Chương 74: 73: The Incomplete Experiment

X. The Dance Zeinai laughed. The sound rumbled behind his mask, raw and genuine. She was trying to kill him, sabotaging his suit, hurling grenades into his blind spots, mocking his faction - and she was winning. He loved it. She came again. He met her head-on. They collided in the ruined plaza like two storms. Every swing of his bat shook her entire frame even when she blocked, the shockwaves spiderwebbing windows across the street.

She flowed around his power like water, slipping past strikes that could flatten buildings. He feinted - she read it. She spun - he tracked her. A kick became twin blade slashes aimed at his throat, and his HUD kept him alive by margins measured in millimetres. She laughed.

"So you can dance, New Zealand boy. Guess you're not completely useless." Then she did something insane. Their suits linked for a heartbeat, corrupted data surging between them. Her finger pressed a control on her gauntlet. ZZZKT. Electricity exploded through both arms. Muscles seized. His bat slipped free. Her nanite blades clattered across the rain-soaked street. She'd planned for it. Flipping forward, she unleashed a double side kick powerful enough to fold steel. He roared. His hands caught both legs.

With a violent twist, he hurled her away, then chased before she could recover, closing the gap with terrifying speed. A punch ripped toward her throat, enough force behind it to pulp her larynx. She barely deflected it with a Silat movement that flowed seamlessly into snake-style kung fu. He didn't care. He rushed her. Pure overwhelming force. His endurance was monstrous - the gift that had made him invaluable.

Sphinx blocked, flipped overhead, wrapped her legs around his head, and slammed him backward into the pavement. Concrete cratered beneath him. He rose instantly. Gone. A car screamed in from his blind side alongside a dozen rounds. His left hand shot out instinctively. Metal groaned as he caught the speeding car one-handed by its front end, skidding backward a few metres before bleeding away its momentum.

With a controlled twist, he lowered it harmlessly onto the road and stepped clear as the projectiles reached him. His HUD mapped every trajectory. Bullets. No. The moment they reached him, each round split apart into clusters of tiny metallic pellets that scattered into a perfect sphere around his body. Blue-white current erupted between the pellets.

The street transformed into a crackling cage of electricity, arcs lashing from pellet to pellet until Zeinai stood at the centre of something resembling a living Tesla coil. Bolts hammered him from every direction, racing across his armour in blinding flashes as the stun field overwhelmed the entire area. His jaw clenched. Every muscle spasmed violently. He gritted his teeth and forced one foot forward. Another followed. His HUD finished analysing the device. Gravitational containment field.

Integrated electrical suppression. A gravity cage. The lightning wasn't the weapon. It was there to stun him long enough for the gravity field to pin him in place before the crushing force finished the job. Zeinai's brow furrowed. Were their Steppers really carrying technology this advanced...... or was Sphinx simply stealing gadgets from someone else? With a growl, Zeinai exploded into a burst of speed, ramming straight through the electrified perimeter before the trap could fully lock around him.

The pellet network scattered behind him, its arcs snapping apart as he tore free. A flicker. He spun. Sphinx appeared, shifting position a hundred times in the space of a microsecond. Too slow. His fist tore straight through her. A hologram. He faltered for the briefest instant. Steppers weren't supposed to have holograms. WHAM! A dropkick crashed into the exposed gap in his backplate, trying to fold his spine in half and hurling him across the street.

He rolled with the impact, coughed into his mask, and heard her laugh.

"Surprised? Don't be. I've got plenty of surprises. I steal them. Didn't grow up pickpocketing people in Egypt for nothing." She twirled a small metallic object between her fingers.

"A desync disc. Looks fancy. I'm keeping it." Zeinai glanced at his belt. One gadget was missing. His. A growl rumbled from his chest as he lunged with a brutal shove kick. She slipped aside, flowing around him like water. He kept advancing. BLAM. Swipe. WHOOSH. Dodge. BLAM. Swipe. They tore through the street, burst into a building, and ripped through a shop at blinding speed. Mannequins exploded into fragments, glass rained across the floor, and walls disintegrated beneath the force of their blows.

His fists never slowed. His rage never cooled. Even then, his visor kept tracking every nearby heartbeat, adjusting every strike away from civilians. She suddenly planted both hands on the floor, handsprung over his next punch and landed several metres away before sprinting sideways along the wall.

"Come on!" she shouted over her shoulder.

"Try and catch me with your big ogre ass!" She kicked off the wall. Zeinai lunged after her. She ricocheted between buildings like a pinball, flipping, twisting and spinning through the air, rebounding from walls and balconies with impossible agility as she deliberately dragged him across the city. He stayed on her. One leap. Two. Three. His hand finally closed around her wrist.

"Got y…" Beep-beep. His eyes narrowed. The figure dissolved into shimmering blue light. A hologram. A bomb.

"She's still interfering with my HUD." Without a moment's hesitation, Zeinai hurled the decoy behind him toward the rooftop his instincts told him she would use next. BOOOOOM. The explosion ripped the roof apart. He'd guessed correctly. The blast wave threw her from cover, forcing her backwards into open air. Zeinai was already moving. He closed the distance instantly. At a perfect moment he found a flaw. Barely a fraction of a second where her flow hesitated. His punch was already there.

He caught Sphinx by the ribs, absorbing the kick she landed as he roared and compressed a fraction of his Prism's output into the face of his fist for less than a nanosecond. Sphinx's free hand flicked between them. A four-pointed metallic star spun into existence. Vector Hijacker. The device detonated without heat or light. Space itself lurched. A colossal repulsive force erupted between them, enough to launch tanks into the horizon.

Buildings behind Zeinai folded apart beneath the pressure wave as the device tried to blast him into oblivion. His boots carved trenches through the street. He refused to move. With a growl, he drove even more output through his Prism, bullying his way through the crushing vector field until his fist reached its target. CRACK. The sound was quiet.

His blow shattered her Apis defences and suit armour together, enough force to rip through a planet's core, driven by nothing but brute strength, rage and an Apis Prism screaming at full output. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Her HUD had predicted the punch and thrown her into a dodge. The strike clipped her side instead of punching straight through her torso. One of her ribs broke.

"Ugh…" She staggered, clutching her side. For the first time since the fight began, she stopped moving. He drew back for another punch. She'd already slipped away. WARNING: APIS RESERVES DEPLETED - 20%. The strike had consumed a fifth of his prism's energy in a single instant. Zeinai cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and let the fire in his blood settle into cold calculation. Time to use his new toys. His fingers brushed the feathers at his collar. Click.

Five bird-shaped drones, no larger than sparrows, unfolded into the air and circled him in tight formation. One of the upgrades he'd received upon becoming an Operative. Linked directly to his will, they served as extra eyes, autonomous scouts, suicide bombers and localized nuclear warheads, each carrying enough compressed power to erase a city. Their sensor packages continuously mapped terrain, tracked movement and fed targeting data directly into his visor.

At point-blank range, all five together could overwhelm even a Stepper suit. He scanned the battlefield and met something else. Only now did Zeinai realise he's become so consumed by fighting Sphinx that he'd almost forgotten the Abomination was still on the battlefield. C-3-NTIPID had completed its transformation. Now over eight feet tall, its body had abandoned every trace of humanity. Long, grotesquely jointed limbs dominated its frame, built for impossible bursts of speed.

Skin the color of fresh blood and dark wine stretched over dense muscle. Crimson antennae twitched atop its head, while four eyes - two blazing yellow facing forward and two larger black ones at the sides - locked onto the predators who'd come to kill it. Its forearms ended in monstrous claws, while two longer limbs curved over its shoulders like praying mantis scythes, their black tips gleaming beneath spiraling yellow markings where venom magic pulsed beneath the flesh. His HUD erupted.

ATMOSPHERIC POISON DETECTED. SUIT INTEGRITY: 77%. The asphalt for two hundred metres was melting. Its venom had become so concentrated that simply breathing the surrounding air would've reduced an unprotected human to a dissolving corpse within seconds. Only the suit kept him alive. Zeinai engaged his suit's optical cloak, his outline dissolving from sight. His visor swept a mile-wide radius, instantly identifying every civilian still inside the danger zone. Some were asleep in bed.

Others lay on sofas scrolling through their phones, completely unaware death had reached their neighbourhood. Wormholes opened one after another. Before any of them realised what was happening, they were quietly carried through the portals and deposited inside churches, emergency shelters and evacuation centres hundreds of miles away. The entire rescue took less than a second. His cloak disengaged as he returned to face C-3-NTIPID, exactly where he'd been.

The creature burst forward in a jagged zigzag, its mantis scythes sweeping so wide they carved glowing yellow crescents through the night. Every slash kept traveling, racing through buildings and slicing them apart as though they were paper. Zeinai charged to meet it. Their weapons collided. His visor whirred. ANALYSIS: ANTENNAE DETECT HOSTILE INTENT. It was sensing danger. The centipede caught his leg in midair and hurled him through the glass front of a shopping mall.

Storefronts exploded into glittering shards as he tore through clothing stores, food courts, and escalators before bursting out the opposite side. It followed instantly. Still weaving in that impossible zigzag. Still throwing venom-packed slashes that refused to stop, carving through skyscrapers and highways for kilometers. Distant screams echoed across the city while, miles away, his suit picked up the growing chorus of fire trucks racing toward the devastation.

Even with Stepper armor, he couldn't afford to block those blades. The concentrated venom would melt through his defenses like a hot knife through wax. An idea formed. He collapsed into a wormhole and emerged directly above the creature. It reacted before he finished materializing, snatching him from the air and slamming him into the pavement hard enough to crater the street. A hologram. The real Zeinai remained cloaked over a hundred meters away. SHRIP.

A monomolecular wire flashed through the air, shearing through the creature's clawed fingers in a single sweep. The wire melted apart immediately afterward, unable to withstand claws saturated with Apis and venom, but it had done its job. The creature screeched. The wounds didn't heal. The overwhelming Apis concentration had turned the severed sections into little more than rumors, preventing regeneration. It would eventually overpower the effect in a few minutes. Zeinai had no intention of giving it that long.

THOOM. The creature launched itself at him with impossible acceleration. He barely caught the strike on his bat. The impact still blasted him across the street, through a concrete wall, and into the side of an apartment building. A window above slid open.

"Oi! I'm trying to sle-" The poison reached him. His body dissolved into a steaming puddle before the sentence finished, and the screams inside the apartment stopped just as abruptly. Zeinai froze.

"… 씨발." Fuck. How had he missed that? A surge of cold anger flooded his mind as his gaze snapped back onto the Abomination, locking onto it with murderous intent. Zeinai's eyes narrowed. POSSIBLE VELOCITY: MACH 10, 000. The centipede had reached its true speed. SCREEEEEEEE— Sphinx struck first. One mantis claw shot toward Sphinx's heart. She slipped past it by millimeters as her HUD screamed warnings, her blades already slicing through the opening. SHINK. An arm spun away. The creature didn't care.

Even as nanites flooded the severed limb, trying to consume it, its remaining fist crashed toward her with desperate, murderous fury. She couldn't evade. The rippler activated. A low hum spread through her suit as the air around her distorted into shimmering rings. The poison had delayed the system by a fraction of a second. It should've triggered instantly. The punch connected. The world rippled. Concentric shockwaves tore across the city, buckling streetlights, shattering windows, and ripping through four blocks.

Sphinx hurtled backward, slammed into a fuel tanker, and vanished in a deafening explosion that rolled fire through the street before hurling the burning wreckage into a collapsed wall. The rippler had bled away eighty-three percent of the impact. The remaining seventeen percent still pushed her suit to its limit. Zeinai's HUD calculated the exchange almost instantly. A Stepper had nearly been broken by a strike reduced to seventeen percent of its power. Without the rippler, Sphinx would've been erased.

The abomination's strength was monstrous, even by abomination standards. And this was still an incomplete specimen. It had already lost an arm. It kept coming.... The cut was already infected. Nanites flooded the wound, spread through its blood, and reached its core. The creature screeched in pure panic, tore off the infected arm, and hurled it away. Too late. The nanites had already taken hold. In less than a second, the severed limb dissolved into bubbling black sludge.

Sphinx strode back through the smoke, casually tucking what looked suspiciously like stolen jewelry into one of the pouches on her utility belt before glancing at the battlefield. She watched the dissolving remains for half a heartbeat, then turned to Zeinai.

"That punch hurt like a bitch. Now..." She stretched her shoulders, glanced up at the sky and let out a slow breath.

"Where were we?" Zeinai's eyes drifted to the twin swords resting casually in her hands.

"I doubt those are Stepper approved. They're too advanced."

"Oh, they definitely aren't." She idly scratched the back of one leg with the toe of her boot before lazily spinning a blade around one finger. As a chunk of shattered concrete tumbled past, she casually flicked the sword through it. The rubble split cleanly in two before liquefying midair, splashing harmlessly onto the street as nothing more than clear water.

"Every nanite in these can rewrite matter into whatever I want. I could overwrite your body in an instant, hijack your nervous system, control your mind, make you see whatever illusions I feel like... pretty much anything."

"Who built them?"

"A gift." She caught the spinning sword without looking.

"Dr Isolde herself." Zeinai's expression hardened.

"She said they were too unstable to issue to anyone else." Sphinx rolled one shoulder, wincing slightly before laughing it off.

"Using them causes absolutely horrific neural pain."

"And yet you use them."

"Worth it." He looked at one of the blades for a long moment.

"…May I?" She blinked.

"You want to touch it?"

"I want to inspect it." She held it out by the flat of the blade.

"Promise you won't cut me." She snorted.

"I promise I won't cut you." Slowly, Zeinai reached forward and rested two fingers against the nanite edge. Pain. It felt as though every nerve in his hand had ignited at once. His HUD erupted into flickering menus. NANITE INTERFACE DETECTED. Thousands of configuration options, permissions and rewrite protocols flashed through his visor faster than he could consciously read them, branching into countless subroutines before collapsing into entirely new ones. His breathing caught.

After only a second, he pulled his hand away.

"…Hah…" He exhaled sharply, flexing his fingers as the burning sensation gradually faded. Sphinx watched him with poorly concealed amusement.

"You okay?" The sarcasm in her voice was impossible to miss. Zeinai looked her up and down. Only then did the pieces fit together. She'd been fighting like this the entire time. Every swing. Every impossible trick. She'd been enduring constant pain without letting it show. His gaze lingered on the blades. Dr Isolde. The creator of God-killing Abominations. One of the Syndicate's most notoriously cruel scientists. The fact that she had personally given Sphinx anything...... was unsettling enough on its own.

"You're staring again," Sphinx said, idly balancing one sword across her shoulders.

"What? Never seen a woman with reality-breaking swords before?"

"I'm wondering how you're still alive."

"Aww." She tapped her chest.

"He cares."

"I do not." She pointed a sword at him.

"You're such a troglodyte." Zeinai frowned.

"…What does that mean?" Sphinx paused.

"Huh." She tilted her head.

"I actually don't know."

"You don't know?"

"My dad used to call me that." She tapped her mask with one finger, thinking.

"Pretty sure it was an insult." Zeinai considered that.

"So your insults are a manifestation of unresolved childhood trauma." She stared at him.

"Go get a job as a therapist."

"I'm an Enforcer."

"Exactly. Hand out lollies to little kids and stop trying to diagnose me. I just like insulting people." A brief silence followed.

"That," Zeinai replied, "I believe." Sphinx grinned.

"See? Now you're learning." Instead of attacking, she planted her feet and began shifting her hips from side to side. Left. Right. Left again. Zeinai paused.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to fart." He stared at her.

"What?" She sighed dramatically, continuing to wiggle her hips.

"This poisonous air's making everything sticky. My cheeks are practically glued together." Another exaggerated wiggle.

"Can you help me spread them?"

"I am not helping you spread your cheeks." Before either of them could say another word- A brilliant yellow wave burst without warning. Neither HUD registered it. The sheer concentration of venom saturating the air had begun interfering with their Apis systems, slowing processing speed and introducing brief but potentially fatal moments of lag. Sphinx's instincts reacted before her technology could. She threw both swords into a cross in front of herself just as the blast arrived. BOOM!

The impact blasted her backwards, her boots gouging deep trenches through the street as she skidded dozens of metres before finally forcing herself to a stop. Zeinai was already moving. The centipede regenerated from the discarded arm. New limbs burst from its shoulders, its body growing taller, stronger. Six limbs now. Faster. Deadlier. Its venom thickened into something even worse. He couldn't match its speed, and wormhole teleportation was too risky.

His HUD predicted it would sense the distortion and counter immediately. He only needed to keep its attention. The drones attacked. Two streaked forward at relativistic speed. Its antennae twitched, and it dodged. They curved back, accelerating a hundredfold. This time, it couldn't. They struck its torso with the force of collapsing cities. The creature barely flinched. That was never the attack. It was the distraction. Zeinai's bat was already descending. CRUNCH.

Flesh capable of enduring dozens of point-blank nuclear missiles cracked beneath the blow. The bat didn't spread force. It concentrated it, amplifying the swing a millionfold across an area smaller than a fingernail. It struck less like a club and more like a rod burning as hot as the sun. C-3-NTIPID screamed. Its venom surged in response. Buildings closest to it sagged and melted as the air itself began to dissolve. With a roar, it swung at Zeinai in blind fury.

He leapt backward, retreating in long bursts to open the distance between them as the colossal strike carved through the space he'd occupied only an instant before. Fifty meters away, a crack opened in Sphinx's suit. Poison seeped inside, and her skin sizzled. She moved anyway.

"Finish it, asshole!" Her blades flew as she hurled a white, gelatinous orb. The creature refused to let it touch it again. It clapped. Its hands met with catastrophic force, unleashing a wave of poison, sound, and annihilation. Five hydrogen bombs. That much force erupted from a single clap. Without Sphinx's absorber, everything nearby would've ceased to exist. Even with the glowing sphere devouring most of the blast, the remaining shockwave tore through the city. Buildings collapsed. Streets liquefied.

The earth split beneath a chain of 7. 5-magnitude earthquakes as gas mains ignited and steel screamed. From somewhere beyond the dust came the distant sound of people screaming - thousands of voices swallowed beneath collapsing concrete, shattering glass, and the endless roar of the dying city. Sphinx was hurled into the darkness, her sparking suit vanishing beneath clouds of dust. Zeinai's suit whined. The prism in his suit flickered as warning alarms filled his ears. SUIT INTEGRITY: 65%. The armor held.

He exhaled and muttered a sharp Korean curse beneath his breath. The attention had been contained. It hadn't been erased. Now the creature knew they could hurt it.