Chapter : 1981

  "Shut up," Lloyd told the machine.

  On the other side of the canyon, the Sirius suit paused. Its sensors were confused. The energy signature coming from Lloyd’s suit had changed. It was no longer a steady, rhythmic pulse. It was jagged, spiking and dipping erratically.

  "What did you do?" Anthony asked, his voice losing a bit of its smug edge. "Your energy readings are unstable. You’re going to blow yourself up."

  "Maybe," Lloyd said. He slammed the throttles forward, not smoothly, but with a violent jerk.

  The Aegis didn't glide forward this time. It lurched. It exploded into motion like a cannonball. One of the leg thrusters fired a split second before the other, causing the suit to tilt dangerously to the left.

  To a normal pilot, this would be a mistake. To Anthony’s computer, it was an error. The Predictive Combat Engine calculated that the Aegis was crashing. It predicted Lloyd would try to correct the balance. It moved the Sirius suit to the right, expecting Lloyd to swing wide.

  But Lloyd didn't correct the balance. He leaned into the crash.

  He let the massive black suit fall into a chaotic spin, using the "mistake" to gain speed. He wasn't flying anymore; he was falling horizontally, a tumbling brick of black steel.

  "Target trajectory... unknown," the Fire Fly computer whispered in Anthony’s ear. "Error. Logic fail."

  "Logic fail," Lloyd repeated through gritted teeth. "I like the sound of that."

  ________________________________________

  The sky blurred.

  Lloyd was spinning so fast that the g-forces were pressing him back into his seat, trying to crush the air out of his lungs. The metal frame of the Aegis screamed in protest. Bolts were popping. Hydraulic lines were hissing as they were pushed past their breaking point. Without the safety limiters, the machine was tearing itself apart to obey Lloyd’s commands.

  But it was fast. It was terrifyingly fast.

  To Anthony, it looked like the black mech had gone insane. It wasn't moving in straight lines or smooth curves. It was jagged. It zig-zagged violently, dropping ten feet in a split second, then shooting upward with a burst of unrefined fuel.

  "Target lock lost," the Sirius computer chirped. "Target movement erratic. Cannot predict impact point."

  "Just shoot him!" Anthony yelled, panic starting to creep into his voice. He swung his plasma cannons around, spraying blue fire into the air.

  But he was shooting at where Lloyd should have been, not where he was. The blasts sailed harmlessly through the empty space where a logical pilot would have flown.

  Lloyd was currently upside down, twenty feet below Anthony, scraping the paint off the canyon floor.

  "Now," Lloyd grunted.

  He slammed the air-brakes on the left side only. The Aegis whipped around with a violence that snapped Lloyd’s head against the headrest. The suit stopped its forward momentum instantly and shot straight up, directly into the blind spot beneath the Sirius suit.

  This was the "Fractured Maneuver." It was a move that no computer would ever recommend because it had a 50% chance of snapping the pilot’s neck. But because it was suicide, Anthony’s computer hadn't seen it coming.

  "Below you!" Anthony screamed, trying to fire his thrusters to escape.

  Too late.

  Lloyd roared as the Aegis collided with the golden suit from below. He didn't use his fists this time. He didn't use a sword. He used his legs. The Aegis wrapped its heavy legs around the Sirius suit’s waist, locking them together in a mid-air grapple.

  "Get off!" Anthony shrieked. The golden suit thrashed, slamming its elbows into Lloyd’s cockpit, denting the armor.

  "No," Lloyd said. "I think I’ll stay."

  They hung there in the air, suspended by the roaring engines of both suits. Atlas, seeing his master had the grip, released his water hold to avoid getting hit by the crossfire, retreating to the canyon floor to watch.

  Lloyd looked at his right arm control. The "Tungsten Pile-Bunker" was ready.

  A Pile-Bunker wasn't a fancy weapon. It didn't shoot lasers. It didn't use magic. It was basically a giant, hydraulic jackhammer. It was a solid spike of super-heavy tungsten metal, sharpened to a needle point, sitting on top of an explosive charge. It was designed to do one thing: punch holes in things that didn't want to have holes.

  Lloyd lined up his right fist with the center of Anthony’s chest. Right where the Fire Fly reactor was humming.

  "This is for calling my tech primitive," Lloyd said.

  He pulled the trigger.

  KA-CHUNK.

  Chapter : 1982

  The sound wasn't like a gunshot. It was deeper. It was the sound of the earth cracking. The explosive charge behind the tungsten spike detonated. The spike shot forward with enough force to punch through a battleship.

  It hit the gold "Null-Alloy" armor of the Sirius suit. The armor was designed to stop heat. It was designed to stop magic. But it couldn't stop fifty tons of kinetic force concentrated on a single point.

  The armor crumpled like tin foil. The spike drove through the gold plating, through the inner shielding, and buried itself deep inside the chest of the enemy mech.

  Then, it hit the reactor.

  The world went silent for a second.

  The Sirius suit ran on a Cold Fusion Reactor—advanced science. The Aegis suit ran on the Golem Heart—ancient magic.

  When the tungsten spike connected the two, something impossible happened.

  Sparks didn't fly. Fire didn't erupt. Instead, the air around them turned purple.

  A low, sucking sound filled the canyon, like a giant taking a deep breath. The point where the spike had entered the reactor began to glow with a light that hurt to look at. It was swirling, chaotic, and wrong.

  "Warning," Lloyd’s computer said, its voice distorted and slow. "Dimensional... anomaly... detected."

  "What did you do?!" Anthony screamed. His voice wasn't coming through the radio anymore. It was coming through the air, thin and terrified.

  The coolant from Anthony’s suit began to leak, but it didn't drip down. It floated up. The purple light was creating a vacuum, a hole in reality. It was a Singularity Event.

  Lloyd felt his stomach drop. The gravity around them was shifting. Rocks from the ground were starting to float into the air. The sky above them flickered again, the blue turning to a static gray.

  "I broke it," Lloyd said, staring at the swirling rift in Anthony’s chest. "I think I broke physics."

  The suction increased. The Sirius suit began to buckle, its metal skin peeling away and being sucked into the purple hole in its own chest. Anthony was thrashing, trying to eject, but the systems were dead.

  "Let go!" Anthony begged. "You’ll kill us both! Let go!"

  Lloyd tried to pull his arm back, but the Pile-Bunker was jammed. The metal had fused together from the heat of the impact. He was stuck. He was locked to a ticking time bomb that was eating reality.

  The purple light expanded, swallowing the two machines in a blinding halo. The wind howled, sounding like a thousand voices screaming at once.

  Lloyd gripped his controls, his knuckles white. He wasn't scared. The Major General didn't get scared. He just calculated the odds.

  "Well," Lloyd muttered as the world around them began to twist and stretch like taffy. "This is going to be a bumpy ride."

  The light flashed white, and for a moment, the desert was gone.

  ________________________________________

  The purple light from the singularity event was still swirling around the chest of the golden Sirius suit, pulling at the metal like a hungry ghost. Lloyd Ferrum, locked tight against his enemy in the cockpit of the Aegis, watched his monitors with the cold, hard eyes of a man who had already done the math. The Tungsten Pile-Bunker had done its job. It had punched through the fancy gold armor, smashed the shielding, and cracked the reactor.

  By all the rules of warfare Lloyd knew—both from Earth and Riverio—this was the end. The enemy pilot should be ejecting, screaming, or begging. The machine was dead. Gravity was bending around them. The fight was over.

  But Anthony wasn’t screaming.

  Inside the crushed, sparking cockpit of the Sirius suit, a sound started to bubble up. It wasn’t a cry for help. It was a laugh. It started low, a dry, rasping chuckle that sounded like sandpaper rubbing against bone, and it grew louder until it was a chilling, mechanical cackle that cut through the roar of the dying engines.

  Lloyd frowned behind his helmet. "You’ve got a weird way of celebrating a loss," he muttered, trying to jerk his arm free from the mangled chest of the enemy mech. The metal was fused solid. He was stuck.

  "A loss?" Anthony’s voice crackled over the short-range radio. The signal was dirty, filled with static and digital noise. "You still don't get it, do you, Ferrum? You look at this suit and you see a vehicle. You see a car. You think it’s a tool you put on in the morning and take off at night."

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Chapter : 1983

  The golden armor of the Sirius suit suddenly stopped glowing blue. The lights died. For a second, the machine looked like a lifeless statue.

  "For Alpha Team," Anthony rasped, "the suit is not armor. It is me."

  A new light flickered deep inside the cracks of the golden armor. It wasn't the clean blue of the fusion reactor, and it wasn't the chaotic purple of the singularity. It was red. A sickly, dark crimson that looked like dried blood under a microscope.

  "Warning," Lloyd’s onboard computer said. The voice was flat, but the message was urgent. "Unknown energy spike detected. Energy signature does not match standard Fire Fly database. Danger. Proximity alert."

  "Protocol Initiate," Anthony whispered. "Circuit-Ascension: Generation 3."

  The sound that followed was something Lloyd would never forget. It started as a high-pitched mechanical whine, like a jet engine spinning out of control. But then, underneath the machine noise, there was a wet, tearing sound. It sounded like a siren mixed with a human scream.

  Through the shattered viewport of the Sirius suit, Lloyd saw movement.

  The inside of the enemy mech wasn't made of leather seats and control sticks anymore. The inner lining of the cockpit began to move. It pulsed. Thick, black data-cables, looking like metal snakes, burst out from the walls of the suit. They didn't plug into a port on Anthony’s helmet. They didn't attach to his suit.

  They punched through his flight suit.

  Lloyd watched, his stomach turning, as the cables burrowed directly into Anthony’s flesh. They dug into his shoulders, his chest, and his thighs. The largest cable, a thick bundle of fiber-optics and steel, shot out from the back of the seat and slammed into the base of Anthony’s neck, drilling into his spinal column with a sickening crunch.

  "Override," Anthony gasped. His voice was changing. It was losing the human tremble and gaining a metallic, synthesized echo. "Override... pain... inhibitors. Override... biological... limits."

  This wasn't magic. This wasn't a spell. Lloyd recognized it instantly from the darkest, most classified files of his old life on Earth. This was "Body Horror" refined by 22nd-century military science. It was the ultimate, desperate step of transhumanism. Anthony was forcibly overclocking his own nervous system by hardwiring his brain directly into the machine’s combat CPU.

  He was deleting the human delay.

  "Get back!" Lloyd shouted. He fired the reverse thrusters on the Aegis, tearing the fused metal of his arm free with a screech of tortured steel. The Aegis stumbled back, putting fifty feet between them.

  It wasn't enough.

  The Sirius suit began to convulse. The gold plating shifted and cracked as the machine seemed to bulk up. The red light intensified, bleeding out of every seam.

  Atlas, the Water King, sensed the threat. The massive spirit, still in his humanoid form, roared and slammed his trident down. He tried to re-apply the pressure, summoning a sphere of heavy water to crush the transforming mech.

  "Hydro-Static Lock!" Atlas bellowed. A bubble of dark blue water, weighing thousands of tons, formed around Anthony.

  Usually, this would be game over. Water pressure crushes submarines. It stops tanks.

  But the red light inside the Sirius suit didn't dim. It got brighter.

  "Inefficient," Anthony’s voice boomed. It wasn't coming from the radio anymore. It was being projected from external speakers, loud enough to shake the dust off the canyon walls. "Liquid has mass. Mass creates drag. I have deleted drag."

  A shockwave of red electricity exploded from the golden suit. This wasn't normal lightning. It was "Anti-Logic" energy—a chaotic discharge created when the laws of physics are forced to bend until they break.

  The red lightning hit Atlas’s water prison. The water didn't just splash away; it vaporized instantly. There was no steam, just a sudden, empty void where the water had been. Atlas was thrown backward, his watery form rippling and destabilizing as if he had been hit by a bomb.

  The smoke cleared.

  The thing standing there wasn't the Sirius suit anymore. Not really. The gold paint was scorched black. The elegant fins and spoilers were gone. The machine stood hunched over, its arms hanging low like a gorilla. The red cables were visible through the gaps in the armor, pulsing with a heartbeat that was too fast for any living thing.

  Chapter : 1984

  Anthony lifted his head. His helmet visor was shattered, revealing his face. His eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only the whites, glowing with the reflection of the red dashboard lights. Veins of black corruption spread out from where the cables entered his neck.

  He didn't look at Lloyd. He didn't look at Atlas. He looked at the data streaming across his internal vision.

  "Processing speed," Anthony droned. "Three hundred percent. Neural latency... zero."

  Lloyd gripped his controls, sweat running down his back. The Major General inside his head was screaming warnings. He knew what he was looking at. He was looking at a pilot who had turned off his survival instincts to become a pure weapon.

  "You're going to burn your brain out," Lloyd shouted. "That link isn't stable! You'll be a vegetable in five minutes!"

  The Cyborg Singularity that used to be Anthony twitched its head. "Five minutes," it said, the voice devoid of arrogance, replaced by cold calculation. "Is four minutes and fifty-nine seconds longer than I need."

  The red lightning crackled around the machine’s feet. The ground beneath it turned to glass.

  "Let's test the hardware," Anthony said.

  And then, he vanished.

  ________________________________________

  He didn't run. Running implies movement that the eye can track. Running takes time. You have to lift a foot, push off the ground, and propel yourself forward.

  Anthony didn't do that.

  One millisecond, the corrupted Sirius suit was standing amidst the glass and smoke of the crater. The next millisecond, there was a thunderclap—the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum—and he was gone.

  Lloyd’s eyes widened. He instinctively jerked the controls of the Aegis to the left, raising his shield arm. It was a reflex born of eighty years of combat experience.

  It was too slow.

  WHAM.

  The impact came from the right. It felt like a freight train had slammed into the side of the Aegis. The twelve-ton black mech was lifted off its feet and thrown sideways, skidding through the dirt.

  "Warning," the Aegis computer screamed. "Right flank armor critical. Impact velocity unmeasurable."

  Lloyd gritted his teeth, wrestling the machine back to a standing position. He scanned the area frantically. "Where is he? Use the All-Seeing Eye!"

  He activated his visual power. The world turned into a grid of information. He looked for the heat signature, the mana flow, the electrical output.

  He saw a blur. A streak of red light zigzagging across the battlefield. It was moving so fast that it left afterimages—ghostly red copies of the mech that faded a second later. Anthony wasn't moving through space; he was practically teleporting by using raw, overwhelming velocity. He was bypassing the "Time Lag" of neural reaction. By the time Lloyd’s brain saw him, Anthony was already somewhere else.

  "He's too fast," Lloyd realized, a cold knot forming in his stomach. "My eyes can see him, but my hands can't move the controls fast enough to hit him."

  It was the ultimate bottleneck. The Aegis was powerful. Lloyd was a genius. But between Lloyd’s thought and the machine’s action, there was a tiny, tiny delay. A fraction of a second where the signal traveled from his brain to his hand to the stick to the servo.

  Anthony had removed that delay. He was the servo.

  "Target identified," Anthony’s mechanical voice echoed from everywhere at once. "Priority One: Remove defensive variables."

  Lloyd froze. Defensive variables?

  "Jasmin!" Lloyd shouted. "Move!"

  Spirit Jasmin, still in her crystalline Diamond form, was standing near the edge of the canyon, recovering from her earlier effort to refract the laser. She was the ultimate shield. Nothing physical could break her.

  But Anthony wasn't using physics anymore. He was using cheats.

  The red blur materialized directly behind Jasmin. He didn't use a sword. He didn't use a laser. He pulled his fist back. The arm of the Sirius suit vibrated. It wasn't shaking from fear; it was oscillating. The metal fist was vibrating at a frequency so high it emitted a screeching sound that shattered nearby rocks.

  Anthony had calculated the resonant frequency of diamond.

  "Shatter," Anthony said.

  He punched her in the center of her back.

  PING.

  It wasn't a thud. It was the sound of a tuning fork being struck. The vibration traveled through Jasmin’s indestructible body instantly. The perfect lattice of her diamond structure couldn't handle the harmonic overload.