The impact of his boot against the damp concrete sent a shockwave from his knee to his spine. Djin clinical his teeth, the pain pulsing sharp and hot, but he didn't have the luxury of stopping. Stopping meant being processed, and being processed in the Low City meant disappearing.
Behind him, the deep, vibrating hum of a D.E.V.A. unit cut through the sector's noise pollution. He ran. The drone's red sensor lights sliced through the alleyway gloom like aiming lasers, reflecting off oil puddles and the high-collared red jacket Djin wore—a vibrant scarlet blur trying to lose itself in the gray concrete.
His fingers danced in the air, manipulating the visual pad projected before his black eyes as he desperately tried to establish a secure audio connection. He needed a route, a hole, a miracle. The machine's hum intensified, the air displacement hitting the back of his neck. Without thinking, Djin threw himself through the open window of an abandoned warehouse.
The floor wasn't where he expected it to be.
He plummeted into the void of a dark stairwell, tumbling down the steps, the metal railings slamming into his ribs. As the world spun, the call icon finally connected.
"Alma! Help!" he shouted, his voice echoing through the stairwell as he tried to brake his fall by grabbing the handrail. "D.E.V.A.s are on my tail!"
The reply came in his ear, crisp and irritatingly calm.
"Ahhh, hi, Djin." Her tone was light, as if she had just woken up from a pleasant nap on the other side of the city. "What's the aggression level? Did you attack one of them? You know vandalism against Federation property only makes the fine worse, right? Anyway, I have a message for you from—"
"Focus, Alma!" Djin landed on the ground floor of the warehouse, panting, wiping sweat that glued his black hair to his pale forehead. "Level Three Wasps. I didn't even touch the damn things, I got caught in a random sweep! They're scanning signatures. I need a new ID, now!"
The warehouse ceiling shuddered with the weight of the machines landing on the roof. Red lights flooded the staircase above.
"Damn, they found me!"
Djin didn't wait. He bolted toward the service exit, kicking the crash bar of the metal door. The steel gave way and he was catapulted outside, landing clumsily on the tarp of a street food stall.
The crash of falling pots and the hiss of steam mixed with shouts.
"WHAT THE—? YOU CRAZY, KID?!" The stall owner, a burly man with a rusted mechanical arm, grabbed Djin by the collar, ready to punch him.
But the merchant's fury evaporated in the next instant.
The warehouse doors were ripped open. The two D.E.V.A. units floated into the street, silent and lethal, ignoring physics. The red sensors swept the area, passing over the merchant. The man released Djin immediately and backed away, pale, shrinking against the wall, seized by the absolute terror those machines inspired in the common populace. They didn't negotiate. They executed.
Djin took advantage of the distraction and bolted into the labyrinth across the street.
The Low City closed in around him. There were no planned streets there; it was a vertical and oppressive chaos. Shanty buildings grew over one another like concrete tumors, power cables hung like vines in a metal jungle, and the sky was just a distant slit blocked by neon signs flickering in dead languages.
He ducked into a narrow alley where the walls felt like they wanted to crush him. The smell of chemical waste and cheap spices was suffocating. The claustrophobia was real; every turn could be a dead end.
"I've got your locations and I've hacked their neural network," Alma informed him. Her voice lost its laziness, taking on the focused tone of someone hammering a keyboard miles away. "Djin, you must have done something big or your luck is rotten today. They just activated the lethal weapons protocol."
Djin skidded around a corner, using the dirty wall to propel himself, nearly colliding with a group of VR addicts blocking the path.
"Lethal?!" He jumped over a pile of e-waste. "I told you I didn't do anything!"
"The system disagrees. You have sixty seconds before they stop trying to arrest you and start firing plasma." The sound of her frantic typing leaked through the comms. "I'm configuring your new signature, but the upload is delicate. I need you to stay fifteen meters away from them and avoid direct eye contact with the sensors so you don't corrupt the data packet."
Djin looked back. Two more units had joined the hunt, flying low, dodging clotheslines and data cables with terrifying speed. The humming was louder, closer. Fifteen meters was practically impossible.
"You've got to be kidding me," he grumbled in disbelief, forcing his tired legs to accelerate.
He knew Alma was the best hacker money—or the lack of it—could buy, but sometimes he suspected she blocked any sense of urgency or self-preservation on purpose, just to watch him suffer.
The alley ended at a high fence. Without slowing down, Djin used the crumbling architecture to his advantage, leaping onto an overturned dumpster to gain momentum. His fingers brushed the top of the rusted fence and he launched himself to the other side, his body spinning in the air.
But his luck ran out before his feet touched the ground.
A bluish glow lit up the alley, followed by the smell of ozone and burnt flesh.
He screamed, a hoarse and involuntary sound, as the plasma beam grazed his right calf. It wasn't a clean cut; the heat instantly cauterized the skin, cooking the muscle. He landed hard, rolling in the toxic mud, his leg failing under the weight.
"SHIT! They're not playing around!" he bellowed, his voice trembling with panic as he crawled behind the carcass of an industrial generator.
The cover was temporary. Plasma bolts began hammering the generator's metal, tearing off chunks of incandescent steel that rained down on him. The mechanical hum of the D.E.V.A.s intensified, oppressive, coming from above and the sides. The toxic air burned his nostrils, and acid rain, now mixed with his own blood, ran down his skin like liquid fire.
"Signature ready for upload!" Alma announced, her tense voice cutting through the noise of the explosions. "But the interference from the shots is corrupting the signal. I need you to create vertical distance, now! Two more units are closing the circle from the front. Twenty seconds, Djin!"
Djin looked at his leg. The fabric of his pants was melted, fused to the raw flesh. He couldn't run. Not like that.
With trembling hands, he pulled a hard case from his belt. Inside, protected by foam, was a single glass ampoule containing a silvery, viscous, and living liquid.
"Damn it..." he muttered, staring at the vial as if it were a death sentence.
That wasn't medicine. Those were experimental military nanomachines, salvaged from the wreckage of a warship from the Unification Era. The middleman had already valued that single dose at five hundred thousand credits. It was enough to buy a new identity, a ship, and vanish from this junkyard planet forever. It was his golden ticket.
And he was about to inject it into his leg just to keep from dying in a filthy alley.
"Inject that shit already, stop being a wuss!" Alma screamed in his ear, reading the hesitation in his biosignals. "If they catch you with Level S stolen military tech, they'll trace the origin and kill us both. Five seconds before the flank!"
The generator's metal began to glow red from the heat of the continuous fire.
"TO HELL WITH IT!" Djin roared.
He slammed the syringe into his own thigh, ignoring the pain of the thick needle, and pressed the plunger.
The silver liquid entered.
It wasn't cold. It was absolute ice, followed by an electric shockwave that raced through every nerve in his body, resetting his nervous system.
Djin gasped, eyes wide, as he looked at the wound on his calf.
It was grotesque and fascinating. Under the burned skin, thousands of nanobots went into a frenzy. He watched the muscle tissue weave itself back together; the scorched skin peeled away, replaced by a new, accelerated, pinkish layer. The pain vanished, replaced by a hum of raw power.
The world stopped.
No, the world didn't stop. Djin's perception had accelerated to a god-like level.
The drops of acid rain looked like diamonds suspended in the air, falling in slow motion. The sound of the plasma blasts distorted, turning into a deep, drawn-out bass. He could see the gears of the servomotors in the D.E.V.A.s' wings spinning, calculating the next shot.
He felt every muscle fiber vibrate with potential energy. The loss of half a million credits stung his wallet, but the power coursing through his veins was undeniable.
He mapped the alley in milliseconds: four units firing at the generator, two closing the northern exit. Smooth concrete walls on both sides. The only route: a fire escape on the building to the right, six meters up.
Impossible for a human. Trivial for what he was now.
Djin flexed his knees. The concrete floor cracked under the pressure of his boots.
He didn't jump; he detonated.
His body was projected vertically with the violence of a missile. He soared five, six, seven meters into the air, passing through the smoke of the shots that were still traveling toward the spot where he had been a second ago.
He grabbed the fire escape railing with one hand. The metal groaned and bent under the excessive force of his grip, but it held. With a pull that defied physics, he launched himself to the top of the building.
"Vertical distance achieved!" Alma's voice sounded distorted by the speed of his mental processing. "Get out of their line of sight!"
Djin reached the roof but didn't stop. The energy from the nanos demanded movement. Instead of running, he used the residual momentum to leap the gap between the buildings—a ten-meter abyss separating the blocks. He landed on the neighboring rooftop, rolling to dissipate the kinetic energy, coming to a stop in a crouch behind a massive polymer water tank.
The effect of the drug began to stabilize, and the world snapped back to normal speed with a nauseating pop.
Down below, the D.E.V.A.s flew in erratic circles, their scanners sweeping the void, confused by the target's disappearance.
"Signature rewritten. The ghost is gone," Alma's voice sounded in his ear, relieved, but Djin could barely process it.
The crash came fast. His body, forced beyond its biological limit, claimed its price. His muscles trembled uncontrollably, sweat soaked his jacket, and his heart beat so hard it hurt his ribs. He had survived, but he had just spent his fortune to do it.
The hum of the drones began to fade, heading off to hunt the random poor soul Alma had chosen to carry the old signature. Only then did her voice return, calm and light as ever.
"Are you okay, my half-million-credit hero?"
Djin leaned his head against the cold polymer of the water tank, looking at his intact leg where a smoking hole had been just moments before. He let out a nervous, humorless laugh.
"I'll... survive. But as soon as I stop shaking, we're going to have a serious talk about that favorite soba stall of yours. You're picking up the tab for the next ten years."