The negotiation was over. Glitch was a pragmatist, a creature of cold, hard numbers. He was weighing the possibility of a future threat against the certainty of the prize sitting helpless in front of him. His logic was sound, from his perspective. I needed to change the equation. I needed to make the future threat an immediate, undeniable reality.
"Anya," I whispered, my voice so low it was barely a breath. I didn't take my eyes off Glitch, didn't let my gaze waver. I had to project absolute confidence, even as my heart hammered against my ribs. "The grenade."
She understood instantly. There was no hesitation, no question in her eyes. We were partners, and in that moment, our thoughts moved as one. "Are you sure?" she whispered back, her fingers already moving towards her belt. "It's our only one. Our only explosive."
"It's not for them," I said, a grim finality in my tone. "It's for him."
With a subtle movement, hidden from the prying eyes below by the low metal lip of the elevator platform, she passed the fragmentation grenade from her belt to my hand. The cold, heavy sphere felt like a death sentence and a key all at once. My palm was slick with sweat as I wrapped my fingers around it.
"Last chance, Glitch!" I shouted, my voice echoing up the massive elevator shaft, making me sound braver than I felt. "Let us down, and we walk away. We disappear into the Undercroft. No one else has to die tonight."
"You're not in a position to make threats, kid," Glitch rasped, a hint of finality in his own tone. The time for talk was over. He raised his sparking metal hand, a clear signal to his crew to prepare to fire.
"You're right," I said, letting a humorless smile touch my lips. "I'm not making a threat. I'm giving you a warning."
With a fluid motion, my thumb hooked into the pin's ring. I pulled. The small, metallic click was barely audible over the hum of the floodlights, but its meaning was universal. It was a sound that every player, every survivor in this world, understood intimately.
The Exiles flinched as one. Zane, the scarred man, started to raise his heavy machine gun, his knuckles white on the grip.
But I didn't throw it down at them. That would have been suicide.
With all the strength in my arm, I threw the grenade up.
It sailed into the darkness of the shaft, a tiny, arcing messenger of chaos. It was a perfect, desperate spiral. It clattered against the far wall of the shaft once, a loud clang that made the Exiles jump, then landed on the factory floor level above us. I heard it skid across the metal, coming to a stop near the edge of the shaft where the Enforcer had last been seen.
The Exiles stared at me, their faces a mixture of confusion and disbelief. "What did you do, you crazy bastard?" Zane yelled, his voice echoing in the sudden silence.
We waited. For three long, silent seconds, nothing happened. The world seemed to hold its breath. My own heart felt like it had stopped. Did it work? Was the Enforcer still there? Or had I just thrown away our last hope for nothing?
Then, the grenade detonated.
The explosion was a muffled thump from above, but the effect was immediate and dramatic. A shower of dust and small metal fragments rained down on our elevator platform. The blast wasn't powerful enough to seriously damage the Enforcer. I knew that. It was designed to kill players, not heavily armored System agents. It was just an alarm clock. A very loud, very angry alarm clock.
A new sound echoed from above. It was the sound of a heavy, metallic body scraping against the floor as it got to its feet. It was followed by a roar of pure, synthesized rage that seemed to shake the very walls of the shaft. It was a sound of fury and frustration, the sound of a predator whose prey had just pricked it with a thorn.
The Exiles looked up, their faces pale in the harsh glare of the floodlights. Their bravado, their greedy confidence, vanished in an instant. Their bluff had been called. My "imaginary" monster was real.
"What is that thing?" one of them stammered, his modified rifle trembling in his hands.
The red eye of the Ghost Enforcer appeared at the edge of the shaft high above. It peered down, its gaze cutting through the darkness like a laser. It saw us in the elevator, trapped and illuminated. Then, its gaze shifted, sweeping over the crowd of armed Exiles on the level below us. Its tactical AI, I prayed, would register them as hostile combatants. Obstacles between it and its primary target.
"You wanted proof, Glitch," I said, my voice calm now, steady. The terror was still there, but it was overlaid with the cold satisfaction of a successful gambit. "There it is. Its name is the Ghost, and it's coming down. And it will kill you all to get to me."
The dynamic had shifted completely. We were no longer just the prize. We were the bait in a trap that was about to snap shut on the Exiles themselves. The cage had two monsters in it now, and they were stuck in the middle. The hunter had become the hunted.
The Enforcer, its arm still damaged and sparking, began to secure a grappling line from its own internal mechanisms. A compartment in its wrist hissed open, and a high-tension cable shot out, its magnetic tip clamping onto a steel beam above. It was preparing to descend.
Glitch and his crew were now faced with a terrible choice: deal with us quickly and then immediately face the wrath of an unknown, powerful System Enforcer, or retreat and lose the bounty forever. Their greed, so powerful just a moment ago, now warred with their primal survival instinct. The tense standoff had just become an active, ticking time bomb. And we were sitting right on top of it.