The white flash swallowed everything. Sound. Thought. Light. Even Lira’s grip on Raymond’s arm evaporated into nothingness.And then...A low, metallic heartbeat began pulsing in his ears.Thump. Thump. Thump.When Raymond’s vision snapped back, he found himself standing in a half-real space, a shimmering projection overlaid atop the ruined laboratory. The real world flickered beneath his feet; the holographic layer hummed like a surgical simulation caught between loading and collapsing.SV-0 stood across from him.No longer slumped.No longer failing.Here, within this ghostly interface, it was whole.Its exosuit gleamed with polished chrome.Its eyes blazed with sterile white light.Its presence weighed on the air like gravity itself.Lira was nowhere to be seen.Raymond swallowed. “Am I inside the System?”The Zero Healer inclined its head, movements unnaturally smooth.“Not inside,” it said, voice echoing with glitching layers. “You are standing in the border between code and cons

The descent into Vault Theta didn’t feel like entering a building, it felt like being swallowed.A cylindrical shaft spiraled downward beneath the abandoned sanitation hub, lit only by intermittent pulses of red emergency strips.Raymond followed Lira’s lead, his boots thudding against grated metal stairs slick with condensation. Jax trudged behind them, plasma rifle cradled against his hip.Above them, the city’s noise faded into a hollow mechanical hum.Below… something else hummed back.A resonance. A bass note that made Raymond’s teeth buzz.The System stirred.Alert: Anomalous Signal Detected. Source Match: 37% — Forbidden Healer Prototype Node.Raymond’s pulse quickened. Prototype node? Ahead? Here?Lira glanced at him, catching the change in his breath. “Your toy is pinging again,” she whispered.“Not a toy,” he murmured. “A… sibling.”She smirked. “Creepy.”They reached the bottom of the shaft and stood before a reinforced door carved with warning sigils and old corporate bran

The storm fell.Thousands of glass shards screamed downward in a spiraling kill-pattern, each one sharpened to a molecular edge by Healer Zero’s nanofield. The air shimmered with refracted neon, turning the chamber into a bladed kaleidoscope of death.Raymond sprinted straight into it.Lira swore. Jax yelled something about “terminal stupidity.” But Raymond didn’t hear them.His pulse synced with the System.His footfalls fell into surgical rhythm.And the Neon Scalpel burned in his hand like a sliver of living light.Cut precisely. Cut efficiently. Cut everything that intends to kill you.The System whispered with cold, clinical calm, its words flowing through his blood like chilled anesthesia.SWIPE. One arc of the blade carved a clean line through thirty shards, splitting them like brittle bones.STRIDE. Raymond angled his body, letting several shards skim his coat but never touch skin.DIVE. A twist, a slide, a pivot, every movement calculated with surgical perfection, every vecto

The chamber vibrated with a low, bone-deep hum.Incisor stood motionless, perfectly still, perfectly lethal, red incision-line pulsing like a heartbeat. Lira and Jax backed toward Raymond as he clutched his bleeding arm, neon nerves flickering beneath torn skin.“Raymond,” Lira whispered, “tell me you have a plan.”“Working on one,” he muttered through clenched teeth.You cannot defeat Model Two in your current condition. Evade. Escape. Stabilize.“Yeah,” he whispered under his breath, “not really in the mood for suggestions.”Incisor tilted its head. “Subject Raymond Briggs. You are ordered to comply.” “Reclamation protocol has been initiated.”Jax blinked hard. “Reclamation? That sounds like recycling. Bro, they’re gonna melt you down into parts.”Raymond didn’t respond.He couldn’t.Because Incisor’s voice was familiar, not in sound, but in precision. The cadence. The sterile detachment.The surgical cadence drilled into him by the one man he spent his whole life trying to escape.

The rain hissed against the cracked pavement. Neon reflections shimmered in puddles, painting the city streets in fractured blues and reds.Raymond crouched behind a rusted cargo container, Scalpel in hand, breathing ragged, blood dripping down his arm. Lira leaned beside him, blade still active, eyes scanning every shadow. Jax was crouched farther back, muttering curses and wiping rain from his plasma rifle.Raymond’s chest burned, not from the wound, but from adrenaline. His System thrummed inside him, alive, awake, hungry.Every nanosecond was a calculation, every heartbeat a protocol. Incisor had chased them here. The Helix Enforcer’s path remained unknown. For now, survival depended on turning the hunters into the hunted.System Alert: Primary threat detected, Prototype Incisor.Suggested Countermeasure: Engage selective offensive tactics.Raymond exhaled slowly. Offensive tactics… He hadn’t fought proactively in months. His life had been reaction: survive, evade, heal, repeat. N