The synchronized sound of magazines locking into place was a chilling promise of

violence.

Then the rhythm broke.

"I... I can’t do this," a shaky terrified voice whispered.

Sebastian turned his head slightly.

Standing a few feet to his left was a young Vanguard soldier. His name tag read [Silas Level 38]. He looked like he barely belonged in the armor. His hands were trembling so violently that his heavy kinetic rifle was rattling against his chest plate.

Silas was staring past the barricade. He was looking directly at a young woman shielding two small crying children with her own body. They didn’t have Void corruption. They weren’t mutating. They were just terrified starving kids.

"Silas, keep your weapon up," the soldier next to him hissed without taking his eyes off the target. "Don’t be an idiot."

"They’re kids," Silas choked out as his voice cracked. He took a stumbling step backward. "They’re just kids! This isn’t pest control. This is murder! Command lied to us!"

The boy’s panic was a sudden jarring burst of actual humanity in a sea of corporate programming.

Silas didn’t just hesitate. He completely broke.

He violently threw his kinetic rifle onto the metal grating.

CLATTER.

The heavy gun bounced across the floor. Silas ripped his helmet off and exposed a pale sweat-drenched face filled with absolute mind-breaking horror.

"I’m out! I’m not doing this!" Silas screamed. He turned around and sprinted back toward the transport vehicles.

He didn’t make it five steps.

A heavy cybernetic hand shot out of the gloom and clamped down on Silas’s throat.

Lieutenant Garret lifted the younger soldier entirely off the ground with one arm. The hydraulic servos in Garret’s prosthetic whined in protest but the officer’s grip was an absolute iron vise.

"Where exactly do you think you’re going, private?" Garret asked softly. His voice was a dangerous venomous purr that immediately silenced the immediate area.

The gunfire in their section of the alley tapered off. The other soldiers lowered their weapons and watched the confrontation with wide terrified eyes.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

"L-let me go," Silas gagged. His hands desperately clawed at the thick black metal wrapped around his windpipe. His legs kicked uselessly in the air. "I quit! I won’t shoot them!"

Garret let out a dark booming laugh. He slammed Silas violently against the rusted wall of a shipping container.

BANG!

The metal dented inward from the sheer impact. Silas gasped as a thin line of blood trickled from his nose.

"You don’t quit the Vanguard, Silas," Garret sneered and leaned in close. "You signed a contract. Your code belongs to the Syndicate. Desertion during an active deployment isn’t a demotion. It’s a server wipe."

Garret didn’t draw his sidearm. He didn’t drop the boy to execute him himself. The sadistic officer turned his head and his eyes scanned the crowd of silent soldiers until he locked onto Sebastian.

"Trent," Garret barked with a cruel testing smile spreading across his face. "Get over here."

Sebastian felt his stomach drop. He didn’t show it. He kept his face perfectly

deadpan behind his visor as he slowly walked forward with his rifle resting loosely in his hands.

"Sir," Sebastian acknowledged and stopped a few feet away from the struggling deserter.

"You’ve been slacking all day, Trent. You were late to the transport. You let a mutant get the drop on you earlier," Garret stated as his voice dripped with condescension.

He shoved Silas forward and threw the gasping boy onto the wet metal floor right

at Sebastian’s boots.

"Prove you aren’t completely useless," Garret ordered and pointed a heavy finger

at Silas. "Execute the deserter. Right now."

Silence fell over the alleyway. The only sound was the distant muffled gunfire from the other squads and the heavy terrified breathing of Silas on the floor.

Silas looked up at Sebastian. The boy’s eyes were wide pleading and entirely

desperate.

"Trent, please," he whispered and coughed up a small splatter of blood. "Don’t. We have a choice. We don’t have to be monsters."

Sebastian stared down at the boy.

His highly optimized digital brain rapidly processed the logistics of the moment. He ran the math.

If he refused, Garret would instantly flag him as a traitor. The entire squad would turn their guns on him. He would have to drop his disguise and use his conceptual laws to slaughter all forty Vanguard soldiers in the alley.

If he did that, the planetary firewall would instantly detect his Admin Suspicion spiking to one hundred percent. The orbital cannons would lock onto his exact coordinates. The Server Spoofing Drive would shatter.

He would survive. His Demigod stats were high enough to tank an orbital strike.

But his cover would be permanently blown.

He would never get close to the

Regional Core. He would never upgrade Sanctuary.

And Valerie currently locked in a magical coma on a slab of stone thousands of

miles away would never wake up.

The math was brutally horrifyingly simple. Silas was already dead. The boy had killed himself the moment he dropped his rifle in a dystopia.

Sebastian didn’t feel a sudden rush of villainous pleasure. He didn’t feel a sad

heroic pang of regret. He felt absolutely nothing. He had deleted his pain and he was currently operating entirely on the cold unyielding calculus of survival.

"You’re right," Sebastian said softly while looking down at Silas. "We do have a choice."

Sebastian didn’t raise his heavy kinetic rifle.

He casually reached down to his thigh holster and drew his standard-issue Vanguard sidearm. It was a sleek black pistol that fired condensed mana slugs.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t offer a final prayer. He didn’t even blink.

He pointed the barrel directly at the center of Silas’s forehead and pulled the

trigger.

BANG!

The sharp cracking sound of the pistol was deafening in the tight space.

The execution was completely flawless. The high-velocity slug punched clean through the reinforced visor of Silas’s helmet and instantly destroyed the brainstem and severed the digital connection to the server.

The boy’s body went totally rigid. His health bar instantly vanished. The corpse slumped heavily onto the grated floor as a pool of blood expanded rapidly beneath his shattered helmet.

[Target Eliminated. Friendly Fire Protocols Bypassed via Officer Command.]

Sebastian slowly lowered the smoking pistol. He didn’t look at the body. He simply engaged the safety with a soft click and slid the weapon smoothly back into his holster.

The entire squad stared at him in absolute stunned silence.

They had expected him to hesitate. They had expected him to shake or argue or miss the first shot. Nobody executed a squadmate with that level of terrifying clinical apathy. He looked like a man who had just casually swatted a fly.