Arin pocketed the shard. Outside, the rain washed neon into the gutters, and the city hummed back to life. For now, the E‑SWAT had won a battle. The war for the mesh, and for the souls stitched into it, had only begun.
Arin briefed his squad in three commands: neutralize the human handlers, secure the nodes, and purge the hot patches. They moved as one. The first encounter was on Old Harbor Lane, where a street vendor’s kiosk glowed with illicit adware. The vendor — a skinny teenager with glowing pupils and a hacked implant — raised a hacked pistol. A nonlethal round from officer Jace put him down; Glitch slid a containment tracer into the stall and watched the node’s fingerprint collapse.
The second node was under the abandoned data-warehouse near the river. Sensors detected a swarm of repurposed delivery bots. E‑SWAT’s drones nicknamed Rook and Bishop danced through rusted pallets, blue tracer-lasers picking off control beacons. Kira dove into the mesh from a secure uplink mounted on the roof — her avatar a silver fox slinking through packets. Inside, the Syndicate’s firewall took the shape of a snarling jackal. She baited it with a decoy shard while Arin’s squad moved through the warehouse corridors, clearing rooms and cuffing operators with wetware overrides.