His fist crashes into the bot’s side, then again — metal-on-metal, raw power — but the thing absorbs it, twists, and backhands him across the chamber.
“Tex!” I scream.
He hits the floor hard, rolling to recover. “Still alive,” he grunts. “Bastard’s got a hydraulic core.”
More crates shatter open. Three. Five. Seven. Figures spill into the room, some humanoid, others animalistic, all fast and brutal. A storm of claws and metal limbs. Gleaming red sensors lock onto us, their prey.
Noah drops to one knee and fires a round into a jointed leg. It drops. Sparks fly. “Aim for the seams!” he shouts.
Jace spins beside me, unloading a mag into another one’s torso, then switching to a sidearm in the same breath. “Go for the connectors. They’re armoring the cores.”
“Since when do prototypes move like this?” Luca yells, ducking a spinning blade that nearly takes off his head.
I bolt forward, sliding under a table as one of the smaller machines lurches past me. Its head swivels 180 degrees. It leaps. I twist, jam one of my daggers into its neck seam —pop— and wrench it free just before it collapses in a rain of sparks.
My chest heaves.
I look up.
The room ischaos.
Red lights pulse. Jace is shouting orders. Tex grabs one bot by the arm andripsit off with brute force. Noah hurls an EMP charge across the floor, and one machine collapses in a twitching heap.
Luca’s knife slashes into exposed wiring, spraying black fluid. “I’m gonna need a damn upgrade after this!”
I duck behind cover, fire a burst of rounds into a creeping spiderlike drone. “You’re doingfine!”
A massive bot — easily twice my size — thunders toward me. My SMG’s empty. I throw it down, yank the pistol from my vest, and fire point-blank into its knee joint.
Itstaggers.
Jace is there in an instant, vaulting onto its back, planting a round directly into the control node. The bot collapses in a heap.
“You good?” he breathes, reaching for me.
“Still breathing.”
We spin, backs to each other, scanning the room. The last machine twitches, half-melted by Noah’s EMP, Luca finishing it with a clean strike.
And then…
Silence.
The red lights still flicker. The air tastes like ozone and metal.
I lower my weapon slowly, breath ragged.
We’re alive. Barely.
39 FORGED IN BLOOD
The room is still ringing with the echo of my voice when we hear it.
Clap.Clap.Clap.
Slow. Measured. Mocking.
The sound carries, amplified by the steel walls, drawing all of our eyes upward.
