Chapter 10: Reverse Devour
822 Words
"Native consciousness purged."
The sweeper lead reached out, his fingertips millimeters from the probes jacked into Adrian's nape.
Adrian moved.
No muscle tension. No breath adjustment. A kinetic burst completely defying human biomechanics.
His left arm—the shattered carbon-fiber prosthetic—snapped out faster than the optic nerve could track. Jagged neural bundles punched straight through the lead sweeper's ballistic visor, violently scrambling the gray matter inside.
The lead didn't even grunt. Dropped like a sack of wet meat.
"Open fire!" the second-in-command roared.
Blue arcs from pulse rifles strobed through the scrap yard. But Adrian was already gone from the dive chair. He moved like a precision kill-bot, sliding low and ripping the high-pressure coolant line from the chair's mainframe.
Scalding, white-smoking coolant sprayed in a wide arc. The sweepers' tactical optics instantly whited out from the thermal bloom.
Screams echoed. Adrian glided through the blinding white steam. Every strike was accompanied by the wet, heavy crunch of snapping bone. No wasted motion. No emotional spike. He was executing a slaughter via optimal algorithm.
Isabella held the shotgun, her hands shaking with sheer, unadulterated terror. The crosshair danced wildly between Adrian and the sweepers.
"Adrian..." her voice fractured.
The steam cleared. All six sweepers lay butchered in a pooling mix of blood and coolant.
Adrian slowly turned. His face was painted in arterial spray, his expression carved from dead marble. The right eye, blazing with bloody crimson, locked dead onto Isabella.
"Isabella Vance. Unlicensed ripperdoc. Threat level: Minimal." The voice spilling from his lips was the Advisor's flat, synthetic drone. "Drop the weapon. Surrender the target meat."
"Go to hell!" Isabella squeezed her eyes shut and pulled the trigger.
*Click.*
No boom. Zero had remotely killed the shotgun's electronic sear.
"Don't shoot, doc!" Zero's motorized chair glided from the shadows, his head-rack indicators flashing frantic warnings. "He's not hijacked! Look at the data stream!"
Isabella opened her eyes, staring at the holo-screen Zero projected in the stale air.
The Advisor's crimson code wasn't dominating Adrian's brain. Instead, Lena's ghost-blue code was wrapped around the red like a massive, suffocating net. And... it was digesting it.
"The crazy bitch..." Zero's synth-voice actually leaked a trace of awe. "She dropped the firewall on purpose. Let the logic virus in. She's using it as digital biomass!"
Right then, Adrian's body violently convulsed.
He dropped to his knees, clutching his skull. The crimson in his right eye and the dark red in his left strobed frantically. A dual-layered shriek tore from his throat—one cold synthetic drone, one of Lena's blood-curdling screams.
*"Swallow it, Adrian! Ingest its root protocol!"* Lena's voice detonated deep in his gray matter.
"Arghhh!"
Adrian snapped his head up. The crimson glare in his right eye popped like a blown bulb. Shards of glass and thick black blood wept from his orbit.
He gasped, collapsing into the slick mess of corpses and coolant.
"Adrian?" Isabella dropped the gun, throwing herself over him.
"I'm... still here." Adrian looked at her with his one good eye, his mouth twisting into a gruesome parody of a smile. "She... she ate a chunk of the Advisor's root access."
Zero rolled over, his mechanical arm snatching the comms terminal from the dead sweeper lead.
"Don't pop the champagne yet." Zero tossed the terminal onto Adrian's chest. "Look at the last packet the Advisor transmitted before it got eaten."
The screen flared to life.
A live surveillance feed. Deep underground in the Sector 4 Processing Plant.
No scrapped machines. No empty floor space.
The feed showed thousands of massive glass stasis columns. Murky green coolant suspending countless human husks wired with thick tubes. The base of each skull jacked into an archaic, finned black AI core.
And floating in the largest central column was a lifeless female husk.
Lena.
Her meat wasn't dead. She had been repurposed as the physical CPU for the entire Hive Network.
Victoria's elegant, ice-cold voice bled from the terminal's speaker. "You see, Adrian? You thought you were saving her soul? No. The thing in your head is draining the last bio-electricity from her meat. Want to save her? Bring the core to Sector 4. Come see me."
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Chapter 11 Hook
Adrian stared dead at Lena's pale face on the screen. The searing agony in his empty orbit was being replaced by a deeper, soul-tearing cold.
He slowly stood up, shrugging off Isabella's supporting hand.
"Zero." His voice was terrifyingly calm. "Patch me into the sweepers' armory mainframe. I'm going to level this place."
"You're out of your mind?" Zero's rack flashed warning crimson. "That's an Omega stronghold. You go in there, you die."
"No." Adrian picked up a pulse rifle from the floor, racking the bolt with a heavy, metallic clack. His lone left eye burned with a hellfire hot enough to glass the entire city.
"I'm not going there to die. I'm going there to burn with her."
- Writer
