Two days.
Two days since the fire on the rooftop, since the digital scream of the decryption rig had given them a perfect, fleeting coordinate.
Two days since Ember Morrigan had evaporated into the city's bloodstream like a toxin, leaving no trace.
Blaze paced the length of their cramped hideout, the silence a physical irritant.
The crimson conduit lay on the table, a dormant star, useless without a target.
The initial thrill of the hunt was curdling into a grinding frustration.
She hadn't made a move.
No new security breaches flagged on WhiteRoot's shadow network Ash was monitoring.
No financial trails from hacked accounts.
No sightings from the informant channels.
It was as if, after burning her life to the ground, she had simply ceased to exist.
"Combing the whole city isn't an option," Ash had stated the obvious before he'd left, strapping on his newly acquired Ignis-7 with a mixture of pride and apprehension.
"We don't have the manpower, the drones, or the corporate satellite access. She's a ghost who knows she's being hunted. She'll stay buried."
Cinder had said nothing, just performed a final systems check on her rifle.
Her silence was louder than criticism.
The convoy job was a clean, tactical operation with a defined payoff.
This was a scavenger hunt in the dark.
Now they were gone, off to intercept the Nimbrix transport on the border road.
The hideout felt larger, emptier.
The hum of the aether node outside was the only company.
Ash had tried the digital avenues.
He'd posted a sanitized version of Ember's face on the Ghost Key forums—a shadowy network of freelancers and information traffickers—with a modest bounty for confirmed sightings.
The post had gotten views.
No replies.
In the Junkyard, selling out a woman who was making trouble for WhiteRoot was a good way to end up in a landfill yourself.
Fear was a stronger currency than credits.
So Blaze was left with the one thing he hated most: legwork.
He stood now at the edge of a sprawling, makeshift market that spilled out from a collapsed parking garage, clutching a printed photo—a grainy still from the Gilded Cage's employee files.
Ember's face, sharp and unsmiling, looked back at him.
It felt absurdly primitive.
He approached a vendor selling refurbished power cells. "Hey. You seen this woman?"
The vendor, a woman with a weathered face and eyes that had seen too many scams, glanced at the photo, then at Blaze's intense, impatient expression.
She shook her head and turned back to her wares, a silent dismissal.
He moved to a group of kids playing with a cracked drone.
They scattered before he could speak, sensing danger in his stride.
An old scavenger huddled by a barrel fire squinted at the picture. "Lotsa faces come through here, son. Can't remember 'em all." He pointed a gnarled finger at the photo. "She in trouble?"
"Yeah," Blaze said, his voice tight. "With me."
The old man just chuckled, a dry, rattling sound, and looked away.
This was torture.
He was built for decisive, violent action, for the moment of impact, not for this slow, grinding sieve of human indifference and faulty memory.
Every shrugged shoulder, every averted gaze, was a tiny insult.
He was a force of nature reduced to asking questions.
As the hours bled into the grey afternoon, a cold certainty settled in his gut like a stone sinking in murky water.
She wasn't hiding in the slums.
She wasn't lingering in the marketplaces, blending into the crowds of the desperate and the broken.
A woman who could crack a WhiteRoot black-box encryption, torch her own safehouse, and vanish without a whisper wasn't hiding.
She was hunting.
Blaze's gut—a sense honed in back-alley ambushes and corporate traps—told him she was running towards something.
The fire on the rooftop hadn't been panic.
It had been ceremonial.
A line crossed.
She'd gotten what she needed from the files and was now moving with purpose.
But what?
Revenge?
Data?
Something she could use as leverage?
He'd pressed Ash on it two days ago, after the initial triangulation had gone cold.
<
Ash had said, his voice tinny through the comm, the sound of his own frantic hacking audible in the background.
<
A wall.
A digital fortress they couldn't breach without declaring war on the very client who'd hired them.
So they were blind.
Hunting a ghost without knowing her obsession.
All Blaze had was the corporate dossier: Former security. Terminated (disputed). Elevated threat.
Cold facts, but not even one trace.
Blaze's tongue snapped against the roof of his mouth in a sharp, frustrated sound that was swallowed by the market's din.
The crumpled photo was damp in his clenched fist.
This was inelegant.
Wasteful.
Beneath him.
He needed a new vector.
If he couldn't find the ghost's path, he needed to find what the ghost wanted.
And when someone steals from WhiteRoot, burns their life down, and goes to ground… they usually want one of two things: to hurt WhiteRoot, or to take something back.
He clicked his tongue again.
The sound was a punctuation mark to his decision.
He let the ruined photo fall from his hand.
It fluttered to the muddy ground, Ember's face landing face-down in the grime.
He didn't look back.
He turned and began walking, not with the aimless frustration of a hunter who'd lost the scent, but with the grim, accelerating purpose of a man who has decided the best way to catch someone running toward a fire…
…is to already be standing in the flames.
***
Ember wasn't about to infiltrate the WhiteRoot Primary Medical Research Facility, Sector 1 without a plan.
That was suicide, and she hadn't burned her life down just to throw her corpse at their gates.
But the exhaustion was a predator she couldn't outrun.
The fatigue had been accumulating for months—a slow, toxic buildup of sleepless nights, adrenal spikes, constant vigilance, and the bone-deep weight of grief and rage.
It had hollowed her out.
The rush of finally knowing, of seeing the words "SECTOR 1" on the screen, had been the last surge of fuel in a tank running on fumes.
She remembered leaving the burning rooftop.
Remembering staggering through back alleys, the data drive clutched so tightly her knuckles ached.
Remembering the world beginning to tilt, the edges of her vision blurring into a buzzing grey static.
She'd fought it, forcing one foot in front of the other, but her body had finally called in the debt.
She didn't remember passing out.
She woke to the deep, resonant hum of the mag-lev—a sound that vibrated up through the cold concrete beneath her.
It was dark.
The world above was a lattice of crisscrossing support beams and the underbelly of the elevated station, lit only by the sickly yellow glow of safety lights and the occasional streak of a passing train.
She was under the bridge, curled in a shallow service alcove, hidden from the street above by a curtain of dripping pipes and corroded machinery.
For a disorienting second, she didn't know where she was.
Then it crashed back in: the guard's dying gasp, the gasoline, the flickering screen, the words "CONTAINED – PHASE 2."
Ellie.
Sector 1.
She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her muscles protesting with a chorus of aches.
A quick, frantic pat-down confirmed the data drive was still secure in her inner pocket, next to the photograph.
Her knife was on her belt.
Her conduit, its charge nearly depleted, was still clipped to her thigh.
She was alive but is currently hidden.
And in her state—shaky, dehydrated, her mind still cottony with forced sleep—storming a WhiteRoot fortress wasn't a plan.
It was a final, glorious mistake.
She leaned her head back against the cold concrete, listening to the rhythmic whump of a train passing overhead.
But for now, in the echoing dark beneath the city, Ember closed her eyes, not to sleep, but to think.
To calculate.
Slowly, she pushed herself fully upright, her back scraping against the rough concrete.
The world swayed for a moment before settling.
Thirst had clawed up at her throat with a dry and painful scrape.
Hunger was a distant, hollow echo- her body had moved past wanting fuel to simply running on the dregs of adrenaline and will.
She couldn't afford to be weak.
Not here.
Not so close.
With stiff fingers, she unclipped the water canister from her belt.
It was less than a quarter full.
She took two small sips.
That was all she could spare right now.
Her planning began with brutal and logistical triage.
First step, and the most important.
Reconnaissance.
She couldn't just walk up to the research facility.
But the least she could do at the moment was observe.
She needed sightlines, shift changes, security patterns, delivery schedules.
She needed to know if the air shimmered with those unseen barrier glyphs that is currently one of the trends in security.
Or what the guards equipped by.
She needed to look for their weaknesses.
Second step, Gear.
An inventory of her pathetic arsenal flashed in her mind: the standard-issue pistol from her Gilded Cage days, with two magazines left and the combat knife on her belt.
She needed much more than these.
She needed leverage.
Explosive of any kind.
If she can even find EMP then much better.
She can't help but sigh thinking she needed to come back to Raker again after all those troubles she had given him.
But it was her only option.
Third step, Access.
Getting into the most restricted areas of a WhiteRoot medical black site.
The heart where Project LOTUS would be housed.
This was the gauntlet.
It would require either flawless stealth, overwhelming force, or a key she didn't possess.
She pushed the specifics down.
One nightmare at a time.
But the hardest part of all was—
Fourth Step, Extraction.
This was the part her mind kept skittering away from.
Finding Ellie was one thing.
Getting her out, past layers of security, when she might sedated or injured was another.
Ember had no backup.
No escape vehicle.
No safehouse to run to.
It was a one-way trip with a return ticket she hadn't figured out how to buy.
A cold, pragmatic voice whispered in the back of her mind: You might not be bringing her out.
But be sure they can't keep her.
She shoved the thought down, deep.
That was a door she wouldn't open.
Not yet.
But first she needed to know first the enemy.
Without proper assessment, any move would be a fatal mistake.
Ember gathered her legs beneath her and stood, using the wall for support.
She oriented herself—the constant, low-grade hum of Sector 1's aether grid was a beacon, a sterile thrum of power to the northeast.
She moved out from under the bridge, keeping to the deepest shadows cast by the elevated track.
She was a smear of darkness, her footsteps silent on the wet pavement.
She scaled a rusted maintenance ladder bolted to a support pylon, moving with an economy of motion that belied her fatigue.
At the top, lying flat on a narrow service gantry, she had her first clear view of Sector 1.
It was a world apart from the Junkyard.
Clean, geometric buildings of white alloy and blue glass rose in orderly clusters, lit from within by steady, shadowless light.
Wide, empty streets.
Floating security drones patrolled in silent, intersecting patterns, their spotless white hulls reflecting the glow.
A visible haze of sanitized air shimmered over the district line—a climate and filtration barrier.
And at the center of it all, larger than the rest, stood a monolithic structure shaped like a stepped pyramid: the WhiteRoot Primary Medical Research Facility.
Its surface wasn't glass or metal, but a seamless, polished white ceramic that seemed to glow with its own internal light.
No visible doors.
No windows below the tenth floor.
It looked less like a building and more like a holy relic, or a tomb.
Ember's breath fogged in the cold air. Her fingers tightened around the rusted railing.
There was the fortress.
There was the dragon's den.
And somewhere in its sterile, silent belly, was her sister.
A sound escaped her—a short, hollow puff of air that was too broken to be a laugh, too empty to be a sob.
Deep inside, in the place where hope had once lived, she knew.
This was an impossible mission.
A fairy tale where the knight was already wounded, her sword was rusted, and the castle had no doors.
But the plan was no longer an abstract list.
It was a mountain in front of her, its face slick with black ice and sheer at every angle, its peak hidden in clouds of certain death.
She lowered her head, her dark red hair a stark, messy splash against the grimy gantry.
The exhaustion was still there, a lead weight in her veins.
But it was now joined by something else—a cold, focused clarity that burned away the last traces of doubt.
She had seen the target.
Now she needed the tools.
Slowly, she began her descent back into the shadows, her mind already turning from observation to acquisition.
The black market beckoned, a den of sharks where she had nothing to trade but her own desperation.
It would have to be enough.
***
Arriving at the border of Sector 1 was like stepping through an invisible membrane into another world.
Blaze had only ever seen the district from afar—a distant cluster of white geometry and clean light, shimmering behind its atmospheric barrier like a mirage of order.
Up close, the effect was disorienting.
The air lost the Junkyard's familiar cocktail of rust, decay, and smoke.
Here, it was crisp, filtered, scentless.
The sound of his boots on the polished composite sidewalk was too loud in the pervasive, artificial quiet.
He braced himself as he approached the main checkpoint—a sleek, minimalist archway where two guards in immaculate white and grey uniforms stood at perfect, still attention. Their eyes, sharp and assessing behind transparent visors, tracked him the moment he came into view.
He saw the instant their assessment registered.
His clothes were Junkyard practical—worn leather, durable synth-weave, scuffed boots.
He carried himself not with corporate deference, but with a prowling, unconcealed confidence that bordered on aggression.
He was an oil stain on their pristine canvas.
He expected to be stopped.
Challenged.
For barriers to snap up, for glyphs to flare, for the polite, firm request for credentials he didn't have.
It didn't happen.
The lead guard's eyes flicked from Blaze's face down to his waist, where the sleek, crimson conduit was clipped openly to his belt.
A barely perceptible shift occurred.
The guard's posture didn't relax, but the readiness for intervention faded.
His gaze held Blaze's for a second longer—not with permission, but with a cold, clear judgment.
Then the guard gave a minuscule, almost imperceptible nod to his partner.
They both looked away, their focus returning to the middle distance, dismissing him.
Blaze walked through the archway unchallenged.
No scan.
No query.
The barrier field rippled around him with a faint static kiss against his skin, then stabilized behind him.
For a moment, he was genuinely amazed.
He'd spent his life navigating systems designed to keep him out—the Velvet's velvet ropes, corporate security grids, Nimbrix clean-up crews.
This was the most heavily fortified district he'd ever seen, and he'd just… strolled in.
Then the reality clicked into place, cold and certain.
The conduit.
It wasn't just a weapon.
It was a key and also…a badge.
The sleek, predatory design, the inlaid corporate glyphs, the resonant frequency it emitted—it was broadcasting a clearance signal.
High-level.
Deniable.
The kind issued not to employees, but to assets.
To weapons that needed to move through their master's territory without inconvenient questions.
WhiteRoot hadn't just given him a tool to hunt with.
They had given him a leash that opened doors.
They owned the lock, and they had just slipped the key into his pocket.
A slow, humorless smile spread across his face as he walked deeper into the sterile streets, the judgmental eyes of the guards burning into his back.
The amazement curdled into a darker understanding.
He wasn't a visitor.
He wasn't even a citizen.
He was a hunting dog that had been let off its chain inside the gilded kennel.
And the masters were watching, waiting to see what he would flush out.
Blaze had taken up a position in a small, sterile plaza that offered a direct sightline to the monolithic research facility.
He was leaning against a planter filled with genetically perfected, scentless flowers, looking every bit like a predator out of its natural habitat.
The white ceramic of the pyramid glowed under the district's artificial noon, a blank, impassive face.
He was running scenarios in his head—how she might approach, what vectors she could use, when a vehicle glided to a silent, electric halt directly in front of him, blocking his view.
It was a limousine.
Not the ostentatious, armored kind favored by gang lords, but a model of understated, terrifying expense.
Its body was matte gunmetal grey, the windows perfectly opaque.
It looked less like a car and more like a vault on wheels.
The front passenger window hummed down.
The driver, a man in a sharp black suit and mirrored lenses, didn't turn his head.
"Get in."
Blaze didn't move.
One eyebrow lifted slowly, a silent question etched in skepticism and amusement.
A car service wasn't part of the hunt.
The driver let out a soft, weary sigh, the sound of a professional dealing with an unpredictable variable.
He still didn't look at Blaze.
"Our boss is calling for you," he clarified, his tone flat, as if explaining gravity to a child.
Our boss.
The words landed, and the pieces snapped together.
The unimpeded access.
The judging-but-yielding guards.
The feeling of being both an intruder and an expected guest.
That man.
The executive from the buried suite beneath the Gilded Cage.
The one with the smile that didn't reach his eyes and the case that held a crimson future.
He hadn't just given Blaze a weapon and a target.
He'd given him a tracker.
The moment Blaze had used the conduit-key to enter Sector 1, he'd sent up a flare.
He hadn't found Ember.
He'd announced himself.
Blaze's slow smile returned, wider this time, edged with a sharp appreciation for the sheer, controlled audacity of it.
He was being monitored.
Managed.
His hunt was on a corporate leash, and the leash had just been given a gentle, irresistible tug.
He pushed off from the planter, the perfect flowers shivering in his wake.
Without another word, he walked around to the rear door.
It unlocked with a solid thunk before he even touched the handle.
He slid into the cool, silent, perfumed darkness of the limousine's interior.
The door sealed shut behind him, and the vehicle pulled smoothly away from the curb, leaving the white pyramid behind, another piece moved on a board he was only beginning to see.
The interior of the limousine was a capsule of silent luxury.
The air was cool, filtered, and carried a faint, expensive scent of sandalwood.
The seats were deep, black leather that seemed to absorb all sound.
The partition between the passenger cabin and the driver was a solid slab of darkened glass, granting total privacy.
Blaze settled into the seat opposite the man he'd met in the buried suite.
The executive looked exactly as he had before—impeccable charcoal suit, silver hair swept back, hands resting calmly on his knees.
He held no drink this time.
The only light came from a single, recessed strip along the ceiling, painting his sharp features in stark relief.
"Welcome to Sector 1," the man said, his voice as calm and cultured as before. "I trust your passage was uneventful."
"It was open," Blaze replied, his own voice a low contrast to the polished quiet. "Like you knew it would be."
"Our new Vitalis model has certain…administrative privileges," the man said, a fain smile touching his lips as he glanced at the crimson conduit at Blaze's side.
It's red casing and silver WhiteRoot emblem seemed to pulse softly in the dim light.
"It's a high-value asset. We like to know where our assets are, especially when they enter sensitive territories."
Vitalis model.
A WhiteRoot chosen name.
A label that spoke of protection, of sanctioned access.
A badge for a guard dog.
"I'm here to find your ghost," Blaze said, cutting through the polished silence to the raw point. "Not take a tour."
The man's smile didn't fade; it deepened, showing a sliver of perfectly white teeth.
He was clearly amused.
"Of course, of course. The direct approach. A virtue."
He leaned back slightly, the leather sighing beneath him.
"But tell me… did you find out why?"
The shift was instant.
The amusement remained in the curve of his lips, but it drained from his eyes, replaced by a sudden, penetrating focus.
The temperature in the cabin didn't change, but Blaze felt a cold prickle race across the back of his neck, raising the fine hairs there.
The question wasn't casual inquiry.
It was a test.
"No," Blaze answered, keeping his voice flat.
He hadn't.
The 'why' was buried in firewalls Ash couldn't breach.
The man's head tilted a fraction.
"Oh? Then don't tell me it was just… intuition that brought you to the very gates of our most sensitive research installation?"
The words were light, almost playful, but the weight behind them was immense.
How did you know to come here if you don't know what she wants?
Blaze met his gaze, the truth simple and, in this gilded cage of implications, strangely blunt. "Yeah. It was."
For a long moment, the man said nothing.
The limousine glided soundlessly past sterile plazas and gleaming structures.
Then, the sharp, assessing look vanished, swallowed once more by that veneer of warm amusement.
He chuckled softly, a dry, approving sound.
"So I wasn't wrong in choosing you," he murmured, more to himself than to Blaze. "Instinct over intel. The predator's logic. You didn't follow a trail. You anticipated the prey's desperation. You went to the waterhole."
He nodded slowly, as if a private hypothesis had been confirmed. "Excellent."
Blaze didn't understand the man's satisfaction, the peculiar delight in his lack of knowledge.
But the prickling sense of danger hadn't subsided; it had settled, a constant hum beneath his skin.
This wasn't praise.
It was categorization.
He had just been filed away in the executive's mental ledger.
Blaze decided, for the first time since entering the car, to keep quiet.
To let the silence stretch.
To become the listener in a game where every word seemed to have a price he couldn't yet see.
"Well, knowing her objective—and now, appreciating your… methodology—I think it's best for you to stay here in Sector 1 for the time being," the man said, his tone final, leaving no room for debate.
In the front seat, the driver's eyes flicked up to the rear-view mirror.
He caught a nearly imperceptible nod from the man beside Blaze.
"We will be heading to the guest house," the driver announced, his voice monotone through the speaker system.
The limousine smoothly changed lanes, gliding away from the central plaza and the view of the research pyramid.
Guest house.
The term conjured images in Blaze's mind—a sterile corporate apartment, a safe-room with a cot and a surveillance feed.
A cage with a polite name.
He was wrong.
The limousine turned onto a secluded, tree-lined avenue where the buildings were set far back from the street behind high, transparent barriers that shimmered with subtle dispersion glyphs.
They pulled up to a set of wrought-iron gates adorned with an abstract, flowing design that subtly echoed WhiteRoot's logo.
The gates parted without a sound.
The guest house was a mansion.
It wasn't the old-world stone of Junkyard gang lords.
This was modern, brutalist elegance—tiered levels of pale grey concrete and floor-to-ceiling glass, cantilevered over a manicured koi pond that glowed with submerged aether-lights.
The structure was all sharp angles and serene planes, a monument of controlled wealth and silent power.
The limousine came to a stop on a crushed white gravel driveway.
The driver exited and opened Blaze's door without a word.
The executive remained seated, making no move to leave.
"You'll find everything you need inside," he said, gesturing vaguely toward the imposing entrance.
"Rest. Familiarize yourself with the Vitalis model in a… less combustible environment. She will make her move soon. When she does, you will be close. And you will be ready."
He met Blaze's eyes, the pleasant mask firmly back in place. "Think of it not as waiting. Think of it as the moment between drawing the bowstring and releasing the arrow."
With that, the driver closed Blaze's door.
The limousine pulled away, its electric motor silent, leaving Blaze standing alone on the pristine gravel, staring up at a mansion that felt less like a safehouse and more like the most beautiful, most expensive cage he'd ever seen.
***
The days that followed were a grinding cycle of desperation and degradation.
Ember couldn't storm a WhiteRoot fortress with a knife and a half-charged pistol.
She needed an edge.
She needed a weapon that could meet corporate glyph-tech on its own terms.
And in the Junkyard, that kind of power had one price: credits. Lots of them.
She went back to Raker, not as a client with a focused goal, but as a supplicant.
His corner of the market hadn't changed.
He still sat on his crate, working through stim-sticks, his chrome jaw reflecting the sickly green light.
But his demeanor had shifted.
The last transaction had ended in fire and a corporate flag on her head.
She was trouble, and trouble was bad for business.
"No," he said, the first time she asked, not even looking up from the circuit board he was soldering.
"Raker—"
"I said no." His voice was a flat, final scrape. "You're a lit fuse, Missy. Last time, you brought WhiteRoot's attention within a block of my stall. I don't sell to ghosts who leave burning footprints."
She came back the next day.
And the day after that.
She stood at the edge of his space, not speaking, just waiting.
Her silence was a pressure.
Her presence, gaunt and fierce-eyed, was a reminder of the debt he'd already incurred by helping her.
On the fourth day, he finally snapped the stim-stick in half with a sharp crack.
"What do you want?" he snarled, his mechanical eye whirring as it focused on her.
"Work," she said, her voice hoarse from disuse. "High reward. Anything. Smash-and-grabs on Nimbrix outposts. Escort runs through Reclaimer territory. Data heists from Myriad dropboxes. I don't care. I need credits. Fast."
Raker stared at her, the hollows under his eyes deep pits of cynical calculation.
He saw the fever-bright purpose in her gaze, the utter lack of self-preservation.
She wasn't just desperate; she was committed.
A human bullet.
And sometimes, bullets were useful.
With a disgusted sigh, he pulled a stained ledger from beneath his crate.
"There's a transport," he muttered, flipping pages. "Heavy security. Private contractor, not corporate. Carrying 'cultural artifacts' from a Spire collection to a private buyer in the Velvet. The security is muscle, not tech. The payout is… significant. If you live."
"I'll take it," Ember said immediately.
"It's a three-person job. Minimum."
"I'll do it alone."
Raker's organic eye narrowed. "You'll die."
"Then find me something a person can do alone," she shot back, her patience a thin, fraying wire. "Or find me two other suicidal idiots. I don't care. Just find it."
It took more days.
More pleading that tasted like ash in her mouth.
More offers from Raker's black ledger—each one more lethal than the last.
She took them all.
A solo sabotage run on a rival gang's aether capacitor, leaving her with second-degree burns across her arm.
A courier extraction through a sector boiling with territorial war, ending in a sprint through live gunfire.
The credits trickled in.
Too slow.
Every hour was an hour Ellie spent in WhiteRoot's hands.
Finally, after a week of near-fatal gigs, she stood before Raker again, her body a tapestry of fresh bruises and healing cuts, but her eyes unchanged.
She slapped a cred-stick on his crate.
"I need a conduit. Not scrap. Something that can punch through a military-grade barrier glyph. What will this buy me?"
Raker picked up the stick, plugged it into a reader.
The number made his brow twitch.
It was more than he'd expected her to scrape together.
Enough to be… interesting.
He looked from the number to her shattered, unwavering determination.
"It'll buy you a problem," he said finally, standing up. "But it's the kind of problem you're looking for. Wait here."
He disappeared into the deeper shadows behind his stall.
When he returned, he held not a sleek corporate model, but a heavy, brutal-looking device.
Its casing was scarred carbon-fiber, its glyphs hand-etched and reinforced with weld marks.
It looked like it had been cobbled together from the wreckage of five different military surplus conduits.
"It's ugly," Raker said, handing it over.
Its weight was substantial, promising violence.
"It's unstable. It'll probably burn out its core after three, four high-yield casts. But it's got a bite. Stolen from a Myriad perimeter defense unit. Retuned to overload. Call it… the Jawbreaker."
Ember took it.
It hummed in her grip, a discordant, angry vibration.
It felt right in her hands.
An instrument of pure, unforgiving force.
It wasn't elegant.
It was a hammer.
And she finally had a wall to swing it at.
***
Blaze's first day in the expensive cage ended with fixation.
The mansion's oppressive luxury was a gilded blur, his world had narrowed to the Vitalis model in his hand.
Its organic, pulsing glyphwork was a language he was determined to learn.
He found a maid—a real one unlike the Crimson Velvet's escorts, in a stark, traditional uniform, her efficiency as polished as the floors—and asked where he could "test" his conduit.
Without a word, she led him through the estate to a hidden door in the hillside, down a sloping tunnel, and into a vast, underground proving ground.
A corporate-funded playground for breaking things.
That first day was a symphony of controlled violence.
He learned the Vitalis didn't roar like fire; it resonated.
Its power was less about explosive bursts and more about sustained, harmonic force—waves of concussive energy that could shatter reinforced plating, or bio-aetheric pulses that disrupted synthetic nervous systems in the target dummies.
It was surgical.
Cold.
Perfect.
He returned the next day.
And the next.
A week bled away, marked only by the rhythm of his sessions in the silent, grey chamber.
He ate meals prepared by unseen hands.
He slept in a room larger than any hideout he'd ever known.
The servants attended to his every unspoken need and vanished, ghosts in a white-walled machine.
And the target—Ember—didn't move.
The WhiteRoot executive had said 72 hours.
A week had passed.
The monolithic research facility in the distance remained a silent, gleaming tomb.
No alarms.
No breaches.
No sign of the desperate woman.
The waiting should have grated.
It should have felt like a leash growing taut.
Instead, Blaze found a strange, cold focus in the routine.
The delay wasn't idle time; it was preparation.
Each hour in the proving ground was an hour he learned the Vitalis' secrets, an hour he honed his control over this new, terrifying power WhiteRoot had placed in his hands.
He wasn't just waiting for a ghost.
He was arming himself for the moment she finally decided to stop being one.
On the seventh evening, as he left the proving ground, the tunnel door sealing behind him with its usual soft hiss, he paused.
He looked not toward the mansion, but through the trees, toward the distant, glowing pyramid in Sector 1's heart.
"Zhen Baigen."
The name was a low murmur on his breath, a key turning in a lock he hadn't known existed.
He'd learned it two days prior, from the maid assigned to him.
He'd asked, not expecting an answer.
Corporate masters loved their anonymity.
But she'd paused in her dusting, her eyes still downcast, and spoke the name softly, as if it were a piece of trivia about the artwork on the wall.
"The master of the house is Director Zhen Baigen, of WhiteRoot's Special Projects Division."
Then she'd continued her work, the moment gone.
It was a breach of protocol.
A gift, or a test.
Blaze didn't know which.
In the underworld, you didn't give your name to the hired knife.
It was insurance.
Deniability.
The man in the buried suite—Zhen Baigen—had broken that rule, even if by proxy.
He'd allowed himself to be known.
Or he'd allowed Blaze to think he was known.
That was the seed of the unease, coiling tighter with each silent, opulent day.
Blaze wasn't a fool.
He was a weapon, and weapons were told where to point, not why.
He'd painted Ember as a rogue element, a threat to stability.
But what if that was just the surface?
What if the "why" was a decoy?
What if Ember wasn't just a loose end, but someone who knew something?
What if Project LOTUS wasn't just an experiment, but a crime Zhen needed buried deeper than any grave?
Zhen had told Blaze what he wanted Blaze to know.
Enough to motivate.
Enough to direct his fury.
But the vital core, the true stakes—those were locked away, as inaccessible floor of the white pyramid.
Blaze's fingers tightened around the Vitalis.
Its resonant hum was a comfort, a promise of power he could control.
The rest of this—the mansion, the name, the waiting game—was a web.
He could feel the strands, subtle and strong, settling around him.
He was no longer just the hunter, or the bait.
He was becoming a piece on Zhen Baigen's board.
And the first step to not being played was knowing the name of the player.
He looked once more at the distant pyramid, no longer just a target's destination, but a symbol of the hidden game.
***
Ember's two-week preparation wasn't a plan.
It was a metamorphosis forged in violence and paid for in blood.
She couldn't just arm herself with a conduit, especially one as unstable and alien as the Jawbreaker.
She had to become it.
So she did what only the desperate or the insane would do: she used Raker's high-risk, high-reward missions as her live-fire training ground.
Each job was a lesson written in gunfire and glyph-light.
A smash-and-grab on a Nimbrix arms depot taught her the Jawbreaker's recoil—a vicious, bone-jarring kick that threatened to dislocate her shoulder if she didn't brace perfectly.
An escort run through Reclaimer territory taught her its aether-drain; one overcharged blast could leave the device dark and sputtering for precious, lethal minutes.
A data heist from a moving Myriad convoy taught her its instability: a containment glyph meant to suppress sound once flared out of control, rupturing the eardrums of two pursuers in a silent, horrifying burst of pressurized air.
She didn't just survive these missions.
She excelled.
With a ferocity that bordered on the suicidal, she carved a path through the Junkyard's underbelly.
The jobs were anonymous, but the aftermath wasn't.
Stories spread of a woman with dark red hair moving like a storm front, her hands sheathed in crackling crimson light, leaving broken bodies and shattered security grids in her wake.
They didn't know her name.
But they called her the Red Demon.
Gangs in the slums started posting lookouts for a flash of crimson.
Jobs dried up for anyone operating in zones she was rumored to be hunting.
Fear became her currency, and she spent it freely.
With the credits she earned—and the salvage she stripped from the security teams she dismantled—she slowly, painstakingly upgraded the Jawbreaker.
She traded for reinforced capacitors to handle the overcharge, for better heat sinks to mitigate the feedback burns on her palms, for a crude stabilizer module that reduced the chance of a catastrophic misfire from "likely" to "possible."
But she never came to rely on it.
The conduit was a tool, a force multiplier, but it was treacherous.
Her body—honed by years of security work, now sharpened to a razor's edge by desperation—was her primary weapon.
She fought with a brutal, efficient blend of martial discipline and gutter savagery, using the Jawbreaker not as a crutch, but as a surprise.
A grenade in her fist.
She discovered one of its more stable glyphs early on: Rank 1—Caestus.
When activated, it didn't fire a projectile.
It encased her hands and forearms in constructs of solidified, crimson aether—gauntlets that shimmered like heated glass.
They were blunt, knuckled slabs of pure force.
As a Rank 1 glyph, they couldn't project barriers or unleash beams, but they could turn her fists into wrecking balls.
She learned they could deflect knives, shatter lesser conduits on impact, and, with a well-timed cross-block, even stop bullets with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil, leaving her arm numb but unbroken.
It became her signature.
The Red Demon's crimson fists.
By the end of the second week, the Jawbreaker was as upgraded as it could be without a corporate engineering bay.
Her body was a map of fresh scars and burning muscle memory.
And her reputation was a ghost story that cleared the streets.
She stood once more on the grimy gantry under the mag-lev tracks, looking across the barrier at the glowing white pyramid.
The fear in the slums meant nothing here.
***
By the second week, the routine began to chafe.
The days were a single-minded symphony of aetheric violence in the proving ground—he had pushed the Vitalis model to its theoretical limits, mapping every harmonic frequency, every potential overload point.
He could now wield its sustained resonance like a physical blade, could disrupt complex glyph matrices with a carefully tuned pulse.
He had mastered the tool.
But the nights were a different kind of prison.
The security perimeter around the mansion and Sector 1 tightened after dark.
The silent patrols of white-armored guards became more frequent, their movements synchronized and relentless.
The shimmering barrier over the district seemed to brighten, humming at a higher, more vigilant pitch.
Any attempt to slip out would be less an escape and more a declaration of war against his host.
Restlessness turned to a gnawing curiosity.
What else was hidden in this place besides a weapons lab and silent servants?
One moonless night, he walked the manicured garden paths, the gravel crunching softly under his boots.
The assigned maid followed at a precise, respectful distance of ten paces, a silent shadow in her stark uniform.
At the geometric center of the garden, where four paths converged, stood a single, upright stone—a stele.
It was about chest-height, made of polished black obsidian that seemed to drink the light from the subtle path lamps.
Intricate characters were carved into its surface, flowing and elegant.
Blaze stopped before it.
He couldn't read it.
It was in another language.
Curiosity won.
He unclipped the Vitalis model from his belt, intending to use it and translate the inscription.
But before he could activate it, the maid's voice cut through the quiet, clear and close.
She had closed the distance without a sound.
"It means, 'From the root, all life is sustained,'" she said, her tone respectful but devoid of personal inflection. "It is the founding quote by our master, Baigen."
Blaze lowered the conduit, turning to look at her.
Her eyes were fixed on the stone, her face a mask of serene reverence.
"What does it mean?" Blaze asked, not about the translation, but about the weight behind the words.
In a garden of sterile beauty, next to a mansion that housed a private armory, the phrase felt like a paradox.
The maid finally met his gaze.
For a fleeting moment, the perfectly cultivated blankness slipped, revealing something colder, more zealous beneath.
"It means," she said softly, "that WhiteRoot is not a company. It is the root. The source. All that grows in this city—its medicine, its order, its progress, even its… corrections—flows from this root. To be sustained by it is a privilege. To be cut off from it is to wither."
She gave a slight bow toward the stele, then stepped back, reassuming her role as a shadow.
Blaze stared at the obsidian stone, the maid's reverent words hanging in the perfumed night air.
From the root, all life is sustained.
He didn't feel inspired.
He didn't feel privileged.
A slow, cold smirk touched his lips.
His interpretation was simpler.
Twisted by the Junkyard, forged in betrayal, and honed by the understanding that nothing in this city was given—only taken.
You own something, you sustain it.
You sustain something, you own it.
WhiteRoot sustained Sector 1's clean air, its perfect order, its silent guards.
Therefore, WhiteRoot owned Sector 1.
They sustained this mansion, this garden, this maid.
Therefore, they owned it all.
They were sustaining him—feeding him, housing him, arming him.
Therefore…
He looked down at the Vitalis model in his hand, its organic glyphs pulsing softly.
They think they own me.
The thought didn't anger him.
It amused him.
It clarified everything.
This wasn't patronage.
It was a purchase.
They had bought a attack dog, were keeping it in a kennel, and were pointing it at a problem.
He clipped the conduit back to his belt, the cold weight of it a familiar comfort.
"Thanks," he said to the maid, his voice dry. "Poetic."
He turned his back on the stele, on the quote, on the entire carefully constructed myth of benevolent order.
He began walking back toward the mansion, his footsteps firm on the gravel.
***
Ember walked through the black market, the air thick with the smell of sweat, rust, and illicit deals.
Fresh blood was smeared across her cheekbone and jaw, a dark, drying crimson against her tanned skin.
She hadn't bothered to wipe it.
The coppery scent was just another note in the market's symphony of decay.
She stopped at the familiar, cramped stall wedged between gutted machinery.
Raker was there, as always, perched on his crate, working a stim-stick down to the filter.
His chrome jaw caught the flickering neon from a nearby sign as he looked up.
His face—what she could see of it beneath the scars and augmentation—immediately soured.
The mechanical eye whirred softly, focusing on the blood.
"Missy," he said, the word a flat exhale of smoke.
He didn't sound angry.
He sounded tired.
"At least wash your face before you come here. You're scaring off the paying customers."
His gaze didn't leave hers.
It was the look of a man watching a building burn, knowing he sold the accelerant.
"Red Demon," he muttered, more to himself. He crushed the stim-stick under his boot. "That's what they're calling you now in the hushed corners. You're not just hunting credits anymore. You're hunting… something else. And it's hunting you back. You're slowly turning into the monster you need to kill."
He leaned forward, his voice dropping, stripped of its usual transactional dryness.
"Not my way to get tangled in other folks' affairs. But I gotta ask… what would your sister's reaction be if she saw you now?"
The words hit Ember like a physical blow.
Her breath caught.
The relentless, forward-driving force inside her stuttered.
"...How did you know?" she whispered, the raw sound foreign to her own ears.
Raker let out a low, humorless chuckle.
It sounded like gravel grinding.
"Missy, I've been seeing you for weeks. You think an informant who survives in this pit wouldn't piece it together? A former Gilded Cage guard, suddenly burning her life down, asking for hardware to crack WhiteRoot files. It doesn't take a genius to guess what your desperation is."
He looked at her, his organic eye holding a grim, pitying clarity.
"You're trading pieces of yourself for every credit, every upgrade. I just wonder… what's gonna be left of you to save her with when you finally get there?"
Ember stood frozen, the blood on her face feeling suddenly cold.
The Red Demon was armor.
Raker's words were a needle, slipping through a seam she hadn't known was there, pricking the raw, terrified girl still hiding inside.
Ember stared at her stained hands.
The blood was drying in the creases of her knuckles, under her nails—a map of violence she was learning by heart.
"…Should I stop?"
The question hung in the stale air between them, quiet and fragile.
It wasn't really pointed at Raker.
It was a whisper from a part of her that was growing fainter every day, a ghost asking the living if there was still a way back.
Raker didn't answer.
He just watched her, the stim-stick smoke curling between them like a slow, grey ghost.
He knew some questions weren't for fixing.
They were for feeling the wound.
Ember already knew the answer.
She was beyond redemption.
That bridge had burned the first time she drove her knife into a stranger's temple for nothing more than a clear line of sight.
Redemption was for people who could still feel the weight of their sins.
Hers had become… background noise.
A low, constant static.
Her mind was becoming more and more numb.
Each kill didn't add to a tally of guilt anymore.
It just sanded down another sharp edge of her conscience.
The horror, the revulsion, the nightmares—they were all fading, replaced by a cold, efficient clarity.
The Red Demon wasn't just a name others gave her.
It was the hollow she was carving out inside herself to make room for nothing but purpose.
She looked up from her hands, her eyes meeting Raker's.
There was no plea in them.
No hope.
Just a grim, accepting emptiness.
"It doesn't matter," she said, her voice flat. "I'm already in too deep. There's only forward now."
Raker just shrugged, a single, weary lift of his shoulders.
The conversation was over.
Some paths didn't have warning signs; they had tombstones.
He'd placed his stone.
She'd chosen to keep walking.
Without another word, he turned back to his crate and pulled out the final piece she'd paid for—a bulky, cylindrical charge of breaching gel, its surface cool and inert.
The transaction was silent, efficient.
Credits transferred from her stick to his with a soft beep.
He handed her the charge, his chrome fingers brushing hers for a second, cold and impersonal.
No farewell.
No good luck.
In the Junkyard, sentiment was a liability, and goodbyes were for people who expected to see each other again.
Ember took the charge, slid it into her pack, and turned away.
She didn't look back at the stall, at the flickering green light, at the man who had been her last tether to anything resembling counsel as this would be the last day Ember would come back to this shop.
***
"So it's finally time."
The words were a low murmur, more to himself than to the night.
The alert wasn't a sound, but a vibration—a subtle, insistent chime that resonated through the Vitalis model where it lay on the glass table beside him, a pulse of light flickering along one of its vein-like glyphs.
Blaze had been resting on a sun lounger on the mansion's vast, empty terrace, though 'resting' was a generous term.
His body was still thrumming with the echo of a full day in the proving ground, where he'd pushed the conduit's harmonics to their limit, sculpting shockwaves that could bend reinforced steel.
The cocktail in his hand—some frothy, sweet thing a maid had brought at his vague request—was untouched, the ice long melted.
For two weeks, he'd learned to navigate the luxury like a man studying the habits of a beautiful, alien predator.
He understood the silent rhythms of the servants, the perfect temperature of the pool, the way the mansion's sound-dampening fields created pockets of absolute silence.
He'd enjoyed none of it.
His interest, his entire being, had been funneled into the conduit.
The luxury was just the cradle the weapon rested in.
Now, the weapon was calling.
He stood up, his movements fluid, the fatigue burned away by a surge of electric focus.
He set the watery cocktail down on the tray of a nearby maid, who had been standing motionless in the shadows, waiting.
The glass clinked softly.
"It's done," he said, not looking at her.
He picked up the Vitalis model.
It warmed instantly in his palm, its pulse synchronizing with his own heartbeat.
He looked out past the manicured gardens, the shimmering barrier, toward the Sector 1 skyline.
There, in the distance, the white pyramid of the research facility was still lit, but a new pattern of lights was moving across its lower face—security drones, shifting to a higher alert pattern.
A silent alarm had been tripped. A ghost had touched the wall.
A perfect night for a haunting.
A perfect night for a hunt.
Blaze's lips curved into a smile that held no joy, only a sharp, anticipatory edge.
He turned and walked inside, not toward the opulent bedrooms, but toward the hidden tunnel, toward the proving ground, and the armory he knew would be stocked and waiting.
The wait was over.
***
Ember had always known, in the cold, logical part of her mind that survived beneath the rage, that this was a suicide mission.
The odds were astronomical.
The facility was a fortress.
She was one woman with a cobbled-together weapon and a cause.
But knowing it and feeling it were different things.
Now, she felt it.
The outer security grid had a blind spot exactly where her stolen schematics said it would.
A service air-vent's glyph-lock had been deactivated for maintenance.
She'd slipped past two patrols whose timing left a perfect, silent window.
It wasn't luck.
It was a funnel.
Even with all the studying, all the schematics she'd pieced together between bloody missions, she had fallen into their trap.
They hadn't just been waiting for her.
They had prepared for her.
Rolled out a welcome mat made of her own predictable desperation.
The sterile white corridor she was in ended at another featureless alloy door.
No console.
No keypad.
Just smooth, impassive ceramic.
"Another locked door," she whispered, the words swallowed by the dead air.
Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears as she was all out of the breaching gel.
She wasn't lost.
She was being led.
Herded deeper into the facility's heart, away from the exit routes, away from the holding areas where Ellie might be, into a controlled space where they could contain her, study her, or delete her without mess.
The Jawbreaker was a hot, angry weight in her hand.
The crimson Caestus glyphs shimmered around her fists, casting a bloody glow on the white walls.
But what was she supposed to punch?
The door?
The walls?
The entire, patient, intelligent system that had already calculated her every move?
A deep, resonant hum filled the corridor, emanating from the door itself. It wasn't an alarm. It was a recognition.
The door slid open with a soft hiss.
Revealing not a cell, not a lab, but a vast, circular chamber.
The walls were lined with observation galleries behind one-way glass, dark and empty.
In the center of the room, under a single, focused spotlight, stood a lone figure.
He held a conduit of deep, liquid crimson, its organic glyphs pulsing softly.
He wasn't in security gear.
He wore simple, dark clothes.
He looked… relaxed.
As if he'd been waiting for a bus.
He smiled.
"Took you long enough," Blaze said.
Ember's blood went cold.
This wasn't a guard.
This wasn't WhiteRoot security.
This was something else.
The trap hadn't just been sprung.
The other predator was already in the cage with her.
Blaze started the fight not with a roar, but with a test.
A flick of his wrist, and the air between them shimmered.
Ten pinpoint glyphs, sharp and precise, ignited in a tight spread: Rank 1—Ember Needles.
They weren't meant to kill.
They were diagnostics—fast, searing projectiles to gauge her reflexes, her defense, her pain tolerance.
Corporate efficiency at its most cold.
Ember didn't flinch.
She didn't dive for cover.
Her hands came up, and the Caestus glyphs flared to life.
Crimson aether surged from the Jawbreaker, not as a wave, but as a second skin, sheathing her forearms and fists in solid, knuckled gauntlets of shimmering force.
They hummed with a unstable, angry energy, casting a bloody glow across her determined face.
The Ember Needles streaked toward her.
Ting-ting-ting-ting-ting!
The sound was like hot nails hitting a furnace plate.
Each needle struck the crimson gauntlets and shattered into harmless sparks, deflected with sharp, percussive cracks.
She stood her ground, weathering the barrage, the Caestus constructs vibrating with each impact but holding firm.
When the last needle faded, the air smelled of ozone and burnt aether.
Ember lowered her arms slightly, the gauntlets still pulsing.
Her eyes, locked on Blaze over the crimson glow, held no fear.
Only a cold, evaluating focus.
She had passed the first test.
Ember didn't wait for his next move.
She dashed forward, a blur of dark clothing and crimson light, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat.
Her boots were silent on the polished floor, her movement a product of desperation-honed agility and pure, reckless intent.
Blaze's eyes widened a fraction—a flicker of genuine surprise behind his focused calm.
An idiot, the tactical part of his mind supplied, cold and clinical.
Going melee against a ranged weapon in an open chamber. Suicide.
He was a scalpel. She was a hammer. And she was trying to smash the surgeon's hand before he could make the first cut.
His surprise lasted only a microsecond. Training—both Junkyard instinct and WhiteRoot's downloaded protocols—took over.
He backpedaled smoothly, his free hand already sketching a more complex glyph in the air.
The Vitalis model hummed, priming a Rank 2—Kinetic Wave, designed to knock her off her feet and shatter those clumsy gauntlets at range.
But Ember's desperation was a weapon of its own.
It was sharpened by a week of near-death encounters, polished in back-alley bloodbaths, and honed to a lethal edge by the singular goal of reaching her sister.
It wasn't rage.
It was intuition forged in fire.
As Blaze's hand moved to complete the Kinetic Wave glyph, her own instincts—quicker than thought—screamed a warning.
She didn't see the glyph; she saw the intent in the shift of his shoulders, the focus in his eyes.
She didn't try to stop.
She diverted.
Mid-stride, she threw her weight sideways, not away from him, but into a low, spinning slide.
The Kinetic Wave erupted from his conduit, a visible ripple of distorted air that hissed over her head as she passed beneath it, close enough to feel its concussive pressure tear at her hair.
Her slide carried her inside his guard, into the deadly space where his ranged advantage vanished.
As she came up, already uncoiling, her right fist—wrapped in the humming crimson Caestus—shot forward in a brutal, rising uppercut aimed not at his conduit, but at the arm holding it.
Blaze had his own experiences.
A lifetime of street fights, corporate ambushes, and the raw, gnawing hunger of the Junkyard had carved reflexes into his bones.
But this—this was different.
He felt it the moment her Caestus-connected fist connected.
It wasn't just the physical impact, though that was devastating enough—a sickening crunch of stressed bone and a white-hot lance of pain shooting from his wrist to his shoulder.
It was the frenzy behind it.
A desperation so vivid, so all-consuming, it seemed to bleed through the air itself, a scream of pure, undiluted need.
It wasn't anger.
It was a deeper, and more terrifying thing: the absolute refusal to be stopped.
For a split second, it short-circuited his own clinical focus.
He can endure the pain.
The desperation was an emotion, and it washed over him, unfamiliar and unsettling.
Pain was a spike in his brain, but it sharpened his focus into a single, burning point: create space.
He didn't aim at her.
He knew she'd dodge.
Instead, as Ember recoiled for another punch, he twisted his left wrist and slammed the base of the Vitalis model against the polished floor.
A Rank 2—Fire Ball glyph erupted in the air. It wasn't a projectile; it was a point-blank detonation.
The world vanished in a thunderous WHUMP of concussive force and searing orange light.
The shockwave hit Ember like a physical wall.
Her dodge, meant to weave around a flying sphere, was perfectly wrong.
The force lifted her off her feet and hurled her backward across the chamber.
She slammed into the far wall with a sickening crunch of body against unyielding ceramic, the crimson glow of her Caestus gauntlets snuffing out as the impact shattered her focus and her breath.
Dust and the acrid smell of scorched floor-plating filled the air.
Blaze staggered back, his left arm now trembling from the conduit's feedback, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side.
The room echoed with the aftermath.
He had created space.
But the cost was written in the fractures of his own body and the still, crumpled form across the room.
Silence descended, thick with dust and the hum of strained systems.
The air still shimmered with heat from the point-blank detonation.
Blaze stood, favoring his left side, the Vitalis model held tight in his trembling hand.
His right arm was a throbbing, useless weight.
Across the chamber, Ember pushed herself up from the wall, a dark smear against the white ceramic.
Her movements were jerky, pained.
One of her Caestus gauntlets had shattered entirely, the aether bleeding away in fading crimson sparks.
But her eyes hadn't dimmed.
If anything, the pain had stoked the fire within them into an even hotter, more desperate blaze.
"What are you?" Blaze asked, his voice rough, cutting through the quiet.
The question wasn't tactical.
It was born of the unsettling realization that had struck him moments before—this wasn't a standard hostile.
This was a force of nature.
A person shouldn't be able to get back up after that.
Ember didn't answer.
She just stared, her chest heaving, her gaze locked on him with an intensity that felt less like hatred and more like... a plea.
Blaze took a step forward, his own desperation—a need to understand the variable breaking his perfect mission—pushing him.
"What is it?" he demanded, his voice rising. "What is it you're so desperate about that you'd walk into a death trap? That you'd fight like this?"
He gestured vaguely at the wreckage between them, at his own fractured arm.
"This isn't a job. This isn't greed. This is... something else. Tell me."
For the first time, the clinical hunter was gone.
In his place was a man confronting a mystery that refused to be solved with glyphs and fire.
He needed to know what fuel powered this human inferno, before it consumed them both.
"What are you talking about?" Ember's voice was a raw scrape, shredded by smoke and impact.
She braced herself against the wall, her remaining Caestus gauntlet flickering weakly.
"Aren't you part of them?"
Confusion, sharp and genuine, cut through her desperation.
This man, this weapon they'd sent, was asking why?
The question unlocked something behind her ribs—a dam of grief and fury so vast it couldn't be contained by silence anymore.
It tore out of her, not as a scream, but as a ragged, burning accusation.
"You should know!" she shouted, the words cracking. "You work for them! You all abducted my sister! You took her and you made her a part of your… your fucking Project LOTUS!"
The name of the project hung in the charged air like a poison.
Her voice broke, but her eyes never wavered, pinning him with the raw, unvarnished truth of her war.
"She was just a performer. She wasn't a threat. She wasn't just some data. She was my sister!"
She took a staggering step forward, her good hand clenched into a fist, the last crimson sparks of the Caestus dying around her knuckles.
"So don't you stand there and ask me what I'm desperate about. You tell me where she is. Or get out of my way."
Sister?
The word landed, and the pieces—the ones Ash had warned him about—clicked into a horrifying picture.
The impenetrable "Project LOTUS" firewall Ash had refused to breach.
The corporate obsession with "acquisition."
The woman's suicidal ferocity.
It wasn't corporate espionage.
It wasn't a rogue employee.
It was a kidnapping.
A family.
Blaze let out a short, sharp snort of air.
It wasn't laughter.
It was the sound of something cold and cynical inside him cracking.
He didn't know if he wanted to laugh at the absurd, tragic simplicity of it, or scream.
But beneath the cynicism, something else finally simmered over and boiled to the surface.
It was disgust.
A deep, visceral revulsion that had nothing to do with tactics or payouts.
It was the same feeling he'd had as a kid, watching Cleaners drag away dissidents in the night.
The feeling of being a tool for something utterly, pointlessly cruel.
He looked at Ember, really looked at her.
Not as a ghost or a target, but as a woman standing in the wreckage of her life, covered in blood and dust, staring him down with nothing left but a sister's name.
He looked down at the Vitalis model in his hand—WhiteRoot's key, their badge, their beautifully crafted leash.
The disgust crystallized into a decision.
His gaze lifted from the conduit to meet hers. The hunter's calm was gone, replaced by something darker, more volatile.
"Lotus," he said, the word flat.
"Yeah. I heard of it." He paused, his jaw tightening. "They didn't tell me it was a family business."
Suddenly, a sterile, amplified static crackled through the chamber, emanating from hidden speakers in the ceiling.
The voice that followed was calm, cultured, and utterly devoid of the human tension choking the room.
"Mister Blaze."
It was him.
Zhen.
Watching from some sterile control room far from the smoke and the blood, observing his asset and the variable through a screen.
"You don't need to hear her pleas." The voice was reasonable, a mentor guiding a student past a distraction. "They are irrelevant to the objective. Just do what you were contracted to do. Terminate the liability."
The words hung in the air, a stark, chilling command. It was an order to switch off his humanity and complete the transaction.
To become the pure, logical weapon they had paid for.
In that moment, the invisible leash around Blaze's neck pulled taut.
Blaze's expression went blank, the pain and disgust wiped away by a mask of pure, terrifying focus.
The Vitalis model in his left hand flared, its organic glyphs blazing with a harsh, white-hot light as he drew deeply from its core.
The air around the conduit shimmered with gathering heat.
A complex, triple-layered glyph began etching itself in the space before him—interlocking rings of destructive intent.
Rank 3—Scorchline Array.
A siege-clearance spell.
Not for people.
For fortifications.
Ember's heart plummeted.
She braced, her remaining Caestus flickering as she raised her arms, ready to meet the annihilating beam head-on, to be erased in a final, defiant flash.
But Blaze didn't aim at her.
In one smooth, violent pivot, he spun on his heel and leveled the fully-formed glyph at the massive, sealed alloy door behind him, the door that led deeper into WhiteRoot's trap.
He fired.
A horizontal beam of concentrated plasma, half a meter in diameter, lanced across the chamber.
It didn't roar; it screamed, a sound of air being ripped apart by pure heat.
It struck the center of the fortified door.
For a second, nothing.
Then, the polished white ceramic glowed cherry-red.
The metal beneath shrieked in protest.
A molten line appeared across its width, deepening, spreading.
With a deafening CRACK and a shower of molten slag, the door was sheared in two, the upper half sagging inward with a groan of tortured metal.
The path was opened.
Blaze lowered the smoking conduit, the feedback from the high-rank spell making his left arm tremble violently.
He didn't look at the ruined door.
He looked back at Ember, his mask gone, his eyes burning with a new, reckless fire.
The static from the speaker erupted into sharp, clipped noise. "Blaze! Stand down! What is the meaning of—"
He looked at the stunned Ember, her face a mask of shock amidst the settling dust and molten stench.
"GO!" he roared, the command ripping from his throat.
Ember didn't hesitate.
She was a arrow finally loosed, darting through the smoldering hole in the ruined door, deeper into the facility's heart.
Blaze went with her.
If he was going to burn his bridges with WhiteRoot, he might as well see the ending of the story that had started this fire.
He expected the Vitalis model to die in his hand any second—a remote kill-switch from the furious executive watching from afar. But it didn't happen.
Instead, a strange thing occurred.
The resonance between him and the conduit strengthened.
The glyphs burned brighter, hotter, as if responding to his defiance, as if the act of betrayal had fused their purposes together.
WhiteRoot's leash had become his own torch.
Together, they cut a relentless, merciful path through the facility's security.
Blaze's Scorchline Arrays carved through reinforced bulkheads.
Ember's shattered Caestus and brutal efficiency cleared rooms.
They were a storm of vengeance and ruin, leaving broken drones and unconscious guards in their wake, moving with a single-minded fury that admitted no obstacle.
They descended, level by sterile level, until they reached the deepest sanctum.
The air grew cold, humming with the low, hungry thrum of powerful aetheric engines.
The chamber was vast, circular, and dominated by a grand display board of black steel alloy that covered an entire wall.
Upon it, in clean, glowing white glyphs, was the word:
>> LOTUS
Below it, streams of data flowed—vital signs, aetheric saturation levels, genetic drift percentages.
A monitor of an ongoing atrocity.
Blaze didn't read it.
He raised the Vitalis model, its strengthened hum reaching a fever pitch. "LOTUS," he spat, and unleashed another Scorchline Array.
The beam of screaming plasma struck the center of the board.
The alloy didn't just melt; it vaporized in a shower of sparks and molten droplets, the data feeds dying in a cascade of frantic error messages.
The name was erased, replaced by a smoldering, blackened scar.
"E-77!" Ember shouted, her voice fraying as she sprinted past the wreckage to the rows of translucent stasis pods lining the far wall.
Each pod bore a code.
She found it: E-77.
She skidded to a halt before it.
Blaze came to stand beside her, the heat of the conduit warming the suddenly frigid air.
Inside the pod, suspended in pale blue nutrient fluid, was the horror.
It was no longer a person.
It was a lump of pulsating, amalgamated flesh.
Fragments of bone jutted at unnatural angles.
Patches of skin, hair, and what might have been an eye were visible, but they were merged, distorted, grown into and around each other in a nightmare of forced biological convergence.
Tubes and aetheric filaments burrowed into the mass, feeding it, measuring it, sustaining the unspeakable experiment.
It was unrecognizable.
It was a thing that should not be.
Ellie was gone.
Only Project LOTUS remained.
Ember made no sound.
She didn't scream.
She simply stood, her hand pressed against the cold glass, her body rigid, her eyes wide and utterly, completely empty.
The desperate fire that had carried her through hell had finally met the fuel it sought, and found only ash.
Beside her, Blaze stared, the last of his disgust hardening into something colder, more absolute: a vow.
He looked from the thing in the pod, to Ember's shattered form, to the Vitalis model blazing in his hand.
The ending was here.
And it demanded a pyre.
Ember moved.
It wasn't a decision; it was a collapse in motion.
Her fist, still faintly sheathed in the last ghost of the Caestus, struck the pod's glass.
It didn't shatter—it exploded inward in a cloud of crystalline fragments and foaming fluid.
The lump of flesh within shuddered as the cold air hit it.
Ember didn't reach in.
She didn't try to hold it.
She just stood there, the nutrient solution soaking her boots, and stared at the ruin of her sister.
Then, she broke.
Not with a scream, but with a silent, shuddering collapse to her knees.
Her shoulders hunched, and a low, raw, animal sound was torn from her chest—a sob so deep it seemed to come from the shattered earth itself.
Tears cut clean tracks through the grime and blood on her face.
Her head bowed, she spoke to the floor, her voice a shredded whisper.
"Blaze, was it? Thank you."
He looked down at her, at the horror in the pod, at the facility burning around them.
The gratitude felt like a knife twist.
He hadn't done this for thanks.
He'd done it because the alternative was becoming the monster that made this room.
"Yeah," he said, his own voice rough. "No shit."
The alarms, which had been a constant, distant whine, suddenly spiked into a deafening, pulsed WAIL.
Crimson emergency lights strobed, painting the nightmare scene in jerking flashes of hellish light.
The speaker in the ceiling crackled again, the static sharper now, laced with a cold, controlled fury that had finally burned through the executive's calm.
"You disappoint me, Mister Blaze."
The words were measured, but each one carried the weight of a sealed fate.
"We invested. We equipped you. We gave you purpose. And you choose sentiment over progress. You choose a broken ghost over your own advancement."
A deep, hydraulic thrum began to vibrate through the floor.
From vents in the ceiling, a pale, odorless gas started to hiss into the room.
"A tool that turns on its maker is not a tool. It is scrap. And scraps are to be disposed."
The finality in his tone was absolute.
The trap hadn't been sprung on Ember.
It had been sprung on both of them.
The gas stung Blaze's eyes, a chemical sweetness clawing at the back of his throat.
Disposed.
He felt a raging defiance in this disgusting place.
He looked at Ember, still kneeling in the spilled fluid, her sobs silent now, her spirit shattered.
He looked at the twisted thing that had been her sister.
He looked at the Vitalis model in his hand, its resonance a defiant song against his palm.
A tool that turns on its maker.
Fine, he thought. Let's see how much turning this tool can do.
But it wasn't just his own anger fueling the thought.
A whispering had begun at the edges of his mind the moment they'd entered this profane chamber.
It had grown stronger with every step, a susurrus of alien intent that vibrated in time with the Vitalis model's pulse.
When the executive's voice had crackled through the speaker, the whisper had spiked into a clear, cold command that overrode the man's words.
Consume.
The voice didn't feel like his own.
It felt older.
Hungrier.
It resonated from the conduit itself, from the very aether WhiteRoot had woven into its core.
Hallucination, Blaze's rational mind insisted, a frail defense against the mounting absurdity—the horror in the pod, the broken woman, the betrayal, the gas.
His brain was cooking in a stew of pain and adrenaline.
But he didn't deny the voice.
In the face of the unspeakable, the inhuman command felt like a compass.
A purpose.
He raised the Vitalis model one last time.
He didn't focus on a reactor column or a door.
He focused on the room itself.
On the data, the pods, the corrupted aether, the very memory of Project LOTUS.
He channeled the whisper.
He channeled his disgust.
He channeled every shred of stolen power.
The Rank 3—Scorchline Array glyph that formed was unlike any he'd cast before.
It didn't hover neatly.
It blazed, a miniature sun erupting before him, its light so ferociously bright it seared through his closed eyelids, painting his vision with bloody afterimages.
The heat was instantaneous, blistering the skin on his face and hands.
The air itself seemed to catch fire around the glyph, warping and screaming as it was pulled into the forming cataclysm.
He released it into the heart of the chamber.
And as he did, the whispering voice in his mind spoke one last time, clear as breaking glass:
...Thanks.