The first Specter mercenary never even registered what hit him.
He was coasting at three hundred meters, his active-camouflage completely blending his frame into the gray clouds, when a sudden silhouette tore through the mist beside him. Before he could raise his thermal rifle, a sleek, matte-black hand wrapped around his throat armor.
Hiss!
Lucy’s wrist-mounted plasma blade erupted, driving cleanly through the mercenary's heavy helmet visor, vaporizing his skull instantly. Without a sound, she ripped the spent battery core from his exo-suit, tossed his lifeless body into the void, and used his falling chassis as a stepping stone.
She fired her micro-thrusters again, changing direction mid-air like a lethal, mechanical acrobat.
"Squad Leader! We have an interceptor in the air!" a mercenary yelled over the Specter comms as his HUD suddenly registered his teammate's flatlining vitals. "Active-cam is useless! She’s tracking our exact descent vectors!"
"Deploy thermal flares! Blind her!" Captain Vane roared from his own descent path.
A dozen blinding, high-temperature magnesium flares exploded in the sky, turning the dark storm into a flickering, white-hot nightmare. To a normal cybernetic eye, the sudden thermal overload would have caused total optical blindness.
But Lucy wasn't relying on normal optics. In her mind's eye, Ren’s voice was a perfect, real-time map.
"Left, thirty degrees, two units trying to flank. Right, fifty meters down, one unit preparing a micro-missile lock," Ren’s voice flowed like water through the link.
Lucy twisted her body in mid-air, her dark-iron frame absorbing the heat of the flares without taking damage. She slipped past the first two mercenaries like a literal ghost, her plasma blade drawing two clean, horizontal lines across their midsections. Their severed exo-suits exploded in mid-air, raining burning shrapnel down onto the lower streets.
Meanwhile, at the southern civilian shelter, the remaining twenty Specter mercenaries completed their heavy-boot landings, slamming into the concrete plaza with their rifles already raised.
"Kill anything that moves!" the sub-commander ordered, pointing his thermal rifle at the heavy iron doors of the old church where hundreds of families were hiding.
Before his finger could even touch the trigger, the ground beneath his feet violently heaved.
The thick concrete exploded upward as a massive, towering figure burst from the subterranean sewer lines. It was Jax. His new Abyssal Dreadnought frame was completely wrapped in a heavy, dark-iron shield that pulsed with blue dual-fusion energy.
"Looking for someone, plastic boys?!" Jax roared, his voice a deafening explosion of raw Strength.
He didn't use a firearm. He slammed his two massive, heavy Dark-Iron fists together, activating his new core's primary ability: [Kinetic Shockwave].
BOOM!
A literal wall of concentrated kinetic energy and purple Monarch Qi ripped outward across the plaza. The sheer force of the blast didn't just knock the mercenaries off their feet; it completely shattered the active-camouflage systems of twelve suits, revealing the sleek, gray corporate armor underneath as their internal electronics violently fried.
"Heavy cybernetic anomaly spotted!" a mercenary yelled, trying to re-establish his footing. "Concentrate fire on the large one!"
A barrage of high-frequency thermal rounds slammed into Jax’s chest and shoulders, the superheated bullets melting the top layer of his armor. But Jax just grinned, his teeth covered in blood, his Tier 1 Dreadnought framework actively absorbing the kinetic impact and converting it into raw power for his next strike.
"My turn," Jax growled, lunging forward like a runaway freight train.