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Chapter 56: Steel Heart
chapter 56: steel heart
in the maze of the 18th street fighting arena, sun jack and the group sprinted toward the location marked by king kong. the journey was fraught with danger, but just as their ammunition was nearly depleted, they finally stopped in front of a wall.
“this is it! it’s inside!” song 6pus exclaimed, his face brimming with excitement.
with a few grenades, sun jack blasted a hole in the thick wall. song 6pus rushed in first, with sun jack close behind, while father and tapai stayed by the opening, suppressing the enemies outside with heavy gunfire.
inside, sun jack saw rows of black server racks, their blinking indicator lights illuminating the room. the space was filled with incomprehensible electronic equipment, and in the center of it all were three metallic chairs, densely connected by wires and fiber optics.
on one of the chairs lay a white goat, and on the other two were men, both severely injured. transparent, flexible wireless helmets covered their heads, and above them hovered various holographic images of brains, pie charts, and rapidly shifting data tables.
as someone from an older time, sun jack had no idea what these devices were but could tell they were extremely advanced.
“damn! i knew it! i knew it!” song 6pus shouted, pacing around the three chairs with manic excitement.
“what do you know? what is this thing?” sun jack demanded, his voice urgent.
“cognitive mode buffers!” song 6pus shouted, pointing at the chairs. “this thing connects virtual signals directly to neural cells through synaptic links! bro! do you get what i’m saying? this thing can modify memories!”
“f***! i knew it! i knew i didn’t owe them money! those memories of debts were all fake! they stuffed that sh** into my brain with this thing! hell, they probably owe me money!”
“damn it! i’m going to stream this and blow their operation wide open! f***, using this on animals was bad enough, but these 18th street scumbags dared to use it on people!?”
he immediately started a livestream, aiming his camera at the machines.
“look at this! look, everyone! these databases are full of stored memories! god knows how many people’s memories they’ve tampered with! and check this out—cognitive mode buffers, neural network reconstructors! this is straight-up contraband! insane, right? isn’t this sh** incredible?”
this guy wasn’t just a lion-headed human—his entire body was a mix of flesh and machine, though it was hard to tell if the machinery was internal implants or external augmentations. what had seemed normal-sized on the livestream now loomed over them; steel heart stood over three meters tall. his matte black metallic prosthetics, armed to the teeth, radiated an overwhelming sense of menace.
and to top it off, six circular drones hovered menacingly around him.
steel heart glanced at song 6pus, sprawled on the ground, and sneered coldly. “still streaming, huh?”
with a press of a button on his waist, an invisible pulse rippled outward. song 6pus’s livestream instantly cut off, and not just his—sun jack’s neural system also went offline, severing his connection to both aa and king kong.
“sh**!” sun jack cursed, raising his weapon and firing a shot at steel heart.
to his horror, steel heart didn’t even flinch. he took the hit head-on, his massive body effortlessly absorbing the attack.
as the smoke cleared, sun jack stared in shock. aside from a slight blackening of the lion’s mane on steel heart’s face, he appeared completely unharmed.
with a casual wave of steel heart’s hand, the drones hovering around him quickly dispersed. instead of directly attacking sun jack, they extended a tangled mess of data cables, plugging into the surrounding databases.
every database the cables connected to went dark, their indicator lights extinguishing before emitting black smoke and bursting into self-ignited flames.
“sh**! bro! stop him! he’s trying to destroy all the evidence before unit 3 arrives!” song 6pus yelled in a panic.
sun jack felt an almost physical urge to vomit blood. this idiot just sits there yelling nonsense and doesn’t help at all! now wasn’t the time to worry about “evidence”!
“correct! you guessed it! and guess what? that evidence includes you!,” steel heart sneered.
before sun jack could act, steel heart’s ankle jets erupted with cobalt-blue flames, propelling his massive, metal-clad body forward with a gale-like force. like a small mountain, he hurtled toward sun jack with unstoppable momentum.