What happened next defied prediction. Irisman didn’t dodge. He walked . Each bullet curved around him—not magic, but micro-ECM bursts from his shoulders, spoofing the turrets’ targeting algorithms. The bullets punched into the deck behind him, a perfect outline of his silhouette in craters.
Irisman pressed his palm to Managunz’s primary processor housing.
Irisman stepped into the open hangar, rain sliding off his polished shoulders. “I don’t need backup. You’re not a general. You’re a virus.”
In the rain-slicked neon gutter of Neo-Seoul, two apex predators circled each other. Not in the street—in the data-thrumming heart of the global logistics grid. The prize: control of every automated weapon system from Singapore to Seattle.
Managunz dropped from the gantry, landing with a seismic crash. He was bigger, slower on his feet—but his arms split into four weapon-limb configurations: a plasma cutter, a flechette launcher, a shockwave emitter, and a grapnel line.
Tonight, they met inside the derelict Sparrow’s Drydock , a decommissioned orbital elevator anchorage. Rain hissed through cracked ceramasteel panels. Managunz stood on a gantry above, twenty automated turrets swiveling below him like a metal garden.
Order hadn’t won. A second chance had.