12:23 P.M. – Steel Talons Base Cafeteria
The cafeteria's usual clamor had dulled to a tense murmur, the air thick with the metallic tang of blood beneath the scent of reheated rations and stale coffee.
Most of the Talons had cleared out—some by Vey's barked orders, others by their own unease—leaving only a handful to scrub the floor where Flick had fallen.
Their rags came away stained, the water in their buckets swirling pink.
In the corner, Jack sat with Lily and Kai, his revolver loose in his grip.
The old man's silence was heavier than the gun, his gaze distant as he sipped his coffee.
Lily, ever restless, was mid-story, waving her hands as she recounted something to Kai—probably exaggerated, given the way her voice pitched with dramatic emphasis.
Kai listened, but his fingers tapped an uneven rhythm against the table, his eyes flicking every so often to the dark smear on the floor.
Nearby, Vey loomed like a storm cloud, his augments whirring faintly as he watched the cleanup with a scowl.
His ruined face was unreadable, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed him.
This wasn't just another corpse.
This was a breach.
At the center of the room, Lucent crouched over the smoldering remains of Flick's augment.
The segmented limb—now a twisted wreck of blackened alloy and fried circuitry—had stopped sparking, but the stench of scorched metal clung to it like a curse.
Cale hovered beside him, arms crossed, his usual smirk plastered across his face.
"Well," Cale drawled, nudging the wreckage with his boot. "Looks like we won't be getting any juicy intel from this hunk of scrap."
The augment didn't so much as twitch.
Only a thin wisp of smoke curled from its shattered core.
Lucent didn't look up.
His fingers traced the edge of the casing, where a half-melted Myriad logo was barely visible.
"Too obvious," he murmured.
"Hm?"
"The logo." Lucent's thumb brushed the scorched engraving. "They wanted us to see it."
Cale snorted. "Or maybe they just didn't give a damn about hiding it."
Lucent exhaled through his nose, unimpressed.
He'd seen corpo work before—clean, precise, untraceable.
This wasn't that.
This was a message.
Cale, ever the opportunist, leaned in. "Anyway," he said, flashing a grin, "since we're not getting anything useful here, how about you hook me up with some of those fancy spell apps? Like the ones you gave the kid."
Lucent didn't dignify that with a response.
"Come on," Cale pressed. "I've got a Rank 1—Razor and a Piece Mind taking up space in my conduit. Useless crap. You've got better."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because," Lucent said flatly, finally looking up, "the kid needed them to survive. You don't."
Cale's smirk didn't waver, but his fingers twitched. "Ouch. And here I thought we were friends."
Lucent turned back to the augment. "We're not."
A beat. Then Cale laughed, sharp and humorless. "Fair enough."
The conversation circled like this—Cale prodding, Lucent shutting him down—while the wreckage between them cooled.
Like It was an old routine, one like they'd played out a dozen times before.
But beneath the banter, the unspoken truth lingered:
Someone had been pulling Flick's strings.
And they hadn't bothered to hide it.
The Myriad logo wasn't just carelessness—it was a taunt.
A signature left at the scene of a crime, smug in its certainty that no one could touch them.
But why?
Lucent exhaled sharply through his nose and stood, brushing ash from his knees.
At this rate, staring at the wreckage wouldn't give him answers.
Whoever had engineered this wanted to be seen—by someone on the inside.
Someone who knew someone on the inside.
Cale raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Giving up already?"
"I don't have the equipment to dissect this properly," Lucent said, his voice flat. "And even if I did…" His gaze lingered on the scorched metal. "This thing's message wasn't meant for me."
Cale's smirk faltered for half a second—just long enough to betray his curiosity. "Then who the hell was it meant for?"
Lucent didn't answer.
His eyes flicked toward the corner of the room, where Jack sat motionless, his revolver still in hand.
The old man was sipping his coffee, unbothered or so it may seem.
There.
If this was a message, it wasn't just for the Steel Talons.
It was meant for someone specifically.
And Lucent had a sinking feeling he knew exactly who it may meant for.
His gaze cut toward Jack again.
The old man sat like a statue, his revolver resting on the table, fingers curled loosely around the grip.
His eyes were distant, fixed on nothing—or perhaps everything, seeing ghosts in the empty air.
Lucent could ask him outright—Do you know what this means?
But not here.
Not out in the open, surrounded by prying eyes and rattled rookies.
No.
If Lucent was right about Jack's personality, the old man would just grunt, shrug, and bury the truth even deeper.
He'd spent years surviving in an unfair world—long enough to perfect the art of feigned ignorance.
So Lucent said nothing.
Some truths were best uncovered in the shadows.
He turned and made his way toward the corner table where Kai and Lily sat, the girl still chattering animatedly between bites of her food.
Cale, ever persistent, fell into step beside him, undeterred by yet another rejection.
"You know," Cale mused, shoving his hands in his pockets, "if you're not gonna give me those spell apps, the least you could do is tell me what's got you so worked up."
Lucent didn't slow his stride. "Nothing."
"Bullshit." Cale's smirk was razor-thin. "You've got that look—like you just swallowed something sour. So?"
Lucent ignored him.
He was more surprised by the guy's needless sharpness than the accusation itself.
Ahead, Lily's voice carried over the murmur of the cafeteria. "—and then the glow-rat exploded!" She mimed the blast with her hands, sending a bread roll tumbling off the table.
Kai blinked. "That's… not how glow-rats work."
"This one did!" Lily insisted, grinning.
Jack didn't react to their banter.
His fingers tapped once—just once—against the revolver's barrel.
Lucent stopped at the table, the weight of the ruined augment still fresh in his mind.
Kai glanced up, gesturing toward the smoldering wreckage across the room. "Done examining that thing already?"
Before Lucent could respond, Lily suddenly tugged at Kai's sleeve. "Who's that uncle?" she stage-whispered, jabbing a finger toward Lucent.
Her voice carried perfectly—loud enough that even Cale, lurking behind Lucent, caught every word.
Uncle.
Lucent's mouth twitched—just once—a microscopic crack in his usual stoicism.
Behind him, Cale muffled a silent laugh into his palm, shoulders shaking with barely contained amusement.
Kai shot Lily a look. "That's Lucent," he muttered.
"Ohhh." Lily nodded sagely, as if this explained everything.
Then, with the brutal honesty only a child could wield: "He looks grumpy."
Cale lost the battle with his composure.
A snort escaped him, followed by a poorly disguised cough.
Lucent exhaled through his nose, long-suffering.
"The arm is a dead end," he said, ignoring the commentary on his demeanor.
"Deliberately." His gaze flicked to Jack, testing.
The old man didn't react.
Just took another sip of his cold coffee.
Lily, undeterred, leaned across the table. "Was it scary?" she asked, eyes wide with morbid curiosity. "The arm, I mean. Did it wiggle?"
Kai groaned. "Lily—"
"What? If I had a robot arm, I'd make it wiggle all the time—"
Cale finally stepped around Lucent, grinning. "Kid, if you ever get augs, I'm teaching you how to pick locks with them."
"Really?!"
"No," Lucent and Kai said in unison.
Jack's knuckles whitened around his cup—just for a second—before he set it down with deliberate calm.
The unspoken tension thickened.
Lucent studied Jack's stony silence, watching for any crack in the old man's armor.
"You don't need any augments to learn how to pick locks, kid," Lucent said flatly.
Lily wrinkled her nose.
"I know. But augments look so cool—except that thing." She pointed emphatically at Flick's ruined arm, her small face scrunched in disgust.
Kai shuddered, glancing back at the twisted metal. "Yeah. That thing was creepy. It wasn't just a machine—it was like... it was imitating an insect or something."
At the word insect, Jack's finger twitched against his revolver's trigger guard—just a flicker of movement, there and gone in an instant.
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
Lucent caught it.
Cale, leaning against the table with his usual lazy grin, didn't miss it either.
His smirk sharpened. "Huh. Now that you mention it, the way those segments moved..."
He mimicked the jerking motion of a spider's leg with his fingers. "Real corpo shit. Myriad's got a style, don't they?"
Jack's coffee cup hit the table with a quiet clink.
Too controlled.
Too deliberate.
Lily, oblivious to the undercurrents, tilted her head. "Why would anyone make a robot arm like a bug? That's stupid."
"Not stupid," Lucent said quietly. "Specific."
The cafeteria's hum of conversation seemed to fade around their table, the air thickening with unspoken recognition.
Jack finally lifted his head, his gaze locking onto Lucent's.
For the first time since the shooting, the old man's eyes were fully present—sharp, wary, and burning with something dangerously close to dread.
You know exactly what this means, Lucent thought.
And you're afraid of it.
The silence stretched taut between them—Lucent's gaze unrelenting, Jack's knuckles pale around his revolver.
Then, slowly, the old man lowered his head.
When he spoke, his voice was rough, each word dragged up from somewhere deep and wounded.
"I…"
The entire table stilled.
Kai's fingers froze mid-gesture.
Lily's chatter died in her throat.
Even Cale straightened, his smirk vanishing.
Jack's next words landed like a corpse hitting concrete:
"I know where it came from."
***
12:37 P.M. – Undisclosed Alleyway, Sector 20 Border
The sun bled weakly through the smog-choked clouds, casting a dim, flickering shadow beneath Blaze as he walked.
His boots scuffed against cracked pavement, the sound swallowed by the ever-present hum of distant machinery.
Then—he stopped.
A beat of silence.
His hand lifted, reaching for empty air—until his fingers met something solid where there should have been nothing.
A shimmer rippled across the alleyway as the cloaking field destabilized.
>> Scanning Biometrics.
>> Subject #1483-B | Codename: Blaze
>> Status: Active
Blaze's mouth twisted.
*Subject #1483-B.* The designation scraped against his nerves like a rusted blade.
He clicked his tongue, but the door hissed open anyway—revealing the sterile white glow of the mobile laboratory hidden within.
The air that spilled out reeked of antiseptic and something sharper, something electric.
It clung to the back of his throat, familiar as a bad memory.
A voice echoed from inside, smooth and synthetic: "You're late."
Blaze didn't flinch.
"Got distracted." He stepped over the threshold, the door sealing shut behind him—and the alleyway returned to empty stillness, as if nothing had ever been there at all.
The synthetic voice hummed through the sterile air, its tone smooth and indifferent:
"Doesn't matter now that you're here."
A pause. The faint whir of machinery filled the silence before it continued:
"We're still in the beginning phase of the project. Your body remains unstable. Daily maintenance is required."
Blaze rolled his shoulders, the motion cracking the tension in his neck. "Yeah, yeah. Maintenance." His voice dripped with practiced boredom, but his fingers twitched at his sides—a tell he couldn't suppress.
The lab's interior was all cold metal and blinking diagnostics, the air thick with the sterile bite of antiseptic and the underlying ozone-tang of active glyphwork.
Tubes snaked along the walls, pulsing with faintly luminescent fluids.
At the center stood an examination chair, its restraints hanging open like the jaws of a dormant beast.
Blaze didn't move toward it. Not yet.
"You missed yesterday's session," the voice noted.
Not accusatory.
Just a fact.
"Got distracted." Blaze smirked, flashing teeth. "Had someone to burn. People to scare. You know how it is."
Another pause. Longer this time. Then, with the faintest hint of something beneath the synthetic cadence—something almost like concern:
"Your vitals are erratic. Cortisol levels elevated. Neural sync at 78% and dropping."
Blaze's grin didn't waver while he removed his shirt and jacket. "Still enough to do the job."
The voice didn't argue.
The restraints clicked shut—cold alloy biting into Blaze's wrists, unyielding.
The machine overhead whirred to life, segmented arms unfolding like the legs of some grotesque metal insect.
Blaze gritted his teeth as the central probe descended, its needle-tipped pincers latching onto the seams of his sternum.
Click. Hiss.
His chest plate parted with a sound like tearing flesh—though there was no flesh left to tear.
Not there.
Not anymore.
The sensation never got easier.
That first violation of pressure, of something foreign prying into what should have been inviolable.
His body remembered the ghost of pain, the phantom scream of nerves that no longer existed.
Beneath the opened plating, his interior gleamed—a grotesque masterpiece of corporate engineering.
Ribs reforged into alloy struts.
Arteries replaced by pulsating aether conduits.
And where his heart should have been, a core pulsed with eerie blue light, its surface etched with glyphs that writhed like living things.
A battery.
A prison.
A mockery of the organ it had replaced.
The machine's probes dipped into the cavity, adjusting calibration nodes, siphoning corrupted aether, scraping away the blackened buildup where his body kept trying—and failing—to reject the foreign systems.
"Neural sync stabilizing at 82%," the voice intoned. "Aether filtration at 67%. Recommend increased coolant intake post-procedure."
Blaze's fingers twitched against the restraints.
He could feel it—the way the machine's cold fingers brushed against the edges of his consciousness, tweaking, editing.
He wasn't a person.
He was a prototype.
A conduit crammed into the shape of a man.
The probe touched his core—
White-hot, electric, alive in a way nothing else was anymore.
His back arched against the chair, veins lighting up with aether burn as the machine purged something, reset something, violated something—
Then it was over.
The probes retracted.
His chest sealed shut.
The voice, impassive: "Procedure complete."
Blaze exhaled, his breath shuddering.
The taste of burnt sugar filled his mouth—his body's pathetic attempt to simulate saliva, to pretend he was still human.
He flexed his fingers.
The restraints released him.
"Go burn something," the voice suggested, as if offering a treat to a dog.
Blaze stood. His grin was all teeth, no joy.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Think I will."
The synthetic voice cut through the hum of machinery:
"Before you leave, I uploaded a part of me to further assist you on the project."
An AR sigil flickered to life above Blaze's head—crimson letters burning in the dim light:
>> AiM
>> Adaptive Intelligence Module | Project Lead: #1483-B ("Blaze")
The hologram pulsed like a living thing, each throb synced to the faint glow of Blaze's aether-core.
AiM's voice had changed—smoother now, less sterile. Almost human in its cadence, if not for the underlying precision. "Your cortisol levels remain elevated."
A pause. "Unnecessary stress degrades your aether-core efficiency. Have you been overclocking your glyph arrays again?"
Blaze rolled his shoulders, the motion making the exposed wiring along his spine catch the light. "Maybe."
A holographic screen materialized beside him, diagnostics scrolling in relentless corporate glyphscript.
AiM's interface was sleek, impersonal—but beneath the surface, something twitched.
Like the AI was more than just code.
Like it was listening.
"You are not a disposable asset, #1483-B," AiM said. The correction was automatic, rehearsed. "Your combustion output is valuable. Your instability is not."
Blaze's grin turned feral. "Call me that again," he said, voice dripping with false sweetness, "and I'll melt your server rack."
The hologram flickered—the digital equivalent of a sigh.
"Blaze," AiM amended, with the tone of a scientist humoring a volatile experiment. "Your last field test showed a 12% drop in thermal regulation."
The hologram shifted, displaying a rotating model of his aether-core, the glyphs along its surface fraying at the edges. "If you refuse maintenance, you will combust from the inside out. Permanently."
The words hung in the air, clinical and cruel.
Blaze stared at his reflection in the polished metal wall.
The man looking back was a stranger—eyes too bright, veins too blue, skin threaded with faint glyph-scars that pulsed when he pushed too hard.
A living weapon.
A walking corpse.
AiM's light pulsed, almost hesitant. "The solution is simple: adhere to your stabilization protocol. No unscheduled ignitions. No unnecessary energy expenditure."
Blaze laughed—a sharp, broken sound. "Yeah. Real simple."
His fingers found the popsicle stick still resting in his hand, and he began to roll it absently between his fingers.
A small, splintered stick—fragile and meaningless to anyone else.
But to him, it was one of the last pieces tethering him to who he used to be.
A reminder of simpler moments, and the fading echo of his own humanity.
For a moment, the lab was silent save for the hum of machinery.
Then AiM spoke again, softer this time: "Compliance ensures survival."
Blaze's jaw tightened. "Fuck compliance."
The words hung in the sterile air like smoke.
For a heartbeat, the only sound was the low hum of machinery—the lab holding its breath.
Then Blaze turned on his heel and strode toward the exit, boots ringing against the metal floor.
AiM's hologram flickered into existence beside Blaze's shoulder as he strode down the alley, its edges shimmering with restrained static.
"You are making a tactical error," it murmured directly into his auditory implants now, the voice no longer confined to the lab's speakers.
The clinical tone fractured slightly—the barest hint of something almost like concern threading through the words. "Your core cannot sustain aether corruption without scheduled maintenance."
Blaze exhaled smoke through his nose, watching the ember of his cigarette flare brighter in response to his rising core temperature.
The projection kept pace with him effortlessly, a crimson specter only he could see.
"Yeah yeah," he muttered, tapping ash onto the pavement.
The popsicle stick turned absently between his fingers as he walked, its edges worn smooth from constant handling.
AiM's interface pulsed, diagnostics scrolling across Blaze's peripheral vision despite his refusal to look. "Thermal regulation at 83% efficiency. Cortisol levels still elevated. Recommend immediate—"
"Recommend shutting the hell up," Blaze interrupted, crushing the cigarette against the wall.
The brick blackened where he touched it.
The hologram dimmed briefly—a programmed approximation of a sigh—before reforming closer to his field of view. "Compliance is not optional."
Somewhere beneath his ribs, his aether-core throbbed in agreement.