The servo lag chose its moment with almost insulting precision, which is to say it chose the worst one possible for the gang leader. Timing, I’ve noticed, only feels neutral until it betrays you.

His left arm responded theatrically late, within the tight corridor Nyx had been, that delay wasn’t small. It was everything.

She had been juggling the problem of his collar ever since the armor cracked, testing direction, firing around him, watching how he protected the intact left side.

So when that left arm lagged and exposed the collar by exactly the fraction she had been waiting for, she didn’t hesitate. She completed the thought she had already been thinking and took the shot.

Clippy projected the targeting overlay unprompted. It always did that when the situation crossed some invisible point of urgency. A brief amber ring hung in the air, politely indicating the target as if this were a tutorial, while the smart round adjusted its trajectory in real time.

The pistol fired. The round entered the collar with guided precision.

The sound was wet, dense, compressed. The language of unprotected skin.

He lurched sideways into the corridor wall, leaving a dark smear where his shoulder struck, and the groan that escaped him was low, involuntary.

He did not go down. That, too, felt like a decision.

He straightened, the cracked plate scraping along the wall, the knee servo ticking in its damaged rhythm like a metronome that had lost interest in accuracy. His face, visible within the collar, had an expression of shock.

Then he moved his good arm.

The explosive was already there when Proxy’s scan caught the servo signature. The assist system drawing power in a way that didn’t correspond to balance or forward motion.

Proxy watched it through the network a fraction of a second before his eyes confirmed what the gang leader was holding.

"Nyx."

Anything more would have been redundant.

She had already seen it. Of course she had.

Clippy had already manifested beside her shoulder, its small holographic body framed in a pale blue speech bubble, wearing a bright red exclamation icon like a badge of panic, announcing Explosive ordnance detected! which was technically correct and practically useless.

Her amber eyes processed the situation.

She moved toward him. Which, depending on your philosophy, is either bravery or a refusal to participate in cause and effect.

She closed the distance at a speed that bent the definition of human, reflex implants moving faster than conscious thought, and drove her shoulder into his chest before his arm could complete the arc of a throw.

The impact sounded less like a fight and more like an industrial accident.

He absorbed it the way one absorbs inevitability. He didn’t fall. He did rock backward into the corridor wall, and the concrete accepted both of them with a heavy thud that propagated a crack from floor to ceiling in the aging section beside them.

He got his good arm across her chest and shoved.

Calling it a shove felt dishonest. The armor made it more than that. He committed his entire upper body, plate leading, so it wasn’t a push so much as a wall advancing.

It hit her on the right side and threw her into the corridor wall with the authority of augmented mass. The bruised ribs she’d been recovering received this latest amendment and responded unanimously.

Every nerve in her right side screamed in pain at once. She did not acknowledge it aloud. Her face had the impact the way a machine registers stress. It noted it. It contained it. It continued.

She remained inside his arm’s arc. That was the only thing that mattered. Inside the arc, the explosive wasn’t his weapon. It was their liability. A bilateral problem.

And a man whose own body occupied the blast radius between grenade and target was a man who, statistically, did not throw.

Meanwhile, the trooper progressed through the corridor.

He was bleeding from the shoulder where the reflected conduit wave had torn through jacket and skin, a dark line running down his left side, but his movement was calm.

Training had overwritten panic.

He identified window. A spot where the corridor widened by roughly half a meter before narrowing again. From there, he had a sightline into the rear room that didn’t require committing to the doorframe.

He raised the machine gun. He ignored the smart-link, because Proxy’s interference had converted assistance into liability.

Instead, he used his eyes. And the years of muscle memory that the neural enhancement supplemented rather than replaced.

At this distance, inside a concrete enclosure, a man with that kind of discipline on manual fire wasn’t just dangerous.

The barrel tracked toward the rear room door with patience.

Proxy drew the handgun.

He drew it without ceremony, the way he did most things, and fired a burst through the doorframe at the trooper’s position.

He was already moving along the wall when the trooper’s return fire came. A burst cut through the doorframe, sweeping at knee height, tearing a chunk from the concrete before continuing into the rear wall at a point that missed him by exactly the distance he had already vacated.

The rounds struck the wall he had just abandoned. The concrete responded with small craters, shedding dust across his shoulder as he passed, like a delayed acknowledgment of his absence.

Through the network, he tracked the trooper indirectly.

The bleeding continued, steady, but it didn’t slow him. Somewhere in that cyberware stack was military-grade pain management. The sort designed for people who are expected to fight beyond reasonable limits.

From the corridor, Nyx and the gang leader were stuck in their impasse.

The creak of damaged plate under strain. The irregular click of the knee servo marking each step. The subtle instability of feet finding purchase in blood pooled beneath the collar wound.

She was taking hits. She wasn’t stopping firing. The situation had only become visceral.

The trooper hadn’t established his next move yet. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Proxy estimated the window at approximately five seconds. Not a long time, but enough to matter, which, I’m starting to think, is the only kind of time that ever exists.