I advance.
He fires.
The plasma bolt clips my shoulder, heat blooming white-hot across my armor and into my flesh beneath it, pain detonating hard enough to make my vision stutter.
I keep coming.
My spurs rip his rifle in half and then rip him in half.
The other one tries to run.
He makes it three steps.
The corridor narrows into a choke point lined with old pipework and conduit bundles that hang low enough to brush my helmet, and I can hear more enforcers converging now, boots hammering on metal stairs, someone shouting for heavier weapons, another voice screaming into a comm unit for reinforcements that are not going to arrive in time.
“Tur,” command says again, and now there’s fear in it. “Stand down. This is your final warning.”
I breach into the holding level corridor just as a volley of plasma fire erupts from the far end, the bolts slamming into the walls around me and showering the air with molten debris and sparks that sting my face and leave the air tasting like burned copper.
I don’t retreat.
I walk into it.
Each step is deliberate.
Controlled.
Unstoppable.
My spurs carve through armor and bone and weapons with the same sickening ease, my knife flashing silver in my left hand as I disable throats and knees and spines, my breacher detonating in close quarters to turn one cluster of enforcers into a concussive cloud of blood and concrete dust that coats the walls in a fine red mist.
My ears ring.
My shoulder burns.
My ribs ache.
I don’t care.
The bond is screaming now.
Not in distress.
In direction.
She’s here.
Ten meters ahead.
Behind a steel door at the end of the corridor that is already sagging inward at the center from my earlier weapons fire, the metal warped and glowing faintly orange at the edges like it’s trying not to melt all the way through out of spite.
I fire one last plasma round into the locking mechanism.
The door half-melts, sagging further, sparks cascading down the surface like falling stars.
I drop the rifle.
Grab the warped edge with both hands.
