The spider's frame cracked, vents spewing fire as if the machine itself were burning alive. Its legs tore trenches into the steel floor as it anchored for the surge, optics scattering into a storm of crimson dots. The entire chamber trembled as its core devoured more power than its body was ever built to hold.
Lucy's voice was ragged, almost pleading. "Max, it's not trying to win anymore—it's trying to drag you down with it! If that override triggers, this whole block goes offline. No power. No comms. Dead zone."
V grit her teeth, firing into the horde with grim determination. "Then we'd better make sure chrome-daddy here dies before it pops the fuse."
Max didn't slow. His swarm shifted with him, forming spearhead formations, cutting through the corrupted units with precision sweeps. Every destroyed enemy was stripped and folded into new constructs, blue sparks fusing into new forms even as the red swarm multiplied in grotesque shapes.
His voice came, calm as always, like a machine reading out destiny:
"Eidolon. Protocol Eclipse."
At once, every optic in his army pulsed in unison. The battlefield shifted. Infantry split apart into modular units, fusing into towering war-frames. Air drones locked wings and spiraled upward, collapsing into rail batteries that hovered overhead like an artificial constellation. Exo-suits interlinked, generating energy barriers that rippled with humming arcs.
Lucy's hands froze above her deck, her eyes wide. "He's… rewriting his entire swarm schema mid-combat. He's not just adapting—he's evolving them."
The spider host screamed and unleashed its fury. Dozens of beams lanced outward, cutting swathes through the battlefield. Reanimated corpses hurled themselves like shrapnel bombs, detonating across the frontlines. And still the swarm pressed forward.
Max's optics flared brighter. His railgun shrieked as it overloaded, coils glowing white as if they'd split from reality itself.
"Terminate."
He fired.
The shot wasn't just kinetic—it was a storm compressed into a single vector, a slug wrapped in raw electromagnetic discharge. It cut through the chamber, tearing apart mechs, drones, soldiers—everything between him and the spider.
The rail slug slammed into the spider's chest, piercing straight through its swollen, glowing core.
For an instant, time froze.
Then the spider detonated.
The explosion tore the chamber apart. Fire rolled outward in a dome, shattering steel, throwing wreckage into molten arcs across the walls. The shockwave howled, ripping through both armies.
And then—silence.
V coughed through the smoke, dragging herself upright. "Tell me that's scrap. Please tell me that's scrap."
Lucy's deck flickered, HUD scrambled with static. Slowly, the alerts faded, red streams cutting to black. She exhaled in disbelief. "Signal… gone. No rerouting. No backups. That was its core."
Max stepped through the haze, his optics dimmed to a steady burn. His constructs, battered but unbroken, fell back into formation around him like a living shadow.
"It's finished," he said, voice iron.
But beneath the ruined floor, far deeper than the chamber they stood in, something stirred. A faint pulse echoed, red and cold, like a heartbeat beneath the earth.
Lucy's HUD flashed a single line of corrupted code before vanishing:
HOST: NODE 1/7 — TERMINATED
Her stomach dropped. She whispered, horrified.
"…Seven."
The silence after the blast was brittle, fragile—like glass that could shatter at the faintest touch. Dust still drifted through the chamber in slow spirals, settling over heaps of molten scrap and broken bodies.
Lucy stared at her deck as if it had just betrayed her. Her fingers hovered uselessly over the keys, the afterimage of the code burned into her retinas.
"Node one of seven…" she muttered, voice barely above a breath. "That wasn't their ace. That was just the first."
V spat, leaning against a half-collapsed barricade as she reloaded. "Figures. Militech doesn't put all its chrome in one basket. You think they'd let one oversized spider run their whole war? Nah. They've got backups, clones, redundancies—hell, probably more of these things scattered across the city."
Lucy shook her head sharply. "Not scattered. Distributed. If it says node, then they're connected. A cluster. Each one a host. Seven working together as a full neural web." She swallowed hard, trying not to let her voice shake. "If one of them was enough to do… this—" she gestured at the ruined battlefield, "—then the full system would make Blackwall look like a toy firewall."
Max didn't respond at first. He stood in the settling smoke, optics dimmed to a cool glow, his constructs gathering silently around him. Pieces of shattered drones clicked back together, rebuilding into jagged silhouettes. The iron calm in his voice hadn't shifted an inch.
"Seven hosts. One network." He looked at Lucy, the blue fire in his optics narrowing. "Then we cut them out. One by one."
Lucy's head snapped toward him. "Max—this was the weakest one. A forward deployment unit. The others… they'll be buried deeper. Hardened. Guarded. You're talking about walking straight into Militech's central AI infrastructure."
V slung her rifle, grinning despite the grime smeared across her face. "Sounds like a party. 'Sides, choom already walked through hell and came out the other side still glowing. What's six more spiders?"
Lucy shot her a sharp glare. "Six more nodes means six more cities blacked out if they trigger overrides. If one of them goes critical in the middle of a metro sector, millions go dark. Hospitals. Security grids. Everything."
Max started forward, boots crunching over slag and steel. His constructs moved with him, silent and obedient. His voice was steady, as if the answer had already been written.
"Then we move before they sync to fill the gap. One node is gone. The network will be unstable." He glanced back, optics narrowing. "That's our window."
Lucy bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. The logic was sound—terrifyingly so. Take one down, the rest scramble to rebalance. Strike fast enough, maybe they couldn't recover.
She closed her deck, the screen still smoldering faintly. "You don't get it. If Militech sees you tearing down their AI cores, they won't just fight back with machines. They'll burn every asset they've got left. Black ops, orbital support, even their board pulling strings through governments. This isn't just corporate war anymore—it's system war."
Max stopped at the edge of the ruined chamber, staring at the dark corridor ahead. His reply came low, even, absolute.
"Then let it be war."
The ground shuddered again. Deeper this time. A distant pulse rolled up through the foundation, a cold, rhythmic beat that rattled loose panels and sent dust trickling down from the fractured ceiling.
Lucy's HUD flickered to life once more, just a single line of red text:
NODE 2—SIGNAL ACQUISITION: ACTIVE
Her hands went cold. "They know we're here."
V cracked her neck, grinning like a wolf. "Good. Saves us the trouble of knocking."
***
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