leaving him clumsy and enraged. He lunged, falling back on pure, feral brutality, trapping Ray against the wall.

As the chrome teeth aimed for his throat again, Ray, with his own systems screaming warnings, made his final move. He ignored the crushing pressure, the blaring alerts. He let the snap believe he was winning. A single, sharp blade emerged from the center of Ray's chest, plunging deep into the soft tissue of the snap's neck. It severed coolant tubes and power lines with a wet, mechanical crunch.

The snap convulsed. A final, wet gurgle escaped his ruined jaw as a secondary wave of nanites swarmed from the blade, crawling into the wound to sever his spinal cord from the inside. He collapsed, a heap of useless chrome and meat, his life's work ending in a dark, forgotten room.

Ray staggered back, his vision flickering with red alerts. He leaned against a wall as his nanites, no longer needing to feign vulnerability, began their work. Shimmering silver lines traced paths across his wounds, knitting metal and simulated flesh back together. The hole in his shoulder sealed, and the deep rents in his torso filled and smoothed over. It was a calculated risk—hiding his full regenerative ability to lure the snap into a fatal mistake. The fight had lasted less than a minute.

Helping a whimpering Kaelen to his feet, Leon cautiously peered over their cover. The air was thick with the coppery smell of blood. He saw the tableau of destruction left in Ray's wake—corpses twisted at unnatural angles, dark pools spreading across the grimy floor. He stepped out slowly,heading to the hallway. His gaze landed on Ray, as he emerged from an adjoining room, looking utterly unharmed. Leon had heard the violent, desperate sounds of the fight. He had expected to see Ray battered and broken. Seeing him pristine sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. His jaw tensed.

Ray turned his head, the motion almost mechanical. His glowing OptiRange eyes fell upon Leon, who was clutching a bleeding arm. He walked closer, his footsteps unnervingly silent.

"Why?" Ray asked, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. "Why all of this? Why risk your life for a story that HVM will bury in less than a month? Give me the real reason."

The facade of the hardened reporter finally cracked, worn down by grief and terror. "My sister," Leon said, his voice rough. "Her name was…is Elara. HVM… they gave her a MemStream during a corporate trial. A 'gift ' that hollowed her out and left her a drooling zombie. I'm doing this so no one else has to watch their family fade away like that."

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Ray was silent. He processed the data: grief, revenge, justice. A motivation he understood on a fundamental level. If anyone had done that to his mother, to Alyna, Julia, Johnny and Arty... he would have done the same. His gaze snapped toward the ascending stairwell, then back to the jagged hole in the wall, the snap's body lay visible on the other side.

"We need to move," Ray stated. "But we're not leaving him."

Leon stared, bewildered. "What? We can't just drag a body up…"

"This one wasn't a local merc," Ray cut him off, his tone leaving no room for argument. "His gear seems to be military-grade. He was waiting for us. He knew the plan." He crouched, his fingers tracing a port at the base of the snap's skull. "His neural link might still hold residual data—his last few minutes of sensory input, comms chatter, who hired him. We need that intelligence." He stood up, effortlessly lifting the heavy body and slinging it over his shoulder. "I can't do a field extraction without corrupting the data. We take him with us. Now."

The journey back was a tense, agonizing crawl through the labyrinth of the Shallows. Leon, pale and losing blood, leaned heavily against the rusted walls of the walkways, his breathing ragged. Kaelen, his mind fractured by terror, stumbled constantly, his whimpers a stark counterpoint to the rhythmic sloshing of the water below.

Ray moved with an unnerving, tireless grace, even with the dead weight of the armored snap on his shoulder. His Advanced Sensor Suite was on high alert, painting his vision with the heat signatures of scavengers drawn by the sound of battle, their glowing forms watching from the shadows of stacked shipping containers.

They reached a junction—a wide platform where three rusty walkways converged over a particularly dark patch of water. Ray stopped abruptly. His auditory sensors had picked it up: multiple squads, moving in a coordinated pincer movement, their comms chatter lighting up his tactical display. They were being herded. They had less than a minute.

He made the calculation. There was no way to fight through with Leon and Kaelen. There was only one logical play.

"They're boxing us in," Ray stated, his voice devoid of urgency but filled with absolute authority. "I will create a diversion. You two, take that maintenance tunnel," he said, pointing to a dark, narrow opening in the side of a concrete pylon. "Head for the extraction coordinates Monica has. Do not stop and do not wait for me."

"Ray, no," Leon protested, leaning against a railing. "We're not leaving you."

"My chance of survival alone is 87 percent," Ray said, the number rolling off his tongue with chilling certainty. "Yours, with me, is less than 12. This is not a debate." He looked Leon in the eye. "Protect the asset. That's the mission, remember?"

Before they could argue further, Ray acted. He grabbed a loose metal plate from the walkway and hurled it down a separate corridor, the clatter echoing loudly in the opposite direction of the tunnel. As the distant squads reacted to the sound, Ray, carrying the snap's body, took two running steps and leaped from the platform.

He dropped five meters (sixteen feet), landing with a heavy thud on a lower, rickety walkway that groaned in protest. He glanced up once, his glowing blue eyes meeting Leon's for a fraction of a second, and then he melted into the shadows, deliberately drawing the hunters away from their prey.

He moved deeper, descending into the flooded, forgotten underbelly of the Shallows. He found what he was looking for: a submerged generator room, its entrance choked with filth and decay. He dragged the body inside, the only light the faint, pulsing glow of his own optics.

He laid the body on the floor. His purpose was singular: acquisition. Nanites, like living mercury, flowed from his hands, enveloping the snap. The process was silent, efficient, and quick. The armor, the chrome teeth, the military-grade Z-Dragger, the small amount of organic matter beneath—it all began to break down, deconstructed on a molecular level.

And with the physical components came the data. As the nanites consumed the brain, fragmented memories flooded Ray's consciousness. He saw a corporate handler with a face blurred by encryption, transferring a large sum of untraceable credit. He heard the briefing: "The target is this man, named Kaelen. Alive is optional, but his head must be intact." Then, another memory, one that didn't belong to the mission. A flash of a hospital room, clean and sterile. The snap, younger and without the chrome jaw, is holding the hand of a young woman lying in the bed, her body frail, her breathing shallow, aided by a humming machine. His wife. Another flash: a data-slate in his hands displaying a medical bill. A rejection notice stamped in red: Treatment Denied - Insufficient Funds. The final memory is of him staring at that rejection notice in his dark apartment, his face a mask of utter despair, before the rage hardens his eyes. He shatters the data-shard against a wall and heads out to take the very contract that might finally pay the next bill.

The memories settled, as echoes in the quiet spaces of his own mind. The snap, the predator he had just disassembled, wasn't just a target. He was a man who had made a desperate choice.

He saw the man's path laid out, a dark reflection of his own. The desperate drive to protect someone, the willingness to sacrifice pieces of oneself, to trade flesh for steel, to become a monster in the hopes of saving an angel. But the snap had failed. He had paid the ultimate price, forfeiting his humanity for a reward that never came. He was a ghost of a future Ray had never wanted to consider—one where all the power in the world wasn't enough to stop the bleeding. The feeling that settled in Ray's core was something old and cold and horribly familiar.

It was the logic of futility.

Systems integrated, his interface reported, jarring him from the reverie. New hardware detected: Military-Grade Neural Accelerator: KRYPTLINE-X

He stood up, the snap's body completely gone. He was stronger now, his blue bar topped off and his knowledge expanded. But he was also heavier, burdened by the echoes of a life he had extinguished. He activated his comms, sending a single, encrypted ping to Monica. The mission continued.

The hunt was already underway. Ray moved through the flooded underbelly of the Shallows like a phantom, the ghost of the man he'd just consumed whispering warnings in his mind. His Advanced Sensor Suite parsed the chaos, tagging the heat signatures of the hunting parties, their disciplined, sweeping patterns a stark contrast to the random movements of the local scavengers. He used the maze to his advantage, his Combat and Navigation Computer plotting a course through forgotten service tunnels and across precarious, rusting gantries, always keeping him one step ahead of the closing net.

He reached the rendezvous point—a grimy, abandoned mag-lev maintenance bay.

The massive bay door hissed open a few inches, and he slipped inside.

Half an hour later, Ray arrived at Monica's location: a narrow, hidden alley nestled between two buildings. The Kurai was nowhere in sight. Monica leaned against the wall, arms crossed, her expression a thundercloud of controlled fury. In the dim light of the bay, Leon sat on a crate, coat removed, while Kaelen, his face obscured by a neck gaiter and hat, hands still trembling, fumbled to apply a medi-patch to the bloody wound on Leon's arm.

"Report," Monica snapped, her voice sharp enough to cut steel. She strode forward, her eyes scanning Ray's clothes, assessing the damage herself rather than asking if he was alright.