"Get out of my way, you little brat! I don't have time for hide and seek with a lab experiment like you!" Raka yelled, aiming his energy pistol not at the Child, but at the thick gas pipes pulsing on the ceiling right above the elevator.The Child, standing inside the elevator with a terrifyingly innocent smile, simply tilted his head as if he were calculating Raka’s probability of success. "Are you really going to blow this place up, Daddy? You know that if the biometric tanks down here leak, Megalopolis will become a permanent ghost town, right?" the boy asked, his voice so calm that Raka felt like vomiting his silver blood right into the creature's face."I’d rather it be a ghost town than a Darma clone farm, you bastard!" Raka fired back, and his finger squeezed the trigger with everything he had left.The explosion was instant. Blue flames ripped through the air, obliterating the pipe’s safety valves and creating a shockwave that threw the Child back into the elevator, which imme

"Stop dragging me, you bastard! I'm not some piece of scrap carpet you can just pull around whenever you feel like it!" Raka roared, trying to kick the steel hand of the Darma clone that was dragging him by the leg.The concrete floor of the sewer sliced into his already battered back, while the greenish gas continued to fill his lungs with a suffocating, bitter taste. The Preceptor-type clone didn't flinch, continuing its march with tireless machine strength toward the elevator shaft. Raka fumbled in his jacket pocket, making sure the phone containing Digital Elena hadn't fallen out, but his consciousness was starting to slip away under the lethal weight of the nerve gas. Suddenly, the clone’s footsteps came to an abrupt halt, as if its motor system had been forcibly ripped from the data center."Cleanup unit, deactivate retrieval protocol immediately. The target is my private variable," a child's voice, clear yet chillingly cold, echoed through the fog of gas.Raka tumbled onto the

"You’re a literal demon, Anna, you killed someone who actually trusted you just so you could be Seraph’s puppet," Raka roared, his voice cracking as it echoed through the suffocating silence of the Thermal Core.Julianna didn’t flinch, her Magnum’s muzzle remained steady, aimed directly at Raka’s forehead. "I don’t need a morality lecture from a murderer, Raka, Bara was just a pebble in the road, and you’re a piece of trash variable that I need to sweep away immediately.""This piece of trash is going to make you regret ever being born, you bitch," Raka tried to lunge forward, but the wound in his left thigh sent a massive shock through his nerves, causing him to collapse into the pool of Bara’s blood."Papa, stop acting like a heartbroken drama queen," the Child’s voice echoed in Raka’s head, sounding cold and mocking. "Look around you, Mother’s toys are awake, and they’re starving for that messy bio-electricity of yours."Sure enough, the millions of human batteries that had crawled

"Easy, Raka! Your body is already like a rusted-out tin can, and if I tug on you any harder, your whole nervous system might just crumble, damn it!" Leo shouted while wiping the sweat that trickled into his bionic eye, which was now only half-functional.Leo struggled to prop Raka up as they moved into the remains of a small food stall, where the roof was tilted so low it nearly touched the ground. The smell of concrete dust and lingering nerve gas still clung to their tattered jackets. Outside, the Megalopolis sky was no longer red, instead, it had turned a sickening, pale gold because the space fleet was literally sucking the earth's atmosphere dry. Raka groaned as his paralyzed legs dragged across the shattered floor tiles, leaving a trail of shimmering silver blood that caught the dim light."I can't see anything, Leo. Everything is just gray pixelated lines," Raka moaned, his hands fumbling through the air with a pinky finger that was still snapped at a jagged angle."Just hang o