Proxy’s first thought when he saw her eyes was that the personality card he had been updating since the courtyard on day one had a new entry he did not have the knowledge to complete yet. Amber he knew. Blue he had seen once at distance across a golf course fairway. This was not amber. It was not blue.

It was a new color, which meant the card was open and incomplete, and he did not have enough information yet.

The shotgun fired.

The round hit the yard surface four meters to his left, the impact throwing grit up in a short spread. The gang leader had the weapon back in his right hand, braced against his thigh from one knee, the smart-link targeting wire running from the grip up to the port at his wrist.

His left arm was gone below the elbow. The stump was pressed against the chest plate of his armor, the only compress available, and the blood soaking down the plate had already gone dark and thick at the edges.

None of that had made him stop.

Proxy moved right, toward the debris field from the collapsed roof section. Large pieces of corrugated metal and conduit had come down across the right side of the yard and the corrugated panel he reached was heavy and layered. He pressed behind it and went into the network.

The gang leader’s armor servo system was still broadcasting on the network. He pushed into the servo sync signal, introducing timing inconsistency into the shoulder and elbow joints of the right arm. What he could force was a fractional lag, nerve signals arriving before the servo could honor them, the arm responding a beat behind what the man inside it intended.

The gang leader fired again. He had tracked Proxy’s movement toward the debris cover and he was experienced enough to lead the target. The round punched through the outer layer of the corrugated panel, deformed against the second layer, and stopped.

The tip of it was visible from Proxy’s side as a blunt protrusion in the metal, pressing inward without breaking through. The panel held.

"Fuckin’ piece of trash."

The breath behind his voice was shorter now, the blood loss and pain taking its toll.

Proxy came around the right side of the panel and fired twice at his position. The first round hit the chest plate and sparked off the surface. The second round went two meters wide because he was still a netrunner and the distance was far enough and those two facts remained consistent regardless of circumstance.

But the first round’s impact registered. The gang leader’s right arm had to respond to incoming fire from the right while the servo timing lag was active, and the arm arrived at the aim point late.

He fired. The round hit the yard surface between them.

From the fuel cylinder housing on the left side of the yard, Jinx leaned around the housing and raised her right pistol. She was looking at the targeting wire running along gang leader’s right arm, the thin line from the grip to the wrist port, routed along the outer surface of the armor and pinned to it by three small brackets that had been welded in place at some point in the weapon’s history.

She fired.

The round hit the armor surface near the second bracket, deforming the plating inward along the wire’s channel. The bracket’s housing crumpled against it, pinching the wire’s outer casing against the plate.

The smart-link signal degraded, the targeting data feeding into gang leader’s wrist implant becoming imprecise, the system reporting wrongly.

"Another damn bitch," he grunted.

Proxy advanced from the debris cover, moving left across the yard while keeping the servo disruption active through the deck. The disruption required continuous input. He fired once more while moving, forcing the gang leader’s attention right while Jinx had pulled it left. The round went into the yard nowhere near the target and accomplished what cover fire was supposed to accomplish, which was making someone process an additional direction.

The gang leader’s right arm tracked toward Proxy. The tracking arrived two tenths of a second after the intent sent it there. He fired the shotgun regardless.

The round came across the yard and passed through the fabric of Proxy’s jacket over the left hip and hit the bony ridge of the hip, the edge of the pelvis, and did not penetrate.

The jacket tore open along a six-centimeter line and the round’s passage across bone transmitted through Proxy’s entire left side in one immediate impact that staggered him one step right. He did not go down. He noted it was just a graze and kept moving.

He was five meters away from his opponent.

The gang leader looked at him. The chrome on his jaw, the chrome on the orbital above his left eye and the one biological eye that was wet at the corner from pain.

His right arm was bringing the shotgun back toward center, the servo lag making the motion visible as something mechanical rather than natural. The stump of his left arm had shifted from the chest plate slightly, the blood at the armor’s surface was thicker now, running freely in the groove between the chest section and the ab plate, dripping from the lower edge in a steady line.

He had not conceded. He was going to fire again.

Proxy raised the handgun at the upper right portion of the skull, above the right ear, where the chrome from the orbital stopped and the bone began, where there was nothing between the round and the flesh underneath it.

At four meters. With the smart-link degraded and the servo disrupted and the blood loss having brought him to this position from one knee. The clearest shot Proxy had been offered.

He fired.

The round entered above the right ear. The skull took the blunt impact and the gang leader did not make a sound. He did not go backward, dramatically, the way it tends to look when depicted. He settled down.

The armor distributed his body downward through its contact points with the yard surface, and the enormous frame that had been held together by hardware and refusal went from kneeling to a bloody mess of metal and flesh on the ground without any additional noise.

The shotgun was still in his hand.

Proxy stood over him for one breath. He did not say anything. He checked the weapon, the magazine and holstered it against his hip.

He looked at Jinx. She was still behind the fuel cylinder housing, both pistols down, looking at the yard surface where the corpse was. Then she looked at Proxy.

"Is she okay," Jinx said.

She did not clarify who she meant. It was obvious enough.

Proxy looked east. "Obviously." he said, even if he couldn’t know for sure.

The yard’s far section was lit by the emergency floor strips and the orange glow from the hub’s interior through the partially collapsed wall and ceiling.

He could not see them clearly. What he could see was the aftermath of positions, a part of wall where something had struck it and left a mark, a track in the disturbed yard surface, the displacement of a fight operating faster than his eyes could track.

He heard impact. Short and irregular. The rhythm of two close-range exchanges happening at pauses he could not predict.

He pushed the cyberware outward into the yard’s eastern network, extending the scan through the zone’s infrastructure toward where the two power signatures were. Both still present. Both active, both pulling the specific load of implants at full output.

He caught a glimpse of movement at the corner of his visual range, one figure and then the other, too fast to hold, a blur into a position that was already somewhere else. He saw Nyx’s knife hand for half a second before she had already moved past the position that showed it to him.

She was still fighting. That was all he could confirm.

He watched the eastern yard and waited.