Another soldier spun, shouting orders, but his voice died in a static choke. His comms were hijacked mid-command, rerouted into shrieking white noise that left his squad clutching their helmets. By the time they regained balance, Max was already among them.
His rifle reconfigured mid-motion, plates sliding apart as Eidolon's code whispered across the nanofabric inside his chassis. The weapon split into twin blades that shimmered with liquid metal edges.
Max flowed through the squad like a phantom. One soldier's arm went limp as his smartgun locked up under Max's intrusion; another's visor blacked out, leaving him blind. Steel bit through armor, efficient, surgical. They didn't fall like men in a firefight—they dropped like corrupted lines of code, erased in silence.
V popped up long enough to drop two with clean headshots, then ducked again as return fire hammered her cover. "Shit, Max! You're making me look lazy over here!"
Max didn't answer. His optics glowed brighter, voice reverberating with Eidolon's undercurrent.
"Efficiency is survival. Style is noise."
Lucy stared from the console, hands trembling on her deck. Her screen pulsed with mirrored data from Max's feed—enemy heart rates, weapon temps, squad chatter all bleeding into a lattice of raw information. "He's not even fighting them," she whispered. "He's… editing them."
From the catwalk above, a Militech heavy with powered exoskeleton dropped into the chamber. Hydraulic limbs hissed as its chaingun spun up, barrels glowing.
Max stood still, eyes locking on. In his vision, time fragmented into vectors and probabilities. Eidolon's voice folded into his own:
"Target acquired. Probability of survival: negligible. Correcting outcome."
He raised one hand. The nanotech surged out, streaming into the floor in a silver ripple. In an instant, the metal beneath the heavy's boots reformed, locking into spires that shot upward like jaws. Armor screeched. The heavy screamed once before the spires sheared through the chassis, shredding hydraulics and spine alike.
Silence, then the corpse collapsed in sparks and smoke.
V blinked from behind cover. "…Okay. That one was style."
Max's gaze didn't shift, his tone flat but carrying the weight of both man and machine.
"They send more. I see them gathering three floors up. Drones deploying. Netwatch assets en route."
Lucy's stomach dropped. "Max, if you keep burning like this, you won't just be synced—you'll merge. You'll stop being you."
Max finally turned toward Lucy, the glow in his optics steady, almost calm.
"Nothing can overtake me," he said flatly. "Look at my vitals."
Lucy blinked, swiping through her deck's diagnostics. Her eyes widened. "It's… impossible." Every metric read perfect—sync ratio one hundred percent, no degradation, no corruption, no bleed. Eidolon wasn't devouring him. It wasn't even scratching him.
"It's like…" she breathed, "…it can't touch you at all."
Max's optics dimmed faintly, like the slow exhale of a machine at rest.
"I knew the moment it tried. Assimilation, overwrite, control—textbook tactics. But in my case?" He tilted his head slightly, voice calm as stone. "It's a ghost trying to leash a lion king. There's nothing here for it to hold."
Lucy stared, still processing. "So… you're saying—"
"I set the rules," Max cut her off, raising his rifle as more vibrations shook the chamber. "It can't write them for me. That means you sit back, keep your eyes open—" His optics brightened, cold fire in the dark. "…and watch the show."
Above, the reinforcements hammered closer, doors straining under the weight of Militech's next wave. The war wasn't breaking Max. It was feeding him.
The chamber doors groaned, hinges shrieking as hydraulic cutters bit through steel. Dust rained in sheets. V slid another mag into her pistol, jaw tight. "This is it. Whole damn company's about to flood us."
Max stepped forward, rifle balanced with perfect ease. The blue glow in his optics sharpened until it looked like molten glass. "Let them come."
The first breach charge went off, a thunderclap that shook the entire hall. The doors ripped open, and Militech poured through—armored shock troops, drones scuttling at their heels, heavy weapons primed.
Lucy's deck screamed with alerts. "Max, there's too many—"
But Max was already moving.
He didn't dodge. He didn't hide. He walked straight into the storm of fire. Bullets howled, tracers carving the air—yet none found him. Not a scratch, not a stagger. To Lucy's eyes, it was like reality bent around him, Eidolon's predictive streams pouring through his body in perfect sync.
V swore, half in awe, half in disbelief. "He's walking through it like rain."
Max's rifle barked once, twice, each shot cutting down a soldier with surgical precision. A drone lunged low, its rotors buzzing—Max caught it with one hand, twisted, and slammed it into the ground so hard its chassis burst in sparks.
The squads tried to regroup, their comms screaming orders—but Max rewrote them mid-fight. Commands flipped, targets scrambled. Half the troopers suddenly thought their allies were hostiles and opened fire on each other.
Lucy watched the chaos unfold, her breath caught in her chest. "He's… rewriting the battlefield. Every move. Every bullet."
Max's voice came layered, Eidolon echoing behind his calm words. "They call it overwhelming force. I call it predictable input."
He slid behind one soldier, moved faster than the man's visor could track, and severed his power pack with a single strike. Sparks showered the chamber as the soldier collapsed, inert.
Above, another wave rushed the breach—heavies this time, exo-suits thundering forward.
Max tilted his head, optics glowing brighter. "Better toys. Same mistake."
The heavies opened fire, cannons roaring. Max surged forward like a blade through water. One step, two—then he vanished in a blur, reappearing behind the lead exo. With a flicker of motion, his hand drove straight into the machine's spine. Circuits screamed as Eidolon's code cascaded down his arm, seizing the suit. The pilot convulsed, then went limp as the exo toppled.
Lucy's throat tightened. "He's not just fighting them… he's erasing them."
Max stood over the wreck, rifle steady, voice cold.
"They wanted a war machine. Now they've seen one."
And as the chamber shook with the next surge of boots and metal, Max lifted his weapon and stepped into the breach like it was his throne.
***
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It's 22 chaps ahead