The rain fell on Neo-Aethelburg in greasy, iridescent sheets. Kael, known on the streets as "Steel Runner," leaned into a turn, his custom carbon-fiber bike slicing through the flooded underpass. His legs were pistons, his breath a steady rhythm against the city's chaotic symphony of sirens and neon. On his back, sealed in a waterproof courier pack, was Package #734: a simple, non-descript data-tile for a Mr. Silas at OmniCorp Plaza. A standard high-priority drop.
He never took the easy routes. While grid-locked hover-vehicles honked impotently overhead, Kael wove through drainage tunnels and pedestrian walkways, a ghost in the machine. He was five minutes ahead of schedule when the first tremor hit.
It wasn't an earthquake. The traffic lights on the entire 5th Avenue corridor flickered, went red, then died. A wave of silence, then panic, rolled through the streets. Kael’s encrypted comms unit, provided by the courier service for emergencies, crackled to life.
“—epeat, all Steel Runners, abort non-essential deliveries. City grid is experiencing a cascading failure. Power, water, and comms are going down sector by sector. This is a coordinated attack.”
Kael’s blood ran cold. He looked down at the package scanner. The destination for #734 was OmniCorp Plaza—the central nexus of the city's power distribution. The timeline was too perfect. A delivery, a system failure.
Courage under chaos.
He slapped the scanner, activating its deep-level diagnostic mode. The screen bloomed with lines of code he wasn't meant to see. It wasn't a data-tile. It was a fractal-key, a digital skeleton key designed to burrow into and commandeer core systems. And its destination was the master server room.
He had a choice. Dump it in the river, run, and save himself. Or deliver it straight into the lion's den.
Kael made his choice. He gunned it, not away from OmniCorp, but toward it. The city was descending into madness around him. Holographic billboards sputtered and died, plunging streets into a stormy twilight. People were spilling out of buildings, their faces masks of confusion and fear.
He became a blur of focused motion. He rode up a construction scaffold, launching across a terrifying gap to a lower rooftop. He navigated by memory and instinct, the city's geography etched into his soul. He wasn't just a courier anymore; he was an artery, and the cure for this sickness was in his pack, needing to reach the heart to be administered.
He skidded to a halt in the underground delivery bay of OmniCorp Plaza. The security scanners were dead. He sprinted past confused guards, taking the stairs three at a time to the 70th floor.
The server room was guarded by two men in black tactical gear—not OmniCorp security. Mercenaries. They raised their weapons, but Kael didn't stop. He slid the last ten feet, using his bike as a shield, and slammed the package into the delivery chute labeled “SILAS - URGENT.”
A moment of silence. Then, a sharp pop from inside the room. The mercenaries’ comms fizzed. The fractal-key had done its job, but in reverse—it had found the invasive code and overwritten it.
One by one, outside the panoramic window, the lights of Neo-Aethelburg flickered back on. The sirens waned. The grid was healing.
Kael leaned against his bike, chest heaving, the rain on his skin feeling clean for the first time. He wasn't a hero. He was just a Steel Runner who had made a delivery.
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