The sound that came out of him didn't feel like something he'd chosen to make.
He dropped without warning, knees buckling, both hands slamming against the sides of his helmet as a scream tore loose from somewhere low in his chest—wet, ragged, and utterly convincing, built from years of hearing men actually die. His body hit the floor and kept moving, heels drumming against stone as every muscle fought itself in a convulsive frenzy.
Jack's finger, resting on the trigger guard of his handgun a split second from ending her life, jerked. The steel muzzle pulled off the woman's temple before conscious thought caught up with the reflex, swinging toward the noise on pure animal instinct.
"What—" Jack's head snapped around, delight momentarily overridden by genuine surprise. For one held breath, the room's entire focus shifted from the woman on her knees toward Lucius, and that single breath was all Lucius required.
"Vents!" Lucius forced the word out between another convulsion, loud and frantic. "It's coming from the vents, it's in the—"
Three sets of eyes flicked upward. The goon by the server racks took a step back, weapon raising toward the ceiling grate. The goon on hostage row hesitated, caught between two mandates—a brief flicker of indecision that proved lethal.
Lucius let his thrashing body slide sideways into the tripod. He grabbed the housing on the way down, driving his full weight into it. The rig hit the stone floor with a heavy crunch, the video cable tearing free from its port.
Every live feed went dark at once.
Before anyone could process the sudden blackness, Lucius was already on his feet. He drove straight into the nearest camera goon, locking a hand around his throat and ripping the sidearm from the man's holster in a single fluid motion. Dropping the unconscious guard, he raised the firearm and targeted Jack immediately.
Before Jack could swing his weapon back toward the woman, Lucius pulled the trigger.
Crack-crack-crack.
Three heavy rounds slammed directly into Jack's center mass. The kinetic force lifted Jack off his feet, driving him backward into the stone wall as his gun skittered uselessly across the floor. Freed from her captor, the woman scrambled frantically toward safety.
Across the room, the goon on hostage row raised his rifle toward the fleeing woman.
The guard moved instantly. He launched himself off the wall, driving his whole weight into the goon's arm a heartbeat before the shot went wide into the concrete floor. The goon swung the rifle butt back hard, but the guard absorbed the blow across his collarbone, stubbornly keeping both hands locked onto the barrel.
The goon snarled, his neck muscles bulging as a sickening, wet ripple began to travel under his skin—his own payload trying to activate in response to the struggle. He never got the chance to finish. Lucius closed the distance and put a single round through the side of the man's head, dropping him like a stone.
The last goon by the server racks brought his weapon up. Lucius didn't hesitate. He fired once, shattering the receiver of the man's rifle, turning the weapon into useless scrap metal. Before the goon could even drop it, Lucius fired twice more, blowing out both of the man's kneecaps. The goon collapsed with an agonizing scream, a sound Lucius violently cut short by stepping in and delivering a brutal, silencing kick straight to his face.
The room went still for exactly one second. Then, a horrific sound echoed from the back wall.
Jack was climbing back to his feet.
Three point-blank center-mass hits should have ended the fight. Instead, the massive physical trauma had forced his subdermal payload to trigger early. It sounded like thick branches snapping under immense pressure. Pale, jagged bone plates ruptured outward through his skin and clothes in a violent, wet unfurling of mass, ripping across his chest, collarbone, and spine.
"Quite the performance," Jack purred, wiping a smear of blood from a chin now framed by jagged bone ridges. "Fake fit. Clever."
He lunged with terrifying speed, bone blades protruding from his wrists. He caught Lucius across the ribs in a shallow slice. Lucius ducked a high strike, rolled across the stone, and came up just as Jack pressed the offensive, twin spikes driving down. Lucius caught one wrist, taking a blade edge across his shoulder while driving a hard knee into Jack's stomach to buy space.
Jack bounced back, unbothered, laughing as broader spikes erupted across his back—a walking hazard crowding toward the terrified hostages. Two of them screamed, throwing themselves flat.
Lucius pivoted to step between them, but the reinforced wall behind Jack shattered inward first.
It didn't just break; it exploded. A concussive shockwave of pulverized stone and deafening noise blew through the room. Sol breached at terminal velocity, a literal freight train of kinetic violence. Without breaking stride, Sol slammed into Jack and Lucius, catching them both by the throat.
The raw momentum carried all three of them straight through the fresh gap and into the corridor outside, concrete dust trailing behind them like a mortar blast. He proceeded to drive Jack mercilessly into the far concrete wall of the hallway with a spine-rattling crunch. The masonry spider-webbed under the sheer force of the impact before Sol let go, leaving Jack to slide down the heavily dented wall in a heap of sparks and bone.
Sol turned, his fist pulled back with the flat, uncomplicated intention to crush Lucius next.
"Wait!" Lucius ripped his mask free, revealing his face a fraction of an inch before the punch landed.
Sol's fist stopped, the wind off it catching Lucius's hair. "...You?"
"No time," Lucius rasped, clutching his bleeding ribs. "That room is clear. Bigger group two floors up in the atrium—they need you there. I'm taking the sub-level exit, but I need you to put me on the upper landing."
Sol glanced at Jack, who was already rising, bone spikes scraping the floor with twisted delight, then planted his feet, grabbed Lucius, and threw him upward.
The building blurred past in a rush of floors. Lucius hit the upper landing running, snagging a tactical radio off a fallen guard before his boots fully gripped the floor.
"Teo."
"You're alive," Teo replied instantly. "And Sol just blew through a load-bearing wall on my grid. That was incredibly reckless. Somebody want to explain that to me?"
"Later. He's clearing the atrium now. Get teams ready to receive the civilian crowd. I've got a second group coming out through the sub-level."
"How do you know all this?"
A second, flat voice cut over the frequency. "Doesn't matter how. He hasn't been wrong yet. Deploy to both exits."
"Copy," Teo clipped out. "Moving units now."
Lucius pushed through the heavy fire doors, blood dripping down his forearm. "Any word from the team at the harbor extraction? Hannah Gipson's group?"
A heavy pause hung over the line.
"Nothing yet."
---
To Be Continued