Chapter 127 Hundred and twenty seven
"Ram them?!" I shouted, the sheer, unfathomable math of the command making my head spin. "Dax, we aren't a bullet! We're a five-mile-wide sphere! If we crash into their underbelly at maximum thrust, the kinetic shockwave will shatter our upper hemisphere!"
"Then we don't hit them with the bare metal, Ghost!" Dax roared over the comms, revving his Interceptor until the exhaust spat a continuous stream of blue Phase-fire. "Wrap the roof in the Origin-Code! Make us the hammer!"
I didn't argue. In the Open World, the Speedrun King's absolute insanity was the only metric that mattered.
I closed my eyes, the blood still drying on my chin from the thermal feedback. I tapped into the distributed sub-ether network the combined willpower of ten thousand wastelanders clinging to the outside of our city.
"Rerouting all localized slipstream energy to the northern apex!" I announced, my hands flying over the panoramic command station.
Out on the durasteel hull, the Vanguard felt the gravity shift. The iridescent blue web holding their motorcycles to the sphere flowed upward, pooling at the absolute top of the Ark like a massive, glowing blue battering ram.
"Hold on to something heavy!" Jax bellowed, wrapping his massive, armored arms around the front forks of his chopper.
"Punch it, Mia!" Dax commanded.
I slammed my palms flat onto the master interface.
The six retrofitted Prime Forge thrusters strapped to our equator fired with catastrophic, unyielding force. The billion-ton sphere of Neo-Angeles surged upward through the thin, freezing air of the stratosphere, accelerating straight toward the sprawling, jagged iron underbelly of Neo-Tokyo.
< CLOSING DISTANCE: 5,000 FEET. >
< CLOSING DISTANCE: 2,000 FEET. >
From the outside, it looked like a glowing blue meteor defying gravity to strike the heavens.
The Shogun’s automated defense grids panicked. Thousands of magenta plasma batteries on the underside of the floating metropolis opened fire, raining superheated death down on our ascending dome. But the plasma splashed harmlessly against the concentrated, hyper-dense Origin-Code shield I had pooled at our apex.
< IMPACT. >
There is no sound on Earth that compares to two flying cities colliding in the stratosphere.
The blunt, phased apex of Neo-Angeles smashed directly into the massive, inverted shipyards and durasteel support struts of Neo-Tokyo's underbelly. The kinetic shockwave was apocalyptic.
Inside the Founder's Penthouse, the reinforced smart-glass shattered outward. My father, Chen Wei, was thrown to the floor, clutching his ears as the deafening, tectonic groan of tearing metal vibrated through our bones.
We didn't just bump them. We breached them.
The sheer upward momentum of our billion-ton sphere drove a massive, mile-wide hole straight through the lower levels of the Shogun's fortress. Jagged, ruined durasteel peeled back like the lid of a tin can, exposing the neon-lit, rain-slicked internal causeways of Neo-Tokyo to the open sky.
"The roof is open!" Dax roared, completely ignoring the concussive force that threatened to crush his lungs. "Vanguard! Launch!"
The Iron Wolves didn't wait for the dust to settle.
Dax dumped the clutch. He rode his Interceptor directly up the curved, smoking durasteel of our city, hit the absolute apex where the Origin-Code shield had just smashed through the enemy floorboards, and launched his motorcycle off the Ark and into the jagged, smoking breach of Neo-Tokyo.
He flew through the open air, surrounded by tumbling debris and sparking magenta power cables, before his heavy tires slammed down onto the polished, black-glass streets of the Shogun's city.
Tank, Jax, Reyes, Sienna, and Lena poured into the breach right behind him.
Thousands of roaring, heavy iron choppers and treaded scav-crawlers launched from the top of Neo-Angeles, pouring through the shattered floor of the flying metropolis like a roaring, mechanical geyser.
"Blood on the asphalt!" Jax bellowed, his tires screeching as he drifted his massive bike around a smoking crater in the black glass. "Or whatever the hell they pave their streets with up here!"
"Perimeter!" Captain Reyes shouted, pulling her crawler into a defensive wedge alongside Tank's massive trike.
The Vanguard had successfully boarded the enemy Ark. But they hadn't landed in an empty hangar. They had breached directly into the lower industrial wards of Neo-Tokyo.
Towering above them were massive, neon-drenched skyscrapers covered in scrolling, magenta holographic text. And pouring out of the sleek, cybernetic alleyways were the Shogun's internal defense forces.
They weren't the hulking, slow-moving Trench-Walkers of the Marianas, nor the pristine Paladins of Silas.
They were Cyber-Ronin.
Sleek, incredibly agile bipedal mechs painted in matte-crimson and chrome. They didn't carry rifles. They wielded localized, high-frequency plasma katanas that hummed with a lethal, vibrating magenta light.
"Looks like they brought swords to a gunfight," Reaper noted, standing up in the passenger seat of a scav-crawler and racking the bolt of his sniper rifle.
"Those aren't just swords," Dax warned, his amber eyes tracking the impossibly fast movements of the advancing crimson mechs. "They're phased. Kinetics won't stop them."
A squad of Cyber-Ronin lunged forward. They didn't run; they engaged integrated repulsor-skates in their boots, gliding across the black-glass streets at terrifying speeds.
One of the Ronin closed the distance to Tank in a microsecond, swinging its magenta katana in a blindingly fast, horizontal arc designed to cleave the massive enforcer and his trike entirely in half.
Tank didn't flinch. He swung his Origin-Code logging chain, the heavy blue sub-ether clashing directly against the magenta plasma blade.
The resulting shockwave of conflicting frequencies blew out every neon sign on the city block in a shower of sparks. The sheer kinetic force of Tank's swing batted the Ronin backward, but the katana didn't break.
"The hacker was right!" Tank grunted, wrestling his smoking chain back. "These guys don't break easy!"
"Then hit them harder!" Dax ordered.
Dax spurred the Interceptor forward, charging directly into the center of the crimson swarm. As three Ronin glided toward him, their blades raised, Dax hit his manual override.
"Phase-Shift!"
For two seconds, Dax and his motorcycle slipped into the iridescent blue sub-ether. The three magenta katanas passed harmlessly through his phantom chassis. Before the Ronin could recover their balance, Dax dropped back into solid reality behind them, drawing his SMG and firing point-blank explosive rounds into the exposed, unarmored exhaust ports on their backs.
The mechs detonated in a chain reaction of crimson fire and shrapnel.
"Push them back!" Dax roared, spinning his bike around. "We need to secure the breach so Mia can lock the Ark into their grid! We can't hold this hover forever!"
Down in the penthouse, my terminal was screaming with critical thermal warnings.
"He's right!" I yelled into the comms, wiping a fresh streak of blood from my nose. "The Prime Forge thrusters are redlining! We are too heavy to maintain this altitude! I need a physical hardline into their anti-gravity repulsor network, or Neo-Angeles is going to fall right back out of the sky!"
"Where is the terminal, Ghost?" Dax asked, dodging another plasma blade.
I pulled up the architectural scans of the city towering above them.
"It's not a terminal," I realized, the sheer scale of Neo-Tokyo's engineering becoming clear. "The repulsor network is decentralized. It's powered by the Neon Arteries massive, suspended energy conduits running between the skyscrapers! You have to find a primary junction node and plug my deck directly into their city's bloodstream!"
Dax looked up. Suspended between the towering, monolithic skyscrapers above the battlefield were thick, glowing magenta cables, pulsing with raw, unrefined energy.
"I see them," Dax said, a wicked, reckless grin spreading across his face. He looked at Jax and Sienna. "Looks like we're taking the stairs. Keep the Ronin busy!"