03:00 P.M. -- A Borrowed Room, Red Dogs Base
The air in the room was a physical presence, a thick, warm blanket of coppery iron and the sickly-sweet stench of pork left too long on a grill.
It was the smell of a butcher's shop after a fire, clinging to the back of the throat and coating the tongue.
A raw, guttural laughter ripped through the stifling silence, a sound that belonged in a madhouse, not a military base.
Ash stood in the center of the chaos, a portrait of domestic insanity.
His fine suit was pristine, but over it, he wore a frilly, pure white apron now decorated with a fresh, crimson stains.
His hands, sheathed in thin latex gloves, were slick and red.
He threw his head back and inhaled with a theatrical, shuddering gasp, as if breathing in the perfume of a blooming flower, not the stink of a cooked human being.
"Ahhhh...!" he exhaled, a dreamy sigh twisting into another peal of laughter. "The finale! The grand crescendo! You can really feel the passion, can't you?"
He was speaking to the thing on the floor in front of him.
It was vaguely human-shaped, a blackened, shrunken mannequin of crackled skin and fused tissue.
It was impossible to tell if it had been a man or a woman.
It was just charcoal now.
But the true horror in the room wasn't the corpse.
It was the audience.
In the corner, huddled together on a single, stained mattress, were Tink and Jessa.
Gags were pulled tight across their mouths, a necessary cruelty that muffled their screams but did nothing to hide the sheer, animal terror in their eyes.
Jessa's gaze was fixed, her sharp mind—the one that could dissect complex glyph structures—now completely shattered, reduced to a primal need to not be seen.
The silver scar through her left eyebrow seemed to gleam in the low light, a stark, manufactured flaw on a face frozen in a natural, human nightmare.
Tink was smaller, curled almost entirely behind Jessa, his small frame trembling uncontrollably.
He made tiny, broken sounds against the gag, the whimpers of a creature that has seen hell and knows it is still trapped inside.
Ash's manic glee suddenly evaporated.
His head snapped toward the children, his eyes narrowing.
The joyous artist was gone, replaced by a petulant child denied a toy.
He clicked his tongue, the sound sharp and disapproving in the quiet.
"Tch. What a waste of a good audience," he muttered, his voice dropping to a sulky whisper. "If only the boss would let me... just a little touch. A small improvisation. To see what sounds you'd make."
He took a slow, deliberate step toward them.
Jessa flinched, pressing herself back against the wall, her wide eyes screaming everything her mouth could not.
Tink let out a muffled squeak, burying his face in Jessa's side.
The single step stretched into an eternity for the children.
Jessa's lungs burned, forgetting how to pull in the foul air.
Tink's tiny tremors vibrated through her side.
Ash's shadow fell over them, a long, grotesque shape that promised a new kind of terror.
Then, a jarring, synthetic pop beat erupted into the room.
A cheerful, mindless tune about summer love and dancing, its bubbly melody a violent intrusion on the scene of horror.
It was Ash's conduit.
The spell broke.
Ash froze, his outstretched hand curling into a frustrated fist.
The petulant annoyance on his face curdled into something darker, a genuine, sour rage.
He clicked his tongue again, louder this time, a sound of pure venom.
"Tch. Now?"
He spun on his heel, the moment of intimate torment forgotten.
His polished shoes made sharp, impatient clicks on the concrete as he strode across the room, away from the children and toward a small, clean coffee table that stood in stark contrast to the surrounding carnage.
His conduit lay there, vibrating with its absurdly cheerful ringtone.
The screen glowed brightly in the gloom:
>>Ember
Ash's jaw tightened.
He snatched the device, his thumb hovering over the answer button.
He couldn't tell her he was in the "guest room" again.
He'd been reprimanded by Ember and ordered to reduce the number of his "artworks" as much as possible.
He took a breath, forcing a veneer of calm over his irritation, and answered.
"Yes, dear?" he said, his voice slick and artificially light. "What seems to be the trouble?"
"...I called because you probably haven't even read the message Blaze sent."
Ember's voice was dry as dust, the sarcasm a thin veil over her clear annoyance.
It wasn't a question; it was an accusation.
Ash's eyes darted to the screen.
A single, unread notification glared back at him from the display.
>>Briefing at 3 PM
A flicker of genuine irritation crossed his face.
Of course.
He'd been… preoccupied.
The masterpiece on the floor had required his full, undivided attention.
Before he could formulate a suitably flippant reply, the door to the "guest room" let out a long, weary creak.
"Here you are."
The voice came twice—once flattened through the conduit's speaker, and again, sharper and more immediate, from the doorway.
Ember stood there, one hand on the doorframe, her expression a familiar mix of exhaustion and simmering anger.
She ended the call and slipped her own conduit into her pocket, her gaze sweeping over the room.
It took in the scene with a practiced, grim efficiency: the corpse, the blood-spattered apron, the two children huddled in the corner.
She didn't flinch.
She'd seen his work before.
Her eyes finally landed back on him, narrowing. "Don't tell me you even touched those kids this time?"
She already knew the answer.
A quick, assessing glance at Tink and Jessa—terrified, gagged, but physically unharmed—confirmed it.
The question wasn't for information; it was a line drawn in the sand. A reminder of the one rule even he couldn't afford to break without consequences from a higher paygrade. Her asking was a formality, a ritual of control meant to reassert order over his chaos.
Her gaze, cold and assessing, then slid past him to the blackened thing on the floor.
Ash saw the direction of her stare. He moved with a casual, almost dancer-like grace, deliberately stepping into her line of sight, using his own body to block the view of his "art."
"C'mon, let me have my fun," he whined, his voice taking on a petulant, theatrical tone.
"It's so boring to wait around this long." He took another step back, now standing directly over the corpse, and gestured behind him with a thumb, slick with residue he'd missed. "Besides, I've heard something interesting from this guy. Before the finale, of course."
Ember's curiosity was piqued, cutting through her irritation.
Her right eyebrow arched, a silent command to continue.
"Oh really?" she said, her voice dangerously calm. "Have you already got what I asked you before?"
Ash's confident posture deflated.
The tall, menacing figure seemed to shrink under her unwavering stare.
He scratched the back of his neck, a nervous, almost boyish gesture that was grotesque given the context.
"…About what you asked," he began, his voice losing its manic edge. "N-no, not yet."
He flinched as Ember's brows knitted together, the air growing colder.
He hurried to speak again, the words tumbling out. "B-but! It seems the Red Dogs were preparing something cold for us. Just below this base. In the sub-levels. He was babbling about it, trying to buy his life with the information."
Ember had already heard the exact same thing from Blaze earlier.
But hearing it confirmed from Ash, pulled from the dying breaths of a Red Dog, made the reality of their situation solidify into something cold and heavy in her gut.
It wasn't just a rumor; it was a confirmed threat.
And that realization was fucking horrifying.
Her mind raced.
How?
How on earth did Blaze get that intel so fast?
He was a force of nature, a walking explosion, not a spy. He shouldn't have sources.
He was the source of the problem, most of the time.
Her eyes dropped to the back of her own hand.
The flame insignia there seemed to pulse with a faint, phantom heat.
It used to be just a tattoo, a symbol of their crew, etched in simple ink.
But that man had "upgraded" them.
He'd called it a "biometric interface," reconfigured it with microscopic circuitry that threaded into her nervous system.
At first, she'd been fine with it.
Power had a price, and the raw, glyph-amplified fire he offered was a price she was willing to pay.
But now, staring at the symbol, she had to wonder: At what cost?
What else had he woven into their flesh besides power?
"…Blaze said the same thing earlier," Ember said, her voice flat, betraying none of the chill running down her spine.
"What?!" Ash's theatrical shock was genuine this time. "Where does he even get his intel? Since when does he do anything but burn things?"
Ember didn't answer immediately.
Her gaze was still locked on her tattoo, as if the answers were written in the intricate lines of the flame.
"…I want to know that too," she finally said, her voice dropping to a murmur meant only for herself, a quiet confession of a fear she couldn't quite name. "Is he even the same Blaze we know anymore?"
The ones who were most shocked by his return weren't their enemies; it was them.
Their crew.
After his very public, very definitive "death," the group had splintered.
No one wanted to stick around and risk suffering the same gruesome fate that had claimed Blaze.
They had scattered to the winds, becoming ghosts in a city full of them.
Then, six months ago, a message had flickered to life on her conduit from an unknown, encrypted string.
The text was simple, a time and a place—one of their old, dead-drop locations.
The style was his, but that could be faked.
When she arrived, shrouded in the pre-dawn gloom of a derelict refinery, and saw the man standing there, every instinct she had screamed that it was a trap, a corpo mimic, a phantom.
Skepticism had coiled in her gut like a sick, cold snake.
She had been there.
She had seen it.
The confrontation with the Steel Talons' leader, Nex.
The precise, brutal shot from Nex'shotgun that had punched clean through Blaze's chest, a spray of blood and vaporized his heart to a paste.
He had fallen, and he had not gotten up.
So the man who stood before her now, wearing Blaze's face and Blaze's swagger... was he real?
She had to be sure.
She didn't welcome him; she interrogated him.
She fired off questions only the real Blaze would know: the name of the street dog they'd fed scraps to behind their first hideout, the stupid punchline to a joke he'd told during the siege of the Nimbrix outpost, the real reason he'd gotten the scar on his left knuckle.
And he had answered.
Every single one.
Without hesitation, with the right inflections, even with the same old, familiar annoyance at her nagging.
The answers were perfect.
Flawless.
Standing there in the chemical-tainted wind, Ember had felt a profound and terrifying helplessness.
The evidence was undeniable, yet her every nerve ending rejected it.
She had no logical reason left to deny him, no thread of doubt she could pull on without sounding insane.
She had no choice.
She had to accept that Blaze had, against all reason and nature, returned from the dead.
A fractured, traitorous part of her had certainly felt a spark of something like joy—or perhaps just the relief of a missing piece snapping back into a broken picture.
For a single, shameful second, it was just Blaze, her old comrade.
But that feeling was instantly swallowed by a colder, more profound horror.
Because the man who came back was a man remade.
The real terror wasn't that his soul had been lost; it was wondering what new, corporate thing had been shoved into the hollowed-out space where it used to be.
The body was the same, the memories intact, but the engine inside was now privately-owned.
The thought slithered into her mind: Maybe it would have been better if his soul had stayed in hell.
At least in hell, he would have been himself.
This? This was a perversion.
Being a slave, a branded asset, a weapon owned and maintained by those monsters... it was a fate so much worse than a clean death.
Ember didn't look back at the children, nor at Ash's latest masterpiece.
She had seen enough.
She turned on her heel, the motion sharp and final.
"…Let's go," she said, the words a low command that brooked no argument.
She strode toward the door, her boots echoing in the gruesome silence.
Ash lingered for a moment, his eyes drifting back to the corner.
A slow, possessive grin stretched across his face.
He took a single, deliberate step toward the huddled children, his voice a venomous whisper that slithered across the room.
"Don't worry," he chuckled. "I'll come back for you. We'll have so much more fun when there's no one to interrupt."
With one last, longing look, he turned and followed Ember out, the door clicking shut behind him.
Leaving Tink and Jessa alone in the suffocating dark with the smell of burnt meat and the echo of his promise.
***
The air in the repurposed garage hummed with two distinct frequencies: the low, unstable thrum of Blaze's core, and the sharp, irritated crackle of a soldering iron.
Blaze leaned against a rusted support beam, the popsicle stick from earlier rolling endlessly between his fingers.
He was waiting. AiM's crimson hologram hovered just over his shoulder, a silent, judgmental specter.
Diagnostics scrolled endlessly across its surface, highlighting the gradual decay of his aether-core stability.
He ignored it.
Across the room, surrounded by a nest of scattered tools and scorched metal, Cinder muttered curses under her breath.
A disabled drone lay splayed open on the workbench before her, its internal circuitry exposed like gleaming entrails.
One of its repulsor fins was bent at a sickening angle.
"Stupid, cheap-ass alloy," she snarled, yanking the damaged component free with a violent twist. "One good shockwave and the whole frame goes to hell. Who designs this crap?"
AiM's hologram pulsed. <
Blaze's lips twitched in a faint, humorless smile. "Let her be," he murmured. "She's mourning her lost toys."
<
Before Blaze could form a retort, the AI's hologram shifted.
A new, silent video feed bloomed in the corner of his augmented reality vision, marked with a discreet tag:
>>Audio Surveillance - Sublevel Lab.
<
The feed showed Arden, his posture tense, standing in Tenn's cluttered lab.
He was gesturing emphatically towards one of the motionless "Dolls" suspended in its pod.
"What do you mean you want to talk to the Steel Talons?" Tenn's voice was a mixture of disbelief and intrigue.
"Seeing those things," Arden shot back, jabbing a finger toward the Doll, "just cements my idea. Talking to the Talons is a much better option than siding with these pyromaniacs. We're just fuel to them."
Tenn was silent for a long moment, her gaze fixed on the grotesque masterpiece of engineering. "...I do get the idea," she admitted, her voice hushed. "These things... they scare me. But at the same time, they fascinate me."
Blaze went very still.
The popsicle stick stopped moving, clenched tight in his fist.
This was the gamble.
He'd sent the Dolls to Tenn precisely because she was an outsider, a brilliant mind untainted by V-Tech's core protocols.
In the deepest, most secret part of himself, a part he shielded even from AiM, he thought that maybe—just maybe—she could see something in their design that the corporate engineers missed.
A flaw.
A backdoor.
A way to crack the cage of his own body open.
<
Blaze swallowed, forcing a slow, even breath.
The only good thing about this AI, he thought with a surge of vicious gratitude, was that for all its analysis and monitoring, it couldn't read his mind.
It could see the physiological symptoms of his hope and his terror, but it couldn't see the desperate, fragile plan taking root in the dark.
"—have you said this plan of yours to Gideon?" Tenn asked, her voice lowering as if the walls themselves might be loyal to the Red Dog leader.
Arden let out a short, dry laugh that held no humor. "I did. I suggested it to him earlier."
He shrugged, a gesture of weary resignation. "Go on. Take a guess what his reply was."
He didn't need to elaborate.
The answer was written in the tense line of Tenn's shoulders, in the way her eyes briefly flickered away from the Dolls and toward the ceiling, as if she could hear Gideon's roaring disapproval from the levels above.
She had seen his rages, his stubborn, bull-headed pride.
"So," she said, the single word heavy with understanding. "That's why you want to use Vega. He's not just a prisoner; he's your contact. Your backchannel to the Talons, since Gideon would never sanction it."
Blaze's brow furrowed slightly.
The pieces—Arden's desperation, Tenn's fascination, the mention of a "contact"—were there, but they hadn't quite clicked into a clear picture for him.
He didn't have to wonder for long.
AiM's hologram shimmered, the surveillance feed minimizing as a new, detailed map of Sector 20 overwrote his AR vision.
It was stolen directly from Arden's laptop, still warm with the strategist's frantic calculations.
A single, pulsing red marker was highlighted deep within Talon-controlled territory.
<
The AI didn't need to pause for breath. Its conclusion was instantaneous and brutally logical.
<>
But before the order to burn them all could even form on his tongue, a new alert flashed across his vision.
Two familiar heat signatures, one a steady, controlled furnace and the other a flickering, chaotic blaze, were approaching the garage door.
Ember and Ash had finally arrived.
The moment for a swift, silent purge was gone.
The decision was forced back into the dark, a seed of treachery now planted and left to grow.
AiM's hologram flickered, its suggestion hanging in the air, unanswered and unresolved.
"Later," Blaze muttered under his breath, the word a low promise of violence postponed.
He straightened up, the casual lean vanishing as the door began to creak open.