"You mean like your manners?!"
He doesn't laugh. He just punches the throttle and we shoot through a checkpoint gate that hasn't been sealed in years. It creaks behind us like a warning. The deeper we go, the less human everything feels—hollow-eyed mannequins still posed in shattered window displays, ash-scars on brick walls from riots no one ever admitted happened.
Then trouble finds us again.
Two bounty hunters leap down from a broken billboard like vultures with better fashion sense—tight combat gear, armored chests, glowing rifles.
Valtron doesn’t brake.
Hestandson the bike mid-ride, steering with one foot, and launches a dagger—straight between the eyes of the first one.
I scream.
The second bounty shouts something in a language I don’t know and fires. The bolt zips past us, misses, and fries a street lamp.
And a kid—maybe nine?—bolts out from behind a cart of old vending cores, right into the crossfire.
"Valtron!"
He sees it.
Jumps.
He flips off the bike mid-motion, grabs the kid, rolls across the asphalt as the laser sizzles past his shoulder. The grav-bikeeats a wall and detonates in a neat little fireball that roasts the first bounty’s corpse for good measure.
I scramble up from the cracked pavement where I landed, heart in my throat.
The second hunter charges—his skin glitching. Not skin. Chrome. A cybernetic. Modified deep. Maybe ex-military, maybe not even born human.
He swings a plasma blade at Valtron.
Valtron catches it—with hisclaws.
They screech and spark, metal on metal. The hunter grins—until Valtron growls, twists the blade aside, and drives a scaled fist straight through his chest.
Cybernetics and spine bits fly.
I want to gag.
I don’t.
Because that same arm—bloody and torn—is the one he uses to cradle the kid.
The child’s crying. Mute sobs, hiccups, eyes wild.
“You’re alright,” Valtron murmurs, setting him down. “Stay low. Run that way. Don’t stop.”
The kid bolts.
I stare at him. At Valtron.
“You’re a one-man apocalypse.”
He glances at the twitching remains of the chrome assassin and shrugs. “They started it.”
The safehouse is a bunker squatting under what used to be a surveillance hub. Abandoned now, probably on purpose. It smells like rust and silence. The air’s thick with history—old sweat, oil, data cables rotting under dust.
Valtron scans the entry pad with his wristband. It beeps once and opens with a sigh like it’s exhaling its last breath.
