"Ten meters?" Elias yelled, his voice cutting through the whining roar of the Coalition gunship hovering above the burning timber. "That truck is sitting right in the middle of a clearing completely exposed to heavy machine gun fire! You want me to carry you across a killing zone?" "I don't want to die of internal hemorrhage on this ridge!" Noah screamed back, clutching his chest as another violent tremor wracked his body. A fresh streak of crimson leaked from his left nostril, dripping rapidly onto the frozen dirt. "If we stay here, the plasma sweep vaporizes us in thirty seconds. If we run, you might actually hit something with that rifle of yours!" "You're full of brilliant tactical advice today," Elias snarled, his fingers flying over his tactical belt to check his remaining ammunition clips. Only two power cells left. Not enough for a sustained firefight, but more than enough to punch a hole through an unarmored engine blo

 "Keep your legs moving!" Elias roared, his boots tearing through the frozen mud and slush as a fresh volley of heavy machine-gun fire chewed the ground two inches behind his heels. The air smelled intensely of ozone, scorched pine sap, and the burning chemical stink of Coalition ordnance. Every breath Elias took felt like inhaling crushed glass, his lungs burning from the frantic sprint across the open killing zone. To his left, Noah stumbled, his left leg buckling beneath him as a violent spasm of frequency feedback rippled visibly beneath the skin of his throat. "I'm—I'm not falling behind," Noah gasped, his voice tight with agony, a fresh stream of dark blood pouring freely from both nostrils and staining the front of his tactical jacket a bruised, wet crimson. "The local network frequency... it's fighting me. The truck's encryption protocols are ancient, Elias. They're military-grade cold-war architecture. It’s

 "The onboard security isn't just code, Elias, it's a living, breathing neural trap!" Noah screamed, his voice pitching sharply as a violent tremor racked his frame, throwing a spray of dark blood across the frozen canvas of the truck bed. "If I force the gateway without matching their sub-harmonic handshake, the internal processors will fry my entire nervous system down to the spinal stem!" "Then match their damn handshake or we die right here in the mud!" Elias roared back, dropping Noah unceremoniously onto the rusted floorboards of the truck bed before spinning around with his rifle raised. He didn't hesitate. Through the swirling gray-white curtain of falling snow and billowing black smoke from the ruined tree line behind them, the dark silhouette of a Coalition pursuit squad broke into the open. Three heavy infantrymen in titanium-plated reinforced armor, their visors glowing with a baleful crimson hue, charged across the

 "We are completely out of time, Noah!" Elias screamed, his rifle barrel glowing a dull, angry cherry-red as he jammed another heavy magazine into the smoking receiver with a brutal, practiced snap. The remaining two Coalition infantrymen didn't slow down. They advanced in a synchronized, terrifyingly efficient bounding overwatch, their heavy boots crunching into the frozen mud and ice with the implacable weight of executioners. Red tactical laser sights lanced through the swirling snow, painting crisscrossing geometric patterns across the rusted iron panels of the truck bed inches from Elias's face. A stuttering burst of high-velocity rail-slugs slammed into the tailgate with a deafening, metallic shriek, tearing fist-sized chunks of rotten wood and frozen canvas into the air. "If you don't bypass that relay in the next three seconds, we aren't going to have a nervous system left to fry!" Elias barked, not daring to look back a

 "Do it now, Noah!" Elias screamed, his shoulder slamming hard against the frosted metal of the truck's bed as a fresh cluster of high-velocity rail-slugs chewed the remaining inches of the tailgate into a blizzard of splinters and lead dust. "I'm doing it! I'm doing it!" Noah shrieked back from the cab, his face illuminated by the strobe-like flash of purple and indigo static discharging straight from the torn dashboard wiring into his bare forearms. His knuckles were raw, bleeding from the frantic speed of his work, but his fingers danced across the exposed copper cores with a terrifying, inhuman precision. "Hold them off for one more heartbeat, Elias! Just one!" Elias didn't answer with words. He didn't have the breath to waste. Instead, he jammed his thumb against the magazine release of his assault rifle, letting the empty, smoking metal casing drop into the frozen mud with a dull clatter while a fresh magazine slapped upwa