The command center was no longer a hub of science; it was a tomb of frosted steel. Dr. Thorne, backed into the corner of her own console, pulled a small, high-density energy pistol from her lab coat. Her hands shook, a biological frailty she had tried to erase with cybernetics.
"Stay back! You're an anomaly! A glitch!" Thorne shrieked.
Seraphina didn't stop. Her feet didn't even touch the ground; she was gliding on a cushion of distorted space. The grey mist from her eyes began to pour out like heavy incense, obscuring the faces of the frozen guards.
"A glitch is something that shouldn't exist," Seraphina whispered, her voice sounding like a thousand glass bells shattering at once. "But I am the only thing in this room that is truly real. You and your machines... you are just echoes in Arthur's dream."
Thorne fired. The high-density plasma bolt, capable of piercing tank armor, screamed through the air. But as it reached the sphere of influence around Seraphina, the bolt didn't explode. It slowed down, lost its color, and simply withered into nothingness.
"My turn," Seraphina said.
She raised a single finger. The Void Symbiote inside her pulsed, and for a split second, the Link with Arthur flared to 100%. She didn't use Qi; she used Information Erasure.
Thorne's energy pistol began to turn into fine, white sand. Then the console. Then the very air between them.
"Arthur says... thank you for the fuel," Seraphina murmured, her eyes locking onto Thorne's terrified ultraviolet sensors. "The anti-matter you sent didn't kill him. It just woke him up. And he wants to see what's inside that artificial brain of yours."
With a sudden flick of her wrist, Seraphina exerted a Gravity Collapse. The circle of Enforcers was thrown back as if by a physical shockwave, their armor denting and sparking. Dr. Thorne was lifted into the air, her cybernetic limbs locking up as Seraphina's grey energy began to "reprogram" her nervous system.
"Please... stop..." Thorne choked out, her biological eye tearing up.
"I can't stop a storm," Seraphina replied, a cold, divine light radiating from her skin. "I can only witness it. And right now... the storm is here."
Suddenly, the floor of the command center groaned. A massive, jagged crack ripped through the reinforced steel from below. A pillar of grey, oily lightning erupted from the breach, and for a second, the entire Pacific Ocean seemed to go silent.
Arthur had returned. But he wasn't the boy who left.