Alert blared: Intruder detected. Priority: Zero. The Scourge Protocol kicked in.
The floor rattled, and a hidden hatch yawned open. Something climbed out—a machine straight out of a nightmare, stitched together from the worst ideas of old wars. It walked on two armored legs, bristled with twin gatling guns, and stared out through a central lens, glowing with a searing, ancient sort of laser.
“Target Identified: Prototype Mark-I. Level: N/A (Hard-Coded). Status: Unstoppable.”
Carter didn’t bother lighting his blade. No point. Against a hard-coded machine, all his high-level tricks just got shrugged off as noise. This fight would be simple: muscle and brains, nothing fancy.
The Mark-I opened fire. Carter barely made it behind a lead-lined server rack before bullets chewed through metal l
