Raymond watched the blade glide toward his neck, a sliver of polished steel humming faintly as it cut through the air. He felt the atmosphere split just before his skin, a cold rush that promised a final, sharp finality. Anton's pale blue eyes remained analytical, detached, missing nothing.
NOW!
The oppressive weight of the armor vanished—one moment encased, the next horribly exposed. Cool air chilled the sweat on his skin as a large cylinder of machined steel materialized in his free hand, its sudden weight a dense, comforting reality. He drove its mouth forward, pressing it point-blank into the reinforced armor covering Anton's stomach.
Anton's face twisted—muscles tightening in a microsecond of raw, instinctive recognition. His cybernetic lens flickered, processing the sudden weight in Raymond's grip, the precise angle of the barrel's muzzle pressed flush against his stomach. The scent of gun oil and hot metal flooded his nostrils a heartbeat before the click of the trigger mechanism reached his ears.
His body tensed, every muscle fiber screaming to pivot away—but neural signals moved too slow against the inevitability of physics. The cold realization hit him like a delayed echo: too late. Raymond's finger had already completed its three-millimeter travel.
SWOOSH!
The launcher roared, a blast of heat and cordite washing over him. The rocket slammed Anton backward, his blade scraping an ice-cold line across Raymond's nose. The sting was followed by the coppery tang of blood.
Without pause, he stored the launcher and sprinted for the doorway, his lungs burning with the chemical-laced air. He was just clearing the frame when the room behind him detonated. A solid wall of overpressure hit his back, lifting him off his feet. He crashed face-first into the opposing wall, the abrasive brick grinding against his skull in a flash of pain.
The air was a choking fog of smoke and concrete dust, gritty on his tongue. A high-pitched whine was the only sound, drilling into Raymond's skull. His chest ached, a deep throb from the blast's impact, and his face was a line of fire.
Groggy, he sat up, coughing. Too close. Much too close.
He pushed himself up on one elbow, the corridor tilting. A persistent, high-frequency whine drilled through his hearing, the only sound in a world gone silent. A cold, sharp clarity cut through the concussion's haze.
Sloppy. Complacent.
The thought cut like an accusation. He'd begun believing in the numbers—the skills, the instantaneous armor. Started thinking like some superhuman instead of a survivor.
Facing Anton, he'd forgotten two decades of training. That fundamental truth: no magic bullet exists.
Yet this world had magic. A system where rockets materialized from thin air. In that surge of power, he'd almost become another casualty of his own trick.
The System offered advantages. But it didn't repeal physics. Not yet.
Overpressure still tore flesh. A blade at the throat still meant death.
His fingers probed along his ribs, checking for damage. He expected the deep, sickening ache of internal trauma—broken bones, ruptured organs. But there was only a faint soreness, more like muscle fatigue than injury.
The upgrades had done their work. Three packages of Endurance, three of Agility—sixty hard-earned REP points spent resisting hesitation. That investment had saved him.
The increased Endurance had layered his organs like Kevlar, absorbing a blast that should have shredded his insides. The Agility had given his desperate sprint an unnatural speed, pushing his teenage body beyond its limits.
He would lie pulverized into the bloody bricks or find himself back in the system's white room, having failed the mission, without those upgrades.
Raymond rose to his feet, boots crunching on shattered plaster and twisted metal. He turned.
The office was gone. A jagged maw had been torn in the side of the building, framing a night sky smeared with cordite smoke. Small fires licked at the edges of the hole, feeding on shredded wires and splintered furniture. The air tasted of ozone and burnt plastic.
Beyond the flames, the wreckage was a tomb of blackened steel and pulverised concrete. Had the rocket been enough?
The Vector-7 materialized in his hand, its cool weight a solid anchor in the disorienting aftermath. The ringing in his ears persisted, a high-frequency whine that drilled through the muffled roar of the fire. Smoke billowed from the shattered office, thick and acrid, stinging his eyes and coating the back of his throat with the taste of burnt chemicals.
He moved forward, boots crunching on a carpet of fractured glass and plaster. Heat washed over him in waves, eddying from the gaping hole where the office wall had been. Flames licked at exposed wiring and splintered furniture, casting a flickering, hellish light across the scene. He kept the Vector-7 raised, muzzle sweeping the debris field in a practiced arc.
No body. No confirmation.
The thought was a cold shard of ice in his gut. Anton was resourceful. Armoured. Until Raymond saw a corpse, the threat remained active.
He stepped over the toppled desk, its polished wood blackened and split. Twisted metal supports jutted from the wreckage like broken bones. The invisible barrier was gone, the space it had occupied now a torrent of superheated air.
Deeper in, where the force of the blast would have thrown a body, a shape lay half-buried under a collapsed section of the ceiling. It was mangled, contorted. The heavy plating of Anton's armour was cracked and warped, blackened by fire and sheared open in several places. One arm was gone, torn away at the shoulder.
Raymond approached with caution, the Vector-7 trained on the ruin of a helmet. The cybernetic lens in the half-exposed face was dark, shattered into a spiderweb of cracks. Meat and metal were fused together. Unmoving.
He pressed two fingers to the exposed sliver of neck, feeling for a pulse he knew he wouldn't find. Nothing. Just cooling flesh and the inert hardness of the armour's frame.
Anton Volkov was dead.
A breath Raymond hadn't realised he was holding escaped his lips in a long, slow hiss. The tension that had coiled in his shoulders since he'd entered the office began to unspool.
A translucent blue notification flickered to life at the edge of his vision, its clean digital lines a stark contrast to the primal chaos of the fire.
[ Main Quest: Locate and Destroy Sand Rat Gang ] [ Completion Rate: 60.81% ]
Raymond stared at the number. Sixty percent. After killing the outpost, clearing the den, and eliminating its leader, nearly forty percent of the gang remained scattered across the city and the desert.
Hunting them down one by one is inefficient. A waste of time and an unnecessary risk.
He needed to send a message. A final, undeniable statement that this territory was closed for business. Permanently.
He swept his gaze across the compound, his mind redrawing the schematics he had memorized. Support columns, structural junctions, and ammunition stores helped him shape a different, colder, and more absolute plan: he would burn the nest.
He moved back into the industrial bay, his steps now decisive and measured.
Raising his hand, he summoned a block of C4 from his inventory. The plastic casing felt smooth and waxy against his palm.
He knelt beside a primary support column, pressing the charge into place. The magnetic adhesive gripped the steel with a quiet snap.
A quick flick of his thumb armed the device. The timer display lit up with thirty seconds, already synchronizing.
He repeated the process on the opposite column using the cold economy of motion perfected over two decades of work. The action was mechanical and impersonal. A deep, chilling satisfaction settled in his gut—a feeling derived from solving the problem permanently. This was liquidation.
He placed another charge by the main gate's hydraulic mechanism, sealing their tomb. Four more followed, each pressed onto a structural weak point his professional eye catalogued instantly. Each placement was a precise word in a final statement, turning their fortress into a grave.
He finished with ten minutes on the synchronized timer. He sprinted through the now-empty corridors, the echoes of his footsteps swallowed by the compound's apathetic hum. He vaulted a low wall and melted into the network of alleys outside, heading for the rendezvous point.
From a rooftop five hundred metres away, Sayeed watched him approach. Raymond reached the roof's edge and dropped to a crouch beside the mercenary, their shoulders almost touching. Sayeed opened his mouth to speak, but Raymond just raised a hand, his eyes fixed on the target.
A deep, gut-thumping whump signaled the first explosion from the compound's core. The ground beneath them trembled.
A rolling, deafening cascade ignited the other charges a second later. The main building's walls blew outward. The roof collapsed inward. The gate exploded from its housing, a mass of twisted metal cartwheeling into the night.
It all fell in on itself—dust, smoke, fire. A monstrous cloud swallowing the Sand Rat Gang's funeral pyre whole.
As the roar faded, replaced by the crackle of a self-sustaining inferno, Raymond glanced at the mission log hovering in his vision.
[ Main Quest: Locate and Destroy Sand Rat Gang ] [ Completion Rate: 85.88% ]
Significant. But not total. Fifteen percent remained, but it was not his problem anymore.
A fresh notification scrolled into view, the text crisp against the backdrop of destruction.
[ Combat Finished. Calculating rewards... ]
[ Total Kills: 9/(Tier 0) | 1/(Tier 1) ]
[ Awarded 19 REP ]
Then, another set of notifications appeared on the retinal interface.
[ ACHIEVEMENT: Trojan Wolf ]
[ Reward: 35 Reputation Points ]
Notifications continued appearing.
[ ACHIEVEMENT: Danger Close ]
[ Reward: 40 Reputation Points ]
[ ACHIEVEMENT: Pest Control ]
[ Reward: 25 Reputation Points ]
The last notification appeared across his optical feed, and the cumulative impact was immediate—it reversed his current pool of REP, snapping the total back from a precarious single point to a satisfying one-hundred-and-twenty. A surge of professional satisfaction—clean, uncomplicated, and distinctly different from genuine happiness—flowed through Raymond.
Beside him, Sayeed stared at the inferno, his jaw slack. He turned to Raymond, mouth open to voice the protest that this spectacular demolition was never part of the plan. But he shut it with a click, a weary resignation settling over his features. He had seen a man return from death and conjure weapons from thin air. A building collapsing was just another Tuesday.
"The Table will come for this," Sayeed said, his voice low and strained. "They don't like vacuums. We need to go to ground. Six months, at least."
Raymond pushed himself to his feet, his gaze sweeping over the burning ruin one last time before turning away.
"You and Rakheel can disappear. My clock runs differently."
He started walking toward the edge of the roof, leaving Sayeed in the flickering firelight.
"I have things to test."
The conference room occupied the forty-seventh floor of a tower in Cyber City's core district, its windows offering a panoramic view of the sprawling industrial wasteland below. Recessed lighting cast a warm amber glow across the polished obsidian table, where eight figures sat in high-backed chairs arranged in a semicircle.
Dmitri Kuznetsov leaned forward, his thick fingers drumming against the table's surface. The Russian representative's face was weathered, marked by decades of desert politics and corporate warfare. His territory. His losses.
"The main compound. Walls, roof, gate—all of it." His voice carried the clipped efficiency of a man who'd learned to quantify disasters. "Infrastructure investment totalling eight-point-three million credits. Gone. The subordinate structure—completely fragmented."
A woman with sharp features and silver-streaked hair adjusted her spectacles. "Anton Volkov was your asset, Dmitri. Your oversight."
"Anton delivered tangible results for fifteen years." A distinct grinding sound accompanied Dmitri's jaw tightening beneath the weathered skin. Click. Click. "Someone meticulously planned this operation. Professional execution. It carried the chilling signature of military precision."
Silence settled across the table as the implications registered. Gang wars were common. Calculated demolition of an entire den wasn't.
The lean man with grey temples sitting at the head of the table nodded at the man in police uniform.
Sir Geoffrey Hawthorne, the British representative responsible for Cyber City's public security apparatus, activated the holographic projector embedded in the table. Twin portraits materialized in the air above the obsidian surface—high-resolution, crystal clear.
The first showed a young man with dark hair and sharp, analytical eyes. Lean. Unremarkable. The kind of face that disappeared in crowds.
"John Reese." Geoffrey's Oxford accent carried across the room. "The alias he provided to Carlos Mendez at the Golden Fleece. Casino surveillance corroborated their interaction."
The hologram shifted, displaying footage of Raymond and Carlos at the poker table, then moving to the VIP booth. The timestamp showed the service exit, the alley beyond. Six figures emerging from vehicles. The abduction played out in silent, grainy detail.
"Later surveillance"—Geoffrey manipulated the controls—"shows him entering the Sand Rat compound with Carlos." The footage jumped forward. "And here, exiting eight minutes before the structure collapsed."
The second portrait materialized. Older. Scarred. Desert-hardened features.
"Sayeed. Former Desert Eagle Mercenary Group. He hired low-level contractors from The Pit for what appeared to be an unrelated abduction job." Geoffrey paused. "Analysis suggests the job was a smokescreen. These two are working together. The kidnapping was theatre—a method to infiltrate the compound whilst attention focused elsewhere."
"They've gone underground since the operation concluded," Geoffrey continued. "There is no digital footprint. No verified sightings. They initiated a professional disappearance, leaving behind nothing." The silence following his assessment stretched, thick and unyielding.
"What do we do?"
The silence that followed pressed down like the desert heat outside.
Chairman Elias Vance, the head of the Table, finally expelled a measured, dry cough. His age manifested in the wrinkles circling his eyes and in the deliberate calculation of his movements, confirming that power did not require volume.
"Post a bounty. Standard protocol for contract violations." Vance's fingers steepled before him. "Otherwise, we leave things as they stand."
Dmitri's chair scraped against polished floor. "Leave it? They destroyed—"
Marcus Chen's voice, the intelligence dealer, sliced through the objection. It was calm, corporate, and final.
"We have evidence." He produced a data chip, sliding it across the obsidian surface toward the center. "Anton Volkov negotiated with Reformers, dealing in intel on our city's gang distribution and transporting illegal MPAs. He compromised The Table's neutrality arrangement with the Sultanate."
The chip sat between them like unexploded ordnance.
"Someone eliminating that liability"—Marcus's smile held no warmth—"saved us considerable political complications."
Dmitri stared at the chip. His fingers curled into fists, then relaxed. Territory could be rebuilt. Political exposure couldn't be undone.
"The bounty serves our interests," Vance concluded. "It maintains our reputation for responding to territorial disruptions. But we don't pursue this further. The vacuum will fill itself within weeks."
He surveyed the assembled representatives. No one spoke.
"This meeting is concluded."
Chairs pushed back. Representatives stood, gathering data pads and terminals. Conversations fragmented into smaller exchanges as the coalition dispersed.
Geoffrey remained seated, studying the frozen holographic portraits of Raymond and Sayeed.
Two men. One calculated destruction.
The desert bred survivors. But these two were something else entirely.
He deactivated the projection, and the faces dissolved into amber light.