"Szzzzzzzt—!"
A piercing high-frequency plasma cutting blade carved an intensely blinding arc of ghostly blue electricity through the cramped, dim garage.
The arc carried temperatures of over ten thousand degrees and a powerful ozone stench, slicing past Bolt's nose by a hair! The moisture in the air ionized and evaporated in an instant, bursting with sharp crackles. The blade's aftershock swept across the edge of the workbench. An entire row of precision screwdrivers and wrenches forged from high-carbon steel snapped cleanly within one ten-thousandth of a second of touching the blue-white blade, as if they were blocks of butter under a knife. Red-hot droplets of molten metal sprayed from the cuts!
"Fuck!"
Bolt was built like a black bear, but the combat muscle memory he'd accumulated through twenty years of scrapping in black-market pits and war zones let him execute an extreme evasive maneuver at the line between life and death.
He suddenly threw himself backward. His back slammed into the oil-slick puddle covering the floor, and he used the momentum of the slide to move more than two meters backward.
"Shrrrk!"
The plasma blade skimmed his scalp, instantly scorching the beard and several strands of gray-white hair on top of his head and filling the air with the acrid stench of burnt protein.
"Don't shoot! Bolt! Whatever you do, don't shoot!"
Crouched beneath the lead-lined base of the operating table, Taichi screamed in a distorted shriek.
He pointed frantically at the dark corner three meters behind Bolt. "There are four full drums of high-purity chemical acetone cleaner stacked behind you, and two cans of industrial ether right beside them! If you miss that shot or a ricochet ignites the gas, this entire underground garage will turn into a sealed firebomb in one microsecond!"
Bolt's fingers had just started swinging his heavy electromagnetic smoothbore rifle up onto his shoulder when they suddenly froze. He forced the barrel downward and cursed furiously, spraying spit everywhere.
"I know, you little shit! Think of something, fast! This fucking possessed corpse's output is already overclocked to four hundred percent! My hydraulic cybernetic arm can't withstand more than three hits from that plasma cutter!"
Standing on the concrete floor was Black Rat—or rather, the high-entropy code monster controlling Black Rat's corpse. It slowly rotated the head that had been twisted a hundred and twenty degrees.
The flesh around its neck had been completely torn apart, exposing stark-white cervical vertebrae and severed blood vessels. Yet not a drop of blood flowed. Every wound had been carbonized and welded shut by the arc's intense heat. The heavy military-grade cybernetic arm on its right shoulder released hydraulic high-pressure inflation noises like an enraged beast roaring. The plasma blade slashed wildly through the air, leaving behind streaks of ghostly blue afterimages.
"Tactical assessment of target organism complete."
Before Taichi's retinas, ECHO's deep decompilation interface refreshed frantically at sixty frames per second:
"The target organism's brain has long been completely brain-dead. The entity currently controlling this body is the 'Styx Military Tactical Assist Chip' inside the cybernetic arm, forcibly overwritten by high-entropy code. The code is violently overclocking the system and squeezing every bit of potential from the servo motors."
"Target advantages: physical strength exceeding 3.2 tons; close-range cutting and destructive power: S-class."
"Fatal hardware flaw: This cybernetic arm uses Styx's early-development fourth-generation bidirectional hydraulic servo valve. When the plasma cutting blade releases energy at full power, the coolant reverse-flow system in its elbow joint has a fixed hardware reset delay of 0.28 seconds!"
"Furthermore, its visual capture unit is a 'Zenith Type-3 multispectral thermal-imaging lens.' It lacks dynamic white-balance compensation at the modern software layer for high-temperature heat sources and violently intense light!"
"Taichi, look thirty centimeters to your left. That industrial halogen spotlight used to service the undercarriage!"
Lying prone on the cold, greasy concrete floor, Taichi's eyes instantly locked onto the heavy portable spotlight wedged in the corner of the operating table, its surface caked with oil and scratches.
It was a five-kilowatt quartz-halogen lamp encased in cast aluminum, originally used for nighttime high-altitude work at the abandoned port. A dual-layer insulated high-voltage rubber cable as thick as a thumb trailed from its rear.
"I see it! What do I do?!" Taichi shouted urgently inside his mind.
"That puppet relies entirely on optical and thermal signals to lock onto our brain's neural potentials." ECHO's voice was clipped and lethal. "Connect the spotlight's power cable directly to the exposed 380-volt three-phase copper power bus beside it! Then, 0.2 seconds after its next cutting swing misses, fire straight into the facial sensors with everything you've got!"
"Use the purest physical lumens and photon impact to burn straight through its photosensitive wafers!"
"Taichi! If you don't do something right fucking now, this bastard's going to cut me in half!"
At the workbench, Bolt had already been driven into a desperate fight for his life.
Black Rat's cybernetic arm came crashing down from above with a shrill howl that tore through the air! Bolt roared and gripped a solid high-carbon-steel crowbar weighing fifty jin with both hands, bracing it firmly across the top of his head!
"KLANGGGG—!"
A deafening metallic boom exploded through the garage!
The instant the plasma blade bit into the crowbar, a storm of violent blue-white sparks erupted! Under the horrifying heat and force, the solid steel bar visibly reddened, softened, and bent downward in seconds! Both of Bolt's knees slammed into the concrete, smashing two shallow craters into the floor. The hydraulic lines in his cybernetic left arm burst instantly, and scalding hydraulic oil sprayed across his sweat-soaked face like blood!
"Crack!"
The crowbar snapped! The instant the plasma blade shattered the steel bar, the cooling vent at the cybernetic arm's elbow joint blasted out a plume of white coolant gas, and its movement locked up for an extremely brief 0.28 seconds!
Now!
"You little bastard! Open your eyes and take a good look!"
Like a wild wolf cornered with nowhere left to run, Taichi suddenly leaped out from beneath the operating table!
He clutched the twenty-jin industrial halogen spotlight with both hands and, with brutally self-destructive force, rammed its exposed thick copper plug into the sparking 380-volt power-switch copper bus on the wall!
"BOOM—!"
A savage high-voltage current surged into the spotlight's quartz tube within one-thousandth of a second!
An extreme pure-white radiance, like a supernova exploding inside an enclosed space, suddenly detonated in the cramped, dim garage!
Forty thousand lumens of insane photon energy, carrying searing heat reaching six hundred degrees, struck the multispectral optical sensors on Black Rat's face at point-blank range—less than half a meter away—with the merciless force of a solid sledgehammer forged from light!
"SZZZZT—!"
The four miniature multispectral photosensitive chips and optical quartz lenses inside Black Rat's eye sockets were completely burned through and melted within one microsecond under the direct assault of the raging photon flood!
Black-and-white smoke and the reek of scorched silicone poured from its eye sockets. The lenses shattered into countless tiny glowing-red fragments!
『Fatal error: Optical sensor array fully burned out! Heat-source signal lost!』
A shrill, distorted synthetic alarm sounded from inside Black Rat's body. The blind cybernetic arm flailed wildly through the air. Its plasma cutting blade slammed into an I-beam crossbeam in the ceiling, slicing straight through the half-meter-thick steel girder. Red-hot iron cascaded down like rain!
"Bolt! Ceiling! The pulley hook!" Blinded by the glare, Taichi could see nothing as tears streamed wildly from his eyes, but he still screamed at the top of his lungs from memory.
"Get the fuck... down!"
The veteran's battlefield rapport was on full display!
Bolt, his face slick with oil, rolled backward along the floor. His undamaged right hand seized a thick metal pull chain beside the wall, soaked in machine oil, and he yanked down with every ounce of his strength!
"Clatter-clatter-clatter—!"
Above the ceiling, an electric pulley assembly originally used to hoist diesel engines for heavy mining trucks suddenly unlocked and went haywire!
An enormous cast-iron engine block weighing a full eight hundred kilograms, connected to a rusted crankshaft, thundered straight down its rail with earth-shattering force and slammed onto the blind puppet's head!
"CRASH—!"
A terrifying boom that made everyone's chests convulse violently erupted underground!
The eight-hundred-kilogram solid cast-iron engine block used unstoppable physical momentum to smash Black Rat's ruined body—and the berserk military-grade cybernetic arm—into the concrete floor like a bug!
The solid concrete floor instantly split with more than a dozen cracks reaching half a foot deep. The crisp sound of Black Rat's bones being pulverized into dust rang clearly through the garage, while black machine oil and viscous dead blood splashed outward like mud!
Yet even with half its body crushed into a meat patty, the black military-grade cybernetic arm continued writhing frantically at the edge of the engine block. The plasma blade in its palm carved one after another of deep, charred-red furrows into the floor.
"The micro nuclear battery inside it is still supplying power!" Bolt panted, grabbing a heavy sledgehammer and starting toward it.
"Don't smash the battery! You'll trigger a secondary radioactive explosion!" ECHO issued a sharp warning inside Taichi's brain. "Taichi! Grounding clamp! Cut the exposed yellow analog neural bus at its seventh cervical vertebra!"
Taichi didn't hesitate for even half a second.
The timid, death-fearing bottom-level laborer who normally cowered at the first sign of trouble in Abandoned Port 13 had, after passing through several cycles of life and death, found a beastlike decisiveness erupting from the depths of his eyes.
He snatched up a pair of heavy high-voltage insulated cutters connected to two meters of thick red-copper wire. Stepping across scalding iron and slick black blood, he slid on one knee to the engine block.
Black Rat's mangled head twitched at an impossible angle. Blue smoke rose from its scorched eye sockets, and its mouth kept spitting out a monotonous, stuttering electronic voice: "Clear... clear... noise..."
Taichi didn't even blink. The insulated cutters in his hands plunged like a precision surgical blade into the depths of Black Rat's heat-scorched cervical spine and clamped down hard on the thick neural-fiber cable glowing with a faint yellow light!
"Fucking... disconnect!"
Taichi let out a hoarse roar, throwing his entire body weight onto the cutter handles!
"Snip!"
A crisp metallic snap erupted alongside a dazzling burst of golden electric arc!
The berserk military-grade cybernetic arm suddenly locked rigid.
Then the dazzling high-frequency plasma cutting blade in its palm rapidly went dark like a receding tide. The hydraulic piston inside the arm let out one long hiss of escaping pressure, and the entire limb went limp on the cold, greasy floor, never moving again.
The garage once again fell into suffocating silence.
All that remained in the air was the thick, acrid smell of blood, scorching, and ozone, reminding the two men just how dangerous that close-quarters fight of less than forty seconds had been.
"Huff... huff..."
Taichi tossed aside the insulated cutters and collapsed against the enormous engine block, utterly drained. Both hands shook uncontrollably as his chest heaved.
Bolt dragged his damaged, smoking cybernetic left arm over, reached down, and hauled Taichi off the floor. With his black-oil-covered hand, he gave Taichi's back several heavy slaps. "Nice work, you little shit... Never figured those scrap-pulling hands of yours would hit harder than my wrench when your life was on the line."
"Save it..." Taichi wiped the cold sweat and bloody spittle from his face and gave a bitter laugh. "Find out where this arm came from. Black Rat was just a low-level rat who delivered smuggled goods. There's no way he could've gotten his hands on a military-grade weapon like this."
Bolt crouched down and pulled a fine steel scraper from his tool bag. Carefully, he scraped away the layer of camouflage paint blackened by fire and extreme heat on the cybernetic arm's shoulder.
As flakes of paint fell away, several lines of dark-gold engravings and anti-counterfeit markings, etched with high-precision lasers, emerged beneath the alloy armor—
A black river emblem coiled around a metal skull. Beneath it was a line of cold, glaring military-industrial text:
【Styx Heavy Industries (Styx Heavy Industries) · 4th Assault Sequence · Special-Grade Experimental Neural Weapon】
【Asset ID: STYX-EXP-0881】
Bolt stared at the skull-and-river emblem. His pupils contracted to pinpoints, and even his breathing stopped for an instant.
"Styx Heavy Industries..." Taichi recognized the emblem too. "The one among the Big Three megacorps that controls weapons, heavy industry, and private mercenaries? This arm isn't AETHER's?!"
"That's the most disgusting—and most fascinating—thing about this city, you worthless punks."
ECHO let out a mocking, icy laugh deep inside Taichi's brain.
"AETHER handles human experimentation and waste cleanup in District 13, while their mortal enemies at Styx Heavy Industries... secretly install custom cybernetic limbs with backdoors in black-market smugglers, specifically to 'salvage' and 'capture' those high-risk S-class ghost data leaks."
"The two megacorps maintain the appearance of peaceful order in the Zenith District while conducting the filthiest arms deals imaginable beneath our feet, in the stinking gutters, using living people and ghosts."
Bolt slowly stood and looked down at his own old cybernetic left arm, which bore the same battered Styx emblem. A deeply buried hatred accumulated over eight years began burning in his eyes.
"Drake..." Bolt forced the name through clenched teeth.
"This city's rot goes far deeper than we ever imagined." Taichi kicked aside the broken steel pipe at his feet, an unprecedented chill rising in the depths of his eyes. "But now... at least we've got one military-grade piece of hardware in our hands."
He looked down at the Styx military-grade cybernetic arm. It was somewhat deformed, but its core remained intact.
A truly armed-to-the-teeth, desperate counterattack was about to begin.