By dawn, Voss sat beside Kael on the roof of Aethel Tower, watching the sky-mines fall harmlessly into the sea as the last slave pods drifted down to freedom.
Below, in the streets of Neo-Tokyo, people were singing for the first time in decades. The reset had begun.
Voss lunged. Kael sidestepped, not with superhuman speed, but with the precision of someone who understood energy flow. He tapped Voss’s wrist. A soft zap —and Voss’s neural implant rebooted. His eyes went wide, then soft. He dropped the blade.
Kael stood up, the discharge rod humming faintly in his palm. “I didn’t cause trouble. I just zapped the system back to its default settings: freedom.”
“Zapper Zero,” Voss sneered, raising a high-frequency blade. “You’ve caused a lot of trouble.”
