I lined up the shot.
One try.
If I unloaded the [Mutagen Cannon] into its face, maybe—maybe—I could knock it back into the pit and ride the lift alone.
It was a Bronze-tier int, and I was tapped out on resources.
Then a rat—a literal Dregs Rat, not some Prime variant—skittered out from under the crate, chittering like it owned the place.
The Warden tracked the movement instantly.
"Vermin detected," the Warden stated.
"Disregard."
The Warden turned its back on me, returning to the lift console. It punched a sequence into the keypad.
"Manifest confirmed. Returning to Promenade Level."
The lift shuddered.
The heavy gears overhead groaned, and the platform began to rise.
I exhaled. My mouth tasted like burnt ozone and dust.
[+50 XP]
"Stealth mechanics: actually functioning for once."
Relief hit—quick and clean, like landing a critical strike on a Sentry.
"Buggy pathing AI. Gotta love it."
The lift accelerated.
The Dregs—the toxic green fog, the rusted pipes, the piled-up garbage—started falling away under us.
We rose past the mid-levels, then Promenade. Not safety. Just not down here.
Just anywhere that wasn't down here, breathing The Dregs like it was permanent poison.
I stayed wedged behind the crate, eyes locked on the Warden's back. It stood at attention, rigid, staring at the elevator doors.
The [Data Leak] ticked again.
[-1 HP]
"Hold together," I rasped.
"We hit the surface, find a shop, buy a hull-breaker—anything. Then we scale."
The lift passed the sector marker.
Zone: Ventilation Shafts - Sector D.
The air was getting clearer.
The oppressive green smog was thinning out, replaced by the oily, metallic scent of the mid-levels.
Hope popped up anyway—like a trash notification you can't close.
I was actually going to make it.
This was the delivery run I needed—clean, fast, no questions. I was the extra sauce packet at the bottom of the bag—crushed, ignored.
Then the floor shrieked under my boots.
Not a normal lift-whine—this was steel tearing open.
BOOM.
The entire lift platform bucked violently, throwing the Warden off balance. Sparks showered down from the guide rails.
"Seismic activity detected," the Warden announced, fighting for balance.
"Recalibrating..."
BOOM.
Something hit the underside of the lift. Hard.
My crate skated across the floor and slammed the railing.
I scrambled for a grip—my stealth got blown as my model clipped into the crate.
"What is that?" I gasped.
The Warden raised its weapon, scanning the floor.
"Unauthorized structural contact. Identify."
The answer climbed up as a screech from below.
It started low—a guttural gear-grind—then climbed into a digitized shriek that rattled my teeth.
WARNING: BOSS ENCOUNTER IMMINENT.
"Oh, hell."
My voice came out thin.
"No. No—no. Not him. Not here."
The center of the lift floor bulged upward.
The thick, reinforced steel plating—supposed to handle heavy loads—buckled like dollar-store foil.
A massive, electrified claw punched through the metal.
It was serrated, made of jagged copper and steel, pulsing with unstable voltage. It gripped the steel and crumpled it inward like crushing an aluminum can.
The claw wrenched the hole wider.
A heavy salvage-rig chassis shoved through the gap. Tesla-coils crackled along its spine, dumping voltage into jury-rigged servos. Welded scrap plating covered whatever this thing used to be—a hunter-killer drone, maybe, rebuilt by a madman.
It wasn't just a monster. It felt like an ult on a zero-second cooldown.
The screech ripped through the air again, closer this time. Deafening static.
I sank deeper into the crate's shadow. My fingers locked onto the cannon's grip, knuckles bloodless.
The Corruption was ticking, my HP was dropping, and I was trapped in a metal box with a Zenith beat-cop and a creature ripped straight out of The Sink's nastiest alley rumors.
The floor peeled back, curling up like a can lid you pried open wrong.
From the dark below, a single glowing red lens snapped onto the crate.
The lift stopped. We weren't rising anymore. Just hanging.
"Cleanup crew," I breathed.
"Here we go."
The thing hauled itself up.
WARNING: LEVEL DIFFERENCE EXTREME.
SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: < 1%
Claws scraped metal—click, click—circling my crate.
"Run it down," I muttered, finger white-knuckled on the trigger.
"We go down swinging."
The Zenith Warden didn't hesitate.
Its AI was simple: Lawbreaker spotted → Engage.
It didn't understand the matchup at all. It was a Level 35 Elite Mob trying to arrest a Prime.
It raised its shock-baton, the Core-Tech coils whining.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
"Halt! By order of the—"
The Tesla-Stalker didn't lunge. Didn't wind up.
He just… phased—texture glitching into a blur of motion.
One frame he was still, the next, he was inside the Warden's guard.
It wasn't a fight. It was an execution.
A hydraulic bite crushed the Warden's chest plate inward.
Metal crunched like stale chips in my headset.
The Warden didn't scream. Its health bar simply vanished.
100% to 0% in a single tick.
The Stalker shook once—hard enough to blur my feed—then whipped the Warden's lower half into the elevator wall.
It slid down, leaving a smear of oil and blue sparks.
(Ignored)
I stood frozen behind the crate. My whole screen froze for a second—full lag spike.
He's a stat-checker, I thought—my gamer brain tagging the problem on autopilot.
He doesn't need mechanics. He just walks at you and wins because his numbers are bigger than yours.
The Tesla-Stalker turned.
My HUD finally tagged him correctly. The outline shifted from neutral yellow to a terrifying, deep crimson.
[ALERT: ENEMY PRIME DETECTED]
[TEAM: BLUE]
A singular thermal strip flared amber along his helm, scanning the confined space in a sweeping arc.
He twitched, the Tesla-coils on his shoulders venting ozone and heat.
Then he scanned.
The sound was mechanical and wrong—like servos grinding through a sweep. He panned again—slower.
My HUD flashed red. A symbol appeared over my head—a pulsing bio-signal marker.
[DEBUFF APPLIED: STATIC RESONANCE]
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I whispered.
The Corruption.
My leaking HP.
To a normal mob, I looked like background noise. To him?
I didn't read as ambient static. I registered like a wounded power source bleeding signal into the void.
I was fresh meat—my nameplate might as well have been a pinged target.
The lift jolted, then surged.
The gears screamed overhead, matching the growl in his chest.
He lowered his head. The spinal manifold along his back cracked, flooding his system with a neon-blue combat stim.
"Back up!" I barked.
I leveled the Tox-Tech Mutagen Cannon.
"I know your kit. I know your bugs. Your pathing logic fails on sharp turns!"
I prayed for a bug.
I prayed for a Pathing Fault—that rare glitch where his navigation wedged on tight geometry.
It was a known exploit. 'The Tesla-Stalker's AI derps on corners—sometimes he just locks up trying to path.'
Please, Axiom. Just this once. Whiff it.
The Stalker didn't bug out. He accelerated.
Instant. A global jumpscare jammed into a five-meter steel box.
"Overcharge!" I barked at the cannon.
"Dump the core—now!"
I didn't have the damage to break through his sustain. But I had one shot at an escape.
I dumped mana into the overcharge circuit, praying the recoil would be enough to create distance. I gripped the Core-crystal and forced an overcharge past the safety lock.
[-160 MP]
The cannon whined, flaring into blinding purple.
I pulled the trigger just as the hulking silhouette reached me.
BOOM.
The recoil nearly dislocated my shoulder.
A massive sphere of unstable Core-Tech energy slammed into The Tesla-Stalker's chest.
[-42 HP]
The explosion checked him. A chunk of his armor plating sheared off.
His health bar dipped—maybe 4%?
Not even close.
He swiped. Not even a skill. Just a weave-in auto.
He slammed his claws into the patrol unit's corpse as he recovered from the blast, magnetically ripping metal plating off the dead warden and fusing it to his own chest.
[+42 HP]
Green numbers popped off him. His health bar snapped right back to full.
Drain tank.
He's a drain tank. I can't DPS through the heal.
He was on me.
I scrambled backward, climbing up the crates, boots slipping on the vibrating metal.
A slapstick chase in a steel coffin.
"Stealth! Engage Stealth!"
I spammed my [Strafe-Cancel Variant] controls.
My model flickered transparently. For a millisecond, I vanished.
[SYSTEM: STEALTH NEGATED BY ELECTROMAGNETIC SIGHT]
The Static Sight passive—of course.
He had vision of me because I carried an electrical charge.
The stealth failed instantly, but the mana cost was already paid.
"Again!" Panic took the wheel.
I spammed it anyway.
[SYSTEM: STEALTH NEGATED]
"Get off!" I yelped, punting a heavy canister down at him.
The Stalker didn't dodge. He opened his mouth.
[ABILITY] Electric-Clamp.
He didn't bite me directly. He activated a magnetic pull.
The metal plating on my arm jerked forward, dragging me with it.
The physics straight-up broke.
His jaws snapped around my left arm—the one holding the cannon.
CRUNCH.
[-305 HP]
Pain spiked instantly—like my nerves crashed to desktop.
Not the dull ache of the Data Leak. This was sharp, blinding, pain at max intensity.
My visual feed fractured into static.
The numbers were absurd—scaled damage based on my total durability plus a big flat hit. For a minion , that was basically a one-shot.
"ERROR: LIMB INTEGRITY CRITICAL," the system blared.
He wrenched his arm back.
My minion robes—the pathetic red cloth that marked my team allegiance—shredded instantly.
The plating on my new mechanical arm sparked. The joints whined as his grip kept crushing down.
I stared into his face.
Up close, he looked like a bugged horror skin—too sharp, too real. The scars looked real.
The smell was oil, copper, and chemical runoff.
And beneath the rage… I saw something else in his HUD tag—something that shouldn’t still be there.
`Entity_ID: THE Tesla-STALKER`
`Legacy_Ref: [CORRUPTED_DATA]`
"Wait— I know you," I choked out, hot copper flooding my throat.
The red eye widened.
For a split second, he hesitated.
The Sentinel of the Dregs. The man who hunted the corrupt.
Then the [Data Leak] pulsed.
[-2 HP]
The low-HP mark took over, drowning whatever was left of him.
The screech took over.
He slammed me into the floor of the lift.
[-54 HP]
The impact spiderwebbed the floor plating.
We were moving fast now—too fast. The elevator was rocketing up the shaft, the force pinning us down.
I rolled and dumped the cannon. It clattered away, sliding toward the edge.
"Get away!" I scrambled on my back, kicking out blindly as I stared up at his snout.
I tried to summon a Toxin Filter shield, anything to shave the next hit.
[-120 MP]
My MP hit zero.
The shield flickered for a second, weak and
transparent, before popping under the sheer pressure of him.
He loomed over me, venting hydraulic fluid that hissed on my visor like solvent on metal.
His chassis vents flared wide. A concentrated panic-cloud pressurized behind him.
[3] Panic Pulse.
"No, no, no—"
PULSE.
The sound spike ripped through the air. It didn't just hit—my controls got yanked.
[STATUS: STUNNED]
My body locked. My inputs seized.
My character model turned on its own, forcing me to run from him.
Fear status. Movement ripped out of my hands.
No exits. Nowhere to go.
I ran straight into the corner of the lift, face-planting into the steel.
[-15 HP]
I slumped.
Health: CRITICAL.
Mana: DEPLETED.
The lift shuddered hard.
We had reached terminal velocity, the rails screaming outside.
Sparks showered down on us from the shaft above.
I couldn't move.
Fear was wearing off, but my legs still felt bricked.
I was glitching in the corner like scrap.
The Stalker stopped.
He didn't bite. He didn't claw.
He crouched.
A low, vibrating hum started deep in his chest.
Kinetic charge gathered along his mounted vibro-blades, stacking up like a finisher windup.
He lowered his center of gravity, muscles bunching like a trap about to snap.
My HUD flashed the warning every player knows—the cue right before you're done.
WARNING: SUPPRESSION PROTOCOL CHARGING.
He was prepping his Ultimate.
My screen edges dulled into gray.
The world slowed down.
He was going to lock me down.
He was going to grapple me, shred me in a rapid assault cycle, and there was nothing I could do about it.
He was going to delete me.
"GG," I whispered, hot copper and static in my throat.
"Diff."
The lift hit a snag in the rails, jarring violently, but The Tesla-Stalker didn't flinch.
He was locked in. Target acquired.
He leaped.
Generated by GlitchWriter.