Kaito used the half-second of Taggart’s confusion to move. He didn’t charge. He retreated, his boots scraping on the grime-slicked ferrocrete, luring the enforcer away from the console where Morgan Webb and Caleb Jericho worked. His goal was not to win, but to reposition the fight onto ground of his own choosing. He backed toward a rusted catwalk that spanned a dark, cavernous drop between server racks, a decaying spine of iron that smelled of corrosion and time.
Heath Taggart’s cybernetic eye, a single point of glowing red, refocused on him, the false security alert already purged from his logic. He followed Kaito onto the elevated walkway. The structure groaned, a low, guttural complaint of tortured metal under the enforcer’s cybernetically enhanced weight. Flakes of rust, disturbed after half a century of stillness, rained down into the darkness below. The catwalk felt dangerously unstable.
From the corner of his eye, Kaito saw the green glow of Webb’s console. The archivist’s fingers were a blur across the keys, his face a mask of intense concentration.
— Buffer’s fighting the file structure, — Caleb’s synthetic voice rasped, his own focus locked on a secondary screen monitoring the Hub’s power flow. — Hold him off.
The upload progress bar crept to forty-five percent. Not enough time. Kaito needed another distraction, another flaw in the environment to exploit. He spotted a junction box for the Hub’s old power conduits bolted to the wall beside the catwalk. With his good hand, he slammed his fist into the corroded panel. The metal buckled.
Sparks erupted in a shower of brilliant, angry light. Blue-white electrical arcs, thick as his thumb, lashed out from the broken conduits, crackling and hissing in the damp air. The smell of ozone was sharp and clean. Taggart instinctively raised an arm, shielding his optical sensor from the blinding, chaotic energy. The raw, unpredictable display of power was a variable his combat programming couldn't immediately process. His primary sensory input was compromised.
Kaito knew he couldn’t beat the man. He wasn’t trying to. This wasn’t a fight for survival; it was a transaction. He was trading his own physical safety, what little he had left, for the few precious seconds Anya’s ghost needed to find its voice. He moved in while Taggart was still processing the electrical storm, his actions no longer guided by the clean lines of combat but by a messy, desperate freedom. He was already a ghost in the System; pain and erasure had no hold on him now. Taggart’s combat analysis, built to counter predictable attacks, struggled to model a man who no longer cared if he lived through the next five seconds.
The enforcer’s movements were a blur of perfect, efficient blocks, but Kaito’s wildness created openings. He saw a loose metal rod, part of the catwalk’s decaying safety railing, and ripped it free with a grunt. The rusted metal was heavy and solid in his good hand, an improvised weapon from a dying world. He feinted a strike at Taggart’s head.
As Taggart moved to block, Kaito changed his angle, jamming the metal rod deep into the catwalk’s main support joint where it met the wall. He put his entire weight behind it, feeling the shriek of metal grinding against metal. It was a final, desperate act of sabotage, a prayer to the god of decay. The structure screamed in protest, a high, tearing sound.
Taggart recovered, his red eye locking back onto Kaito. He advanced, his logic overriding the clear structural warnings. His single-minded focus on neutralizing the target was his fatal flaw. He took one step, then another, ignoring the groaning death of the iron beneath him. He was a creature of perfect performance, blind to the soul in the flaw.
The catwalk collapsed. The support joint, savaged by the metal rod, sheared away from the wall with a sound like a giant’s breaking bone. The entire structure gave way, plunging downward into the blackness. Taggart’s expression did not change as he fell. There was no surprise, no fear. Only the silent, logical acceptance of a failed process.
A tremendous crash of metal echoed up from the darkness below. Then, silence.
The dust from the collapse settled slowly in the dim light. The only sound was the quiet, steady hum of the broadcast console.
Kaito turned, his body screaming in protest. The final act was his.
