Episode-992
Chapter : 1983
The golden armor of the Sirius suit suddenly stopped glowing blue. The lights died. For a second, the machine looked like a lifeless statue.
"For Alpha Team," Anthony rasped, "the suit is not armor. It is me."
A new light flickered deep inside the cracks of the golden armor. It wasn't the clean blue of the fusion reactor, and it wasn't the chaotic purple of the singularity. It was red. A sickly, dark crimson that looked like dried blood under a microscope.
"Warning," Lloyd’s onboard computer said. The voice was flat, but the message was urgent. "Unknown energy spike detected. Energy signature does not match standard Fire Fly database. Danger. Proximity alert."
"Protocol Initiate," Anthony whispered. "Circuit-Ascension: Generation 3."
The sound that followed was something Lloyd would never forget. It started as a high-pitched mechanical whine, like a jet engine spinning out of control. But then, underneath the machine noise, there was a wet, tearing sound. It sounded like a siren mixed with a human scream.
Through the shattered viewport of the Sirius suit, Lloyd saw movement.
The inside of the enemy mech wasn't made of leather seats and control sticks anymore. The inner lining of the cockpit began to move. It pulsed. Thick, black data-cables, looking like metal snakes, burst out from the walls of the suit. They didn't plug into a port on Anthony’s helmet. They didn't attach to his suit.
They punched through his flight suit.
Lloyd watched, his stomach turning, as the cables burrowed directly into Anthony’s flesh. They dug into his shoulders, his chest, and his thighs. The largest cable, a thick bundle of fiber-optics and steel, shot out from the back of the seat and slammed into the base of Anthony’s neck, drilling into his spinal column with a sickening crunch.
"Override," Anthony gasped. His voice was changing. It was losing the human tremble and gaining a metallic, synthesized echo. "Override... pain... inhibitors. Override... biological... limits."
This wasn't magic. This wasn't a spell. Lloyd recognized it instantly from the darkest, most classified files of his old life on Earth. This was "Body Horror" refined by 22nd-century military science. It was the ultimate, desperate step of transhumanism. Anthony was forcibly overclocking his own nervous system by hardwiring his brain directly into the machine’s combat CPU.
He was deleting the human delay.
"Get back!" Lloyd shouted. He fired the reverse thrusters on the Aegis, tearing the fused metal of his arm free with a screech of tortured steel. The Aegis stumbled back, putting fifty feet between them.
It wasn't enough.
The Sirius suit began to convulse. The gold plating shifted and cracked as the machine seemed to bulk up. The red light intensified, bleeding out of every seam.
Atlas, the Water King, sensed the threat. The massive spirit, still in his humanoid form, roared and slammed his trident down. He tried to re-apply the pressure, summoning a sphere of heavy water to crush the transforming mech.
"Hydro-Static Lock!" Atlas bellowed. A bubble of dark blue water, weighing thousands of tons, formed around Anthony.
Usually, this would be game over. Water pressure crushes submarines. It stops tanks.
But the red light inside the Sirius suit didn't dim. It got brighter.
"Inefficient," Anthony’s voice boomed. It wasn't coming from the radio anymore. It was being projected from external speakers, loud enough to shake the dust off the canyon walls. "Liquid has mass. Mass creates drag. I have deleted drag."
A shockwave of red electricity exploded from the golden suit. This wasn't normal lightning. It was "Anti-Logic" energy—a chaotic discharge created when the laws of physics are forced to bend until they break.
The red lightning hit Atlas’s water prison. The water didn't just splash away; it vaporized instantly. There was no steam, just a sudden, empty void where the water had been. Atlas was thrown backward, his watery form rippling and destabilizing as if he had been hit by a bomb.
The smoke cleared.
The thing standing there wasn't the Sirius suit anymore. Not really. The gold paint was scorched black. The elegant fins and spoilers were gone. The machine stood hunched over, its arms hanging low like a gorilla. The red cables were visible through the gaps in the armor, pulsing with a heartbeat that was too fast for any living thing.
Chapter : 1984
Anthony lifted his head. His helmet visor was shattered, revealing his face. His eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only the whites, glowing with the reflection of the red dashboard lights. Veins of black corruption spread out from where the cables entered his neck.
He didn't look at Lloyd. He didn't look at Atlas. He looked at the data streaming across his internal vision.
"Processing speed," Anthony droned. "Three hundred percent. Neural latency... zero."
Lloyd gripped his controls, sweat running down his back. The Major General inside his head was screaming warnings. He knew what he was looking at. He was looking at a pilot who had turned off his survival instincts to become a pure weapon.
"You're going to burn your brain out," Lloyd shouted. "That link isn't stable! You'll be a vegetable in five minutes!"
The Cyborg Singularity that used to be Anthony twitched its head. "Five minutes," it said, the voice devoid of arrogance, replaced by cold calculation. "Is four minutes and fifty-nine seconds longer than I need."
The red lightning crackled around the machine’s feet. The ground beneath it turned to glass.
"Let's test the hardware," Anthony said.
And then, he vanished.
________________________________________
He didn't run. Running implies movement that the eye can track. Running takes time. You have to lift a foot, push off the ground, and propel yourself forward.
Anthony didn't do that.
One millisecond, the corrupted Sirius suit was standing amidst the glass and smoke of the crater. The next millisecond, there was a thunderclap—the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum—and he was gone.
Lloyd’s eyes widened. He instinctively jerked the controls of the Aegis to the left, raising his shield arm. It was a reflex born of eighty years of combat experience.
It was too slow.
WHAM.
The impact came from the right. It felt like a freight train had slammed into the side of the Aegis. The twelve-ton black mech was lifted off its feet and thrown sideways, skidding through the dirt.
"Warning," the Aegis computer screamed. "Right flank armor critical. Impact velocity unmeasurable."
Lloyd gritted his teeth, wrestling the machine back to a standing position. He scanned the area frantically. "Where is he? Use the All-Seeing Eye!"
He activated his visual power. The world turned into a grid of information. He looked for the heat signature, the mana flow, the electrical output.
He saw a blur. A streak of red light zigzagging across the battlefield. It was moving so fast that it left afterimages—ghostly red copies of the mech that faded a second later. Anthony wasn't moving through space; he was practically teleporting by using raw, overwhelming velocity. He was bypassing the "Time Lag" of neural reaction. By the time Lloyd’s brain saw him, Anthony was already somewhere else.
"He's too fast," Lloyd realized, a cold knot forming in his stomach. "My eyes can see him, but my hands can't move the controls fast enough to hit him."
It was the ultimate bottleneck. The Aegis was powerful. Lloyd was a genius. But between Lloyd’s thought and the machine’s action, there was a tiny, tiny delay. A fraction of a second where the signal traveled from his brain to his hand to the stick to the servo.
Anthony had removed that delay. He was the servo.
"Target identified," Anthony’s mechanical voice echoed from everywhere at once. "Priority One: Remove defensive variables."
Lloyd froze. Defensive variables?
"Jasmin!" Lloyd shouted. "Move!"
Spirit Jasmin, still in her crystalline Diamond form, was standing near the edge of the canyon, recovering from her earlier effort to refract the laser. She was the ultimate shield. Nothing physical could break her.
But Anthony wasn't using physics anymore. He was using cheats.
The red blur materialized directly behind Jasmin. He didn't use a sword. He didn't use a laser. He pulled his fist back. The arm of the Sirius suit vibrated. It wasn't shaking from fear; it was oscillating. The metal fist was vibrating at a frequency so high it emitted a screeching sound that shattered nearby rocks.
Anthony had calculated the resonant frequency of diamond.
"Shatter," Anthony said.
He punched her in the center of her back.
PING.
It wasn't a thud. It was the sound of a tuning fork being struck. The vibration traveled through Jasmin’s indestructible body instantly. The perfect lattice of her diamond structure couldn't handle the harmonic overload.