Blaze watched the dance of violence unfold, a connoisseur at a particularly rowdy theater.
The crimson armor was a pivot point in a storm of desperate motion—the woman with the shotgun firing defiant blasts, the brawler with the glowing fists pushing her back with surprising weight, the others shifting like shadows, preparing their next move.
He felt no urgency.
Not a flicker.
If he wished, he could step in.
A snap of his fingers, a wall of flame, and this pathetic resistance would turn to ash and screaming.
It would be simple.
Clean.
And profoundly, soul-crushingly boring.
That would also ruin the whole point, wouldn't it?
The men in their distant spires wanted data.
They wanted to see how a gutter rat fought when given a god's weapons.
Watching Ember struggle, adapt, and be pressed by these insects… that was the entire experiment.
To intervene would be to fail the test himself.
A dry, silent laugh shook his shoulders.
False hope.
That was the real spice.
Let them think they'd found a crack.
Let them believe, for one glorious, heart-pounding moment, that they could win.
The terror that would follow when he proved them wrong… that would be a vintage despair.
He could almost taste it.
His eyes, sharp behind the augmented display, tracked every movement, but his attention turned inward.
"Are you watching this, AiM?" he murmured, the words lost under the cacophony of gunfire and screeching metal.
The response was instant, a cool, genderless voice painted directly onto his auditory nerves.
<>
"And you don't find anything… concerning about this?" Blaze asked, a genuine curiosity in his tone.
He wasn't worried, he was merely taking a poll. "Your precious prototype is getting mobbed by the local wildlife."
<
AiM's reply was devoid of emotion, a simple recitation of facts.
<
A pause, almost imperceptible.
<
Blaze's grin widened.
So the machine agreed with him.
<
"So we're on the same page," Blaze said, his voice a low purr of satisfaction. "Let her play. Let them think they're winning."
He crossed his arms again, settling in.
The show was getting good.
The best part was always right before the curtain fell.
A strange clarity descended upon Ember, cold and sharp amidst the storm of impacts.
The world had narrowed to a brutal calculus: the heavy, mass-driven swings of the boy's fists, the stinging, precise shots from the woman's shotgun trying to blind her sensors, the sniper's rounds that never aimed to pierce, only to shove and distract at the worst possible moment.
It was chaos.
It was pressure.
And for the first time since donning this polished shell, she felt alive.
Not the sterile, clinical power of crushing unresisting foes.
That had been satisfying in its own way, a proof of concept.
But this… this was different.
This was a fight.
A hot, electric current was singing in her veins, a feeling so foreign it took her a moment to recognize it.
It wasn't just the suit's systems humming; it was her own blood, her own heartbeat thundering in her ears, a raw, exhilarating cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine.
She hadn't felt this since… since the old days, in the grime and the dark, where every scuffle was a potential death sentence and survival was a taste sweeter than anything.
A grim, almost-smile tugged at the corners of her mouth behind the mask.
This is more like it.
Across the ruined yard, the remaining Talons watched, their earlier paralysis thawing into a stunned, breathless vigil.
They saw Nail—not the hotheaded kid, but a focused, roaring force—pushing the crimson horror back with blows that landed with deep, shuddering thumps.
They saw Mags, a specter of grim determination, circling like a wolf, her shotgun barking not to kill, but to harry, to spoil the armor's balance, her eyes missing nothing.
And they saw Rook, the mountain, now a statue of intense focus, his massive rifle silent until the exact moment the armor committed to a killing strike against Nail, his accelerated round snapping out to knock a fist a crucial few inches off course.
It was a desperate, three-part dance, and it was working.
The understanding spread through them without a word being spoken.
They couldn't fire.
Not with their shaky hands and standard rifles.
In this tangled, close-quarters brawl, any wild shot was as likely to hit Nail or Mags as the armor.
They would only add noise, chaos, and potential tragedy.
So they became an audience.
Their fear didn't vanish, but it was overlaid now with a fragile, burning hope.
They watched Nail, driven by a fury they all shared, trade blows with a god.
They watched Mags, their veteran, proving that defiance had a shape and a sound.
And they trusted Rook, their anchor, to be the single, precise instrument that could tip the scales.
They held their breath, their weapons lowering slightly, their world shrinking to the violent ballet unfolding in the dust.
For this moment, they weren't just victims waiting to be slaughtered.
They were witnesses to a fight-back.
On the opposite side of the ruined yard, sheltered by the skeletal remains of a cargo loader, Echo worked in furious silence.
Her hands moved with a swift, surety as the ragged handful of Talons with conduits gathered close.
Their faces were pale, streaked with dirt and sweat, but their eyes held a hard glint—the look of people who had run out of everything except the will to try one last, stupid thing.
Echo's mind, however, was a world away, piecing together the silent sermon Rook had delivered.
It had taken her three solid seconds of frozen focus to decipher his crude, urgent pantomime.
Three seconds where the world—the gunfire, the shouts, the heavy thumps of Nail's fight—had faded into a muffled hum.
Then, the logic snapped into place, cold and razor-sharp.
Rule One: The barrier dies when the armor attacks.
She hadn't witnessed it herself, but the truth of it felt immediate.
The shield was a perfect, all-or-nothing bubble.
It couldn't selectively let a fist pass through while protecting the rest.
To touch the world, to deliver violence, the armor had to be vulnerable.
It was a fundamental trade-off, a chink in the divine armor not of strength, but of purpose.
Rule Two: The barrier cannot form around what is already inside.
This, she had seen.
The crimson gauntlet that closed in around Nail's arm.
Mags's vibrating blade biting into the alloy a moment later, meeting no shimmering resistance, only metal and then… blood.
The shield wasn't a second skin.
It was a castle wall.
And if you were already past the gate, the wall was meaningless.
The second rule was the key.
It was also a death sentence.
Exploiting Rule One required split-second timing, a gamble on the moment the armor chose to strike.
Dangerous, but a soldier's gamble.
Exploiting Rule Two required something else entirely.
It demanded getting close.
Intimately close.
It meant entering the kill-zone of a machine that could crush a skull with a casual gesture.
It meant surviving long enough to plant a blow or a blade inside that invisible perimeter before the pilot even knew the rule had been broken.
It was the most exploitable flaw because it bypassed the shield completely.
It was the most dangerous because it meant inviting the monster to embrace you.
Echo's gaze swept over her small, desperate band.
She saw the flickering glyphs on their conduits.
They were hackers armed with rusted knives, about to storm a fortress.
"Listen," Echo said.
Her voice was a low rasp, scraped raw by dust and tension.
It carried no inspiration, no fire.
It was the sound of a door closing, of options running out.
This wasn't a rallying cry.
It was a funeral instruction.
The Talons with conduits leaned in, their faces etched with a grim focus that had burned away the last of their fear.
There was only the job now.
Echo's eyes, sharp and cold, tracked the violent dance in the center of the yard before flicking back to them.
"That thing isn't a god," she stated, the words flat and absolute. "It's a tool. An expensive, terrifying tool, but a tool all the same. And tools have manuals. They have limits. Rules the people who built them couldn't break."
She let that settle.
They were junkyard rats.
They understood flawed machinery better than anyone.
"It's durable. We've seen that. But durability isn't the same as invincibility. It has to follow its own logic. It has a switch that has to be flipped, and it can't be in two places at once."
She paused, her gaze locking onto the crimson armor as it blocked another of Nail's earth-shaking blows.
"Our job isn't to break the tool. It's to find the flaw in its programming and jam a spike into it."
Her jaw tightened. "The flaw we have to use… is the most dangerous one. It's not a weakness in its armor. It's a hole in its defense that only opens up if you're right on top of it."
She nodded toward the epicenter of the storm, where Nail traded blows and Mags darted like a venomous shadow. "Like them. You have to get inside its guard. Past where its shield even matters. You have to be close enough to smell the aether off its hull."
"Everyone here saw it bleed." Echo's words hung in the dusty air, simple and brutal.
She didn't need to point.
The image was seared into all of them: the shower of orange sparks, the grinding shriek of metal, and the dark, shocking red that had welled up from the gash in the crimson alloy.
It was the most important thing any of them had witnessed all day.
"Mags's blade bit into its arm," Echo continued, her voice cutting through the distant sounds of the fight. "Not when it was standing there invincible. Not when its shield was up. It bit in when the armor had already reached out. When it had grabbed Nail."
She let the implication sink in, watching it register on their faces—not as hope, but as a terrifying equation.
"The shield doesn't work if you're already where it wants to be. That's the rule. That's the only opening we get."
A cold silence followed her words, deeper than before.
They had all been brave enough to gather here, to clutch their unstable conduits and prepare for a final stand.
They understood the theory, the brutal logic of the trap.
But understanding was one thing.
The visceral, animal reality of it was another.
Echo saw it in the slight tremble of a man's hands as he adjusted his grip on his conduit.
In the way a woman's throat worked as she swallowed hard, her eyes fixed on the distant, violent blur of the crimson armor.
In the collective, almost imperceptible shift in their stances—not a step back, but a settling of weight, as if bracing against a physical dread.
They had cold feet.
Not from cowardice, but from a perfect, primal understanding.
Getting close to that thing wasn't tactics.
It was offering your throat to a wolf's jaws and hoping you could cut its belly open on the way down.
They knew what they were getting into.
And knowing made the air in their lungs feel thin and frozen.
A wild, reckless grin had stretched across Nail's face, a stark white slash in the grime and sweat.
He didn't feel it.
He didn't know it was there.
All he knew was the roar in his ears that wasn't sound, but pure sensation.
The deep, satisfying THUMP of his mass-driven fists meeting the invisible barrier.
The shudder of impact that traveled up his arms and rattled his teeth.
The electric buzz of the glyphs on his knuckles flaring with each blow.
A raw, chemical fire was flooding his system, burning away everything else—the memory of Pen's broken body, the icy fear that had turned his limbs to lead, the crushing certainty of their doom.
This wasn't courage.
It was a dopamine fever, a brutal high granted by the simple, primal act of fighting back.
He was in the ring.
He was swinging.
Nothing else existed.
He didn't see the calculated shift in the armor's stance, the way its movements were becoming less reactive and more anticipatory.
He didn't register the slowing fraction of a second it took for him to recover from his own powerful, telegraphed swings, or how the crimson figure began to exploit those gaps—not with overwhelming force, but with precise, probing strikes that forced him to defend, to flinch, to give ground.
The reality that the fight was changing, that the three-way pressure they were applying was being methodically parsed and dismantled by the thing inside the shell, never dawned on him.
The advantage was slipping, grain by grain, from their desperate grasp into the suit's cold, adaptive processors.
But Nail didn't see a losing battle.
He saw a target that flinched.
He felt the vibration in his bones when he made contact.
He was alive, screaming and sweating and fighting, and for a man who trusted only what his hands could break, that was the only truth that mattered.
The grin stayed, a testament not to triumph, but to the sheer, blinding relief of finally being able to hit something.
Nonetheless, beneath the roar of adrenaline, a quieter kind of learning was happening.
It wasn't conscious.
It was written in the bruises forming beneath his skin, in the subtle adjustments of his footwork, in the way his body had started to predict the wind of a passing strike before his mind could process it.
Nail's eyes, sharpened by a hundred back-alley scrambles, were slowly—painfully—adjusting to the armor's unnatural rhythm.
Its movements weren't human; they were the jerks and glides of a machine, all maximum efficiency and no tells.
But even a machine had patterns.
The way it pivoted on its heel before a kick.
The slight dip of its shoulder before a straight punch.
He was starting to see the ghosts of its intentions a half-heartbeat earlier.
But seeing and reacting were two different things.
When his predictions failed, when the crimson blur moved faster than his fraying instincts could match, the mistake would come.
A fist would slip past his guard, aimed to end him.
That's when the others caught him.
He never saw the coordinated save.
He only felt its effect.
The killing blow meant for his temple would be knocked askew by a hyper-sonic crack from Rook's rifle, the concussive round slapping the armored wrist off-course.
Or the armor's footing would suddenly dissolve in a burst of dust and buckshot as Mags, with sniper-caliber timing, obliterated the chunk of rubble under its advancing foot, forcing it to recalibrate its balance.
They weren't just fighting alongside him; they were building a fragile safety net out of grit and timing.
Mags was the disruptor, ruining the monster's foundation.
Rook was the corrector, altering the path of its violence.
And Nail, driven by fury and a growing, instinctual map of his enemy's movements, was the anvil against which they tried to break it.
He learned through near-misses paid for by others.
Every exchange taught his body a little more, even as the cost of each lesson was written in the strain on Mags's focus and the dwindling reserve of Rook's specialized rounds.
The dance had a new, frustrating rhythm.
Every time Ember saw an opening—the woman with the shotgun pausing to reload, the sniper shifting behind his cover—and lunged to erase the distraction, the boy was there.
Not just blocking.
Interposing.
He would abandon his own defense, turn his body into a battering ram, and throw a mass-driven fist directly into her path.
Not at her, but at the space she needed to occupy.
The impact against her chest plate wasn't the sharp ping of bullets.
It was a deep, resonant GONG that shuddered through the entire Aegis-frame, a sound like a wrecking ball hitting a bank vault.
The barrier held, dispersing the force, but the sheer, dumb kinetic weight of the blow couldn't be denied.
It shoved her back, gliding her two, three steps across the torn concrete, ruining her angle, breaking her momentum.
It was infuriatingly effective.
He was using his own body as a living, breathing barricade.
Each metallic groan of impact narrowed her world further.
The other two became peripheral ghosts, annoyances.
The central problem, the immovable object in her path, was the snarling young man with the glowing fists.
He was the lock.
Break him, and the whole fragile resistance would shatter.
A cold, efficient part of her mind presented the solution.
The crowd-control glyph.
The one that had flattened the yard with a wave of pure force.
She could activate it now, in this tightened space.
It would blast him off his feet, stun the others, end this tedious scrum in a heartbeat.
But she dismissed the thought almost as soon as it formed.
That would be… premature.
A shortcut.
The corporate observers—wherever they were—wanted data on adaptive combat, not a replay of an already-demonstrated function.
More than that, it felt like cheating.
This fight, this raw, grinding exchange, was the first real challenge she'd faced in the suit.
It was teaching her things.
About the suit's balance under repeated, heavy impacts.
About the lag time between her will and the servos' response.
To end it with a pre-programmed trick felt like admitting the suit—and she, by extension—couldn't win the old-fashioned way.
So she let the glyph remain dormant in her arsenal.
Her focus, laser-sharp and simmering with a professional kind of irritation, remained fixed on the boy.
She would break him with her hands.
She would dismantle this young man piece by piece, and make the others watch as their best defense was reduced to a red smear on her alloy fists.
That was the correct conclusion to this test.
The thought was a clean, cold line in her mind—a solution waiting to be deployed.
But the calculation was shattered by a blur of movement from her blind side.
Not a shot.
Not a glyph.
A person.
A Talon, his face a mask of terrified resolve, had broken from the ragged line and flung himself at her in a desperate, diving tackle.
It was clumsy, born of pure adrenaline, aiming not to hurt but to disrupt.
Her augmented reflexes fired.
She twisted at the waist, a jerky, piston-fast motion that pulled her center of mass aside.
The man's grasping hands scraped harmlessly across the lower edge of her back plate instead of catching her legs, and he sprawled past her into the dirt.
The attack was harmless.
The barrier hadn't even flared.
But the shock was a static jolt in her veins.
Someone else got close.
Not the brawler she was fixated on, not the veteran with the knife.
Someone new.
Someone who had looked at the invincible crimson specter, at the carnage she'd already wrought, and had decided the only move left was to throw his own body into the gears.
For a single, suspended heartbeat, the rhythm of the fight stuttered.
The arrogance of it—the sheer, stupid bravery—was a different kind of blow.
It didn't hurt the armor, but it cracked the pristine bubble of her focus.
The false hope was spreading.
And it was getting brave.