The first blast rolled through the district like a fist, a hard concussion that made the glass skyscrapers shiver and threw every conversation, every car horn, every step into silence for a single second before the screaming started. The air filled with dust and the metallic stink of ruptured power conduits. Zoey’s head snapped toward the column of smoke blooming between two office towers three blocks away. Etrius was already moving.
She broke into a trot, armored boots slamming against the pavement, Titan servos whining as she picked up speed. Civilians poured past her, a tide of suits and bags and panicked faces, some covered in blood from flying glass. Traffic had already collapsed into a deadlock of abandoned cars and blaring alarms. Etrius cut between vehicles with precise, long strides, shoving a man aside before he got trampled in the stampede.
SCDF comms lit up in their ears, clipped reports cutting through static. “Unit Five responding to blast zone, fire suppression en route.” “Possible secondary devices in grid 8-A, evacuate pedestrians from central plaza.” “Crowd control units needed at Towerline Interchange, mass panic underway.”
Etrius barked into his mic. “Ghost and Warlord on-site, moving to epicenter.” He didn’t wait for permission. He vaulted a crashed delivery drone and dropped into a low sprint.
Zoey’s armored fists smashed aside the bent frame of a security gate that had buckled in the blast, clearing their path. She moved like a machine, helmet HUD cycling through thermal and optical overlays as she scanned the smoke column. “Blast was focused,” she said, voice metallic through the suit speakers. “Not random.”
Etrius spared a glance as they rounded the corner, shrapnel scars were concentrated inward, glass blown into the street. “Directed charge. They hit infrastructure, not people.”
“Not yet,” Zoey muttered, pushing forward.
They cut through a side street where civilians were still struggling to get clear. A child sat screaming on the pavement, ankle caught under a chunk of fallen concrete. Zoey stopped just long enough to rip the slab away and haul the kid to his feet before shoving him toward a cluster of SCDF medics fighting their way in.
The smoke was thicker here, heat rolling off the pavement. The outer wall of a credit exchange had been ripped open, exposing steel beams and fire-belching conduit. Alarm klaxons were deafening at this range, automated sprinklers hissing steam as they tried to suppress the blaze.
Etrius scanned the wreckage, sword unhooked but idle in his hand. “This wasn’t meant to level the building. It’s disruption. First strike to trigger evacuation.”
Zoey turned her head, the Titan’s optics catching movement at the edge of the smoke. Two figures, masked and carrying rifles, sprinting deeper into the district.
“Contacts,” she snapped. She didn’t wait for acknowledgment. She launched forward, glass crunching under her boots. Etrius followed, plasma sword up, green eyes narrowing as the first bursts of automatic fire cracked through the haze.
Pedestrians screamed again and hit the ground. Bullets sparked off Zoey’s chestplate, glancing away as she closed the distance. Zoey's PTRS-41 spat a single, concussive shot that tore a small crater into the pavement, sending one of the shooters sprawling. The second turned to run.
Etrius dropped him with two precise cuts to the legs, then advanced, blade still steady. “You’re done,” he said flatly, stepping past the writhing man to clear the alley’s far end.
Zoey grabbed the first attacker by the collar and slammed him against a wall hard enough to rattle his teeth. “Where’s the rest of you?” she demanded, voice amplified to a roar.
The man spat blood and said nothing. She raised a fist, but Etrius’s voice cut across the comms. “We don’t have time. Move.”
She let the body drop and turned back toward the avenue. More gunfire echoed to the east, another cell opening up. Screams followed, higher and sharper this time.
Etrius reloaded without breaking stride. “They’re spreading out. We cut them off before they get civilians pinned.”
Zoey’s gauntlets clenched. “Good. I hate running.”
Together they plunged deeper into the smoke, leaving the first scene of destruction behind them, heading toward the next.
Gunfire echoed like a chain reaction, rolling through the canyons of glass and steel. Zoey moved first, Titan servos whining as she took a corner at speed, her heavy frame scattering shards of broken window. Etrius kept pace behind her, plasma sword stowed now in favor of his M1911-50, firing precise single shots to drop any figure moving with a rifle. Civilians lay flat wherever they could find cover, under eaves, behind wrecked vehicles, pressed against walls with their hands over their heads.
They reached the first intersection and found three more attackers pinning SCDF officers behind a disabled patrol carrier. Zoey didn’t break stride. She went through the wreckage, Titan boots crunching over twisted metal, her antitank rifle hosing a single, devastating shot that turned one gunman into a spray of red mist against the concrete barrier.
Etrius swept left, firing controlled pairs, dropping the second before he could recover from the shock. The last man threw down his rifle and tried to bolt, but Zoey caught him one-handed by the back of his webbing and slammed him into the ground hard enough to crack the pavement.
Etrius was on him in a second, boot on the man’s chest, pistol at his temple. “Where are the rest?”
The man spat curses in a language Etrius didn’t speak. Zoey’s gauntlet came down, not as a punch but as a warning, a clang against the pavement next to his head. “Talk, or you won’t get a second chance.”
The prisoner shook his head, blood pooling under his cheek. No answer. Etrius cursed under his breath and pressed forward; there was no time to argue. “SCDF’s got this block. Move.”
They left the prisoner for the arriving officers, Zoey’s armored silhouette disappearing back into the smoke.
The next cell was better organized. As Zoey came through an underground loading ramp, an IED detonated at her feet, tossing her into the wall. The Titan’s armor held, though the plating was scorched.
“Still up,” Zoey growled, pulling herself out of the crater. Etrius vaulted the ramp, cutting one attacker down with his sword before the man could reload.
The rest opened fire, hammering the concrete around them with rifle rounds. Zoey shouldered through the storm, Titan optics locking on heat signatures. She fired her rifle, and the confined space filled with dust and blood as the last of the ambushers went down.
When it was done, the smoke hung heavy in the loading bay, tasting of propellant and ozone. Etrius kicked the last rifle away and crouched over a dying grunt, pressing a knee to the man’s chest. “Why here?” he demanded. “Why the Business District?”
The man bared bloody teeth and laughed. His accent was local. “Paid,” he rasped. “Paid to make your precious President look weak. Paid to make SCDF run like rats.”
Etrius leaned closer. “Who paid you?”
The man’s grin widened despite the blood in his throat. “Doesn’t matter. Top floor of Delta Finance Tower. They’re waiting. Whole city’s going to watch them die.”
His breath rattled once, then stopped. Etrius stood, wiping blood from his gloves on the man’s vest. “We’ve got a target,” he said, voice clipped.
Zoey was already moving, climbing the ramp. “Then we go. Before the show starts.”
They broke into a run again, vanishing into the smoke and sirens, heading for the tower.
The Business District narrowed as they neared Delta Finance Tower, the streets funnelling them into a canyon of glass facades and gridlocked vehicles. Fires burned unchecked in upper floors, raining embers into the avenues below. The Titan’s optical sensors highlighted movement ahead, heat signatures darting between the wrecks, setting up hasty defensive lines.
Zoey didn’t slow down. She plowed through an overturned taxi, the frame screeching as it split. Bullets sparked across her chestplate, ricocheting into the street as she charged. Etrius moved parallel through the shadows of the curbside awnings, firing precise shots into firing ports and dropping shooters one by one.
The closer they got to the tower, the tighter the resistance became. Two attackers with RPGs fired down the avenue, one detonating short, showering the street with glass and shrapnel. Zoey staggered under the blast, armor scorched black, but she kept going. The second shooter reloaded too slow; Etrius’s plasma sword cut him cleanly across the torso as he came around the corner.
They breached the tower’s perimeter through a side loading dock, finding bodies, SCDF officers already cut down by the first wave. The lobby was a mess of broken glass, torn banners, and overturned furniture. The elevators were locked down, red lights flashing across the panels.
“Stairs,” Etrius said, checking the ammo counter on his sidearm. “We climb.”
Zoey’s voice was calm, almost bored. “You climb. I’ll take the fast way.”
He shot her a look but didn’t argue. They split without ceremony. Etrius pushed through the lobby, clearing the first stairwell with surgical precision, stepping over bodies and keeping his breathing steady. His focus narrowed with each floor, hearing distant gunfire and the occasional scream echoing from above.
Outside, Zoey ran for the side of the building, slammed her gauntlets into the steel facade, and began climbing. The Titan’s claws and weight tore gouges in the surface as she hauled herself up, using exposed beams and window ledges when she could find them. Glass shattered under her boots, raining onto the street below. Her breathing stayed slow, calm, the climb a rhythm she’d done a hundred times before.
Halfway up, a terrorist leaned out of a broken window and opened fire. Rounds sparked off the Titan’s pauldrons as Zoey swung one-handed, grabbed him by the vest, and yanked him out into open air. He fell silently into the chaos below.
By the time she reached the roof, Etrius was clearing the final stairwell. He drove his sword through the chest of a defender blocking the last landing and shoved the body aside. Zoey smashed through the glass skylight and dropped into the top-floor hallway, landing with a crunch that crushed a grunt under her boots.
She straightened, brushing glass off her shoulder, and caught Etrius pulling his blade free from another man.
“Guess I’m not late,” she said, visor glinting under the emergency lights.
“About time,” Etrius replied, cleaning the sword on the dead man’s sleeve. “I was running out of targets.”
“Plenty left,” Zoey said, motioning toward the hall where the hostages were being held.
Together, they advanced, silent but sure, moving toward the final room where the remaining terrorists waited.
The hostage room was hot, the air stale from shattered ventilation. Emergency lights strobed faintly in the smoke, casting long, thin shadows across the kneeling figures. Hostages were lined up against overturned desks, some with zip-tied wrists, others gagged. The surviving terrorists had been disarmed, forced to their knees at gunpoint. The silence was thick, broken only by the hum of the Titan’s servos and the faint whimpering of civilians.
Etrius stood in the doorway, plasma sword still lit, its glow reflecting off the blood smeared across his arms. Zoey loomed just behind him, her visor burning red. The two of them had the room locked down, no one was leaving unless they decided it.
“They go to trial,” Etrius said, his voice carrying in the tight space. “We bring them in alive, we hand them over to SCDF command. You know what a public trial will do, it will show this city that order still holds. It gives the President a win.”
Zoey’s helmet tilted slightly. “You think anyone cares about a trial? People care about seeing them dead. This is faster.”
Etrius took a step in, the blade still raised but pointed away from the prisoners. “Faster isn’t the point. Capture means information. Capture means dismantling the network behind them. You think this ends if we butcher them right here? There’ll be ten more tomorrow.”
Zoey’s voice came back like iron. “Good. I’ll kill those too.”
The argument escalated. The hostages stared wide-eyed as the two shouted over the bodies on the floor, voices sharp enough to cut. Etrius’s tone was controlled but angry, hammering every point: political stability, SCDF morale, proof that the city’s law wasn’t a joke. Zoey’s voice was louder, colder, cutting through his logic with simple, brutal finality, none of that mattered if these men lived to inspire more chaos.
“You think I care about giving some politician good optics?” she snapped. “My job isn’t to make the city look clean. My job is to make sure no one tries this again.”
“And you think slaughtering them in front of civilians will do that?” Etrius barked back. “You’ll give them martyrs. You’ll make them legends.”
“They’re not martyrs if no one’s left to care,” Zoey said, stepping closer until her armored bulk filled the space between him and the prisoners.
Etrius’s grip on the sword tightened, then loosened. He stared at her for a long second, jaw set, then deactivated the blade. “Fine. I’m leaving the choice to you. Do what your heart says, and clean up whatever mess you decide to make.”
He turned his back and walked toward the stairwell, his boots ringing against the steel floor.
Zoey stayed perfectly still until Etrius’s footsteps faded down the stairwell. The sound of the last door shutting echoed faintly, leaving only the thin rasp of breathing from the hostages and the quiet creak of metal from the Titan’s joints. She felt the room watching her, fear, anticipation, judgment, but none of it moved her. Inside the suit, her pulse was steady. This was the part of the job that was simple.
She stepped forward, the Titan’s boots grinding glass across the floor. The lead terrorist flinched as she loomed over him. His eyes were wide, darting between her visor and the corpses of his men. Zoey grabbed him by the front of his vest and yanked him upright, bringing his face level with her helmet. She made sure he could see his own reflection in the mirrored visor, not the woman inside, just the faceless machine that had killed its way here.
“I’ve just decided to spare you,” she said, voice filtered through the Titan’s speakers, calm and almost conversational.
For a fraction of a second, his features softened. Hope cracked through the fear. She felt it, the way his body loosened slightly under her grip, and she crushed it. She drove her serrated combat knife up under his jaw and into his face with one clean motion. The helmet’s mic caught the wet, tearing sound. Blood sprayed in a fan across the floor and over her armor. His body convulsed once, then went slack.
She let him drop like a bag of meat and turned to the next man. There was no hesitation, no flash of anger or pleasure. Her motions were clinical. She knelt, pinned him in place with one gauntleted knee, and shoved the knife through the side of his skull. The Titan’s servos whined softly as she leaned in, ensuring the kill was immediate.
The others tried to twist away as she moved down the line, but the zip-ties held. Each time, the knife struck with the same precision, the same measured force. The helmet cam recorded everything, the digital timer in the corner counting the seconds of silence between each kill.
Her thoughts stayed cold and practical. No speeches, no threats. Just work. These were not enemies anymore, they were unfinished business. Leaving them alive would mean appeals, rescues, more blood later. Killing them meant closure.
When the last one stopped twitching, she stood. Blood had spread across the floor in a wide sheet, soaking into paper, pooling around chair legs, dripping into the seams between tiles. She wiped the blade clean on a dead man’s vest, then holstered it on the Titan’s thigh mount.
Zoey’s visor panned toward the hostages. Most of them were crying. A man was covering his child’s eyes. Another sat frozen, hands clamped over his ears. They looked at her like she was another disaster, not a savior, not a soldier, just another thing they had barely survived.
Her HUD pinged softly, confirming the camera feed was still transmitting. She stared at the red recording icon for a moment, then let it run. Let them see it. Let the city know what happens to men like this.
Zoey stepped back from the bodies and just stood there, letting the room’s fear settle on her like dust. There was no triumph in it, no rush. Just the faint sense of something closing. She hailed SCDF’s emergency channel and said, flat and final, “Extraction required. Top floor secure. Perpetrators have been executed.”
The response came through the comms a few seconds later, but she didn’t listen to the words. She shut the channel off and waited in silence, blood drying on the Titan’s armor, watching the hostages tremble until the sound of boots and shouted orders from arriving SCDF units filled the hall.
Zoey didn’t speak when the first SCDF troopers stormed the room. The hostages cried out at the sudden movement, some dropping flat to the floor, others clutching at the armored figures as they were gently pulled away from the blood and glass. Orders barked over radios, boots thumped, body bags were dragged in. None of it moved her. She stood where she had been, the Titan’s systems humming softly, the red smear across her visor still half-dried.
Etrius was gone, just like she knew he would be. He hadn’t waited to see the result. The stairwell door was already shut, no trace of him except the clean arcs of blood where his boots had crossed the hallway outside. That absence said more than anything he could have told her. He had left her here to face the civilians alone, to stand in the room with their horror and their gratitude mixing into something sharp and ugly.
She enjoyed it.
One of the SCDF medics glanced at her as he helped a hostage to her feet. His visor was tinted, but she could still feel the weight of his stare. It wasn’t fear, not exactly, but it wasn’t thanks either. It was begrudging appraisal, deciding what kind of monster would do this and still be standing calm among the corpses. She turned away from him and started toward the far side of the room, glass cracking under the Titan’s boots.
She paused at the exit, looking back once. The hostages were huddled together, some whispering, some sobbing into their hands. One man stared at her openly, face blank except for the tear tracks down his cheeks. His eyes didn’t look grateful. They looked like they were memorizing her faceplate, locking her into memory as something to fear. He was right to do so.
Zoey keyed open the Titan’s external speakers long enough to say, “SCDF will get you out. Stay down until they tell you to move.” Her voice came out flat, mechanical, without comfort. Then she shut it off, turned, and pushed through the door.
The stairwell smelled like hot metal and blood. She descended only far enough to reach an emergency maintenance hatch, then forced it open and stepped out into the wind at the building’s edge.
The city below was still burning in patches, sirens and drones filling the air with overlapping sound. SCDF convoys were pushing through the streets, lights flashing. Evacuation zones glowed with emergency beacons. From this height, the Business District looked like a wound, scorched, blackened, still smoking.
Zoey stood there for a long moment, watching it all without speaking. Her HUD kept trying to pull SCDF updates, but she dismissed them, leaving her visor dark. This wasn’t the time for chatter. Her breathing stayed even inside the suit, her muscles loose, but the quiet was heavy, dragging at the edges of her thoughts.
When she finally climbed down, she didn’t return to SCDF command to file a report. She didn’t go looking for Etrius. She walked away from the tower on foot, keeping to the alleys where the smoke was still thick, letting the city swallow her. The helmet cam was still rolling, capturing her slow departure past barricades and emergency lights until she finally shut it off with a flick of her wrist and left the feed to upload later.
No one tried to stop her. No one asked her to explain. SCDF had their hostages back and their bodies to count. Whatever she had done here would be analyzed and debated later, but for now, the Business District was quiet except for the low rumble of fire suppression drones.
By the time she reached the edge of the district, night had fully set in. The fires still glowed behind her, reflected in the Titan’s blackened armor as she crossed back into the outskirts. She never looked back.
Zoey’s little plot of land was still as dead as the day she’d bought it, a stretch of scrub earth and half-buried concrete foundations, ringed with rusting fencing and the distant glow of Sigma City’s outer ring. The sky above was a dull brown haze, light pollution bleeding across it like a wound. She trudged up the gravel path to the APC she called home, servos in the Titan suit whining softly, the weight of the day’s fight still caked across the armor in dried streaks of blood and soot.
She didn’t exit the suit right away. She stood just outside the APC, staring at the ground while the wind hissed across the open lot. She was alone, and the silence pressed in on her like a second skin.
She keyed open the Titan’s chest seals and stepped out slowly, the air hitting her sweat-slick fur in a rush that made her shiver. The suit stood there, still bleeding heat into the cool night air. She left it like that and walked barefoot over the hard-packed dirt until she reached the edge of the lot.
Her prosthetic hands felt sticky even after she’d wiped them clean, as if the blood had worked its way under the metal and stayed there. She flexed her claws, staring at them in the dim light spilling from the container’s doorway. There was no remorse gnawing at her, not exactly. She had done what she set out to do. The hostages were alive. The attackers were dead. But the satisfaction was thin, almost hollow, like chewing grit.
She sat down heavily on an overturned concrete block, elbows on her knees, letting the night air cool the sweat and blood on her. Her mind kept pulling back to the room at the top of the tower, the sharp smell of blood, the way the hostages had gone quiet when the last man fell, the blank stare of the one who had watched her without flinching. That face stayed with her, floating in the smoke like a burned-in image.
Her MeTube notifications were already piling up on her wrist display, hundreds of thousands of new views, clips of the helmet feed spreading like wildfire across the city. Comments were streaming in faster than she could read them, and she didn’t try. She shut the display off with a flick of her wrist. The thought of watching her own footage didn’t disturb her, but she didn’t need to see it. She knew every frame by memory already.
Inside the Mantis APC, the dim glow of her terminal illuminated the metal walls. She didn’t sit at it. She didn’t record a debrief or write a report for SCDF command. There was nothing to explain. She lay down on the cot instead, boots still on, staring at the ceiling until her eyes adjusted to the dark. The smell of smoke still clung to her fur, and she let it, as if washing it off would erase something she wasn’t ready to lose yet.
Sleep didn’t come. At some point she sat back up, and leaned against the doorway, looking out over the silent land. The city lights pulsed in the distance like a living thing, the towers of the Business District still faintly glowing with emergency spotlights. She imagined Etrius somewhere far away, maybe back at his penthouse, maybe nowhere near at all, doing what he always did, staying busy so he wouldn’t have to think.
The night stretched on without relief, and Zoey stayed in the doorway, half-shadowed by the glow of the APC’s terminal. Her hands had stopped shaking, but the restlessness had not faded. It sat under her ribs like pressure, a constant tightness that refused to ease.
Out in the distance, the glow of the Business District was still visible, a faint bruise on the horizon. She imagined the SCDF forensic teams still working, cataloging bodies, zipping up bags. There would be reports filed before morning, orders drafted by noon. Her name would be somewhere in all of it, appended, footnoted, turned into something clinical. Killed by Warlord. Neutralized with extreme prejudice. Every word stripped of heat and smell and sound, turned into a statistic that politicians would point to on talk shows.
The thought didn’t anger her. It didn’t comfort her either. It just felt empty.
When she finally lay down again, she stayed on her side, staring at the wall. The cot creaked under her weight. Her tail twitched once, then went still. The silence was so complete that she could hear her own breathing.
Somewhere, a faint vibration in the terminal signaled another wave of messages. She ignored it. MeTube would keep spinning, the helmet feed would keep spreading. Somewhere, millions were watching her work on repeat, frame by frame. Some of them would cheer. Some of them would vomit. Some of them would say it was staged. The noise of the city would churn and argue, but out here it was just her and the smell of old blood.
Zoey shut her eyes and let the image of the hostage room come back one last time. The way the man had stared at her, like he was memorizing her face. The way the blood had spread under the bodies, reaching out in thin lines like veins across the tile. The way her own voice had sounded when she told him she’d decided to spare him. It didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t feel right either. It just felt finished.