I kept my back pressed against the cool metal of the doorframe and watched Isia's fingers dance over the tablet's port as she plugged it into the server rack. The warehouse lights buzzed overhead, their flicker revealing dust motes drifting like tiny specters. Around us, the shelves stood empty and cavernous, a silent testament to how rapidly resources vanished once the lockdown began. I narrowed my eyes on the glow of Isia's neuralink interface and asked, "Just how much control does Quinn actually have over the drones?"

Isia didn't look up. She flipped a switch here, tapped a panel there, and murmured into the link only she could hear. Her voice was low but steady. "The nerd says it's not pulling a full hijack," she said, sweeping her hand over the tablet's screen as if brushing away my worries. "Route data gets rewritten in midair and the return address gets recycled so the drones never know they're flying in circles." She paused to tighten a cable, then continued. "Their internal data ports stay open the whole way, that's Quinn piggyback's the network."

I let that sink in while I watched a line of drones roll toward the rooftop exit, their half-rusted chassis humming and screeching as they went. "Could Quinn seize them outright? Manual overdrive?" I asked when the last drone lifted and vanished into the night sky.

Isia exhaled and gave me a tired shrug. "Quinn says that if they had the time, sure. But we don't." She glanced back at me as the rack's lights steadied and the tablet chimed confirmation. "Vesper's pushing hard to rush this, she's got more fires to put out than people to throw at them."

I didn't like the sound of that, but I kept my mouth shut.

Tension was already thick enough to choke on. The whole district was literally catching fire, and we were supposed to be in charge of a chunk of it. I had no doubt the Saint's HQ was pure chaos right now.

"Quinn's confirmed the drones have joined the net, let's scram," Isia said.

We slipped out of the warehouse, but I paused at every entryway, dragging and bending lengths of rebar and upended steel shelves across the frames to barricade them off. It was a necessary measure now that we'd confirmed someone had purged the worm from one of the warehouses we'd hit already.

Walking straight out through the busted doors I'd been pummeling just a few minutes ago, I couldn't help but note there were several new fires burning in the district.

CYPHER still hadn't unlocked any usable bandwidth, so fire-team dispatches were spotty at best, though every ten minutes a meguca alert cut through the static providing some minute update to the situation each time. It was hard to cobble anything together, but Quinn had some other sources of intel and had given everyone in the gang the run-down.

There'd been an unexpected surge in monster activity and ranking, catching everyone with their pants down. The gangs were barely managing to avoid a total collapse even with elder support, which has left gaps in the wall for lower-threat monsters to slip through. The horde numbered in the millions, too spread out for effective solutions, and yet it was still less of a danger to the district than everything else that they were fighting off at the wall.

The panic was palpable. There were many gangs in the fourth district, each with their own slice of it… I didn't like the odds. The horde was too spread out, and the district lacked the manpower to defend the entire perimeter.

And that was the bigger issue: we needed additional firepower. It was something glaringly absent from the meguca-issued bulletins. Maybe they were keeping military logistics under wraps, but Isia's prediction were manifesting in full force. There had not been a single AV flying over the fourth district over the past hour, and worse, there had not been a single peep from the wall itself. The massive construct separating the third and fourth district loomed overhead, and I was sure there had to be thousands of artillery pieces atop it.

But there was only silence.

It just made no sense that they'd not sought to at least thin the number of monsters coming our way. The more I thought about it, the more my blood boiled.

"Oh shit!" Isia's voice cut sharp enough to make me flinch.

I lunged forward, dropping her and myself to the ground in one motion and dragging the tower shield over our heads. Metal rattled and sparks flew from a nearby load-bearing post as my ears rang. I held my breath and waited for the danger to reveal itself.

"Hey!" she snapped, swatting at my arm. "Get off me, you gonk."

I opened my mouth to apologize, ready to complain about her timing. "There's no attack," she said. "But we got new orders." She gave me an awkward smile that tried and failed to be reassuring. "You're going to stream."

I blinked.

"What?"

The air around me thrummed with digital static as dozens of voices fought for airtime on every free frequency. Families used their neuralinks to transmit frantic location pings between sobs, while makeshift managers barked shift updates to skeleton crews that weren't showing up. Automated marketing bots sprayed cheerless slogans at anyone within earshot and rogue scammers wove deceptive invites into the chaos, luring the unwary through malicious connections.

I was just thankful I couldn't sense any of it, or else I'd be overwhelmed.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Vesper's voice cut through the cacophony inside my earpiece while four camera drones circled overhead with mechanical precision. Their metal shells gleamed in the glow of distant fires, lenses swiveling at every twitch of movement. "Here is the plan," she said, her tone clipped but steady. "We turn Quinn's network to max power and have it broadcast to everyone within range. The biggest problem is that there are a few large emitters trying to impose on everything. It's more or less what the Paws did on their side, if we can pull it off…"

I held back the urge to point out how big that 'IF' was.

Shifting my weight made the rooftop's cracked brickwork groan in complaint, I looked out over a horizon of haphazard scaffolding and corrugated shacks. Smoke curled up to the night sky. Below, the streets writhed with panicked figures dodging burned-out trucks and overturned carts. Looters rifled through abandoned stalls while others crouched in doorways or edged toward the distant wall, hoping for a safer refuge.

I tightened the straps on my vest and set my jaw. "Do they trust us enough for that?" I said aloud, my voice almost lost beneath the rising roar of gunfire that blanketed the district.

"We're grasping at straws here, Axel," Vesper replied, and I heard the tension in her words. "The Paws have their official meguca blessing and enough manpower to impose martial law if she wanted. No one expects the Sewer Saints to play savior." A short pause followed, as if she weighed each syllable. "We can pull as many listeners as this rig will bear, but we cannot man the line beyond our base. The people out here? They'll be dead when the monsters hit if they can't organize."

My brows furrowed, she was right, and I didn't have answers. But the monsters would be getting here in a matter of hours. It was time to throw caution out the window. "Use the emergency frequency to broadcast the stream." There was a very narrow bandwidth no one touched, and that was the one reserved for CYPHER emergency comms: 162.5 MHz.

Vesper took a moment to speak. "Are you sure?"

A crooked smile tugged at my lips even though I felt anything but amused. "I'm not," I replied, checking my gear one more time. It was always a good idea to give one last 30 second look-over before getting started. "But we need something that'll grab their attention, and I can't think of anything big enough to count."

Well, there was ONE option.

AP:

20 / 200

The system rattled at me half-heartedly, clearly aware there wasn't much it could do to help me. I had to agree with the assessment, transforming here and now would cause a lot more problems than it could potentially fix.

"Everything's ready on our end. You?" Quinn's voice thudded through the crackle of static on the drone's uplink.

I inhaled the acrid plastic smoke and sweat, suppressing a slight cough, before I answered. "I don't think I ever will be."

With that I dropped from the collapsed walkway, landing on the roof of a flattened sedan. Metal groaned under my boots as I rolled forward, shield clicking open. One camera drone hovered at my shoulder level while the other three climbed into circling patterns overhead, their lenses glinting like a jury of silent witnesses.

Two blocks ahead, the staccato stutter of automatic fire rattled out from the shattered windows of a storefront. A handful of civilians crouched behind burned-out cars and scorched concrete barriers, their makeshift barricade half-finished and trembling under every burst. The building's interior barked back each time someone dared to peek over cover. I set my jaw and picked my path between twisted metal and ember-cooled rubble, shield raised to catch the next spray of bullets.

"We're broadcasting," came Quinn's low whisper in my ear. I didn't need to look to know the feed was going live. I tried to imagine how people would react to that, but that was for another time.

I strode into view, boots scraping gravel as I brought the metal tower shield to bear. "Stop," I called out at full volume, voice rolling over the gunfire. The nearest civilian froze, raising a polymer pistol at me more out of instinct than thought.

A sharp crack rang out and the round pinged clean off my shield.

Sparks flew where metal met metal, my shield not even scratched.

I planted my feet and squared my shoulders, thankful the earphones doubled as plugs. "Give up now or I will use force." My words landed harder than anticipated. Instead of lowering their weapons they collectively took aim at me and started firing, chips of asphalt spraying where bullets skittered off the shield's surface.

There was a loud sputtering wet bang.

One of them howled in pain as his gun had exploded in his hand.

Not one to give up on a wounded prey, I charged.

Gun-Idiot the second tried to retreat, scrambling toward a broken hatchback, but the building's occupant zeroed in on the movement. His cries ended in a wet thud that echoed down the street. The survivor hunkered back behind his car door, jaw clenched in terror as I kept getting closer.

"Shoot him!" he yelled at his fellows, clutching his ruined arm.

The moment I was within range, I didn't hesitate. I raised the shield and let my shoulder drive into his midsection, not enough to kill, but enough to twist him airborne. His back hit the pavement with a sickening crack. I kept my voice calm but carried every ounce of weight in it. "You will stop." I held him up by the collar of his jacket, keeping him between me and the others. "This area belongs to the Sewer Saints. You will comply."

"Someone get this man a copper hat," Isia snarked into my earpiece and I wished I could mute her, but lacking the neuralink interface to do so.

A second thug swallowed and swallowed again. "And if we don't?" he challenged, voice shaking.

"Are you insane?" the wounded man (now renamed to prisoner the first) spat out of one side of his mouth as he writhed in my grip. His battered hand flailed uselessly. I pivoted and kicked the nearest wrecked car, sending its rusted hood careening into another carcass of metal. It screamed on impact and the others flinched.

A drone speaker crackled to life, Quinn's voice squeaking through. "Disobey and the Gods Unga and Bunga will be displeased."

Their eyes widened. One of them gasped: "Wait that's Caveman!"

"Seriously?" came another's voice.

"He's live-streaming right now!"

"We're dead meat!"

I had no intention of killing them, but I was not going to correct them on that. Instead, I tightened my grip on my captive and leaned in close. My voice came out rough as gravel. "Why are you attacking this place?"

The wounded man groaned and spat out a broken tooth. "We just need the guns with the monsters coming."

Letting go of the guy and watching him stagger back toward the burned-out car, I glanced at the other participant in this firefight. A storefront packed with firearms, probably still guarded by the owner or whoever beat them inside.

I reassessed the situation as I turned to the gangers. "You are guilty of attempted robbery, looting, and violence against private property. Your punishment is indentured servitude for the next twenty-four hours." I snarled, watching the color drain from the faces of grunt candidates one through eight. "Congratulations, you've just been drafted into the Sewer Saints."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.