The steam, thick with grease and despair, seemed to cling to them like a second skin as Yeji, Min-ji, and Cho shuffled silently out of the Rust Wok. The heavy mesh screen swung shut behind them with a final, rusty clang, sealing Ah-Jin and his anguish inside with the bubbling wok and the ghosts. The alley, always oppressive, felt like a tomb corridor after the volcanic eruption within. Cho moved like an automaton, his polished boots scuffing uncharacteristically on the slick deck plating, his head bowed, that granite stillness fractured only by the tremor in his clenched fists. Min-ji hugged herself, pale and shaking, the taste of congealed noodles and ash thick on her tongue. Yeji felt numb, hollowed out by Ah-Jin's raw grief and the terrifying certainty of his final words.
They navigated the treacherous climb back up through the service chutes and rusting access ladders in near silence, the groans of the Belt's superstructure and the distant wail of a scavver's warning horn their only accompaniment. The sterile chill of Yeji's office within the old Comms Relay Station felt alien, violently antiseptic after the visceral heat and decay below. Fluorescent panels hummed overhead, bleaching the utilitarian grey walls and the sleek, dormant terminals. Cho didn't sit. He stood before the broad, reinforced plexi window overlooking the vast, cavernous lower levels, his reflection a smudged grey outline against the distant, twinkling constellation of slum-lights and the pulsing red warnings of malfunctioning power grids far below.
"Can we stop this, Cho?" Yeji's voice was hoarse, barely audible above the ventilation hum. The question felt futile, absurd even as she asked it. Yet the image of Ah-Jin planting his fists on that counter, declaring "I will be HERE", wouldn't leave her. The vision of Haerin, clutching her book, playing in poison dye-pools. Kiri bleeding out on rusted metal. "Cleansweep… tomorrow. Can't you…?"
Cho didn't turn. His knuckles, resting on the cool plexi, were white. His voice, when it came, was flat, stripped of command, raw with a shame that scraped bone. "No." Simple. Absolute. "Orders is locked also security Directive Sigma, sub-article Gamma: Containment of Sub-Level Insurgency Threat. It is Signed and sealed." He finally shifted, turning slowly. His eyes, usually chips of flint, were bloodshot, haunted wells of exhausted impotence. Gone was the Steel General. In his place stood a man crushed by machinery he'd once commanded. "I tried last time as well they won't do anything for someone who stays in the belt. All my order comes from Higher ups, people from higher ups don't like people down there, people like.."
He scanned Yeji and Min-ji, his gaze lingering on Yeji's expensive, albeit now stained, synth-weave jacket, on Min-ji's perfectly tailored trousers. A flicker of something harsh, almost accusatory, lit his ruined eyes. "You…" He jabbed a finger not at Min-ji, but directly at Yeji. His voice dropped, guttural, carrying the full weight of Ah-Jin's accusation. ""You're the rich one—the Station Five pedigree with Nexus Group stock climbing your family tree like tungsten vines. Your codes unlock gates I'll never even see. That access chit of yours? It sings symphonies to security subroutines."."
Min-ji flinched. Yeji felt the words like physical blows. He was weaponizing her privilege, the very thing Ah-Jin despised. Her mouth was dry. "I'm fugitive, Cho, i got cut off, they will now hunt me." "Since when are you a fugitive?" asked Min-ji. "Since i broke up with him, he had proof that i went in the belt, so now higher ups had pressed my family, so now i will be fired from my ceo position and have been cut off, so they will now hunt me."
"Use it!" Cho snapped, a spark of the old fire flaring, fueled solely by desperation. "Weave it! They want you, Yeji? Fine. Put your tracker-fear bait on their screen! Tell them…" He paced, a caged predator, ideas sparking frantically. "Tell them Havoc Legion cells massing in Sector Gutter's Turn, they are planning coordinated sabotage and threat to Tier Seven mainline filtration." He stopped, eyes blazing. "Say it's personal, and say Kael sent you whispered threats and Poison promises leaking upstream." Yeji's ex-boyfriend's name hung in the sterile air, heavy as phlegm. "Make it vital to their precious pipes and protocols. Buy Ah-Jin… buy the Belt… hours! Days if you spin gold!"
The brutality of the maneuver was breathtaking. Leverage her desperation, Kael's obsession, the Upper Tiers' narcissistic self-interest. Lie. Fabricate an existential threat to them. For the Belt. For a man who'd just seared their souls with grief. For the little girl enforcing face-rules over noodles.
Silence stretched. Min-ji looked horrified. Cho stood rigid, breathing hard. Yeji stared at the blank terminal screen. She saw Ah-Jin's knuckles threatening to splinter wood, felt the phantom heat of the Rust Wok's steam.
Without a word, Yeji sat. Her fingers, trembling slightly, danced over the pristine console. Authentication sequences bypassed using cut-out codes Min-ji murmured, layered with residual Nexus encryption fragments Yeji still carried like scar tissue. The message was crafted with clinical precision, tipped with jagged shards of believable panic: *Priority Alpha-Kilo. Source: Secure Fugitive Asset YJ-Nexus. Direct intel intercept: Havoc Legion command nexus identified Sector Gutter Turn. Primary Target: Tier Seven Main Arterial Filtration Node Omega. Timeline: IMMINENT. Leadership sigil confirmed: Kael Voss sig-track verified. Personal threat vector YJ-Nexus confirmed. Recommend immediate, preventative orbital suppression/drone saturation strike pre-assembly. Data packet secured locally awaiting extraction protocol.*
She hit send. The soft *whoosh* of encrypted transit sounded obscenely loud. A seed of pure fiction planted in the sterile garden of Upper Tier paranoia. Would it grow? Would it buy anything but time? The bleak awareness settled over them: even if it worked, it was barely a bandage on a severed artery. Hope tasted like burnt circuitry.
Below, bathed in the greasy orange glow of a failing sodium lamp, Ah-Jin moved with ritualistic precision. The upper-level tumult, the desperate gambit unfolding in sterile offices miles above and away, didn't penetrate the heavy stillness of the Rust Wok's back room. He hauled open a floor panel hidden beneath stacked crates of dried, questionable legumes. Below lay his past, his desperation, his final argument. Not a vast armory, but a cache cobbled together from Belt salvage and desperation. Steel gleamed dully in the low light – older, not antique, just brutally pragmatic technology generations behind the shimmering horrors Tier Security wielded.
He hauled out his gear piece by piece into the unsettling quiet. First, the suit: matte black, composite nano-weave layered with scavenged ablative plating scavenged from wrecked deep-space hauler hard-suits. Heavy-duty knee and elbow pads bolted on, bearing tool marks and scars. Crude reinforcement welding along the ribs and shoulders where impacts had tested its limits. On the left breastplate, meticulously hand-painted in fading, chipped silver: SHADOW MASTER. Not a boast. A promise to the ghosts of Zone Seven, written five years ago with stolen paint. The helmet: full-face coverage, rigid polymer shell integrated with a cracked, basic tactical display visor salvaged from a wrecked Corp-Sec scout trike. No fancy targeting suite, just low-light enhancement and cracked threat-tracking icons that flickered faintly. He snapped it into place, the hiss of the seal cutting off the outside world, reducing it to the hum of his own breath amplified in the confined space. Gauntlets, fingerless but reinforced with knuckle-plates filed to needle-sharp points – gut-jabbers. Boots: heavy-grip tread, impact-dampening soles, greased leather uppers stained beyond recognition.
His weapons sang a different song. No humming plasma blades, no seeking micro-missiles. The main piece: a heavy-caliber slug-thrower classified as a "Portable Autocannon" by its infantry spec sheet fifty years prior. Hydraulic recoil dampeners squealed faintly when he hefted it, the barrel wide enough to park his thumb in. Belt-fed drum mag, loaded with mixed materiel – high-explosive frag tips, armor-piercing tungsten-core slugs, vicious flechette rounds packed like wasp nests. Utterly illegal. Savage recoil meant even Belt-hardened users risked shattered shoulders. It was crude, loud, and turned concrete into confetti. He slammed a fresh drum mag home with a satisfying *kachunk*. Side-arm: a sawed-off coilgun scattergun, its magnetic coils visibly patched and rewired. Effective at five meters, turned corridors into mincing machines. Pure wall-of-lead terror. He shoved shells packed with powdered osmium and liquid thermite slugs into bandoliers. And blades. Always blades. A vibro-shiv humming erratically in its thigh sheath, its power cell emission flickering unsteadily. A mono-filament-edged trench knife gripped wetly with palm sweat soaked into its hilt wraps. And an ancient boarding pike, its tip magnetized for puncturing hull-plate, slung across his back.
The weight settled onto him like an old friend, a second skin molded from pain and necessity. He smeared soot across the visor over the eyepieces. One last adjustment to the SHADOW MASTER insignia. No fanfare. No grim soliloquy. He banked the Rust Wok's fires. Unplugged the main lighting. He sat on the stool Haerin had occupied earlier, Bori tucked away safely upstairs. He rested the heavy cannon across his knees. Closed his eyes within the helmet's confines. The Belt groaned around him. Somewhere, pipes dripped. He didn't sleep, not truly. He sank into the silent place coiled beneath rage and grief, the hard edge where survival strangled sentiment. He was waiting. Judge. Jury. Executioner. For the trench that was home.
Dawn on the Belt wasn't heralded by light, but by a lowering of shadow into deeper gloom. Ah-Jin felt the first vibration through the deck plating before the ambient groaning changed pitch. Subtle to anyone not tuned like a seismic sensor. They were early. Corporate efficiency overriding even Upper Tier paranoia. He rose fluidly, the cannon settling into the cradle of his shoulder with practiced indifference. The heavy charge-packs slotted home with a series of heavy clicks. He moved towards the corroded blast shutters covering the Rust Wok's narrow service door.
Above, Yeji stared at the terminal. A priority beacon flashed insistently. The reply was glacially efficient, brutally succinct: *Priority Verified YJ-Nexus. Directive Sigma-Gamma Override Requires Higher Authority Council Authorization. Council Session Est. Resolution: 12-18 Tierspace Standard Hours. Vigilance Recommended. Prepare Extraction Assets for YJ-Nexus.* Twelve hours. *Twelve hours*. The Cleansweep team crossing the Belt's outer marker already had their boots on steel decking.
"More time… they need more time," she choked out, the absurdity choking her.
Cho's laugh was a dry rattle. "Of course they do. Paperwork moves slower than Belt justice, Yeji." He stared down at the Belt. "Too late."
They couldn't see, but they could feel. The dull crump of flash-bangs followed by staccato las-fire. Not the clean zap of military grade. The harsher, tearing WHUMP of electrolasers designed to cook circuits and flesh indiscriminately. Then the screaming started. Distant, collective. Not just fear. Fury.
Cleansweep Unit Kappa-Seven moved with professional detachment, standard issue. Sleek CoilSec Raptor armored suits in urban grey, integrated disruptor rifles spitting precise bolts of ionized energy. Head-up displays painting movement vectors and thermal signatures – a children's stray thermal bloom in a vent shaft became a target cue. Sweeper Drones skittered ahead on articulated spider-legs, sensor domes sweeping, deploying localized sonic canisters that triggered nausea and vertigo in scanners. Their directives were neural-imprinted: Quell designated sub-level insurgency. Portfolio briefings implied feral gangs and biohazard waste mutants. Efficiency measured in percentage suppression per cubic meter. Kael had ensured their squadron leader held specific tracking parameters for a Nexus Group fugitive. Collateral extermination authorized.
Ah-Jin kicked the blast shutter release. Rusty guides screamed. Light – the harsh, sterile beams from Cleansweep helmet spots – stabbed into the Rust Wok's dimness. He filled the doorway, a silhouette of matt black menace framed by greasy steam. Monolithic. Alien. The SHADOW MASTER insignia catching the light.
The lead Raptor hesitated, coms squawking "Unidentified hostile armor!" before Ah-Jin's cannon spoke its brutal language.
**KRA-KOOM!**
Not a shot. A detonation. Time compressed. Air became solid, hammering into the armored suits. The high-explosive frag round detonated six meters out. The shockwave hit first, staggering the front line. Then the shrapnel storm – jagged durasteel petals ripped from the round's casing, superheated, spinning. They tore through polymer plating at intimate range like paper. One Raptor went down screaming as his visor shattered, jagged metal embedding in his face and neck. Another took twisted metal petals clean through his thigh hydraulic line, spraying hydraulic fluid like arterial spray. Air filled with ozone, burnt meat, and the shriek of twisted metal.
Ah-Jin was moving before the echo died. A long stride out, the scattergun in his left hand coughing thunder. *BOOM-ACK! BOOM-ACK!* Liquid thermite slugs sprayed across the second rank. Molten metal stuck to armor plates, burning through with horrific sizzling screams. Their neat ranks disintegrated into chaos and incandescent agony. Ah-Jin prioritized movement: Never stop. Keep them off balance. Drag them. Away to the dump zone. He surged forward, cannon sweeping, the monstrous recoil punishing his shoulder with every shot he loosed blindly into their disrupted formation. Not good shots. Territory shots. Pushing shots. Scare them. Herd them.
"Engage! Suppress! Body smasher!" the Cleansweep sergeant's voice crackled, high-pitched. Stun-grenades arced – *CRACK-FZZZZT!* Blinded by optics overload, deafened by sonic shrieks, Ah-Jin staggered. Not immune. Pain screamed in his skull. Kinetic leaps – Raptor suits using boot thrusters – landed heavy plates crunching down on the decking around him. Shock batons crackling. He ducked a wild swing, felt the charge kiss his pauldron. The mono-fil trench knife whispered free of its shin sheath. He thrust it upwards, no style, pure bio-mechanic desperation, into the hydraulic coupling at the leaping trooper's knee joint. A horrifying shriek of tearing metal, sheared lines, and choked-off human sound. He pivoted, dropping low, bringing the sawed-off coilgun up under the chin-plating of another trooper closing fast. *BOOM-ACK!* At point blank, the osmium pellets turned head and helmet into a cloud of viscous paste. He absorbed a coilgun bolt on his chest plate – punched hard backwards, the breath knocked out in a grunt, ablative weave smoking. Keep moving!
He fired the heavy cannon one-handed, by feel, backwards as he scrambled. A tungsten-core round punched clean through a drone. Gut shots shivered into the legs of a trooper trying to flank him. Severed conduits spat sparks. Chaos was his shield. He triggered a smoke-grenade cannister rigged to his belt. Thick, acrid grey bloomed.
The Belt fought back. Not an insurgency, a desperate defense. From rusted platforms high up came the spitting *crack!-crack!* of chem-slugger rifles held by men and women whose eyes held nothing left to lose. Heat-seeking flechettes spat from jury-rigged tube launchers whistled down, bursting against Raptor chest plates, cracking visors. Boobytrapped service tunnels blew shrapnel into advance paths. A woman in grease-stained coveralls dropped a heavy half-metre drive gear chain from three levels up onto a cluster of drones, crushing them into tangled scrap. A teenage boy jammed a prybar into the hip gyros of a Raptor suit, screaming as the trooper backhanded him away – but the suit staggered, off balance. They were distractions, gnats buzzing against armored bears, but gnats that bled, gnats that *drew fire*.
"Designate primary hostile 'Shadow Master'! Focus fire! Burn him down!" the Cleansweep sergeant snarled, seeing the towering figure clubbing a trooper aside with the stock of his cannon and vaulting a collapsed railing. Ah-Jin wasn't hard to track. He was a lodestone of violence, dragging a trail of carnage, moving relentlessly towards the declivity leading to the Waste Injection Zone – a ruined sector largely deserted, craters where Upper Tier purification dumps still disgorged their grey, foul-smelling slurry.
Ah-Jin took hits. A coilgun bolt seared across his bicep, melting armor, drawing a hiss behind his masked lips. A sonic grenade detonated close – his ears rang, nausea threatened to swamp his awareness. He stumbled, dropping to one knee. He ripped a thermal charge from his bandolier, hurled it blind into the smoke behind him. The *WHUMP* of localized inferno added to the cacophony. His lungs burned, vision swimming in the visor. *Just further… gotta get them closer to the pit…*
He reached the edge of the designated battleground. The Waste Injection Zone was a vast, rusted basin lined with immense, choked conduits weeping slime. Old slag heaps rose like diseased monuments under emergency floods flickering erratically. Up ahead, a skeleton of platforms spanned the canyon. Perfect choke point. He braced hard against a massive rusted coolant reservoir casing. He had their attention. Half the unit, maybe more, still functional, converging. Laser-designators painted his position.
*Come on,* he thought, tasting copper. *Come close.*
They took the bait. Professional formation tightened, laying down suppressing fire – pinpoint accurate las-blots melting the metal around him. The first two Raptors hit the platform ahead, boots locking down. Ah-Jin brought the cannon up, sighting on the first trooper, his finger tightening on the oversize trigger. Before he could fire, the reservoir casing he leaned against *exploded*.
Not a grenade. A Armor-Piercing shaped charge from a diverted security drone he hadn't tracked. It punched through the old metal inches behind him.
WHAM!
The impact hurled him forward like a rag doll, skidding across the filthy grating. Pain detonated across his back. Wetness bloomed beneath the armor – deep bruising or worse. His cannon went skittering away over the edge into the murky depths below. Alarms squealed inside his helmet. The flickers of Haerin's face swam before him. Kiri's smile. He fought to rise, pushing with trembling arms. Cold rage surged, pushing past the agony. *Not here. Not on the edge.*
"Appa!" The shriek, high-pitched, terrified, pierced the din of battle. *Haerin.* He looked up, pure terror overriding pain.
A skinny kid, barely four, cloaked in rags like all Belt-born, stood on a higher gantry nearby. He glimpsed her shoved hard aside by a snarling Raptor trooper clearing a line of sight. She gripped something white and embroidered – not Bori. The Rules book. She'd followed. She'd *followed* him. Into hell.
The Raptor raised his electrolaser carbine towards the kid spitting curses behind cover near her. An aberrant movement signature. Protocol: eliminate. He didn't see her book. Just movement.
Ah-Jin's roar wasn't human. Primal, the sound of rending worlds. He found strength born from beyond flesh. He pushed off the shuddering grate with raw force and launched himself towards the trooper. The vibro-shiv was free in his hand, a high-pitched whine slicing the air as he closed the impossible distance in a single diving lunge. He slammed into the trooper from the side, a dark comet impacting the Raptor armor hard enough to buckle plating. The electrolaser bolt spat wide, vaporizing rust. Ah-Jin drove the shiv hard, not at armor, but into the multifaceted sensor cluster linking the trooper's left eye to his targeting system. The blade bit deep with a shower of sparks and a scream of tearing composites. He scrabbled for leverage on the slick armor, punching viciously with knuckle-plated fists at the other cluster, the visor edge. Blinded, disoriented, the trooper stumbled back against the corroded railing. Ah-Jin grabbed the discarded boarding pike from its hard-sling across his own back. Not for stabbing. He swung it like a battering ram.
*CLANG!*
He drove the heavy magnetized tip through the suit's weakened chest plate, buckling it inward. Another blow, harder. The carbon-composite splintered. A third strike shattered it entirely. The sound was sickening. The pike punched in deep. The trooper shuddered violently twice, then slumped, armor sparking. Ah-Jin ripped the pike free with a spray of hydraulic fluid and synthetic blood. He whirled, vibro-shiv dripping brilliant coolant. He stood between Haerin and the advancing chaos, the **SHADOW MASTER** emblem stark against his ruined, blood-streaked chest plate, backlit by the flickering emergency floods and the harsh lights of distant corporate killers. His breath rasped like a broken turbine through the helmet's filter. Pain was a constant howl beneath the adrenaline, the battle-fury singing in his veins. He saw movement below. More Raptor suits advancing, weapons zeroing in on his new position. On *Haerin* behind him.
He spat metallic-tasting blood inside his mask. Eyes narrowed on the advancing silhouettes glaring upwards through the toxic gloom. A heat-seeking flechette whined past his head from a Belt defender. Below, the red-hot slag heaps reflected the blaze in his shattered visor display. For a fleeting second, just a fracture of time between breaths, his cracked helmet lips tightened beneath the soot-streaked polycarbonate. The faintest ghost of a smile touched the Shadows of his concealed jaw. He hefted the gore-slick boarding pike. Adjusted his grip on the humming shiv. Stepped deliberately in front of Haerin. Ready. Always ready. For the ditch. For the scrap. For rage. For home.
Activate my extension