The Public Reckoning

Sparks showered from the Iron Lung’s shoulder actuator, a jagged, white-hot strobe against the sterile gloom of the Tier 4 transition gate. Kaelen Vane didn't flinch. His fingers, slick with blood from the suit’s feedback-shredded knuckles, danced across the haptic interface. Beyond the reinforced glass, the Tier 4 observation deck lay littered with the husks of failed frames—rusted chassis and scorched wiring, the detritus of those the Tower had purged before him.

System Integrity: 34%. Critical Failure Imminent.

Thorne wasn't just trying to stop him; he was trying to delete him. A crimson warning light pulsed on Kaelen’s HUD, the signature of a full-scale purge protocol. Kaelen slammed the Vane-family override key—a jagged, decrypted fragment of his father’s original architectural code—into the gate’s main terminal. The interface shrieked. A cascade of blue light flooded the console, fighting the Tower’s clinical red. With a shudder that vibrated through the deck, the terminal accepted the override. The local monitors flickered, the corporate logo dissolving into a raw, unfiltered stream of the Vane family ledger.

The Tier 4 Proving Ground was a meat grinder of rotating basalt plates and kinetic-impact pistons. Kaelen didn't fight the floor; he read it. His Iron Lung frame hummed with the stolen cadence of the Tower’s own blueprints. Targeting cycle: 0.4 seconds, the HUD flashed. Kaelen lunged, hydraulics screaming as he landed precisely where a piston slammed a microsecond later. The force rattled his teeth, but he was already moving, his uplink bro

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