“Forty-seven hours, fifty-nine minutes.”
In the darkroom, Bolt’s heavy, muffled breathing echoed through the dead silence like a diesel blower on the verge of total failure.
He raised his heavy industrial hydraulic cybernetic left arm and viciously slammed a fist into the oak workbench. With a dull thud, several old copper washers scattered across the tabletop bounced high into the air before rolling into the cracks in the dark, damp floor.
“Fuckin’ AETHER…” Bolt’s eyes were webbed with crimson veins, and the beard along his jaw trembled violently as he ground his teeth. “What the hell do they take us for? Dust caked onto a server’s cooling grilles? Sludge smeared across a motherboard? Wanna clear us out? Just fire up the microwaves and hit one-button format?!”
“From the pure perspective of commercial computing power and balance sheets, mechanic, your metaphor is almost too flattering.”
Deep inside Taichi’s mind, ECHO’s voice was a thin sheet of ice without a trace of warmth, calm enough to send chills down the spine.
“In the eyes of the boardroom lords in the Zenith District, the three hundred thousand undocumented black-market residents of District 13 without legal citizen chips or social security accounts have less economic value than the coolant consumed by a single standard server rack in one hour. To them, vaporizing this entire place and flattening it clean is nothing more than a routine quarterly defragmentation of the lower-level storage sectors.”
Taichi stood with his back against the cold, damp lead-plated wall, his legs as limp as two waterlogged noodles.
He slowly slid down the wall and sat on the concrete floor, clutching his knees with both arms and burying his head in the crook of his elbows. The interface at the back of his neck, where Bolt had just violently welded on an external flash chip, was still burning hot. Waves of dull, tingling pain pulsed through him like red-hot iron needles stabbing straight into his spinal cord.
In the lower-right corner of his retinal HUD, the crimson timer frozen at【00:00:01】was entangled with the forty-eight-hour purge countdown mentioned in Old Chen’s recording, like two tungsten garrotes belonging to the Grim Reaper tightening around his neck.
“Where can we even run…” Taichi’s voice was feeble, carrying the instinctive despair of an insignificant man facing annihilation. “The rail line out of Abandoned Port 13 was locked down completely by AETHER’s unmanned security towers long ago. The underground sewage pipes are packed with the Stability Hounds’ mechanical hunting units… Even if we dug another thirty feet down like gophers right now, once the high-energy orbital microwave sweep came down forty-eight hours from now, all our brains and spinal cords would be roasted into piping-hot water bags within a microsecond.”
“I’ve scavenged for food in scrap heaps for twenty years, and I sure as hell won’t let those white-suited motherfuckers decide how I die!”
Bolt snorted coldly, yanked the filthy towel from around his neck, and strode out of the darkroom into the spacious yet cold, damp main garage bay.
Taichi braced himself against the wall and staggered after him.
The repair bay reeked of machine oil, diesel, and rust. Bolt walked to a wire-mesh wall covered with all kinds of heavy tools and pulled open a half-ton blastproof steel cabinet below it, retrofitted from the door of a discarded safe.
Clatter!
Inside the steel cabinet, more than a dozen heavy thermite demolition shells converted from old high-pressure fire-extinguisher cylinders were stacked in neat rows, alongside six homemade electromagnetic smoothbore guns with their barrels brutally bored out and five full crates of armor-piercing penetrator spikes fitted with high-voltage capacitors. At the very bottom of the heavy weapons lay three infantry anti-tank missile tubes stripped from scrapped armored fighting vehicles.
“All the private cash I’ve saved over the years went into these goddamn hard hitters.” Bolt casually picked up one of the heavy electromagnetic smoothbore guns, pulled back the bolt one-handed with practiced ease, and shoved a tungsten armor-piercing spike as thick as his thumb into the chamber. The metal locked into place with a crisp, weighty click.
“Wanna format my garage? I’ll use these few hundred pounds of explosives to send their Hounds and airships straight to hell!”
“If you plan to use kinetic chemical toys from the technological level of the nineteenth century against regular Zenith forces equipped with five-layer phase-deflection shields, I have no objection to you taking your own life right now.” ECHO’s voice came through Taichi’s throat speaker, still viciously poisonous. “At least that would save two precious tungsten rounds for scavengers to bury with you.”
“Fuck! Then what the hell do you suggest we do?! You parasitic, sharp-tongued ghost living in somebody else’s brain!” Bolt spun around and roared, gun raised. Heavy flecks of spit flew far through the dim light.
“The memory packet Old Chen left behind contains a second layer of locked deep data,” ECHO said calmly. “It includes a vulnerability in the underlying communications frequency of AETHER’s current ‘Purification Sequence,’ as well as the coordinates of the only underground slag-disposal pipeline that bypasses the surface surveillance grid and leads directly to the Steel Middle Tier.”
“As long as we crack the second-layer encryption, we can break out through the pipeline blind spot beneath the megacorp’s nose before the sky net closes completely.”
A faint glimmer appeared in Taichi’s eyes. “What’s the password? How do we crack it?”
“That requires—”
Before ECHO could finish, the air throughout the underground garage suddenly tightened in an utterly bizarre way!
BOOM—!
A heavy, violent crash, like a massive siege hammer slamming into a steel plate, exploded dead center on the garage’s rolling door, which was made of three layers of bulletproof armor!
Rattle-rattle-rattle!
The entire basement shook violently. Decades of accumulated rust and concrete dust showered down from the ceiling like a gray blizzard, pelting the two of them and the workbench.
“Who is it?!”
Bolt’s combat instincts were terrifyingly fast. His massive body dropped at once, and he braced the heavy electromagnetic smoothbore gun atop the cylinder block of a discarded diesel engine. The hydraulic cybernetic arm on his left side released a sharp pneumatic pressurization hiss, and the cold tungsten spike at the muzzle remained trained squarely on the door.
Taichi’s reaction was even more textbook lower-level survival. Within a tenth of a second of the crash, he had already slipped with practiced ease into the thickest double-layer lead-plated angle beneath the operating table. His right hand clutched a thick copper insulated clamp with a grounding wire, and he did not even dare breathe.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The impacts outside the door did not stop. Instead, they grew faster and more frenzied.
It was not a human hand or foot pounding on the door. Some impossibly heavy solid metal object, carrying terrifying kinetic force, was hammering the armored door panel again and again without mercy. Under the brutal assault, the three layers of reinforced alloy steel actually bulged inward, forming a dent the size of a fist!
“Warning: Extremely violent high-entropy electromagnetic anomaly detected outside the door.”
Deep inside Taichi’s mind, ECHO refreshed a crimson energy topology map at the highest priority:
“Target count: one. However, the negative neural current fluctuation emitted from its body… is three hundred and fifty percent higher than the Class-S Glitch residue on Old Chen just now!”
“Door… open the door…”
Amid the raging wind and rain outside, a faint, hoarse cry for help suddenly came through, thick with blood froth and the static of a ruptured windpipe.
“Bolt… old man… help me… it’s me… Black Rat… my hand… it’s gonna blow…”
Bolt’s rough finger, resting on the trigger, stiffened slightly. His brows knotted into a deep crease.
“Black Rat?” Bolt muttered. “That kid’s an underground smuggler courier who runs errands through the black-market dark web… He usually steals secondhand chips and smuggled tobacco for me from the Steel Middle Tier’s garbage chutes. How the hell did he get mixed up with something this deadly?”
“Bolt! Don’t open the door!” Taichi shouted urgently from beneath the lead-plated base, keeping his voice low. “ECHO said the electromagnetic data coming off him is wrong! Those aren’t the data characteristics of a living person!”
“Goddammit, I watched that kid grow up on the streets. I can’t just stand by and watch him die at the door.”
Bolt gritted his teeth. He snatched a heavy pneumatic hydraulic cutter nearly half a meter long from the tool rack, crouched low, and silently picked his way over the scattered scrap parts and puddles of machine oil to the peephole beside the door.
It was a viewing window embedded in a four-inch-thick lead-plated door, fitted with three layers of bulletproof, radiation-resistant polarized lead glass.
Through the rain-streaked, scratched glass, Bolt looked toward the sewage passage outside.
Torrential rain poured down over the world beyond. Deep green and ghostly purple neon reflected in the filthy puddles, shattered into countless fragments of light by the pounding rain.
On the concrete steps outside the rolling door, a slight young man in a ragged black waterproof cloak sat collapsed. He was soaked through, his face as pale as paper, black-red foam constantly bubbling from the corners of his mouth. His whole body convulsed violently like a dying fish.
But the most horrifying thing was his right arm, exposed to the downpour—
It was not a cheap regenerative-plastic cybernetic limb used by people from the lower levels. It was a heavy, military-grade combat arm, jet-black from end to end, covered in matte carbonized armor, with an eye-searing deep-red glow radiating from within!
At that moment, the arm’s cooling grilles were spewing scalding white steam like a pressure cooker, while the miniature hydraulic cylinders inside shrieked with the sharpest metallic friction. Worse still, at the neural socket where the mechanical arm connected to Black Rat’s right shoulder and cervical spine, the flesh had been completely burned black and peeled outward by the extreme heat. Dozens of clearly visible crimson threads of code, writhing frantically like living parasites, were spreading along his collarbone and carotid artery toward his brain and eye sockets!
“Help me… it won’t obey… it’s gonna rip my neck off…” Black Rat sobbed, desperately gripping his right wrist with his good left hand, trying to stop the right hand from clamping around his own throat.
“Fuck… neural cybernetic rejection and a code runaway!” Bolt’s face changed dramatically. “If we don’t cut the neural bus right now, that military arm’s output will rip his entire spine apart like pulling up a radish!”
“Bolt! Don’t!” Taichi had just started to rush out to stop him.
Hissssss—!
Bolt had already yanked down the emergency manual hydraulic lever on the door!
With a shrill burst of escaping air, the massively heavy alloy rolling door sprang upward, opening a gap half a meter high. Bolt moved like a cheetah. He dropped to one knee, thrust his thick arm through the gap, seized Black Rat by the back of his cloak, and hauled him into the garage like a drowned chick.
Then Bolt kicked the emergency locking valve shut with all his strength!
Bang!
The door slammed down, locking the raging acid rain and the night outside.
“Lie still! I’m cutting your power and your network right now!”
Bolt roughly pinned Black Rat to the concrete floor. The heavy pneumatic hydraulic cutter in his hand let out a piercing pressurized shriek, its sharp tungsten blades bearing down with thunderous force on the yellow neural trunk cable spitting sparks at the back of Black Rat’s neck!
But one ten-thousandth of a second before the hydraulic cutter’s blades could close and sever the cable—
Clack.
A dull, icy metal impact sounded out of nowhere.
A pitch-black, freezing heavy mechanical hand covered in thick carbonized armor shot upward at a speed beyond the limits of human vision and clamped down hard on the blades of Bolt’s pneumatic hydraulic cutter, whose rated output reached three tons!
Creak… creak…
The teeth-grating sound of twisting steel spread through the silent garage. The specialized hydraulic blades, powerful enough to cut through a solid steel beam, were actually crushed inward and deformed under the purely physical grip of Black Rat’s right hand, as easily as soft mud!
“What the—?!” Bolt’s pupils contracted violently. His entire body jolted as though struck by lightning.
Black Rat, who had been howling in pain and begging for help on the floor, suddenly stopped struggling and sobbing altogether.
Slowly, at an angle that completely violated the physiological limits of a human cervical spine, he rotated his head backward a hundred and twenty degrees to face the dumbstruck Bolt.
In the flickering yellow light overhead, Taichi saw everything clearly from beneath the operating table. The human eyeballs that had once been distinctly black and white were completely gone from Black Rat’s sockets. In their place were two bottomless vortexes, spinning and leaping madly with crimson binary code!
The corners of Black Rat’s mouth stretched upward at an utterly unnatural angle, the flesh tearing open as thick, cold black blood poured out.
Then, from the depths of Black Rat’s ruined throat came a completely distorted, grotesque voice assembled from hundreds of overlapping metallic mechanical noises and frigid electronic tones:
“Target coordinates locked.”
“High-entropy frequency residue from Chen Shouren detected… Unauthorized data cleaner designation detected: NIL.”
Black Rat’s mechanical right arm suddenly jolted. The cooling cover at the exact center of its palm snapped open, revealing a high-frequency plasma cutting blade spinning at tremendous speed and flashing with dazzling blue-white arcs!
“Found you… you lower-level pieces of trash.”