The corporate headquarters of Chrono-Tech Logistics was a towering spire of glass and white chrome that rose three hundred stories above the slums, looking down on the workers like a monument to eternal greed.
Inside the top-floor boardroom, Director Kael—a pale man with slicked-back silver hair and gold-plated cybernetic fingers—was furiously shouting at his holographic display.
"What do you mean the automated train isn't responding?!" Kael screamed at his security chief. "We have three billion credits worth of refined minerals on that transport! Shut down the tracks! Demolish the bridges! Do not let that train enter the city center!"
"Sir, we've lost control of the central rail network!" the security chief yelled back over the static-filled comms. "The automated switching systems have been locked out by some kind of demonic encryption! The train... the train is accelerating! It’s bypassed all safety buffers!"
Kael ran to the massive floor-to-ceiling glass window, looking down into the dark, rain-slicked concrete canyon below.
A mile away, the purple-lit mag-lev train was roaring down the elevated rails like a massive kinetic missile. It didn't slow down as it hit the final terminal station. It smashed through the reinforced steel buffers, jumped the tracks, and ploughed straight through the grand marble lobby of the Chrono-Tech spire.
CRASH!
The entire skyscraper violently shuddered as thousands of tons of steel and cargo pulverized the lower five floors into white dust and broken glass. The alarms across the entire city sector screamed in unison, their red emergency lights painting the rain-soaked streets in blood-colored hues.
Before the security forces could even organize a response through the thick dust cloud in the lobby, a massive figure stepped out of the wreckage.
Asher walked out of the shattered remains of the train's lead car, his cloak completely clean, his Level 6 aura flaring so violently that the surrounding fires were snuffed out by the sheer lack of oxygen. Jax and Lucy flanked him, their upgraded dark-iron frameworks gleaming through the smoke like ancient gods of war.
"Secure the perimeter," Asher ordered coldly. "Kill anyone who refuses to submit. Nora, take the data core. I want every asset this corporation owns integrated into our network by dawn."
"Right away, Boss!" Nora cheered, sprinting toward the central mainframe elevators with a massive wrench in her hand and a manic grin on her face.
Hundreds of Chrono-Tech private security guards poured out of the upper stairwells, their automatic weapons firing a continuous stream of high-velocity rounds down into the lobby.
But their bullets never reached Asher.
Lucy materialized in front of the line of fire, her sleek dark-iron arms creating a defensive matrix of plasma shields that deflected the kinetic energy effortlessly. Jax lunged forward a second later, his heavy fists turning the front line of corporate guards into a cloud of broken armor and concrete shrapnel.
It wasn't a battle; it was a methodical, industrial-grade liquidation of corporate security.