11:25 A.M. – Sector 20, Abandoned Parking Structure
The silence was wrong.
Nail's boots scraped against cracked concrete as he skidded behind a rusted sedan, his breath loud in his own ears.
The entire neighborhood should have been alive with the sounds of Red Dog patrols, of cursing and clattering gear—but instead, the air hung thick and heavy, like the moment before a storm breaks.
Then he saw them.
Three figures emerged from the shelter's shadowed doorway, their movements too smooth, too synchronized.
Not the ragged, brawler swagger of Red Dogs.
These were augmented—tall, broad-shouldered, their limbs whirring with hydraulic precision.
Military-grade.
Corporate.
Nail's fingers twitched toward his beloved knuckle dusters—custom Talon steel, etched with kill marks—but he forced his hand to his pistol instead.
These weren't the kind of enemies you punched.
"These guys are clearly different from the intel!" he hissed into his comms, already backpedaling. "Fall back! I'm compromised—repeat, compromised!"
The augments' heads snapped toward his voice. No shouts, no threats. Just the quiet click of targeting systems locking on.
Nail didn't wait.
He bolted, weaving between skeletal cars as gunfire chewed through the metal around him.
The operation was a bust, but one thing was certain—whatever the Red Dogs were hiding in that shelter was worth this level of protection.
Now he just had to live long enough to tell someone.
The augmented Red Dogs moved like ghosts—no battle cries, no wasted motion. Their footfalls were eerily precise, each step calculated to cut off Nail's escape routes.
Too quiet.
Even with the Red Paws tattooed across their biceps, they didn't act like any Dogs Nail had fought before. No taunts, no reckless charges—just the cold, methodical advance of predators herding prey.
His lungs burned as he vaulted over a collapsed barrier, the augments' footfalls echoing behind him—steady, relentless. No ragged breathing. No curses. Just the mechanical whir-click of joints recalibrating mid-stride, optimizing for pursuit.
A bullet sparked off the concrete near his heel. Too close.
Nail ducked behind a gutted truck, its rusted frame offering meager cover. His teeth clamped down on his conduit, wrenching it free from his belt. The screen flickered—Rank 1—Smokescreen glyph already primed.
A gamble. Their augments likely had thermal optics, but the dense, mineral-heavy dust of the parking structure might scramble their sensors just long enough.
His comms crackled. "Nail? Status!" Carlos's voice, sharp with tension.
No time to answer.
Nail's thumb swiped across the conduit's surface. The glyph flared to life in his palm, and he slammed it against the ground.
The explosion of gray-blue smoke was instantaneous, thick with particulates that stung his eyes and clogged the air. He didn't wait to see if it worked.
Muscle memory took over.
Nail lunged left, boots skimming soundlessly over debris, and slithered through the shattered windshield of an old delivery van. The glass crunched under his weight, but the sound was lost in the chaos.
Inside, the van's corpse reeked of mildew and stale oil. Nail pressed flat against the floor, conduit held tight to his chest.
Outside, the augments' footsteps hesitated.
Then—
A voice, flat and synthetic: "Thermal obscured. Switching to echo-location."
Nail's blood ran cold.
Not Dogs. Not even close.
Nail's thoughts shattered like glass as gunfire erupted behind him.
No time to think. Only move.
He was running before the first bullet whined past his ear, his body moving on pure instinct.
His fingers dug into his belt pouch, yanking free a compact charge—one of Vey's specials, already rigged with a Rank 1—Thermite Glyph. He didn't look back as he hurled it blindly into the smoke.
The augments wouldn't see it coming.
A bullet grazed his shoulder, the heat searing through his jacket before the pain even registered.
He barely flinched. The building's edge loomed ahead—three meters from the streets to the building.
Nail leapt.
He hit the concrete hard, rolling to disperse the impact, and immediately clamped his hands over his ears.
The explosion came a heartbeat later.
A concussive whump punched through the air, followed by a searing flash of orange-white light.
The shockwave rattled his teeth, sent debris skittering across the rooftop. Nail waited, breath held, as the dust slowly settled.
The augments were—
Oh, hell.
Three figures lay twisted in the wreckage below, limbs splayed at unnatural angles.
Smoke curled from exposed wiring, from the molten stumps where alloy met flesh.
One's torso had been split open, revealing a ribcage half-replaced with blackened hydraulic pistons.
Another's faceplate was gone entirely, the skull beneath a grotesque fusion of bone and chrome.
They weren't just augmented.
They were built.
Nail's hands shook as he fumbled for his conduit, its cracked screen flickering to life.
The camera app loaded sluggishly.
Click. Click. Click.
Each snapshot made his stomach turn.
There are serial numbers stamped on spinal reinforcement.
A Myriad logos etched into joint casings.
And—
One of the augments twitched.
Nail's blood turned to ice.
Its remaining eye—still horrifyingly human—locked onto him.
The jaw, half-torn from its hinges, spasmed.
"Target… acquired…"
The words slithered into Nail's skull like a parasite.
He stared at the broken thing at his feet—its remaining eye glazed with pain, yet still obeying, still hunting.
Are you still even a human anymore?
The question coiled around his throat like a noose.
His father's face flashed in his mind—hollow-eyed, standing at attention in that damned Spire uniform, reciting orders like scripture.
"Duty first," the old man had rasped, even as his hands shook from the neural implants they'd buried in his cortex.
Even as he burned people for corpo paychecks.
A soldier to the last.
A slave to the last.
Nail's breath came ragged.
His fingers found the knuckle dusters at his belt—cold, familiar steel etched with kill marks.
He slipped them on, the weight a comfort.
Then he activated the Rank 2—Mass Driver glyph.
Blue light spiderwebbed across the dusters' surface, the kinetic amplifiers humming to life.
His fist ached with pent-up force.
The augment's eye tracked him.
It didn't beg.
Didn't flinch.
Just kept repeating: "Target—"
Nail's punch landed like a meteor.
The augment's chest caved, alloy and bone crumpling under the amplified impact.
The second strike liquefied its skull, scattering chrome and grey matter across the concrete.
He didn't stop.
One after another—crunch, splatter, crack—until all three were reduced to sparking scrap.
Panting, Nail stared at his bloodied dusters.
This was freedom.
The choice to destroy.
The privilege of refusal.
The augments were nothing but shattered metal and wet ruin now.
Nail's hands trembled.
The Mass Driver glyph flickered out, its blue light fading from his knuckle dusters.
His breath came in ragged gulps, each inhale thick with the stench of scorched alloy and—god—something disturbingly organic.
Like copper and burnt pork.
His stomach lurched.
Bile surged up his throat.
He barely had time to rip off his dusters before he was on his knees, vomiting over the edge of the streets.
The acid burned his tongue, his nose.
Tears pricked at his eyes—not from the pain, but from the realization:
He hadn't just killed them.
He'd erased them.
And a part of him—a part he hated—had reveled in it.
"Nail?!"
Carlos's voice.
Close.
Nail wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood and spit.
He turned just as Carlos and two rookies vaulted onto the rooftop, their weapons raised.
They froze.
Carlos's face went slack as he took in the scene—the mangled corpses, the splintered concrete, Nail kneeling in the middle of it all, his hands dripping with fluids that weren't all his.
"What the fuck did you do?" Carlos whispered.
Nail opened his mouth.
No words came.
The rookies looked like they might be sick too.
One—a kid barely old enough to shave—stumbled back, his rifle shaking. "They're… they're people," he choked out.
"Were," Nail rasped.
His throat felt raw. "They were people."
Carlos's jaw tightened.
He stepped forward, his boot crunching on a piece of skull plating. "Intel said recon only. You were supposed to observe—"
"Intel was wrong!" Nail snapped, surging to his feet.
"Look at them, Carlos! You really think the Red Dogs built this? That this is just some gang shit?" He kicked a severed arm, the fingers still twitching. "They're property. Just like my—."
Nail stopped before he regrets what he intends to say.
The words hung in the air, too loud, too raw.
Carlos stared at him. Then, slowly, he lowered his rifle. "We need to get this intel to Karen. Now."
Nail exhaled.
The adrenaline was fading, leaving him hollow.
Somewhere below, the warehouse explosion rocked the district—Echo's work.
The fireball painted the sky in hellish orange, casting long shadows over the rooftop.
Over the corpses.
Over Nail's bloodied hands.
***
11:30 A.M. – Sector 20, Red Dog's Main Base, Tenn's Workshop
The lab smelled of scorched wiring and stale coolant—a far cry from the sterile research halls Tenn had once known.
Half-dismantled machinery littered every surface: a gutted drone sprawled across a workbench, its repulsor coils spitting sparks; a prototype gauntlet with exposed glyph arrays flickering erratically; a dozen failed experiments stacked like corpses in the corner.
At the center of the chaos stood her magnum opus—not some elegant corporate marvel, but a bastardized masterpiece of desperation.
The cryo-tank hummed as she adjusted the stabilization runes, her fingers moving with the precision of someone who'd spent too many nights elbow-deep in aether-corrupted wiring.
The original containment glyph pulsed inside its glass chamber, casting jagged blue shadows across her face.
Almost there.
A decade ago, Tenn had been a third-year mechanical engineering student with a scholarship from the government.
Back when she still believed technology could save people.
Then the Aether Incident happened.
Overnight, the demand for glyph programmers skyrocketed.
The corporates came knocking, waving contracts thick with zeroes and fine print.
She'd watched classmates sell their souls for lab coats and stock options—designing weapons disguised as "security systems," tweaking medical glyphs to addict instead of heal.
She'd refused.
The memory still tasted bitter: her thesis advisor's disappointed sigh, the way her friends stopped returning her calls when she published that damning paper on corporate aether-hoarding.
By the time the blacklisting started, she'd already sold her prototype reactor schematics to the highest bidder—not for profit, but to fund her own research.
And look where that got you.
A Red Dog enforcer banged on the lab's reinforced door. "Tenn! Gideon's losing his shit out here!"
She didn't look up. "Tell him to wait."
Her fingers tightened around a soldering iron as she reconnected the final conduit. The cryo-tank's diagnostics flared to life:
>> STABILIZATION AT 87%
>> GLYPH SYNCHRONIZATION: NOMINAL
Not perfect. But it would have to be enough.
Outside, the distant crump of another explosion rattled the shelves.
Vials of liquid aether trembled, their glow illuminating the faded diploma tucked beneath her workbench—the one she'd pulled from the trash after the university revoked her credentials.
Tenn exhaled through her nose and reached for the activation switch.
The corporates had played god with people's lives for too long.
The alarm's shrill pulse cut through the hum of machinery.
Tenn's head snapped toward the security feed—a lone Steel Talon scout, wiry and bleeding, moving through the parking structure's wreckage like a cornered animal.
Her lips curled.
Perfect.
She tapped the comms panel, her voice cool and measured as it echoed through the shelter's hidden speakers: "Activate test protocol. Send the security detail."
A pause. Then—
"Understood, Doctor."
The response came not from a human throat, but from the augments themselves—their vocal modulators flattening the words into something sterile.
Doctor.
The title still tasted like ash. She hadn't earned it in any lab the corporates would recognize.
The monitors flickered as the three units moved out, their gait unnervingly synchronized.
Tenn watched, fingers drumming against the cryo-tank's control panel.
This wasn't just defense.
This was a stress test.
Her augments—her work—were more than just muscle.
She'd built them to learn.
Every dodge, every counterattack, every wound they sustained or inflicted would feed back into their combat algorithms.
By the time the Steel Talons reached her door, her creations would be perfected.
A warning light flashed on the tank's display—GLYPH STABILIZATION AT 91%—but Tenn barely glanced at it.
Her focus was locked on the Talon scout's desperate movements.
Run. Fight. Adapt.
She'd done the same, once.
The memory surfaced unbidden: her first night in the Junkyard, clutching a stolen conduit and a half-written thesis on ethical glyph modulation.
The corporates had called her naive.
The gangs had called her prey.
Now?
Now they'd call her mad.
A smirk tugged at her lips as the lead augment's fist connected with the Talon's ribs—crack—the sound crisp through the audio feed.
"Interesting," she murmured, zooming in on the scout's reaction.
The way he rolled with the blow, how his fingers twitched toward a concealed weapon.
Instincts sharpened by survival.
Just like hers.
The cryo-tank's hum deepened, its core cycling up to full power. Soon, it wouldn't just stabilize glyphs—it would rewrite them.
No more corporate stranglehold on aether-tech.
No more playing by their rules.
A red alert blared across the screen—WEST WAREHOUSE BREACHED—followed by Gideon's snarling voice over comms: "Tenn! Status report!"
She silenced the alarm with a jab of her finger.
"Busy," she replied, eyes never leaving the feed as the Talon scout detonated a thermite charge.
The explosion filled the screen with white noise, but not before she caught the exact moment her augments' targeting systems adapted—shifting to echolocation before the smoke even cleared.
Beautiful.
The corporates had wanted obedient soldiers.
She'd built something better.
"Doctor?" The lead augment's voice crackled through the speakers, its tone eerily calm despite the shrapnel jutting from its chest. "All three security detail was destroyed. Requesting Tactical Override"
"Denied," she said softly. "Let me see what he does."
Some lessons had to be learned in blood.
Tenn sat and leaned back in her chair, fingers steepled under her chin as she watched the security feed.
The thermite blast had scrambled the visuals for a moment, but now—
Ah.
There he was.
The Talon scout moved through the smoke like a ghost, his silhouette sharp against the orange glow of smoldering wreckage.
At first, he did exactly what she expected: documenting.
His conduit's camera flashed as he cataloged the damage, snapping pictures of her augments' exposed wiring, the Myriad logos stamped on their spinal plating.
Standard intel-gathering.
Then—
He stopped.
Tenn's breath hitched as the scout crouched beside Unit-03, the one with its faceplate blown clean off.
For a moment, he just... stared.
At the exposed flesh beneath the chrome, at the way its remaining eye—still so human—tracked his movements despite the ruined jaw hanging slack.
What are you—
The scout reached for his belt.
Tenn's fingers dug into her knees as he pulled out a pair of knuckle dusters, the steel etched with crude kill marks.
A gangster's weapon. But then—
No.
A glyph flared to life across the dusters' surface, its blue light spiderwebbing through the grooves.
A Rank 2—Mass Driver, if she wasn't mistaken. Corporate tech, repurposed.
Tenn's lips parted.
The first punch landed with a wet crunch.
Unit-03's chest caved inward, hydraulic fluid and something darker spraying across the concrete.
The second strike took its head clean off.
She didn't blink.
Unit-02 twitched, its vocal modulator gargling static. "T-Target—"
The scout turned.
Something in his face—
Tenn's pulse thundered in her ears.
It wasn't just rage.
It was recognition.
The way his teeth bared, the way his shoulders shook—not with exhaustion, but with something far more primal.
He wasn't destroying machines.
He was killing slaves.
And he hated every second of it.
Unit-01's arm lashed out, grasping the scout's ankle.
A death rattle of programming: "Mission... parame—"
The dusters came down.
Again.
Again.
Until there was nothing left but sparking wreckage and the scout kneeling in the mess, his breath ragged, his hands trembling.
Tenn exhaled.
The workshop felt too quiet suddenly, the hum of the cryo-tank too loud.
On screen, the Talon vomited over the edge of the rooftop, his body rejecting what he'd done even as his fists had embraced it.
Fascination curled in her chest.
How long had it been since she'd seen something so human?
Not the cold efficiency of her augments, not Gideon's mindless brutality—but this?
This raw, ugly truth of flesh rebelling against itself?
She reached for her coffee, only to find the cup shaking in her grip.
Oh.
Her own hands were trembling.
The realization sent a thrill down her spine.
For the first time in years, Tenn didn't see a threat in that security feed.
She saw a kindred spirit.
Tenn's finger hovered over the playback controls.
She had to see it again.
The footage rewound in jerky increments—blood and hydraulic fluid reversing their arcs, shattered plating reassembling itself in macabre reverse.
There.
She paused it just as the Talon's fist connected with Unit-03's face, the moment of impact frozen in perfect clarity.
Zoom in.
Enhance.
The resolution pixelated, but the details remained unmistakable:
The Scout's Eyes, Not the blank fury she'd expected, but something far more complex.
Pupils blown wide, yes, but the way his brow furrowed—that wasn't rage.
That was revulsion.
At what he was doing.
At himself for doing it.
His Breathing, Chest heaving even before the first strike.
Not exhaustion.
Dread.
The Knuckle Dusters, Custom Talon steel, but the glyphwork... She traced the glowing patterns on-screen.
A Mass Driver variant, yes, but modified.
Overclocked. The kind of reckless engineering that burned out conduits—and flesh.
He knew this would hurt him too.
Tenn leaned back, the chair creaking under her weight.
Her coffee had gone cold.
She didn't remember setting it down.
On-screen, the playback continued unprompted—the scout's final, brutal strikes against Unit-01.
This time, she noticed what she'd missed before:
The way his punches grew less precise as he continued, not more.
How his left arm—the one with fresh bullet grazes—lagged halfway through.
The moment he realized Unit-01 was already dead, and kept hitting it anyway.
Not a soldier.
Not a killer.
A man breaking his own limits.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard, isolating the scout's biometrics from the augments' residual scans.
Elevated heart rate, spiking cortisol—standard fight-or-flight.
But then...
There.
As Unit-01's hand fell limp.
No satisfaction.
Guilt.
Tenn exhaled sharply through her nose.
The workshop's air smelled of aether and stale caffeine.
She'd seen that look before—in mirror reflections after all-nighters, in the faces of lab assistants ordered to scrap "non-viable" prototypes.
The corporates called it ethical friction.
She called it the rot.
And this Talon—this Nail, according to the unit's dying transmission—had it festering in his marrow.
A new alert blinked on the secondary monitor: WEST WAREHOUSE – STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.
Gideon would be here soon, demanding answers she no longer cared to give.
Tenn tapped a command, saving the footage to a private drive.
Then she did something she hadn't done since her university days.
She took notes.
**>> Subject: "Nail" (Steel Talons)
Observed Behavior:
Destructive capability exceeds standard Talon training
Emotional response suggests prior trauma related to augmentation
Glyph modification indicates self-taught/improvised engineering**
Her stylus hovered over the next line.
>> Hypothesis:
The cryo-tank hummed behind her, its stabilization runes flickering to 93%.
Tenn smiled.
>> Potential test parameters for Phase 2.