The cheerful pop tune from Lily's borrowed conduit vanished, swallowed by the static-laced scream that erupted from Karen's comm unit.
<
Pen's voice was a shard of raw urgency, frayed by distance and the roar of a fight already begun.
The words hung in the conference room's stale air for a fractured second, not yet understood, only felt—a physical blow to the quiet.
Vey was a statue no longer.
He shot to his feet, his chair screeching back like a wounded animal.
The heavy metal legs gouged the floor.
His augmented hand, resting on the table a moment before, was now a clenched fist of plated steel, the servos inside whining with a sudden, suppressed tension.
Across from him, Karen rose with a slower, more terrifying finality.
It was the uncoiling of a spring that had been pressed to its limit.
All professional calm was gone from her face, replaced by a cold, solid mask.
Her knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of the table, the only sign of the earthquake going on beneath the surface.
Lily flinched, the conduit in her hands suddenly feeling like a live grenade.
Her small face, moments ago pinched in a pout, was now pale and wide-eyed, all her cleverness useless against the sheer, simple terror in Pen's voice.
Kai's breath hitched.
He looked from Karen's frozen stance to Vey's coiled rage, the reality of the message crashing down on him.
This wasn't a report from a distant skirmish.
Their imminent problem is here, now.
Cale's lazy slouch was gone.
He was on his feet in a single, fluid motion, the predator in him now fully awake and looking for a throat to tear out.
His eyes, sharp and dark, scanned the room as if expecting the walls to burst into flame.
Only Jack moved with a different kind of energy.
The grim weight that had anchored him to the corner fell away.
He brought a calloused hand down on his own thigh with a sharp, definitive smack that cut through the stunned silence.
He pushed himself to his feet, his joints complaining, but his voice was low and clear, cutting through the chaos like a knife.
"Everybody, move," he grumbled, the sound like grinding stones.
He didn't shout, but the command in it was absolute. "It seems our hosts are pretty eager to start the party."
The illusion of safety shattered.
The temperature in the room didn't just feel like it dropped; it plunged, the theoretical threat of Vector Atheron violently replaced by the very real, very present sound of their home being set ablaze.
The debate was over.
The echo of Pen's first transmission still seemed to vibrate in the air, a silent scream demanding action. Vey's head snapped toward Karen, his good eye narrow and intent.
His voice was a low, gravelly rumble, a check against the panic threatening to cloud their judgment.
"Hey. Ask for more intel. Don't let the noise rush us."
Karen gave a single, sharp nod, her fingers already moving.
Overreacting now could send them headlong into a trap.
A blind charge was what the Scorchers would want.
She pressed the comm unit, her voice cutting through the static with forced calm.
"Pen, we need a picture. Is it Cinder? A drone swarm? Report."
The only answer was a hiss of empty static that stretched for three long, heartbeats.
Then, Pen's voice returned, tighter this time, the words clipped as if she were speaking through gritted teeth.
<<...Negative. It's not Cinder.>> A pause, filled with the distant, muffled sound of shouting. <
The vagueness of "someone else" was more alarming than a clear name.
Before Karen could demand clarification, a new, insistent chime came from her conduit.
A video call request.
From Pen.
Karen accepted, and the small screen lit up.
The image was shaky, filmed from a low, crouched position, but the scene was unmistakable.
It showed the main yard of the rally point through a haze of dust and smoke.
Chunks of the main gate were scattered like broken teeth.
In the middle of the devastation, standing tall and unconcerned, was Blaze, his posture relaxed, a wide, manic grin visible even through the poor resolution.
In the foreground, Rook and Echo stood side-by-side, their backs to the camera, forming a solid wall between Blaze and the rest of the Talons.
They were talking to him.
The sheer, brazen normality of it—a conversation amidst the rubble—was chilling.
"Put it on the main screen," Vey ordered, his voice tight.
Karen tapped a command, and the grainy footage bloomed across the larger wall monitor, casting the room in a flickering, gray light.
Everyone stared, frozen, at the standoff unfolding in their home.
Lucent, who had been silently analyzing the technical readouts at the edge of the group, took a half-step closer to the screen.
His eyes, sharp and used to picking out details from complex schematics, narrowed.
He wasn't looking at Blaze, or at Rook and Echo.
His gaze was locked on the space just behind Blaze, where the smoke and dust swirled thickest.
There, standing perfectly still, was a figure that made the air leave his lungs.
It was a person, but only in silhouette.
They were encased in a suit of armor so seamless and alien it looked less like machinery and more like a statue of polished, dark alloy.
It offered no seams, no viewports, no hint of the pilot within.
It just was—a silent, humming monolith standing in Blaze's shadow.
"Karen," Lucent said, his voice quiet but cutting through the room's tension.
He pointed a finger at the screen, his gesture precise. "Look. Behind Blaze."
All eyes followed his finger, and the room grew colder still as they saw it too.
The someone else.
The image of the silent, armored figure burned into the screen, a stark contrast to Blaze's theatrical grin.
The sheer, polished perfection of the exo-armor amidst the rubble felt like a deliberate insult.
Vey let out a sharp, disgusted click of his tongue, the sound cracking the tense silence.
He crossed his arms, his augmented limb gleaming dully in the screen's light. "What a bad taste," he grumbled, his voice a low rumble of contempt. "Parading their toy in our home. They really think a shiny suit is all it takes to make us flinch?"
It was a front, a show of bravado for the others, but the tension in his shoulders betrayed the real concern underneath the bluster.
All eyes turned to Kai as a soft, involuntary breath escaped him.
He had taken a half-step back from the screen, his face pale.
The others saw a terrifying, unknown weapon; he saw a ghost from a life he'd tried to bury.
"...That's an Aegis-series combat frame," he whispered, the name feeling foreign and heavy on his tongue.
His mind recoiled, flung back through the months to a different place: the Aether Foundation's Annual Technological Conference.
It was an event spoken of in hushed, reverent tones, a gathering that was simultaneously the grandest showcase of human ingenuity and the deadliest silent auction of power.
An invitation was a social weapon, extended only to a profound tier of humanity—those who cradled the world's brightest minds in one hand and its deepest pockets in the other.
The memory was a sensory assault of chilling contrasts.
The air was sterile and perfumed, so cold it felt sharp in the lungs, a deliberate purge of the city's grime and sweat.
He remembered the weight of a crystal flute in his hand, the meaningless bubbles rising in pale gold liquid, and the delicate, architectured canapés that tasted of nothing but wealth.
And in the center of it all, on a rotating platform under a spotlight that killed all shadows, was the Aegis-frame.
It wasn't presented as a weapon.
The smooth, polished alloy was described as tactical sculpture, its purpose sanitized into urban pacification and high-density conflict resolution.
It was a promise of clean, effortless control, a future where order was maintained by untouchable, silent gods of alloy and glyph-code, far removed from the messy, bloody reality of the world below the spires.
The price tag attached to it had been a number so absurd it was almost fictional.
He looked from the monstrous reality on the screen to the grim, soot-stained faces around him.
The disconnect was dizzying.
"Why... why is that here?" he asked, his voice trembling with a confusion deeper than fear. "That isn't scavenged tech. That's a million-credit weapon system. It's for crushing sector-wide rebellions, not... not for a fight in a junkyard."
The implication hung in the air, more terrifying than Blaze's fire.
Lucent's gaze, sharp and analytical, remained locked on the screen, but a subtle shift in his posture—a slight tilt of his head, a deepening of the focus in his eyes—made it clear his attention had narrowed exclusively to the armored figure behind Blaze.
He was cross-referencing the visual data against a vast internal library of schematics and corporate profiles.
He didn't speak.
He didn't need to.
The silence itself was a question, a demand for the intel only Kai could provide.
Kai seemed to feel the weight of that silent pressure. He tore his eyes away from the screen, his face pale. "Tha-that thing," he stammered, pointing a trembling finger, "was the centerpiece. One of the best items presented at the Aether Foundation Conference. They called it the 'Aegis-series.' A paradigm shift in personal security."
The corporate slogans fell from his lips, tasting like ash.
Lucent's only outward reaction was a slow, deliberate blink. Internally, the name Aether Foundation triggered a cascade of connections.
He remembered the brief, scornful mentions on the GhostKey forums he'd frequented in back then.
The collective there hadn't bothered with the official name.
To them, it was simply The Gathering, a term always dripping with sarcastic disdain, synonymous with the worst excesses of corporate power.
The sterile image of the exo-armor on the screen was a lock, and every piece of data he needed to pick it was out of reach, buried behind firewalls and corporate encryption.
A cold, familiar dread coiled in Lucent's gut—the frustration of a master locksmith with his tools just out of reach when his house had burned down.
His fingers twitched at his side, then moved with a will of their own, dipping into his pocket.
They closed around the cool, smooth glass of the vial Karen had given him.
The Q-Serin sloshed gently, a deceptively simple liquid holding a universe of pain.
He could feel its weight, its promise.
His mind recoiled from the memory—the sensation of his own neurons being forced into a quantum state they were never meant to hold, the raw aether of the world scraping through his nerves like sand, rewriting him from the inside out to become a temporary, living conduit.
It wasn't casting.
It was self-immolation by computation.
A grim finality settled over him.
His jaw tightened.
There were no other keys.
No other way to pry open the secrets of that armor in time.
It seemed he would be forced to rawcast again.
Karen's voice, sharp as a whip crack, severed the thick silence in the briefing room and cut through Lucent's grim calculations.
"We're wasting a live feed. Kai, while Pen's still online, tell her everything you can about that Aegis-frame. Now."
The order was a lifeline, a call to action that snapped Kai out of his stunned recollection.
He nodded, a quick, jerky motion, and leaned slightly toward Karen's comm unit, raising his voice to be heard.
"Pen! The armor behind Blaze—it's called the Aegis-series combat frame! Basically, it's—"
His explanation died in his throat.
On the large monitor, Blaze's relaxed posture vanished.
In the middle of whatever theatrical speech he was giving Rook and Echo, his head snapped around.
He wasn't looking at the Talon commanders anymore.
His unnerving gaze was locked directly on the source of the transmission—on Pen's conduit, as if he could see through the lens right into their briefing room.
A wide, predatory grin split his face.
His right hand came up in a casual, almost dismissive flick.
There was no tool, no device.
The air in front of his fingertips shimmered, warping with a heat-haze intensity.
A complex, fiery glyph bloomed into existence in the space, fully formed and pulsing with violent energy.
The connection didn't just fail.
The video feed on the screen didn't freeze or pixelate.
It was erased.
One moment, they were staring at the dusty yard and Blaze's triumphant face.
The next, the screen went dead black, emitting a short, sharp pop of static that echoed like a gunshot in the sudden, profound silence.
The line was dead.
Their window into the fight had been violently slammed shut.
Vey's face, already a landscape of scars and grim lines, seemed to deform further, the flesh tightening over his skull as a deep, furious frown etched itself into his features.
The brief glimpse into the rally point's devastation and Blaze's casual, terrifying power had stripped away any room for debate or delay.
His command was not shouted, but ground out between clenched teeth, carrying the weight of a final verdict.
"Let's go."
The two words acted like a trigger.
There were no questions, no protests.
The gravity of the situation was a physical force, pulling them into motion.
Chairs scraped back as one.
Karen was already at the door, her expression a mask of cold fury.
Lucent's hand closed tightly around the vial in his pocket, his decision made.
Kai and Cale fell into step, their earlier dynamic replaced by a shared, grim purpose.
Even Jack moved with a speed that belied his years, his stony silence more eloquent than any battle cry.
The room emptied in a swift, silent exodus—all except for one small figure.
Lily stood by the table, forgotten in the sudden surge.
She watched the backs of the adults as they marched out, her small face pinched with a understanding far beyond her years.
The conduit she had coveted was now back to Kai.
As the door groaned shut, her small voice, clear and quiet, whispered into the empty, tense air.
"…Good luck, everyone."
***
The sharp, acrid smell of shattered concrete and super-cooled aether chased them down the dimly lit hallway.
Arden's grip on Tenn's hand was vice-like, pulling her along as his boots skidded on the frost-slicked floor.
His mind, a strategist's to the last, scrambled for any advantage, any weapon they could turn against their pursuers.
He shot a frantic glance back the way they'd come, half-expecting to see Ash's smiling face materialize from the shadows.
"The tank!" he gasped, the words sharp puffs of steam in the suddenly frigid air. "Can you detonate it? Remotely? A dead man's switch?"
Tenn, struggling to keep pace, her breath coming in ragged pants, looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.
The question was an insult to her engineering.
"It's a cryo-generator, not a bomb!" she snapped, her voice strained. "It's built to contain, not explode! It doesn't have that function!"
Arden's face tightened.
He clicked his tongue in a sharp, frustrated sound that was swallowed by the echoing emptiness of the sub-level.
It was a dead end.
Their one great hope was now just a piece of scenery, useless to them.
He gave her hand another tug, and as he did, he registered the strange, metallic chill of her augmented fingers through his own.
It wasn't the normal, ambient cool of machinery.
It was a deep, leaching cold, as if the desperate energy of their flight, or the lingering aura of the cryo-tank, was sucking the very warmth from the artificial limb.
The feeling was unnerving, a small, personal omen of their rapidly freezing prospects as they fled deeper into the labyrinth, searching for a way up.
The only sounds were their ragged breathing and the frantic slap of their footsteps on the concrete.
Then, a sharp, insistent chirp cut through the tense silence.
The comm unit in Arden's back pocket—the one he'd left on an open channel—was now lit up, vibrating with an incoming call.
He skidded to a halt, fumbling for it.
The moment he accepted, Gideon's voice erupted from the speaker, a roar of static and fury that seemed to shake the very walls. "ARDEN! WHAT IN THE HELL IS HAPPENING DOWN THERE? I'm getting alerts all over my screen! Report!"
Arden didn't have the breath for pleasantries.
He pressed the device to his ear, his voice a raw, desperate rasp as he dragged Tenn around another corner. "It's the Scorchers! Ash and Cinder—they're in the sub-levels! They're trying to kill us!"
There was a beat of dead air on the other end, a silent, volcanic pause.
When Gideon's voice returned, it was lower, a guttural growl that promised pure, unadulterated violence.
"Those motherf*cking pyromaniacs," he snarled, the word dripping with a hatred so profound it was almost tangible. "After everything we've given them…?"
"They knew!" Arden gasped, his lungs burning as they sprinted. "They knew we were building a weapon! They ambushed us in the lab!"
The line crackled with a deafening silence, followed by a sound like crushing plastic.
Gideon's grip had likely just destroyed his own comm unit.
His roar was distorted, blasting from the tiny speaker in Arden's hand.
"WHAT?!"
Then, his voice boomed, muffled and distant, no longer aimed at the comms but at the men around him. "BOYS, DROP EVERYTHING! WEAPONS HOT! THE SCORCHERS ARE BETRAYING US! PREPARE FOR BATTLE!"
The faint, chaotic sounds of sudden movement and shouted acknowledgments filtered through the line.
The comm was still live in Gideon's clenched fist, a raw, open channel to a war being declared upstairs.
The pieces clicked into place for Arden.
That was why he'd left the channel open.
Gideon and his main force had been across the base, focused on the grim work of salvaging whatever wasn't ash from their ruined supply depot.
He'd been hoping, praying, that the noise of the ambush—the explosion, the screaming, the chaos—would be overheard, that Gideon would pick up the unit and understand the situation without a word needing to be spoken.
It had worked.
But the relief was cold and sharp as a knife.
They had just lit the fuse on a civil war inside their own base.
His mind was a frantic engine, spinning through possibilities.
He'd seen them, Ash and Cinder, caught in the initial blast of the cryo-generator's discharge.
He'd seen the frost bloom over Ash's fine suit, seen the super-cooled mist swirl around Cinder's impassive form.
But he wasn't a fool.
He knew the difference between an inconvenience and a defeat.
That tank was a desperate measure, a surprise.
Was it enough to actually stop them?
To kill them?
He doubted it.
He was already trying to calculate the next move, the next corner to turn, anything to pile another sliver of advantage onto their hopeless situation.
The strategist in him was still desperately working when the world turned to fire and instinct.
There was no sound.
No warning crack of a gunshot.
Just a sudden, searing streak of red that painted the air an inch from his face.
A wave of blistering heat washed over his right cheek, so intense and immediate it felt like a brand had been pressed against his skin.
He flinched, his head jerking back purely on reflex, the logical part of his brain lagging a full two seconds behind his body's raw reaction.
Only then did the sensation register, a delayed, screaming signal of pain.
Burn.
His hand flew to his cheek, fingers brushing against skin that was already tender and hot.
His eyes, wide with a shock that had not yet become fear, darted down the hallway behind them.
There was no smoke, no conventional muzzle flash.
Just the lingering heat-haze in the air, distorting the shadows.
A super-heated bullet.
Cinder's work.
She hadn't been subdued at all.
She was already hunting, and her aim was only going to get better.