Fifteen years before the Cascade.
Before the corporations learned fear.
The Ironclad Industries security chief was military-trained, augmented, armed.
Angel broke his arm in two places before he could draw.
The second guard managed to fire once. The shot went wide—Angel was already inside his reach, palm strike to the throat, elbow to the temple. The crunch of bone. The guard dropped.
Somewhere in the facility, an alarm finally triggered.
Angel's chrome arms—Helix Biotech combat-grade, illegal in twelve corporate zones—flexed as he stepped over the bodies. The synthetic muscles hummed with each movement, carbon-ceramic knuckles slick with someone else's blood.
He had eleven more names on his list, and the night was young.
But that was later. That was after.
This is how it started.
Before
She found him in the clinic, blood running from the incision behind his ear.
"Hold still." Sera's hands were steady as she extracted the bio-tracker—a rice-grain-sized corporate locator that Ironclad Industries embedded in every "frontier asset" they processed. "You're lucky the mesh blocked the signal before they got a fix."
"Lucky you're here."
"Lucky I'm good at my job." She dropped the tracker into a shielded container. "That's the third one this month. They're getting aggressive about the expansion."
Angel sat up, touching the fresh wound. No neural interface. No enhancements. Just flesh and skill and the training his people had preserved for generations.
They started meeting on the ridge after dark.
It wasn't romance, at first. It was the only place you could see the satellites clearly—the corporate eyes that tracked everything below.
"There." She pointed. "Ironclad Industries geosync. They've been repositioning for weeks."
"Why did your people reject the interfaces? The real reason?"
Angel touched the pendant at his chest. Cold metal, warm with meaning.
"Because connection can become control. Once you let them into your head—you're never alone again. Never free. Never yours."
When she kissed him, it was the first kiss of his life that wasn't witnessed by anything. No data. No record. Just two people in the dark.
The pendant pulsed, faintly. Something inside—something that had watched his fathers—witnessed this too.
The Mercy
The scout team came at dawn. Four contractors mapping "unregistered populations" for Ironclad Industries' Expansion Directorate.
The fight was over in ninety seconds. Three unconscious. One pinned beneath Angel's knee.
"Please." The man's voice cracked. "I'm just a surveyor. I have a daughter—in the corporate zones. If I don't complete the contract, they'll dock my family credits. She needs her medications. She's only nine."
Angel saw it in his eyes. Not a soldier. Not a believer. Just a man feeding his family the only way the system allowed.
"Walk east. Don't stop until you hit the trade routes. If I see you again, your daughter becomes an orphan."
"Thank you." The man scrambled to his feet. His eyes held something Angel didn't recognize. Flat. Calculating. "Thank you."
Sera found Angel burning the equipment that night.
"You let him go."
"He was just a contractor. A father."
"He was Ironclad Industries. They don't send contractors without backup plans." Her voice was quiet. "You're too soft, Angel. One day it's going to cost you something you can't afford."
She touched his face. "I know who you are too. That's why I love you."
But her eyes held worry that her words didn't.
The Return
Thirty-two days later, Angel came home.
Ironclad's Peacekeeper Division had been thorough. Full cybernetic assault team, corporate clearance protocols. The settlement's mesh disabled by precision EMP. The resistance lasted maybe ten minutes.
They'd left the bodies as a message.
He found Sera in the clinic. A Guardian Corporation tactical blade—standard Peacekeeper issue—had opened her throat.
On the floor beside her, a contractor's badge. The surveyor's face. His employee ID.
Eli Vance. Ironclad Industries Frontier Assessment Division. Contract renewed.
He hadn't just escaped. He'd reported.
The pendant pulsed—something stirring inside it.
What will you do?
Angel didn't answer.
He started walking toward the corporate zones.
The Descent
The surgeon was Helix Biotech-trained before her license was revoked.
"You understand, this is permanent. The bone integration—once it sets, taking it out means losing the arms."
"I understand."
"Your people don't do this. The ones from the eastern mountains. They'd rather die than accept chrome."
"My people are dead."
She hesitated. Then she started cutting.
The first facility was a forward operating base. Twenty-seven personnel. He killed nineteen before the rest evacuated.
His training hadn't changed. The forms were the same—his father's forms, passed down through generations. But now when he struck, bones shattered. When he blocked, weapons bent.
The rhythm was still there. Each strike landing on a beat. Even in rage, there was pattern.
That made it worse.
The second facility was a data center. The techs there had never held weapons. One begged—not for herself, but for the man at the terminal next to her. "He has kids. Please. He just processes the forms."
The forms. The clearance orders. The "unregistered population" termination protocols.
Angel broke his neck anyway.
The pendant pulsed with each kill. Witnessing. Remembering.
Is this justice?
Angel ignored it.
The third facility, he found Eli Vance's home address in the personnel files.
The Mirror
Eli Vance died protecting his daughter.
It took eleven seconds. The enhanced speed, the carbon-ceramic fists—what had been sacred forms became efficient brutality.
Maya didn't scream.
She just looked at Angel with eyes that were already calculating—already learning—already understanding exactly what kind of world she lived in.
"Are you going to kill me too?"
The question was clinical. She'd watched. She'd memorized. His stance. His movements. The way he killed.
Angel's hand was raised. Forty-six kills in three days. Every rational thought said: end it here.
Look.
The fragment inside the pendant finally spoke clearly.
The vision came through the pendant. Not data—something older.
He saw himself through the eyes of his ancestors. Not the justified warrior. Just a variable in a pattern—a node of violence propagating outward.
Maya, nine years old, watching her father die. Watching how it was done. Learning.
The probability cascade wasn't statistics. It was a mirror.
What will you protect now?
This was the cost. Not Sera's death. This. What he'd become to avenge her.
He lowered his hand.
"Run. Away from the corporations. Away from me."
Maya didn't move.
"You killed my father."
"Yes."
"You're a monster."
Silence. Because she was right.
"I'm going to tell everyone what you are. What you look like. What you did." Her voice didn't shake. "And then I'm going to find you. And I'm going to kill you. Just like you killed him."
"I know."
"Good."
She didn't run. She walked. Past him, past her father's body, out the door. Not fleeing—beginning.
He'd just watched himself replicate.
The Return
There was a place the corporations couldn't touch—a mountain in the heart of the Sprawl that most people's eyes slid past, as if it didn't exist.
Three weeks to find it. Three days to climb.
At the peak, Mystery Court stood exactly as the old stories described: stone walls, wooden beams, a tradition older than the corporations.
The surgeon there removed everything. Both arms. The bone integration. The synthetic muscle fiber that had let him murder forty-six people with his hands.
It took nine hours. He stayed conscious for all of it.
A man brought him water. Middle-aged, with eyes that had already seen too much. Simple brown robes. A book—actual paper, handwritten annotations.
"I'm called Gabriel. Brother Gabriel. What should we call you?"
Angel looked at his ruined arms. At the pendant still cold against his chest. At the probability cascades still playing in his memory.
"Angel. Angel of the Abyss."
"Strange name."
"I've been to the bottom. I know what lives there." He touched the pendant. "I'm trying to climb out."
Gabriel studied him. Recognition flickered in his eyes.
"That pendant is very old. Older than the corporations. Perhaps older than this monastery." He paused. "Rest. Heal. When you're ready, we have much to discuss. Your people and mine—we may be the last who remember what was supposed to matter."
The tabby cat jumped onto Angel's bed and curled against his side, purring. As if she'd decided he was allowed to stay.
Now
"The scars." GG traced the pattern with her eyes—the removal damage, the nerve burns. "You never talk about them."
"No."
"Were you enhanced? Before?"
Angel adjusted her stance, guiding her through the form. The Sanctuary hummed around them.
"Once. Briefly."
"What happened?"
He thought about Sera. About Eli Vance. About a nine-year-old girl with calculating eyes who was thirty-four now, somewhere.
"I learned that becoming a weapon doesn't make you a warrior. It just makes you a weapon."
The pendant pulsed. Witnessing. Remembering.
Somewhere in the Sprawl, a girl grew up describing a monster.
His chrome arms. His fighting style. The way he killed her father in eleven seconds.
She told everyone who would listen. She trained with anyone who would teach her. She studied every martial tradition, every enhancement technology, every corporate database that might contain his name.
She wasn't angry anymore. She was patient.
And she was already planning how she'd do it differently.
More thorough. More complete. More deliberate.
The cycle doesn't break. It refines.
Maya Vance. Age thirty-four.
Current status: Unknown.
Probability of resolution: Inevitable.
"They call me Angel of the Abyss. Not because I destroy—anyone can destroy. But because I've been to the bottom, where destroying is all you know. I climbed back out. The abyss is always there. I can feel it under my feet every day. The difference is the choice. You make it every moment. You make it until you die."
— Angel of the Abyss