They broke from the trench exactly as the frame counter hit zero.
Lin Tao lunged three paces to the north, his body low to the stone, his boots skidding across the frost. Behind him, the violet beam sliced through the granite shelf they had occupied half a second prior. The stone dissolved into starlight with a dry, electric whisper, but the beam didn’t follow Lin Tao. For three split seconds, the ray traced an empty patch of air where Lin Tao’s shoulder had been, its targeting vector lagging behind the mortal’s physical map points.
The exploit had bought them five feet of space.
But the Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon was an adaptive entity. Detecting that its long-range purge beam had failed to resolve a target crash, it didn’t waste cycles on a third discharge.
The curved reflector dissolved.
With a sound like the shattering of a thousand crystal goblets, the daemon closed the distance. It didn’t sprint across the forty paces of granite. It simply flickered out of existence at the central stone base and reappeared twelve paces away, executing a short-range map point translation.
In its right gauntlet, an eight-foot blade of hard-light sharp-angled silver materialized from thin air.
The blade bore no edge in the traditional sense. Its cutting plane was a total exact line, one molecule thick. It shook at forty thousand cycles per second. The air around the blade spark-charged instantly, producing a shrill, ear-splitting scream that threatened to rupture Lin Tao’s ears.
