Hk - 97 Magazine

The weapon clicked empty. Smoke curled from the translucent magazine, and Mei saw that the frozen-lightning spring had uncoiled, lying dormant at the bottom of the housing. It had given everything.

The bioconstruct, callsign "Chimera," had evolved beyond standard threat parameters. It had shed its human disguise in the abandoned subway station, revealing a torso made of shifting crab-shell and limbs that ended in hypodermic stingers. When Mei’s squad opened fire, their standard mags ran dry in three-second bursts. The Chimera just laughed, a wet, gurgling sound. Hk 97 Magazine

“Seventy-three percent helical tension retention,” he muttered, reading a data slate. “Better than the prototype. The 97’s double-stack, quad-feed geometry is inefficient in static storage, but under full-auto stress, it achieves zero friction lock-up. The spring is a carbon-metallic weave. It breathes. It adapts.” The weapon clicked empty

She slapped it into her modified G36K. The weapon felt different. Hungry. The Chimera just laughed, a wet, gurgling sound

A 4.6x30mm round is small, but when you send ninety-seven of them downrange in a single, uninterrupted stream, they stop being bullets and become a liquid. The first fifty chewed through the Chimera’s chitinous plating. The next thirty shredded the synthetic muscle beneath. The final seventeen turned the creature’s core into a fine, pink mist.

Mei looked at her hands. They were still shaking. “Why isn’t this standard issue?”