3:33am, Friday the 10th October, 2132.

Aiden watched as the newly arrived bikers came shooting down the road towards him, their headlights so blinding that he was forced to shield his eyes with his arm. He was expecting them to attack him, to run him down just as the others had tried, but they did not. Instead, they came skidding to a halt in a semi-circle around him, and aimed guns and bats and other miscellaneous weapons in his direction.

“Who are you?” Asked one of them. The rider speaking was a man but his face was covered by his helmet, and Aiden found his own warped image reflected back at him from his visor, dancing in the lights of the street.

“Right now? No-one,” Aiden said. “But if you try to attack me again? Then I’m your enemy.”

“Are they still alive?” The biker asked, looking to the two riders who were still sprawled across the street. One of them had been moaning under the weight of his bike not thirty seconds earlier, but had since passed out. As for the other, Aiden had no idea.

“Who knows? Maybe if you let me go you’ll have enough time to see for yourself,” Aiden replied.

“I saw what you could do. You must have some serious enhancements. But don’t think for a minute that you have the advantage here. We’ll keep shooting until you’re nothing more than a bloody mess, and then we’ll shoot you some more.”

Aiden paused. For once, the threat directed at him was a threat he probably couldn’t ignore. There were so many of them, and so many guns, that even he wasn’t sure he could survive such an onslaught. He had no idea the extent of his regenerative abilities, but it had to have its limits. “I wasn’t the one who attacked your gang,” he finally told them, lowering his arm as he grew used to the blinding lights. “Your gang attacked me.”

“There’s a contract out on someone matching your description, and I don’t believe in coincidences,” the biker said.

“Fuck this,” said another of them. “Let’s just shoot him.”

“You think he’s worth it?” The biker snapped rhetorically. “You saw what he did. You really think he won’t take another couple of us out before we put him down? The pay isn’t enough for that shit, and we need to get Kaya and Ryo to a damn hospital.”

The biker looked at Aiden with disdain. “Whoever you are, back the hell away and we’ll let you go clean.”

Though leaving without violence was exactly what Aiden wanted, the biker’s concern for his fallen comrades reminded him that he wasn’t the only one being hunted. He barely knew the Centipedes, and ordinarily wouldn’t have cared what happened to them, but Hiromi changed things. He still felt guilty about what he had almost done to her, and even if it had only been for a short time, she – like Nami – had offered him help he hadn’t deserved. Perhaps he could at least repay that favour.

“And if I do, what’s to stop you just coming after me again?” Aiden asked. “Or going after the Centipedes?”

“The Mukade?” The Biker replied. “What do you care about them?”

“Just because they’re not my allies does not mean I’ll walk away so you can kill them,” Aiden answered. “The only reason you’re out here tonight is because of Sarratt, isn’t it? Because he fucked up, and now he’s throwing enough money around to convince other people to clean up his mess.”

The biker group seemed to hesitate at Sarratt’s name, confirming to Aiden that they knew him. And if they knew him, then they were probably scared of him.

“I don’t know what the price is, but I’m willing to bet it’s high,” Aiden said. “Do you know why it’s high?”

“Because you’re dangerous,” the biker replied.

Aiden corrected them with a shake of his head. “Because Sarratt thinks I’m dangerous. I’ll leave and let you get your friends, sure, but the Centipedes are now the subject of an agreement between us. If anything happens to them, if I find you’ve taken them out, or harmed their leader Yuji, or the woman Hiromi, then that agreement will be broken. And if it’s broken, then you won’t have to worry about coming after me. Because I’ll be coming after all of you. Do you understand?”

The bikers seemed to falter, their courage failing against the conviction of Aiden’s words. Slowly, their helmeted leader lowered his weapon. “Fine, I understand,” he said. “We’re done here.”

One by one, the Kumo lowered their weapons, and watched as Aiden stepped back away from them. When he felt comfortably distanced Aiden turned, then ran off through the nearest side-street and disappeared.

Left alone, one of the bikers released a sigh. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know,” said the helmeted one. “Let’s grab Kaya and Ryo and go.”

Several of them dismounted and ran to where their comrades had fallen. They pulled the bike off of one, and ran to the glass window that the other had gone through. Both were injured – cut and broken and unconscious – but they were carried back towards the group’s bikes and carefully seated so that they might ride without falling.

“Ryo’s bike is done for,” said one of them. “It’s wrapped around the damn lamppost. We can save the other, though.”

“Leave it here,” said their leader. “We got no-one to ride it and I’m surprised the cops aren’t already here.”

“Bummer. It was a damn nice bike, too.”

All of a sudden, there was a loud bang, and an armour-piercing sniper round put a hole straight through two of the bikers that was big enough to put a fist through.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“What the-“

A second round hit another in the head, taking it clean off his shoulders. Then, while the rest of them were still not entirely sure what was happening, small-arms fire began to pop and crack against the road from buildings on both sides of the street, and another of them was killed.

Their leader screamed, a cold and genuine terror in his voice. Those who still lived rushed to mount and drift around and then accelerate back down the street they had come from. One of the bikes got barely halfway down before it was knocked out from beneath its rider, sliding and screaming across the road and then bursting into flames.

As the survivors fled, rifle fire spitting against the ground between their wheels, they passed a large, bearded man. His hands were empty, and yet he stood in the middle of the road with a brown coat that fell to shins above naked feet. They swerved and rode around him, ignoring him completely, but as the last bike made to pass, the man reached out a hand and caught its rider like a ball.

Even before he hit the ground, the biker was dead. His head was crushed by an inhuman grip, and in the aftermath, the man in the coat turned to watch the survivors screech away into the distance.

“Get rid of the evidence,” the man said. Then, with his bones cracking and popping, and his teeth bared in a disgusting growl, he lowered himself to his hands and feet and began to sprint down the road on all fours.

The Spiders were fast on their bikes, but the man in the coat was faster. Within ten seconds he was already behind one of them, and leaped forwards through the air to make a wild, slashing motion with a now-clawed hand. It shredded the flesh of the gangster’s back, sending both her and her bike shrieking into the side of the road.

The beast kept sprinting. He dashed from side to side, escaping the same oncoming traffic of commuters and police vehicles that the surviving bikers were avoiding, and soon he was gaining on them again like a hound on a hare. There were three of them left now, and those at the rear turned with their guns and began to fire at the beast, who moved like some black terror through the city’s streets. He dodged this way and that, shrugging off any bullet that hit him with no more than a grunt.

One of the bikers lost balance and fell of their own accord, and the man jumped over them and left them to be hit by a car. Suddenly, the two remaining bikers were braking and screeching, and swerving around a sharp corner to take a quieter road. With far more finesse and control than they had, the creature came into a drifting slide, and shot off after them again on the very point of the turn. He barely lost his speed, but the bikes had, and so he jumped from road to wall, then from wall to the back of the rearmost bike, and tore the rider from their seat.

In utter terror, the only survivor abandoned his bike. He braked, hard, sending the creature shooting off in front of him, then dove to the ground as soon as it was safe enough to do so. He slid and rolled across the road until a chain-link fence caught him, and then he groaned, trying to find the strength to crawl into the shadows and hide.

There were footsteps behind him.

Each press of foot on the ground, though soft, sounded like metal hitting against stone. Terrified, the biker swung around with his pistol and began to fire. The beast moved out of the way of the bullets – first right, then left, then right again – so fast that he hardly appeared to move at all. Before long, the biker’s gun clicked.

The man in the torn coat smiled as he approached, his long hair dark and mottled with blood. He reached down and picked the biker up with one hand and then, with cold, silver eyes, stared through the visor and into the terrified face beyond.

“Do not worry,” the beast said, his voice and accent almost soothing. “Your loved ones will never find your body to see what I will do it.”

The biker tried to scream, but his throat was torn open by teeth before he got the chance to do so.

3:51am, Friday the 10th October, 2132.

Aiden had circled out around where the bikers had attacked him, then made a wide berth through back alleys and over walls until his route took him back to the road he had been told about. The gravroad was filled with blur of coloured lights, each belonging to a vehicle moving almost too fast for him to see. Below it, a second road passed beneath the bridge the gravroad was built on.

He passed to the other side of the bridge and turned south. There, the number of pedestrians, and their general wealth, increased with the height of the buildings around them. Those buildings were financial centres, banks, shopping areas, hotels, downtown apartments, and corporate headquarters – each bustling even in the middle of the night – and each so high they looked as though they could touch the stars.

Aiden stood out significantly more there than where Sarratt had approached him, and he had little doubt that every security device in the vicinity would be noticing his tattered, bloody clothes. Hopefully, he would be gone before the police had chance investigate.

Eventually, just as Shinran had promised, the black-windows of the Aoi-Tori Apartment Building rose up on the far side of the street. Aiden dodged through traffic to cross the road and reach it, and the blue of the building’s name sign was so bright that it lit the pavement below like street lights. Wasting no time, he walked through the entrance’s automated doors and into a lobby that was structurally similar to the abandoned tower he had seen Yuji, but different in that it was finely-furbished, well-lit, and occupied by several people going about their business.

“Um, excuse me?” Aiden asked the receptionist, a woman who sat behind a locked desk and typing on her table-screen.

“How may I help you, Sir?” The woman asked, not even lifting her eyes to look at him.

“I’m here to see Zhan Xinyue? In apartment 1081?”

The woman stopped typing. Then, with her nose somehow looking down at him even though he was above her, she examined him and his clothes and shook her head. “Is that right?” She asked. “Please leave, or I will call security.”

“What?” Aiden asked in shock. “I’ve not done anything.”

“No, but you’re clearly here to change that.”

“Look, Mr. Xinyue asked me to come here,” Aiden lied.

The woman raised her eyebrows above her glasses. “Then you already have the prerequisite visitor’s card,” she said, and turned a small scanning machine towards him. “Please sign in.”

Aiden stood there for a moment and then sighed. “I forgot it.”

“Did you?” The woman asked, the sarcasm in her voice almost painful. She pressed a button on her desk and suddenly two large security guards approached, trying to restrain him.

“Hey! Let go of me!” He complained, though in truth he did not put up much of a struggle. He did not want to harm them simply for doing their jobs, and he had no interest in causing any more of a scene than he had to.

As they began to drag Aiden towards the door, and as the woman went back to her typing, a voice suddenly called out for them to stop.

“Um, excuse me! There’s been a mistake. He’s telling the truth!” Said a young man, who came running out of the elevator towards them wearing a labcoat over a set of pyjamas. Aiden recognized him immediately as Zhang, and when the security guards noticed him, they paused and let him go.

“He’s with me! I called him out here!” Said the doctor, marching across the lobby in fluffy slippers until he could grab Aiden by the arm and pull him back towards the elevator. “I know it’s quite a strange time, but I assure you there’s nothing strange going on!”

Before anyone could stop them, Aiden found the elevator doors closing to block the lobby from his view.

“Dr. Xinyue, I’-” Aiden began, but the doctor cut him off. He had tried to introduce himself, had tried to ask the doctor how he knew that he was coming, but Zhang simply shook his head and pressed a button to send the elevator up.

“I know who you are, Aiden King. What I don’t know is how you’re still alive.”