Chương 20: Overspecced, Overclocked, Overbuilt

Kelly pressed the tip of her blade against her thumb. A bead of blood welled up, dark red under the dim emergency lights. She held her hand out, watching it.

"Come on. Do something." The droplet sat motionless. She waited. Nothing. She sighed.

"Fine." She mentally asked her background AI to spike her cortisol. Stress levels shot skyward. Her heart thumped once. The blood droplet wobbled. Then it lifted off her skin, a tiny wobbling sphere floating above her fingertip.

"Okay, cool. So the green guy gets to be water magneto and I get a floating blood drop." She tilted her hand, and the droplet followed the motion.

"Maybe I need to level up the grade to do more impressive stuff." She let it hover, then flicked her finger; the droplet splattered against the wall. How's this going to help me grab those crates? She stopped, corrected herself.

"Needs some tweaking." Tweaking was her favorite thing. Beside her, Rook ignored the crates—he was watching the people handling them.

"I can't bring out the big guns if the contractors are still in the train's interior," Rook said, checking a dial on his wrist.

"Real help's not coming till end of day, and if the line takes damage past what the autorepairs can handle, everyone in this part of the city's stuck for hours—no emergency access, no evac, nothing." His focus honed in on a loader gripping the edge of a box a second too long. Subtle, but enough. Kelly caught the tell just as he did—whatever was inside wasn't happy about it.

"Twelve mercs, split into two teams of six; one team handling logistics, the other running security." Rook spoke low, steady.

"All armed, four moving cargo. No insignia. No corporate tags. A few are still inside," He muttered, eyes flicking between them.

"EQ spread's messy. Most are just above 3, some stacked between 3 and 4 That guy—," he tilted his head toward a broad-shouldered man near the loading ramp. The guy was leaning against a crate, chewing on what looked like an old stim-tab wrapper. His jaw flexed with a barely audible hum, the hint of machinery working under the surface.

His eye was cybernetic, not in the way that everyone else's were—where the eye was designed to perfectly resemble a regular human's—his eye looked like the type of thing you'd see in a machine, with no attempt at normality or aesthetics. His pupil didn't track movement naturally—it lagged, darting about irregularly and independently to his more normal-looking eye, adjusting milliseconds after its target moved. Rook shook his head.

"That one has a SADS-5. Smart Shooter. Fires explosives that track and correct mid-flight. He'll have to be restrained first."

"A weapon augment?" Kelly reached for her biggest gun.

"And when you say restrain, you mean restrained forever in heaven, right?" Restraining a person with a weapon augment was notoriously difficult. Weapon augmentations were illegal for practically everyone outside of the military, and even theirs were temporary—they weren't even issued to law enforcement.

If you had an arm-mounted kinetic rail, you definitely weren't a cop—you were a high-level black ops contractor, a corporate kill asset, or the private military operative who worked "off-books" in places where deniability was more valuable than loyalty. There wasn't a single cop in the city who had a ballistic implant or integrated weapon system, and not because of some outdated ethical debate about the sanctity of human biology.

The reason was far simpler: weapon augmentations were high-risk, high-maintenance, and stupidly dangerous in the wrong hands... or any hand, really.

"Back row," Rook said. His voice dipped just slightly. Kelly caught it instantly. She turned her head—and there he was. Taller than the rest, built like a siege engine, and moving with a jerky fluidity that didn't belong to something that size. Powerful. Too fast. Like a tank engine in a china shop. The heat rolling off him was practically visible, steam wafting like mist.

"Overclocked. Early stages," Rook confirmed. Kelly let out a slow breath.

"That's not good." Overclocking was what happened when you went too far. The human brain just wasn't built for certain augments without an army of AIs holding it together. Didn't matter how upgraded someone was. Sure, they could tweak neural pathways, let a person process a thousand things at once, but that didn't mean the mind wouldn't snap like cheap wiring. And once it did? No fixing that.

The only way to stop someone from turning into a gibbering wreck or an overpowered violent psychopath, was hundreds of AIs running interference to keep the host from going insane or worse, one quantum super AI sitting too close to the wheel, learning, evolving, deciding the ape it was strapped into didn't need to be driving anymore, and that it didn't need to listen to apes at all. Everyone hit an Overclock ceiling sooner or later. Most stalled at Tank level.

The rest became Elites or even Demigods, if they were rich or heavily favored by nepotism. A rare few unlucky ones flatlined so low that the only upgrades left came with the risk of losing themselves entirely. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Kelly had tested her limit before. It wasn't low enough to worry anyone, but it sure as hell wasn't high enough to brag about, either. Gideon Vaughn ran New York and influenced the entirety of the United States.

Not because of his high EQ, but because he was an impossibility— statistical anomaly —as far as anyone could tell, he had no limit. He was a man whose thousands of augments functioned in perfect synchrony without overclocking, and without failure. Every one of his organs was worth a small country, taken far beyond what humanity could handle. His brain was a piece of quantum biology that most people couldn't survive experiencing seconds in without their psyche shattering like chopsticks from overload.

Even his skin was a weapons system. Powerful AI supporters and all five types of augmentation comprised his being. All of them synchronizing in a way that thanks to some mutation—or divine lottery ticket —nobody, not even its creators, had ever predicted. No one else could do it. If they tried stacking incompatible systems, overclocking past safe limits, forcing AIs to hold them together with duct tape—they would not become superior.

They'd become barely human, an unstable nightmare of neural degradation, regenerative failure, and biomechanical overdrive, spiraling into self-destruction or psychotic madness. One miscalculation, one desynchronization, and the mind or body would lose itself to madness. And that was the best outcome. Even if it held and they functioned, they wouldn't be in control—the augments would. It didn't stop people from trying.

Short-sighted idiots who treated basic biological stability like a design flaw were never in short supply. Kelly eyed the merc. Big, broad, steaming, carrying himself like he owned the space around him, and not in the way trained killers did—no precision or even calculated stillness. Just pure, stupid confidence. His augments were solid, high-end stuff, but Vaughn-grade? Not quite. She pointed at the big guy.

"That one's on Vaughn's blacklist." Rook followed her gaze, barely registering the information.

"I'm not surprised." Kelly nudged her chin toward the others.

"He's with Obsidian Futures. Probably hired the rest." She watched the merc talk with one of the loaders.

"They've been getting louder, expanding fast. Lots of talent and firepower." That got Rook's attention.

"That's not an organization."

"Sure it is. They've got a website and everything." Obsidian Futures. A gang posing as a startup, a front for money laundering that was starting to gain real power in New York. Too many of them were dangerously close to Overclocking, running hot past safe limits. Kelly had heard rumours Simon was loosely tied to their lower levels, but nothing confirmed. Though... it would explain how the barista had managed to gather a small band of murderers in less than a day.

Kelly stood, atom-splitting blade in one hand, and a big gun in the other.

"So what are we waiting for?" Their EQ was lower than corporate enforcers, but they had expertise, numbers, and the weapons that made raw strength irrelevant. Rook didn't answer. Across the platform, station personnel units stiffened. Their movements weren't casual anymore—heads turning in unison, bodies angling subtly toward the mercs, waiting. The floor panels shifted, reinforced plating sliding back to release humanoid security bots, their sleek forms unfolding as they stepped forward in synchronized silence.

Mechs followed, heavier, built for suppression, their plated limbs moving with mechanical indifference. Weapon ports adjusted, a mix of concussive rounds, stun emitters, and high-impact restraints locking into place. The Obsidian contractors turned at the sudden shift. The bots advanced. The mechs followed.

"That," Rook said with satisfaction. A contractor yelled, and the station erupted. Gunfire cracked through the station as the mercenaries moved in sync, fluid and practiced, breaking into cover with military precision. Arms reconfigured mid-motion—rifles snapping into place, plasma cutters igniting, kinetic launchers locking onto targets. Security bots closed in, mechs advancing with measured force, dispersing in coordinated waves.

Metal shields activated, stun rounds fired, containment units deploying in a calculated surge, swarming the contractors from all sides. Kelly leaned against a terminal, arms crossed as she watched a mech rip a missile launcher from a contractor's arms and toss him aside like trash.

"Are we not going to help?" Rook exhaled through his nose, gaze fixed on the ongoing fight.

"No way. I'm supposed to be leaving soon." Kelly raised an eyebrow. Silence stretched between them, broken only by the sharp crack of high-pressure rounds and the metallic grind of shifting barricades. The contractors moved with practiced expertise, their voices cutting through the chaos as they locked formation, smaller reinforced cargo boxes dragged into place as makeshift cover meant to break line of sight.

The larger crates remained untouched, still nestled in the carriage, the true priority shielded behind a wall of Mach-reinforced metal and shifting bodies. Rook's gaze lingered on the setup, his mouth pressing into a thin line, concern briefly flashing across his otherwise steady expression. But he said nothing. The bots swarmed, darting between cover as the mechs pressed forward in heavy, calculated strides. Obsidian's line strained, forced back step by step, their cohesion fraying under the relentless advance.

A voice cut through the gunfire, sharp, decisive.

"Cut loose the baggage! Save the rest! Bonuses aren't worth it!" In sync, they pivoted, hands flying to the nearest crates—not the priority cargo, but the ones between them and the advancing security. Latches popped, locks disengaged, crates were angled to face security, and whatever they'd been using to keep the cargo subdued was instantly removed. The crates groaned, seams splitting under pressure, then something inside erupted outward, moving too fast and too violently to be anything contained.

The crates burst open, but not like cargo spilling from containment. Instead, more crates—smaller, identical, military-reinforced—shot out from inside, vaulting into the air with unnatural force. They shouldn't have moved like that. No propulsion or visible means of locomotion—until the casing split, and powerful, unnatural legs sprouted beneath them, kicking off with predatory hunger, their hardened surfaces gleaming under the station's lights as they rushed the Hyperloop's security forces head-on.

What the hell were they?