Chapter 83: The Bait
The plumber’s van cut through the deserted streets like a gray, angry shark.
Its engine was a low, guttural growl in the pre-dawn quiet.
Jax drove with a focused, manic intensity, his bad leg propped up at an awkward angle, his hands light on the wheel.
"Okay, Boss Lady," he chirped into his headset, his voice a little too loud for the tense silence inside the van.
"We are approaching the designated ’spooky murder alley’."
He glanced in the rearview mirror, his eyes sparkling with a familiar, reckless glee.
"ETA to target intersection, sixty seconds."
"Copy that, Jax," Chloe’s voice was a calm, disembodied presence in their ears, a cool line of logic in the building tension.
"Jinx, you’re on the roof of the adjacent warehouse. What do you see?"
A moment of static, then Jinx’s voice, a cynical rasp over the comms.
"I see a lot of brick and a distinct lack of convenient sniper perches."
Another pause.
"But I have eyes on the target."
"He’s early."
"And he looks like he’s about to have a heart attack."
In the back of the van, Michael was a coiled spring of pure, focused energy.
His [Void Sense] was a high-pitched, insistent whine in the back of his skull.
The Stalker was close.
He could feel its cold, empty presence, a patch of absolute zero on his internal radar.
A place where the city’s life just... stopped.
Luna sat beside him, her face pale, her eyes squeezed shut as if she could block out the visions.
She was their canary in the coal mine, and the mine was full of gas.
"It’s here," she whispered, her voice trembling, each word a tiny, fragile thing.
"It’s in the shadows. Across the street from the scared man."
She took a shaky breath.
"It’s... watching him."
Michael focused, pushing his sense out, trying to get a lock on the cold spot.
He saw it. Not with his eyes, but with his soul.
A flicker of movement in a dark, recessed doorway. A ripple in the fabric of the shadows.
It wasn’t just watching its target.
It was watching them.
It knew they were here. It was playing with them.
"Okay, team," Michael said, his own voice sounding distant to his ears. "New plan. This isn’t a protection mission anymore. It’s an ambush."
He took a deep breath.
"And we’re the bait."
"I don’t like it," Jinx’s voice cut in, sharp and final as a gunshot. "It’s too risky. We don’t know what this thing can do."
"It’s the only way," Michael countered, his voice firm. "It’s not going to show itself as long as we’re all sitting here. I need to draw it out."
"Negative."
Chloe’s voice was a block of solid ice.
"The primary asset will not be used as bait. That is an unacceptable risk."
The scary robot lady was in full Mama Bear mode again. It was almost sweet. Almost.
"She’s right, Spooky," Jax added, his usual cheerfulness gone, replaced by a rare, serious concern.
"This thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. And I’m a guy who willingly puts his hands in things that are designed to explode."
They were trying to protect him.
His broken, dysfunctional, pizza-loving family was trying to wrap him in tactical cotton wool.
It was infuriating.
It was also, in a strange, unfamiliar way, deeply touching.
"I’m not asking for permission," Michael said, his voice quiet, but edged with an authority he didn’t know he possessed.
He looked at Chloe’s icon on his HUD, a silent, direct challenge.
"I’m the only one who can track it. I’m the only one it’s interested in."
He took a breath.
"It’s my play, Chloe."
The silence on the comms channel stretched for a long, tense, and deeply insubordinate second.
Finally, Chloe’s voice came back, stiff with a reluctant, professional fury that he could feel even through the radio.
"Fine."
The word was a surrender.
"You have a sixty-second window, Michael," she stated, her voice all business once more.
"Draw it out. Jinx will provide cover fire. Jax will block its escape route with the van. But if you are not clear in sixty seconds, I am scrubbing this mission and pulling you out."
The unspoken part was a clear threat: And you and I will be having a very long, very logical conversation about chain of command.
"Understood?" she snapped.
"Loud and clear, Captain," Michael said, a faint, grim smile on his face.
He opened the side door of the van and slipped out into the rain-slicked alley.
The air was cold, but he felt a familiar, hot hum beneath his skin.
The Void. It was humming with anticipation.
He took a deep breath and walked out onto the main street, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie, trying to look like just another lost soul wandering the city at a terrible hour.
The DGC analyst, a nervous-looking man in a trench coat, was pacing anxiously at the far end of the street, checking his watch every few seconds.
Michael didn’t look at him.
He looked at the shadows.
He was the bait. He was the shiny loot drop in the middle of a PvP zone.
Okay, monster. Come get your free EXP.
"Come on, you glitchy son of a bitch," he muttered under his breath. "Come out and play."
He felt it before he saw it.
A sudden, sharp drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the rain.
A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision.
He spun, his Reaper’s Fang already in his hand, its matte black surface drinking the dim, wet glow of the streetlights.
The Stalker stood in the middle of the street, twenty feet away.
Its form was unstable, a shimmering, glitching silhouette of a tall, thin man in a long coat, as if he was being projected by a faulty hologram.
Its face was a smooth, featureless plate of chrome that reflected a distorted, fish-eye version of the street.
It didn’t speak. It didn’t make a sound.
It just tilted its head, a silent, curious gesture that was somehow more terrifying than any roar.
Then it moved.
It didn’t run. It didn’t phase.
It flowed.
It dissolved into a cloud of oily, black smoke and shot across the asphalt, reforming directly in front of him with a silent, terrifying speed.
A long, wicked blade, like a shard of obsidian glass, extended from its wrist.
SLASH!
Michael used [Shadow Step], a desperate, reactive teleport that put him ten feet to the left, his heart hammering in his chest.
ZIP!
The blade sliced through the air where he had been, leaving a faint, shimmering trail of distorted reality in its wake, like a tear in a photograph.
Okay. So it’s fast. Very, very fast.
"Jinx!" he yelled into his comms. "Light it up!"
The crack of her rifle was a deafening thunderclap in the narrow street.
BANG!
The high-caliber round, a thing of beautiful, deadly precision, slammed into the Stalker’s chest.
It didn’t leave a hole.
The creature’s glitching form just... absorbed the impact, its shimmering form wavering for a second like a bad TV signal before stabilizing.
It turned its featureless, chrome face towards the rooftop where Jinx was perched.
It knew where she was.
Well, crap, his inner monologue noted with a rising sense of panic. So it’s bulletproof. That’s a fun new feature for the mid-boss.
The Stalker raised its other hand, and a second blade extended from its wrist, giving it a cruel, insect-like silhouette.
It was going to come at him again.
He was out of time. He needed to end this.
"Jax!" he roared into the comms. "Now!"
The roar of the plumber’s van was the most beautiful, glorious sound Michael had ever heard.
Jax slammed the van into gear, the tires screaming on the wet asphalt, and shot out of the alley, a two-ton, rust-colored battering ram aiming directly for the Stalker.
The Chimera didn’t even flinch.
It just turned, its body dissolving into that oily black smoke again, preparing to flow effortlessly out of the van’s path.
But Michael was ready for it.
He threw the one thing Jax had given him for just this occasion.
The Glitch Grenade.
It arced through the air, a small, silver sphere, and detonated directly in the path of the smoke-form.
It didn’t explode.
It let out a high-pitched, electronic screech that grated on the teeth.
The Stalker’s smoke form convulsed, its cohesion shattered by the grenade’s disruptive frequency.
It was forced back into its solid, glitching form for a single, critical second.
Right in front of the speeding, two-ton plumber’s van.
The impact was a sickening, wet crunch of metal on something that was not quite metal and not quite flesh.
The Stalker was thrown through the air like a broken, glitching doll, its limbs flailing at unnatural angles.
It slammed into the brick wall of a warehouse and collapsed into a twitching, sparking heap on the wet cobblestones.
Jax skidded the van to a halt, a wild, triumphant grin on his face.
"Touchdown!" he yelled, his voice crackling with pure, unadulterated joy.
Michael sprinted towards the fallen Chimera, his dagger held ready.
He had to finish it.
He had to get its core, its data.
He was ten feet away when he heard it.
A new sound.