She threw the katar.

Mako—Callsign Vortex_1337 —slid the katar blade from its forearm sheath. The edge wasn’t steel. It was a sliver of obsidian-edged code, a null-edge that cut not flesh, but the wetware link between a man and his augs. She didn’t need to kill them. Just unplug them from the swarm.

Behind her, R3z—the squad’s breach-cipher—was already whispering into a corrupted data-slate, fingers dancing across a projection of the building’s nervous system. “They’re daisy-chained, boss. One mind, twelve bodies. Classic 1337 cultists. They think they’re gods because they found a backdoor into the city’s irrigation subnet.”

But Mako had already seen the pattern. 1337 VREX wasn’t about strength. It was about finding the bug in the rhythm.

Their leader—a gaunt thing with too many teeth and a crown of soldered RAM sticks—grinned. “Vortex. We heard you were retired.”

The door didn’t exist. Not to them. R3z blinked it out of reality with a single line of shellcode. The hinges dissolved into digital dust.