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"Damn it, Lauren's life was just thrown away like that. Fuck it, for that broken piece of junk, thirteen lives were lost, and in the end, we got nothing."
Under his hushed curses, Prang stood on the steel cable bridge of the second floor, grieving for his fallen brother. Lauren was dead. Prang had always known this was the likely fate for their group, but knowing didn't make it easier.
Only yesterday, Lauren had been drinking and laughing with him, dismembering a haul and stripping valuable chrome from warm bodies. Now, he didn't even have a corpse to bury. Lauren's death jolted Prang's previously numb mind. He suddenly realized that this kind of life wasn't what he wanted.
While the thrill of the kill and the screams of his victims were satisfying, he couldn't stop the intrusive thought: What if that were me…
But leaving the Nightwalkers? He shivered and shook his head. That was a death sentence. Joining was easy; they took any piece of trash the city spat out. But leaving? Leaving was impossible.
Shaking off the grief, Prang lowered his head, reaching for a hit of "Glitter" from his powder stick. But just as his chin dipped, he saw a blur. An afterimage. It flashed by, leaving him momentarily stunned.
Blinking, Prang gripped the railing and leaned half his body out to get a better look at the shadows below. The moment he lowered his head, his pupils constricted in terror.
A hand suddenly appeared from the underside of the bridge, slamming into his face. Prang's body vanished from the walkway without a sound.
Immediately after, a figure wearing a cap vaulted over the railing. Jax glanced back at the cargo container where he'd stuffed the body, then turned toward the stairs.
That was the third one.
"He always... always did it like this?"
Jax's actions were being broadcasted in real-time. Lucy was currently patched into the factory's internal security cameras, feeding Jax the locations of every guard. But watching him move was something else entirely.
The way he ghosted through the shadows, his incomprehensible speed, and the clinical efficiency with which he'd neutralized three veterans—Lucy was utterly shocked. He didn't have a single drop of combat chrome, yet he was moving like a legend.
"Surprised, huh?" Maine's voice crackled over the link. He couldn't see the feed, but he knew the rhythm of a Jax infiltration.
Most people think Sandevistan is the ultimate edge. It is. It's like time-stop; you can dodge bullets and zero a man before his brain realizes he's been hit. But it comes with a price—inhibitors, neurological decay, and eventually, cyberpsychosis.
But Jax? Jax was a freak of nature. The team had once tested his reaction speeds. Sasha, with her high-end neural link, clocked in at 72 milliseconds. Rebecca hit 103.
Jax? 34 milliseconds.
The average human is 300. A trained soldier is 200. Jax was operating at the extreme edge of human biology—a natural Sandevistan and Kerenzikov reflex booster without the side effects. If Maine had his way, he'd tell Biotechnica to stop studying hyenas and start studying Jax.
"I haven't found the surveillance room yet," Jax's voice broke the silence. "I'm heading to the third-floor office."
"Lucy, scan the level. What's waiting for him?" Maine asked.
"Analyzing," Lucy replied softly. "Alright, Jax. Go up. I'll guide you."
The third floor was eerily quiet. Jax moved through the corridor, surprised that there weren't more guards. He'd only seen about thirty of the estimated hundred members. Were they all off-site, or just lazy?
He reached the heavy door Lucy had pointed out. It was a high-security coded lock—fingerprint, iris, and alphanumeric.
"This door is a problem," Lucy whispered in his ear. "It'll take me or Kiwi ten minutes to bypass the encryption remotely. We might need to—"
SCREEECH—CRACK!
"What did you say?" Jax asked, distracted. He had gripped the doorknob and the edge of the frame, his muscles bulging as he literally bent the reinforced iron door away from its hinges.
"Nothing..." Lucy's voice was faint, her mouth twitching. "Just... carry on."
Even Maine with his gorilla arms would have struggled to bend a security door like that. Lucy began to wonder if Jax was an experimental "Natural" escaped from an Arasaka lab.
Jax stepped into a seventy-square-meter office. It was a mess—a desk covered in dried blood and oil, piles of smart-weapons, and open medical crates. His eyes locked onto the supplies: Falcon 2 and MaxDoc 2 injectors.
These were high-end stims. If Jackie had possessed a Falcon 2 during the heist, he might have stayed stable long enough to reach the clinic. Jax reached for the medicine, intending to pocket the lot.
But just as his hand closed on a canister, his nerves screamed.
Jax didn't think; he reacted. He dropped into a crouch and rolled forward. A split-second later, the steel table he'd been standing at was cleaved in two by a shimmering blue blade. Sparks flew as the medical kit was destroyed.
"Damn it, those useless pieces of trash! They let a rat in!"
"I knew something was wrong when the surveillance room went dark. It would be strange if the cargo company didn't send a recovery team. I told the boys to be vigilant, but look at this—Boett, everyone in the monitor room is already cold meat!"
Two men stood at the far end of the office. One was thin and wire-muscled; the other was a hulking mass of steel and scar tissue, nearly as big as Maine.
Jax's Kiroshis scanned them instantly.
NAME: Krisfen Zobert (Nightwalker Leader) IMPLANTS: Sandevistan Mk.3, Gorilla Arms, Chitin Plating, Biodyne Skin.
NAME: Boett Mitchell (Nightwalker Leader) IMPLANTS: Dynalar Sandevistan Mk.4, Projectile Launch System, Mantis Blades, Micro-rotors.
"You've got guts, kid," the short one, Boett, said. He flicked his blood-stained Mantis Blades. "The boys we sent this afternoon were supposed to handle you, but you're still breathing. I like that."
"Boett, look at him. Not a scrap of chrome on his face," Krisfen rumbled. "Kid, why die for a corporate salary? Join us. The boys you killed were weak; they needed replacing anyway."
Jax didn't answer. He stood up slowly, his face like stone. He reached over his shoulder, untied the rope securing his sheath, and gripped the hilt of the black-and-red Katana.
He held the blade horizontally, the thermal edge humming with a low, deadly vibration. With his free hand, he made a slow, deliberate "come here" gesture.
Jax had made his choice.
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