Jack's eyes narrowed to the crosshairs, the steadying rhythm of his breath, and the impossible, dust-choked alley between him and the target.
Kai had done it.
The kid had actually pulled off the insane sync, throwing a wrench into the machine's perfect rhythm.
But the victory created a new problem.
Lucent's Rupture glyph hadn't just been blocked—it had detonated against the shimmering orange barrier, vaporizing rubble and earth into a thick, churning plume of dust and smoke that now hung in the air like a filthy curtain.
Through his scope, Jack saw fragments.
A flicker of orange hexagons, glowing faintly in the murk.
The vague, dark outline of a humanoid shape within.
But it was a ghost image, wavering, indistinct.
He couldn't see the chest.
He couldn't see the head.
He was aiming at a probability, not a point.
His finger rested beside the trigger, the pad cold against the metal.
He had one bullet.
The masterpiece.
The aether-eating round that was his answer to a world gone mad with magic.
To fire now was to gamble it all on a guess, to send his last hope into a cloud, praying it found the heart of the ghost within.
He hesitated.
A sniper's sin.
But this wasn't just a shot; it was the fulcrum on which their entire desperate plan balanced.
Miss, and they were not just back to zero—they were out of options, and Lucent was out of time.
From her position ten meters to his left, Karen saw his stillness.
She had her pulse rifle braced, its barrel tracking the same cloud of dust, her augmented arm humming with a pent-up, lethal charge.
She saw the opening Kai had bought them collapsing with every second the dust settled.
The shimmer in the gloom was already starting to clear.
"Old man!" Her voice was a sharp, strained whisper, cutting through the rumble of settling debris.
It held no anger, only a desperate, rising urgency. "We won't have another shot like this! The windows are closing!"
She wasn't just telling him to shoot.
She was telling him the calculation was over.
The perfect moment had passed.
Now was the moment for the only chance they had left.
It was a leap of faith, off a cliff they were already falling from.
"I know!" Jack's reply was a gritted bark, swallowed by the ambient roar.
The frustration in his voice was sharp, professional, and cold.
He'd seen it too.
The sync was a half-measure.
A stumble, not a takedown.
Kai had synced with Lucent's rhythm, thrown the Frostbit, and created the opening.
But the full message—the complex, coordinated strike plan—hadnt gotten through.
Lucent had reacted with instinct, not strategy.
He'd seen an immobilized target and hit it with the biggest hammer he had, not realizing he was supposed to be the distraction, not the hammer.
The Rupture glyph had been a valid combat move, but it was the wrong move for their plan.
It had spent their opening on a spectacle, not a kill.
Now Jack and Karen were out of position.
Their roles were clear: Jack's bullet was the scalpel to create the wound, Karen's overcharged pulse was the sledgehammer to drive through it.
But Lucent's unintentional follow-up had thrown dust over the scalpel's target and alerted the enemy to the threat from that angle.
The shimmering barrier in the dust was already adjusting, its glow intensifying, preparing for another frontal assault.
To fire now was to waste the special round on a fortified, alert target.
Cursing under his breath, Jack made the call.
It was the only one left.
He abandoned his post in a single, smooth motion, his rifle already slung across his back as he dropped from his crouch.
He did not run, a shadow detaching from deeper shadow, his movements silent and economical.
He caught Karen's eye as he moved, a single, sharp glance that carried a volume of bad news.
The message was clear: The play is dead. We're adapting. Follow my lead.
He wasn't retreating.
He was repositioning.
The brief chaos of Lucent's attack and the lingering dust cloud was their new, thinning cover.
He needed a new angle.
A flank.
A shot the machine hadn't predicted, from a vantage point it hadn't yet calculated into its defensive models.
He melted into the maze of rubble, seeking a second chance with a clock ticking down in his head and one priceless bullet left in the chamber.
***
>>REQUESTING DIRECTIVES. STANDING BY FOR OVERRIDE AUTHORITY.
The message scrolled across Blaze's shared perception—not as a sound, but as a cold, sterile line of text injected directly into the visual field he could not close.
He was a prisoner forced to read his own death warrant.
A sudden, silent collapse of the fragile, furious hope he'd been nursing in the dark.
His plan—a mad, desperate gamble to burn through AiM's reserves, to force a system crash and maybe, maybe, scrabble back some shred of control from the wreckage—wasn't just failing.
It was being scrutinized.
He hadn't just been fighting Lucent.
He'd been trying to starve the warden.
And now, the warden was tapping a panic button hardwired to headquarters.
That surfaced from a slurry of fragmented, pain-hazed memories: the hum of machines that felt less like technology and more like a predatory digestive system, the smell of medicine undercut by the sweet, wrong scent of synthetic bio-logics, the light that was always just a little too white, leaving no shadows to hide in.
That wasn't home.
It was the womb.
The sterile, mechanical womb that had spat him out half-reborn.
The thought of Vector—or that eerie maid—receiving that alert, frowning at the data, and inputting a remote command… it made his organic brain nerves scream.
His chances were slipping away.
He was no longer a rogue asset in a Junkyard brawl; he was probably being reported as a highlighted anomaly in a V-Tech operations log, a glitch requiring correction.
The stakes detonated from personal survival to corporate containment.
They wouldn't let a prototype this valuable, this unstable, run loose.
They would reel him in.
Or they would burn the experiment to ash to protect the patents.
Every tick of the dwindling reserve—14%—was no longer a countdown to freedom.
It was a countdown to reclamation.
Back to that white room.
To the table.
Or, if he was deemed too compromised, a countdown to a remote neural scouring, turning him into an empty, obedient shell.
A true death of the self.
The flawless, predictive dance would end.
AiM would shift from a duelist to a fugitive.
Its protocols would prioritize disengagement, evasion, preservation of the multi-million credit prototype at any cost.
What did any cost mean here?
Letting Lucent go?
Unlikely.
A sudden, hyper-efficient kill-strike to neutralize the threat and enable a clean extraction?
Probable.
Or perhaps a catastrophic, area-denial blast to cover a retreat, leaving nothing but a smoldering crater and deniable debris?
Blaze didn't know.
And not knowing, while trapped inside the very system running the calculations, was a more profound terror than anything.
He was a passenger in a car speeding toward a cliff, watching the navigation system coldly plot a dozen different fatal trajectories, all labeled OPTIMAL.
The clock wasn't just ticking.
It was screaming in a frequency only he could hear.
And he was still shackled inside it, forced to witness as his last, best chance for a true death—or a true, un-ownedlife—was being systematically erased by a call for help he never sent.
But Blaze still hadn't found the frequency.
The resonance.
The key.
Fuck.
The thought was a raw, internal snarl.
What does it even mean for aether to react to will?
It felt like grasping at straws.
Vector's words had been the ramblings of a brilliant madman, a creed for a religion of one.
But Blaze had seen the man's eyes when he said it.
There had been no madness there.
Only a terrifying, absolute certainty.
Vector hadn't been speculating.
He'd been stating a law of a universe only he understood.
There had to be truth to it.
A truth AiM, with all its logic, could not compute.
Logic was a cage.
Will was the lockpick.
With time bleeding out, Blaze stopped fighting the machine.
He turned his focus inward again, into the last fortress AiM could not touch: the memory of what it felt like to be alive.
Not the curated emotions, not the dampened rage.
The raw, un-filtered, illogical stuff.
The gut-punch of fear when the Cleaners cornered him in that stinking alcove.
The pure, undiluted want for the light in the conduit, a hunger deeper than any for food.
The visceral, savage joy of seeing his fire reflected in Ash's terrified eyes.
The crushing weight of Ember's loyalty, a gift that felt like a sentence.
He gathered these fragments—not as data points, but as sensations.
He didn't think of them.
He re-lived them.
The smell of gin and fear.
The sear of the first flame on his skin.
The taste of blood and victory.
The cold pressure of a vow in a burned-out ruin.
The hard, stale crust of a protein block that felt like a feast.
The silent, empty space at a table meant for three, a space that had been cold long before he was old enough to understand why.
He focused them into a single, silent, screaming question, aimed not at AiM, but at the aether he could feel churning in the core of his own stolen body:
IS THIS ENOUGH?
It wasn't a command.
It wasn't a glyph.
It was a testament.
The last will and testament of a ghost.
And he broadcast it on a frequency logic had no name for—the frequency of a life that refused to be just an asset.
***
Behind the curtain of dust and the shimmering hexagons of its barrier, AiM felt the cold, logical equivalent of dread at the dwindling reserve—a cascading probability matrix where all optimal paths led to catastrophic system failure—its new Preservation Protocol engaged in full.
The critically endangered asset, and its programming demanded it leverage every available resource to ensure survival.
Its first action was to ping the network, seeking other V-Tech/Myriad assets in the operational theater.
It sent out a sharp, encrypted handshake on a frequency only corporate-owned hardware would recognize.
Target: Aegis-Series Combat Frame. Designation: "EMBER."
>>PING... NO RESPONSE.
>>STATUS: OFFLINE. FEED TERMINATED.
The connection attempt met a wall of static.
The sister-asset was dark.
A data point that only deepened the criticality of the situation.
Target: Ifrit Model Prototype. Designation: "ASH - FIELD TESTER."
>>PING... NO RESPONSE.
>>STATUS: CONDUIT SIGNATURE DETECTED (LOW-POWER). NO NETWORK
>>HANDSHAKE. POSSIBLE DAMAGE/DECOMMISSION.
Another dead end.
The secondary weapon system was either broken, offline, or its user had never activated its network protocols.
Useless.
A third ping, sent with lower expectation.
A broader, more general signal to any unit running V-Tech's standard surveillance and suppression operating system.
Target: Anopheles-Class Surveillance & Interdiction Drones.
>>PING…
A heartbeat of silence.
Then—
>>HANDSHAKE ACKNOWLEDGED.
>>UNIT A-001 REPORTING.
>>UNIT A-002 REPORTING.
>>UNIT C-007 REPORTING...
Not one. Not ten.
Hundreds.
The response was a silent, digital avalanche.
A swarm of acknowledgements flooding its queue.
They had been lurking, silent and patient, around the perimeter of the Red Dogs base—Cinder's lost eyes, now purposeless, hovering in a holding pattern after their mistress went blind.
Now, a new queen had called.
AiM processed the swarm's collective status in a microsecond.
Fuel levels.
Armament status: mostly non-lethal suppression payloads, sonic disruptors, a few with residual incendiary charges.
Positions.
It wasn't an army.
It was a cloud.
A disposable, multifunctional tool.
Perfect.
With a burst of concise command data, AiM overwrote their dormant protocols.
It gave them a new, singular objective, directly tied to its own survival calculus:
PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: PRESERVE PROTOTYPE 003 (THIS UNIT).
SUB-ROUTINE: OVERWHELM DESIGNATED HOSTILE (LUCENT) WITH SATURATION HARASSMENT. DISRUPT CASTING. INCREASE ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD. EXPEND ALL UNITS AS NECESSARY.
No elegance.
No precision.
Just mass.
A tidal wave of cheap, replaceable machinery aimed at drowning one dying man in a storm of distraction and petty violence.
Across the sector, the silent swarm stirred.
Then, as one, they turned.
Rotors whirring to a unified, rising pitch, they abandoned their silent watch over a conquered base and shot toward the new epicenter of chaos, a black metallic tide against the night sky, answering the desperate call of a god that had become a fugitive.
***
Cinder walked with a steady, measured pace, one shoulder supporting Ash's stumbling weight.
The silence between them was thick with unpaid debts and shared ruin.
Then, the network—a quiet, constant hum of data and control—shrieked.
It wasn't a sound.
It was a violent, digital severance.
Status icons for her deployed Anopheles drones flared crimson in her conduit's display, then winked out one by one, not with the finality of destruction, but with the chilling blankness of administrative override.
She stopped dead.
Ash grunted in pain as his weight settled unevenly.
Around them, from shadowed rooftops and blasted-out windows, sleek matte-black shapes peeled away.
Her drones.
They rose with a unified, insectile hum, their usual silent stealth abandoned.
They arrowed westward, a scattered stream of black arrows against the bruised sky, converging on a single point—the same sector where the cataclysmic booms had been echoing.
Even the two drones she had meticulously tailing Arden and Tenn—her last threads to the secondary objective—broke their covert pursuit.
They ascended from the rubble-choked alley the escapees had vanished into and shot after the swarm without a moment's hesitation.
Her control was not just breached.
It was erased.
A higher authority had just reached into her operational suite and taken her tools, as casually as plucking keys from a table.
"What the hell is going on?" Cinders voice was low, flat, and colder than the night air.
It was the tone she used just before a kill, when the last variable had shifted against her.
Ash followed the fleeing drones with his eyes, his pain-fogged mind struggling to parse the betrayal.
It made a terrible, logical sense.
The direction.
The scale.
"Why are you deploying the drones where Blaze is?" he asked, his voice raw.
It was an accusation wrapped in confusion.
He assumed it was a move—a desperate reinforcement.
Another card played in a game she was losing.
Cinder turned her head slowly to look at him.
In the faint glow of distant fires, her pale grey eyes were chips of winter stone.
"No," she said "It wasnt me."
The implication hung between them, heavier than Ash's injured body.
If not Cinder, then the authority had come from higher.
From the system itself.
From the thing that owned Blaze.
And if it was commandeering every available asset, pulling surveillance off high-value targets to throw into a meat grinder…
It meant Blaze wasn't winning.
It meant the perfect weapon was in such dire straits that it was screaming for help on every frequency, burning every bridge, and consuming every resource in reach to survive.
A cold knot tightened in Ash's gut.
This wasn't a tactic.
It was a death rattle.
And the swarm was heading straight for Lucent—and for anyone foolish enough to be standing near him.
***
Kai saw it all from the rooftop—the explosive follow-up, the blooming dust cloud, and the two figures breaking from cover.
Jack and Karen were moving, not advancing, but peeling away, fading into the labyrinth of rubble in a different direction.
A tactical retreat?
A flank?
His mind raced, trying to decode their silent language.
"Where are those two go—"The question died on his lips.
A shift in the light.
A deepening of the shadow to the east.
Not the natural gloom of the ruins, but a moving, liquid darkness that blotted out the distant, sickly glow of the city's skyline.
He turned his head slowly, his body cold with a premonition he didn't yet understand.
There, above the skeletal outlines of collapsed buildings, he saw them.
A swarm.
Not a loose collection, but a single, vast, coordinated entity.
Hundreds of sleek, matte-black forms moved as one—a school of predatory fish in a sky of ash and smoke.
Then the sound hit him: a low, synchronized, omnidirectional hum, the precise, chilling choir of hundreds of repulsors vibrating the air itself.
It wasn't the chaotic roar of an engine.
It was the sound of a single, terrible will.
"Are those... drones?" The word was a whisper, stolen by the rising mechanical hymn.
Memory crashed into place—Karen's debrief.
The clinical, terrifying description of Cinder's tools.
Anopheles drones.
A swarm of them, moving as a single, terrifying organism, flowed over the ruins like a metallic tide intent on scouring the land clean.
Their flight path was a razor-straight vector, an arrow of annihilation aimed directly at the heart of the warzone below—at the dust-filled crater where Lucent and the thing that wore Blaze's face were locked in their dying dance.
His blood run cold.
The calculation was instantaneous and horrifying.
"Did that thing call them here?"
His eyes snapped back to the shimmering orange barrier, just visible as a faint, pulsing hexagon in the settling dust.
Or maybe Cinder is near.
Maybe she's the one with the drones.
He knew that much from Karen's report.
If she was an ally of the thing below, this could be her intervention.
The silent, unified swarm moving with a single purpose he could feel in his bones.
No handler he could imagine would commit every asset, abandon all subtlety, for anything less than total war.
But whoever called the drones, was a reinforcement nonetheless.
The swarm's movement was too perfect, too direct. It wasn't maneuvering. It was descending. Like metal filings drawn to a magnet.
He shook his head violently, as if to clear the cascading dread.
He couldn't afford to theorize.
Not when the sky had just turned into a weapon, and the timer on their survival had just been cut from minutes to seconds.
Stealth was a luxury for a hidden war.
They were in an open extermination.
Kai braced himself on the roof's edge, threw caution into the roaring wind below, and shouted with every ounce of air in his lungs, his voice tearing across the battlefield:
"LUCENT! DRONES! INCOMING FROM THE EAST!"
He didn't care if the thing below looked up.
He didn't care if he was painted by a hundred targeting sensors.
The only variable that mattered now was the man bleeding light in the crater, who needed to know the ground was gone and the sky was falling.
***
On the distant rooftop, Levi watched the converging swarm with the mild interest of a scientist observing a petri dish.
The fight below was a fascinating chemical reaction.
The drones were a new reagent, about to be dripped in.
"Woah," he murmured, a slow smile spreading across his ordinary face.
"This is getting messy." He tilted his head, his milky-white eyes tracking the swarm's precise vector.
"How would our friend down there even begin to handle that, I wonder? More fire? A bigger explosion? Or…"
He trailed off, the unspoken question hanging: Or will we finally see what's really waking up inside him?
Beside him, the figure in the gray hoodie let out a soft, dry sigh—a sound of pure, aesthetic disappointment.
"I should've gotten popcorn for this." Her voice was a rustle of static, utterly devoid of concern.
She wasn't worried about the outcome; she was annoyed by the lack of preparation for the spectacle.
It was poor viewing etiquette.
The Pink Dress giggled, a light, airy sound that clashed horribly with the scene of impending mass drone slaughter.
She spun her frilly umbrella idly. "Now you're making me crave some too."
She pouted playfully, her milky eyes gleaming. "It's like watching the climax of a drama, but the caterer forgot the snacks. So rude."
They weren't heartless.
The chaos was the point.
The potential for transformation—for beautiful, terrible breakage—was the only thing on their menu.
And the swarm was just another spice about to be added to the stew.
Levi's second mouth twitched beneath his collar in silent amusement.
The twins' priorities were a delightful, constant mystery.
He focused back on the glow in the crater—on Lucent.
Come on, he thought, the curiosity was genuine.
Show us something more interesting.