Lu Jin crouched in the shadow of the drainpipe, lungs working in broken wheezes. Every breath dragged through his chest like someone pulling on a rusted accordion.
He pressed his palm hard over the scrape on his arm from that bucket of filthy water earlier, trying to keep the smell of blood from leaking out too far, too fast.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Heavy tactical mag-boots stepped over slick moss, the sound bouncing off the pipe walls until it felt like it was marching right through his skull.
The man in the black coat—"Hound"—blocked the far end of the side pipe like a full-stop at the end of a sentence. Suppressed SMG hanging from one hand. Half-face tactical mask. A dull red electronic glow pulsing where his left eye should've been.
Leishen Industrial's mass-produced Eagle-Eye III tactical prosthetic.
"D-grade trash."
Hound's voice ran through a modulator, metal scraped over metal. He lifted the gun, red laser dot crawling up to Lu Jin's knee.
"Selling Leishen's core exploit code. You've got nerve. Upstairs wants the brain intact, but they never said anything about the limbs."
Lu Jin didn't move. He couldn't. Standing up was already a fantasy.
He just breathed, shallow and hard, eyes washed out from blood loss but locked on that red point in Hound's left eye.
He was gambling.
Gambling that this bargain-bin hitman on Leishen's payroll, to save a few credits or "keep compatibility," hadn't updated his eye's firmware.
Three hours ago, in a black net café, Lu Jin had sold that snippet of code with a "little bonus" tucked in. Now the backdoor rode the black market's data streams, lying low somewhere inside Leishen's intranet like a primed landmine.
All he needed was that prosthetic to ping the network. Just once. Cross-check a wanted face in the cloud.
Beep.
A soft tone chimed from Hound's eye. The lens tightened on Lu Jin's features and started uploading the scan.
Now.
The finger he'd kept flattened against his phone screen under his sleeve finally moved, hitting the single virtual button he'd prepared.
Not magic. Detonation.
[Command: Exploit Activation · Logic Deadlock]
Zzz—!!
No fireball. Just a scream of electric noise that made his teeth buzz.
The tiny cooling fan in Hound's socket whirred once and went straight into a death rattle. That old Eagle-Eye model—overclocked, under-cooled—swallowed the small, perfectly wrong loop of code and its chip temperature spiked to four hundred degrees in half a second.
"AAAH—MY EYE!!"
There was no dramatic eyeball burst. Just nerves seared raw. The left eye went dark, and the pain punched so hard into his brainstem his thoughts froze for a heartbeat.
Hound grabbed at the smoking mask, staggering, muzzle jerking upward.
One chance.
Lu Jin bit down, burned the last oxygen in his lungs, and hurled himself out of the shadows.
No slick slide. No acrobatics. He hit Hound's shin like a dying mutt in a last lunge, driving into the man's legs and taking him down into the reeking sludge.
They grappled in the stink.
Lu Jin wasn't even close to this augmented bastard's weight class. One wild elbow smashed into his face; something in his nose gave with a bright, wet crack. His vision flashed white—
—but the Glock 19 in his hand stayed jammed up under Hound's jaw, right where the mask didn't reach.
Bang.
A muffled thump, swallowed by the narrow pipe.
The struggle cut off.
Warm blood mixed with thicker matter splashed across Lu Jin's face, hot enough that his skin jerked.
He shoved the body off, rolled away and turned on his side, gagging, retching hard. His nose burned; his whole face was one wet blur; his lungs felt like they'd split open.
No clean, cool one-shot kill. To drop one low-tier company hitman, he'd almost spent half his life.
[System Notice: Extreme weakness detected.]
His hand shook as he dug through the corpse's inner pocket and tugged out a wad of crumpled bills. Two thousand-something, by feel. Real cash. Heavy.
Then he saw Hound's terminal, still lit. Mission brief, one simple line:
[Mission: Eliminate leaker "Gray Rat" (alias: Lu Jin). Retrieve all distributed exploit code. Bounty: ¥5,000.]
No North Star. No secret tower. No apocalyptic scheme.
That was reality. He was just a code thief who'd sold the wrong thing, and the company had sent a security dog to drag him back. That was all.
"Kh…"
He stuffed the money into his pocket, braced a hand on the slime-slick concrete, about to haul himself up and crawl out of there—
—when the wasteland feed in the lower right of his vision exploded into harsh red.
[Alert! S-09 energy fully depleted (0%)!][Status change: Standby → Hunger Protocol]
His heart pulled tight.
Wasteland. Far northern ice fields.
The storm had passed. The camping pod glowed a soft orange on the snow, Li Xing asleep inside, slack and peaceful.
Outside, S-09 "Big Yellow" lay in the drift. All external indicators were dead. Only its single rust-scarred eye still burned with a murky, unhealthy light.
That was the biobrain's own current.
No power left. To keep that lump of brain from shutting down for good, it needed biomass. Something alive. Something warm.
Creak.
One hydraulic forepaw, strong enough to peel a tank, rode the last trace of pressure in its lines and settled on the pod's airtight hatch.
It didn't know Li Xing.
Without electricity driving the logic core, S-09 wasn't a guardian. Not a machine. Just frenzied nervous tissue locked in a can of steel.
And it could smell the protein inside. Three bodies. One small, tender one.
[Biomass craving: 99.9%]
In the sewer, Lu Jin stared at the feed until the picture warped. The cash in his fist deformed under the pressure of his grip.
He'd just risked his neck killing for this money.
Now the system calmly informed him that his only investment in the wasteland—that clueless girl—was about to become her pet's midnight snack.
Ding!
The shop window slammed across his vision, bright colors and fake cheer like a slap.
[Warning! Your S-class junk heap is about to open a "buffet"!][Want it to shut up? Want it to NOT eat your only song source?][Recommended item: Synthetic High-Energy Brain Tissue (Bio-mimetic · Cheap Edition)]
[Description: Even an S-class monster is just a pile of scrap once its stomach's full. No buffs, no upgrades, just pure calorie bomb.]
[Original price: ¥2,888.00][Disaster-Gouge price: ¥1,500.00]
[Current balance: ¥1,301.10 (previous funds) + ¥2,200.00 (corpse loot) = ¥3,501.10]
One and a half.
Lu Jin stared at the number. That was exactly what his broken nose had cost him just now.
"…Eat," he rasped, words thick in his throat, like he still had a mouthful of blood.
"Stuff yourself."
He had no other option. His finger hit [Pay] hard enough his knuckles hurt.
[Deduction: -¥1,500.00]
On the wasteland's skin, the air tore.
A pinkish clump of synthetic meat dropped out of nothing and hit the snow in front of S-09 with a wet slap, sugar-metal stench rolling off it.
S-09's paw, poised to crush the pod hatch, went still.
The cloudy eye rolled, then locked onto this richer, closer energy source.
"Urgh…"
A low, animal rumble.
S-09 lunged like some mangy street dog, hydraulic jaws opening wide. It scooped up the entire mass—wrapping and all—and bolted it down in a few savage bites.
Seconds ticked by.
The glassy eye slid shut.
No evolution. No sudden flash of genius. No power-up screen.
It just let out a heavy little internal burp. The urge to crack the pod like an egg drained away, replaced by the lazy heaviness of a full gut. It settled back into its snow hollow, all menace gone, nothing but dead metal waiting on the next charge.
Crisis over.
Cost: half of Lu Jin's net worth, and a broken nose.
Back in the drain, Lu Jin sagged against the wall. He dragged a filthy sleeve across his face, smearing blood into the rest of the grime, then flicked his gaze to the laughable leftover balance in his account.
A short, bitter laugh scraped out of him.
Out here in the real world, he was butchering people and looting corpses like a stray dog.
All so that, in that ruined world, he could keep a walking man-eater fed and a girl who slept through being on the menu alive for one more night.
"What a fucking…losing business," he muttered.
He spat pink onto the moss, pushed himself upright, and limped deeper into the dark, one bad leg dragging a wet trail behind him.