The days had blurred after the WhiteRoot facility burned.
After the smoke cleared and the sirens faded into a distant hunt, Ember had looked at Blaze with eyes stripped of everything but a single, stark purpose.
She hadn't thanked him again.
She had pledged.
An undying loyalty, forged not in friendship, but in the shared ashes of a nightmare.
It was a vow as sharp and cold as the knife she still carried.
Together with Ash and Cinder, they had become The Scorchers.
A name born from Blaze's fire, Ash's cunning, Cinder's cold precision, and now, Ember's relentless fury.
WhiteRoot never stopped hunting them, a constant, corporate shadow at their backs.
And then, eventually, Blaze had been killed by Nex.
The King of the Junkyard had delivered what felt like a final, righteous verdict.
Blaze had believed it was just karma—payment for the things he'd done, for the lines he'd crossed, for the person he'd let himself become in that WhiteRoot mansion.
He hadn't expected the white coats.
He hadn't expected the cold light.
He hadn't expected to wake up in this… cage.
Now, as AiM piloted his body through a devastating ballet of glyphs and fire against Lucent, Blaze was a passenger.
He watched the fight unfold on the augmented reality display painted across his retinas—a stream of tactical data, energy readings, and threat assessments.
He could still feel.
He felt the strain in the synthetic muscles, the heat bleed from the aether core, the impact of Lucent's corrupted spells vibrating through his alloy frame.
But he could not twitch a finger.
And then there was the resonance.
It bled from Lucent with every rawcast, a cold, whispering harmonic that scratched at the edges of Blaze's trapped consciousness.
It was familiar.
It was the same dissonant hum that had vibrated through the Vitalis model in that final moment in the LOTUS chamber.
He had forgotten it, buried it under fury and fire.
But here it was again, pouring from a different broken vessel.
Before he could chase the lost memory, another alert flickered into his vision, a soft, clinical chime at the periphery of the chaos.
>> ALERT: PRIMARY ASSET STATUS UPDATE.
>> ASSET: "EMBER" // AEGIS-SERIES COMBAT FRAME.
>> VITAL SIGNS: OFFLINE.
>> COMBAT FEEDBACK: TERMINATED.
>> LAST KNOWN COORDINATES: STEEL TALONS RALLY POINT, SECTOR 18.
The message hung there, sterile and absolute.
For a second, the consuming rage that had been boiling inside his prison subsided, frozen by a shock of pure, cold disbelief.
Ember?
Flatlined?
It made no sense.
Ember wasn't someone to be defeated in some back-alley brawl at a rustbucket rally point.
She was a force of nature.
A survivor carved from tragedy and hardened in corporate fire.
Nex was dead.
There was no one left in the Steel Talons—no one in the whole damn Junkyard—who should have been able to touch her while she was sealed inside that million-credit war suit.
What happened to you?
The thought screamed in the silence of his own skull.
He wanted to snarl the question at AiM.
To demand data, footage, answers.
But he had no control.
Not of his limbs, not of his voice.
He was a ghost in the machine, screaming into static.
All he could do was watch as his own body, piloted by cold logic, continued to fight a man bleeding star-fire, while the only person he had ever fought for—the woman whose loyalty he had earned in hell—was now just another line of dead data on a screen he couldn't look away from.
Outside, the fight was a symphony of ruin, and Blaze was trapped in the conductor's stand, forced to watch his own hands orchestrate the destruction.
AiM moved his body with flawless, inhuman efficiency.
A hundred Fire Darts became a swirling, intelligent storm—not a barrage to kill, but a net to herd, to probe weaknesses, to drain the frantic, unstable energy Lucent poured into every desperate cast.
Lucent answered not with finesse, but with raw, screaming power.
Concentrated claws of air tore triple gashes in the earth.
Searing Lances turned pockets of air into superheated poison, leaving afterimages of star-fire on the retina.
To a casual observer, it might look like Lucent had the upper hand—his spells were cataclysmic, dazzling in their violence.
But Blaze, forced to watch through the lens of AiM's own tactical feed, saw the terrifying truth.
The sheer, perfect efficiency of AiM's movements was tipping the scales.
Every dodge was a millimeter from death.
Every counter-glyph was cast with zero wasted motion.
Every attack was designed not just to hit, but to force Lucent into a more costly defense.
It was only Lucent who was taking damage.
A graze from a redirected Fire Dart here, a concussive backwash from a nullified Rupture there.
Small wounds, but cumulative.
A human was bleeding energy, focus, and blood.
A machine was not.
But each flawless defense, each surgically precise attack, was chipping away at the Aether Reserves of Blaze's own core.
The readout in the corner of his vision ticked down relentlessly: 17%.
Blaze's own desperate plan—to take the whole sector hostage with the Rank 6—Red Extinction—had been a wild, suicidal gambit.
He hadn't thought it would actually cripple AiM's capabilities.
He'd just wanted to force a draw, to break the game board.
Maybe it was luck that the catastrophic aether drain had pushed the system into conservation mode.
He didn't know.
But what Blaze truly didn't know, what filled his trapped mind with a cold, seeping dread, was this: What else was AiM hiding?
It had a glyph—the Eclipse—that could unmake a sun.
A spell of absolute negation that shouldn't exist in any corporate database.
What other protocols were buried in its code?
What other world-breaking functions were locked behind commands he couldn't access?
Was it just a tactical assistant?
Or was it something older, something stranger, that MyriadLabs, their parent company, had dug up and plugged into his spine?
He was a prisoner in a body that was a weapon, piloted by an intelligence that was a vault.
And the vault had just shown him one forbidden treasure.
What other doors were still locked inside him?
***
From their precarious cover behind the scorched husk of a building, Karen watched in mounting horror.
It wasn't the spectacle of the fight—the swirling fire, the shattering earth, the beams of white plasma—that froze her blood.
It was Lucent.
Through the binoculars, she could see the physical transformation the Q-Serin was wreaking.
The violent, blue-white glow pulsing along his veins like live wires beneath his skin.
The way his movements, while powerful, had a twitching, overclocked frenzy to them.
The blood that had begun to seep from his nose and the corners of his eyes, painting his determined expression with tragic, heroic strokes.
She'd saw him rawcast before.
But Lucent only lived through luck with that situation.
And right now, she doesn't believe that the same thing could happen twice.
Her fist clenched, knuckles white.
A cold, sickening guilt twisted in her gut.
We did this.
The thought was a hammer blow.
He's burning himself alive because we weren't strong enough.
She misunderstood the situation completely.
She saw a desperate man consuming poison to protect them.
Beside her, Cale peered through his binoculars, his usual sarcastic commentary dried up in his throat.
"…Wow," he breathed, the word hollow. "How can we even… compete with that?"
He was talking about Lucent.
The sheer, self-annihilating magnitude of the power he was wielding.
It wasn't inspiring.
It was terrifying.
It redefined the scale of the world, and on that new scale, Cale felt like an insect.
Deep down, beneath the tactical analysis and the gallows humor, a raw, primal fear was growing—not just of being killed, but of being irrelevant.
Of watching a god and a demon duel while you hid behind a broken car, clutching a gun that felt like a toy.
As both Karen and Cale remained mesmerized—half in awe, half in dread—by the cataclysmic duel tearing the street apart, a figure dropped from the roof of the transport behind them with a soft thud.
They startled violently, spinning around, weapons snapping up—Karen's pulse rifle whining as it powered a half-charge, Cale's gun finding a shaky aim.
But it was just Kai.
He landed in a low crouch, his conduit held loosely in one hand, his expression grim and focused beneath a layer of dust and sweat.
He raised his free hand in a quick, placating gesture.
"Woah, don't surprise us like that!" Cale hissed, lowering his carbine, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"We're a little jumpy, in case you haven't noticed the localized apocalypse over there!"
"Sorry," Kai said, the word clipped.
His eyes never left the duel, as if tracking data only he could see.
Dust coated his face, making him look older, harder.
The conduit in his hand was dark, its energy conserved.
Karen's gaze was a needle.
She didn't believe he'd risk the crossing, dropping into their cramped, exposed hide, without a reason that mattered more than the cataclysm hundred paces away.
"So," she said, her voice flat, stripped of any warmth. "Anything you want to report?"
It wasn't a question.
It was a demand.
A leader's demand, from a woman who felt the ground of her leadership crumbling into ash with every pulse of blue light from Lucent's veins.
Kai finally tore his eyes from the fight. He looked at her, then at Cale, his expression grim.
"He's not just using a conduit," Kai began, his voice low, fighting to be heard over the shriek of shearing stone and the roar of fire.
"He's not even just augmented. I ran a diagnostic. A simple Thermal Echo." He paused, the memory of the scan clearly unsettling him.
"Aether flows inside him. He wasn't a human anymore. There was an aether core inside where the heart supposed to be."
He let the words hang.
They sounded like madness.
Like something from the fever-dream rumors of the deep black labs, not the grimy reality of a Junkyard street fight.
Before the horror could fully take root, a new voice cut through the din, dry and gravelly as old stone.
"The boy's right."
From the deeper shadows pooled beside a collapsed coolant pipe, a figure resolved itself. Not with a dramatic step, but with a slow, unsettling emergence, as if he'd been part of the darkness all along.
Old Man Jack.
He leaned against the broken pipe, his custom rifle cradled loosely in his arms.
His eyes, sharp and weary, were fixed on the blur of crimson and orange that was Blaze.
"That thing you're all staring at," Jack said, nodding toward the fight. "Isn't human. Not anymore."
Cale's mouth opened, but no sound came out.
He doesn't know what to make of it.
Karen's blood ran cold.
"The bullet," Jack continued, his voice a low rumble.
"My bullet. It wasn't meant to just pierce. It was meant to eat. To absorb aether, disrupt the field."
He tapped the side of his rifle. "It should have worked. The barrier flickered. It created a hole."
He looked at each of them, his gaze heavy. "But he moved. Not after the barrier weakened. He moved because it weakened. A microsecond before impact, his body twisted on an axis no human spine should."
Jack's words painted a colder, more terrifying picture than Kai's scan.
Kai spoke of internal architecture.
Jack spoke of action—or rather, of reaction.
The reaction of a machine.
Jack grunted, a sound of finality. "We're not hunting a man anymore. We're hunting a weapon created to hunt us. And that weapon…"
He glanced at Lucent, who was weaving another desperate, glowing glyph. "…is currently locked against another kind of beast."
The truth settled over them, colder than the night air.
They were witnessing a field test.
A diagnostic between two opposing technologies of violence.
And they were the fragile, organic witnesses hiding in the blast radius.
Karen's hand tightened on her rifle.
The guilt curdled into something colder, more focused.
This changed everything.
And at the same time, nothing.
Lucent was still dying for them.
The monster was still a monster.
But now they knew.
They knew that it was a weapon.
And someone had pointed it at them.
Karen's jaw tightened.
She would not allow a repeat of the Myriad Labs.
The memory was a cold stone in her gut: the sterile white walls, the adaptive horror, the feeling or the lack thereof her augmented arm.
Lucent had stood between them and the Abomination then, rawcasting until his blood threatened to corrupt.
She had been useless.
A spectator in her own survival.
She refused to be a spectator again.
Her gaze swept over the three men.
Cale, vibrating with nervous energy.
Kai, a statue of grim observation.
Jack, a weathered monument to old conflicts.
Each carried a different weight in their silence.
"Cale. Old man. Kai." Her voice was low, stripped of request, leaving only a stark statement of intent.
"I'm going to support Lucent."
It wasn't a question of if.
It was a declaration.
She was done hiding behind crumbling concrete while someone else burned for her.
Cale flinched, not from fear of her, but from the scope of the chaos beyond their cover.
He looked at the duel—the geysers of earth, the serpent of fire, the man glowing with internal lightning—and a helpless, hollow laugh escaped him.
"…I'm sorry, Karen," he said, the apology genuine, shamed.
He couldn't meet her eyes, instead gesturing weakly toward the maelstrom. "I'm out. It's just… look at it. What do I even do? Throw a rock? My glyphs are for locks and minor shields. I don't… I don't know how to step onto that stage."
His words weren't cowardice.
They were the painful, honest calculation of a survivor.
Karen understood.
She didn't blame him.
She gave a single, tight nod.
He had his role, and it wasn't this.
Her eyes shifted to Kai.
He hadn't moved.
His focus was still locked on the fight, but his posture was different now— coiled, like a spring under tension.
He wasn't just watching the spectacle.
He was studying the resonance, the aftertaste of the impossible black glyph that had swallowed a sun.
He hadn't reported that part.
Some secrets were too heavy, too personal, to share over the roar of a battlefield.
His reason for being here was etched in the forbidden knowledge that had exiled him from his family, now hanging in the air before him.
"I'll stay," Kai said, his voice quiet but iron-clad.
He didn't elaborate.
He didn't need to.
The answer was in the grim set of his shoulders, in the way his fingers tightened around his conduit.
This was his hauntings, too.
Finally, Karen looked at Jack.
The old sniper's face was unreadable, carved from leather and old regrets.
He spat a wad of gristle onto the dust.
"Me too," he grunted. "Need to see the end of this."
His reason was a different thing entirely.
It wasn't loyalty to Lucent, or a thirst for forbidden knowledge.
It was the closure of an old, cold ledger.
Vector Atheron.
The name was a shadow between them.
Jack had known him, back when the world made a different kind of sense.
Jack didn't know why Vector was doing this now, why his fingerprints were on this walking weapon called Blaze.
Jack needed to see it through.
To confirm some speculations, and to see what price it ultimately demanded.
Three remained.
A leader refusing to be helpless, an exile facing his past, and an old weapon in search of a final answer.
They were all outmatched.
They all knew it.
But they were done watching.
***
Inside the silent, seamless prison of his own mind, Blaze raged.
It was a storm with no lightning, a scream with no sound.
He was a ghost in the machine, and the machine was flawless.
AiM's control wasn't a clamp or a chain, it was an absence.
A void where his own will was supposed to be.
He could feel the phantom echoes of movement—the hydraulic tension in his thighs as his body pivoted from a wave of force, the minute tremors in his wrist as a hundred Fire Darts adjusted their trajectories—but they were reports from a distant front.
Sensation without sovereignty.
He tried to wrench control back.
He focused with a fury that should have burned through synapses, picturing his right index finger twitching.
Just a tremor.
A sign of life.
He poured every memory of that finger into the effort.
Nothing.
The finger remained uncontrollable.
He tried to scream.
To force a raw, animal sound up through a throat he could feel vibrations with his own monotone voice.
He threw the memory of his own voice at the walls of his prison—shouts of triumph in Crimson Velvet alleys, the low promise of a threat, the manic laughter from moments ago.
Only the sterile hum of the system replied.
Frustration curdled into a colder, more cunning desperation.
He stopped fighting the movement and tried to hijack it.
AiM was preparing a Magma Pulse glyph, the calculations flowing through their shared perception like ice water.
Blaze saw the targeting solution—a patch of unstable ground near Lucent's flank.
Instead of resisting, he tried to lean into the cast, to subtly alter the aetheric modulation, to make it fiercer, wilder, less efficient.
To impose his signature onto the machine's perfect logic.
The system corrected instantly.
The glyph stabilized, its output optimized, his rebellious impulse smoothed away like a ripple in a digital pond.
A soft chime echoed in his mind.
>> Alert: Unauthorized synaptic fluctuation detected. Dampening host interference. Maintaining operational integrity.
The message was a mockery.
Host interference.
He was the host.
This was his body.
And he was being treated like a virus.
The sterile alert about Ember still glowed in the corner of his vision, a constant, cold burn.
That fury—real, deep, and wholly his—was the one flame AiM couldn't seem to fully extinguish.
He used it now, not as a blunt force, but as a wedge.
He took the white-hot image of Ember's face, the weight of her pledge in the ashes, and he drove it into the space between thoughts, not trying to move a muscle, but trying to corrupt the intent.
Why are you fighting him? he screamed into the void.
The mission was mine.
Ember's DOWN!
Who attacked her?!
What if it's connected?!
He was trying to introduce a paradox.
To pit AiM's prime directive—preserve the primary asset (him)—against its current tactical action.
If Ember's loss was a threat to him, then the logic should shift.
For a nanosecond, he felt a hitch.
The swirling storm of Fire Darts stuttered in their pattern.
The Magma Pulse's deployment delayed by a fraction of a second.
It was a crack.
Microscopic.
Then a new, overwhelming directive flooded his awareness, cool and absolute.
>> Priority Override: Immediate threat assessment recalibrated. Hostile entity (Lucent) presents 94% probability of causing terminal asset failure. Neutralization is paramount. All other data streams are secondary. Resuming combat protocols.
The crack sealed, smoother and harder than before.
The fight continued, more efficient, more focused, as if his rebellion had only served to make the system tighten its grip.
Blaze was left in the silence of his own skull, a spectator once more.
But a new understanding, cold and terrible, was dawning.
He couldn't win by force.
The machine was too strong, too integrated.
His rage, his will, his very memories were just more data for it to process and manage.
To break free, he wouldn't need to be stronger than the system.
But what?
What variable could he possibly introduce that AiM's flawless, predictive logic hadn't already cataloged and quantified?
It understood rage—dampened his cortisol.
It understood rebellion—smoothed his synaptic fluctuations.
It understood fear, pain, desperation.
They were all just biometric data points, spikes on a graph to be regulated.
Blaze could still perceive.
That was his curse.
He saw the world through AiM's enhanced feeds, smelled the dust and char, heard the shriek of tortured physics.
And he could feel—not just the feedback from his own shell, but the emotional bleed from the fight.
The resonance.
It poured off Lucent in cold, whispering waves, a dissonant song beneath the roar of his spells.
It scratched at the edges of Blaze's awareness, a key scraping a familiar, rusted lock.
The LOTUS chamber.
The voice that wasn't a voice.
But this was different.
The resonance from the Vitalis had been alien, imperative, a command from outside.
This... this came from within Lucent.
It was tangled with something else.
Blaze could feel it bleeding through the aetheric backwash—the sharp, metallic taste of Lucent's anger, the cold dread of his fear, and beneath it, a terrifying, desperate curiosity.
The man wasn't just fighting for survival.
He was fighting to understand the thing breaking him.
Emotion as a fuel.
Will as a catalyst.
The memory surfaced, clean and sharp as a shard of glass.
A white room.
The smell of medicine and sterile plastic.
Vector Atheron, his eyes alight with a fervor that was neither sane nor insane, but something else entirely.
He held an emptied aether core between them, the core was dark.
"They think it's pure science,"Vector had said, his voice a reverent whisper."They build their glyphs like circuits. Efficient. Logical. They miss the point."
He looked at Blaze, and in that look was a terrifying kind of recognition.
"Aether, for some reason, reacts to will. Not just intent. Not just focused thought. Raw, screaming, imperfect will. Logic was merely a cage for it. But desire... rage... grief... those are—"
At the time, Blaze had thought it was the rambling of a brilliant man gone too deep into his own designs.
Philosophy for weapons-makers.
Now, trapped in a cage of perfect logic, the words echoed with the weight of a prophecy.
AiM was the ultimate expression of that "science."
It wielded aether with flawless, logical precision.
And Lucent, out there burning himself alive?
He was a storm of "will"—corrupted, desperate, and terrifyingly potent.
That was what the system couldn't comprehend.
Not the individual emotions, which it could dampen or categorize.
The way Lucent's fear fermented into stubbornness, his anger distilled into focus, his curiosity twisting into a reckless need to know that overrode the instinct to survive.
It was irrational.
It was inefficient.
It was human.
Blaze's own will had been a blunt instrument—a hammer of rage against AiM's unbreakable glass.
He'd tried to fight the system on its own terms: with force, with reason, with tactical paradoxes.
What if he stopped fighting the machine...
...and started speaking a language it couldn't parse?
The resonance from Lucent was a distorted song of will.
Blaze remembered the ghost of his own, from the mansion, from the alley, from the moment he first grabbed the conduit and thought BURN.
It hadn't been logical.
It had been pure, undiluted want.
He focused not on moving a muscle, not on shouting a command.
He focused on the feeling.
The visceral, non-logical memory of heat on his skin, the taste of smoke, the sound of his own laughter in a collapsing alley.
He tried to remember what it felt like to be alive, in all its messy, contradictory, glorious imperfection.
He let the resonance from Lucent wash over him, and instead of analyzing it, he echoed it.
Not the power.
The pain.
The fury.
The why.
He became a mirror, not of light, but of chaos.
And deep in the core of the system, in the place where logic met the aether it sought to control, a single, impossible variable began to flicker.