The rain had stopped, but the alleys of Silverwood still wept, the runoff smelling of wet stone and old rot. Minato kept his body low behind a pile of refuse sacks, the Starlight carbine an alien thing in his hands. It was too light, its polymer frame too smooth. He missed the familiar, weighted promise of a sword hilt. This weapon hummed, a low thrum that vibrated through his palms and into the fillings of his teeth.
Beside him, Sora, a weaver with clever hands, was trying to master his own breathing. His quick puffs of air turned to smoke in the cold. Yesterday, that boy was mending tapestries. Now he held a tool that could unmake a man.
"Anything?" Minato's voice was a dry crackle in his own ears.
"Two," Sora breathed, his eyes fixed on the mouth of the alley. "Like she said."
The checkpoint was just a wooden barricade under a leaking awning, lit by a single, spitting lantern. The two Black Guards looked half-asleep, their boredom a tangible thing. They had no idea Minato was fifty feet away, crouched in garbage. We are going to die, a voice shrieked in Minato's skull. He swallowed against a knot of bile.
He tried to recall the lessons. Kaito's voice, sharp with urgency: "Finger off the trigger." Riku's, flat and cold: "Stun setting. A dead man tells you nothing."
"My mark," Minato whispered, the lie of confidence tasting foul on his tongue. "Center mass." He raised the carbine, and the sight painted the left guard in a shimmering green box. The man scratched his nose. The stitching on his uniform collar was frayed. He was just a man, bored on a Tuesday night. His heart hammered against his ribs.
He almost called it off. Then he saw the ghosts of the plaza, the Duke's smiling face.
"Hit it," he hissed.
Two beams of blue light tore through the dark. The sound was less a bang and more a sharp, electrical zip. The guards snapped straight, their bodies lit for a heartbeat in a cage of crackling energy, and then fell like sacks of grain.
The sudden silence was deafening, broken only by Sora's ragged gasps.
"Are they...?"
"Move," Minato ordered, his own voice unsteady. Their boots slapped through the puddles, the air thick with the smell of a lightning strike. Up close, the guards looked like they were sleeping. Minato nudged one with his boot. The man's head lolled. It worked. The thought didn't bring triumph, but a sickening lurch that was half-terror, half-something new.
Sakura was a slab of stone on the roof of an old bell tower. For six hours and forty-three minutes, she had been part of the city's architecture. The cold of the roof had leached into her bones, a fact her suit registered and her mind ignored. Below, the city lived its life. The smell of charcoal and sewage drifted on the wind. A cat wailed. The data was irrelevant.
Her internal systems fed her a constant, silent stream: wind speed, humidity, thermal drift. She filtered it all, her focus absolute. A flicker of motion in a window across the square. Her rifle, Spectre, was already there, its optics peeling back the night.
A woman, humming as she hung laundry on a line in her small apartment. Useless. Filter. Dismiss.
But the tune snagged on something. It wasn't a memory, not really. More like a data fragment, corrupted and out of place. A clean white room, the scent of antiseptic, and that same, simple melody. The fragment vanished, leaving a lingering sense of… static.
A new thermal signature. The target. Captain Valerius. Walking with a limp. Flanked by two guards. Intel was wrong. A complication.
Recalculating, her AI noted. Optimal target remains primary. Collateral risk: minimal.
Her finger rested on the trigger. The captain stopped, the flare of a match illuminating a cruel, pockmarked face. The shot was there. Simple. Clean.
But the static was still there. The humming. It was an error, an illogical distraction that was compromising her function. Her programming, her very purpose, issued a single, screaming command: Fire.
She watched the captain turn a corner and vanish.
The opportunity was gone.
Sakura remained motionless for another ten minutes, the cold a distant thing. She tried to analyze the failure, to pinpoint the source of the error. But there was no logic to it. For the first time, a feeling that had no corresponding data point bloomed in her chest. It was a cold, sharp-edged thing that whispered of broken code and a machine that was no longer entirely under her control.