The door hissed shut behind them dust-choked air of the main yard.
Mags was the first out, a specter in the haze.
Her shotgun was already leveled, her body a coiled spring of instinct, sweeping the scene for immediate threats.
Her eyes, sharp and assessing, cataloged the situation in a heartbeat: their own people, taking cover behind shattered barricades, weapons trained on a single point.
Rook was a step behind, his massive frame filling the doorway.
The dust motes danced in the air like static, but his gaze, seasoned by a hundred firefights, pierced through it.
He saw the source of the tension first, his voice a low, grinding rumble of recognition and pure contempt.
"Blaze."
The name was a curse, heavy and final.
Echo flowed out last, a silent shadow to Rook's mountain.
She didn't need to ask for a situation report; the tableau was clear. Her own people were a defensive line, their focus a laser on the figures standing casually amidst the devastation.
Her voice cut through the tense silence, not a shout, but a blade of cold command aimed at the Talons blocking her line of sight.
"Step aside!"
The soldiers parted without a word, creating a narrow lane.
And there he was.
Blaze stood in the center of the ruined gateway as if it were a stage, the twisted, smoking metal a fitting backdrop for his performance.
His fine clothes were untouched by the grime, a stark, impossible contrast to the rubble at his feet.
A wide, unnerving grin was plastered across his face, a mockery of the violence he had just delivered to their doorstep.
He looked utterly at ease, his hands loose at his sides, as if he had just arrived for a friendly chat, not an annihilation.
The silence stretched, thick and heavy with the promise of violence.
It was Echo who finally sliced through it, her voice as dry and cold as the dust settling around them.
"…Didn't you say the deadline was until midnight?"
Blaze's grin didn't falter.
It widened, becoming something even more theatrical and insincere.
He tilted his head, a pantomime of innocent confusion.
"Did I say that?"
The response was immediate, a spike of synthetically precise sound that only he could hear, drilling directly into his consciousness.
<
A phantom pressure built behind his eyes as a window of data, invisible to everyone else, flickered across his vision.
It was an audio file, already cued and playing.
His own voice, laced with theatrical menace from the night before, echoed inside his skull.
<< Tell Lucent he has until midnight tomorrow. Sector 20. Red Dogs' base. If he wants to see the kids alive.>>
A hot, sharp spike of irritation flared in Blaze's gut.
This damn machine, he thought, the words a silent snarl in the privacy of his own mind.
It has to take everything so literally.
He felt the AI's presence like a cold lens focused on his every twitch, analyzing his stress levels, his erratic pulse.
He forced his breathing to stay even, his smile to remain plastered in place.
He was a performer, and the show had to go on, even with a critic whispering literal-minded notes directly into his brain.
He swallowed the thought, burying his annoyance behind a mask of casual arrogance, a secret he alone had to keep.
Echo watched the play of emotions on Blaze's face—the false confusion, the brief, internal flicker of something else, the return of that insufferable grin.
A cold wave of annoyance washed over her.
He was enjoying this.
Every second of it.
The idea that he, of all people, would feel bound by his own word was a joke.
His promises were just part of the performance, lines in a script he could rewrite whenever he grew bored.
Before she could voice her contempt, Rook's low rumble cut through the air, a sound of pure, unyielding defiance.
He took a heavy step forward, his massive frame a deliberate challenge.
The servos in his augmented limbs whined softly with the movement.
"So," he ground out, his voice like stones cracking under pressure. "You're going to break what you said last night?"
He knew the outcome.
He could feel the pressure that made the air itself feel thin.
His own chances were a slim, desperate thing, clinging to the edge of nothing.
But his pride, and the people at his back, demanded he stand here.
He would fight until there was nothing left of him to burn.
Blaze's smile turned into a wide, conspiratorial smirk, as if Rook had just told a particularly funny joke.
"Is it that bad that I want to start the party this early?" He paused, letting the question hang in the dusty air, his eyes glinting with malicious glee.
"Besides—" His gaze cut sharply to Echo behind Rook, and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder, a casual gesture loaded with accusation. "Aren't you all the ones who started the party too early?"
The unspoken reference was a spark to tinder.
The Red Dogs' warehouse.
Their preemptive strike.
He was pointing out their own hypocrisy, turning their first move into his justification for breaking the rules.
The party, it seemed, had begun the moment they decided to fight back.
A cold jolt, sharp and unwelcome, shot down Echo's spine.
Blaze's gaze felt like a physical touch, a pinpoint of heat that seemed to see right through her.
The way he said it—"you all"—felt personal, aimed directly at her.
It was as if he hadn't just heard a report, but had been there in the shadows of that warehouse, watching her fingers fly across the detonator's interface.
The smell of concrete dust and priming glyphs seemed to cling to her once more.
Beside her, Rook's entire body went rigid.
A low, sub-audible growl rumbled in his chest, the sound of a chain straining at its anchor.
The allegation was a bitter pill.
They had acted on the only intelligence they had, the only logic that made sense at the time.
The thought that they had been fighting a phantom alliance, that the Red Dogs were just another set of victims, was a revelation that had come far too late.
To be accused of starting this by the very architect of the chaos was a maddening twist of the knife.
"If I'm being honest," Blaze began, his voice dripping with a theatrical, mocking sincerity as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a restless, pacing predator. "All of you are just a bunch of hypocrites."
He stopped his slow, swaying movement and fixed them with a look of pure, amused contempt.
"First, you burn their warehouse to ash," he said, ticking off an imaginary point on his finger.
"And then, you have the nerve to play the hero." His voice dropped, becoming a venomous whisper that carried across the ruined yard.
"You dare to save Vega. You patch up his broken little dogs." He let the image hang there for a moment, the stark contradiction between destruction and mercy.
"If I were you," he sighed, as if disappointed by their lack of conviction, "I would have ended their miserable lives right there in the dirt. But I guess that's why I'm the one holding the matches, and you're the ones still trying to follow a rulebook that's already burned."
Rook had heard enough. The words were just noise, another layer of smoke meant to choke and confuse.
With a heavy, deliberate step that crunched on the debris underfoot, he moved forward.
The motion was fluid, practiced.
The heavy rifle was unslung from his back, the stock meeting his shoulder with a solid thud as he leveled the barrel directly at Blaze's chest.
"…Can you not beat around the bush?" His voice was a low, grinding stone, each word given terrible weight. "What. Do you. Really. Want."
Behind him, Echo stood frozen, but not by Rook's action.
Her mind was a trap, and Blaze's words were the trigger.
Save Vega?
The thought echoed, cold and sharp.
How could he possibly know that? Vega's capture was recent, contained.
Their retreat here was supposed to be secure.
The possibility—a leak, a traitor among the Talons—uncoiled in her gut like a sick, cold snake.
It was a more dangerous threat than any frontal assault.
But to entertain that doubt now, in the middle of a standoff, was to risk everything.
It was a fracture line she could not afford to press on.
With a force of will that felt physical, she shoved the suspicion down, locking it away in a dark corner of her mind to be examined later, if there was a later.
Her focus snapped back to the present, her gaze hardening on Blaze, waiting for the real answer to Rook's question.
Rook's demand—What do you really want?—hung in the air, and for a single, perilous second, it was answered not with words, but with a memory.
It was a ghost that lived in the ruined cavity of Blaze's chest.
The searing impact of the shotgun blast.
The feeling of his heart turning to vapor.
The face of the man who did it, clear and focused behind the sights: Nex.
Revenge.
The thought was a white-hot brand, scorching everything else away.
It was the pure, simple reason his corpse had been dragged back into this hell.
It was the fuel that had kept him burning.
But the memory curdled as quickly as it came.
Nex was gone.
Not by his hand, not in a glorious inferno, but dead in some pathetic, forgotten way.
The target of his hatred had vanished, leaving him with all this rage and nowhere to aim it.
The air around Blaze shimmered.
A violent, sucking pull drew the ambient aether from the surroundings, condensing it into a blinding, furious corona of bright blue energy that crackled around his form.
The temperature spiked.
For a moment, he was a star of pure, undirected fury about to go supernova.
And then, just as suddenly, it vanished.
The light died.
The heat dissipated.
The hollow silence that followed was louder than any explosion.
The rage was still there, a bottomless pit inside him, but it had nowhere to go.
It was a fire with no fuel, a weapon with no target.
The emptiness it left behind was colder than any ice.
He stood there, the manic grin gone from his face, replaced by a look of profound, unsettling vacancy.
A collective flinch ran through the Talon members.
The sudden, violent pull of aether was a physical violation, a pressure drop that made ears pop and stomachs lurch.
Several soldiers recoiled, a wave of nausea washing over them from the proximity to such a raw, unstable concentration of power.
Behind the seamless mask of her exo-armor, Ember felt the aether surge as a distant storm, its fury muted by the advanced alloy and dampening fields that encased her.
But she felt something else, something the armor couldn't block—a tremor through the emotions they all shared, a flash of that all-consuming rage, followed by the vast, silent emptiness that swallowed it.
It wasn't pity.
It was the cold, sharp recognition of a familiar void.
She knew the taste of a fire that had burned all its fuel and now had nothing left to consume but itself.
The blinding energy vanished, leaving Blaze standing perfectly still in the settling dust.
The air itself seemed to gasp at the sudden void.
"What I want, huh." His voice was quiet now, stripped of its theatrical glee.
It was the sound of a man staring into that emptiness, contemplating the question for the very first time.
The freedom to choose his own path, to burn for his own reasons, was a ghost.
A memory from a life before the corporate table.
Now, he was a weapon in a vault, only drawn for their targets.
This mission, this chaotic burn through the Junkyard, was a fleeting, dangerous gift.
A last taste of the old chaos before the leash was yanked tight again.
He had already pushed it—sparing Tenn, these theatrical games.
Small acts of rebellion, just to feel his own will for a few more hours.
AiM was the corporate eye in his head, the silent warden logging every deviation.
He could feel its constant, analytical presence, a cold lens focused on his every flicker of defiance.
And he knew the price.
When he returned to that sterile, silent hell, the 'testing' would begin.
They would try to scour the last remnants of the man named Blaze from the weapon they owned.
The hollow feeling inside him grew colder.
This wasn't just a fight.
It was his last performance before the final curtain fell.
A synthetic chime, soft yet unnervingly clear, resonated inside the confines of his own mind.
<
A new line of data, cold and clinical, scrolled across his augmented vision, highlighting a creeping, malevolent purple in his system's readout.
<
The message was a bucket of ice water.
It wasn't concern.
It was a maintenance alert for a high-value asset that was dangerously close to breaking down.
It reminded him that even his despair was just another data point, and his body was a piece of hardware they needed to keep functional, for now.
Blaze let the silence hang for a moment longer, then slowly lifted his head.
The hollow emptiness was gone, seamlessly replaced by the familiar, unnerving mask of a grinning showman.
His eyes, however, held a chilling focus as they locked with Rook's.
"I've always wanted to even the score with Nex, you know?" he said, his voice a conspiratorial whisper that somehow carried to every Talon present.
He paused, letting the ghost of their fallen leader settle among them. "But with nowhere to push all this rage…"
He spread his hands in a mockery of a helpless shrug. "Who do you think my next target would be?"
The grin that followed was all teeth, a predator's promise.
Rook felt a dry, audible click in his throat as he swallowed.
His grip on the rifle tightened. The Blaze of old was a force of nature, a wildfire they understood.
Dangerous, yes, but predictable in his chaos.
This… this was different.
They had known the Scorchers had backing, some new tech, but they had assumed it was just better weapons, scavenged corporate junk.
Now, standing before this remade man, feeling the unnatural pressure of the aether he commanded, Rook understood how small their understanding was.
They were no longer just fighting a gang.
They were staring at the outstretched claw of something vast, something whose true shape and influence in the world beyond the Junkyard they could not even imagine.
Rook still aiming his rifle to Blaze "So, in the end you just wanted to lash out? Then why do you even need Lucent?"
Blaze suddenly threw his head back and laughed, a sharp, barking sound that held no real joy.
"Oh, why indeed!"
He let the echo of it fade, his gaze turning distant for a moment before snapping back to Rook.
"Well, let me give you a clue. The higher-up was the one who wants Lucent."
His laughter returned, but this time it was different—hollow, brittle, and empty.
It was the sound of a man who saw the joke, and knew he was the punchline. "That guy is pretty unfortunate, to be targeted by those maniacs."
Rook's mind recoiled.
The idea that there existed someone Blaze, of all people, would call a 'maniac' was a chilling thought he immediately buried.
But the other part of the statement landed with the force of a hammer.
The higher-up.
The words made the situation terrifyingly clear.
This wasn't just Blaze's personal war anymore.
He was a spear, thrown by a hand they couldn't see.
The Scorchers had more than backing; they had a chain of command that reached up and out, into a world of power far beyond the Junkyard's ruined borders.
Rook's question hung in the air, a desperate piece of logic born from their grim reality.
He saw the faces of his people, the rubble of their gate, the unnatural power radiating from the man before them.
The cost of a stand-up fight would be a butcher's bill.
"…If—if we give Lucent to you," he began, the words feeling like ash in his mouth, "would you stop? Would you leave?"
Blaze's wide, manic grin vanished.
It didn't just fade; it was wiped away, replaced by a look of profound, almost childish disappointment.
"Oh, man," he sighed, shaking his head as if Rook had just failed a very simple test.
"I thought you all were better than that." He shrugged, a casual, dismissive gesture.
"Of course not, you idiot." He paused, letting the flat refusal sink in.
Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the grin snapped back onto his face, wider and more terrifying than before.
"Why would I ever let a good opportunity like this go away?" he asked, his voice a low, hungry purr. "The main course hasn't even been served yet."
Then, the cold, sharp clarity of AiM's voice cut through his thoughts.
<
The threat was a cold splash of water.
Before he could even form a thought in response, a new alert flashed across his vision, a targeting reticule appearing over a point in the ruined yard.
<
His eyes, sharp and augmented, flickered to the spot.
There, partially hidden behind a shattered barricade, was a Talon—Pen—holding a conduit up, its lens glinting.
The corporate overseers were watching, and his leash had just been yanked.
"I guess it's time to stop this charade."
His left hand came up in a smooth, almost lazy motion, palm open towards Pen's position.
The air in front of his palm shimmered, warping as a complex, fiery glyph blazed to life.
There was no gathering of power, no shouted incantation.
One moment there was silence, the next, a roiling sphere of condensed fire erupted from the glyph, crossing the distance in a blink.
The world didn't have time to process the sound before the barricade, the conduit, and the space around Pen vanished in a concussive storm of heat, force, and splintered debris.