The execution of the man's command exploded with such violent suddenness that even the architect of the trap reeled for a fractured second before snapping her focus back into absolute clarity.

  "Finally," Serevia hissed, purging the jagged breath she had trapped in her lungs into a thick, white plume of vapor.

  She locked her eyes onto the lone armored transport left behind. Her snare had worked, but Sarcos did not breed fools; she knew they would leave a vanguard unit to hold the line—she hadn't stalked them for days for nothing. Still, the sight before her drove a deep, furious crease between her brows. Three guards remained anchored around the colossal mass of metal, supposedly securing the perimeter.

  Three targets... A dangerously low number. Serevia had never seen the enforcers leave such a sparse rear guard, yet the exact count still gnawed at her nerves. Two targets meant she could weaponize the shadows, bleed them against each other, or slip right through a careless crack in their awareness. But three meant they could effectively choke off every single angle of approach. They had left behind far fewer men than she had calculated—a glaring advantage—but she possessed absolutely no desire to search for silver linings right now.

  "To hell with my luck," she grunted, forcing out a heavy, bitter sigh.

  She narrowed her eyes, dissecting their positions with the cold, absolute focus of a predator. By some twisted stroke of luck, one of the enforcers had retreated into the transport, claiming the driver’s seat; though the distance blurred his silhouette, she figured he was either monitoring the comms or desperately leeching heat from the cabin. That effectively erased him from the initial equation. The remaining two guards had anchored themselves at the front of the vehicle, assuming strict sentry positions on the left and right corners. They braced their heavy rifles against their armored chests, sweeping their visors across the street. She couldn't pin a definite role on the man inside, but she didn't care; long before he could rip open that metal box and join the slaughter, Serevia would already be done. Her targets were the two armored statues out in the frost.

  Peeling herself away from the freezing, abrasive grit of the wall, she melted into the pitch-black corridor carved between the buildings. The shattered, rotting architecture of Caduta served as far more than just a sanctuary; it provided flawless, impenetrable camouflage. She seamlessly fused with the dead gray walls, the soot-choked facades, and the suffocating gloom of the alleyways. She paused mid-stride every few paces, tracking the guards through the jagged teeth of collapsed rubble and shattered concrete pillars. She calculated every single footfall and strangled every breath into total silence.

  Finally, she clung to the corner of the building closest to the armored transport with the sickening quiet of a spider. She had choked out the distance, but the clock now bled against her. The hounds had swallowed the bait, yet they could easily snap their jaws empty and return before digesting the lie. She had to strike violently fast, breach the metal beast, carve out her prize, and vaporize into the shadows. Otherwise, the other transports would tear back down the street and trap her inside this concrete tomb.

  Right in the dead center of that agonizing hold, a chaotic swarm erupted from the far end of the street and crashed into Serevia's line of sight. They belonged to one of Caduta's feral street gangs, a pack of rabid dogs beaten into insanity by pure starvation. Just like Serevia, they had recognized the thinned ranks as a glaring vulnerability, a sudden, bloody opportunity. Shrouded in rotting rags and caked in filth and raw hatred, the pack of six or seven launched themselves straight at the enforcers. Screaming like suicidal zealots, they charged with rusted rifles and jagged, makeshift clubs. It was absolute madness; their scrap-metal trash couldn't even scratch the guards' armor, but the violent, blinding chaos they ignited was utterly priceless.

  Seeing this unexpected wave crashing toward them, the enforcers snapped into defensive positions. Serevia embraced this momentary chaos like a blessing handed down by the gods. She launched herself from her hiding spot like an arrow unleashed from a bow. Yet, this wasn't the loud, clumsy sprint of a soldier; she advanced like a rising shadow on her tiptoes, barely grazing the ground. She moved with the meticulous care of someone whose life hung by a single thread, as silent as a cat stalking its prey. Every time her foot struck the snowy, mud-choked earth, she swallowed the sound and entirely masked her presence.

  Both guards outside had surrendered their absolute focus to the gang, leveling their barrels at the screaming, charging mob. As short, metallic bursts and the reek of gunpowder flooded the street, Serevia closed in from their blind spot with lethal speed. The third guard inside the transport remained nowhere to be seen. Whether he was screaming for backup over the radio or simply waiting out the slaughter from within his armored shell remained a mystery. But Serevia didn't care. He wasn't what mattered right now; she only cared about those exposed backs out in the frost. Amidst all that deafening noise and chaos, no one would ever notice this silent shadow—the true threat—creeping up right behind them. The gang served as the perfect bait to distract the enforcers, and Serevia fully intended to bleed that distraction dry.

  Fueled by the feral strength of pure starvation and hatred, one of the gang members launched himself at an enforcer, clinging to the man's armored torso and violently thrashing to break his balance. Yet, that single, sharp, and lethal crack tearing through the freezing air brutally severed the desperate struggle. A dry, mechanical gunshot echoed down the street.

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  The other guard had raised his weapon like a cold-blooded executioner, aiming the barrel straight at another wretch charging him, and pulled the trigger without a flinch of hesitation. The invisible death spitting from the muzzle buried itself dead center in the man's forehead. His head snapped back violently, and his body collapsed to the dirt like a puppet with its strings severed. The thick, hot, and fluid crimson bleeding out over the gray, filthy snow instantly altered the color of the street.

  The blood rapidly bloomed across the white like a curse, gorging the thirsty soil. When Serevia saw the man's glassy eyes and his lifeless body—breathing only seconds ago—now drowning in that pooling crimson, she felt a delicate sheet of glass shatter right beneath her ribs. Her stomach violently lurched, and her breath knotted in her throat. In that exact moment, she felt the sheer proximity, the terrifying simplicity, and the absolute banality of death down to her very marrow. Something snapped deep within her, violently twisting mercy and sheer terror into one.

  Yet, defying the paralyzing command her brain screamed at her legs, her primal survival instinct roared back at the top of its lungs: she would not stop! She violently tore her eyes away from the bloody slaughter. If she surrendered to that flood of emotion and hesitated now, she would instantly become the next target for that freezing barrel. In a world where conscience was a dead luxury and mercy an absolute weakness, she had to keep running just to avoid lying dead next to that corpse. She ground her teeth together, leaving the execution behind her, and lunged straight toward her target—the armored beast.

  While the enforcers waded deep into that meat-grinder of a brawl, fully consumed by the shrieking, apocalyptic chaos, Serevia slipped to the rear of the armored transport with the absolute silence of a shadow. They had left the heavy rear doors cracked open. This was the dark, iron cage where they usually crammed those poor souls branded as "mutants" amidst screaming fits—a filthy hold reeking of dried blood and raw terror.

  Sweeping her eyes over the interior, she saw that the dungeon section, cut off by heavy iron bars, sat completely empty. But right at the threshold, in the cramped "staging area" where the guards sat during transport, her eyes ignited. Weapons rested on the seats and hung from racks bolted to the wall. Serevia lunged for the smallest firearms she could spot. Yet, even the most compact of these death machines, engineered specifically for Sarcos's elite units, looked far bulkier and more brutal than any standard pistol.

  She quickly reached out and snatched the two "small" weapons she had selected. She frantically tried to shove them into the pockets of her cardigan, but it was completely useless; the grips jutted out, and the heavy barrels dragged the fabric down. Hiding them was impossible. Time bled against her. Left with no choice, she grabbed one in each hand and slipped her fingers through the freezing trigger guards. Now her hands were full, the agonizing weight of the metal bearing down on her wrists. Yet, this intoxicating rush of victory lasted only a single heartbeat.

  Right at that moment, the front door of the armored transport hissed open on its hydraulics with a heavy, metallic groan. At first glance, the figure stepping out looked indistinguishable from the rest; but Serevia recognized him instantly. This was the man she had identified as their "Leader" from afar, betrayed by his rigid posture and the sheer authority radiating from him as he barked into his comms. The pale blue light blinking at the edge of his visor served as technological proof that he was no ordinary grunt. And with the distance violently choked out, a new, jagged detail locked onto Serevia's radar: the rank insignias on his shoulders... The other two enforcers bore no trace of such sharp symbols. But the ultimate proof wasn't his gear; it was his glacial composure dead center of the chaos.

  Serevia's blood turned to ice. In that exact second, the turning gears in her mind ground to a violent halt, and the absolute truth smashed into her face: this was a trap!

  His presence there, waiting inside the transport, was no coincidence. The moment the leader received the report, he hadn't believed the lie for a single second. He had unraveled Serevia's game on her very first move; by dispatching the other two vehicles from the zone, he had actually engineered a false sanctuary for her. He cleared the perimeter, cast the bait, and simply waited for the prey to crawl out of her hole and approach the seemingly defenseless transport. While Serevia thought she was playing them like puppets, she had marched straight into her own snare.

  The instant the man stepped out of the vehicle with his double-barreled rifles, he plunged the street into pure hell. He showed absolutely zero hesitation, not even bothering to aim. The advanced tech inside his helmet had to be painting the targets for him; he simply squeezed the triggers and scythed down the wretched bodies before him with clinical precision. Within seconds, the ground shed its filthy snow, violently painted in a hot, dark crimson.

  Serevia's breath knotted in her throat. The terrifying intellect of the man standing before her eclipsed the sheer lethality of his weapons. This wasn't a firefight; it was a premeditated, cold-blooded purge.

  "Fuck!"

  The curse tearing from her lips carried absolutely no fury; it was the raw expulsion of pure terror and immediate shock. She couldn't even process the absolute nightmare she had stumbled into, nor how brutally unforgiving the rules of this game truly were. Her mind clouded, her senses utterly dulled by the reek of gunpowder and the metallic taste of blood. The only thing she knew for certain was that she had to vaporize before those barrels swung her way.

  As the man anchored himself and mowed down everyone in his path like a grim reaper, dropping several more bodies to the dirt, Serevia spun sharply on her heels. She broke into a dead sprint, driven entirely by the feral panic commanding her legs. Her boots hammered the ground, violently spraying muddy slush against her calves. The freezing air flooding her lungs scraped against her raw, sick throat like sandpaper, embedding itself in her chest like shattered glass with every single breath. Her fever spiked, her head throbbed relentlessly, but feeling pain, thinking, or stopping were simply no longer options.

  Against all absolute odds, despite this pure insanity and the lethal snare, she had to survive today. She finally held the weapons, and her heart still beat in her chest. With the deafening roar of gunfire and the burning stench of death tracking her every footfall, Serevia ran straight into the unknown, tearing through the shadows until she had absolutely no breath left to give.