The Nest hummed with quiet tension.
Riven was elbow-deep in the stealth drone, its shell peeled open like a mechanical fruit. Every circuit, every chip—it was a puzzle he loved.
But something felt… off.
A ping. Not from inside the Nest—but the perimeter scanner.
Motion. Two blocks out.Too clean. Too subtle.
He paused.Marked the coordinates.Went back to work.
Across the city, in a neon-lit blacksite lab, a group of masked tech scavengers—The Gridrats—huddled around a prototype gauntlet.
A copy of TOOLHAND.
Not a good one.
Stolen footage. Market scrap. 3D-printed plating.But they thought it would be enough.
"We sell it fast," one of them grinned."Before the original gets famous."
They powered it up.
It exploded.
A wave of kinetic force tore half the lab apart. One Gridrat flew into a wall. Another screamed, arm scorched and twitching.
They hadn't copied TOOLHAND.
They'd copied Riven's trash.
And it still had bite.
Back at The Nest, Riven reviewed his surveillance relay.
He saw the lab's collapse in grainy footage.
He didn't smile.Didn't flinch.
He just scribbled one note beside the blueprint for TOOLHAND v2:
"Next version: trap code."