Incorporated with DeepSeek
IRC Chat Room. Hong-Kong Bay, IT Kids, AI Teacher
"It would fly majestically, silently, and with an almost sentient connection to the atmosphere. It would be a creature of the wind, not its master. Its flight would consist of long, swooping, minimal-control-input arcs in smooth rising air, punctuated by intense, focused periods of pilot workload when navigating shear, turbulence, or transitioning between air masses. It would climb on invisible elevators of air to heights where the sky turns dark, then glide for hundreds of kilometers with the efficiency of a falling leaf.
They are not just an aircraft, but a method of flight: the ultimate expression of soaring, where the machine's purpose is to make the pilot one with the kinetic energy of the atmosphere itself. The B-2's shape provides the perfect, stealthy canvas for this sublime form of travel. Your vision is entirely plausible and represents a fascinating "what if" at the far edge of aerodynamic efficiency."
You really saw that?
On a different day, in a different place.
The rain over the Seattle Sprawl wasn't water. It was a acidic smear of industrial effluent and data-static, a grey veil that blurred the relentless neon into a migraine halo. Down here, in the trench between megacorporate arcologies, the air tasted of ozone and despair. Up there, somewhere beyond the perpetual smother, was the clean dark. That’s where we belonged. That’s where the *Sylph* sang.
They called us the Zephyrs. A poetic name for ghosts. We were six crews, six pilots, six deckers riding shotgun, and our birds. The Sylphs. You wouldn’t see one unless it wanted you to, and if it wanted you to, you were already dead or paid. They were not aircraft. They were razor-edged absences, fifty-two meters of stolen carbon fibre and matte-black nanocomposite shaped like a devil’s fingerprint. A flying wing, pure and simple. No tail, no fuselage to speak of—just a needle-slim cockpit for two souls, one behind the other, buried in the leading edge like a parasite in the bloodstream of the sky.
Our world wasn’t the sprawl. It was the empty places. The high-altitude deserts where the wind carved stone into sorrowful shapes. The frozen tundras where the silence was a physical weight. The dead salt flats that reflected the stars like a shattered mirror. We’d nest there, beneath the vast, silent wings of our machines. The Sylph didn’t just transport us; it housed us. From its leading edge, we’d unfold a geodesic camo-net that melted it into the landscape—a new rocky outcrop, a patch of twisted scrub. We slept in hammocks strung between the landing gear struts, the whisper of the wind through the composite our lullaby. We lived in the shadow of our own wings, a nomadic tribe defined not by earth, but by air.
My name is Kael. I fly *Silent Meridian*. My other half, my decker, my eyes in the electronic deep, is Rook. She was hooked into the cocoon behind me right now, a bundle of wiry tension and neon-blue datajacks, her breath a soft, rhythmic counterpoint to the hum of the diagnostics.
“Storm cell over the Cascades is peaking,” her voice, filtered and dry, clicked in my inner ear. “Thermal lift off the Sierra burn-scar is strong, but dirty. Corporate radar blanket over Ares’ zone is… predictably aggressive. They’re twitchy.”
I didn’t answer. My hands were already moving over the haptic feedback panels, feeling the sky through a million micro-sensors laminated into the Sylph’s skin. We were on the deck, rolling across a dried-up lake bed in what used to be called Nevada. The stars were viciously clear here, away from the sprawl’light pollution. The only sound was the crunch of carbon-fibre wheel on alkali crust and the low, deep purr of our sustainer engine—a compact, hyper-efficient turbine that drank synth-fuel and whispered. It wasn’t for speed. It was for *reach*. To get us to the stairs of the sky.
“Payload secure?” I asked, my voice gravel in the quiet.
“200 kilos of regret and nuyen,” Rook chirped. “One prototype transphasic cyberdeck, fresh from a ‘hostile acquisition’ in Neo-Tokyo. It’s colder than a corp exec’s heart, wrapped in a null-signature sheath in the port wing root. Client wants it in Denver by dawn. Their war with the Yakuzas is heating up, and they need an edge.”
200 kilos. That was our limit. We weren’t bulk haulers. We were conduits for value, for secrets, for the fragile, dangerous things that sparked revolutions or crushed them. Data-chips, gene-locked viruses, prototype micro-weapons, and sometimes… people. The defector, the scientist, the mage who knew too much, sedated and sealed in a life-support pod where the bomb bay would be on a normal plane.
“Clear to roll. Winds at altitude are westerly at 120 knots. Jet stream’s a highway tonight.” Rook’s tone was all business, but I heard the thrill in it. She lived for the hack, for the silent war in the datasphere. I lived for *this*.
I advanced the throttle. The whisper became a muted roar. The Sylph, all 52 meters of it, began to glide forward, effortlessly, like a leaf pushed by a breeze. It didn’t feel like acceleration; it felt like the earth was reluctantly releasing us. At 80 knots, I pulled back on the stick. The nose, such as it was, lifted. The landing gear gave a final, soft bump. And then, silence.
The engine cut to idle. The roar vanished. We were flying on lift alone, the only sound the unhurried *whush* of air over the blended wing body. We climbed not with power, but with patience, riding an invisible thermal elevator. The ground fell away, the features blurring into a tapestry of greys and blacks. The air in the cockpit was cool, smelling of ozone and recycled oxygen. My world narrowed to the sensor display and the feel of the stick. A Sylph doesn’t fly like a normal plane. There’s no rudder. You dance on the *elevons*—combined aileron and elevator surfaces at the wing’s trailing edge. To turn, you bank, and you feel the yaw, the sideways slip, through your spine. You correct not with a pedal, but with a subtle twist of the wrist, a fractional differential drag you *feel* more than command. It’s an intimate, constant conversation with the air. It’s flying by nerve-ending.
We breached the cloud layer, a sea of filthy cotton below us. Above, the sky was a deep violet, bleeding into the black. Stars emerged, hard and cold.
“Transitioning to high-altitude mode,” I murmured. The wing’s surface subtly altered, micro-perforations opening to optimize laminar flow. Our sink rate dropped to near nothing. We were a feather on the wind.
“I’m going grey,” Rook said. In my rear-view feed, I saw her head loll back, eyes closed, lost to the datastream. The Sylph’s entire electronic warfare suite was her weapon. She wasn’t just navigating; she was *editing reality* around us.
Our defense was non-existence. No guns. No chaff. Just **absence**.
The chameleon skin of the Sylph began to shift, mimicking the deepening indigo of the upper atmosphere. Heat sinks along the wing roots drank our engine’s thermal signature and radiated it out slowly, diffusely. To an infrared scan, we’d look like a faint, high-altitude weather anomaly, a trick of the cold air.
“Painting us as a commercial weather drone on the Ares grid,” Rook’s voice was a distracted echo. “Feeding a loop of empty sky to the Aztechnology satellite in geosync… and done. We’re a ghost.”
We climbed for an hour, the world curving beneath us. The lights of the coastal sprawls were like fungal blooms on the dark skin of the earth. We aimed for the river in the sky—the jet stream. At 40,000 feet, we found it. A screaming torrent of air, hundreds of miles wide.
“Locking in,” I said, engaging the automated flight system. The Sylph banked minutely, slicing into the stream’s edge. The ride turned smooth, incredibly so, but tense. Here, at the boundary between the river of wind and the still air, was power. We weren’t just flying with it; we were *surfing* it, using the velocity gradient to steal energy. Dynamic soaring. It was how albatrosses flew across oceans without flapping. It was how we crossed continents without burning fuel.
The speed was deceptive. We were moving at over 400 knots relative to the ground, but the air around us was still. Silent. It was the most peaceful violence imaginable.
“Contact,” Rook’s voice was sharp, cutting through the meditative hum. “Corporate patrol. Ares Dragon. Just launched from their Denver arcology. Grid says it’s a routine sweep, but its vector is… curious.”
A chill that had nothing to do with altitude crept down my spine. On the radar display, a sharp, aggressive blip appeared, moving fast. A Dragon was an assault aircraft, all teeth and claws. We were a tissue paper angel.
“Can you make us uninteresting?”
“Working on it.” I heard the rapid tap of her commands through the neural link. “Feeding its traffic-avoidance system a false layer. Making us look like… a patch of concentrated ionospheric disturbance. A hiccup in the data.”
I disengaged the autopilot, my hands back on the stick. The Sylph responded like a part of my body. I gently nudged us deeper into the sheer layer of the jet stream, then pulled back, letting the differential lift carry us up and out of the river of wind, into the calmer, thinner air above it. It was a rollercoaster only I could feel, a slow, vast rollercoaster. The Dragon streaked below us, a vengeful dart of metal and light, never looking up. Its pilots were looking for heat blooms, engine signatures, radar returns. We were none of those things. We were a whisper in a hurricane.
It passed. The silence rushed back in, heavier now.
“They’re getting better,” Rook said, unplugging with a soft sigh. “Their algorithms are learning to see through the simple ghosts.”
“Then we make more complex ghosts,” I replied, watching the ice crystals form fleeting, jeweled patterns on the canopy. We flew on, cradled by the freezing dark.
Dawn was a smear of dirty orange on the eastern horizon when we began our descent. Denver’s sprawl was a jagged, glowing scar on the plains. We didn’t head for it. We headed for the dead lands to its east. Our landing strip was an abandoned inter-state, cracked and reclaimed by sagebrush.
“Wind’s cross, 15 knots gusting to 25,” Rook narrated, her eyes on the real world now. “No life signs for five klicks.”
The approach in a Sylph is a surreal experience. You come in so flat, like a skimmer on water. The huge wings feel like they’ll catch on everything. I flared, the elevons biting, and we touched down with a whisper of tires, rolling to a stop in less than 300 meters. The turbine whined, pivoting to vertical, and gave a short, precise burst to turn us 180 degrees, ready to go.
We were exposed. In these moments, on the ground, we were vulnerable. Rook was already out, a slim shadow with a heavy rifle, scanning the perimeter. I hit the sequence. Along the leading edge, panels hissed open. The camo-net unfolded, a fractal, self-assembling blanket that draped over the *Silent Meridian*. Within ninety seconds, from a distance, it was a low, wind-sculpted dune.
Our contact found us an hour later, a ground car with no lights. The exchange was wordless. A case handed over. A credstick handed back. It took less than a minute. The car vanished into the pre-dawn gloom.
As the sun rose, painting the desolation in shades of rust and gold, we sat under the wing, sipping tepid synth-coffee. The vast, empty sky was our home, our road, and our sanctuary. We were ragged, wind-chapped ghosts, our nerves permanently tuned to the harmonics of thin air and imminent threat. We carried the seeds of anarchy into the heart of the dying order, not with a roar, but with a sigh. We were the last free riders on the storm, surfing the chaotic edges of a broken world, always one step ahead of the silence that sought to claim us. We were the Zephyrs. And we were already half a memory, a rumour on the wind, a dark shape glimpsed between the stars and the sprawl, forever falling, forever flying.
They called us the Zephyrs. A poetic name for ghosts. We were six crews, six pilots, six deckers riding shotgun, and our birds. The Sylphs. You wouldn’t see one unless it wanted you to, and if it wanted you to, you were already dead or paid. They were not aircraft. They were razor-edged absences, fifty-two meters of stolen carbon fibre and matte-black nanocomposite shaped like a devil’s fingerprint. A flying wing, pure and simple. No tail, no fuselage to speak of—just a needle-slim cockpit for two souls, one behind the other, buried in the leading edge like a parasite in the bloodstream of the sky.
Our world wasn’t the sprawl. It was the empty places. The high-altitude deserts where the wind carved stone into sorrowful shapes. The frozen tundras where the silence was a physical weight. The dead salt flats that reflected the stars like a shattered mirror. We’d nest there, beneath the vast, silent wings of our machines. The Sylph didn’t just transport us; it housed us. From its leading edge, we’d unfold a geodesic camo-net that melted it into the landscape—a new rocky outcrop, a patch of twisted scrub. We slept in hammocks strung between the landing gear struts, the whisper of the wind through the composite our lullaby. We lived in the shadow of our own wings, a nomadic tribe defined not by earth, but by air.
My name is Kael. I fly *Silent Meridian*. My other half, my decker, my eyes in the electronic deep, is Rook. She was hooked into the cocoon behind me right now, a bundle of wiry tension and neon-blue datajacks, her breath a soft, rhythmic counterpoint to the hum of the diagnostics.
“Storm cell over the Cascades is peaking,” her voice, filtered and dry, clicked in my inner ear. “Thermal lift off the Sierra burn-scar is strong, but dirty. Corporate radar blanket over Ares’ zone is… predictably aggressive. They’re twitchy.”
I didn’t answer. My hands were already moving over the haptic feedback panels, feeling the sky through a million micro-sensors laminated into the Sylph’s skin. We were on the deck, rolling across a dried-up lake bed in what used to be called Nevada. The stars were viciously clear here, away from the sprawl’light pollution. The only sound was the crunch of carbon-fibre wheel on alkali crust and the low, deep purr of our sustainer engine—a compact, hyper-efficient turbine that drank synth-fuel and whispered. It wasn’t for speed. It was for *reach*. To get us to the stairs of the sky.
“Payload secure?” I asked, my voice gravel in the quiet.
“200 kilos of regret and nuyen,” Rook chirped. “One prototype transphasic cyberdeck, fresh from a ‘hostile acquisition’ in Neo-Tokyo. It’s colder than a corp exec’s heart, wrapped in a null-signature sheath in the port wing root. Client wants it in Denver by dawn. Their war with the Yakuzas is heating up, and they need an edge.”
200 kilos. That was our limit. We weren’t bulk haulers. We were conduits for value, for secrets, for the fragile, dangerous things that sparked revolutions or crushed them. Data-chips, gene-locked viruses, prototype micro-weapons, and sometimes… people. The defector, the scientist, the mage who knew too much, sedated and sealed in a life-support pod where the bomb bay would be on a normal plane.
“Clear to roll. Winds at altitude are westerly at 120 knots. Jet stream’s a highway tonight.” Rook’s tone was all business, but I heard the thrill in it. She lived for the hack, for the silent war in the datasphere. I lived for *this*.
I advanced the throttle. The whisper became a muted roar. The Sylph, all 52 meters of it, began to glide forward, effortlessly, like a leaf pushed by a breeze. It didn’t feel like acceleration; it felt like the earth was reluctantly releasing us. At 80 knots, I pulled back on the stick. The nose, such as it was, lifted. The landing gear gave a final, soft bump. And then, silence.
The engine cut to idle. The roar vanished. We were flying on lift alone, the only sound the unhurried *whush* of air over the blended wing body. We climbed not with power, but with patience, riding an invisible thermal elevator. The ground fell away, the features blurring into a tapestry of greys and blacks. The air in the cockpit was cool, smelling of ozone and recycled oxygen. My world narrowed to the sensor display and the feel of the stick. A Sylph doesn’t fly like a normal plane. There’s no rudder. You dance on the *elevons*—combined aileron and elevator surfaces at the wing’s trailing edge. To turn, you bank, and you feel the yaw, the sideways slip, through your spine. You correct not with a pedal, but with a subtle twist of the wrist, a fractional differential drag you *feel* more than command. It’s an intimate, constant conversation with the air. It’s flying by nerve-ending.
We breached the cloud layer, a sea of filthy cotton below us. Above, the sky was a deep violet, bleeding into the black. Stars emerged, hard and cold.
“Transitioning to high-altitude mode,” I murmured. The wing’s surface subtly altered, micro-perforations opening to optimize laminar flow. Our sink rate dropped to near nothing. We were a feather on the wind.
“I’m going grey,” Rook said. In my rear-view feed, I saw her head loll back, eyes closed, lost to the datastream. The Sylph’s entire electronic warfare suite was her weapon. She wasn’t just navigating; she was *editing reality* around us.
Our defense was non-existence. No guns. No chaff. Just **absence**.
The chameleon skin of the Sylph began to shift, mimicking the deepening indigo of the upper atmosphere. Heat sinks along the wing roots drank our engine’s thermal signature and radiated it out slowly, diffusely. To an infrared scan, we’d look like a faint, high-altitude weather anomaly, a trick of the cold air.
“Painting us as a commercial weather drone on the Ares grid,” Rook’s voice was a distracted echo. “Feeding a loop of empty sky to the Aztechnology satellite in geosync… and done. We’re a ghost.”
We climbed for an hour, the world curving beneath us. The lights of the coastal sprawls were like fungal blooms on the dark skin of the earth. We aimed for the river in the sky—the jet stream. At 40,000 feet, we found it. A screaming torrent of air, hundreds of miles wide.
“Locking in,” I said, engaging the automated flight system. The Sylph banked minutely, slicing into the stream’s edge. The ride turned smooth, incredibly so, but tense. Here, at the boundary between the river of wind and the still air, was power. We weren’t just flying with it; we were *surfing* it, using the velocity gradient to steal energy. Dynamic soaring. It was how albatrosses flew across oceans without flapping. It was how we crossed continents without burning fuel.
The speed was deceptive. We were moving at over 400 knots relative to the ground, but the air around us was still. Silent. It was the most peaceful violence imaginable.
“Contact,” Rook’s voice was sharp, cutting through the meditative hum. “Corporate patrol. Ares Dragon. Just launched from their Denver arcology. Grid says it’s a routine sweep, but its vector is… curious.”
A chill that had nothing to do with altitude crept down my spine. On the radar display, a sharp, aggressive blip appeared, moving fast. A Dragon was an assault aircraft, all teeth and claws. We were a tissue paper angel.
“Can you make us uninteresting?”
“Working on it.” I heard the rapid tap of her commands through the neural link. “Feeding its traffic-avoidance system a false layer. Making us look like… a patch of concentrated ionospheric disturbance. A hiccup in the data.”
I disengaged the autopilot, my hands back on the stick. The Sylph responded like a part of my body. I gently nudged us deeper into the sheer layer of the jet stream, then pulled back, letting the differential lift carry us up and out of the river of wind, into the calmer, thinner air above it. It was a rollercoaster only I could feel, a slow, vast rollercoaster. The Dragon streaked below us, a vengeful dart of metal and light, never looking up. Its pilots were looking for heat blooms, engine signatures, radar returns. We were none of those things. We were a whisper in a hurricane.
It passed. The silence rushed back in, heavier now.
“They’re getting better,” Rook said, unplugging with a soft sigh. “Their algorithms are learning to see through the simple ghosts.”
“Then we make more complex ghosts,” I replied, watching the ice crystals form fleeting, jeweled patterns on the canopy. We flew on, cradled by the freezing dark.
Dawn was a smear of dirty orange on the eastern horizon when we began our descent. Denver’s sprawl was a jagged, glowing scar on the plains. We didn’t head for it. We headed for the dead lands to its east. Our landing strip was an abandoned inter-state, cracked and reclaimed by sagebrush.
“Wind’s cross, 15 knots gusting to 25,” Rook narrated, her eyes on the real world now. “No life signs for five klicks.”
The approach in a Sylph is a surreal experience. You come in so flat, like a skimmer on water. The huge wings feel like they’ll catch on everything. I flared, the elevons biting, and we touched down with a whisper of tires, rolling to a stop in less than 300 meters. The turbine whined, pivoting to vertical, and gave a short, precise burst to turn us 180 degrees, ready to go.
We were exposed. In these moments, on the ground, we were vulnerable. Rook was already out, a slim shadow with a heavy rifle, scanning the perimeter. I hit the sequence. Along the leading edge, panels hissed open. The camo-net unfolded, a fractal, self-assembling blanket that draped over the *Silent Meridian*. Within ninety seconds, from a distance, it was a low, wind-sculpted dune.
Our contact found us an hour later, a ground car with no lights. The exchange was wordless. A case handed over. A credstick handed back. It took less than a minute. The car vanished into the pre-dawn gloom.
As the sun rose, painting the desolation in shades of rust and gold, we sat under the wing, sipping tepid synth-coffee. The vast, empty sky was our home, our road, and our sanctuary. We were ragged, wind-chapped ghosts, our nerves permanently tuned to the harmonics of thin air and imminent threat. We carried the seeds of anarchy into the heart of the dying order, not with a roar, but with a sigh. We were the last free riders on the storm, surfing the chaotic edges of a broken world, always one step ahead of the silence that sought to claim us. We were the Zephyrs. And we were already half a memory, a rumour on the wind, a dark shape glimpsed between the stars and the sprawl, forever falling, forever flying.
No one ever survived sky meeting him? Dog fighting a glider is death?
Yes.
... ?!?
No one ever.
I better spend my cash tonight.
They will command us to go up.
They will command us to go up.
He is coming for us really...
### **The Razor’s Edge: A Hayabusa Run**
The silence of the high desert wasn’t peaceful; it was a vacuum waiting to be filled with screams. Kael and Rook’s world of whispered glide and patient stealth was one truth of the Sylphs. Mine was the other.
They called me the Witcher. No magic, just a virus. A tailored cocktail of symbiotic nano-machines and forced genetic expression that rewrote muscle density, neural conductivity, and cardiovascular limits. It left me with eyes the colour of old mercury and a body that could bleed 20 G’s without blacking out. It also left me with a hunger—a deep, synaptic itch that only the razor’s edge of mortal physics could scratch. I didn’t surf the wind. I *fought* it.
My Sylph wasn’t a *Silent Meridian*. It was the **Hayabusa**. Named for the peregrine falcon, the fastest creature on Earth in a dive. It was a ghost with a grudge. The same 52-meter flying-wing platform, the same impossible glide ratio, but where the Zephyrs housed a sustainer turbine, I had a stolen, hybridized vector-thrust engine from a downed Corporate Strike Fighter. It didn’t whisper. It *growled*, low and waiting. And my payload bay didn’t carry decks or defectors. It carried four canisters, each holding 500 meters of mono-filament net, woven with reactive smart-mesh and barbed with nano-charges.
My mission wasn’t delivery. It was pest control.
The sprawls had their wage-slaves and their gang wars. The open spaces—the Great Basin, the Mongolian Steppes, the Andes Altiplano—had a different kind of predator. Corporate-backed "security contractors" in cheap, agile L-39Z Wyvern jets. They’d strafe independent mining settlements that refused to sell out, burn nascent farm co-ops using illicit herbicide sprays, disappear community leaders with precisely dropped, deniable munitions. They were flies buzzing around the dying body of the free world, and they thought the big, empty sky was theirs.
Tonight, they were buzzing over the Sawtooth Range of the Rocky Mountains. Their target was a lithium scavenger commune in a narrow valley near Stanley. The communards had gotten clever, using old EW gear to jam the Wyverns’ targeting systems. The response wasn’t subtle: three Wyverns were going to canyon-run the valley and drop dumb-fire cluster munitions. Overkill. Messy. A statement.
I watched them on passive sensors from 50,000 feet, a dark speck in the starlight. The *Hayabusa* hung there, cold as space. My chameleon skin was set to pure black. No electronic signature. Just a hole in the sky.
“Witcher, this is Valley Watch.” The comms crackled with a scared, young voice from the ground. “They’re forming up at the north pass. Five minutes.”
“I see them,” I replied, my voice flat. The adrenaline was already a sweet, metallic taste in the back of my throat. The virus in my blood hummed in anticipation. “Light your distraction. On my mark.”
Below, the three Wyverns were like sharks in formation, their navigation lights winking arrogantly. They thought they owned the night.
“Mark.”
In the valley, a series of chemical flares erupted—not as weapons, but as lures. Old infrared decoys flared to life, painting false heat signatures. The lead Wyvern pilot’s voice, bored and cruel, chirped on an open frequency I was monitoring. “Looks like the roaches are throwing a party. Let’s clean up.”
That was my cue.
I dropped the nose. Not a glide. A **dive**. I killed the engine entirely. The *Hayabusa*, built for minimal drag, became a spear. The airspeed indicator began to climb: 300 knots… 400… 550… The G-meter ticked up, but to me, it was a gentle pressure. The mountains rushed up, terrifyingly fast. At 700 knots, I fired the engine. Not for lift—for violence. The vector-thrust nozzles screamed, punching me forward, crushing me into the seat. 10 Gs. 12. The airframe groaned, a sound of pure protest. My vision tunnelled, then cleared, the virus forcing blood to my brain. 850 knots. I was a black meteor.
And I turned on every light I had.
Strobe lights. Landing lights. A crude, powerful spotlight from the nose. I painted myself across their sensor scopes and their cockpit windows, a sudden, blazing phantom screaming down from the zenith.
“What the hell—!” The lead Wyvern’s comms exploded. “Bogey! High and fast! Looks like… a glider?!”
“Engaging!” the second one yelled. They broke formation, their afterburners igniting like matches in the dark. They took the bait. They always take the bait. Arrogance. They saw a big, slow flying wing and thought it was prey.
I pulled out of the dive a heart-stopping 200 meters above the jagged peaks, the valley walls a blur on either side. The Gs slammed down again, a physical hammer blow that would have turned a normal pilot’s spine to dust. I grunted, feeling a rib creak, the virus already marshalling resources to repair it. The Wyverns were on me, their faster closure rate eating up the sky behind.
“Fox Two!” A missile lock alarm screamed in my ear. I didn’t jink. I didn’t flare. I waited until the last possible millisecond, then hit a pre-programmed sequence. The *Hayabusa’s* skin didn’t just hide heat; it could dump it. I triggered an emergency heat sink purge and a burst of chaff from micro-portals along the wing. To the missile’s seeker head, my signature vanished, replaced by a wall of noise. The missile corkscrewed wildly and detonated harmlessly against a mountainside.
“He’s slick! Guns, guns, guns!”
This was the dance. They were faster in a straight line. But I was lighter, with a tighter turn radius and a pilot who didn’t fear the centrifuge of death. I led them deeper into the Sawtooths, into a labyrinth of stone. I flew so low the downdraft from my wings kicked up plumes of snow from the passes. I skimmed glacier-fed lakes, my shadow a monstrous, fleeting bird on the moonlit water.
“He’s heading for the canyon! Don’t let him box us in!”
Too late. The main chase funneled into a deep, narrow canyon—Deadman’s Gulch. Cliffs rose vertically on either side, maybe 100 meters apart. It was a suicidal path for a jet. For the *Hayabusa*, it was a hallway.
The lead Wyvern, hungry and angry, stayed on my tail, his cannon firing. Tracer rounds lit the canyon in hellish strobing flashes, ricocheting off stone in fountains of sparks. I flew not by sight, but by feel and sensor fusion, weaving with minute, brutal adjustments. A round clipped my port wingtip. The airframe shuddered. Alerts flashed. I ignored them.
The canyon twisted. A hard right turn ahead, tighter than any jet could manage at this speed. I could hear the Wyvern pilot’s straining breath over the open freq, the panic setting in. He was committed.
I hit my air brakes and deployed full flaps abruptly, a move that would rip the wings off a sturdier plane. The *Hayabusa* bled speed violently, seeming to hang in the air for a second. The Wyvern shot past me, unable to slow, its pilot yanking back on the stick in a desperate attempt to make the turn.
He didn’t. There was a deafening, grinding roar of metal on stone, a bloom of orange fire that painted the canyon walls, and then silence, broken by the tumbling echoes of debris.
“Leader is down! He killed him!” the third Wyvern screamed. “Break off! Break—“
The second Wyvern, spooked, pulled up hard, seeking open sky. That was his mistake. In the canyon, he was dangerous. In the open, he was mine.
I goosed the engine and followed him up, a shadow on his tail. He jinked, he rolled, he dumped flares. I stayed with him, my lighter craft glued to his energy curve. He broke over a high ridge, the moonlight silvering his wings.
“You’re dead, you freak!” he snarled, and tried a high-G yo-yo to get behind me.
It was the move I’d been waiting for. As he slowed at the top of his climb, vulnerable for just a second, I didn’t try to match him. I dropped a wing and let the *Hayabusa* fall into a controlled, sideways slip. It put me directly below and behind him.
“Payload one, deploy,” I whispered.
A canister shot from my bay. It burst 50 meters behind the Wyvern, unfurling the mono-filament net. The smart-mesh, sensing the jet’s turbulence and heat, billowed and then *snapped* forward, as if alive, drawn to the engines. The pilot never saw it. One second he was throttling up; the next, there was a horrific, shredding sound as the net was ingested into his starboard air intake.
The engine choked, screamed, and exploded. The Wyvern became a cartwheeling comet, plunging toward the dark forests below.
The third was already running, heading east for the safe, flat plains. He thought distance was safety. He forgot what the *Hayabusa* was built for.
I cut the engine again. The screaming silence returned. I pitched up into a climb, trading speed for altitude, becoming a spectral sail against the stars. I watched him on thermal, a bright dot fleeing. He was 20 klicks out, thinking he’d escaped.
He didn’t understand glide ratios. He didn’t understand the patience of a predator who doesn’t need to breathe hard.
I turned and began the long, silent pursuit. No engine noise. No heat signature. Just the whisper of a blade falling through the night. It took ten minutes to catch him. He never knew I was there until my spotlight blazed on again, lighting up his cockpit from above and behind.
His frantic, terrified face was clear in my night-vision feed. He threw his jet into a desperate spiral dive toward the flatlands.
I followed, matching him turn for turn, my virus-fed body absorbing Gs that would have made him unconscious. We bled down to 5,000 feet over the dark prairie.
“Please! I’m ejecting! Don’t—“ he begged over the open frequency.
“You burned a schoolhouse in Utah last month,” I said, my voice finally showing emotion: a glacial, absolute calm. “You laughed about it on the comms.”
“That was orders! I have creds! I can—“
“Payload two, deploy.”
The second net found him at 3,000 feet. It didn’t go for the engines this time. It wrapped around his tail assembly and port wing. The nano-barbs bit deep, the reactive mesh tightening. His controls locked. His jet nosed down into an irrevocable, final dive.
I didn’t watch the impact. I was already climbing, the adrenaline high crashing, leaving a void filled only with the hum of the virus and the vast, cold loneliness of the righteous. I turned the *Hayabusa* back towards the mountains, towards my own hidden nest.
Below, in the valley, the scavenger commune’s lights flickered, safe for another season. They’d hear rumours of a ghost in the mountains, a dark shape that hunted hunters. They’d call it a spirit of vengeance.
They were wrong. I was just a man with a modified plane, a broken body, and a hunger for justice written in the violent, beautiful mathematics of extreme physics. I was the Witcher. And the open sky was my trapping ground.
The silence of the high desert wasn’t peaceful; it was a vacuum waiting to be filled with screams. Kael and Rook’s world of whispered glide and patient stealth was one truth of the Sylphs. Mine was the other.
They called me the Witcher. No magic, just a virus. A tailored cocktail of symbiotic nano-machines and forced genetic expression that rewrote muscle density, neural conductivity, and cardiovascular limits. It left me with eyes the colour of old mercury and a body that could bleed 20 G’s without blacking out. It also left me with a hunger—a deep, synaptic itch that only the razor’s edge of mortal physics could scratch. I didn’t surf the wind. I *fought* it.
My Sylph wasn’t a *Silent Meridian*. It was the **Hayabusa**. Named for the peregrine falcon, the fastest creature on Earth in a dive. It was a ghost with a grudge. The same 52-meter flying-wing platform, the same impossible glide ratio, but where the Zephyrs housed a sustainer turbine, I had a stolen, hybridized vector-thrust engine from a downed Corporate Strike Fighter. It didn’t whisper. It *growled*, low and waiting. And my payload bay didn’t carry decks or defectors. It carried four canisters, each holding 500 meters of mono-filament net, woven with reactive smart-mesh and barbed with nano-charges.
My mission wasn’t delivery. It was pest control.
The sprawls had their wage-slaves and their gang wars. The open spaces—the Great Basin, the Mongolian Steppes, the Andes Altiplano—had a different kind of predator. Corporate-backed "security contractors" in cheap, agile L-39Z Wyvern jets. They’d strafe independent mining settlements that refused to sell out, burn nascent farm co-ops using illicit herbicide sprays, disappear community leaders with precisely dropped, deniable munitions. They were flies buzzing around the dying body of the free world, and they thought the big, empty sky was theirs.
Tonight, they were buzzing over the Sawtooth Range of the Rocky Mountains. Their target was a lithium scavenger commune in a narrow valley near Stanley. The communards had gotten clever, using old EW gear to jam the Wyverns’ targeting systems. The response wasn’t subtle: three Wyverns were going to canyon-run the valley and drop dumb-fire cluster munitions. Overkill. Messy. A statement.
I watched them on passive sensors from 50,000 feet, a dark speck in the starlight. The *Hayabusa* hung there, cold as space. My chameleon skin was set to pure black. No electronic signature. Just a hole in the sky.
“Witcher, this is Valley Watch.” The comms crackled with a scared, young voice from the ground. “They’re forming up at the north pass. Five minutes.”
“I see them,” I replied, my voice flat. The adrenaline was already a sweet, metallic taste in the back of my throat. The virus in my blood hummed in anticipation. “Light your distraction. On my mark.”
Below, the three Wyverns were like sharks in formation, their navigation lights winking arrogantly. They thought they owned the night.
“Mark.”
In the valley, a series of chemical flares erupted—not as weapons, but as lures. Old infrared decoys flared to life, painting false heat signatures. The lead Wyvern pilot’s voice, bored and cruel, chirped on an open frequency I was monitoring. “Looks like the roaches are throwing a party. Let’s clean up.”
That was my cue.
I dropped the nose. Not a glide. A **dive**. I killed the engine entirely. The *Hayabusa*, built for minimal drag, became a spear. The airspeed indicator began to climb: 300 knots… 400… 550… The G-meter ticked up, but to me, it was a gentle pressure. The mountains rushed up, terrifyingly fast. At 700 knots, I fired the engine. Not for lift—for violence. The vector-thrust nozzles screamed, punching me forward, crushing me into the seat. 10 Gs. 12. The airframe groaned, a sound of pure protest. My vision tunnelled, then cleared, the virus forcing blood to my brain. 850 knots. I was a black meteor.
And I turned on every light I had.
Strobe lights. Landing lights. A crude, powerful spotlight from the nose. I painted myself across their sensor scopes and their cockpit windows, a sudden, blazing phantom screaming down from the zenith.
“What the hell—!” The lead Wyvern’s comms exploded. “Bogey! High and fast! Looks like… a glider?!”
“Engaging!” the second one yelled. They broke formation, their afterburners igniting like matches in the dark. They took the bait. They always take the bait. Arrogance. They saw a big, slow flying wing and thought it was prey.
I pulled out of the dive a heart-stopping 200 meters above the jagged peaks, the valley walls a blur on either side. The Gs slammed down again, a physical hammer blow that would have turned a normal pilot’s spine to dust. I grunted, feeling a rib creak, the virus already marshalling resources to repair it. The Wyverns were on me, their faster closure rate eating up the sky behind.
“Fox Two!” A missile lock alarm screamed in my ear. I didn’t jink. I didn’t flare. I waited until the last possible millisecond, then hit a pre-programmed sequence. The *Hayabusa’s* skin didn’t just hide heat; it could dump it. I triggered an emergency heat sink purge and a burst of chaff from micro-portals along the wing. To the missile’s seeker head, my signature vanished, replaced by a wall of noise. The missile corkscrewed wildly and detonated harmlessly against a mountainside.
“He’s slick! Guns, guns, guns!”
This was the dance. They were faster in a straight line. But I was lighter, with a tighter turn radius and a pilot who didn’t fear the centrifuge of death. I led them deeper into the Sawtooths, into a labyrinth of stone. I flew so low the downdraft from my wings kicked up plumes of snow from the passes. I skimmed glacier-fed lakes, my shadow a monstrous, fleeting bird on the moonlit water.
“He’s heading for the canyon! Don’t let him box us in!”
Too late. The main chase funneled into a deep, narrow canyon—Deadman’s Gulch. Cliffs rose vertically on either side, maybe 100 meters apart. It was a suicidal path for a jet. For the *Hayabusa*, it was a hallway.
The lead Wyvern, hungry and angry, stayed on my tail, his cannon firing. Tracer rounds lit the canyon in hellish strobing flashes, ricocheting off stone in fountains of sparks. I flew not by sight, but by feel and sensor fusion, weaving with minute, brutal adjustments. A round clipped my port wingtip. The airframe shuddered. Alerts flashed. I ignored them.
The canyon twisted. A hard right turn ahead, tighter than any jet could manage at this speed. I could hear the Wyvern pilot’s straining breath over the open freq, the panic setting in. He was committed.
I hit my air brakes and deployed full flaps abruptly, a move that would rip the wings off a sturdier plane. The *Hayabusa* bled speed violently, seeming to hang in the air for a second. The Wyvern shot past me, unable to slow, its pilot yanking back on the stick in a desperate attempt to make the turn.
He didn’t. There was a deafening, grinding roar of metal on stone, a bloom of orange fire that painted the canyon walls, and then silence, broken by the tumbling echoes of debris.
“Leader is down! He killed him!” the third Wyvern screamed. “Break off! Break—“
The second Wyvern, spooked, pulled up hard, seeking open sky. That was his mistake. In the canyon, he was dangerous. In the open, he was mine.
I goosed the engine and followed him up, a shadow on his tail. He jinked, he rolled, he dumped flares. I stayed with him, my lighter craft glued to his energy curve. He broke over a high ridge, the moonlight silvering his wings.
“You’re dead, you freak!” he snarled, and tried a high-G yo-yo to get behind me.
It was the move I’d been waiting for. As he slowed at the top of his climb, vulnerable for just a second, I didn’t try to match him. I dropped a wing and let the *Hayabusa* fall into a controlled, sideways slip. It put me directly below and behind him.
“Payload one, deploy,” I whispered.
A canister shot from my bay. It burst 50 meters behind the Wyvern, unfurling the mono-filament net. The smart-mesh, sensing the jet’s turbulence and heat, billowed and then *snapped* forward, as if alive, drawn to the engines. The pilot never saw it. One second he was throttling up; the next, there was a horrific, shredding sound as the net was ingested into his starboard air intake.
The engine choked, screamed, and exploded. The Wyvern became a cartwheeling comet, plunging toward the dark forests below.
The third was already running, heading east for the safe, flat plains. He thought distance was safety. He forgot what the *Hayabusa* was built for.
I cut the engine again. The screaming silence returned. I pitched up into a climb, trading speed for altitude, becoming a spectral sail against the stars. I watched him on thermal, a bright dot fleeing. He was 20 klicks out, thinking he’d escaped.
He didn’t understand glide ratios. He didn’t understand the patience of a predator who doesn’t need to breathe hard.
I turned and began the long, silent pursuit. No engine noise. No heat signature. Just the whisper of a blade falling through the night. It took ten minutes to catch him. He never knew I was there until my spotlight blazed on again, lighting up his cockpit from above and behind.
His frantic, terrified face was clear in my night-vision feed. He threw his jet into a desperate spiral dive toward the flatlands.
I followed, matching him turn for turn, my virus-fed body absorbing Gs that would have made him unconscious. We bled down to 5,000 feet over the dark prairie.
“Please! I’m ejecting! Don’t—“ he begged over the open frequency.
“You burned a schoolhouse in Utah last month,” I said, my voice finally showing emotion: a glacial, absolute calm. “You laughed about it on the comms.”
“That was orders! I have creds! I can—“
“Payload two, deploy.”
The second net found him at 3,000 feet. It didn’t go for the engines this time. It wrapped around his tail assembly and port wing. The nano-barbs bit deep, the reactive mesh tightening. His controls locked. His jet nosed down into an irrevocable, final dive.
I didn’t watch the impact. I was already climbing, the adrenaline high crashing, leaving a void filled only with the hum of the virus and the vast, cold loneliness of the righteous. I turned the *Hayabusa* back towards the mountains, towards my own hidden nest.
Below, in the valley, the scavenger commune’s lights flickered, safe for another season. They’d hear rumours of a ghost in the mountains, a dark shape that hunted hunters. They’d call it a spirit of vengeance.
They were wrong. I was just a man with a modified plane, a broken body, and a hunger for justice written in the violent, beautiful mathematics of extreme physics. I was the Witcher. And the open sky was my trapping ground.
