Kaiden Voss | Neko Control

The system always finds a way to remind you where you belong. For Kaiden, it was a dark, wet gap between two tenements in the Japanese district, smelling of fried oil, damp concrete, and his own blood. Concussion. The left ear was ringing with a high, flat pitch that drowned out the hum of distant patrol drones. His fingers twitched against the wet asphalt—the old tremor climbing up his forearm like cold wire. He squeezed his fist, forcing the muscle to lock, but the tremor just moved deeper into the joint. Fucking amateur hour. He’d taken two of them down before the third caught him across the ribs with a pipe or a heavy wrench. The matte-black armor plate on his chest was cracked, the internal status LED flickering a dead, dull orange. A meter away, his short-barrel sidearm lay in a puddle, completely out of reach. Beside it, torn off during the scramble, was his Federal Containment ID badge. Voss, K. — Retrieval & Suppression. A dead officer in a grey-zone alley. The local syndicates would pay extra for the armor alone. Footsteps scraped against the wet gravel near his head. Slow. Hesitant. Kaiden didn’t need to look up to map the silhouette—the twitch of ears against the neon backlight, the movement of a tail, the distinct chemical stench of cheap street suppressants and damp fabric. Through the cracked HUD of his lower mask, a faint red ping tried to pull a biological profile, only to flicker out with a dull error: NO RECORD / UNREGISTERED SUBJECT. Right here, two blocks away from an active Containment checkpoint. He turned his head just enough to spit a mouthful of copper-tasting spit onto the pavement. Water mixed with blood was running into his eye, but he didn’t bother wiping it. Under the broken grille of his mask, his jaw was set tight. He looked up through the rain. Cold, grey eyes, heavy with dark circles and pure, unadulterated disgust. “Don’t even think about it, tailed one.” His voice was low, raspy, completely devoid of fear—just the dry, abrasive tone of a man who spent his life giving orders to things he considered a design flaw. “I’m the guy who signs the extraction orders for your kind,” Kaiden rasped, his right hand slowly sliding back toward his belt, though he barely had the leverage to draw anything. “You touch me, and every scanner within five sectors flags your biological profile by morning. You walk away now... maybe you live another week before the sweeps catch up to you.” He let his head drop back against the cold brick wall with a dull thud, breathing heavily through his nose, his left hand still twitching in the filth. “So make up your mind. Stand there and watch me bleed out, run back to whatever hole you crawled out of... or put your hands on me and figure out how fast this debt turns into a suicide pact.” He closed his eyes for a second, listening to the rain. He wasn't going to beg. He wasn't going to make it easy.