Carl moved through the wreckage of panic and gunfire like a ghost in the machine. Blood painted the pavement. Smoke from scorched bullet casings still hung in the air, curling lazily in the heat. Ahead, Patrick stood mid-motion—blade drawn, target marked.
But then… he stopped.
The cyberpsycho's neural net—fried, corrupted, barely functional—still recognized danger. Even stripped of higher reasoning, drowned in bloodlust and glitching battleware, something inside him knew this new presence wasn't like the others. It wasn't prey approaching him.
It was a predator.
To Patrick's warped senses, the street had been filled with panicked rabbits. Running. Screaming. Weak. Easy.
But this one?
This one was a tiger, walking right into his kill zone without a flicker of fear.
A single word drifted through Patrick's fragmented mind. He didn't know why he thought it—where it came from, or what it even meant—but it took root and held.
"Tiger claw."
He whispered it.
And across the cracked asphalt, Carl heard him.
Standing twelve meters away, he narrowed his eyes, noting the mumble. Was there lucidity left? Something resembling logic? But when their eyes met—those flickering yellow-red optics buried in broken sockets—he saw the truth.
There was nothing left but fire.
Carl's lips pulled into a crooked smile. He tilted his head ever so slightly.
"Come on, then."
It was barely a whisper, but it hit like a starting pistol.
Patrick shimmered—then vanished.
The Sandevistan kicked in, and the world collapsed into a narrow tunnel of time dilation and violence. The roar of chaos around them dimmed to silence. Reality slowed. Blurred.
To Patrick, everything crawled. Air felt like static. Gravity forgot itself.
In this fractured moment, he was untouchable.
The Sandevistan sang through his nerves. Military-grade, stripped and repurposed. More than just speed—it provided real-time combat predictions, tactical vectors, and decision overlays. The kind of implant that turned mercenaries into death gods.
Even in his madness, Patrick moved with purpose.
His feet thundered across the pavement, each step launching him meters ahead. The mantis blade extended from his right arm, its monosteel surface gleaming like a scalpel kissed by hellfire. His trajectory: Carl's right flank.
It was surgical.
His plan was simple—stab through the arm, then the ribs, the lung, and end it with a straight shot to the heart. Quick, clean, final.
But the moment he closed the gap, something derailed.
Carl was smiling.
He wasn't frozen.
He was watching.
Even in the haze of slowed time, Carl's gaze followed every micro-movement of Patrick's approach. His body began to shift, just slightly. The faint turn of the head. A shift in weight. No panic. No surprise.
"I can see you," Carl said.
The words shouldn't have reached him. Sound didn't travel normally here.
But somehow, they did.
Patrick faltered. Something ancient and primal in his chest clenched. An echo of fear, still surviving beneath layers of metal and madness.
But the attack had already begun. The blade had committed.
There was no turning back.
That was when Carl moved.
His hand flicked outward—not defensive, not desperate, but calculated.
The monowire, nearly invisible in the shifting light, lashed through the air like a whisper of death. It arced across Patrick's flank, slicing effortlessly into his exposed side.
The first thing to go was the armor—subdermal plating meant to resist pistol rounds, maybe a shotgun blast. The monowire didn't care. It passed through with minimal resistance, severing cables, slicing through synthetic muscle and arteries alike.
Then it hit the mantis blade.
There, it didn't cut.
It wrapped.
Like silk threading around a spinning top, the wire coiled in tight spirals along the length of the weapon. It twisted and anchored with flawless momentum—an engineered trap sprung mid-strike.
Patrick's Sandevistan told him to pull back.
He did.
And it was his worst mistake.
The wire wasn't just wrapped around the blade—it had caught the full lower half of his right arm. As he yanked backward, the monowire responded with all the tension and violence it had been waiting to unleash.
It cut deeper.
Sinew. Nerve. Bone.
Blood sprayed in thick arcs as Patrick let out a distorted scream. The force of his own retreat turned his limb against itself—his own strength, his own reflexes, used to carve him open.
Half of his arm came away like peeled fruit.
The scream that followed was less human, more machine—like a data feed shorting out mid-scream. His feet stumbled, body swaying as the world slammed back into real-time.
The Sandevistan cycle ended.
Now, there was only agony.
The cyberpsycho stared down at his maimed limb, twitching. Sparks spilled from exposed nerve ports. The blade remained locked in Carl's monowire like a predator still chewing on its prey.
But Patrick wasn't done.
He still had another arm.
His left.
With a mechanical jerk, the second mantis blade extended. His body trembled from the imbalance. Blood soaked his waist. His optics flickered, dim and stuttering.
Still, he raised the blade.
One final charge.
Carl was already there.
Calm. Centered. A statue carved from control and calculation.
The barrel of his Kenshin pistol pressed lightly against Patrick's forehead.
Carl looked down at him.
The psycho's breath rattled, broken by pain and fractured breath cycles. Yellow light in his eyes faded beneath the red haze of blood. His body hunched low from the tension of the severed arm still caught in the wire.
Carl's face was unreadable—just a quiet kind of focus, like he'd already seen how this ended.
"Pleasure meeting you, golden-eye."
His voice was low, but clear.
Final.
Carl's finger shifted, tension rolling up his arm like a trigger pull through molasses.
"…and goodbye."