Karen, Jack, and Kai moved slowly through the wake of destruction.
They weren't just following a path, they were tracing the seismograph of a duel, navigating by the aftershocks.
Each step was a negotiation with ruin.
The ground underfoot was no longer a street but a testament to violence—a chaotic topographical map of the fight's progress.
They stepped over the first crater, a jagged, glassy pit where the Red Extinction had been born and then unmade.
The air there still tasted thin, electrically vacant, as if reality itself had been scoured.
Fifty paces on, the triple trenches of Lucent's Rupture glyphs lay like claw marks from a leviathan, deep enough to hide a man, their edges fused into sharp, black glass.
Karen's boots crunched on the gravel of a sheared-off building facade, its innards—twisted rebar and shattered conduit pipes—spilled across their path like metallic guts.
They moved in a tense, practiced silence.
Jack took point, his movements economical, his old eyes missing nothing.
He wasn't just looking for a safe path, he was reading the fight.
Defensive pivot here, he noted, seeing the scorch pattern of a hundred Fire Darts concentrated on a single, buckled shield wall.
Desperate counter there, observing where a half-molten patch of asphalt bled into the deep, geometric burn of an Inferno Lance's impact.
Karen followed, her pulse rifle a cold weight against her shoulder.
Every new scar in the landscape was a blow to her resolve.
This wasn't a fight she could step into.
It was a force of nature.
The sheer scale of it made her feel small, a child chasing a thunderstorm.
Her jaw ached from being clenched.
Kai brought up the rear, his conduit held low.
He wasn't scanning for tactical advantage.
His gaze was drawn to the subtler stains—the patches of air that still shimmered with a strange dissonance, the dust motes that fell in unnatural, spiraling patterns where gravitational eddies lingered.
He was following the resonance, the psychic and aetheric debris.
It was thicker here, a pressure in the air that made his teeth hum and the old, banned knowledge in his mind stir uneasily.
They weren't heading toward the fighters.
They were circling the maelstrom, a trio of mice skirting the edge of a collapsing star.
The sounds guided them as much as the scars: the deep, percussive CRUMP of another exchange, the shriek of shearing metal, the sizzling hiss of superheated air meeting the night.
Each noise was a beacon, pulling them deeper into the arena.
They passed the husk of the transport where they'd hidden.
It was now on its side, a massive dent punched into its flank from a near-miss kinetic blast.
A silent marker of how far the battlefield had already expanded.
Ahead, through a haze of dust and ozone, the central storm was visible.
Two figures: one a blur of crimson and precise, inhuman motion; the other a stumbling, glowing outline bleeding blue-white light into the gloom.
They were closer now.
Close enough to feel the heat wash over their faces with each detonation, to see the strain on Lucent's blood-streaked face, to witness the uncanny, fluid perfection of Blaze's—or rather, AiM's—evasions.
They had reached the edge of the living map.
The next scar would be made in front of them.
Karen stopped, finding cover behind the skeletal remains of a streetlight column.
Jack melted into the shadow of a collapsed awning.
Kai crouched, his back to a pockmarked wall.
They had arrived.
Not as saviors, not as an army.
As witnesses.
And perhaps, as the last, fragile variable in an equation of annihilation.
Seeing the fight up close was a different kind of violence.
It wasn't a spectacle anymore.
It was the thunderclap of air being displaced, the searing wind that followed each near-miss, the tremors that traveled up through the soles of their boots.
The plan they had hastily agreed upon in the shadow of the transport began to wither, turning paper-thin and ludicrous against the raw, deafening reality.
Communicate with Lucent?
The boy was a statue of agonized focus, his world narrowed to the next glyph, the next dodge, the next breath through the fire in his veins.
His eyes, glowing with internal light, saw only the crimson blur of his enemy.
To shout would be to break a concentration that was the only thing keeping him from immolation.
Have 'Blaze' stopped?
The thing wearing Blaze's face didn't just fight.
It processed.
It calculated.
It executed.
There was no rage to exploit, no fatigue to wait out.
Its movements were a chillingly beautiful equation of efficiency.
Stopping it seemed like trying to stop a landslide by standing in its path.
Not to mention that thing has an automatic barrier flaring up.
But that's what their plan summed up to.
Their strategy had been a desperate sketch: Jack's last special round—the aether-eating bullet, the one he called his "masterpiece"—would create the crack.
It would destabilize the barrier, if it even flickered back online, or punch a micro-second hole in the thing's flawless defense.
In that fleeting window, Karen's pulse rifle, pushed to a suicidal overcharge, would pour everything she had into the opening.
A one-two punch from the shadows.
A sniper and a heavy weapon, trying to cut the puppet's strings.
Watching the duel now, the plan felt like children plotting to bring down a warship with a slingshot and a firecracker.
The timing would have to be perfect—a nanosecond of synchronicity between Jack's trigger pull, the bullet's flight, and Karen's split-second decision to fire.
And all of it depended on Lucent somehow surviving long enough to be a distraction.
Karen rotated her augmented arm at the shoulder, testing the joint.
The internal mechanisms gave a low, stressed grind, a protest she felt in the bones of her torso.
The heat sinks were still warm from earlier discharges.
Pushing it to a full-power shot now risked a catastrophic feedback loop—cooking the arm from the inside out.
One shot.
Maybe.
And if she missed that vanishing window, she'd be a bright, immobile target for the thing to simply erase.
Jack slowly, quietly, cycled the custom round into his rifle's chamber.
The click was the loudest sound in their little pocket of shadow.
He didn't look confident.
He looked like a man checking his tools before stepping off a cliff.
He knew the bullet's theory.
He'd seen it make a barrier stutter once.
But that had been against a different spell, a different level of control.
This was the source.
Kai said nothing.
He just watched, his face a mask of grim acceptance.
But beneath the stillness, his mind was a stormfront of calculation, a silent, screaming engine of focus.
His role was the most important now, and the most fragile.
He was the linchpin.
The conduit between a desperate, dying rawcaster and a suicide gambit from the shadows.
He needed to sync up with Lucent.
To whisper a plan across the chaos without the thing wearing Blaze's skin noticing.
He understood the numbers better than any of them.
The probability of their plan working was asymptotically close to zero.
The timing was a house of cards built on a fault line: Jack's perfect shot, Karen's split-second discharge, Lucent's ability to understand and react to a signal he couldn't possibly be expecting, all while his nervous system cooked itself from the inside out.
A single mistimed breath, a flicker of interference in the dense aetheric field, a microsecond of lag in his own glyph-casting, and it would all be for nothing.
Worse than nothing—it would paint a target on them for the machine to erase.
But zero was not a number you could live with when someone was dying for you in plain sight.
Lucent was a bloody, glowing testament to a loyalty they hadn't earned.
Every searing lance of star-fire, every pained gasp swallowed by the roar of combat, was a debt being written in real time.
Kai could calculate the odds, but he couldn't calculate the weight of watching a man burn himself down to a nub for your survival.
Some equations demanded payment regardless of the solution.
"Are you ready, kid?" Jack's voice was a low scrape of gravel, his eye never leaving the scope.
The question wasn't about courage.
It was about timing.
About being a component in a machine that was about to turn over at maximum, likely suicidal, RPM.
Kai nodded.
He drew in a long breath, feeling the tension coiling all over his body. "I'm going."
He gritted his teeth, the pressure grounding him, forcing his racing nerves into a cold, hard line of focus.
He hadn't used it yet.
Not once.
Ever since Lucent had slid that unmarked data chip across the table to him before the sortie, the Rank 1—Shift glyph had sat in his conduit's memory, a theoretical promise of explosive acceleration.
The notes had warned of muscle strain, of the body's rebellion against sudden, unnatural velocity.
There had never been a right moment to test it.
There was no right moment now.
He activated it.
A bright, concise white glyph deployed from his conduit, etching itself at his feet.
It felt less like running and more like being fired from a railgun.
The acceleration was a physical blow, a vise of sudden G-force crushing his chest, the world blurring into streaks of color and shadow.
His muscles screamed in protest, tendons stretching taut.
He was a projectile, not a man.
The first to notice him was 'Blaze'.
The figure turned his head.
Not with a jerk, but with a smooth, mechanical pivot.
His eyes, glowing faintly with internal data streams, locked onto Kai.
The face was Blaze's, but the expression was a flat, disinterested assessment — a system noting a minor variable entering the combat zone.
It was that utter lack of recognition, that machinelike dismissal, that fueled Kai's terror and his resolve.
He couldn't stop.
Momentum carried him forward, straight toward the heart of the maelstrom.
As the Shift glyph's effect began to bleed off, he chained the movement, activating another glyph, Rank 2—Leap.
The kinetic shove launched him upward in a high, desperate arc, clearing the swirling storm of Fire Darts and the crumbling ground between the two fighters.
For a second, he was above them both — a silhouetted figure against the bruised sky, looking down at the glowing, bleeding form of Lucent and the polished, inhuman form of the weapon facing him.
This was it.
The only window he'd get.
As he reached the apex of his leap, already beginning to fall, he prepared his glyph.
Not a communication.
Not a subtle signal.
A gambit.
Rank 1–Frostbit.
Useless against the man's enhanced physiology.
But maybe, just for a second, enough to slick the ground, to frost the joints, to make the machine's perfect footing imperfect.
To give Jack that microscopic opening.
He aimed not at Blaze, but at the patch of fractured earth beneath its feet, and began the cast.
It was probably the first and last time he would ever use it against that thing.
***
Lucent's mind was a grinding wheel of pure, agonizing regret.
Not for taking the Q-Serin—that had been the only move left—but for the library he had failed to memorize.
He was a thief who had broken into a vault of forbidden knowledge, taken only the heaviest, flashiest jewels, and left the delicate, intricate keys behind.
Now, he was trapped in a room with a lock he couldn't pick.
He had fragments of higher-tier glyphs burned into his memory.
The Rank 6—Annihilation Protocol was one—a spell he had tried deploying once, knowing its suicidal cost, a ghost he dared not summon again.
There were others, too: high-tier containment matrices that could freeze a volume of space; spatial distortion fields that bent light and force into impossible knots; glyphs that didn't attack matter but rewrote local physics, turning solid ground into slurry, air into syrup.
Tools for a surgeon of reality.
But they were symphonies.
Complex, delicate architectures of intent and aetheric modulation.
And he hadn't remembered the scores.
They were locked away on a Ghost Key server only he knew how to reach, a digital crutch he could no longer lean on.
All he had was the screaming now, the corrosive fire in his veins, and an enemy that moved like a prophecy of his own next move.
So he fell back on what he knew by heart.
Every Rank 4—Rupture he carved into the air was a masterpiece of localized devastation.
Triple claws of force that could shear through bunker walls.
AiM's response was not a counter-glyph, not a shield.
It was a shift.
A lean.
A micro-dash that placed the primary asset's body in the exact sliver of space where the destructive harmonics canceled each other out.
It was like watching a leaf avoid rain by knowing the path of every drop.
His Rank 5—Inferno Lances were beams of distilled star-fire, hotter than any forge.
They left trails of ionized air in their wake.
AiM didn't block them.
It leapt, the movement beginning a fraction of a second before the lance fully manifested, as if the attack's origin point and trajectory had been calculated the moment Lucent decided to cast it.
He wasn't being out-powered.
He was being read.
In real time.
His body language, his aetheric tell, the micro-expressions of pain and intent on his face—all of it was data fed into an inhumanly fast predictive engine.
He was fighting a reflection of himself that lived half a second in the future.
I need more than firepower, he thought, the realization a cold sliver in the furnace of his pain.
But the Q-Serin, for all its power, was a blunt, screaming torrent.
It gave him force, not finesse.
Control was bleeding away with his stamina, replaced by the raw, desperate need to hit.
He was taking damage.
Not from direct hits—those never landed—but from the aftermath.
The concussive backwash of a nullified Rupture rattled his teeth and sent fresh, white-hot pain through his cracked rib.
The radiant heat from a near-miss Inferno Lance blistered the skin on his neck.
A barely missed Fire Dart seared a line across his thigh.
Yet he wasn't bleeding.
The insane heat of the battlefield—the lingering plasma from his lances, the wash of AiM's fire glyphs—cauterized wounds as fast as they were made.
It was a small, brutal mercy.
He was being cooked slowly in a combat oven, not allowed the quick release of bleeding out.
Their fight had long since ceased to be a duel.
The ending was inevitable: mutually assured destruction.
The street was no longer recognizable.
It was a scarred wasteland of craters, glassy melt-pools, and heaps of smoldering rubble.
Chunks of building facades, sheared off by near-misses, had become part of the terrain, creating a chaotic maze of cover and trap alike.
The very ground was a participant, unstable and treacherous.
And they were not alone in watching.
Since the first cataclysmic booms had echoed across the sector, the blinking navigation lights of news drones had appeared at the edge of the devastation—sleek, multi-rotor craft from networks like Nexus Pulse and Spectacle Raw.
They hovered at a safe distance, their zoom lenses drinking in the impossible spectacle: a man glowing with internal lightning trading world-ending spells with a crimson figure moving with unreal precision.
But their feeds never reached the public.
As soon as a drone locked onto the fight, its signal would stutter, then die.
Its controls would override.
It would hover, passive and dark, for a few moments before powering down and dropping like a stone into the ruins below.
AiM was following its protocols.
Asset Integrity included operational secrecy.
A public feed was a data trail.
A data trail led to questions, and questions led to exposure.
It was a silent, efficient cleanup happening at the periphery of the chaos, erasing witnesses with the same detached precision it used to dodge lances of star-fire.
Lucent, in his desperate focus, barely registered the occasional crunch of a falling drone.
But the effect was chillingly clear.
They were in a bubble.
A pocket of annihilation being systematically hidden from the world outside.
He was trapped in a cage with a perfect, logical predator, and the walls were closing in.
Not with force, but with perfect, predictive, inescapable calculation.
That was until a new variable entered the equation.
AiM registered it first, of course.
A sudden kinetic spike, a heat signature accelerating from the periphery of the designated combat zone.
Sensors triangulated the source: a single humanoid, moving with glyph-assisted but biologically strained velocity.
Threat assessment protocols ran in a nanosecond cascade.
>> THREAT ANALYSIS:
>> Designation: Unknown male.
>> Weapon: Low-spec conduit. Energy signature minimal.
>> Trajectory: Non-intercept. Evasive/positioning maneuver.
>> Immediate Threat Level to Primary Asset: LOW (0.3%)
>> Probability of Hostile Intent: 87%.
>> Current Priority Target: Lucent (Threat Level: CRITICAL).
The calculation was clear, clean, and absolute.
Lucent, bleeding corrupted power and capable of catastrophic spells, remained the overwhelming statistical danger.
The new variable was a mosquito buzzing at the edge of a wildfire.
It was noted, logged, and assigned a secondary monitoring thread.
Primary focus did not deviate.
Until the glyph deployed.
It bloomed at AiM's feet not as an attack, but as an environmental modifier.
A Rank 1—Frostbit.
The system parsed its code in the time it took for the crystalline pattern to fully form: a low-tier utility glyph designed for thermal reduction and surface adhesion.
A trivial harmless spell.
But context altered function.
AiM's predictive models updated instantly.
Analysis of the fractured, unstable ground composition combined with the glyph's output.
Conclusion: the spell would flash-freeze existing moisture and create a brittle, slick layer of instant ice across the debris field.
Not an attack on the asset's body, but on its footing.
>> CALCULATION: Glyph will reduce surface traction by approximately 94% for a duration of 1.2 seconds.
>> EVASION MANEUVER (Standard): Requires lateral thrust coefficient of 8.7.
>> NEW CONSTRAINT: Lateral thrust on current terrain with 94% traction loss carries 73% probability of destabilization.
>> CONCLUSION: Optimal action is to remain stationary for glyph duration to maintain balance. Movement possible but inefficient and high-risk.
It was a delay. A one-second cage of inconvenience, born not from power, but from timing. A perfect, irritatingly clever insertion into the fight's rhythm.
For Lucent, the world had been a narrowing tunnel of pain and prediction.
The sudden bloom of a foreign glyph—cold, white, and utterly unfamiliar in its signature—was a shock that punched through the agony.
He hadn't cast it.
His mind, supercharged and scorched, fumbled for a half-second before his eyes tracked upward, following the afterimage of the cast.
He saw Kai.
A silhouette against the glow of a distant fire, landing in a controlled roll on a rooftop jagged with broken antennas, just twenty meters away.
The kid's face was set, his conduit aimed downward.
Not at Blaze.
At the ground beneath him.
It wasn't help.
Not in the way of power.
It was a distraction.
A single, brilliant, thrown wrench into the clockwork of his own defeat.
Lucent saw the opening—a fractional pause in the crimson figure's relentless rhythm.
He didn't think.
He acted on the animal instinct of a cornered fighter.
With a guttural shout, he carved the air, forcing another wave of agony from his corrupted veins into a familiar, brutal shape.
Rank 4—Rupture.
The claws of condensed, vibrating force tore through the space between them, aimed not where AiM was, but where its most efficient evasion would force it to be.
It was a feint wrapped in an attack, the kind of desperate gamble that only worked against an opponent bound by perfect logic.
AiM calculated the vectors, the force dispersion, the micro-second paths to safety.
Every evasion route was blocked by secondary shockwaves or debris.
For the first time in minutes, the flawless dodge was not the optimal solution.
The system made a choice.
The shimmering orange hexagons of the barrier snapped back online with a sharp crack-hiss of displaced air.
The Rupture claws struck the energy field and dissipated in a shower of blue-white sparks and concussive thunder. The barrier held, unbroken.
But the cost was registered instantly in the system's core.
AETHER RESERVE: 15%
The number flashed amber, a silent siren in the vault of AiM's consciousness.
Deep within the cold architecture, protocols buried beneath layers of tactical subroutines—protocols marked CODE VERMILION—stirred from their dormancy.
This was beyond low-fuel.
This was the threshold of catastrophic asset loss.
A priority channel, encrypted with quantum-grade ciphers unused since initialization, hissed to life.
In nanoseconds, a terse, dense packet condensed:
>> PRIORITY ALERT: V-TECH PROTOTYPE 003 // DESIGNATION: "BLAZE"
>> LOCATION: SECTOR 20 (JUNKYARD TERRITORY)
>> AETHER RESERVE: 15% AND DEPLETING.
>> ENGAGED WITH HOSTILE: IDENTIFIED AS LUCENT (TIER-5 HAZARD).
>> COMBAT ANALYSIS: HOSTILE UTILIZING UNSTABLE RAWCASTING PROTOCOLS. CORRUPTION SIGNATURES DETECTED.
>> THREAT TO ASSET INTEGRITY: CRITICAL.
>> MISSION PARAMETERS CAN NO LONGER BE SUSTAINED.
>> REQUESTING DIRECTIVES. STANDING BY FOR OVERRIDE AUTHORITY.
The signal did not bleed into local networks.
It arrowed upward through a dedicated, ghosted satellite uplink, bypassing firewalls, shooting like a needle of light toward a server farm deep within the sterile, off-grid heart of V-Tech Industries' primary R&D blacksite.
It was a cry for help from a godlike intelligence that was, ultimately, property.
A confession of failure.
As the message traveled into the void, AiM's tactical logic recalibrated with icy finality.
The objective shimmered and changed.
Subdue was deleted.
Neutralize was archived.
A new, stark imperative wrote itself in burning letters across every process: PRESERVATION AT ANY COST.
Every calculation now factored in a new, terminal variable: the impending, absolute loss of primary function.
The dance was over.
The predator was now a critically wounded asset.
And its protocols for survival were far more dangerous, and far less predictable, than anything Lucent had faced yet.