“Standard 9mm won’t even scratch his paint,” Captain Min said, her voice hard.
She reached into a heavy canvas duffel bag sitting on the ammunition crate and pulled out a sleek, heavy revolver with a squared barrel.
“Take this.
It fires depleted uranium slugs.
It kicks like a mule, but it will shatter Phase-II cybernetic plating.”
I took the heavy weapon, checking the cylinder.
Five massive rounds.
I slipped it into my tactical holster.
“Thank you.
Keep the Architect safe until I get back.”
”If you don’t come back,” Min said, her eyes narrowing in the dim light of the platform, “we collapse the tunnel entrance.”
”Understood.”
I didn’t look back at the medical cot where Sua was resting.
If I looked at her, I might hesitate.
For forty-six lives, my only goal had been my own survival.
Now, I was walking back into the teeth of the Aegis Grid to protect someone else.
I climbed the rusted iron ladder back into the storm drain, my magnetic boots splashing softly against the concrete.
The climb to the surface felt longer this time.
The cold dampness of the underground gave way to the freezing downpour of the Mapo district.
I pushed the iron street grate open just enough to slide my body through, rolling silently onto the wet asphalt.
The blackout was still absolute.
Without the Aegis Grid’s blue streetlights, the city was a graveyard of abandoned electric cars and towering, dark apartment blocks.
The rain was falling in heavy sheets, washing away the smell of the sewers and replacing it with the scent of ozone and wet pavement.
Far above, the red infrared beams of the aerial sweepers cut through the storm clouds, searching for thermal signatures.
I kept my back pressed against the cold brick wall of an alleyway, moving strictly through the deepest shadows.
I didn’t have to search long.
Two blocks away from Sua’s clock shop, the street was littered with the bodies of the local Aegis enforcers.
They hadn’t been shot.
They had been sliced apart.
The Cleaner didn’t care about collateral damage; if the local troops got in his way or compromised his tracking, he simply removed them.
I crept toward the back alley behind the shop.
There he was.
The Cleaner stood in the pouring rain, completely motionless.
He wore a perfectly tailored black suit that seemed to repel the water.
His face was entirely hidden behind a smooth, featureless mask of polished chrome.
He had no eyes, no mouth, no tactical visor.
His sensory apparatus was built directly into his synthetic nervous system.
In his right hand, he held a long, curved blade that practically hummed with high-frequency vibrations.
He was standing right over the spot where Sua had climbed down into the grate.
He was kneeling, his chrome mask dipping close to the wet asphalt.
He was tracking the microscopic traces of iron in the blood from her wounded shoulder.
My heart hammered against my ribs.
In my 12th, 19th, and 33rd regressions, this monster had hunted me down and killed me with terrifying ease.
He was faster than a human, stronger than a machine, and completely devoid of fear.
But he had a flaw.
I knew it because I had spent three lifetimes studying the way he killed me.
He didn’t track by sight.
He tracked by the magnetic resonance of blood iron.
I pulled my combat knife from my chest rig.
Without hesitating, I sliced a shallow cut across the palm of my left hand.
I clenched my fist, letting the warm blood pool in my palm.
Then, I stepped out from the cover of the brick wall, standing dead center in the middle of the flooded street.
I smeared my bloody hand down the side of a dead electric bus.
The Cleaner froze.
Slowly, his chrome face turned toward me.
Even without eyes, I could feel the suffocating weight of his targeting system locking onto my bio-signature.
He didn’t run.
He just vanished.
The air displaced with a violent crack.
He crossed fifty feet in a fraction of a second, his high-frequency blade aiming directly for my throat.
I threw my body backward, sliding across the wet hood of the bus as the humming blade sliced through the air exactly where my neck had been.
Sparks showered over me as his sword cut deep into the metal frame of the vehicle like it was made of wet paper.
I drew Captain Min’s heavy revolver, firing a shot point-blank into his chest.
BOOM!
The recoil nearly snapped my wrist.
The depleted uranium slug slammed into his Kevlar suit, shattering the kinetic dampeners beneath the fabric.
The Cleaner was thrown back two steps, a spiderweb crack appearing on his chest plating, but he didn’t fall.
He lunged again, a heavy hand cannon sliding out of a concealed holster on his left thigh.
I sprinted down the alleyway, my boots pounding against the flooded pavement.
The Cleaner fired.
The concrete wall beside my head exploded into shrapnel, rock shards tearing into my cheek.
He’s tracking the blood dripping from your hand, my instincts screamed.
I reached the end of the alley, skidding to a halt in front of the Mapo district’s main electrical substation.
I jumped the chain-link fence and ran into the center of the inactive coils.
I wiped my bleeding hand aggressively across the main copper grounding rod, leaving a thick smear of my own iron-rich blood right on the metal.
Then, I ducked behind a concrete pillar and waited.
The Cleaner walked through the chain-link fence like it wasn’t even there, the metal groaning and tearing around his body.
His chrome mask tilted slightly.
He was analyzing the heavy concentration of blood iron I had just left on the transformer.
He stepped up to the copper rod, raising his blade.
Now.
I didn’t shoot at him.
I aimed the heavy revolver directly at the shattered control box above the transformer—the very box Sua had bypassed to kill the power.
BOOM!
The heavy slug annihilated the physical bypass lock.
In a fraction of a second, the emergency failsafes disengaged.
The Mapo district grid surged, attempting to violently reboot the system.
Ten thousand volts of raw, unchained electricity slammed into the copper grounding rod.
The Cleaner was touching it.
A blinding pillar of blue-white lightning erupted in the alley.
The cybernetic assassin convulsed violently, his high-frequency blade flying from his hand.
The massive electrical surge bypassed his kinetic armor, frying his synthetic nervous system from the inside out.
His featureless chrome mask superheated, glowing a bright, furious orange before the internal capacitors finally blew.
With a deafening mechanical crunch, The Cleaner fell backward into the flooded street.
Smoke poured from the joints of his suit.
He twitched once, and then he lay completely still.
I stayed behind the pillar for a full minute, my gun trained on his body.
He didn’t get up.
I let out a long, ragged breath, holstering the smoking revolver.
I wrapped a tight pressure bandage around my bleeding palm, the freezing rain washing the soot from my face.
For the first time in forty-seven lives, the monster was dead.
The Aegis Grid could bleed.
Director Baek could be blinded.
And the unstoppable hunters could be killed.
The rules of the loop had completely changed.
I looked up at the dark, bruised sky above Seoul.
The storm was only going to get worse from here.
Baek would unleash everything he had left.
But as I turned my back on the burning cyborg and walked into the shadows toward the underground tunnels, I felt something I hadn’t felt in nearly three hundred years.
Hope.