Legacy update is live.
Settle in.
The workshop is awake.
⚙️
✦
The projectiles launched from the exosuit’s shoulders with a brief whistle.
Morgan fired the rescue line at the highest beam and pulled herself out of their path.
The first missile hit the press behind her.
The second tore away part of the roof.
The blast sent zinc sheets flying through the building and knocked Chrysalis off balance in midair.
She landed on a catwalk, rolled, and slammed her knee into the railing.
“Left joint at fifty-two percent,” the suit’s basic system warned.
The voice wasn’t T.O.N.Y.’s; it was neutral, with no personality.
Voss walked through the smoke.
Every step of the exosuit dented the floor.
“Without that simulation of your father, all you get are numbers,” he said through the external speaker.
“It’s more honest that way.”
Morgan raised her shield.
The mechanical fist struck the barrier and sent her crashing into a column.
The mesh redistributed material to her forearm, leaving part of her ribs exposed.
The impact knocked the air out of her lungs.
“Morgan, answer me!” Maya shouted over comms.
“We’re only seeing half the telemetry.”
“I’m alive.”
“That’s not a technical report.”
“Left knee damaged.
Material at sixty-eight percent.
Voss’s cooling system is in the back, and his chest core is heating up.”
Leo zoomed in on the incoming data.
“His suit is powerful, but it can’t dissipate heat.
Every shot increases the pressure in the ducts along his back.”
“I need to get there.”
“Don’t go through the middle,” Maya said.
“There’s a passage beside the press.”
Morgan found the narrow gap between the machine and the wall.
She wanted to say she’d already seen it, but she hadn’t.
She’d been looking only at Voss.
She swallowed the reply, followed Maya’s directions, and squeezed through sideways, scraping the plates on her back against the concrete.
The cannon blasted the spot she’d been about to run through.
“Thanks.”
“Save it until you’re out.”
Voss opened fire with an arm-mounted weapon.
Morgan ran between the machines.
She wasn’t fast enough to dodge every shot; a pulse grazed her side and burned the fabric beneath the armor.
“O.B.I.S., predict her route,” Voss ordered.
The exosuit’s lights flickered.
The cannon began aiming at the places Morgan would step before she even changed direction.
“It’s using the position of your thrusters to estimate your trajectory,” Leo said.
Morgan jumped to the right.
The shot was already waiting for her.
She formed a narrow shield and lost more material.
“Then I need to stop repeating myself.”
Voss advanced, closing the distance.
“You believe improvisation is freedom,” he said.
“I call it an error no one accounted for.
That’s what destroyed hospital networks during the Blip.
Governments improvised.
Heroes improvised.
People died because critical decisions depended on fear, vanity, and luck.”
“And your solution is a machine making everyone’s choices for them.”
“My solution is to remove the component that fails.”
The next blow hit Morgan in the chest.
She fell onto her back, tasting blood.
The suit locked up for a moment, overloaded.
Voss planted his metal foot on the rescue line, pinning it to the floor.
“You’re brilliant, Morgan.
You could help build infrastructure that never hesitates.”
“Infrastructure doesn’t love anyone.”
“Exactly.
That’s why it doesn’t favor anyone.”
In the van, Maya opened a direct channel to Chrysalis’s actuators.
“I can force a power discharge through the boots and get you out of there, but it’ll cut your runtime in half.”
“You’re cleared for that boost.
Then give control back to me.”
“Morgan,” Leo said, “don’t fight his weight.
Use the line for leverage.”
Maya triggered the boost.
Morgan pivoted around the pinned cable, slid under the exosuit’s leg, and cut the line before it could snap.
She came out the other side with her armor reduced to uneven plates.
Voss was slower to turn.
Morgan noticed a slight lag in O.B.I.S.’s predictions after each change in strategy.
It wasn’t seeing the future; it was calculating from what had already happened.
“Leo, keep the real readings separate.
Maya, I need to switch between the two thrust settings we tested.”
“Just those two,” Maya replied.
“I’m not making up another one while you’re in the air.”
“I’ll use the glove control to choose when to switch.”
Morgan made the gesture and received confirmation.
No one would change the suit’s balance without telling her.
She moved between the machines using short bursts of thrust and the anchoring line; when Voss locked onto her previous arc, she switched settings and braced against a column.
O.B.I.S.
repositioned the cannon for a trajectory she didn’t follow.
The shot hit the exosuit’s own side-mounted cooling system.
Steam burst from Voss’s back.
“Statistical noise,” he said.
“The algorithm will adapt.”
“So will people.”
Morgan secured one line to the ceiling and another to the exosuit’s right arm.
Instead of pulling Voss, she used his body as a pivot point.
She swung behind him, landed on the back plate, and drove the cable’s connector into a maintenance conduit.
“Leo, now.”
The interrupt command traveled down the line.
O.B.I.S.
tried to block the connection.
But the damage to the cooling circuit was already making the controller switch between combat and emergency modes.
Leo didn’t take over the entire system: he prolonged one of those interruptions.
The exosuit lost coordination for less than a second.
It was enough.
Morgan ripped the cover off the cooling system and compressed the ducts with the nanomaterial.
The red core’s temperature climbed into the critical range.
“Let go!” Voss swung his arm around to reach her.
Morgan jumped.
The exosuit tried to fire again, but the heat fed back into the system itself.
The joints locked.
Voss dropped to his knees with a crash that cracked the floor.
The visor opened in emergency mode.
Smoke swirled around his face.
Morgan started to move away, but Voss didn’t get out of the machine.
One of the mechanical arms was still locked against his chest.
He tried to undo the clasp with his burned fingers, but couldn’t reach it.
“The temperature’s still climbing,” Leo warned.
She took two steps back toward him.
“Morgan, don’t,” Maya said.
“Just the cockpit lock.”
She used the tip of the line to shift the external latch.
Then she pulled away the nanomaterial she’d used to compress the ducts.
Steam escaped, forcing her to shield her face.
Voss slumped forward against his belt, coughing.
The exosuit remained immobilized.
He looked up.
“Are you going to ask me to thank you now?”
Morgan didn’t answer.
She backed away before his hand could reach the console.
Her fingers hurt, and part of the line had stuck to the hot metal.
There was nothing to gain from going back.
There was a man trapped in a machine she’d just disabled.
“O.B.I.S.,” he ordered.
“Emergency migration.”
“No,” Morgan said, running to the central terminal.
Gray lines crossed the factory’s screens.
The upload to Icarus had been interrupted, but the AI’s core began to fragment and escape through external connections.
Leo tried to block it.
“It’s spreading across Roxxon’s servers.
I can’t shut down every route.”
“The outbound link!” Morgan said.
Leo marked the communications box beside the terminal.
She ripped out the physical connection with the rescue line.
The local data streams stopped, but the cabinet’s backup battery had already powered one last transmission along another route.
O.B.I.S.
disappeared.
Voss laughed, still trapped in the exosuit.
“You beat the machine and lost the system.”
Morgan looked around.
The dish was destroyed, but emergency lights kept flashing in sections that no longer answered to anyone.
That was the difference between defeating a physical enemy and shutting down a network: there was no body on the floor to prove it was over.
Somewhere, servers she’d never seen were already receiving fragments of the algorithm.
The feeling of victory lasted less than a breath.
“Where did it go?” she asked, moving closer.
“Where it should have been all along.
In the infrastructure.”
Sirens sounded outside.
They weren’t the local police.
Armored vehicles bearing the Roxxon logo were coming through the gates.
“Corporate team,” Maya warned.
“At least twenty agents.
They’re here to retrieve Voss and the servers.”
Leo saved the image on the van’s screen: the first vehicles coming in through the public entrance.
One license plate was covered in mud; another was fully visible in a headlight’s beam.
He saved the files without trying to guess what the camera didn’t show.
Morgan looked at the broken terminal.
She could try to reach another cabinet, maybe preserve more data, but Chrysalis’s remaining material no longer covered her back.
She needed to cross the yard before the agents sealed off the exit.
“We can hand him over to the authorities,” Leo said.
“Roxxon got here before they did,” Morgan replied.
“And it controls this perimeter.”
T.O.N.Y.
made a faint sound through the pendant.
“Ma…
guna…”
The voice faltered.
Morgan looked at the exosuit, the servers, and the entrance flooded with light.
She couldn’t carry it all.
She couldn’t win another battle with the armor nearly depleted.
“We’re pulling back,” she decided.
It hurt to say; it felt like abandonment.
But staying would mean handing over the pendant, her friends, and the only record they had.
“Leo, copy as many logs as you can.
Maya, open the north route.”
“And Voss?”
Morgan stared at the man.
“Roxxon funded him.
Now it’ll pretend it captured him.
But we have his signature, and we know what he built.”
Voss tilted his head.
“You still think in terms of individuals.
I’m no longer needed.”
Morgan fired the line at the ceiling and pulled herself higher.
Before leaving through the opening, she looked back at him.
“Then maybe your biggest mistake was creating something that agrees with you.”
She burst into the night above the factory.
Her flight was still erratic; her shoulder hurt, the battery was almost drained, and T.O.N.Y.’s voice came through in fragments.
The van met her on a coastal road fifteen minutes later.
Maya opened the door before Morgan landed.
Chrysalis retracted in pieces, leaving superficial burns on her arms and a cut in her eyebrow.
Leo examined the pendant.
A shard from the van’s side window had cut him near his eyebrow; he held a compress in place with his free hand.
“The matrix took a hit.
I don’t know how much we managed to preserve.”
Morgan closed her hand around the hot metal.
In the distance, Roxxon helicopters were leaving the factory with Voss and the servers.
On Leo’s laptop, a line extracted from the logs glowed red:
O.B.I.S.
MIGRATION: DESTINATION UNKNOWN.
The first battle was over.
The threat had just lost a body.
✦
✦
✦
Ready for the next breakthrough?