The silence between the three of them was thick, broken only by the crunch of frost under their boots and the low, persistent hum of the shield generator in Gideon's hands.
The two members flanking him—A woman called Mara, and the other veteran everyone called Bricks—kept their eyes scanning the mist-choked hallways, but their attention was a physical weight against the side of Gideon's face.
He could feel their glances, quick and sharp as knifepoints.
They weren't just looking for threats in the shadows.
They were looking at him.
At the set of his jaw, the white-knuckle grip on the shield, the way he walked like a man carrying a coffin on his back.
He had led them out.
He had chosen them to run.
Every step away from the lab was a step deeper into that choice.
Then the world reminded them.
It started as a deep, intestinal grumble in the bones of the building, a vibration that climbed up from the foundations and into the soles of their boots.
The frost on the pipes overhead shivered into a fine, glittering rain.
A half-second later, the sound arrived—not an explosion from ahead, but a colossal, shearing crunch from somewhere deep below and behind them.
The whole hallway jumped.
Dust and chips of concrete sifted down from the ceiling in a sudden, choking cloud.
Mara stumbled, catching herself against the wall. Bricks braced, his shotgun coming up on instinct, pointing at nothing in the empty mist ahead.
The tremor passed as quickly as it came, leaving behind a ringing silence filled with the slow patter of settling debris.
In that silence, the looks from Mara and Bricks changed.
The suspicion vanished, replaced by a raw, widening fear.
Their heads turned, not down the dark hall toward Arden and Tenn, but back the way they'd come.
Toward the lab.
Toward Nino, Hatch, Filir, and Grease.
Gideon saw it happen.
A misunderstanding dawn in their eyes—that the quake hadn't been in front of them, but behind.
Where they'd left their people.
Where Cinder was.
Mara's breath hitched, a small, trapped sound.
Bricks's weathered face hardened into a mask of grim certainty.
The unspoken question hung in the dusty air, louder than the explosion had been: What did we just leave them to?
Gideon's own gut was a frozen knot.
The image flashed, unbidden—the frozen lab, the cynical light, Cinder's sweet voice, and then the ceiling coming down.
But he clamped down on the thought, hard.
He couldn't afford it.
If he floated away now, it was all over.
He stopped walking and turned to face them.
His voice, when it came, was too loud in the quiet hall.
It wasn't the calm, steady tone of a boss.
It was rough, pushed out from a tight chest, trying to sound like a fact.
"Nino will be fine!"
The words landed between them like a dropped stone.
They didn't reassure.
They sounded hollow, desperate.
A wish shouted into a storm.
Mara and Bricks just stared at him.
Their silence was the answer.
They'd all seen the shadows in the mist.
They knew what fine meant in a place like this.
Gideon saw the doubt in their eyes, and a hot spike of shame cut through the cold dread.
He'd misunderstood.
They thought he was talking about the tremor, about the collapse.
They thought he was naive.
But he wasn't.
He was giving an order.
To himself, and to them.
He couldn't let the crack show.
Not now.
He turned away from their looks, back toward the dark hallway, and started walking again, his boots grinding the new dust into the frost.
"That quake came from further down," he said, forcing his voice lower, flatter. "Arden's direction. Maybe he blew a wall. Or that Ash bastard did. It's not from the lab."
He was lying.
In the underground level, he didn't know where it came from.
But he needed it to be true.
He needed them moving forward, not looking back.
"We keep going. That's the order."
He didn't wait to see if they followed.
He just walked, the hum of the shield the only company he could bear.
Behind him, Mara and Bricks shared one last, silent look.
A look full of things they couldn't say.
Then, slowly, they turned their backs on the direction of the tremor and followed their boss into the gloom, carrying the weight of his lie with them, step by heavy step.
***
Ash's mind, usually a theater of cruel flourishes and dramatic reveals, had narrowed to a single, cold calculation.
How do you touch an untouchable object?
The girl—Jessa, the puppet—was wrapped in a gravitational field that bent everything away from her.
His Fire Darts, precise and lethal, had been gently swerved like stones skipping on a sloped pond. She was a stone in a stream, and reality flowed around her.
But she had touched him.
Her tackle had been a physics-breaking lurch, a human cannonball wrapped in violet light.
She had bridged the gap.
The memory of the impact was a fresh, bruising ache in his ribs, a lesson written in pain.
The answer, then, was clear.
An untouchable object could only be touched in two ways: if it chose to touch you first, voluntarily… or if you let it hit you, and survived the collision.
He had just experienced the involuntary method. It felt like being hit by a truck.
A grim, professional respect settled over him.
Her handler was clever.
They'd given a child a shield that made her untouchable at range and a weapon that made her a battering ram up close.
A perfect, brutal little system.
Some his own offensive arsenal scrolled through his mind.
Fire Darts for precision.
Searing Lash for scorching a large area.
Conflagration Cascade for overwhelming spectacle.
Inferno Wake—his highest-tier app, Rank 4—if you want to straight up cremate any living being.
All are fire based.
All requiring a clear path to the target.
All useless if the air itself refused to carry his heat in a straight line.
He should have an advantage she didn't know about.
The conduit in his hand wasn't standard issue.
It was a prototype, gifted by them—the silent, chilling benefactors behind this whole operation.
Its core wasn't the common, dull-glow aetheric crystal scraped from Junkyard ruins.
It was powered by a sliver of ORX-9 Aetheric Alloy, the same impossible material that formed the heart of Ember's Aegis-frame and Blaze's effortless barriers.
Scaled down, of course.
It couldn't power a suit of armor.
But in a single conduit?
It was like comparing a campfire to a volcanic vent.
It gave him a reservoir of power and stability no street-caster in this dump could dream of.
It also gave him access to systems they didn't.
Like the barrier.
It was a heavy draw on the core, a last resort.
He wasn't a front-line tank like Ember.
His role was control, artistry, clean burns.
But observing the puppet's first move—that terrifying, gravity-warping tackle—had been a data point he couldn't ignore.
Before he'd even fully decided on his new strategy, his will had whispered to the conduit.
A soft, almost imperceptible pulse ran through the sleek black device.
No dramatic flare of light, no hum.
Just a subtle, definitive click in the aetheric circuits.
Around Ash, the air stiffened.
It wasn't the vibrant, hexagonal orange wall that Blaze or Ember conjured.
His was fainter, a shimmering, heat-haze distortion that hugged the contours of his body—a personal, second skin of solidified energy.
Lower-spec.
Weaker.
It wouldn't stop a sustained assault from another Scorcher, or a direct hit from a high-yield charge.
But it would absorb an impact.
It would turn a bone-breaking tackle into a bruising shove.
It would give him the one thing he needed to execute his new plan: the ability to survive the touch.
The puppet wanted to get close? To use her body as a weapon?
Fine.
He'd let her.
He stood straighter, the pain in his ribs a dull background throb under the barrier's numbing field.
He dismissed the remaining fire darts with a thought; their light winked out.
He lowered his conduit, not in surrender, but like a craftsman setting aside one tool for another.
His expression smoothed into something cold and open.
A blank stage.
He was done trying to hit the untouchable object from afar.
Now, he would invite it in.
And show its handler exactly what happened to borrowed toys when they played with real fire.
The feeling in Ash's chest was a strange alloy, impossible to separate: a thread of cold, professional anger braided with a thin, sharp wire of genuine fascination.
He knew his own values were skewed.
He'd never needed anyone to tell him that.
The sharp gasp of pain, the wide-eyed terror before the burn—these were not just side effects to him.
They were the point.
The satisfaction was clean, personal, a private proof of his own agency in a world that had tried to grind him into nothing.
He was an artist, and suffering was his most vibrant paint.
But this… this was different.
This was deranged.
Giving a child—a gutter rat, a scrap of a girl he'd tied up himself—a weapon like that?
A pristine conduit humming with power that bent the rules of space? It wasn't just cruel.
It was wasteful.
It was sloppy.
It reeked of a puppeteer who saw people as nothing more than disposable batteries for their experiments, with no appreciation for the craft of breaking them.
It offended him on a level deeper than any moral code ever could.
He needed data.
A name.
A scent.
Anything.
He let the thin, practiced smile form on his lips.
It wasn't his usual theatrical grin.
This was smaller, tighter—the smile of a collector examining a curious, dangerous insect.
He kept his voice light, almost conversational, as if they were picking up a chat from the storage room.
"...Where is Tink?" he asked, his head tilting slightly. "Why are you the only one in here?"
He used the little one's name deliberately.
A hook.
A reminder of the world before the puppet strings.
He watched Jessa's face, the dirt-smudged features, the silver scar through her eyebrow—too precise for a Junkyard accident.
He looked for a flicker.
A twitch of recognition, a crack in the hollow, borrowed rage in her eyes.
Anything that belonged to the sharp, survivalist girl he'd kidnapped, and not the weapon she'd become.
Her answer was not a word.
The violet lattice encasing her flared.
The air around her warped with a sound like a stifled thunderclap.
Then she was just… closer.
Not a run.
A brutal, physics-denying lurch that covered the space between them in a blink.
She crashed into him, a small, hard meteor wrapped in distorting light.
The impact slammed the air from his lungs.
His lower-spec barrier flared a dull orange around the point of contact, dispersing the kinetic force, turning what should have been shattered ribs into a deep, bruising slam.
It held, but it shuddered visibly, the energy drain a sharp spike on his internal sense.
He was driven backward three heavy, scraping steps, his immaculate boots grinding through frost and debris.
He caught his balance, the barrier's faint shimmer stabilizing.
But the message was received, loud and clear.
The puppet was not listening.
There would be no conversation, no clues willingly given.
The handler had dialed the weapon to a single setting: destroy.
And the force contained in that small, frame—amplified by gravity itself—was dangerous.
His barrier could maybe take one more hit like that.
Two, if he was lucky. After that, his ribs would be paste.
He straightened up, the thin smile still etched on his face.
He raised his conduit, not with a flourish, but with the deliberate focus of a technician running a diagnostic.
A single Fire Dart ignited in the air before him, a compact orb of searing orange.
But this time, he didn't just let it fly.
He poured his will into it, not for finesse, but for raw, penetrative force.
He visualized it not as a projectile, but as a drill—a concentrated lance of heat and kinetic energy meant to pierce, not to be deflected.
He sent it streaking toward Jessa, aiming to brute-force its way through her gravitational distortion.
The response was instantaneous, and it wasn't what he expected.
Jessa didn't just stand there, letting her field bend the attack.
Her head jerked up, the hollow eyes tracking the dart.
Her free hand—the one not gripping the white conduit—twitched.
At its fingertips, the air shimmered and spat out three small, murky projectiles.
They weren't the intricate, world-bending fractals from before.
These were crude, jagged little things—Rank 1—Gravitic Pellets.
They shot forward with surprising speed, not at Ash, but on an intercept course with his Fire Dart.
The pellets struck the dart in rapid succession.
They didn't have the power to extinguish it, but their localized gravity wells tugged and warped its trajectory at the last second.
The dart veered wildly off course, exploding harmlessly against the ceiling in a shower of molten concrete.
Ash went very still.
That wasn't a passive defense.
That was an active, tactical counter.
A minimal-energy response to a minimal-energy probe. It was… efficient.
Almost polite, in a horrific way.
Like swatting a fly with just enough force, and no more.
A new, icy trickle of understanding dripped down his spine.
The puppeteer wasn't just controlling the girl's body and power.
They were supplementing her combat instincts.
Feeding her tactical data.
Directing her like a player in a strategy game.
The hollow-eyed stare wasn't just emptiness; it was a display screen for a remote operator.
The feeling of being mocked was now a certainty.
That's all you've got? the counter-attack seemed to say.
Show me something worth my attention.
Anger, cold and precise, tightened his focus.
Fine.
A diagnostic it was.
This time, his fingers twitched.
Two Fire Darts bloomed into existence.
He sent the first one straight on, another obvious, testing shot.
But the second one, he held back a half-beat, its light deliberately dimmer, tucked slightly behind and to the side of the first—a hidden blade following a visible feint.
He wasn't just testing her power now.
He was testing the puppeteer's cognitive bandwidth.
Could they see the second dart?
Could they process two threats at once?
Was their control reactionary, or predictive?
He watched Jessa's face, the silver scar stark under the hellish light, waiting to see which set of eyes—the girl's or the master's—would respond.
Ash's diagnostic was answered with chilling efficiency.
Jessa's head gave a slight, mechanical tilt.
Her eyes tracked both darts, not with the frantic focus of a fighter, but with the calm, omnipresent gaze of a security system.
One hand twitched.
Two more crude Gravitic Pellets spat forth, each intercepting one of his Fire Darts with unerring accuracy.
Twin explosions bloomed in the air between them, filling the hall with the smell of scorched dust.
But she wasn't done.
Even as the pellets struck, her other hand was already moving, the bone-white conduit humming to a higher, deeper pitch.
Before the light of the intercepts had faded, a new glyph ignited in the air before her—not the simple, murky shapes of before.
This was complex, layered, a shifting mandala of violet lines that seemed to drink the light from the room. Rank 2. Maybe 3.
The gravity in the hallway warped, a sudden, sickening heaviness pressing down on everything.
Ash was already moving, throwing himself into a lateral dive.
He expected a projectile, a crushing wave, a targeted blast.
He was wrong.
The glyph didn't fire at him.
It simply activated around him.
The effect was instantaneous and internal.
It bypassed his shimmering orange barrier completely.
The barrier was designed to stop kinetic force, energy, and heat.
It couldn't stop a fundamental law of physics from being rewritten inside its protected zone.
Ash's dive became a collapse.
It felt like invisible anvils had been strapped to every inch of his bones, to his organs, to the very blood in his veins.
The air in his lungs turned to lead.
His muscles, trained and strong, screamed and gave out.
He didn't hit the ground; he was pulled into it, his knees striking the frost-coated concrete with a brutal, twin crack that echoed louder than any gunshot.
A grunt of pure, shocked agony was punched from his chest.
He caught himself on his hands, his arms trembling violently under a weight that wasn't there a second before.
He couldn't stand.
He could barely breathe.
The world narrowed to the crushing pressure and the taste of copper flooding his mouth.
His own barrier still shimmered uselessly around him, a beautiful, irrelevant lantern in a sea of infinite gravity.
From his knees, he forced his head up.
Across the rubble, Jessa stood perfectly still, the complex violet glyph slowly spinning before her.
Her hollow eyes watched him struggle, her head tilted again.
There was no triumph in her expression.
No malice.
Only the empty, patient gaze of a tool waiting to see if its work was complete.
The message was now carved into his very skeleton.
This wasn't just a puppet with a powerful weapon.
This was a puppet being piloted by a caster of terrifying, surgical precision.
Someone who understood not just raw power, but the elegant, cruel science of bypassing defenses entirely.
Someone who could turn a man's own body into his prison.
From her vantage, the puppet saw the target immobilized.
Kneeling.
Defenseless.
The complex glyph, humming with contained potential, had done its primary work.
The variable was neutralized.
Then, something shifted in the hollow channels of Jessa's borrowed consciousness.
The cold, surgical precision of the puppeteer's control met a surge of raw, churning feedback—the girl's own buried fury.
It wasn't a takeover, but a corruption of the signal.
The objective blurred from neutralize to destroy.
The glyph at her fingertips pulsed, its light deepening from a calculated violet to a furious, bloody crimson.
The command woven into it simplified, coarsened: More. Heavier. Crush.
The weight on Ash didn't just persist.
It multiplied.
It was no longer the precise, all-encompassing pressure of a scientific law.
This was jagged, hateful.
It felt like the ceiling had collapsed directly onto his shoulders, like the floor was rising up to meet his bones with blunt, grinding teeth.
His spine compressed.
His ribs, already cracked, groaned in their sockets.
Every joint became a white-hot flare of agony.
A raw, animal scream tore from Ash's throat, shredding the air. It was a sound stripped of all theatrics, all control—pure, unfiltered suffering.
His vision swam, grey at the edges, threatening to tunnel into black.
But he clung to consciousness with a vicious, desperate will.
He was a Scorcher.
He had survived that place.
He would not black out here, on his knees, to a child.
Through the blinding haze of pain, he felt the other system kick in—the one etched into his skin, not gifted by a handler.
The intricate, burning lines of his tattoos, coiled around his forearms and snaking up his shoulders, began to glow.
Not with their usual passive warmth, but with a fierce, defensive light.
A deep, cellular heat spread from the ink, flooding his muscles and bones.
It was a regenerative override, fighting a desperate, losing battle against the catastrophic compression.
It couldn't lift the weight.
It couldn't break the glyph.
The crushing force was still there, a physical reality imposed upon him.
What it could do—just barely—was mend the damage as it happened.
It knit microfractures in his bones an instant after they formed.
It prevented his lungs from collapsing, his organs from rupturing.
It was a brutal, internal triage, healing him just fast enough to keep him on the ragged edge of being alive and being pulp.
The agony, however, had no cure.
The pain was the process.
The sensation of being slowly, methodically flattened was undiminished.
It was a continuous, excruciating loop: crush, heal, scream. Crush, heal, scream.
Sweat and tears blurred his vision.
He stared through the distortion at Jessa, her face now contorted not with the puppeteer's emptiness, but with a reflection of that borrowed, twisted rage.
She was leaning forward slightly, as if pushing her own body weight into the spell.
She was killing him.
But she was doing it slowly.
Inefficiently.
Letting the rage dictate the method.
***
The echoing scream, raw and shredded with agony, sliced through the muffled silence of the sub-levels.
Gideon froze, one hand coming up in a sharp fist.
Behind him, Mara and Bricks halted instantly, weapons snapping to ready positions.
The sound had come from ahead, around the next bend in the ruined hallway.
It didn't sound like fighting.
It sounded like someone being taken apart.
"Arden?" The name left Gideon's lips in a rough whisper, more fear than question.
His grip tightened on the shield generator, its hum suddenly feeling like a weak, mocking buzz.
He didn't scream like that.
No one should scream like that.
He exchanged a glance with Mara.
Her sharp eyes were wide behind her rifle's scope.
Bricks's jaw was clenched, his shotgun held tight against his shoulder.
No words were needed.
The scream was a compass needle pointing toward disaster.
Gideon moved forward, his steps silent now, each one placed with deliberate care.
The hum of the shield was the loudest thing in the world.
He led them around the fractured corner, into a scene that made his brain stutter, refusing to process it all at once.
The hallway wasn't just damaged here; it was reshaped.
The floor in a wide circle was depressed inward, like a giant had pressed a massive, invisible bowl into the concrete.
It was webbed with deep, radial cracks, and the frost had been pulverized into fine, glittering dust.
Chunks of the ceiling had been pulled down, not by collapse, but as if sucked toward the epicenter.
And at the center of it all, on his knees in the crater, was a man.
Not Arden.
It was the clean-suit.
The Scorcher.
Ash.
Gideon recognized the tailored lines of the suit, even now smudged with dust.
But the man inside was unrecognizable.
He was bent forward, trembling violently, every muscle corded in a fight against some invisible, crushing force.
His face was a mask of tortured strain, teeth bared in a silent rictus of pain.
A faint, shimmering orange haze clung to him—a barrier—but it was doing nothing to stop whatever was happening.
A low, continuous groan of agony vibrated in the air around him.
Then Gideon's eyes tracked forward, to the source.
Standing at the edge of the depression, facing Ash, was a kid.
A small, dirt-streaked girl in torn Junkyard clothes.
Her posture was rigid, one arm outstretched.
In her hand, glowing with a cold, impossible light, was a conduit.
It was long, sleek, and bone-white—a thing of absolute purity that had no business existing in this grime.
It was the most wrong thing Gideon had ever seen.
And at its tip, spinning with a malevolent, patient energy, was a glyph.
It burned with a deep, violent violet light, complex and layered, casting sharp, moving shadows across her determined, hollow-eyed face.
The girl was holding a Scorcher on his knees.
Breaking him.
Slowly.
The world seemed to tilt.
The logic Gideon knew—Scorchers were the hunters, they were the unstoppable force—shattered against the sight.
Mara sucked in a sharp breath beside him.
Bricks muttered a low, heartfelt curse, the barrel of his shotgun drifting uncertainly between the kneeling monster and the child-monster who had caught him.
Gideon's mind emptied of strategy, of guilt, of his mission.
There was only the crater, the scream still hanging in the air, and the terrible, glowing question posed by a little girl with a weapon from a nightmare.