The management office door held for about ninety seconds. Then something heavy hit it from the outside and the frame buckled inward. The mob poured through the gap like water through a broken dam.A detonation shook the building. Sean felt it through the floor, a shaped charge placed inside the office doorway, triggered by a tripwire. Three thermal signatures near the blast went dark instantly. Two more flickered and faded within seconds.But the mob didn't stop. The explosion turned grief into fury and fury into something unstoppable. More bodies pushed through the smoke and debris, climbing over fallen neighbors, screaming Victor's name.Sean watched through his perception as Victor's thermal signature scrambled up a back staircase toward the service exit on the east side of the building.Through the management office window, Victor appeared for a brief second, shoving the window open and hurling something into the courtyard below.Scraps of meat and bread, the remains of his hidden

"You killed six people at point blank range in confined spaces. That's not shooting, that's poking someone with a very loud finger. I'm teaching you to shoot at distance, under pressure, with accuracy that actually means something." Cora stepped back and crossed her arms again.Sean raised the Beretta, sighted the first circle at ten meters, and squeezed the trigger. The round punched through the dead center of the spray painted ring. He shifted to the second target. Dead center. Third. Center. Fourth through ninth, all within one inch of perfect at ten meters."Not bad for a man who holds a gun like a banana. Now move back to fifteen." Cora's voice carried zero warmth and maximum efficiency.Sean stepped back five meters and repeated the sequence. Nine shots, nine hits, all within the center ring. His spatial perception was feeding him data in real time, the distance, the wind drift through the broken windows, the exact trajectory his bullet would follow before he even pulled the tri

Sean and Danny spent the entire afternoon turning apartment 1601 into a fortress that could swallow drones the way a spider's web swallows flies. Danny cut steel mesh panels from the rolls they had stored in the basement, shaping each one to fit precisely over every window, vent, and exterior opening in the apartment."These mesh panels are rated for industrial filtration. A drone hitting this at full speed is like a bird flying into a chain link fence. It stops dead and the payload detonates outside the glass instead of inside the room." Danny bolted the last panel into the bedroom window frame and stepped back to inspect his work."What about the ones that don't reach the windows at all?" Sean pulled a small black box from the spatial dimension and set it on the kitchen counter. Scorpion's signal jammer, the same model that had killed every wireless camera inside the Silverbell Exchange in Tucson."That thing takes out drone control signals?" Danny walked over and examined the devic

Team one evacuated the basement in under ninety seconds. Five men were carried out by their companions, their faces red and blistered, their eyes swollen shut.Team two had worse luck.Fifteen men approached the east wall of the Tower carrying a steel battering ram on their shoulders, protected by a mobile shelter they had constructed from plywood sheets and metal roofing panels. The shelter was crude but functional, designed to protect them from crossbow bolts and small arms fire while they breached the wall.They reached the building and positioned the ram. The first swing hit the exterior wall and bounced back. Not concrete this time. Steel plate. Sean had bolted reinforced steel panels behind every exterior wall section within reach of a battering ram, using materials from the spatial dimension installed overnight while the drone attack provided distraction."It's not concrete anymore! There's steel behind the wall! The ram isn't getting through!" The lead man pulled back, sweat f

The woman picked everything up without a word and walked away, tears freezing on her cheeks before they could fall.By the end of the two hour window, Sean had processed forty seven trades. Gold wedding bands, diamond engagement rings, jade pendants, ruby brooches, silver flatware sets that had been in families for generations. Every piece went into the spatial dimension. Every gem triggered an expansion pulse.The dimension crossed eight hundred thousand cubic meters by closing time.Eight hundred thousand. My perception radius now reaches fifteen meters through solid concrete. I can hear whispered conversations through walls. I can feel the heartbeat of every person within range. The stronger the dimension gets, the less human I become and the more I become something else entirely.Sean closed the gate, locked it, and walked back upstairs to the villa's main floor. Danny and Cora packed up the table and followed."Forty seven trades today. That's double yesterday." Danny set the cr