A nuke!
Everyone snapped to attention. Even the craziest cyberpsycho knew what that meant!
Of course, people also noticed something strange: no nuclear bomb releases massive radiation before detonation. That meant that whatever was inside the vehicle—even if it was a nuclear weapon—could at most be some special kind of dirty bomb.
But given everything these three super-criminals had displayed so far, who would bet on that? Who would gamble that what was in the vehicle wasn't a high-yield nuclear bomb?
BOOM—
BANG!
The Mackinaw was moving at over 300 mph, with terrifying 20mm autocannon fire chasing its tail. The rounds hammering the street behind them sounded like bombardment. Jackie cast a horrified glance at the electronic rearview display and saw nothing but smoke and pulverized debris blotting out the view!
The outrageous barrage kept sweeping after the Mackinaw, failing to stop in time when the truck ducked behind a building. The unlucky structure was instantly chewed open with a massive breach, concrete shattered and split apart, and the rebar inside—already bearing the building's own weight—was struck by external impacts and bent on the spot.
The collapse spread like a chain reaction. A section of the building came down like a cake sliced by a knife, crashing to the ground the moment MaxTac ceased fire!
BOOM—
The Mackinaw burst out of the smoke and then slammed down from a height of about one meter off the ground, making all three inside black out for a moment!
Shaken so hard she nearly smashed into the frame, V grabbed one of the octopus arms in a reflex—
The octopus arm was braced tightly inside the vehicle, serving as reinforcement, a fastening device, and V's seat belt all at once, and it got nicked just a little on the spot.
"Wasn't this thing supposed to fly?! Right now we're skipping across the road like a goddamn stone!"
V roared at Leo, while he remained in the middle of the vehicle, monitoring reactor data—
The entire fission battery had been assembled on the fly. In terms of structural strength, it was theoretically feasible.
But for it to actually run, it needed massive pressure to complete the initial compression and truly shape the reactor!
That pressure came from the powerful electromagnetic attraction generated by the bio-conductive fibers embedded throughout the Chroni-titanium armor plates—essentially a form of magnetic confinement!
Every second the engines ran, that force kept driving reactor-core output higher, steadily lowering the critical mass required for chain reaction, pushing it ever closer to the threshold. And until the reactor's energy output reached rated power, stable flight was impossible—
"Almost there!"
"Leo—MaxTac's faster!"
Whoosh—
A Manticore aerodyne shot out across the street at high speed, its autocannon just a hair away from locking fully onto them—
Leo's face was flushed red—flushed red from radiation—as he shouted, "Dumai! Give 'em a feint!"
Clack-clack-clack-clack—
All four tires changed direction at once. With four wheels capable of independent 360-degree rotation, Dumai possessed a level of agility beyond imagination—and that agility also came from the thirty tons of adhesive force provided by the conductive bio-fibers inside the solid tires!
The surface of the road was ripped up and released under the tires. With only the slightest drift, Dumai completely changed direction, leaving behind broad gouges and cracks in the pavement, along with debris strewn about as if a tornado had torn through!
That single turn thoroughly shocked the corporations, the NCPD, and MaxTac, all of whom were tracking the battle:
That radiation-loaded heavy pickup was heading for Corpo Plaza!
The Manticore aerodyne behind them immediately accelerated in pursuit, its savage hover engines roaring like explosions!
Its speed jumped past 400 kilometers per hour in an instant!
But the Mackinaw only continued for a short stretch before turning again and vanishing at the end of the road—
They'd been played!
Two hundred meters was nothing to the Mackinaw, but for a Manticore already accelerated to 400 kilometers per hour and weighing over eight tons, it was an impossible turning distance!
Whoosh!
The Manticore and the Mackinaw only intersected for an instant at the crossroads. The autocannon aimed as best it could at extreme speed, but what they saw was the Mackinaw lifting off the ground again.
Given the Manticore's speed, the rotation speed of the autocannon, and the gunner's aiming speed, in the millisecond-scale firing window the gunner ultimately saw only that the Mackinaw had lifted again and left the predicted intercept point.
One round struck the Mackinaw—but at an incredibly unlucky angle. It scraped a burst of sparks across the Chroni-titanium surface—
And then the Manticore overshot!
"Hah! I used to think that thing looked pretty badass, but now why do they seem so stupid—"
BANG!
V hadn't even finished her remark before the Mackinaw slammed into the ground again, this time from nearly two meters up, nearly planting her face into the floor—though fortunately Leo caught hold of her.
"Focus!" Leo shouted. "That only works once! They know how to box us in from multiple angles!"
Whoosh—
Hover engines howled from every direction as MaxTac converged in pursuit. Little Octopus immediately completed its acoustic analysis and warned Leo at once:
[Little Octopus: Big Bro! They'll block us at the next intersection!]
Truth be told, Leo had acted calm and composed in front of Rhyne, but at a time like this even he was getting frantic—
Most of the Chroni-titanium had gone into the reactor as casing, and most of the graphene batteries—which also served as structural reinforcement—had been torn apart too.
That meant Dumai's frame strength was far below ideal. If a concentrated burst from a 20mm autocannon hit head-on, it could absolutely punch through!
Leo's mind raced. In his HUD appeared the phantom marker of Little Octopus: an aerodyne hovering high above the intersection at the end of the street—
[Estimated time until hostile arrival: 4 seconds]
There was no heavy weapon in the vehicle that could directly threaten a Manticore!
If he absolutely had to name one...
"Jackie! Hit it!"
Jackie's head was swimming from all the impacts, but the powered armor's exoskeletal systems greatly reduced the blackout effect.
With a brain that was seven parts conscious at best, he saw Leo shouting at him, one hand pointing toward the core that supposedly housed a miniature nuclear reactor, while two octopus arms approached from opposite sides of the core as though to pin it in place.
Jackie didn't know why Leo wanted him to do this, but he knew that whenever Leo came to him, it only ever meant one thing—
The lizard serum pumped rapidly into his heart. The energy in Jackie's muscles released at full speed—
The powered armor was nearly out of charge, already in a power-limited state, but batteries and fuel were not the whole system!
The armor's bioenergy utilization system, under Muramasa's fine tuning, seemed to come alive. With feedback from Little Octopus, it absorbed every bit of force in the punch that wasn't part of the most perfect possible motion, converted that wasted force, and fed it back into the armor itself—
What had been only fifty percent of his strength was now eighty percent!
After throwing the punch, Jackie felt like his fist no longer belonged to him!
But the power was real!
BOOM!
A tremendous force transferred into the surface of the container. Under pressure from the octopus arms, the impact was spread as evenly as possible.
But in the end, that force only affected the upper hemispherical surface of the container, subjecting the reactor—including the neutron reflector and every internal component—to a lopsided but brutally violent compression!
It was just like the high explosives in an implosion-type atomic bomb, shrinking the reactor's volume once again and increasing the density of the nuclear fuel in the core!
In that instant, the chain reaction became more sustained and more violent, which in turn drove its own electro-pressure system, creating a cascading response—
The output increased, but it still wasn't enough!
"Again!"
Brutal blacksmithing—brutal blacksmithing under conditions like these—made Jackie's skull ring, but he could feel the feedback from his equipment too—
He didn't need to make the punch perfect. What mattered was getting as many muscles involved in the strike as possible!
At that thought, countless old training movements flashed through Jackie's mind, along with the innumerable punches he had thrown before...
BOOM!
His burning knuckles smashed into the core again, and the core's heat surged!
The entire hover system's current received an explosive boost, power skyrocketed, the coil undercarriage's cooling system ran beyond overload, temperature plunged, pressure locked in, resistance vanished—
And the magnetic levitation force surged!
Whoosh—
The vehicle flew!
"The car's flying!!!"
"Wasn't this supposed to be an aerodyne?!" Leo also lost control and shouted, "Hold on and hit the bastards!"