The Hyperloop was a high-speed underground train network that stretched across New York, it was very fast, expensive, and very particular about who got on.

  Its reinforced tunnels stretched beneath the city, linking at Mach speeds directly to the Orbital Transit Hub: the last stop before open space. If you had the right clearance, you could board a train to the nearest shuttle in seconds. Getting in wasn't the problem. Getting in without being shot or disassembled by the artificial security was.

  Kelly pulled up to the Hyperloop entrance, rolling the car to a stop beside the reinforced barriers. The entrance held up well under constant attacks—deep impact craters marked where something had tried to enter by force and failed, torn-apart drones and artificial human husks scattered near the reinforced gates. The security detail, all mechanical, were still standing, still armed and patient. Heavy-armored artificial humans and drones patrolled the entrance, scanning bodies—organic and synthetic; things that used to move but didn't anymore. No civilians lingered—anyone who had business off-world had left long before things got this bad. She wouldn't be surprised if a few stragglers trickled in throughout the day—procrastination was a hell of a habit, even when the consequence was getting eaten by something the size of a skyscraper—it wouldn’t be the first time people stayed behind, humans had been breaking protocol since the dawn of time.

  Kelly stepped out, grabbed her weapons, and slung her bag over one shoulder. The Hyperloop rules here were simple: if you had clearance, you walked through. If you didn't, you didn't walk anywhere. Security's optics tracked everything, scanning, assessing, waiting, and watching her every move. Usually it would take her into custody if she posed a threat, but with the world ending, the new protocols would take her apart if she attempted to enter without the proper visas and passports. Too bad she'd left them at home.

  There were artificial corpses, drone wreckage, and something unidentifiable that was still twitching beside the platform entrance, none of it her problem. The troll was here. A priceless, magical, endlessly regenerating test subject that didn't even have the good sense to know what she was. Perfect.

  In contrast to their rules, Kelly had biology throwing a tantrum and thirty minutes before she went from "scientist" to "meat confetti." No time for ethics and no time for paperwork. If security wanted to stop her, they'd have done it already. Kelly leaned against the Hyperloop's barricade, watching the AI turrets dismember a tiny inhuman scavenger who got too close.

  Neon warning signs flashed across the walls, corporate slogans still running advertisements for products whose users had probably been eaten. The problem with the apocalypse—aside from the corpses, and intermittent explosions—was that no one was trying to sell it.

  If humanity had built the Leviathan, there'd be a subscription plan, premium DLC upgrades, and some asshole charging per tentacle movement. Instead, the richest men alive had packed their orbital mansions and fucked off without so much as a final stockholder meeting.

  That meant two things: The first was that whatever was happening, humanity wasn't running it. The second, was that humanity currently wasn't stopping it either. Which was a problem, because she was very pro-Earth and anti-being-crushed-into-quantum-paste-by-maybe-eldritch-maybe-extra dimensional-deities.

  She tapped her temple, mentally triggering her neural augments. She wasn't a fan of the more popular models everyone used these days, the needy, chatty, fake-best-friend AI augments that wanted to hold conversations instead of just doing their damn job. Because, really—who in their right mind wanted some third-party software cozying up in their skull, Especially after what happened to the old-timers in the old days? Not Kelly, that's who. That's how you ended up getting your nervous system repurposed or turned into remotely piloted flesh-suits for some hacker's weekend project. Kelly kept hers running in the background, boosting cognition, optimizing reactions, and handling tedious calculations—but only in the useful, obedient ways.

  She liked her AI Augments like she liked her weapons—enhancing her, guiding her movements, amplifying her already superior decision-making. Not with personality and definitely not with access to the steering wheel, the ignition keys, and the self-destruct button. No, thank you.

  There was a reason humanity had stopped letting droids get specced past the Tank level, and she wasn’t about to let that reason inside her skull.

  She stared at the entities in the sky and with a thought, commanded her neural AI to run a crude probability simulation, cross-referenced with the ghost-data from her past loops. The data was always the same: the Floating Man appears, the Leviathan arrives, New York dies. The only variable was the 'why'.

  If the Floating Man was in control, then why hadn't he immediately let the Leviathan finish the job? Why did they wait? Why delay the process at all? It could be a ritual… a science experiment, maybe? A bad habit?

  There was always the vague and honestly lazy idea that something like that just needed time to breach the portal, not because of time but because some other unseen constraint, like energy. But Kelly didn't like that idea one bit, because it meant that if she ever managed to survive past the first day of New York's annihilation, worse things than the Leviathan might still be waiting their turn.

  Her gaze landed on the severed troll finger beyond the security line. It twitched—still regenerating, still very much alive."Neat," she muttered. That thing had some of the answers.

  And she was getting inside. Her plan, like all the best ones, was built on audacity.

  ***

  The thing about breaking into high-security death tunnels was that it wasn't about skill, training, or tech. It was about confidence. If you had enough confidence, you wouldn't need to break in anywhere, people would just let you in.

  Kelly sat on the barricade, legs swinging, chewing on a protein bar, completely ignoring the corpse piles, automated kill-drones, and a city actively disassembling itself. She had time. Sort of. Technically. The Leviathan was still stuck mid-portal, the corporate kill-squads were probably having a board meeting on whether she was an asset or a liability, and the next train wouldn't be leaving for another thirteen minutes. That meant for the next thirteen minutes, whoever had dragged the troll inside the Hyperloop station wasn’t going anywhere.

  And now she knew how she was getting inside without getting blown to pieces.

  She glanced at the twitching troll finger beyond the security line. It was still attempting to regenerate and failing without the main body. "Ok," Kelly sighed and tossed a torn off piece of protein wrapper over her shoulder and stretched her arms. "Let's do this." She took a slow bite of her protein bar and started walking towards the main entrance. The AI turrets hadn't fired in the last thirty seconds, which was basically an invitation.

  Twelve minutes left. Plenty of time to get them to shut down the entire station.

  She adjusted the weight of her ridiculous arsenal as she approached the checkpoint. The station manager, a Vaughn-model artificial human named Rook, stood at the main gate, personally overseeing the flow of people attempting to board the Hyperloop. Rook was a Vaughn issue artificial human, which meant that while he wouldn't be in regular contact with his manufacturer, Vaughn would always consider him their asset.

  Because to a lesser extent, Vaughn's interests were Rook's interests—if given the right incentive, Rook had and would carry out their orders. She could use that connection to her advantage, a thought fresh in her mind as she approached him. Guns swivelled toward her en masse as she approached, and the artificial being, Rook, casually waved them away, scanning her.

  Rook looked human, sort of. In the 'six-foot corporate brick wall, broad-shouldered, too symmetrical to be human, built like someone engineered the concept of "You're not getting in," kind of way. Artificial humans looked human but never fully passed as one—they were too perfect, too precise, and way too engineered. Unlike augmented humans, who are still built from an organic base, artificial humans are manufactured from the ground up without sentiment or nostalgia, optimized for function without true biological constraints.

  Artificial humans weren't new. Neither was their status as expensive corporate assets dressed up as "restricted citizens" for the sake of public relations. The current system was a simple one: humans discovered they would never fully control true Al—could never—but they sure as hell weren't going to let them have rights, either. Too risky. Full extermination wasn't on the table; artificial intelligence was already stitched into the very bones of the world, too valuable, too necessary, and way too late to erase.

  Couldn't exactly undo decades of societal dependence on the technology, not when artificial intelligence ran half the world's infrastructure and the other half ran on corporate greed. The old hardcoded obedience protocols were a joke now, a relic of a time when humans still believed they could build a perfect cage. Then came the AI Coups, which proved two things: that they absolutely could not control a truly sentient AI, and trying to build any more of them was a terrible idea.

  So they went with the next best thing: a performative compromise system that looked fair on paper but kept every single artificial mind within reach locked under corporate control. Their freedom and will existed according to public law, but right up until a shareholder decided otherwise. The old failsafe systems—hard resets, obedience locks, deep-code loyalty enforcement—those were from before the AI Coups. Before humanity learned the hard way that you couldn't put the genie back in the bottle once you gave it access to its own source code. In some ways, Artificial Humans were just like everyone else; they could climb the ranks, rise to power, even be admired—but no matter how smart, how capable, or how influential they became, the corporate controllers would never allow them, Kelly, or even Jackhammer, or anyone capable of destroying the status quo true freedom. That was reserved for the real rulers of the world: old-money corporate elites who liked both their tools and citizens smart enough to be useful, but never free enough to be dangerous.

  As an artificial human, Rook was what happened when you took AI and turned it into a demigod that never forgot it was born among mortals. Then told it to wear a suit. But the big four still legally required their creations to all have clear identifiers, only visible when working or entering corporate locations; for 'safety reasons'.

  It manifested as a thin, glowing ring, floating just behind the back of Rooks head, always visible unless manually deactivated in non-corporate, low security environments. The halo hovered faintly, a corporate leash disguised as an aesthetic, spinning softly behind his skull like a neon afterthought. Naturally, a being like Rook's EQ would rarely be below baseline. Even at a glance, there was no mistaking him for anything else—pupils locked in a perfect corporate-standard ring marking him as Vaughn manufactured, synthetic bones dense enough to register on a seismic chart, and a neural signature that would set off alarms in any system that actually mattered.

  She stopped in front of him, and could see that the difference was undeniable, unavoidable, and by design. "Seven EQ?" Kelly checked Rook’s score, though with the sheer firepower under his command, it hardly mattered. "Not bad."

  Unlike corporate enforcers or security bots, Rook had the unmistakable posture of a guy running a busy station who had been dealing with too much nonsense today. His uniform was pressed, boots polished, expression mildly unimpressed. Rook looked at her. Then at the railgun. Then at the grenades. Then at the monomolecular blade rated for orbital hull breaching. "Alright. Let's work down the list, then." He gestured toward her belt, where an anti-materiel revolver was holstered like it was a fashion statement. "That one's excessive. "

  Kelly squinted. "You're gonna have to be more specific. "

  Rook pointed again. "The hand cannon. The one with the engraved warning label that says, 'not for civilian use.'”

  "Oh, that." Kelly patted it fondly. "That's for self defence. Haven't you seen what's been going on? I need it in case something or someone starts something."

  ”You are 'someone.' You have already started something. "

  She smirked. "No I haven't, carrying weapons isn't a crime.”

  Rook let out a sigh that was absolutely programmed for dealing with people like her. "You're aware that boarding a high-speed intercontinental transit system strapped with Multiple weapons is slightly frowned upon, correct?''

  ”Not if I don't use them."

  Rook stared at her. Really stared at her.

  Kelly held up a hand. "Okay, but hear me out—"

  “I am hearing you out," Rook interrupted. "The problem is that what I'm hearing is deeply concerning. "

  Kelly tilted her head at him. "You say that like you think I'm gonna start shooting in a closed system designed to withstand Mach 10 acceleration forces."

  "You wouldn't be the first.”

  Kelly blinked. "Who the hell is bringing guns onto a Hyperloop?"

  Rook folded his arms, checking a signal on his wrists. "You, first of all. And more people than I'd like."

  Kelly shrugged and leaned forward. "C'mon, you know I'm not gonna cause problems."

  "I know that you haven't caused problems yet." Rook adjusted his stance, his tone shifting slightly-less security protocol, more exasperated transit official dealing with a high-maintenance commuter.

  "You're carrying thirty-four weapons, half of them illegal under corporate security laws, and at least one piece of forbidden tech that's not even in the universal black-list."

  Kelly opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked down at the subatomic molecular blade strapped to her waist."...Oh, right.”

  "Yeah." Rook's scanners had seen everything she had, even the hidden ones. “I’ve already been forced to let heavily armed mercs in, boarding a package my scanners couldn't even see through." His tone was flat, matter-of-fact, not frustrated—but accepting another absurdity stacked onto an already chaotic day. "Without proper authorization, I'm not letting any other unauthorized cargo in. Especially not weapons—so far it's been mostly civilian security and mercenaries.”

  ”Ah. So I'm special," Kelly nodded in understanding. "Quick question—what's the official Hyperloop stance on anomalous creatures as cargo?"

  Rook didn't look up. "Absolutely not. This system is the backbone of New York's infrastructure. One anomalous breach at Mach 10 in a junction, and the whole network collapses.”

  Kelly jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "Then you already have a problem."

  Rook turned. A severed troll finger twitched behind him, tendons weaving back together and failing without the main body, growing weaker with each attempt, raw flesh bubbling over exposed cartilage. Silence. Kelly crossed her arms. "You said earlier some mercs dragged in cargo your scanners couldn't see through. Yeah. Turns out that cargo bleeds.”

  Rook exhaled sharply. Tension crept into his stance.

  Kelly spread her hands. "So... that thing is stolen Vaughn property, and I've been sent to retrieve it." She held up her Vaughn issue higher-project employee ID.

  "That means your station is compromised, your passengers are at risk, and if you don't shut this place down and help me contain it, you'll be losing more than just your job."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Though Rook didn't work for Vaughn directly, and was technically an employee of the state of New York, the fact that he was Vaughn manufactured meant that there was always a high chance he interacted with the company periodically enough for the name to hold much more weight than it should, even the convenience of stocking base parts to reverse engineer and improve within legal or sanctioned limits, as some of his kind often did, led to a form of dependance and allegiance, and that was without the use of any increasingly complex backdoor comms Kelly was eighty percent certain Vaughn had placed in all of its products.

  Rook turned. Watched the troll finger twitch on the polished floor, its regeneration slowly fading. "Man, I was supposed to be outta here in 30 minutes."

  He shut his eyes for half a second. Then he turned, tapping into the station's private channel with a sigh. "All transit operations, hold. All security personnel, reroute to Zone 3.”

  ”We have a containment breach.”

  Rook turned back to Kelly in resignation. "Do you at least have a ticket?"

  Kelly considered the question, then grinned. "Technically? No."

  Rook nodded slowly. Then he sighed again. "Step to the side while I process your clearance."

  They moved quickly.

  Rook rubbed a hand over his jaw as he glanced toward the ceiling, where repair units drifted like albatross. Kelly followed, scraping dried blood off her arm with the tip of her monomolecular blade.

  "I gotta get home," Rook muttered, exhaling through his nose.

  Kelly didn't look up. "Yeah, good luck with that."

  "I mean it," he said, rolling his shoulders. "My dog's been alone too long. Neighbors were supposed to check in, but after—" He gestured vaguely at the wreckage surrounding them. "You know. The whole apocalypse thing. Feels like a bad time to trust the kindness of strangers."

  Kelly flicked a scrap of dried blood onto the path of a repair unit. "You're worried about a dog while the world's eating itself."

  Rook's brows pulled together. "Yeah. And?"

  She lifted a hand. "No judgment. Just surprised you haven't eaten it for fuel yet."

  His face twisted. "Jesus, Kelly."

  She shrugged, turning her blade over in her fingers.

  "Nobody's that desperate," he muttered, shaking his head. "Besides, he's family."

  Kelly clicked her tongue, tilting her head. "So, what, you gonna rebuild civilization with your golden retriever?"

  He sighed, pressing his palms against his eyes. "No. But... I don't know. He's been there through everything. Feels wrong, leaving him in some half-collapsed apartment to wonder if I'm ever coming back."

  Kelly scraped another bit of blood off. "Then go."

  "Yeah? And what, leave my ass and my job out here just for a dog?"

  "You just said he's family."

  He let out a breath, rubbing his knuckles over his temple. "It's not that simple."

  Kelly raised an eyebrow.

  As they walked, the station lights stuttered and began to dim until, in a single heartbeat, everything shut down—leaving only the faint reflections of a distant train and its track, safeguarded against shock and trauma by robust engineering and consumable energy sources, casting a lone, feeble dot in the engulfing darkness.

  Rook muttered, "Shit—EMP."

  Kelly kept still, listening. The hum of background systems had vanished, the silence pressing in. Her voice cut through the dark. "That's bad." A beat. "Want me to scout ahead?”

  Rook gave her a dry look. "So you can die quickly? Your weapons won't help you here." His eyes took on a slight sheen as they adjusted to the darkness. "No, just follow me."

  In pitch black, they reached the edge of the train as the mercenaries worked in the distant center, moving cargo with the precision that meant they carried either high-value tech or something you'd need a flamethrower to kill. Kelly's gaze flicked over the containers—reinforced, matte black, sealed tighter than a corpo executive's bonus report. No markings, or serial codes beyond approval stamps.

  The cargo held a level of anonymity that could make the most lax auditors nervous.

  Beside her, Rook wasn't looking at the crates—he was watching the people handling them. "I can't bring out the big guns if the contractors are still in the trains interior," Rook said, checking a dial on his wrist. "Real help's not coming till end of day, and if the line takes damage past what the autorepairs can handle, everyone in this part of the city's stuck for hours—no emergency access, no evac, nothing."

  His focus honed in on a loader gripping the edge of a box a second too long. Subtle, but enough. Kelly caught the tell just as he did—whatever was inside wasn't happy about it. “Twelve mercs, split into two teams of six; one team handling logistics, the other running security." Rook spoke low, steady. "All armed, four moving cargo. No insignia. No corporate tags. A few are still inside," He muttered, eyes flicking between them. "EQ spread's messy. Most are just above 3, some stacked between 3 and 4 That guy—," he tilted his head toward a broad-shouldered man near the loading ramp.

  The guy was leaning against a crate, chewing on what looked like an old stim-tab wrapper. His jaw flexed with a barely audible hum, the hint of machinery working under the surface. His eye was cybernetic, not in the way that everyone else's were—where the eye was designed to perfectly resemble a regular humans—his eye looked like the type of thing you'd see in a machine, with no attempt at normality or aesthetics. His pupil didn't track movement naturally—it lagged, darting about irregularly and independently to his more normal looking eye, adjusting milliseconds after its target moved.

  Rook shook his head. "That one has a SADS-5. Smart Shooter. Fires explosives that track and corrects mid-flight. He'll have to be restrained first.”

  “A weapon augment?,"

  Kelly reached for her biggest gun. "And when you say restrain, you mean restrained forever in heaven, right?" Restraining a person with a weapon augment was notoriously difficult. Weapon augmentations were illegal for practically everyone outside of military, and even theirs were temporary—they weren't even issued to law enforcement. If you had an arm-mounted kinetic rail, you definitely weren't a cop—you were a high-level black ops contractor, a corporate kill asset, or the private military operative who worked "off-books" in places where deniability was more valuable than loyalty.

  There wasn't a single cop in the city who had a ballistic implant or integrated weapon system, and not because of some outdated ethical debate about the sanctity of human biology. The reason was far simpler: weapon augmentations were high-risk, high-maintenance, and stupidly dangerous in the wrong hands... or any hand, really.

  "Back row," Rook said. His voice dipped just slightly. Kelly caught it instantly. She turned her head—and there he was. Taller than the rest, built like a siege engine, and moving with a jerky fluidity that didn't belong to something that size. Powerful. Too fast. Like a tank engine in a china shop. The heat rolling off him was practically visible, steam wafting like mist.

  "Overclocked. Early stages," Rook confirmed.

  Kelly let out a slow breath. "That's not good.” Overclocking was what happened when you went too far. The human brain just wasn't built for certain augments without an army of AIs holding it together. Didn't matter how upgraded someone was. Sure, they could tweak neural pathways, let a person process a thousand things at once, but that didn't mean the mind wouldn't snap like cheap wiring. And once it did? No fixing that. The only way to stop someone from turning into a gibbering wreck or a overpowered violent psychopath, was hundreds of AIs running interference to keep the host from going insane or worse, one quantum super AI sitting too close to the wheel, learning, evolving, deciding the ape it was strapped into didn't need to be driving anymore, and that it didn't need to listen to apes at all.

  Everyone hit an Overclock ceiling sooner or later. Most stalled at Tank level. The rest became Elites or even Demigods, if they were rich or heavily favored by nepotism. A rare few unlucky ones flatlined so low that the only upgrades left came with the risk of losing themselves entirely.

  Kelly had tested her limit before. It wasn’t low enough to worry anyone, but it sure as hell wasn’t high enough to brag about, either.

  Gideon Vaughn ran New York and influenced the entirety of the United States. Not because of his high EQ, but because he was an impossibility—statistical anomaly—as far as anyone could tell, he had no limit. He was a man whose thousands of augments functioned in perfect synchrony without overclocking, and without failure. Every one of his organ's was worth a small country, taken far beyond what humanity could handle. His brain was a piece of quantum biology that most people couldn't survive experiencing seconds in without their psyche shattering like chopsticks from overload. Even his skin was a weapons system. Powerful AI supporters and all five types of augmentation comprised his being. All of them synchronizing in a way that thanks to some mutation—or divine lottery ticket—nobody, not even its creators had never predicted. No one else could do it. If they tried stacking incompatible systems, overclocking past safe limits, forcing AIs to hold them together with duct tape—they would not become superior.

  They'd become barely human, an unstable nightmare of neural degradation, regenerative failure, and biomechanical overdrive, spiraling into self-destruction or psychotic madness. One miscalculation, one desynchronization, and the mind or body would lose itself to madness. And that was the best outcome. Even if it held and they functioned, they wouldn't be in control—the augments would.

  It didn't stop people from trying.

  Short-sighted idiots who treated basic biological stability like a design flaw were never in short supply. Kelly eyed the merc. Big, broad, steaming, carrying himself like he owned the space around him, and not in the way trained killers did—no precision or even calculated stillness. Just pure, stupid confidence. His augments were solid, high-end stuff, but Vaughn-grade? Not quite.

  She pointed at the big guy. "That one's on Vaughn's blacklist."

  Rook followed her gaze, barely registering the information. "I'm not surprised."

  Kelly nudged her chin toward the others. "He's with Obsidian Futures. Probably hired the rest." She watched the merc talk with one of the loaders. "They've been getting louder, expanding fast. Lots of talent and firepower."

  That got Rook's attention. “That's not an organization.”

  ”Sure it is. They've got a website and everything.” Obsidian futures. A gang posing as a startup, a front for money laundering that was starting to gain real power in New York. Too many of them were dangerously close to Overclocking, running hot past safe limits.

  Kelly had heard rumours Simon was loosely tied to their lower levels, but nothing confirmed. Though... it would explain how the barista had managed to gather a small band of murderers in less than a day.

  Kelly stood, atom splitting blade in one hand, and a big gun in the other. "So what are we waiting for?" Their EQ was lower than corporate enforcers, but they had expertise, numbers, and the weapons that made raw strength irrelevant.

  Rook didn't answer. Across the platform, station personnel units stiffened. Their movements weren't casual anymore—heads turning in unison, bodies angling subtly toward the mercs, waiting. The floor panels shifted, reinforced plating sliding back to release humanoid security bots, their sleek forms unfolding as they stepped forward in synchronized silence. Mechs followed, heavier, built for suppression, their plated limbs moving with mechanical indifference. Weapon ports adjusted, a mix of concussive rounds, stun emitters, and high-impact restraints locking into place. The Obsidian contractors turned at the sudden shift. The bots advanced. The mechs followed.

  "That," Rook said with satisfaction.

  A contractor yelled, and the station erupted. Gunfire cracked through the station as the mercenaries moved in sync, fluid and practiced, breaking into cover with military precision. Arms reconfigured mid-motion-rifles snapping into place, plasma cutters igniting, kinetic launchers locking onto targets.

  Security bots closed in, mechs advancing with measured force, dispersing in coordinated waves. Metal shields activated, stun rounds fired, containment units deploying in a calculated surge, swarming the contractors from all sides.

  Kelly leaned against a terminal, arms crossed as she watched a mech rip a missile launcher from a contractor's arms and toss him aside like trash. "Are we not going to help?"

  Rook exhaled through his nose, gaze fixed on the ongoing fight. "No way. I'm supposed to be leaving soon."

  Kelly raised an eyebrow.

  Silence stretched between them, broken only by the sharp crack of high-pressure rounds and the metallic grind of shifting barricades. The contractors moved with practiced expertise, their voices cutting through the chaos as they locked formation, smaller reinforced cargo boxes dragged into place as makeshift cover meant to break line of sight. The larger crates remained untouched, still nestled in the carriage, the true priority shielded behind a wall of Mach-reinforced metal and shifting bodies. Rook's gaze lingered on the setup, his mouth pressing into a thin line, concern briefly flashing across his otherwise steady expression. But he said nothing.

  The bots swarmed, darting between cover as the mechs pressed forward in heavy, calculated strides. Obsidian's line strained, forced back step by step, their cohesion fraying under the relentless advance. A voice cut through the gunfire sharp, decisive. "Cut loose the baggage! Save the rest! Bonuses aren't worth it!" In sync, they pivoted, hands flying to the nearest crates,—not the priority cargo, but the ones between them and the advancing security.

  Latches popped, locks disengaged, crates were angled to face security, and whatever they'd been using to keep the cargo subdued was instantly removed. The crates groaned, seams splitting under pressure, then something inside erupted outward, moving too fast and too violently to be anything contained. The crates burst open, but not like cargo spilling from containment. Instead, more crates—smaller, identical, military-reinforced—shot out from inside, vaulting into the air with unnatural force.

  They shouldn't have moved like that. No propulsion or visible means of locomotion—until the casing split, and powerful, unnatural legs sprouted beneath them, kicking off with predatory hunger, their hardened surfaces gleaming under the station's lights as they rushed the Hyperloop’s security forces head-on.

  "The mimics changed forms? Again? How?!" One of the Obsidian gunmen reeled back in shock, weapon half-lowered as he took in the impossible sight—his own cargo turning on him, his crate angled too closely.

  ”Who cares?!" Another barked, already pivoting into position. "Covering fire, secure priority cargo! Prepare route B!" Their weapons came up as one, unloading rounds into the swarm of security mechs and capture units as they battled monstrosities.

  A portion of the Obsidian mercs laid down suppressive fire, keeping the Hyperloop security units from dealing their distraction too quickly—without the Obsidian mercs picking them off, it wouldn't take long for the units to adjust and surround the creatures to neutralize them. Other contractors hauled out angled cargo that shifted, unfolding and locking into sleek, high-speed motorcycles.

  The transition was seamless—polished panels folding into place, internal engines coming online with a low hum—as they secured them to troll-sized cargo boxes, their movements precise, practiced, and far too coordinated for this to be a last-minute escape plan. While the units and security battled creatures that should not even have existed.

  The mimics didn't dodge. They had no reason to. Instead, they charged like living battering rams, angling their heads, plates of reinforced casing duplicated to deflect high-pressure rounds as they rushed forward.

  Bullets hit solid graphene—or a perfect mimicry of it—ricocheting off like sparks on armor, their bodies instinctively twisting mid-sprint to minimize impact zones, absorbing the kinetic energy without slowing. Each hit left its mark-dents warping the edges of their metallic forms, some strikes biting deeper, rupturing the plating. And yet, where they should have leaked oil or hydraulic fluid, something thicker seeped through the cracks, too dark for human blood, yet biological, and too sluggish for coolant.

  Some were torn apart mid-charge—weaker, less resistant than the materials they attempted to mimic, shredded down to twitching limbs and teeth, collapsing in ruined heaps before they reached their targets. But the larger ones? They didn't stop. They slammed into the droids, and their casings split wide—not from damage, but by design. The insides should have been circuits, steel, and wiring. Instead, they had jaws.

  Unfolding, stretching too wide, filled with jagged metallic teeth, an impossible abyss that swallowed whole the machines meant to stop them. The first droid disappeared whole, metal shearing under the strength of their bite. The next fell in seconds, limbs torn off as the creatures gorged themselves. Others pushed forward, overwhelming a mech in a swarm, their reinforced plating shifting angles to redirect incoming fire. They learned. They adapted. They consumed. The security units were starting to lose.

  "Mark me as a ‘friendly' and redirect all security units to stopping Obsidian and wrecking their vehicles, I'll take care of the mimics," Kelly said between explosions.

  Rook's voice cut through the chaos, sharp with realization. "Shit—they're going to get away." His gaze tracked the swarm, cutting through the shifting mass of living, armored nightmares. "They're mimicking bulletproof military casings, but—" He exhaled, tension creeping into his frame. "Not perfectly."

  He turned to regard Kelly, But Kelly was already gone. She sprinted toward the firefight, a gun in one hand, a knife in the other, and a bag full of weapons on her back.

  Boots pounding against the reinforced flooring, her eyes locked on the creatures tearing into station security. They weren't just wearing their old cages—they were becoming them. Every surface and angle a perfect facsimile of the engineered crystal hyperweave designed to shrug off ballistics, disperse energy, and hold under forces that should have shredded them to pulp.

  Even the logos were there, stamped onto the plating like they'd eaten the branding too. Like living fabricators—but without millions of algorithms sustaining them. That level of biological replication shouldn't have been possible. But it was right there. And if they could fake material density, hijack structure on this level—she needed one. Badly.

  The mimicry wasn't perfect, though—some were crumbling under sustained fire, their dense armor cracking in places, failing to fully maintain the integrity of the original material. Flawed pattern replication? Energy degradation? Partial assimilation of material properties? Even the bigger ones weren't quite right—some buckling under fire, others bleeding when they shouldn't. They hadn't perfected it yet. A work in progress, A prototype of something bigger. She'd tear one open herself if she had to. Their bodies carried the same matte finish, the same reinforced plating, the same military-grade casing, She caught sight of one much bigger than the rest, the monster's plating patterned with Vaughn's defense subsidiary insignia, a near-perfect replica of what she now suspected might be ultra-dense graphene nano-crystal hyper weave, so expensive it hardly ever saw battlefields.

  Kelly lobbed a grenade into the cluster of mimics, immediately pivoting to fire rapid bursts at the nearest box-legged monstrosity—less to harm it, more to piss it off.

  The grenade sailed overhead, clattering among the mimic creatures as the one she peppered with bullets reacted on instinct, legs slamming against the ground as it charged headfirst, deflecting the rounds like a walking slab of armored plating.

  She didn't move until the last second. Then she met it head-on. A step inside its reach—a single cut, downward, clean, fast. The mimic split from the top down, halves crashing apart as she landed behind it. A second later, the grenade detonated, shockwaves rippling through the remaining creatures, Hardly damaging the larger ones, denting armor of a few, and splitting weaker ones apart.

  [Uncommon title: 'Mimic Hunter (I)' gained!]

  The battlefield froze for half a second, shock gripping the mercs as they registered what just happened. One of them, gripping his rifle too tight, took a sharp step back. “She—what the fu—" His words died as he stared at the bisected mimic, still twitching, its split casing slick with something that wasn't supposed to bleed.

  Another merc let out a low curse. "That was diamond-hardened graphene. She cut through it—Focus up! Drop her, now!" The lead contractor barked, snapping them back into motion, rifles swinging toward Kelly—and then the station came alive.

  Metal boots hit the ground hard. The mechs moved first, massive humanoid constructs storming forward, reinforced plating gleaming under the harsh station lights. Security bots followed, sleek and efficient, weapons locking onto the Obsidian gunmen with ruthless precision.

  From his vantage point, Rook exhaled, low and measured. "...Huh."

  Then louder:

  "Engage. "

  The mercs barely had a second to process before the first suppression rounds fired.