A cold wind swept in from the Atlantic, churning the waters of the bay into an angry expanse of swells tipped with gold where they caught the lights of the city. Above the Atlantic, a great curtain of storm clouds was sweeping over the barely-visible stars like the end of the universe. It would rain soon; a torrential downpour that would wash the city streets clean, lightning arcing down to the skyscrapers like the wrath of God.

  I fought against the wind and waves, one hand gripping the throttle while the other rested on the wheel, my feet planted firmly on the deck as the rib mounted the closest crest and crashed down into the trough between swells. Imp was leaning over the bow, hunched over with her feet pressed against the inflated sides and her arms gripping the rope that ran around the top of the tube. No matter the swell and the shock of the waves, her head remained fixed on the flickering mountain of light that was the city centre.

  We’d stolen the boat from a Coast Guard station that we’d found abandoned and unpowered. It was the only vessel in there I could get to work, bypassing the crude user ID protection through the application of brute force resonance spikes. It would have been impossible to hike through the city on foot, but neither of us knew how to drive a car.

  Even the bay had its share of traffic, however; three hundred metres to port loomed an immense Panamax container ship, its running lights flickering as its generators went into overdrive. I could see its failing code in the matrix, knocked out of shape by the emissions being released by the titanic resonance well.

  It was drifting uncontrollably, its propellor stuck at a low spin while its rudder had frozen in place. I could hear the crew; the wind carrying shouted mandarin across the water as they rushed around on the deck, while the bridge windows were intermittently lit by the beams of battery-powered torches.

  As I watched the listing titan, a stocky troll in crew coveralls sprinted from the tower wielding an oversized sledgehammer. Once he reached the bow he brought the hammer up and began raining down blows on something below the level of the sides. The crack of metal giving way accompanied the sixth blow, followed by the horrific sound of a great chain grinding against its housing as the anchor plummeted down to the depths.

  The angle of the chain shifted as it struck the seabed, the chain’s own weight continuing to carry link after link over the side without anything to arrest its descent. The ship would swing in a wide arc until the chain finally ran taut, but it wouldn’t strike the shore. The crew were cheering, before shouted voices saw them skittering off to some other crisis.

  I turned my eyes away, fixing my gaze once more on the distantlogo of Medhall tower; that runic black crown superimposed over a red M on a yellow square. We were closing in on the shore, skimming past moored yachts and launches kept by people who sailed the coast for pleasure, never drifting too far towards the uncaring ocean. Beyond them, the lights of the shorefront flickered through kaleidoscopic patterns as the strobing décor of clubs and bars fell victim to the viral strands of resonance drifting through the city.

  We hit the beach at twenty knots, Imp pouncing free the moment we struck the sand. I stayed at the helm as the boat beached, the propellor screaming in agony as it snarled up in the sands. When the keel slumped over to the left I abandoned the craft and leapt ashore, my feet sinking two inches into the damp beach.

  The Boardwalk stretched out a mile to either side, regularly-spaced concrete pillars supporting a wooden walkway coated in weatherproof tars and translucent grip-fast lacquers to protect the illusion of a natural structure against the elements of an unnatural world. Imp and I ascended up a set of grated metal stairs recessed back beneath the boards, emerging through a disguised access hatch onto the promenade itself.

  It was almost deserted, save for a few stragglers gazing across the Bay with a kind of mute astonishment. The gaudy parlours, cafes, nightclubs and other beachfront tourist traps continued to bombard the near-empty walkway with flashing neon signs and the electronic rattle of arcades and walk-in casinos.

  The few people who remained moved through that technicolour haze as if in a dream, staff sitting on the steps of the businesses as they tried to get their commlinks to work while couples out for evening walks argued in whispers over whether to stay in this oasis of calm or brave the streets and head for home. It couldn’t be an easy decision; even from here, I could hear the sounds of gunfire coming from the city centre.

  Some of them started as they caught sight of us, their breath hitching as they took in the demon in her sleek grey taksuit and the ragged troll clutching a submachine gun in a death-grip. They started to stagger away, moving in an uncertain half-run. They didn’t know where they could go, but they knew they needed to leave.

  Suddenly, I felt the air thicken with a heady pressure and instinctively opened my mind to the matrix just as the looming resonance well pulsed once more, sending a titanic wave of energy flying across the city. It smeared everything it touched; a doppler effect pushing icons, hosts and datastreams out of shape as the pure and unrestrained resonance continued to unravel the tightly-ordered code of the matrix.

  I had no idea what would happen if the well went uncontained. I’d dropped out of the matrix for the crossing because of the sheer number of DemiGODs who had descended on the city, drawing as close as they dared to the well as they searched for some way to shut down what I had done. But here, back in the city, I felt almost euphoric.

  The resonance suffused the air around me, blurring the lines between myself and the matrix. It felt like the out of band spaces between each resonance realm, where all the artificial distinctions of mundane reality were rendered down to pure energy. I could feel the devices around me more closely than ever before, could sense the pressure in their systems as circuits fires on overdrive, kicking up volume and flooding lights with energy. It was almost as though I could feel the offline devices as well, as potential energy just waiting for my touch.

  There was motion somewhere to my left; a flare in the matrix mingled with a terrified scream. An almost physical pain seized my head at its light, before I shouldered through it, running into an automated children’s arcade; row after row of VR headsets and gaudy machines flickering their LCDs in a unified pattern of fractal shapes. It was a resonant expression, formed from a mind reaching out into the digital world for the first time.

  I saw the boy’s persona long before I found his body. It was an almost formless shape; the newborn expression of a human form curled in on itself, rocking back and forth in catatonic terror. The boy himself was hiding behind one of the machines, dilated pupils staring off into a new and immense world. He looked like he was about ten.

  “Hey,” I said, dropping to one knee beside him and reaching out to touch his shoulder while sending out a resonant probe from persona to persona. “Focus on me, okay? Just me.”

  I felt the first brushes of his awareness shifting as his mind began to adapt to the sudden onrush of the physical world, filtering his perceptions as his persona grew closer in sync with the neurons it was copying. The weight of his attention was weak, like a newborn animal, but it was there.

  “I know you’re scared,” I said. “I was scared too, the first time. Almost lost my mind. You’ll figure it out, but for now I need you to focus on your body. Think about touches, smells, sights, whatever you can. Bring those memories to the front of your mind and breathe.”

  The kid’s persona flickered as his brain finally began to perceive mundane reality once more. I saw his eyes focus, saw them widen as he took me in. His breathing began to calm a little, his arms shifting as though he was using them for the first time. I leant back, sighing in relief.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Aiden.”

  His voice was faint, but I didn’t know if that was dumpshock or just fear.

  “Okay, Aiden, I know your parents are worried about you. You should go home, if you can. Get under the covers and stay there until the world goes back to normal.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, smiling up at me. “I told them where I am. They’re coming.”

  I gave him a weak smile of my own.

  “That’s good. That’s… you’ll be okay, Aiden. It’s not as scary as it seems.”

  “Come on,” Imp said, not unkindly, her body silhouetted against the entrance. “Got somewhere to be.”

  I nodded, following her out even as some small part of me kept its focus on the faint persona I was leaving behind. I wondered how many others like him were scattered across the digital quarantine zone, awakened to the resonance by the well burning at the heart of the city? I wondered what would happen to them when all of this was done.

  They wouldn’t be easy to find, if they didn’t want to be. The resonance hung over the city like a dense fog, shrouding our alien personas amongst a mass of similar data. I’d achieved the same effect on a smaller scale many times before, bringing through a thin mist of resonance to hide myself from snooping programmes. But eventually this storm would end, the well would calm and they would take their first trembling steps into a new world. They’d make mistakes, like I had, and the powers of the old world would learn they were here.

  What would happen then, I didn’t know.

  Beyond the Boardwalk was a neighbourhood of high-end ‘beachfront’ properties built above yet more tourist trap shops, all of them quiet and seemingly abandoned. The residential towers loomed on either side, their architecture the legacy of a decades-long brawl between developers for ocean views, while on the street the flat glass of shop windows reflected the too-bright glow of the streetlights, illuminating mannequins clad in designer swimwear.

  This was a neighbourhood that had worked. The streets were clean, the walls free from graffiti, the shops fronted by broad windows rather than bars over clear plastic. It had been a place of abundance, if not plenty, where the residents wanted for little that mattered. The last few hours had stripped all of that away, driving spikes into the chips that had always existed in their fa?ade. I felt like I was looking at a great glass window split into fractions by a web of shatterpoint cracks, waiting for some final blow that would bring it all crashing down.

  “Spider,” Imp began, the word halting and uncertain. “I haven’t asked yet ‘cause you’ve been kinda out of it in a real creepy way and because it doesn’t fucking matter, but what the hell is this?”

  “When was the last time you took your suit online?” I asked.

  “I’unno, sometime yesterday?”

  “Do it now. Not for long; less than a second, if you can manage it. Should keep exposure to a minimum.”

  I watched as she moved her hands in front of her, manipulating the haptic controls built into her heads up display. The moment her stealth system appeared online she froze, her right leg unconsciously drifting back as if in a fight or flight instinct. I reached out and smothered the connection, forcibly knocking her helmet back offline.

  “That’s…” she began, then trailed off as she lost her words for the first time since I’d known her.

  “In Crash 2.0, Winternight stole and modified fifteen nuclear warheads to emit a powerful electromagnetic pulse effect, then launched them at fifteen cities to knock out the regional matrix hubs. I’ve managed to create a similar effect from inside the matrix, blinding every tactical network in the city – and everything else besides.”

  I looked up at the pillar of flame, tinged with golden light at the outer edges while its heart was a burning column of light that seemed to shift and shimmer as I watched, as if it contained new and incomprehensible colours; a spectrum of blinding white.

  “It’s a digital nuke.”

  “Fuck…” Imp swore, turning away from the city centre as her masked face fixed me with an unreadable look. I smiled.

  “Give it a week, they might call this Crash Two Point One.”

  Imp stifled a laugh, then shot me a look.

  “Cmon, Taylor, you can’t pull a thing like this and say shit like that. Alec’s right; you’re such a dork.”

  She turned away, shaking her. I was just barely able to catch her murmur “fuckin’ terrifying dork” as she set off towards the city centre.

  Another pulse swept through the city, plunging the building beside me into darkness as its lights failed. Away from the pedestrianised boardwalk, the impact of the resonance well was clearly visible in the cars strewn across the road, some left abandoned as their engines fell silent while others had accelerated or braked uncontrollably, causing pile-ups and scattering vehicles onto the sidewalk or into the windows of shop fronts.

  There were less cars than I’d feared, no doubt an unintentional side-effect of Medhall and Knight Errant’s standoff in Downtown. With a potential war a few blocks away, few people would willingly choose to risk the roads. Even the city’s corporations remembered and feared the chaos of the New Revolution, when they’d looked out of their office windows and seen bodies on the streets below.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  At least I’d been spared that, so far. Instead, as we wandered cautiously down the centre of the road, between the lanes of stalled traffic, we were watched by faces shrinking back from the blinds of the windows above us, by lost and listless travellers sitting on the hoods of their dead cars and a few suited refugees making their way down the sidewalk in the vague direction of home.

  It was the quiet of a warzone, or what I imagined a warzone would be like; the muted and miserable silence of a land beaten into submission by the first blow and now waiting in weary expectation of the next.

  When the blow came, it was like lightning from a clear sky. It was faster than thought, a firestorm burning through the matrix as a titanic form ate through the tattered remains of a tattered office host at the end of the block. It was pursued; I saw crystalline sea monster tentacles slam down onto the ground as the entity roiled and bubbled beneath digital dragonflame, quickly drawing its great bulk back in on itself as LEVIATHAN reformed its anthropomorphic form. It leapt up at the hovering dragon, bringing its whipcord tail around in a devastating blow.

  Their battle tore the local matrix apart, the shock of its strike echoing through into reality as a transformer mounted halfway up the side of a building overloaded with explosive force, spraying a burning rain of sparks across the street. Around me, people screamed and ducked for cover, pulling themselves inside their cars or sheltering as best they could in doorways. Imp’s hand went to her pistol, holding it ready at her side like a cowboy in a duel.

  As LEVIATHAN abruptly turned and hurtled towards us, animal instinct drove my body as I leapt forwards and grabbed Imp by the shoulders, hauling her out of the road. The entity blurred past us too fast to see, with an aftershock of cascading failures following in his wake. Lights burned themselves out in an instant, neon bulbs popping with explosive force while cars were miraculously revived in a jostling, shunting mass of steel and glass as if they were a panicked herd of mechanical wildebeest.

  I didn’t even see the dragon fly past in pursuit, I was too busy throwing myself out of the path of an oncoming car, smoke spilling from beneath its hood as the engine burned itself out. The air was filled with a battlefield din of metal grinding against metal, thick with the clamour of screams and shrieking alarms. On the pavement a woman dropped her commlink as the battery caught fire, while a cyborg’s limbs twisted into odd shapes as he brought them offline a moment too late.

  I rushed over to where he was writing on the floor. He looked like he was in his early thirties, though with how extensively he was augmented that was anyone’s guess. The cybernetics were fairly high-end, with white plastic casings trimmed with gold, exposed by weather-inappropriate designer shorts and a black tank-top. The wealthy elegance of his look was undercut by the fact that his arms were trying to twist their way out of their sockets, while the gold irises of his cybereyes glowed with the light of a malfunctioning heads up display.

  I shouldn’t have been able to do anything. His cybersuite was offline; I couldn’t sense even a single open port in the matrix. But through some instinct I couldn’t explain, I reached out and placed my hand upon his arm. Energy sparked between plastic and metal, leaping from my cybernetic hand like an electric shock that travelled throughout his body, like wiring a branch into a closed circuit.

  I could see his entire cybersuite through the palm of my hand, could see the misfiring neuron analogues and failing man-machine interface points. I could read the logged system diagnostics, could see that the automatic offline failsafes had kicked in when the well went up only for this moron to override them half an hour later to try and livestream the chaos through his cybereyes.

  I realigned his artificial nervous system with targeted resonance spikes, bringing the cyberlimbs back under his control and burning out his suite’s online capabilities for good measure. It took a handful of seconds, but it should have been impossible. As I stood up, I stared down at my hand as if I’d be able to see exactly what had changed. I couldn’t tell if it was the result of the resonance being pumped out of the well or if this was another new trick I’d picked up while beyond the event horizon.

  “And that?” Imp demanded, her head darting between the buildings like she was looking for gunmen. “That the blast wave?”

  “That’s… harder to explain,” I murmured. “It’s like a kaiju, I guess?”

  Imp didn’t say anything for a moment. She just stared at me, the black pits of her mask’s eyes weighing me up with an inscrutable expression. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she simply shrugged her shoulders and resumed her march.

  It was only when we reached the outskirts of Downtown that the full scale of what I’d done became clear. We passed through unpowered streets plunged into premature darkness by the towering skyscrapers that left only a sliver of sky overhead, their glass and concrete fronts reflecting our own images back at us like mirrors of polished onyx. In the matrix, where once there would have been towering hosts so flush with data they were almost incandescent, there was nothing but a gaping hole wreathed in wisps of resonant mist.

  I could see half-visible faces beneath glass doors; armed guards and custodial staff skulking through the halls by torchlight, or suited wageslaves slumped against the walls with their heads in their hands. If a corporation was a kind of organism, this was what happened when the soul was stripped from the body. Devoid of power and the life-giving data that sustained them, these brains of great and terrible enterprises were starving to death.

  On other streets, untouched by the dragon’s pursuit of LEVIATHAN, Imp disappeared from view at the sight of corporate security flipping paralysed cars on their sides to form makeshift barricades before the grand entrances to their skyscrapers, the gunmen eyeing me warily as I walked purposefully down the middle of the street.

  All the while, the matrix burned with energy, spilling out into meatspace in flares that scrambled signals, flickered streetlights and flooded electrochromatic advertising hoardings with fractal patterns of light. In cyberspace a strange pseudo-ecosystem was forming from malfunctioning advirals whose roaming slogans and gaudy images had gathered clumps of resonance like streamers of flypaper, warping their intended messages into psychedelic illegibility.

  I didn’t wonder why the guards were preparing for a siege; I could hear it in the air.

  Distant gunfire still echoed through the artificial canons as Imp returned to visibility, waxing and waning with the ebb and flow of unseen skirmishes. Its exact direction was warped by countless reverberations through streets of towering corporate architecture, but it wasn’t the only noise I could hear.

  Smashing glass, roaring engines and exultant cries came to us down twisted alleyways and access roads, growing louder as we rounded the corner of a block. At the next junction, a trio of cars tore onto the street with the squeal of burning tyres, beaten up junkers that looked like they’d been kept on life support since the twenties, their sides daubed with red and green graffiti.

  Their age was what would have saved them; vehicles that old had been kept running through successive datacrashes, remaining functional simply because the universal points of failure had all left them behind. They had no GridLink, no anti-theft ID software, no forced always-online connection to the manufacturer’s systems – if the manufacturers were even still in business. It was like they’d been proofed against Armageddon.

  You didn’t get cars like that in the South. You couldn’t, not without a Knight Errant patrol pulling them off the road for their inability to mesh into the city’s wholly digital traffic management network. As they screamed past us, exposed engines revving and oversized tyres leaving black marks along the pavement, I knew that they were joyriders come up from the North End to race through the abandoned boulevards of Downtown, the district’s perfect grid making for the perfect drag race.

  The cars hadn’t come alone; a force of similarly antiquated vans and trucks were parked up by the side of the road, while men and women in yellow and green Yakuza colours carried branded boxes out the shattered doors of corporate office towers. They were methodical, their work supervised by gang overseers who hurried the process along with shouts and angry gestures.

  I knew this organised effort was just the tip of the iceberg. Out of all the remaining gangs in the North End, the Yakuza alone had the numbers and the coordination to pull this off so soon. From my perspective, however, their looting was almost incidental to the main point; they couldn’t have pulled this off if Knight Errant still had the bridges barricaded.

  My attack had worked; the walls in my path were crumbling one by one, turning insurmountable fortresses into isolated bastions that could be bypassed even if someone else didn’t come along and knock them down for me.

  One of the Yakuza noticed us, adjusting her grip on a secure data terminal as she shouted something to one of the overseers. The Yakuza lieutenant had his back to us, his black milsurp fatigues and lightweight body armour an uncharacteristically sombre look for the gang. As he turned to size us up, I saw a red-skinned counterpart to Imp’s own mask with sharpened horns growing out of his forehead, a vertical line of green war-paint passing through each eye and oversized canines curving out over his bottom lip.

  The oni tilted his head as he considered us, one hand idly toying with the handle of one of the dozen throwing knives holstered on his vest as though he was confident he could land a hit across twenty metre gap between us. Imp met his gaze ninja to ninja, her own hand poised in the action of reaching for her tomahawk before she instead closed it into a fist and beat it twice against her chest.

  Her counterpart seemed to consider the gesture for a moment, his weathered eyes flicking between the two of us once more before he simply nodded, turning back to watch the progress of his men and snapping something in Japanese that had them moving even faster. I didn’t want to turn my back on them, but I didn’t have a choice.

  From there, things got louder. There were more looters, more joyriders and groups who blurred the lines between the two. Scavenger gangs screamed past on worn-out pickup trucks with emaciated, ragged figures perched on the sides of the bed, each clutching crude blades, lengths of pipe or cobbled-together gangland specials.

  They waved the makeshift guns at everything they saw, pulling up beside abandoned luxury cars and leaping out to hack at the doors and bonnet until they could crack the shell and feast on the components within. When we drew too close they acted like spooked animals; gesturing wildly with blades and guns even if none of them were willing to waste ammo on warning shots. They seemed much more afraid of a fight than the Yakuza, leaving as quickly as they came in search of another easy target to pick apart.

  Other crews were less squeamish. We had to divert around a street where multiple security forces seemed to have pooled their resources, gathering whatever guns they could still get to work and using them to fight off a small convoy of three Yakuza vehicles. The vans were lit up like torches, wreathed in flames so large and intense that they had to have been created by a mage. I could see the charred remains of a corpse that had gone rigid in the act of crawling from a panel door, while unburned bodies in red and green littered the road.

  These guards weren’t wanting for ammo. At the sight of me one of them fired three rounds into the air, while the wagemage gathered fire in her palms. We got the message and complied, even if it meant a long diversion down a road that moved us parallel to the distant Medhall tower.

  At the end of that boulevard, the blacked-out fa?ade of a glass fronted office building was illuminated by a reflected pattern of lights rising from the streets below; a constellation of handheld flashlights, vivid red flares and the hypernatural glow of magelights. As we drew nearer, we began to make out a low rumbling sound that echoed in my bones.

  It was only once the first part of the crowd cleared the corner that I realised what I was hearing; thousands of feet striking the road almost simultaneously, each footfall blending in with the rest to create a solid wall of noise that was only amplified by the cavernous buildings flanking the road. Then I heard the voice. It was as deep as a chasm, as solid as a mountain and it carried the rumble of an avalanche. His words were half battle cry, half advice, half berserk bloodthirst and they were met by a cheer that drowned out the world. I couldn’t make out any words in that response, couldn’t distinguish individual voices or even languages from hundreds of mingled shouts.

  As we entered the intersection, I looked away from the sound for a moment, down the arrow-straight boulevard of one of Downtown’s main grids to where Medhall’s corporate headquarters was visible as a bastion of light among a dark and gutted district, the great pillar of the resonance well still burning through into the building’s electricals.

  Then I turned away, and faced down the advancing crowd.

  At their head was the largest troll I had ever seen. He was nine and a half feet tall, his horns thick and gnarled growths of stone-like bone that curved up out of his forehead, adding another half a foot to his height. He was shirtless, his slab-sided musculature shifting like a rockslide with every step he took. His pale flesh ended at the neck, everything below was coated in intricate electrochromatic tattoos that pulsed with vivid red lights, depicting snarling dragons locked in ferocious battles, while a great burn scar covered the entire right hand side of his face.

  He carried a modified Ultimax Heavy Machinegun, a vehicle-mounted weapon that he held in one hand like it was a carbine with the barrel pointed up at the sky. Belts of ammunition were strapped to a webbing harness he wore over his bulging jeans, but I was struck by the inescapable feeling that the gun was infinitely less dangerous than the hand that held it.

  I knew him by sight and feared him by reputation. He was Lung, the undisputed master of the Brockton Bay Yakuza. He had come to the city from exile, bringing with him a cadre of Japanese non-humans whose parents had been forced out of the Japanese Yakuza clans, and who had grown up second-class citizens on the Japanese mainland, or penned up in concentration camps on Yomi Island.

  Standing before him I could see his past written in the deep fury of his eyes, could feel his brutality in the air as though it were a physical force that preceded him. He was violence and anger and rage, and I knew in an instant that he had come to deliver the death blow to his hated enemy. To kill the Chosen once and for all by massacring those who had always held their strings and guided their actions. He had marched here all the way from Japantown and the mob had formed in his wake, drawn in by his unstoppable rage.

  Some of them were Yakuza, their gang colours already stained with blood. Most of them weren’t. Most of them were orks and trolls, elves and dwarves and even humans. They had no uniform colours, no armour. Their weapons were bricks and pipes and handguns, each clenched tight in death-grips. Many of them were wounded from the fights they’d endured to get this far, but all of them were united in their relentless fury.

  Some of them had got organised, or this avalanche of rage had swept up organised marches in its wake. Banners fluttered over the crowd; slogans and flags and Eyes of Sauron daubed in red on black fabric. Others had come as they were; cooks in grease-stained outfits with cleavers clutched in fat fingers, street kids in scrappy third-hand clothes holding makeshift spears, college anarchists whose all-black outfits looked clean and out of place by comparison.

  It was almost incomprehensible. My mind reeled at the sight, struck dumb at the sheer mass of people united in one furious purpose. Then ice-cold horror began to seep into my core, as the ones at the front recognised me.

  I saw Lung raise his head as he stared me down, his lower lip curling up as though he was uncertain what to make of me. Beside him, people jostled the person next to them, hurriedly asking a single question that I didn’t need to hear to understand. Is that her?

  The procession stalled as people stopped to stare, only to be pushed forwards by the mass of the crowd behind them. Even Imp had stopped, her gaze shifting between me and the rampage I had sparked. I wanted to turn and run, wanted to dive into the matrix. Instead I tightened my grip on my submachine gun and raised it to the sky.

  Lungs lips curled back into a snarling grin, before he hefted up his own weapon and roared a wordless cry of rage that cut straight to some deep and primal part of my soul. The crowd echoed him, the great metahuman sea shifting with the motion of thousands of weapons being raised to the sky, while those without simply lifted their closed fists.

  A cry was raised on every lip, even my own, deep throated roars and high pitched screams shaking the very walls of the buildings around us. I could feel it in my bones, could feel it jolting my heart into action as my mind felt almost faint with sheer thrill at the force I had unleashed. As the crowd began to move once more I leapt down from the car and strode towards Medhall with the hosts of Mordor at my back.

  Medhall was an atavism. A feudal kingdom that had raised its keep in the heart of this city, surrounding it with barricade walls manned by cyborg knights. It had been shaping this city for decades; guiding its politics, building its roads, all for the prosperity of its king and his vassals.

  We were coming to tear it all down; the hosts of Mordor marching forth from the lands they forgot.