Chapter 9 Nearly
The drone didn't fire.
Karl already knew why. It wasn't broken. It was transmitting, feeding everything it saw directly back to whatever was coordinating the hunt, to whatever intelligence sent it here. His face. His mother. Mara. All of it catalogued and filed in the time it took him to breathe.
He yanked the iron rod from his bag and threw it before the thought fully finished.
It connected with the sensor core and the crack split the dead air like a gunshot. The drone lurched sideways, visor fracturing as it spun off balance. Sparks burst outward and it dropped, bouncing hard off the pavement before going still.
"Run!" Karl said, after going off to yank the rod back out.
They ran.
His mother locked her grip around Mara’s wrist and pulled her forward. Karl followed close behind, eyes cutting across every rooftop and alleyway as they moved. His broken ribs ground against each other with every stride and the wound in his side had already soaked through the bandage again, spreading warm and wet across his shirt.
He pushed through it. He had pushed through worse.
The city around them was deteriorating fast. Vehicles abandoned mid-road, doors hanging open. Windows blown in from the inside. Emergency speakers mounted on poles overhead crackling and dying before finishing their broadcast. The calm from earlier was completely gone.
"Smoke ahead," his mother said between breaths.
"Left at the junction."
"You have never been to this part of the city befor--...."
"Left at the junction." he repeated
She didn't question it anymore.
They turned onto a wider road and Karl pressed them close to the building line immediately. The bunker was one street over. Two minutes if they pushed.
Then he heard it.
A high thin whine slicing through the air, mechanical and deliberate. Not a malfunction. Something moving with coordinated precision from multiple directions.
He shoved both of them hard into the nearest doorway. "Inside. Don't come out."
His mother pulled Mara behind her without a word.
Karl turned to face the street.
Three hunter drones emerged from the smoke at the far end of the road. Sleek and skeletal, their frames built purely for speed, clawed limbs folded as they advanced. Visors burning deep, identical red. They spread wide across the street in practiced formation, cutting every exit angle with the efficiency of something that had hunted humans long enough to understand exactly how they moved.
Not random.
They had been sent here specifically.
The center drone locked its visor on Karl and stopped.
He gripped the iron rod and rolled his shoulders. His ribs screamed at the motion and he ignored them.
The center drone lunged.
Its claw caught him before he fully cleared the strike and slammed into his chest. The impact lifted him completely off the ground and threw him backwards. He hit the pavement and skidded, the back of his skull bouncing off the road hard enough to flash his vision white. Blood filled his mouth.
"Shit--..."
He rolled just as a second claw drove into the ground where his head had been, sparks scattering across his face. He forced himself upright, spitting blood, and swung the rod at the drone's sensor. Missed. The machine caught him by the arm and hurled him sideways. He went flying and crashed into a rusted vehicle carcass along the roadside, the metal frame caving against his back with a hollow bang. Something in his shoulder popped. He slid down the side of the vehicle and hit the ground on both knees, gasping.
The rod was gone. Knocked somewhere out of reach.
The second drone circled wide, moving to flank. The third held its position near the doorway where his mother and Mara were hidden.
Get up. Get up right now. Everything became blurry when he finally dragged himself upright using the vehicle frame with his palm slick with blood. His legs were shaking with his vision sliding sideways before he pulled it back. In his past life this was exactly how it always went. On his knees, broken and empty while the machines stood over him.
Not this time.
He yanked a piece of jagged paneling from the rusted vehicle, ripping the sheet of metal free with a grinding screech. He spun and drove it directly into the face of the nearest drone.
The edge bit into the sensor casing with a wet crunch. The machine reeled. Karl drove his knee into its torso and when it bent forward he grabbed the back of its head unit and slammed it down into the pavement once, twice, a third time. The casing split open and oil sprayed across his hands, black and hot.
"Come on," he snarled. "Come on!"
A claw punched into his back from the second drone and drove him face first into the road.
The impact was catastrophic. His broken ribs collapsed under him, a sound like snapping wood buried inside his chest, and the pain that detonated through his body was beyond anything the arena had put him through. He pressed his forehead against the cold pavement, breathing in wet, shallow pulls, each one worse than the last.
He couldn't get up.
His fingers found the EMP jammer in his pocket. He closed around it. But the drones were spread too wide now. Ten meter radius. If he triggered it here he would only catch one, maybe two. The third was still near the doorway.
Near Mara.
He heard her then. A small, strangled sound from behind the door that she tried to swallow before it escaped. She was terrified. She was trying not to show it for his sake and failing.
Something in his chest tore completely open.
Karl screamed and forced himself off the ground.
His whole body was wrong. His shoulder sat at a bad angle. His ribs ground with every movement like broken glass working inward. Blood ran freely down his face from somewhere above his hairline and dripped off his jaw in a steady rhythm.
He didn't care.
He grabbed the second drone by its claw mid-swing and wrenched with everything his shredded muscles had left. The joint snapped backward the wrong way with a horrible metallic crack. The machine lurched off balance and he drove his elbow into its sensor core, once, twice, feeling the casing buckle and bite into his skin.
"You don't touch them," he snarled, driving his fist in again. "You hear me? You don't touch them!"
The sensor went dark.
He spun toward the remaining two drones, grabbed one by its frame and physically threw it into the other before they tangled. He closed the distance at a dead sprint and triggered the EMP jammer at point blank range, pressing it directly against the mass of limbs and sensors.
The pulse went out.
Both machines seized and dropped simultaneously, crashing onto the road with a sound like a building shedding its skin. They twitched twice and went completely still.
Silence swallowed the street.
Karl stood in the middle of it all, blood running down his face and arms and side, breathing in shattered pulls that sounded nothing like breathing should. His legs gave and he went down on one knee. The pavement tilted.
Then the system detonated through him like a dam wall shattering.
Not a flicker. Not a half-formed fragment choking on interference. It came completely, burning across his vision in solid unbroken lines.
\[SYSTEM OVERRIDE SUCCESSFUL\]
\[AI SUPPRESSION BYPASSED\]
\[COMBAT THRESHOLD MET\]
\[STRENGTH: LEVEL 5 / 100\]
\[HEALING: LEVEL 2 / 100\]
The heat moved through him from the center of his chest outward, pushing into every broken thing inside him. Not erasing the damage. Reinforcing what remained beneath it, the way iron gets pressed into crumbling stone. His breathing evened. His vision steadied. The shaking in his legs stopped.
He stood fully upright.
His mother was already beside him, both hands gripping his arm, her composure cracked clean through for the first time since they left home. She looked at his face and whatever she saw there made her exhale like she had been holding that breath for hours.
He met her eyes. "I'm alright."
Mara stood in the doorway, teddy bear pressed against her mouth, watching him with eyes that were too steady for someone her age. Like she had decided somewhere during that fight that falling apart was not something she could afford anymore.
That look sent something cold through him.
"Come," he said. "We're close."
The bunker entrance sat exactly where his memory placed it. A heavy steel door in a concrete barrier wall, buried behind weeds and a rusted unmarked signpost. Something you walked past your whole life without seeing.
Karl knocked twice.
Three slow knocks returned from the other side.
He knocked twice again. The lock ground open with a deep mechanical groan and yellow light fell across the dark street. One eye swept across Karl's destroyed frame, his mother, then Mara.
The door opened.
Commander Holt filled the frame. A jagged scar from jaw to ear. Eyes that had stopped being surprised by anything a long time ago. He looked at Karl the way a man looks at something he doesn't have a category for yet.
He stepped aside without a word.
They moved inside. The door sealed behind them with a resonant clang that swallowed the dying world completely.
Holt turned. His voice was quiet and absolutely level.
"The knock sequence was established three hours ago." His eyes stayed on Karl. "Nobody outside this door knows it." A pause, heavy and deliberate. "So I am only going to ask this once."
The corridor felt smaller suddenly.
Karl held his gaze and said nothing. And somewhere d
eep in the back of his skull, the system watched in silence, waiting for its next opening.
Holt took one slow step closer.
"Who are you really?”