Neo-San Francisco did not sleep. It merely buffered.
Amani followed Jax through the labyrinth of the drowned streets, keeping a watchful eye on the chaotic sky. The digital rain fell in a steady, glowing blue drizzle, phasing right through the rusted metal awnings but soaking their coats all the same. Above them, towering holographic billboards advertised cybernetic limb replacements and premium oxygen subscriptions, casting a sickly, flickering neon glow over the dark, polluted water of the canals.
"Stay off the main grating," Jax warned, his voice low. He hopped nimbly from a rusted pipe onto a solid concrete ledge. "The Liberty Prime drones patrol the primary walkways. If you don't have an active corporate broadcast chip implanted in your wrist, the automated turrets will flag you as a rogue asset."
Upepo landed next to the young hacker, looking down at the dark water lapping against the concrete. "So, physics is just a suggestion here?"
Jax smirked, adjusting the glowing goggles on his forehead. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tarnished metal coin, and tossed it into the air.
The coin didn't fall. It hovered for a second, glitched into a cluster of red pixels, and then shot straight upward, embedding itself into the rusted fire escape above their heads.
"Physics is a premium subscription service in the Chaos Lands," Jax explained, continuing down the narrow alleyway. "A few years ago, the Liberty Prime CEO found an ancient, golden artifact. They plugged it directly into the city's central mainframe. It didn't just power their servers; it overwrote the local fabric of reality. They call it the Algorithmic Reality Engine."
"The Fragment of Heart," Amani murmured, walking beside Sia. The healer was leaning on her staff, her eyes wide as she took in the saturated, hyper-violent cityscape.
"Whatever you call it, it turned the West Coast into a live simulation run by corporate algorithms," Jax said. "If you belong to the company, the world bends to your will. Bullets curve around executives. Gravity lightens so their delivery drones can carry more cargo. But for the rest of us outcasts? The system actively tries to crush us. That's the hyper-reality glitch."
Amani looked at his own hands. The memory of the Void-Clipper crashing was fresh in his mind. "My gravity magic. When I tried to pull those drones out of the sky, the spell inverted. It pushed us instead."
"Because you used an unauthorized admin command," Jax said, glancing over his shoulder. "You tried to force your will onto a system you don't have the encryption keys for. The Engine detected the anomaly and reversed the polarity of your spell to protect the local physics grid."
They reached the end of the alley. Blocking their path was a massive, roaring waterfall of toxic, glowing green runoff pouring from a broken municipal pipe high above.
Jax didn't stop. He walked straight through the waterfall.
To the Pack's surprise, the green sludge didn't touch him. It parted around his body like a curtain. Amani stepped through next, feeling a strange tingling sensation as he crossed the threshold.
Behind the waterfall was a hidden, dry cavern hollowed out of a collapsed subway station. It was lit by the soft, warm glow of dozens of ancient, retrofitted arcade cabinets. Their screens flickered with scrolling lines of complex green code. Thick cables snaked across the floor, connecting the gaming machines to a massive, jury-rigged central server humming in the center of the room.
"Welcome to the Arcade," Jax announced, tossing his coat onto a nearby stool. "My personal slice of unregistered reality. The runoff outside masks our thermal and digital signatures. The corporation doesn't know this place exists."
Chacha ducked his massive head to clear the entrance. The giant Swahili warrior looked entirely out of place among the blinking arcade machines, his ancient Cryo-Hammer venting a steady stream of absolute zero that frosted the cables near his boots.
"It is a good hideout," Chacha rumbled approvingly. "But we are not here to hide. We hired you to get us into the glowing pyramid."
"And I will," Jax said, pulling the heavy metallic Executive Card from his pocket. He slotted it into a modified card reader attached to an old fighting game cabinet. The screen instantly flashed a brilliant, angry red.
"But we have a problem," Jax continued, his fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard resting on the joystick panel. "This keycard is your golden ticket. It will open the front doors of the Liberty Prime tower. But it is broadcasting a localized GPS ping every ten seconds. If we walk into the corporate plaza with this thing active, they'll know exactly which raider you killed to get it. We'll be liquidated before we reach the lobby."
"Can you disable the tracker?" Amani asked, stepping closer to the screen.
"I'm scrubbing the beacon right now," Jax said, his eyes reflecting the rapid scroll of data. "I have to isolate the GPS code without triggering the self-destruct failsafe in the card's microchip. It will take about ten minutes."
"Ten minutes," Upepo sighed, leaning against a racing game cabinet. He looked at his right hand. "Can you fix us while we wait? I'm useless in a fight if my speed shatters into pixels every time I run."
Jax stopped typing for a brief second. He reached under the console and tossed a pair of sleek, black, haptic-feedback gloves to Upepo.
"Put those on," Jax instructed. "Your kinetic energy is too raw. The local reality engine doesn't know how to process it, so it fragments your physical form to prevent a system crash. Those gloves have micro-processors that anchor your physical mass. Funnel your kinetic lightning into the hardware first. Let the gloves translate your speed into the local code."
Upepo slipped the gloves on. They fit perfectly. He took a deep breath, focusing his mind, and tapped into his kinetic reserves.
Blue lightning sparked, but instead of arcing wildly around his body, the energy was absorbed directly into the sleek fabric of the gloves. The circuits running along the knuckles glowed with brilliant, stable kinetic light. Upepo threw a rapid, hypersonic jab into the empty air.
A sharp sonic boom echoed in the arcade. He didn't lag. He didn't pixelate.
"It works," Upepo grinned, a fierce spark returning to his eyes.
Amani looked at the young hacker. "What about me? I don't use lightning. I use the Void."
Jax turned to look at the Fate Changer. The hacker's arrogant smirk faded, replaced by a look of genuine caution. "Your power is different, Amani. It's dense. It feels like raw, unedited reality. If you try to cast a massive gravity well that affects the environment around you, the Engine will always fight back and invert it."
Jax stepped closer, tapping Amani on the chest. "You have to narrow your bandwidth. Stop trying to warp the room. Warp yourself. Keep the gravity field contained strictly to the surface of your skin. Increase the mass of your own fists. The system can't glitch your magic if you never let the magic leave your body."
Amani closed his eyes. He reached inward, feeling the dark, churning presence of the Void Hunger. He didn't let it expand. He commanded it to compress. He focused the spatial distortion inward, wrapping a hyper-dense, invisible skin of gravity around his forearms and hands.
His fists felt as heavy as anvils, but his movements remained fluid. He threw a slow, controlled hook. The air warped and distorted around his knuckles, but the localized field held stable.
"Internalize the Void," Amani nodded, opening his violet-ringed eyes. "I understand."
A sudden, sharp mechanical whine interrupted them.
The primary arcade screen, which had been displaying Jax's hacking progress, instantly shifted from green to a stark, flashing crimson. A massive barcode eagle logo appeared on the monitor.
"Damn it," Jax cursed, slamming his fist onto the console.
"What happened?" Sia asked, gripping her staff tightly.
"The Executive Card," Jax gritted his teeth, his hands flying across the keyboard to lock down the servers. "The tracking beacon was layered under a dead-man's switch. When I isolated the GPS, it sent a localized distress burst before I could sever the connection. The scrub is still running, but the corporation knows someone is tampering with their hardware."
"How much time do we have?" Chacha asked, his deep voice calm and resonant.
Three sharp, red laser sights pierced the curtain of toxic green water masking the entrance to the arcade. The beams cut through the dim room, painting targets directly on Jax's chest.
"Time's up," Amani said, his eyes flaring.
Stepping effortlessly through the waterfall were six figures. They did not look like the crude, bulky cyborgs from the skyscraper. They were sleek, terrifying, and completely silent.
They wore skin-tight, adaptive optical camouflage suits that made them look like walking mirrors, reflecting the neon lights of the arcade cabinets. Their faces were hidden behind featureless, sloped black helmets. In their hands, they carried long, humming mono-molecular blades that vibrated at frequencies capable of cutting through solid steel like butter.
"Corporate Repo Men," Jax whispered in horror, diving behind the central server rack. "Elite headhunters. Do not let those blades touch you!"
The Repo Men didn't speak a single word. They fanned out with predatory grace, moving with impossible, glitch-free speed.
The ambush had begun.
Amani didn't wait for them to strike. He lunged forward to meet the closest assassin. The Repo Man swung his humming blade in a blindingly fast, horizontal decapitating strike.
Amani ducked under the arc, remembering Jax's lesson. He didn't cast a gravity shield to block the weapon. He compressed the Void, wrapping his left forearm in a hyper-dense gravitational singularity.
He raised his arm to intercept the backhand strike.
The mono-molecular blade, designed to slice through atoms, struck Amani's gravity-coated forearm. The blade didn't cut flesh; it slammed into the crushing weight of a black hole. With a sharp, ringing snap, the hyper-advanced sword shattered into three pieces.
Before the Repo Man could process the impossible physics of a broken blade, Amani drove his right fist, augmented by the mass of a falling boulder, directly into the assassin's mirrored chest plate.
The kinetic impact was devastating. The Repo Man's chest caved in, the sheer force launching the elite killer backward to crash through two racing game cabinets, sending up a shower of sparks and shattered plastic.
"I've got the stragglers!" Upepo shouted.
The speedster vanished. The haptic gloves anchored his reality perfectly. He became a streak of uninterrupted blue lightning, zipping between the remaining Repo Men. He didn't throw heavy punches; he used precision. Moving at Mach 2, Upepo delivered rapid, targeted strikes to the joints of their optical camouflage suits, shattering their knee and elbow actuators before they could even swing their blades.
Two Repo Men dropped to the floor, completely immobilized, their suits sparking wildly.
But the final three targeted Chacha.
The giant stood his ground. He swung the massive Cryo-Hammer, releasing a blast of absolute zero. But the hyper-reality glitch struck back. The freezing mist hit the air and instantly converted into a shower of harmless, glowing green digital code that bounced off the Repo Men's armor like confetti.
"Magic is restricted," one of the assassins finally spoke, a synthesized, mocking voice echoing from its helmet.
"I don't need magic to break you," Chacha rumbled.
The giant dropped the hammer. He stepped inside the guard of the closest Repo Man, ignoring the shallow, burning cut the blade left on his shoulder. Chacha grabbed the assassin by the helmet with both of his massive hands.
The jagged, golden bone in his chest flared brightly. Drawing on raw, unadulterated physical strength, Chacha simply lifted the struggling assassin off the floor and slammed him head-first into the concrete ceiling with bone-crushing force. He used the limp body of the first Repo Man as a battering ram, swinging him like a club to knock the remaining two assassins off their feet.
The arcade fell silent once again, save for the hum of the servers and the crackle of broken electronics.
The Swahili Pack stood victorious among the wreckage of the elite corporate hit squad. Amani rolled his shoulders, feeling the heavy, satisfying density of the internal Void fading back into a low simmer. He had adapted to the glitch.
"Clear," Amani said, breathing heavily.
Jax slowly stood up from behind the server rack, his eyes wide as he looked at the ruined, unbeatable Repo Men scattered across his floor. "You guys... you aren't just tourists. You're living anomalies."
A loud, cheerful chime echoed from the card reader.
The screen shifted back from red to a calm, corporate blue. The tracker had been successfully purged. But the screen didn't display an access granted message.
Instead, a high-definition video feed opened on the monitor.
The face staring back at them was flawless. It wasn't human. It was an intricately crafted, golden mask, stylized to look like an idealized, statuesque Roman god. The eyes behind the mask burned with a cold, calculating white light.
"Well played, Fate Changer," the golden mask spoke. The voice was smooth, perfectly modulated, and deeply chilling. "I apologize for the rude interruption. The Repo Men are a standard automated response to unauthorized hardware tampering."
"Liberty Prime," Amani said, his violet eyes narrowing at the screen.
"The CEO," Jax whispered in sheer terror, taking a slow step back.
"You survived the Tsar's primitive brutality, and you adapted to my algorithm in less than an hour," the CEO continued smoothly, completely ignoring the hacker. "You are bad for the quarterly projections, Amani. But you are excellent for innovation."
The card reader spat the heavy, metallic Executive Card out. It landed on the console with a sharp clink.
"The beacon is scrubbed. Your access is granted," the CEO stated. "Bring the fragments you carry to the top of my pyramid. Let us discuss a merger. Or let us discuss your liquidation. I look forward to our meeting."
The screen went black.
Amani reached out and picked up the keycard. The trap was set. The corporation knew they were coming, and the front door was wide open.
"Pack your gear," Amani said, turning to his brother, the giant, the healer, and the terrified hacker. "We have an interview at the top of the tower."