The plasma grenade detonated with a blinding, sapphire-white flash that completely stripped the remaining industrial paint from the clinic walls. The explosive heat was so intense it instantly turned Doc Vector’s expensive medical monitors and diagnostic arrays into dripping, bubbling pools of molten plastic. The concussive shockwave slammed into Bianca Falcone like a physical wall, lifting her entirely off her feet and throwing her lean, athletic body hard against a heavy row of steel storage cabinets. She hit the floor sliding, her vision swimming in a chaotic haze of digital static, her ears ringing with a high-pitched, deafening scream that seemed to vibrate directly inside her skull.Through the thick, choking cloud of ionized ozone, pulverized concrete, and burning rubber, Chloe Vance was already on her knees. She had thrown her entire body weight over her father the exact second the metallic cylinder had rolled across the threshold. Her tactical vest was scorched black, and her hands shook with raw adrenaline, but her fingers remained locked in a death grip around a small, blood-slicked silver canister. Inside it rested the extracted Chronos-V processor."Bianca! Get up!" Chloe choked out, coughing violently as the heavy black smoke filled her lungs and threatened to suffocate her. She looked down at Silas. His chest was barely moving, his skin was a ghostly, translucent blue, and his body was completely unresponsive. He had drifted deep inside a critical neural coma, his heart rate fluttering at a terrifyingly low thirty beats per minute. "He’s not breathing properly! We have to move him right now or he’s going to suffocate in here!"Doc Vector’s illegal clinic was entirely destroyed. The cyber-surgeon himself lay slumped over his ruined workbench, his spinning mechanical eyes shattered into thousands of glass fragments, and sparks shooting erratically from his severed throat-speaker. The room’s main power cells exploded in a chain reaction, showering the floor with emerald sparks. The doctor was gone, taking his black-market medical secrets with him to the grave.Outside, the three-way war for the Sector 3 Neon Bazaar had reached a bloody, chaotic fever pitch. Don Carmine Falcone’s elite hit squad—sent to execute Bianca for her ultimate betrayal—was armed with heavy, black-market submachine guns. They were locked in a brutal bottleneck battle against the remaining Sterling Tech corporate executioners. High-velocity smart-bullets chewed through the multi-tiered neon signs hanging above the marketplace, showering the narrow alleyways in a constant rain of sparking glass and burning plastic rain. It was an absolute slaughterhouse; neither side was taking prisoners, and the civilian vendors had long since fled, leaving behind a ghost town of abandoned stalls and flickering holograms.Bianca forced herself to her feet, using the heavy barrel of her anti-materiel rifle as a makeshift crutch. Her dark, predatory eyes found Chloe through the rolling billows of smoke. "Grab his shoulders," Bianca barked, her voice raspy but perfectly steady despite the pain radiating from her ribs. She racked the bolt of her rifle, spitting a mouthful of coppery blood onto the debris-covered floor. "I'll take his legs. We have exactly five seconds before the corporate clean-up squad steps through that blast hole to check for survivors."Together, the two women hauled Silas’s heavy, unconscious frame off the steel surgical table. As they dragged him toward the dark recesses of the back room, a heavy, synchronized thud-thud-thud vibrated through the floorboards, shaking the metal scraps and broken glass around them. The vibration was so powerful it caused the steel surgical tools on the shelves to rattle violently.A massive, towering shadow blocked out the flashing pink and green neon light of the alleyway entrance.Standing directly in the shattered doorway was a Sterling Tech Goliath-class heavy mech unit. The nine-foot-tall bipedal war machine was encased in thick, matte-black composite armor, its hydraulic chest plate bearing the glowing white corporate logo of Sterling Tech. Its right arm ended in a high-cyclic rotary minigun, its six barrels already spinning in a silent, deadly, predictive blur."Target verified," a hollow, digitized corporate voice boomed from the mech’s external speakers, completely devoid of human emotion. "Initiating full sector sterilization. Threat level: Maximum.""Down!" Bianca screamed.She dropped Silas’s legs, grabbed her Benelli M4 shotgun from her tactical sling with lightning speed, and fired three rapid-fire magnesium dragon's breath shells directly into the mech’s primary optical sensor array. Torrents of white-hot, blinding fire erupted from her barrel, splashing across the machine's reinforced glass visor. The intense heat blinded the machine’s tracking system, forcing its automated targeting computer to glitch and restart violently.The Goliath mech opened fire anyway, entering a blind fire mode. The minigun roared to life with a deafening, buzz-saw sound, unleashing a devastating storm of heavy-caliber, armor-piercing rounds that tore through the clinic's back wall. The bullets obliterated everything in their path, chewing through solid concrete and turning the furniture into sawdust. Severed water pipes burst open from the wall, spraying high-pressure, scalpel-hot steam into the cramped room, further reducing visibility to zero."Chloe, the floor hatch! Under the server racks!" Bianca yelled over the absolute din of the gunfire, firing her last anti-materiel sniper round into the mech's exposed right knee joint to buckle its hydraulic leg and slow its relentless advance.Chloe used every single ounce of her remaining physical strength to kick aside a burning pile of circuit boards and melted cables. Her boots caught the edge of a heavy, rusted iron maintenance hatch that led straight down into the bazaar’s subterranean drainage matrix. She yanked the locking lever back with a loud, metallic screech, throwing the heavy door open to reveal a pitch-black drop into the rushing, icy wastewater below."Go! Go!" Bianca roared, throwing her body into the opening first to brace herself and catch Silas.Chloe slid her father's limp, heavy body down into the dark, freezing currents of the under-city just as the ceiling above them gave way. The Goliath mech collapsed forward, its ammunition drum detonating in a final, catastrophic fireball that consumed the clinic entirely, sealing the hatch above them in a tomb of white-hot slag and twisted steel.