Proxy reached the fuel cylinder housing and put his back against the metal. The housing was large enough to cover him, old enough that the surface was pitted and rough under his hands.

He went into the network.

The cycling implant was the loudest thing in his scan at this range. Military-grade, fully partitioned. A closed system with walls that did not move when he pushed against them.

He tried it anyway. They did not move.

Military-grade cyberware were built by people who expected netrunners to look for exactly this, and they had not left the doors unlocked.

But the implant drew power, and power came through regulation circuitry, and the regulation circuit had to connect somewhere.

He traced the power chain outward from the military core and found it. A civilian-grade power management backbone, installed as the integration layer between the military hardware and the body’s existing neural infrastructure.

Someone had bolted military hardware onto a civilian foundation, and the link between them was not military-grade. It was the weakest point in the cyberware.

He noted it and moved past it for now, going for the faster target.

Her targeting HUD was a separate system. Civilian encryption, simpler design.

He was through it in six seconds, flooding the visual overlay with a ghost of himself standing two meters to the left of his actual position behind the housing.

The assassin was fifteen meters away. She raised her right forearm and the wrist engaged with a precise mechanical click.

The housing on her forearm opened along the outer ridge and a katana extended. Sixty centimeters of blade emerged from the mount in one locked motion, seated flush and immediate, the sound of it a single clean cut through the air.

She advanced toward the ghost outline.

Three meters from it she stopped.

Her augmented eyes processed the discrepancy between where the ghost stood and where the fuel cylinder housing actually sat.

She looked at Proxy, his actual position, not the ghost’s.

"Netrunner," she said. Not surprised, but taking it in consideration.

She lowered her chin slightly as she spoke, studying him.

She deactivated her targeting HUD entirely. His access point vanished.

She advanced without it, reading his actual position with her biological eyes, which at twelve meters were sufficient.

He went back to the civilian integration link and began pushing irregular current pulses into the regulation layer.

Low-amplitude noise in the power supply feeding the military core, the kind of signal inconsistency that a fully closed military system would filter before it could reach anything important.

But if the civilian backbone passed the pulses through the interface before the core’s rejection protocols could catch them, it would introduce noise into the implant’s power management and disrupt the trigger cycle.

He found a conduction path through the link.

He began feeding pulses through it.

She was twelve meters away.

She was eight.

The military implant fired.

The power spike through the network was enormous.

It did not pull power through the regulation circuit. It bypassed the regulation circuit entirely and took everything available through the direct line, every amp the power cell could produce in one immediate surge.

The irregular pulses he had been feeding into the civilian layer were swept away in the first millisecond.

There was no filtering because the implant had not asked the regulation layer for permission. It had simply taken what it needed.

She was not at eight meters.

She was not anywhere he had saw her.

She was past the cylinder housing, past his position, past him.

Then the burst ended and the world caught up to where she had moved.

She was directly behind him.

One arm crossed over his left shoulder.

The katana blade horizontal across his throat at zero distance.

Flat of the blade against his skin. She had stopped it exactly there.

Her forearm was across his shoulder and her face was six inches from the side of his head.

He went very still.

"You are weak," she said quietly, "But I can use you to get the girl."

Her breath was close enough that he could feel it, steady.

He said nothing because there was nothing immediately useful to say, and he also did not panic, which was a distinction he considered meaningful.

He started feeding pulses into the civilian integration link again because it was the option he had and it was better than not having one.

Across the yard, Jinx had moved to a position behind the pipe run’s far end with both pistols raised.

She did not fire.

The blade was at his throat and the line from her position put any round through Proxy before it could reach the assassin.

She stopped.

Her eyes tracked back and forth between the blade and the gang leader on the other side of the yard.

She stayed very still.

On the other side of the pipe run, Nyx had been inside the gang leader’s reach for the past forty seconds.

She had driven the knife at the gap below his right arm three times.

Three times he had cleared her out, the servo assistance giving his arm the mechanical decisiveness to intercept the blade before it could seat in the gap.

She had taken two shoves that used the full mass and momentum of the armor.

She had returned the knife to the armpit three times and felt him take it each time, the flinch getting smaller with each exchange.

Underneath the fight, constant and unasked, the compass ran.

The part of her that tracked which direction Proxy was in, the way gravity tracked which direction was down, background to everything, continuous.

It went wrong.

Present, but alarming in a way it had never been before.

She shoved the gang leader’s forearm wide with both hands and bought herself one second.

She looked right.

The fuel cylinder housing.

The yard beyond the pipe run.

The assassin, back against the housing, one arm locked across Proxy’s shoulder from behind.

The katana catching the zone’s red emergency lighting in a line of sharp light.

Proxy at the end of it, still and upright and not moving.

The amber in Nyx’s eyes did not shift. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

It cut off.

What replaced it was not the blue of the chemical implant.

It was not any color the targeting overlay used.

It came from somewhere underneath both of those, colder than either.

The specific pressure of something that had not needed to exist before this moment because this moment had not existed before now.

Her knife hand tightened until the grip was all she could feel in her hand.

The gang leader’s right hand completed its reach.

His fingers closed around the grip of the grenade launcher on the harness.

He pulled it clear with the motion of someone who had been waiting for the right moment to reach for it.

Nyx did not look at him.

She kept her eyes on the blade at Proxy’s throat.

The color in her eyes flickered.

She let the grenade launcher come out.