The ballroom went dead quiet, save for the hum of gilded air filtration units.
Garek froze, his hand still clamped like a vise on the hermit’s collar. His skin turned the shade of curdled goat’s milk. "What did you say, you sewer rat?"
"That's her!" the hermit squealed, backing away until his spine slammed into an ice sculpture shaped like a rearing Pegasus. "She sold me a soup bowl in District Nine and wrote a four-movement fugue on the paper napkin! You said you had the real author! She's the author!"
A collective gasp rippled through the gathered moguls, investors, and high-court magistrates. Cameras built into lapel pins flickered, broadcasting every twitch of Garek’s disintegrating poise across New Pylos's private financial feeds.
"Shut your lying mouth," Garek hissed. His teeth clicked together. Then his gaze snapped to Taline, wild and cornered. "Espionage. Security! Seize this fraud! She stole proprietary synthetic scores from Ovation files!"
Four heavy-set enforcers in matte-black suits broke from the wall. Chrome chassis gleamed along their necks; subdermal hydraulics whistled as their arms doubled in circumference. Cybernetic shock-batons extended with high-frequency shrieks.
Taline did not step back. She did not set her champagne down gently, either.
She snapped the stem against the edge of the bar.
"Garek," she purred, stepping through the ring of cowering socialites. "You spent three years complaining that I held my fork wrong. You really shouldn't have fired my cooking staff."
The lead guard lunged, his mechanized reach launching a crushing grip aimed straight for her larynx.
Taline slipped inside his guard before the hydraulic pistons finished cycling. Her left hand drove the jagged crystal of the broken flute into the soft synthetic junction under his jaw. Green fluid sprayed, hot and reeking of ozone. With a fluid pivot, she seized his armored elbow, snapped it backward over her shoulder, and slammed his forehead onto the polished mahogany bar.
The wood split. The guard went limp.
"First lesson," Taline whispered into the quiet room. "Natural reflexes beat off-the-shelf augments every single day of the week."
Two more guards rushed her, their shock-batons painting arcs of blue fire through the air.
Taline ducked beneath the cross-swing, grabbed the fallen guard's stun baton, and drove the business end into the second man's groin. She kicked the third through a decorative display of vintage brandy bottles. Glass rained down in sheets, drenching thousand-credit gowns.
Garek scrambled backward behind a buffet cart, his fingers fumbling at his wrist-pad to summon the rest of his private militia. "Kill her! Don't arrest her, butcher her!"
"Oh, boss! Catch!" Neva yelled from the mezzanine.
Taline looked up just in time to see her secretary throw a heavy, bronze-plated sphere the size of an orange into the center of the chandelier-lit room. It hit the carpet, spun three times, and popped open like an iron lotus.
A dome of blue distortion rippled out, passing through flesh and bone without resistance.
Every piece of cyberware in a fifty-yard radius went instantly dark.
The modified elites shrieked as their cosmetic face-lifts lost tension, drooping into grotesque folds. Half the board members collapsed as their artificial knees locked up completely. The remaining guards groaned, staggering under the dead, unpowered mass of their cybernetic limbs, unable to lift their arms.
Only Taline stood tall, unenhanced, breathing steady and clear.
She walked straight toward Garek. Her dress was spattered with hydraulic fluid, but her gait was pure predatory poise.
"You built a fortune on stolen talent, Garek. You bought your ears, you bought your lawyers, and you bought your security." She grabbed him by his silk necktie, yanking him out from behind the buffet cart until his nose hovered an inch from hers. "And you tried to burn out my brain to keep your stocks high."
"You're a monster," Garek whimpered, clawing at her fingers with hands suddenly weakened by the disruption of his micro-actuators. "You're completely insane—"
A high-caliber kinetic slug smashed through the ballroom's reinforced panoramic window with a deafening crack.
It didn't hit Taline. It didn't hit Garek. It punched a fist-sized crater into the floor precisely three inches to the left of the reinforced door where six heavily armed snipers had been trying to breach from the hallway. A second shot followed instantly, blowing the locking mechanism of the northern ceiling vent wide open.
Through the shattered glass across the plaza, a green laser sight traced a lazy, teasing heart onto Taline's collarbone before pointing directly at the vent.
Darius.
Of course that lunatic was watching through a thermal scope from the Obelisk Tower.
"Exit is open, Boss!" Neva shouted, already kicking off her heels and scrambling up the service ladder toward the ceiling duct.
Taline gave Garek’s tie a final, savage yank, slamming his skull into a chafing dish of deviled eggs before letting him drop in an undignified heap.
She turned on her heel and leaped. Catching the edge of the maintenance catwalk with both hands, she swung her legs up, hauling herself toward the gaping vent with effortless muscle memory. Behind her, sirens wailed as emergency protocols kicked in to vent the smoke from the ruined glass.
She dragged herself into the cold steel conduit, pulling the grating shut just as an automated turret spun toward the opening.
"Made it," Neva panted, crawling ahead through the dark metal shaft. "Darius's driver is on the western loading dock, waiting for—boss?"
Taline stopped.
Her head wasn't throbbing. It was boiling.
A searing, molten iron spike seemed to drive from the base of her neck through the center of her prefrontal cortex. The blue dome of the Null-Field hadn't just shut down external augments. Her degrading neural-limiter—deeply integrated into her skull's bio-pathways—had buckled under the magnetic pulse, its containment seals rupturing.
Hot crimson poured from her right nostril, splashing across the dusty metal of the vent.
A string of glitching, blood-red glyphs flared directly across her optic nerve, flickering violently against the dark:
[CRITICAL HARDWARE FAILURE]
[CONTAINMENT INTEGRITY: 1.2%]
[TIME TO COMPLETE NEURAL LIQUEFACTION: 01:58:22]
Taline collapsed against the vibrating steel floor, her vision fading into static as the countdown ticked down.