Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats. / Chapter 79 / 130

Chapter 79 - Steel Against Silicon

The grip around Naomi’s airway was absolute, choking off oxygen in a brutal vice. Her vision blurred at the edges, spots of gray dancing across the red emergency lights.

"Look at her," Vanessa laughed from above, her voice echoing through the chamber. "The legendary Nine-Zero-Four, dangling like a broken doll! Break her neck, Prime! Show her what a real masterpiece looks like!"

Ethan fired a burst from his rifle, the bullets sparking harmlessly off Prime’s back plate. The juggernaut didn't even turn his head; his focus was locked entirely on crushing Naomi’s windpipe.

Naomi didn't panic. Her heart rate, instead of spiking in terror, dropped into that cold, bottomless state of tactical hyper-focus. She looked into Prime’s glowing, unfeeling eyes. He was faster, stronger, and felt no pain. But he was programmed. And programs had loops.

She stopped fighting the grip. Instead, she swung her legs upward, locking her boots around Prime’s extended elbow joint in an inverted scissor hold. With a violent twist of her entire core, she redirected his own kinetic torque, dislocating the hydraulic armature in his shoulder with a deafening metallic screech.

Prime’s grip loosened. Naomi dropped to the floor, gasping for air, but swept his legs out from under him before he could rebalance.

As Prime crashed onto his back, Naomi didn't strike his armored chest. She drew the small, tungsten-carbide hairpin she had hidden in the seam of her gray uniform sleeve—the simple piece of metal she had worn every single day at Whitmore House.

With an explosive downward thrust, she drove the tungsten pin directly into the neural interface port exposed behind his right ear.

A violent surge of blue static arced through Prime’s skull. His limbs seized in an uncontrollable spasm as the foreign metal short-circuited the biological link between his brainstem and the cybernetic harness. He let out a low, robotic wheeze before collapsing entirely, his amber ocular lights flickering out into darkness.

The chamber fell dead silent.

Vanessa stepped back from the railing, her face draining of all color, the smug triumph instantly replaced by naked terror.