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

Aiden watched as the newly arrived bikers rode quickly down the road towards him, their headlights blinding him and forcing him 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. They instead came to a sliding halt a few meters away from him and each of the riders raised handguns and submachine guns and aimed them at their foe.

"Who are you?" Asked one of them. The rider speaking was a man by his voice but his helmet covered his face, and the dark visor reflected Aiden's warped image back to him, dancing with the street lights.

"No-one," Aiden said. "Only your enemy, if you try to attack me again."

"Are they still alive?" The helmeted biker asked, meaning the two riders who were sprawled across the road. One of them had been moaning under the weight of his bike not a minute before, but had seemingly 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," said the helmeted man. "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 of scraps on the floor, and then we'll shoot you some more."

Aiden paused for a moment. There was no way to know how valid the helmeted biker's threat was, but it was far too risky to test and Aiden knew that damage to that extent was unlikely to be something he could just shrug off. "I wasn't the one who attacked your gang," said Aiden, who lowered his arm as he got used to the headlights, "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."

"He's not worth it. We need to get Kaya and Ryo to a damn hospital," the biker answered. "So, whoever you are, back the hell away and we'll let you go clean."

Aiden had to stop and think. Leaving without having to fight further was exactly what he wanted, but the biker's concern for their fallen comrades reminded Aiden that he was not the only one being hunted. "And if I do, what's to stop you just coming after me again? Or going after the Centipedes?" He asked.

"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 more money out on contracts than you can afford to ignore."

The biker group seemed to hesitate at Sarratt's name, confirming to Aiden that he was behind their attempted hit. "I don't know what the price is, but I'm willing to bet it's stupidly high. Do you know why it's stupidly high?" Aiden asked them.

"Because you're dangerous," the biker replied.

Aiden nodded. "I'll leave and let you get your friends, sure, but those Centipedes are now proof 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. In that case 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 in their courage and conviction, and their helmeted leader began to slowly lower his weapon. "Fine, I understand," he said. "Lower your weapons."

They did as he commanded, then watched as Aiden began to step backwards. When he felt comfortably distanced from them Aiden turned, then ran off through the nearest side-street and disappeared.

"What the shit is going on?" One of the bikers asked.

"I don't know," said the helmeted one. "Quick, let's grab Kaya and Ryo and go."

Several of them dismounted their bikes 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 the police will be called here before we can pick it up again."

"Bummer. It was a damn nice bike, too."

Suddenly there was an extremely loud pop and an armour-piercing sniper round put a hole in one of the bikers, and one of the bikes on the other side of him, that was big enough to put a fist through.

"What the-"

A second round hit the head of a biker that was suddenly no more than pieces of bone and brain and hair separating in a hundred directions. Then, when 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.

"Shit!" Their leader screamed, a cold and genuine terror in his voice as the remaining bikers rushed to mount their vehicles, and then drift around and accelerate back down the street they had come from. A moment later, another of their bikes was hit and sent tumbling and sliding in a dozen broken, flaming pieces.

As the survivors fled, assault rifle fire spitting against the ground between their wheels, they passed a large, bearded man in a long, leather coat who stood in the middle of the road with empty hands. The bikers swerved and rode around him, caring for nothing else than to escape their sudden ambush, but as the last of them made to pass the man he reached out a hand and snatched the biker like a ball from the air. The snatched one was dead before he hit the ground, his throat utterly crushed by an inhuman grip, and the man in the coat turned to watch the survivors screech away into the distance.

"Get rid of the evidence," the man said into his earpiece. Then, with his bones cracking and popping, and his teeth baring 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 directly behind one of them and leaped forwards through the air and made a wild, slashing motion with his now-clawed hand that shredded the screaming gangster's back and sent him and his bike shrieking into the side of the road.

The beast kept sprinting, now dashing from side to side to escape the same oncoming traffic of blaring police sirens that the surviving bikers were avoiding, and he grew on their tails again like a greyhound on a hare. There were four 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 streets - dodging this way and that, and shrugging off any bullet that hit him with no more than a growl.

One of the bikers lost balance and fell of their own accord and the man leaped over them and left them to be hit by a car. Suddenly the three remaining braked and skidded and swerved around a corner that led them down a quieter road. With far more finesse and control than any of them had, the creature came into a drifting slide, and shot off after them again on the point of the turn as though he had barely lost speed at all. The bikes had however, and the creature jumped from road to wall, then from wall to the back of the rearmost bike and tore the rider from his seat. He then pressed forward, and through the air he flew like a bullet until he went through the next rider like a blade, and the final rider, terrified, dove from his bike in an attempt to escape.

The helmeted man who had spoken to Aiden slid and rolled across the ground until a chain-link fence prevented him from going further. He groaned, trying to find the strength to crawl into the shadows or dig through the concrete that lay at the fence's base, but such a thing was impossible. There were footsteps behind him then, each press of foot on the ground like metal against stone, and suddenly the biker swung around with a pistol and began to fire.

The beast moved out of the way of the firing - first right, then left, then right again - so fast that he hardly appeared to move at all, and soon the biker's gun clicked. The man in the torn coat smiled, his beard thick but not long, and his hair dark and mottled with blood. He reached down and picked up the biker with one hand and then with cold, silver eyes he stared through the visor at the terrified face beyond.

"Do not worry," the man 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 and 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 passed overhead as a blur of coloured lights, each belonging to a vehicle moving too fast for him to see, and below it a second road went beneath the bridge the gravroad was built on.

Aiden turned south and beneath the bridge and as he walked along the pavement he saw the number of pedestrians increase with the height of the buildings around them. They were financial centres, banks, shopping areas, hotels, downtown apartments, medical facilities and even factories - each a bustle of tens of thousands of men and women - each so high they looked as though they could touch the stars.

The people walking there seemed to grow increasingly wealthy by the minute, and the cars that passed more stylish than any Aiden had seen where the monk had lived. He stood out significantly more there than where Sarratt had approached him and there was little doubt that every security device in the vicinity would be noticing his tattered, bloody clothes, but Aiden hoped he would be gone again before the police ever caught on to his presence.

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 and road below. He waited until the security guards outside were not looking directly at him, then walked through the automated doors and into a lobby that was structurally similar to the abandoned tower he had seen Yuji, but completely different in that it was a finely-furbished and well-lit room with several dozen people going about their business.

"Um, excuse me?" Aiden asked a woman with dark hair and sunglasses who was sat behind the receptionist's 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? Can you show me the way?"

The woman stopped typing and then, with her nose somehow looking down at him even though he was below 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 do something," said the woman.

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

The woman raised her eyebrows above her glasses. "Then you already have the pre-requisite 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 were approaching Aiden and trying to restrain him.

"Hey, let go of me!" Aiden complained, though he did not struggle as much as he could have. He did not want to harm them simply for doing their jobs, and he had no interest in causing more of a scene than he had to.

The woman went back to her typing as the guards began to pull Aiden towards the door, but suddenly a voice called out for them to stop. "Um, excuse me! There's been a mistake. He's telling the truth!" Said a young man in pyjamas, who had come running out of an elevator with a lab-coat around him. Aiden recognized him immediately as Zhan, and when the security guards noticed him they paused and let Aiden go.

"He's with me! I called him out here!" Said the doctor, walking across the lobby 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!"

That last sentence seemed to be directed at the receptionist woman, who looked at the doctor and shook her head, and soon Aiden was pulled into an elevator whose doors shut behind him.

"Dr. Xinyue, I'-" Aiden was cut off. He had tried to introduce himself, had tried to ask the doctor how he knew that he was coming, but the doctor 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."