The sky-bridge was dying.
Raze felt it before he heard it, the low groan of stressed rebar, the wet pop of rivets giving way under his boots. Forty stories above the street grid, the narrow walkway swayed like a drunk. Rain lashed sideways. Neon from the surrounding arcologies painted the falling droplets in streaks of cyan and violent pink.
He had almost made it across.
Then the Anchor Units dropped in.
Two of them, low-tier Ascendant muscle in matte-black exosuits, magnetic boots clamping onto the buckling deck. Shoulder cannons hummed to life. Cyan circuit lines glowed across their armor like veins. One of them raised a massive gauntlet and slammed it down. The bridge lurched.
"Patient Zero," the lead Anchor growled through a vox-speaker. "Stand down. Extraction team en route."
Raze didn't answer. He never did.
He spun and sprinted back the way he'd come, but the second Anchor had already magnet-locked the far end. Steel cables shot out, punching into the support struts with seismic thuds. The entire bridge shuddered hard enough to throw him off balance.
No way forward.
No way back.
The first Anchor charged, exosuit servos whining, fists the size of wrecking balls. Raze dodged left, felt the wind of the missed swing, and vaulted the railing. For one impossible second he hung in open air between two towers, then the bridge gave another violent lurch and he dropped.
His hand caught a dangling cable. Momentum swung him hard. He released, twisted mid-fall, and landed on a lower support beam that was already cracking.
The Anchors above opened fire. Pulse rounds chewed the air. One clipped his shoulder, non-lethal, but the impact rattled his teeth.
Raze tasted blood.
Now.
He bit down on the trigger point in his jaw, the muscle memory he'd drilled into himself for two years.
The chip woke up.
White-hot fire surged down his spine. His eyes flared white. And the world exploded into ink.
Black speed lines blasted off his limbs like shattered glass. Gravity loosened its grip. Time slowed to a crawl.
Messiah Mode.
One minute fifty-nine seconds remaining.
Raze moved.
He kicked off the cracking beam and shot upward like a bullet. The nearest Anchor tried to track him, too slow. Raze planted both feet on the exosuit's chest plate, spun, and drove a heel into the side of its helmet. The impact cratered the armor. The unit staggered backward, cables snapping taut.
Raze was already gone.
He ran straight up the vertical face of the nearest tower, sneakers gripping rain-slicked glass. Ink trails streamed behind him in chaotic black slashes. Forty stories became twenty in three heartbeats. He flipped off the wall, caught a hanging maintenance gantry, and used it like a springboard, launching himself straight at the second Anchor.
Mid-air, he twisted into a spinning kick. The blow connected with the unit's shoulder cannon. Metal screamed. The cannon tore free and spun away into the rain.
One minute twenty-four seconds.
The bridge was collapsing in earnest now, entire sections peeling away and plummeting toward the street grid far below. Raze ricocheted off a falling girder, used the momentum to slingshot himself between the two Anchors, and drove both fists into the weak point where their helmets met their suits. Sparks flew. One unit dropped to its knees.
He didn't stop.
He ran across the crumbling deck, speed lines exploding in every direction exactly like the old black-and-white sketches burned into his memory. A pulse round grazed his ribs. He didn't feel it. He grabbed a snapped cable, whipped it around the lead Anchor's neck, and yanked hard enough to fling the two-ton suit off the bridge entirely.
It disappeared screaming into the neon abyss.
Fifty-eight seconds.
Only one Anchor left. It fired wildly. Raze blurred past every shot, a living storm of ink and motion. He vaulted its shoulders, planted a foot on its helmet, and launched himself toward the nearest stable rooftop—twenty meters away and rising.
He cleared it.
Landed hard on wet concrete, rolled once, and kept running.
Thirty-one seconds.
The final Anchor tried to follow. It never made it. The sky-bridge finally gave up and folded in on itself, taking the last unit with it in a roar of twisting metal.
Raze didn't look back.
He sprinted across the new rooftop, ink still pouring off him in black lightning. His lungs burned. His heart hammered like it wanted out. But he was alive.
He was free.
Four seconds.
Three.
Two.
One.
Messiah Mode ended.
The crash hit like a freight train.
Every muscle in his body locked at once. His vision tunneled to a single white pinprick. The world flipped sideways. He tried to keep running, tried to roll with the momentum, but his legs betrayed him. He pitched forward, skidded across the rain-slicked roof, and slammed into a rusted ventilation stack hard enough to dent it.
Pain flooded in. Sharp. Total. His heart stuttered. Breath wouldn't come.
He lay there, cheek pressed to cold concrete, rain drumming on his back, black ink lines still faintly flickering around his twitching fingers before they faded to nothing.
Consciousness slipped.
Then a voice, loud, sarcastic, terrified, cut through the static in his earpiece.
"Raze? Raze! I'm two roofs over, hold on, you idiot, I'm coming!"
Boots pounded closer. A pair of hands grabbed his hoodie and hauled him upright. White ritual face paint streaked with rain. Fiber-optic braids glowing faintly in the dark.
Yui.
She slung one of his arms over her shoulders, cursing under her breath the whole time.
"Three minutes my ass. You always cut it too close. Come on, Messiah. Let's get you somewhere the Reapers won't find the body."
Raze tried to speak. Nothing came out except a ragged exhale.
Yui just laughed once, sharp and shaky, and dragged him into the shadows between the towers.
Behind them, the rain washed the last traces of black ink off the rooftop until there was nothing left but silence and neon.
And the distant whine of incoming drones.