The screens appeared without ceremony.
One in front of Zach. One in front of Jet. Translucent, hovering at eye level, the kind of clean corporate interface that had no business existing in a room that smelled like blood and burned ozone. Numbers climbed in a calm ascending font.
+10,000 G — WIN BONUSCalculating survivor allocation…Finalizing.
A soft chime. One note. Bright and hollow and completely indifferent to what it was summarizing.
Zach looked at the number.
Looked at his hands.
Looked at the number again.
The gold total sat there glowing, patient, waiting to be accepted. Behind it, through the gaps in the holographic display, he could still see the arena. The drag marks. The helmet that had rolled to a stop against something that no longer needed one.
Ten thousand.
Jet stood beside him in silence. No performance. No grin. The greatsword was still in his hand, tip resting against the stone, and he was looking at the screen the way you look at something that has said something true about you that you didn't want confirmed.
"…Still feels wrong," he said quietly.
Not to anyone in particular.
Zach exhaled.
"All this," he said. Voice low. Flat. The words coming out with the particular weight of something that had been sitting in his chest since the moment the first body dropped. "For gold."
Jet didn't argue.
He knew.
They both knew.
The exit portal opened at the edge of the arena with a low magnetic hum, the same cold oval shimmer they'd stepped through at the beginning, and one by one the survivors moved toward it. Nobody spoke. Nobody looked at each other. The ones who were still moving walked through and the ones who weren't got handled by the retrieval system, and the arena began its automated reset cycle — blood draining through the stone's drainage channels, debris clearing, the holographic sky rebooting in sections from the outside edges in.
Erasing it.
Preparing for the next one.
Zach stepped through.
The club came back all at once.
Bass. Strobes. The smell of synth-smoke and expensive perfume and the specific chemical signature of Virex vents running at idle. Bodies moving in the dark. Laughter from somewhere near the bar. A Kogashi-7 holo-ad cycling its neural-lace loop on a screen nobody was watching.
Like nothing had happened.
Like nobody had died twenty meters below the dancefloor twenty minutes ago.
Like the portal at the bottom of those stairs led somewhere that didn't exist and the people who'd walked through it weren't standing in this room right now with blood dried into the seams of their armor.
Zach stood just inside the door and let it wash over him. The noise. The normalcy. The complete indifference of the world to what had just occurred in it.
Jet materialized beside him through the crowd almost immediately — or rather the crowd materialized around Jet, the way it always did, people gravitating toward him with the reliable instinct of moths toward anything bright.
"Jet, you absolute maniac—"
"You actually made it—"
"Come on, first round's yours, you have to—"
He laughed. Let himself get pulled. The sound reached his face before it reached his eyes, which was the tell, the thing Zach always clocked — Jet's real laugh started in the eyes and worked downward, and right now it was going the other direction.
He caught Zach's gaze across the noise.
"Yo." Half a smirk. Lowering his voice just enough to cut under the music. "You staying?"
A beat.
"Could lend you one. Win bonus perk."
Zach looked at him for a moment. At the tech-scars on his forearm. At the laugh that was still traveling the wrong direction through his face. At the crack in his shield that hadn't been repaired and the blood on the greatsword that still hadn't been wiped.
"I'm good," he said.
"Yeah?"
"I'll head out."
Jet studied him. Not long — just enough.
Then nodded once. Slow. The real nod, not the performed one.
"…Don't get lost."
Zach pushed through the crowd. The bass thinned behind him. The strobes gave way to the dull amber of the corridor lighting and then the cooler dark of the stairwell and then the door, and he put his hand on it and—
The roof came in.
Not gradually. Not with warning. One moment the door was in front of him and the next the shockwave hit him from behind like a physical wall, pressure and heat slamming through the corridor simultaneously, the sound arriving a half-second late as a single catastrophic percussion that didn't echo because there was nothing left to echo off.
He was already moving before the debris finished falling.
Back through the door. Back into the chaos.
The club was unrecognizable. The ceiling had been opened from above — not collapsed, breached, surgical and deliberate, the kind of entry pattern that meant someone had planned the geometry of this in advance. Through the hole, three black-armored gunships hovered in tight formation, spotlights cutting down through the smoke in hard white columns, picking faces out of the dark and holding them.
Drones were already inside. Low-profile units, red optics scanning in tight precise arcs, moving between people with the systematic patience of something that had a list and was working through it.
"CORPORATE ENFORCEMENT."
The voice came from everywhere at once, broadcast through the gunships' PA systems, flat and enormous and utterly uninterested in argument.
"ALL PERSONNEL WILL COMPLY. RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH LETHAL RESPONSE."
Gunfire cracked — controlled bursts, precise, not suppressing fire but targeting fire, the kind that had already identified its targets before the announcement finished. People dropped. Others ran. The drones tracked the runners with the incurious focus of things that didn't need to hurry because they were faster anyway.
Zach didn't stop to process it.
A corpo enforcer stepped into his path — full Haruki-Voss tactical rig, matte black plating, helmet sealed, moving with the practiced efficiency of someone who'd done this specific operation before and found it unremarkable.
Zach ducked the grab, drove a short punch into the gap beneath the ribs where the rig's side plating articulated, felt the enforcer's breath catch, and shoved past before the body had finished reacting.
Another reached for him from the right.
He twisted, dropped his level, let the grab close on empty air, and shoulder-checked the enforcer into an overturned table without breaking stride.
No fight. Just movement. Just the gap between where they were and where Jet was, closed as fast as possible.
Blue Steel's interface flickered across his vision — scanning, filtering, tagging — and then it found him.
Jet.
Center of the room. Greatsword already moving, shield already up, clearing space around himself with the controlled violence of someone who had assessed the situation and decided that the only remaining option was to make himself too expensive to deal with until something changed.
Zach hit the line beside him and they went back to back without a word, the way you do when you've fought next to someone enough times that the geometry of it lives in muscle memory.
A drone came in from the left. Zach caught it by the casing, redirected its momentum, smashed it into an enforcer closing from behind. Jet's shield came around and caught a burst of gunfire in a cascade of sparks, the crack in the edge widening, the energy buffer reading critical in a number Zach could see reflected in Jet's visor.
They held.
For maybe thirty seconds they actually held.
Then the second wave came through the breach and Zach felt the math change in the space between one breath and the next. More drones. More enforcers. The exits covered. The crowd thinning as people went down or got corralled into the corners the drones were systematically creating.
Jet felt it too.
He always felt it first.
Zach heard him exhale — short, sharp, the sound of a calculation completing — and then Jet's hand went to his belt.
The device he pulled out was small. Disk-shaped, matte black, edges lined with faint blue circuitry that pulsed in a slow irregular rhythm. Zach recognized the form factor from the gray-market stalls in the Neon Gut — military-surplus, the kind of tech that moved through three sets of hands before it reached anyone in the lower city and cost more than most people made in a year of fighting.
A Relay Anchor.
Paired transport. Place one, set the destination with the second, and anything tagged gets pulled across in an instant. Old system. Slow initialization. But it worked when nothing else did.
Jet slammed it onto Zach's back.
It locked with a click he felt in his spine.
Zach turned.
"What—"
"No time."
Jet's voice was steady. The particular steadiness that wasn't calm — that was something on the other side of calm, where you'd already done the math and accepted the answer.
"There's another one set at your place."
Zach went still.
"You—"
"Yeah." The smirk was real this time, the one that started in the eyes. "I plan ahead."
Gunfire sparked against the shield. The crack along the edge split further, the energy buffer hitting zero, the buffer indicator on the surface going dark.
The Relay Anchor hummed against Zach's back. Booting up. The initialization cycle spun through its sequence — slow, deliberate, the old military hardware taking the time it needed regardless of what was happening around it.
Too slow.
Jet looked at him.
Not the performance. Not the deflection. Just Jet, underneath everything, looking at him the way he looked at things he'd already decided about.
"Looks like I'm gonna be a ghost after all," he said quietly.
Zach's chest compressed.
"Jet—"
"Don't."
The shove came hard — both hands, full force, sending Zach stumbling backward over an overturned table, down behind the cover of it, the Relay Anchor pulsing warm against his spine.
Jet turned.
And walked back toward the line.
He hit it like weather. Shield up despite the dead buffer, greatsword swinging in arcs that didn't slow down, carving space through the second wave with everything the armor had left and then with whatever was underneath the armor when that ran out. Enforcers fell. Drones went sideways. He was loud and relentless and deliberately, specifically loud — drawing attention the way you draw fire when you need something else to go unnoticed.
Gunfire erupted across his chest plate. Then his shoulder. Then the shield arm.
He kept moving.
Zach pushed up from behind the table. Watched.
His hand found the edge of the table and gripped it hard enough that the gauntlet left marks in the surface.
The Relay Anchor pulsed. Charging. Almost there.
Jet staggered. Caught himself. Kept moving.
One step. One strike.
Then he turned his head.
Just once. Just enough.
Found Zach's eyes across the distance and the chaos and the smoke and the drones and everything between them.
The smirk was small. Real. The one underneath all the other ones.
Then the gunfire found him properly.
Not a glancing hit. Not armor damage. The kind of sustained concentrated fire that corporate enforcement used when something had stopped being a problem to contain and become a problem to end.
Jet went down.
The world snapped white.
The Relay Anchor detonated against Zach's spine — not pain, just force, the entire universe compressing to a single point and then—
Gone.