The return trip down the BR-040 had never been so silent inside the cabin of the Dreadnought Truck.

  Valéria drove with clenched teeth, her foot crushing the gas pedal. The Ether engine roared, swallowing the kilometers of shattered asphalt between the ashes of Minas Gerais and the mountains of Rio de Janeiro.

  The encounter in the Contagem crater had changed the atmosphere. The Pangea Consortium wasn't a horde of irrational beasts; it was a sterile, bureaucratic machine with access to technology we thought extinct.

  "Contained plasma," Valéria broke the silence, slapping the steering wheel. "Arthur, that detachment's weapons... that doesn't use gunpowder or unstable magic. It's magnetically stabilized plasma. One shot from that melts our Blood-Steel armor like it's hot butter."

  "They aren't going to fire on the Leviathan's carcass," I pondered, watching the reflection of my Black Crystal arm in the dirty glass. "Silas Vance was clear. They want the monopoly on the bone and the ports. If they destroy the island, they destroy the investment. They're going to attempt a surgical occupation."

  "Surgical occupation is a very pretty term for 'beheading'," Gristle snarled. She was sharpening her cleaver with a makeshift whetstone, the sparks illuminating the truck's dark interior. "I want to see if their luxury suits can handle a rusty blade in the ribs."

  Luna, who kept her eyes closed and her hands resting on her sonic baton, opened them suddenly. Her pupils were dilated.

  "Arthur... their sound."

  "The sound of the ship?" I asked, going on alert.

  "No. The sound of their hearts. I didn't hear them in Contagem. And now... I hear them on the road. They are behind us."

  The truck's radar beeped, confirming Luna's empathy. Three red dots were moving at an impossible speed on our tail.

  Through the rear window, the fog of ash tore open. They weren't VTOL ships, but three magnetic levitation motorcycles. They glided half a meter off the ground, white and silent, manned by soldiers in black polymer armor.

  "Risk Assessors," I muttered, using irony as a shield. "The Consortium doesn't want us getting home to organize a defense. They came to cut travel expenses."

  "Visual contact!" Gristle threw herself into the turret and opened the hatch. "Let's see how these flying bikes handle steam harpoons!"

  Gristle's first shot tore through the air with a bang. The monster-bone harpoon flew toward the lead biker.

  However, the soldier didn't dodge. He simply raised his free arm. A bluish energy micro-shield projected from his wrist. The harpoon hit the barrier and shattered into dust, without even throwing the bike off balance.

  "What?! They have deflector shields!" bellowed the orc, indignant at the violation of the brutal laws of post-apocalyptic physics.

  The Risk Assessors returned fire.

  One of them aimed his plasma rifle. A beam of superheated light hit the right side of the Dreadnought. The temperature inside the cabin rose ten degrees in a second. The armor boiled and began dripping molten metal onto the asphalt.

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  "Valéria, evasive maneuvers!" I shouted. "They don't feel weapon recoil! The armor absorbs the kinetics!"

  "There's no room to maneuver! The road is full of craters!" Valéria spun the steering wheel, making the ten-ton truck zigzag violently.

  My left eye (the dormant cybernetic interface) calibrated the pursuers' anatomy. The Parasite in my liver analyzed the readings.

  [BIOMETRIC ANALYSIS: TARGETS POSSESS PATENTED GENETIC MUTATIONS.]

  [REFLEXES ENHANCED WITH ARACHNID DNA. TOTAL SUPPRESSION OF PAIN RECEPTORS.]

  They weren't just well-equipped soldiers; they were lab products. Genetic mercenaries created to feel neither fear nor agony.

  "They don't feel pain!" I warned the girls. "Which means they don't realize when their bodies are exceeding physical limits!"

  "And how do we use that, Doctor?!" Gristle fired another harpoon, which was again deflected.

  "If we can't hurt them... let's break them. Literally." I unbuckled my seatbelt. "Valéria, when I say, brake hard. Let them get close to the rear bumper!"

  "That's suicide! Their plasma will pierce the Ether tank!"

  "Do what I tell you! Luna, prep a cavitation pulse aimed at the asphalt, not them!"

  I opened the emergency hatch on the side of the truck and grabbed the external iron bars. The biting wind whipped my lab coat. The asphalt rushed by at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour, inches from my boots.

  The three Risk Assessors lined up behind us, preparing a simultaneous plasma burst to melt our rear engine.

  "NOW!" I shouted through the collar radio.

  Valéria slammed her foot on the air brakes.

  The Dreadnought groaned like a wounded dinosaur, decelerating brutally.

  The bikers, flying at extremely high speed and with perfect arachnid reflexes, tried to brake the magnetic bikes, but inertia pulled them close to us.

  The exact moment they closed in, Luna unleashed a sonic scream focused directly on the asphalt beneath the levitating bikes.

  The pulse didn't target the soldiers, but the road. The sound wave shattered the reinforced concrete and kicked up a cloud of sharp rocks and static dirt.

  The magnetic field keeping the bikes levitating was disrupted by the debris in the air. The bikes stalled.

  The middle soldier slammed violently into the truck's armored rear.

  I threw myself from my foothold, holding on with my human hand, and extended my Black Crystal arm.

  I grabbed the soldier by the shoulders of his polymer armor.

  He didn't scream. The red eyes of the visor looked at me with a disturbing mechanical calm. He tried to raise the plasma rifle at point-blank range.

  "Audit concluded," I whispered.

  I channeled the European crystal's energy. The cold of absolute zero traveled down my arm and invaded the soldier's thermal suit. Without pain receptors, he didn't realize his body water was freezing instantly. When he finally tried to pull the trigger, the frozen tendons in his arm simply snapped like fragile glass, without spilling a drop of blood.

  I threw the shattered body onto the road. The chain reaction caused the other two bikers to swerve sharply and lose control, crashing their stalled bikes into the debris on the shoulder. Explosions of contained plasma lit up the highway with an ethereal blue.

  I climbed back inside the cabin, panting. My crystal arm released a faint purple smoke.

  "The liquidation was successful," I said, closing the heavy door.

  Valéria accelerated again, her heart beating a mile a minute. "Arthur, if that was the welcoming committee, I don't even want to imagine what awaits us at reception."

  The rest of the trip until the descent down the mountain was made under palpable tension. We weren't followed again, but the absence of enemies only indicated that the main trap was already set.

  When the Dreadnought rounded the last mountain and Guanabara Bay revealed itself before us, my blood ran cold in a way magic couldn't replicate.

  The water of the bay was teeming with boats. But they weren't scrap ships or the Piper's Crystal Fleet.

  They were immaculate, white corporate cruisers. Dozens of them. They had formed a perfect naval blockade around Leviathania. Drones floated in the air projecting holograms with the symbol of the Caduceus strangling the Globe.

  From the port of our bone city, columns of black smoke rose, contrasting with the enemy's clinical white.

  "They didn't come to make a merger proposal," Luna said, her voice trembling, watching the corporate siege.

  "No." I clenched my crystal fist, looking at our home under attack. "They came to execute a foreclosure.

  "Valéria, load the harpoon with everything we have. Let's go down the mountain and explain consumer rights in this city to them."