In an attempt to pull the Robo-Dog's attention to herself, Lù-Qímiào vaulted over a fallen log and spun midair, letting off a three-round burst from her second firearm: a sleek plasma revolver with ion-charged bullets. They sparked across the Robo-Dog's flank, shorting out a few sensors. The killing machine growled, actually growled, and retaliated by launching a cable-mounted spike.
She ducked, its spike barely missing her skull.
They ran through a stone gate at the edge of the training grounds, toward the beginning of the school's upper stairways. Ivy-covered walls lined the path. Bells rang in the far watchtower, signaling full breach.
Inside the fortress, guards armed with E M P rifles took aim.
"Don't shoot!" Lù-Qímiào yelled. "You'll only make it madder!"
They froze. The Robo-Dog plowed through two stone pillars like wet clay. One guard fired anyway. A clean hit. The E M P charge exploded in the Robo-Dog's face.
The beast staggered. Sparks flew from its snout. Momentarily distracted, the mechanical beast turned toward the guard and leapt, twenty feet through the air, landing atop the tower, simultaneously ripping the rifle from his hands and smashing him aside with a swipe that sent him crashing through the nearest wall.
"Run. Just keep running!" Lù-Qímiào ordered.
Chidi nearly tripped. The hill felt steeper now. Gravity was the enemy. Panic, its twin. And behind them, the hum of machinery locked on his scent. Relentless. He'd never run this fast in his life.
Another leap from the Robo-Dog. At the same time Chidi felt a pull coursing through his right hand that shoved him momentarily off the Robo-Dog's deadly path as its claws slammed just inches behind him. A tail-mounted blade shot out, narrowly missing his spine.
"You seriously don't know what it wants?" Lù-Qímiào shouted as they dodged between barricades.
"I swear!" Chidi let out desperately.
"Could it be the Brace? she suggested knowingly.
Realization suddenly hit Chidi like an avalanche. He glanced at his right wrist while still running, and noticed, for the first time, his torn sleeve.
She knows! he beamed mentally. And to think that he had forgotten why the metal lethal weapon was chasing only him. But there was no time to explain.
"I would gladly let go of the Brace, if that's what it wants," Chidi yelled. "But the Brace won't let go of me!"
Lù-Qímiào's chin tightened. She then realized that the Brace, whatever it was, was self-aware.
Chidi's legs burned. His heart threatened to cave in on itself. His breath caught in his throat as he dared a glance back.
The Robo-Dog was gaining. No: flying. Its limbs had adjusted. Joints twisted into a more aerodynamic configuration. It was morphing in real-time. Adaptation protocol.
Up in the dusky sky, a beast circled, carving its way across the clouds. A splendid beast, yet savage; and massive as an elephant.
A Griffin. Mythical creature in real life. Its lion-like body pulsed with muscular tension while its wide eagle wings beat with silent fury.
On its back rode two men. The first, positioned forward with commanding posture, was Ikemba, a Master-Hunter: not by title, but by repute. Cold, calculating, and known in the underworld as the man who always got what he came for.
Behind him, on the saddle, sat Master-Bender Oboro: a fierce, scar-faced assassin from Gun City. Though a master of blade, bullet-bending and stealth, Oboro lacked the intellectual sharpness that Ikemba wielded like a scalpel. He was not here by invitation, but by necessity. He was the client.
Oboro had hired Ikemba to retrieve a powerful object: the Brace. An ancient artifact now worn by a boy named Chidi. Oboro wasn't the owner of the Brace: he was a proxy, a hired hand acting under secret orders from higher powers located in the mist-veiled summits of Gun City, a militarized cluster of citadels known for politics, precision, and paranoia.
Ikemba didn't care who truly owned the Brace. He cared only about the hunt: and the andrelalin-pumping excitement it gave him. The longer the hunt took, the more interesting. The more elusive Chidi was, the more intrigued Ikemba became.
It had taken Ikemba more than a month to reestablish a track on the elusive boy, Chidi, now under his surveillance. Within that month-plus, Ikemba had wondered what mysterious force could have scrambled his tracking bird's lock on Chidi back then.
And right now, the trail was back. And hot.
On Ikemba's right shoulder perched Nnunuebe, his faithful duck hawk. She had served as his scout for years, unfailing in her ability to track, trace, and dive. But even she had failed to keep a lock on the elusive boy. Some unseen force had scrambled her path. Ikemba had returned with her to the last known location where Chidi had been sighted. But instead of clarity, Nnunuebe flew in confused spirals, like a bloodhound robbed of scent.
That was when Ikemba made a cold, precise decision. He needed a new hound. One that couldn't be tricked. His investigation unearthed whispers of a perfect wonder-weapon: Robo-Dog.
A war-grade, scent-intelligent tracking machine capable of cutting through scent cloaking, psychic interference, and terrain-shifting frequencies. Designed originally for battlefield recovery and surgical terminations, the Robo-Dog was one of the deadliest tools in existence.
But owning one was illegal. Very illegal. The Continental Defense Accords made it clear: Robo-Dogs were Weapons of Mass-Termination, W M D Tier, and restricted to the Coalition Armed Forces or authorized execution squads. Civilians or lone contractors were absolutely forbidden from purchasing or activating them.
But Ikemba was not just a man. He was a man with a plan.
He traced the manufacturing source to a subterranean depot in the Sahara Outlands, a fortified sector known as Témba-Nine, camouflaged beneath kilometers of red desert and powered by cold-core reactors. The only way in was through biometric and dream-linked authorization codes: coded to the D N A and subconscious of sanctioned officers.
Ikemba didn't attempt to fake clearance. He didn't need to. Instead, he identified a vulnerable military engineer assigned to transport weapon cores. Oboro, eager to prove useful, had helped with the ambush, though the operation nearly failed due to his impatience. Once neutralized, Ikemba extracted the necessary retinal tissue, pulse patterns, and neural keys. He also used a dream-forge serum, a black-market memory transfer compound, to imprint the engineer's subconscious vision onto his own. It was risky. It burned for the two days he endured. But it worked. Within forty-eight hours, Ikemba walked through the gates of Témba-Nine.
Inside the cryo-vaults, Robo-Dogs slept like monsters dreaming of war. Each was sealed in pressure-hardened carbon caskets, guarded by an A I named Veritas, which could detect hesitation, guilt, or unauthorized emotion.
Ikemba passed every gate with surgical precision. He selected one model: Unit Thirty-seven-K Nine: a prototype tagged "Mortivore". Built for terrain tracking, deep-scent recovery, and kill-zone precision, it was equipped with a tri-core engine, empathy-shield bypass, and a scent matrix that could slice through over seventy interference types. It was, by every measure, a hound from hell.
With the supervisor compromised and the A I looped via a logic paradox virus Ikemba had pre-coded ahead of time, Mortivore was activated. Ikemba fed it one instruction: Find Chidi: Retrieve the Brace!
Strapped to Ikemba's left wrist was a slim, rectangular monitor: an encrypted wrist-bound interface that displayed Mortivore's point of view in real-time. Through its eyes, Ikemba would see the path the hound traced.
Oboro had balked at the cost. "You spent a king's ransom on a dog?"
Ikemba didn't blink. "It's not a dog. It's insurance."
Still, acquiring the Robo-Dog had not meant immediate success. The Brace, whatever it truly was, emitted a tracking-scramble frequency: something ancient and deeply engineered, likely more advanced than Oboro's masters realized. It had fooled Nnunuebe, and even Mortivore struggled in the first few days, snarling at invisible echoes, recalibrating with every step.
Two weeks passed. Oboro grew restless. He questioned the dog, the mission, even Ikemba's methods.
Ikemba ignored him. He studied the footage. Analyzed scent displacement in the terrain. Interpreted Mortivore's behavioral patterns. He fed it fragments of Chidi's past environment and movements: leaves, soil samples, temperature gradients, collected through Oboro's prior surveillance. Slowly, the hound adjusted.
And then… it locked. A single growl. A still frame. A heat signature. The interface buzzed.
Chidi... In the woods. Accompanied by someone. A girl. A friend? A guard? But she was of no consequence, Ikemba noted. If she stood in the Robo-Dog's line of hunt, she would become collateral: another variable in the mission equation.
Up in the sky, the Griffin dipped lower. Nnunuebe screeched in response to the signal confirmation. Below, Mortivore, the Robo-Dog, began its silent descent: its limbs absorbing shock, its systems locked into retrieval mode.
Oboro smirked. "We got him!"
Ikemba didn't answer. He tapped a glyph on the interface.
"Now," he said coldly, "we hunt."
And down below, Mortivore, the relentless Robo-Dog, had begun its pursuit of Chidi. The chase tore through the training grounds, where the Bullet-Benders students attempted to intercept the mechanical beast, only to be scattered like chaff before a storm. It was there that Splendor-Bullor confronted Mortivore in a fully synched biometric armored suit: and still fell. The pursuit raged on across treacherous hills, winding up toward the towering spire of the academy, where Chidi and Lù-Qímiào were already scrambling upward, desperate for sanctuary.
That's when Mortivore began to grow wings. Literally.