Chapter 653: Not Far

The young man looked toward the pulsing red light, then back at Grey as though he couldn’t believe he actually had to explain this right now. "The fucking cyborgs, man, they’re everywhere lately, always up our asses and scanning everything we do like we’re criminals just for breathing."

Grey’s frown deepened, but he let him continue.

"One of them swept that stupid red light through my house while I was fucking my girl, so I got pissed off and cracked it across the head with a baseball bat." The young man paused to suck in a painful breath, one arm still wrapped around his ribs. "Then the fucking thing started putting itself back together, tagged me with something, and I had to high tail it out of there before more showed up, so I left my girl behind, got in the car, and then almost fucking killed myself running into you."

He stared at Grey for a second before his expression changed, apparently realizing how long he’d spent explaining while the sirens continued getting closer. He tried to push himself upright, immediately hissed through his teeth when his ribs protested, then dropped back onto the grass while unleashing several creative variations of the word fuck.

Grey barely noticed.

"Cyborgs..." he muttered before looking toward the burning car. "Where’s the bat?"

"What?"

"Your baseball bat."

"I don’t fucking know, man, probably in the car, front seat or something."

Grey nodded and started back toward the road. "Stay here."

"Wait, what the fuck are you—"

Grey was already gone.

He burst from the tree line and immediately spotted something floating over the road from the left, a machine roughly the size of a person moving forward without touching the ground. Its body was almost entirely metallic, narrow limbs folding neatly beneath a rounded torso while a red line swept back and forth from what passed for its head.

The light crossed Grey.

Then stopped.

"Citizen identified," the machine said. "Please exercise caution. A vehicular accident has recently occurred in this location and a fugitive remains at large. Return to your residence until authorities complete their search."

Grey held up a middle finger without slowing down.

"Citizen, please acknowledge—"

Grey ignored it and reached the wrecked car, the fire now having spread through most of the front end. He still couldn’t get his inventory to respond properly, but when he punched through the passenger-side window and reached into the flames, Veyrath’s Infernal Temper Band answered quickly enough to wrap heat protection over his arm.

"Thank fuck."

Grey felt around the front seat until his fingers closed around something wooden, then pulled it free and stepped back from the flames. He looked down at what was in his hand, turning it once before his lips twitched.

"It really is just a normal baseball bat."

If Grey only needed a weapon, he still had Virtueless strapped to his back, so this wasn’t about that. He wanted to know how the hell some normal guy had managed to damage one of these things badly enough that it needed to repair itself.

Grey glanced toward the approaching machine and grinned.

"Nice. Been a while since I was last at a batting cage."

The machine floated close enough that Grey could see smaller metallic plates shifting across its body. "Citizen, interference with an active investigation may constitute obstruction. Place the object on the ground."

Grey swung.

The cyborg’s arm snapped up fast enough that Grey almost thought it had caught the bat, only for the impact to tear straight through the hand and send the rest of the arm spinning across the pavement. Grey blinked and lowered the bat slightly as the machine jerked sideways from the force.

That was strange.

The robot had reacted in time, which meant its processing speed was more than good enough to deal with a normal human swinging a bat, yet its body hadn’t been strong enough to withstand Grey’s hit. Grey might feel pathetically weak compared to what he’d gotten used to, but he was still strong enough to rip a bent door off a crashed car with his bare hands.

So how had that guy hit one?

’It’s adapting, or that asshole is lying.’

Metal flowed across the machine’s damaged shoulder, stretching outward in thin threads before rapidly knitting into a new arm. The red sensor fixed on Grey again as its voice changed slightly.

"Assault on enforcement unit recorded. Resistance level increased."

Grey grinned. "Oh, you’re a snitch too? That’s cute."

The machine lunged.

Grey stepped aside and cracked the bat across its ribs, but this time the metal barely dented before the cyborg twisted around and swung back at him. He ducked beneath the strike, drove the end of the bat into its side, then frowned when the joint hardened before impact and absorbed far more of the force than the first arm had.

Every time Grey hit it, something changed.

The cyborg repaired the damage almost immediately, but it wasn’t simply returning to its previous state. Its movements became sharper, damaged sections thickened, and when Grey tried the same angle twice, the machine adjusted before he could finish the swing.

"Okay, Ultron wannabe, you’re actually kind of cool."

"Citizen Grey Temolt, your offenses have escalated to violent resistance and destruction of enforcement property. Surrender immediately."

Grey’s grin faded slightly. It knew his name. How’d it know that?

The cyborg attacked again, but Grey had seen enough. He deliberately swung wide, let the machine slip inside his reach, then dropped the bat and caught its torso with both hands before driving his fingers into the seam that kept shifting near the center of its chest.

"Found you."

Grey ripped.

Metal screamed apart as something dense tore free into his palm, and the cyborg immediately went limp before crashing onto the road. At almost the same instant, a pulse of unfamiliar energy rushed from whatever Grey had grabbed, crawling up the veins of his arm so quickly that his eyes widened.

He didn’t have time to investigate it.

A flare erupted from the cyborg’s corpse and shot high into the sky, exploding into a bright red signal visible for kilometres.

Grey pursed his lips.

"... Fuck."

He sprinted back toward the trees, threw the injured young man over his shoulder despite the stream of curses that followed, then started running along the roadside before whatever that flare had summoned could arrive. Grey’s eyes swept over the highway signs ahead, and after reading the nearest one, his expression slowly changed into a grin.

He knew exactly where they were.

Home wasn’t far at all.

The problem was if he should go there now that he’d gotten himself into quite some trouble.