Angeline shut down the displays built into her goggles, and turned to look at me in disbelief. “What did you just say?”

  The two of us were riding on the top of my truck’s trailer, following behind the front lines. I was standing on her tiptoes, at the top of a step ladder, arm shoved up to the shoulder into the back of Bob, trying to get his auto-repair functionality running again. I’d even purchased a virtual training shard, which plugged into my augs, to help me. “I said, do you ever feel like you should be doing more?”

  “You mean like right now?” she asked. “I don’t see how we could. I’m struggling to keep track of dozens of concurrent camera data feeds, despite all my implants; And you’re currently up to your elbows in a repair job, while also monitoring your teams for heavier threats. What else could we be doing?”

  Something snapped in Bob’s metallic carapace, and I pulled out a crushed metal cylinder. I inspected it for a second, before passing it over to Deadbeat, who took it and passed back a replacement. I immediately shoved my entire arm back into the giant metal bear, once again feeling around for the proper socket. “I don’t know, recently I feel a little restless. Maybe I’m just overthinking things… Fourteen approaching number three.”

  Angeline flicked back to her displays, while I watched on my augs. One of the oversized centipede-like Antithesis was indeed approaching one of the squads. The IFVs cannon was slowing it down, cracking open its armor in several locations, but not doing any significant damage. Just when it looked like the Fourteen would overwhelm the squad, Silent Saber showed up, stuck his blade into the side of the monster and skated down its entire length, eviscerating the monster. The creature shuddered for a moment, then lay still, and the bears went back to their extermination just like nothing happened.

  After it was over Angeline shook her head, “I thought you gave your bears more autonomy, how are you tagging these threats and informing everyone before I even spot them?”

  There was a quiet click deep within Bob’s chassis, and I quickly snatched my arm out again. Slowly, but surely, the deep indent in the bear's front started to push out, and the fuzzy covering began to regenerate. Taking a rag from Deadbeat, I slowly cleaned my hands, before heading over to where Angeline was seated. “I'm not sure, I just know when they’re in trouble.”

  “That’s due to the brain implant.” Nyx’s voice echoed out of Deadbeat, while the little bear cleaned up the repair area.

  “Beg your pardon?” I hissed, spinning on the spot and started staring down the bear. “What do you mean implant? When did I authorise that?”

  Deadbeat stopped cleaning for a moment and stood up, “The distributed command upgrade. It not only allows you to command the squad leader bots directly under you, but it also allows you to offload some processing to them. The squad leaders, once upgraded to class II, will then be able to do the same for the forces under them. Allows all levels of command to give more informed decisions, without overloading your brain.”

  “I didn’t know that, I thought it was just an upgrade to my Augs.” I said, narrowing my eyes, “Why did you lie to me?”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “I didn’t lie, the majority of the changes happened in your Augs, it just happened to also require a very minor brain augmentation too.”

  “Next time I do any upgrades I want you to inform me of the full extent of the changes ahead of time, got it?”

  “Can do.” The intelligence left Deadbeat’s eyes, and the bear went back to cleaning up.

  “Smart ass.” I whispered, before I resumed cleaning Bob’s internal fluids off my arm.

  I was still cleaning up the area when Angeline started swearing. “Motherfucker. How the fuck did they manage this? The edges are too straight, is this man made?”

  “What’s up,” I asked as I wandered over. “You’re not usually so… expressive.”

  Angeline looked over at me, her goggles flickering as the interior displays changed. “Take a look,” she hissed as she shared a feed.

  I pulled it up, curious at what got her all riled up, and groaned when I saw it. “What the fuck is this?”

  The feed, which contained the view from multiple squirrels spliced together, showed a massive hole in the outer wall, about two kilometres ahead of the column. It looked like there used to be a building in front of the hole at one point, but it had been knocked down by the Antithesis to get through. The worst part was there was a small, but steady, stream of Antithesis coming through.

  “See how clean the sides are?” Angeline asked, “It probably started as a smuggler’s tunnel or something. There were no cameras pointed that direction, intentionally I would guess, so I wouldn’t even have noticed without the squirrels. I doubt the city administration would have left this alone, if they knew, so it must have been camouflaged before. Considering how messed up the surrounding area is, I suspect this might be one of the first places the Antithesis penetrated.”

  “Right.” I chewed on my lip for a minute, considering the situation. “Let’s move ahead of the column, we need to close off that breach, but I don’t think it’s worth breaking up the column and risk leaving a pocket behind. It’ll only take about half an hour for the rest of the column to catch up, between my squad and the APC full of rabbits I’ve been keeping in reserve, we’ll be able to hold.”

  Angeline considered for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll call Epona and get her to meet us there, then I’ll contact the camp and let them know we have an area that needs to be sealed.”

  I took off towards the front cab without another word, Deadbeat only a few steps behind. The sooner they got that breach sealed the better.

  As I turned the truck towards our destination I saw Epona in the distance, blur off towards our destination. She would definitely arrive before we did.

  It only took a couple minutes to make it to our destination. Even with all the devastation around the ugly, square hole was impossible to miss. Not only was it big enough to drive a truck through, but there were a number of the smaller models pouring through. Caitlin was already standing directly in the breach, her lance glowed white for a moment before incinerating a Twelve charging her way. With the larger Antithesis taken care of, she started smashing some of the smaller ones while áine, her horse, trampled others.

  I quickly found a side-street to park in, but before the truck even hit the ground I received a call from Caitlin. I could see her quickly backing away from the breach.

  [We have a problem, Model Twenty-Three at the breach.]

  She wheeled her horse around and took off just moments before a massive reptilian head snapped down on her former position. As if that wasn’t bad enough, as the titanic bipedal monster cleared the breach another showed up behind it.

  [Actually, make that two.]

  and gain access to my full backlog for all stories!

  Here's the link:

  server!

  Here's the link:

  Check out my Stories:

  Big thanks to all those people that review my draft, the chapters would be a lot rougher without your feedback!