The Ghost Enforcer didn't attack immediately. It stood in the ruined doorway, a silent, metallic angel of death, its massive frame filling the space. The Ghost, the man inside the machine, was savoring his victory. This was the moment he had dreamed of, the moment he had been promised. He wanted us to feel the cold dread of our final moments, to let the terror soak in.
"Foolish, Leo," its synthetic voice echoed in the small, enclosed room. The sound was calm, condescending, and laced with triumph. "You chose loyalty. You chose sentiment. Those are weaknesses from the old world. They are bugs in the system. They have no place here. Now, you will die for it. And I will finally take my body back."
It raised its Phantom SR-90, the heavy barrel pointing directly at my chest. The red targeting laser flickered on, a tiny, burning dot appearing on my armor.
Anya, from her position on the floor, reacted with pure, defiant instinct. She fired her pistol. The small-caliber round, our last hope, sparked harmlessly off the Enforcer's reinforced chest plate. The machine didn't even flinch. It was an insult, nothing more.
Its sadism, its need to gloat, was its one flaw. It had given us a few seconds. And in this world, a few seconds could be an eternity.
My eyes darted away from the Enforcer, scanning the room, my brain working in overdrive. The fear was still there, a cold knot in my stomach, but it was being pushed aside by a desperate, analytical calm. We couldn't fight it. We couldn't run. The door was blocked by a ten-ton murder-bot. But we were in a control room. A room that managed the power for this entire industrial sector. We were standing inside the heart of the machine.
While the Enforcer was monologuing, my eyes fell upon a secondary screen on the console I was leaning against. It wasn't the bounty transfer interface. It was a system diagnostic, a schematic that was probably meant for engineers. It showed a power grid for the entire Titan's Cross plaza. I saw massive energy readings from capacitor banks, routing controls for substations, and overload warnings flashing in amber.
A new plan, a desperate, suicidal, beautiful plan, bloomed in my mind. It was a final, all-or-nothing gambit.
"Anya! Distract it! Buy me ten seconds!" I yelled, turning my back on the Enforcer and focusing entirely on the console. It was an act of pure, insane faith.
My fingers flew across the holographic keyboard. I wasn't a hacker, but I knew my way around a game interface. I stabbed at the glowing icons, navigating menus at a speed born of panic. [ROOT_ACCESS]. [OVERRIDE: POWER_MANAGEMENT]. The system was fighting me, throwing up security warnings and confirmation prompts. [WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS]. [ERROR: ADMIN_LEVEL_CLEARANCE_REQUIRED].
The Enforcer took a slow, heavy step towards me. "Your tricks are over, Leo. There are no more doors to hide behind."
Anya, with a grunt of pain, threw her empty pistol. The light piece of metal clattered uselessly against the Enforcer's leg. The machine ignored it. It was focused on me, its primary target.
"Hey, tin can!" she yelled, her voice filled with a raw, guttural defiance. The Enforcer paused, its red eye swiveling to her. Anya grinned, a bloody, defiant smile. "You talk too much."
That was the opening. Its attention was divided for a crucial second. Its human ego had been provoked.
My fingers found the right command. A master override. [REROUTE_ALL_CAPACITORS_TO_SECTOR_GAMMA_CONTROL]. Gamma Control was the designation for this room. I was telling the system to channel all the stored energy for this entire factory level, every watt, every joule, right here, right now.
The lights in the room began to flicker wildly. A high-pitched whining sound started to fill the air, coming from the walls themselves, growing louder and louder with every passing millisecond. The consoles sparked, showering my hands with harmless static.
The Enforcer realized what I was doing. Its posture changed. The calm condescension vanished, replaced by sudden, violent urgency. It lunged towards me, its metal hand outstretched, its fingers curled into a claw, ready to crush my skull and stop me.
[CONFIRM_EMERGENCY_DISCHARGE]. The final, blood-red button appeared on the screen.
I slammed my palm down on the confirmation icon just as the Enforcer's shadow fell over me.
The world turned white.
It was not a flash of light. It was a physical presence. A wave of pure, silent energy erupted from every console, every power conduit, every light fixture in the room. It was an electromagnetic pulse of incredible, unimaginable power. A system overload designed to fry every single piece of unshielded electronics connected to the grid. It was like detonating a miniature sun in a shoebox.
The whining sound rose to an unbearable, piercing shriek that vibrated in my bones, and then—absolute, deafening silence.
And darkness.
The blast had shorted out every system in the room. The lights, the consoles, the humming machinery—all dead. The Ghost Enforcer, caught in the very center of the blast, had convulsed violently for a split second, a shower of brilliant blue sparks erupting from every joint in its body. It had made a sound like a distorted, digital scream. Then it had gone rigid and crashed to the floor with the sound of a falling statue.
It was down. We had won. We had found the third option. We had refused to play Seraph's game and had created our own.
But as my eyes slowly adjusted to the oppressive, suffocating blackness, I realized the true cost of our victory. My HUD was gone. The familiar overlay, my health status, my ammo count, my map—all of it was dark. The EMP had fried my own systems. The comms were dead. I was blind.
Then I heard a soft gasp from the corner. "Leo… my leg. It's dead."
Anya's voice was filled with a new kind of terror, a helplessness I had never heard from her before. The EMP hadn't just taken out the Enforcer. It had fried the complex, advanced electronics of her cybernetic leg.
We had survived. But now we were blind, deaf, and crippled, trapped in a dark, silent room with the body of a disabled murder-bot.