He hit the ledge of the Xelara tower in a silent, controlled roll, the impact absorbed by his augmented limbs. The wind and the blaring alarms were a chaotic symphony around him. He didn't look back to see how Echo would cross; she'd said she was capable, and in the fractured logic of this memory, he had to trust that. He rose to a crouch and began scanning for their entry point.

  "Find anything?" Her voice was suddenly right behind him.

  He turned to see her standing there, a grappling line retracting silently into a device on her wrist.

  "Yeah," he said, impressed despite himself. "I can cut the window, but it's thick and might take a minute. There's a conduit just under the wall next to it. You may be able to hack in and get us access quicker."

  She nodded and knelt by the wall, pulling a small tablet and a tangle of wires from her pocket. "Step back." The window lock clicked and hissed open a moment later. "Alright, we're in."

  "Good work," he told her, already vaulting through the open window.

  The crimson emergency lights painted the corridor in strobing, bloody flashes. He moved to a corner and peered around it. Four figures stood in the hallway, their forms glitching and unstable. Data Phantoms, digital ghosts of corporate security, woven from static and corrupted code.

  He turned back to Echo. "Stand back."

  When he was sure she was clear, he reached his arm around the corner and:

  

  [PULSE ACTIVATED]

  The lights in the hallway went black. The phantoms shrieked, their forms dissolving into a chaotic burst of static as the [PULSE] washed over them. He was already moving, the thermal vision of his mask cutting through the darkness.

  They were stunned, but not destroyed. The [PULSE] was enough to stun these ones, but not enough to delete them outright.

  He flowed through them, a blade in the dark. His combat knife found the first phantom's ‘neck,’ and it dissolved into a shower of dying pixels. He grabbed the stun baton from its dissipating hand.

  The second phantom, a rifleman, turned toward the noise. Lucien cracked the baton against the rifle's barrel, then slammed it into the phantom's face. It staggered, and he used the opening to vault up, wrap his legs around its head, and twist, snapping its digital ‘neck’ with a sickening crunch.

  It felt good to get back into his groove—he was a blur of brutal efficiency. The last two phantoms were dispatched before the crimson lights could even begin to flicker back to life.

  He stood in the silent, dimly lit hallway, the last phantom dissolving at his feet. Flickering, glitching bodies appeared in heaps on the ground, memories of where the actual guards had been killed.

  He let the stolen baton clatter to the floor and turned to look at his companion.

  She was watching him, her expression a mix of professional approval and something else... a flicker of genuine awe.

  "Very good," she said, her voice even. "Dorian is confirming—the main elevator bank is just ahead. But with the lockdown active, the cars are frozen and the shaft is probably crawling with security."

  "So we take the stairs," Lucien said, already moving toward the end of the hall.

  "Negative," Echo replied, pulling out her tablet. "Way too slow, for one, and they don’t go all the way down to sub-level 12, for two. Only option is the shaft itself."

  They reached the end of the hallway, which opened up to a sleek wall of polished chrome doors. Echo knelt beside the control panel, the tangle of wires already sprouting from her dataport. "I can override the door lock, but I can't call the car. We're going to have to rappel."

  "I don't usually rappel," Lucien stated flatly.

  A wry smile touched her lips. "I know."

  She finished her work, and the doors slid open with a heavy thunk, revealing a dark, cavernous shaft that plunged into the depths of the tower. "You can just... fall gracefully, right?"

  Lucien peered down into the abyss. Red emergency lights pulsed at long intervals, illuminating a dizzying lattice of support beams, thick power conduits, and dangling maintenance cabling. Steam hissed from ruptured vents, rainwater dripped from unseen seams above, and the faint hum of backup generators thrummed through the walls. Somewhere below, the mechanical whirr of auto-turrets waiting to be triggered echoed up toward him.

  "This should be fun," he muttered. He turned to Echo, who was already attaching a magnetic grapple line to the doorframe.

  "I'll go first," she said. "Disable the laser grids as I descend. You provide overwatch. If anything moves in that shaft, kill it."

  "Copy," he said, taking up a position and raising the rifle he’d ‘borrowed’ from the data phantoms.

  She gave him a single, sharp nod and then stepped off the ledge, her grapnel line whirring as she descended into the darkness. Lucien watched her go, his HUD's thermal vision cutting through the gloom. He spotted the heat signatures of the automated turrets tucked into alcoves on the level below.

  "Echo, you've got two auto-turrets at the thirty-meter mark," he said into his comms. "On your left."

  "Copy that," her voice came back, calm and focused. "See if you can get a firing angle from there. Dorian is telling me my drones don’t have enough power to take them out."

  Lucien leaned out into the shaft, bracing himself against the doorframe. He could just see the edge of one turret. He fired a three-round burst. Sparks flew as the rounds ricocheted harmlessly off its energy shield.

  "Yep. They're shielded," he confirmed. "We need to get behind them."

  "No time," Echo replied. "Remember there’s a corporate cleaner team en route, we need to hurry this job up or we’re going to be facing way more firepower than we’re equipped to handle."

  Lucien scanned the shaft again. The turrets were positioned to cover the direct descent. There was no way to get past them without taking heavy fire. He looked at the thick power conduit running down the center of the shaft.

  An idea, reckless but direct, formed in his mind.

  "I'm coming down," he said.

  "Wait—how?"

  Lucien took a step back then took a running start, launching himself into the shaft. He didn't aim for Echo's level—he aimed for the central conduit, landing on its thick, cylindrical surface with a heavy thud.

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  He slid down the conduit, using his augmented strength and metal boot plating to control his descent, the friction sending a shower of sparks from his heels.

  His HUD screamed warnings: the turrets tracking, barrels glowing hot. His mind raced in split-second math—speed, trajectory, the precise angle of the conduit curve. A burst of plasma sizzled past his shoulder. Another scorched the conduit behind him, heat licking at his calves. He ducked lower, sparks flaring into his visor as he accelerated.

  Don’t stop. Don’t think. Just time the leap.

  He kicked off at the last second, body arcing across the gulf. Plasma fire stitched the air where he’d been. His boots slammed onto the narrow maintenance ledge. He was already moving, already charging.

  

  [PULSE ACTIVATED]

  The blast flared outward in a concussive surge, shredding the turrets’ shielding and frying their cores into showers of blue static.

  "Show off," Echo's voice came over the comms, a glimmering note of amusement in her tone.

  Lucien didn’t respond, already looking down. "Path is clear. Sub-Level 12 is just below. I'll meet you there."

  He leapt from the ledge, his coat whipping out around him as he dropped the final twenty meters, landing and rolling into a perfect three-point stance in front of the sealed doors of the archive vault.

  He stood up, the silence of Sub-Level 12 a stark contrast to the chaos of the descent. He looked up, expecting to see Echo rappelling down to meet him. Instead, he saw her dangling about fifteen meters above, her descent stalled.

  "Uh, Pulse?" her voice came over the comm, tinged with a frustration that was clearly masking a hint of embarrassment. "I seem to have miscalculated the length of my rappel line."

  He looked at the gap between her and the floor. It was a drop that would snap a normal person's ankles. She was a CIPHER, so her body was technically synthetic, but it was designed to emulate a human body as closely as possible. It would still be a painful, undignified landing.

  Lucien crossed his arms, letting the silence stretch for a beat.

  "...Are you just going to stand there?" she asked, her voice tighter now.

  "I was waiting for you to ask nicely," he replied, the filter on his mask doing nothing to hide the amusement in his tone.

  There was a long, static-filled pause. Then, a defeated sigh.

  "Lucien... would you please catch me?" Her voice sounded impossibly small.

  He wordlessly moved into position below her, bent his knees slightly, and held up his arms. "Go ahead."

  He heard her detach the line, and for a moment—she was in freefall. He caught her with an ease that surprised even himself, her light frame landing securely in his arms.

  For a second, they were face-to-face, her electric eyes staring wide up at his mask with a flicker of something he couldn't quite read—surprise, maybe, or grudging respect. In that suspended moment, there was nothing tactical about the air between them.

  Just an unexpected intimacy.

  “What?” She finally said, still cradled in his arms.

  “You didn’t call me Pulse. You know my real name.”

  A faint flush colored her cheeks, almost human in its imperfection. “I may have looked into you before the mission. I always like to know who I’m working with.”

  He set her down gently and she tucked a strand of hair behind one ear, already moving on to continue the mission.

  But for Lucien, the moment lingered—hot sparks cooling in his chest as silence swallowed the shaft once more.

  The archive vault was a circular chamber, its walls lined with glowing data conduits. In the center of the room, a single, heavily armored figure stood waiting. It wasn't a Data Phantom; this was a Corrupted Security Program, its form more solid, its armor a glitching mosaic of black and crimson. It held a heavy-caliber handgun, its barrel glowing with contained energy.

  "Dorian says that's the system's Warden," Echo whispered, taking cover behind a server bank. "It's directly linked to the vault's core. We have to take it down to get the shard."

  The Warden raised its weapon, its movements smooth and lethally precise. It fired a single shot—a searing bolt of energy that blew a chunk out of the server bank Echo was hiding behind.

  “Eep!” she yelled out, startled.

  Lucien returned fire with the rifle he'd taken, then ducked into cover. The rounds sparked harmlessly against the Warden's armor. "It's shielded."

  "The shield’s power is reinforced by the vault's core," Echo confirmed. "You need to get to that console," she pointed to a terminal beside the main vault door. "Hit that with your Pulse. It's the only way to completely drop the shield."

  He glanced at the console. It was twenty meters away, across an open floor with no cover. "And you?"

   It was the real Echo, her voice cutting through the simulation with a wave of panic.

  He looked at the memory-construct of Echo, then back at the Warden. It was side-stepping, flanking and taking aim for another shot.

  There was no other choice.

  "Get ready," he said.

  He broke from cover, sprinting across the open floor. The Warden's shots chased him, energy bolts sizzling past his head, one grazing his shoulder and sending a jolt of pain through him.

  

  [INTEGRITY: 3%]

  He ignored it, diving into a roll and coming up right in front of the console.

  He slammed his palm against it.

  

  [PULSE ACTIVATED]

  The world went white with static. Echo—both the memory and the voice in his head—vanished. His HUD flickered, half of the readouts going dark.

  He was alone.

  The Warden's shield collapsed with a digital shriek.

  It turned its weapon on him, but Lucien was already moving, firing short rifle bursts. Two rounds punched through the Warden's unshielded chest plate. The program staggered, its form glitching violently. It raised its own weapon for one last shot, but Lucien was faster.

  He closed the distance and drove the butt of his rifle into the Warden’s weapon, knocking it to the side. Trained reflexes falling back into place, Lucien drew his combat knife and thrust it into the Warden's optical sensor, twisting the blade. The program convulsed, then dissolved into a shower of dying code.

  He stood there, panting, as his HUD slowly rebooted.

  

  "I'm here," he said, the relief in his own voice surprising him.

  The memory construct of Echo didn’t reappear in the room with him, but the massive door to the archive vault hissed open. Inside, floating in a beam of soft light, was the data shard: "Cicada-Lock."

  He reached out and took it. The moment his fingers closed around the crystalline shard, a new memory flooded his consciousness, warm and clear.

  The mission was over, as were a handful of other missions they had completed together. He and Echo were sitting on the ledge of a skyscraper, the city of Mindra, a glittering jewel below them as an orange sunset painted the horizon. The wind was cool, the air clean for once.

  "You ever take that thing off?" she asked softly. Her feet dangled off the edge of the building, gently kicking in an alternating rhythm.

  "Of course I take it off," he replied, tone warm and amused. "I have to eat."

  She smiled, that small, private thing that still made his chest ache. "I meant in front of anyone else."

  He hesitated. He couldn't remember the last time he had.

  Her hand came up, her touch impossibly tender as her fingers found the seals at the side of his mask. She didn't pull, her hand just lingered there, waiting.

  A silent question.

  He was trembling, but he gave the smallest nod.

  She delicately unlatched the seals and lifted it away. For the first time, she saw his face. His steel-gray eyes. The faint scars all over his face. The thicker scars on his temples.

  He saw her properly, too, without the filtered display of his visor. Her eyes were even more electric up close.

  He felt like his heart might have stopped. If it had, he wouldn’t have even been upset—she would have been the last thing he saw.

  As the memory faded, it left a profound sense of warmth and a deep, aching loss.

  Her smile was the most real thing in the universe.

  

  [MEMORY FRAGMENT: CICADA-LOCK REINTEGRATED]

  [INTEGRITY: 65%]

  [LOGIC +30]

  

  
• [LOGIC: 51/100]


  

  [WILLPOWER +25]

  

  
• [WILLPOWER: 67/100]


  

  [NEW WEAPON UNLOCKED: CUSTOM HANDGUN]

  [NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: HANDGUN MARKSMANSHIP]