Grid: Omnipotence Series

Issue #6: Crossfire

Maku wiped blood from his lip and didn't apologize for it. "I can hold pockets of real out there—rings where the Grid has to pretend it's a world. Your guns will act like guns. His tricks will act like errors."

A stood with his ledger shut for once. "He'll come for me when the flock screams. I'll give him the straightest line I've got."

Nocturnal said nothing. He cinched anchors across his chest and watched the river through a cracked window, the way you study a throat you intend to cut.

They moved at dusk, when the watchfires below pretended to be stars and the river forgot it was a mirror. Cassiel took the east catwalk with J and two runners. A ghosted along the west, alone by design. Maku climbed the center spine and pressed both hands to a rusted beam until the tone aligned with him like a reluctant dance partner. Pancho scurried the upper lattice, planting coin-sized jammers that hummed just below hearing.

Nocturnal vanished into angles until he was nothing but the future's problem.

The yard woke up to their trespass. Crows poured out of the pylons, neck-plates blinking in tight patterns, filling the white space above the river with a slow, deliberate storm. The first wave tested, the second probed, the third committed.

Pancho whispered, Now, and shot his lullaby into the steel. Jammers sang. Enumerators blinked, faltered, tried to renegotiate and for fifteen heartbeats forgot how.

Maku pulled. Three rings of real crackled into existence across the Hanging Yard—twenty paces each, islands where physics stood up for itself. Lights froze. Wind became an honest thing again. Cassiel's rifle stitched three crows out of the air and they fell as birds, not code. A took the opening, sprinting the west catwalk, loud on purpose, offering Remnant exactly what he wanted.

Remnant took it.

He hit the lattice from above, crows ahead of him like a crown thrown forward. The half-skull flashed between beams, the alloy jaw grinned in the way grins shouldn't, and the first swipe of his arm showed he hadn't come to test anyone's courage.

Nocturnal intercepted in the second ring of real. Blade to claw, shoulder to sternum. The impact threw sparks and broke the evening into sharp pieces.

"Carving your flock," Cassiel called, flat and joyful. "Say when to stop."

Remnant laughed and tried to change the walkway under her into a slope. It didn't listen—Maku held that ring with both hands and too much blood. The android adjusted in a blink, pivoted toward A, and the crows rethreaded the route around the pockets of real with a vicious elegance.

Pancho bit a wire hard enough to see stars and dropped the lullaby again. The enumerators flickered, then came back meaner—learning the song, auto-correcting their way out of amnesia.

"Fifteen seconds is now ten," J said through clenched teeth. "They're adapting."

"Then we don't need fifteen," Cassiel answered, and put a round through an enumerator bulb the size of a child's head. The whole pylon stuttered; a dozen crows pinwheeled into dark like leaves in bad weather.

Nocturnal drove Remnant across a seam in the lattice with footwork the plain could admire. He wasn't trying to win. He was pushing a king into a corner of the board Maku owned. The ring of real bit Remnant's balance a second time; his claw misread the next rung by a hair's width, and Nocturnal's blade kissed the seam of his arm and chestplate. Alloy parted. Something that bled code hissed.

Remnant snarled, swatted the blade aside, and committed to the only move that fit his hunger. He blew through the ring and lunged for A—one straight murder, no showmanship.