The safehouse wasn't safe. It was a neutral point, a bubble of static in the Warrens' fever-dream grid. An auto-clinic run by a man named Fix, who asked no questions because the answers were always worse. The air smelled of ozone, synthetic blood, and old copper.
Elvis stood at a reinforced viewport, watching the rain needle the alley below. His shoulder, where Null's tendril had grazed him, was a perfect, smooth depression in his armor and skin. Not a wound. An absence. The ∞ Mana Core cycled around it, unable to fill the void. It was like a zero in his equation, a persistent syntax error his system couldn't patch.
Behind him, Lin shivered under a thermal foil blanket, her fingers flying over a stolen data-slate, decrypting the fragment she'd risked her life for. The electric blue of her hair was dull in the clinic's sick light.
"He erased you," she whispered, not looking up. "That thing... it didn't cut. It un-made."
"I observed," Elvis said, his voice the same calm monotone. Vital Insight replayed the encounter in a sterile loop: insufficient data. Non-causal event. Threat classification updated: Existential.
"You observed?" A crack in her voice, fear curdling into anger. "He's a ghost in the system! Aethelgard's wetworks cleaner. They call him Null for a reason. He zeros out problems. And now he's tagged you."
"I am aware."
"Are you?" She finally looked at him, eyes blazing. "You move like a machine. You fight like one. That won't work on him. You need to run. Disappear."
"Running is inefficient. It defers the problem." He turned from the window. His gray-white eyes held no emotion, only assessment. "The fragment. What is it?"
She hugged the slate to her chest. "Why? So you can optimize it, too? It's not a weapon. It's a... a key."
"A key has a function. What does it unlock?"
Before she could answer, Fix's security grid chimed a soft, urgent red in Elvis's mind. Tactical Omniscience painted the clinic's exterior. Six heat signatures. Not Warrens gutter-thieves. These moved in synchronized pairs, clearing angles, advanced flanking maneuvers. Professional. A different signature than Null's operators. These were... messier. Organic. Angry.
"Company," Elvis said.
The front door dissolved in a silent bloom of plasma. Smoke poured in, not for obscuration, but as a carrier. Vital Insight flagged the particulate: neural-inhibitor nanites. Designed to induce paralysis, confusion.
A standard, predictable tactic.
Elvis's lungs sealed. His pores closed. The ∞ Mana Core purged his bloodstream. He became a closed system. He shoved Lin behind the surgery slab.
Through the smoke, they entered. Mercenaries, but not corpo-clean. These were modded, scarred, their armor scavenged and brutal. Junk-hounds. One had a chain-blade for an arm. Another's jaw was replaced with a vox-caster that screamed subsonic disorientation waves.
Their leader stepped forward, a hulking woman with optic-cables woven into a shaved scalp. She scanned the room, her enhanced eyes glowing yellow.
"The Bastion," she grated. "The ghost in the grid said you'd be here. Hand over the thief and the fragment. We'll make your deletion quick."
Analysis: Independent contractors. Hired by a third party, likely bidding on the fragment after Null's failure. Motive: profit. Threat level: medium-high. Tactics: brute force, psychological disruption.
"The ghost in the grid," Elvis echoed. "Null communicated with you."
"He's a generous guy. Gave us your location and a bonus tip." The woman grinned, metal teeth glinting. "Said you're a thinker. That you see all the moves before they happen." She tapped her temple. "So we brought a move you've never seen."
She nodded to the vox-caster man.
He didn't scream. He hummed.
The sound was a physical thing, a wall of wrongness that made the air ripple. But it wasn't aimed at Elvis.
It was aimed at Lin.
The frequency was tailored. Not to harm, but to trigger. A sonic key for a latent implant.
Lin's eyes flew wide. She gasped, clawing at her neck. Beneath her skin, something glowed a sickly green—a subcutaneous data-node, activated.
Vital Insight recalibrated furiously.
Asset: Lin.
New variable: Neural implant.
Status: Remotely activated.
Function: UNKNOWN.
Calculating—
The calculation failed.
Lin stood up. Her movements were jerky, puppet-like. The terror on her face was real, but her body was not her own. The glow from her neck pulsed, and her hands—her clever, thieving hands—snatched up a surgical laser scalpel from Fix's tray.
"The move," the hound leader laughed, "is making your asset our weapon."
Lin lunged at Elvis. The scalpel aimed for his eye, a perfect, clinical kill-shot. Her face was a mask of horrified tears.
This was the Unknowable Equation.
His predictive models for Lin—civilian, non-combatant, protect—were instantly obsolete. The new data—hostile, weaponized, immediate threat—contradicted his core imperative. The system conflicted.
For 0.8 seconds, Elvis froze.
The Unyielding Flow broke.
The scalpel grazed his temple, drawing a line of blood before his head jerked back. A millisecond slower than his perfect standard.
The junk-hounds moved, exploiting the opening. Chain-blade man roared in, his whirling weapon shearing towards Elvis's neck. Vox-caster man kept humming, maintaining control over Lin.
Elvis's mind, the perfect processor, entered a state of cascading error.
Target: Lin.
Status: Hostile.
Solution: Neutralize.
CONFLICT: Directive - Protect Asset.
Priority Override: FAILING.
He defaulted to the solvable part of the equation. The junk-hounds.
He dropped under the chain-blade, the teeth ripping through the air where his head had been. Mana-Infused Strike. His palm heel shot up, connecting with the man's sternum. The kinetic energy didn't just crack bone; it traveled through the body, overloading the crude cybernetic linkages in the chain-arm. The weapon seized, whined, and exploded in a shower of sparks and shrapnel.
One ghost-image winked out.
But Lin was on him again, silent tears streaming, slashing with desperate, controlled strokes. He parried with the Aegis's edge, the scalpel sparking against the ceramite. He could shatter her wrist with a thought. The probability vectors for a dozen disabling strikes flashed in his vision.
He used none of them.
Instead, he used Absolute Martial Mimicry in a way he never had before. He didn't copy an attack. He copied her. He analyzed the jerky, implant-driven fighting style—its rhythms, its tells. He saw the 0.2-second lag between the vox-hum's command and her body's response.
He didn't fight Lin. He fought the signal.
He feinted left, drawing a lunge. As her body committed, he blurred right, the Aegis leaving his hand. It didn't go for her. It flew across the room in a flat, screaming spin.
The vox-caster man saw it coming and tried to dodge. But Elvis had calculated his dodge before the man's muscles twitched.
The razor edge didn't decapitate him. It passed precisely through the vox-unit grafted to his jaw.
The infernal humming ceased in a burst of static and flesh.
Lin collapsed like a cut marionette, the green glow fading from her neck. The scalpel clattered to the floor.
The remaining junk-hounds stared, their bravado shattered. Their leader snarled, raising a heavy plasma rifle. "Fine. We'll do this the messy—"
A new sound filled the clinic. Not a hum. A silence. A profound, hungry absence of sound that made the plasma rifle's power cell flicker and die.
From the shadows of the blown doorway, Null reformed.
He didn't step. He coalesced. The rain behind him seemed to slow, then stop, frozen in mid-air.
"Inefficient," Null stated, his gravel-static voice devoid of all emotion. "You were meant to distract, not to perish."
The hound leader turned her rifle on him. "The hell are—?"
Null's hand twitched. A tendril of void lashed out, not to erase, but to touch. It brushed the woman's optic-cabled head.
She didn't scream. She simply… stopped. Her eyes went blank. Not dead. Empty. The complex neural pathways of her memory, her personality, her will—selectively deleted. She stood, drooling gently, a hollow shell.
The remaining hounds broke, scrambling for the exits. Null ignored them. His faceless attention was fixed on Elvis, who now stood over Lin's unconscious form, the Aegis back on his arm, his blood a slow trickle down his temple.
"You hesitated," Null said, a note of clinical interest in his tone. "The asset became a weapon, and your logic conflicted. You experienced… latency. Fascinating."
Elvis said nothing. The error message in his mind blared: DIRECTIVE CONFLICT - RESOLUTION: INELEGANT.
"The God-Algorithm fragment is a key, as the thief said," Null continued, gliding forward. The frozen raindrops began to evaporate around him, unmade. "It unlocks the prison of a forgotten god. My employers wish to use it. I wish to study it. You… are an anomaly it seems to attract. You are coming with me."
"No," Elvis said.
"Your efficiency rating against me is below 2%. This is not a negotiation. It is entropy."
Null extended both hands. The shadows in the clinic deepened, stretching towards Elvis and Lin like grasping fingers of nothing.
Elvis looked at Lin. At the data-slate still clutched in her limp hand. At the hollowed-out mercenary standing blankly in the corner.
He saw the equation. Fight Null: probability of victory, catastrophic low. Protect Lin: impossible while fighting. Objective: Deny operator.
There was only one variable he could control.
He slammed his foot down. Mana-Infused Strike: Maximum Output. But not at Null. At the floor beneath Lin's body.
The reinforced clinic floor buckled, creating a chute directly into the Warrens' maintenance sub-levels—a warren of sewers, data-conduits, and forgotten tunnels.
As Lin fell through into the darkness, Elvis snatched the data-slate from her hand.
He turned to face Null, holding up the slate. "The key is here. The asset is irrelevant."
It was a lie. The fragment was likely in Lin's neural implant, the slate a decoy. A gamble. A bluff.
Null paused, the void-tendrils hesitating. For the first time, Elvis had done something unpredictable. He had sacrificed tactical position. He had introduced deception.
"You are learning," Null said, sounding almost pleased. "But you are still a function. And I am the delete key."
The void surged forward.
Elvis didn't try to block it. He threw the Aegis—not at Null, but at the primary support column of the clinic's ceiling. Then he channeled all his mana into a single, focused pulse into the crumbling floor beneath his own feet.
As the ceiling collapsed onto Null, and the floor gave way beneath him, Elvis fell.
He plunged into the damp, echoing dark after Lin, the sounds of the clinic's destruction muffled above.
He landed in a shallow stream of runoff, the impact jarring. Lin lay a few feet away, stirring, moaning.
Tactical Omniscience mapped the tunnels. Multiple exits. Null would be delayed, not stopped. The slate in his hand was inert, a fake.
He had achieved his primary directive: Protect the asset. He had neutralized the immediate hostiles.
But he had failed his own standard. He had hesitated. He had been inefficient. He had lied.
And he now possessed a terrified, implanted girl who was the real key to a conflict between corporate gods and entropic ghosts.
He looked at his hands. The perfect, unbreakable variable was cracking. Not from the outside, but from within.
The equation was no longer just about fight or flight. It was about a choice: remain the flawless, lonely solver, or become something else to protect the one thing his logic couldn't solve—a human being.
In the dripping darkness, Elvis the Bastion began to recalculate everything.