The world had turned to a freezing, white haze.
The cryo-tank's emergency discharge flooded the sub-level corridors with a super-cooled mist that clung to skin and metal alike, coating everything in a thin, brittle layer of frost.
Visibility dropped to mere feet, turning the familiar hallway into a ghostly labyrinth.
Tenn's lungs burned with each ragged, frigid gasp.
The metallic chill of her own augmented fingers was a deep, aching cold now, syncing with the unnatural winter around them.
She could barely see Arden's back as he pulled her along, his form a blurry silhouette in the shifting white.
Then she saw it.
A searing, crimson line cut through the mist.
It was impossibly bright, a thread of concentrated sun that didn't illuminate but burned the air itself.
It passed so close to Arden's head that the fine hairs at his temple curled and vanished with a silent, sickening sizzle.
There was no sound.
No thunderous gunshot.
Just the hiss of the mist and their own panicked breaths.
For two full heartbeats, Tenn's mind, trained on wires and energy outputs, failed to process the event.
It was a data point with no context—a brilliant, anomalous streak in the visual field.
Then her eyes dropped to Arden's face.
He had frozen mid-step, his hand slowly rising to his cheek.
His fingers brushed the skin there, and he flinched back violently as if stung by a live wire.
Where his fingertips touched, a vicious red line bloomed across his flesh, an ugly, blistering brand drawn by a needle of pure heat.
The smell, faint but unmistakable, was the scent of cooked meat.
It was a bullet.
A scalpel of light meant not just to kill, but to erase.
And it had missed its mark by an inch.
The delayed understanding hit her like a physical blow, colder than the mist around them.
Cinder was hunting them.
Cinder's voice sliced through the freezing mist, a predator's purr that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. "You two just made the game much more fun!"
The words confirmed Tenn's sinking conclusion.
The cryo-tank, her masterpiece of jury-rigged desperation, had been useless.
A momentary distraction, a stage effect.
It hadn't stopped them; it had only annoyed them, like throwing a snowball at a volcano.
The super-cooled mist that was supposed to be their salvation now felt like a funeral shroud, hiding their hunters while doing nothing to slow them down.
Her mind, a frantic bird beating against the bars of its cage, scrabbled for a way out.
She was an augment engineer.
Wires, alloy, synaptic interfaces—that was her language.
Not this glyph-crafting, alchemical bullshit she'd been forced to dabble in.
The failure of the tank felt like a personal indictment.
If she couldn't win with a borrowed science, what could she do with her own?
The memory of the inert, perfect "Dolls" flashed in her mind.
No.
They were a corporate lockbox, beautiful and utterly useless to her now.
She couldn't weaponize a mystery, not against this.
Her own augmentations, however… the cold, intricate machinery woven into her flesh… that was hers.
"Arden," she whispered, the sound swallowed by the mist. "I need access to my lab."
He shot her a wild look, his face a mask of pain and stark disbelief. "What are you even going to do there? It's a deathtrap!"
"I have prototypes there. Augments I built." Her words came out in a rushed, panicked jumble.
She gestured frantically at the mechanical arms fused to her own shoulders. "These… these are specialized. For fine motor work, for building other augments. But I made others. Weapon systems. In case…"
Her voice trailed off.
In case of what?
In case the monsters they'd invited in decided to turn on them.
The contingency plan now felt pathetically small.
Arden stared at her, his gaze dropping from her terrified eyes to her specialized, delicate hands—hands made for soldering and suturing wires, not for combat.
The silence between them was heavy with his unspoken question.
"…Tenn," he finally said, his voice grinding with a painful mix of hope and despair. "Could you even fight?"
Arden's hand clamped around her wrist again, a vise of desperation.
He didn't wait for an answer.
He yanked her into a stumbling run, veering sharply away from the direction of Cinder's taunt.
"And do you want to go back there?" he snarled, the words a harsh gasp as they fled.
He wasn't just asking about the lab.
He was pointing a bloody, mental finger back down the hall, towards the origin point of that searing red line.
Towards the hunter in the mist.
Tenn didn't answer.
She just ran, her breath catching in her throat.
Her world had always been one step removed from this kind of violence.
It was data on a screen, a casualty report, a problem of physics and physiology to be solved from the safety of her sterile lab.
She had felt detached, even clinical about it.
Now, with the smell of Arden's burned flesh in the air and the phantom heat of the beam on her own face, that detachment shattered.
The fear was a live wire in her chest, terrifying and strangely, sickeningly exhilarating.
It was the most alive, the most present, she had felt in years, and the realization filled her with a kind of shame.
As they ran, Arden' mapped out the section they are running.
He knew these tunnels like the lines on his own palms.
The path they were on was a maintenance conduit, a dead end used for routing cables.
A trap.
But his gaze flicked upward, as if he could see through the grimy ceiling tiles and concrete.
Above us… the cafeteria.
The plan was insane.
It was a gamble that would use their last reserves of strength and luck.
But it was the only move left on a board that had been set on fire.
His grip on her wrist tightened. "The ceiling," he panted, the words barely audible over their pounding footsteps and ragged breathing. "We blow the ceiling. It's our only way up."
Suddenly the comm unit cackled into life again.
<
Gideon's voice roared from the comm unit, a blast of static and fury that cut through the freezing air.
Arden skidded to a halt, his boots slipping on the frost-slicked concrete.
The sudden stop jerked Tenn's arm, and she stumbled against him, her wide, terrified eyes searching his face for a reason.
But Arden wasn't looking at her.
His gaze was turned inward, his mind's eye superimposing a tactical map over the blinding white mist.
Gideon was here.
His squad was on the other side of the sub-level, a hammer of brute force and rage.
Ash and Cinder were somewhere between them, two vipers coiled in the fog.
The opportunity was stark and brutal: a pincer movement.
Gideon's squad pushing from one side, he and Tenn acting as the anvil from the other.
They could trap the Scorchers in this frozen corridor.
But the variables were poison.
How effective would Gideon's people be against these monsters?
They were brawlers, not assassins.
Against Cinder's surgical precision and Ash…it would most likely be a slaughter.
A noisy, chaotic slaughter that might buy them seconds, but would likely just add more bodies to the pile.
And then there was the ceiling.
His original plan.
A desperate, vertical escape.
It was a single, all-or-nothing gamble.
It wouldn't kill the Scorchers, but it might save them.
He stood frozen for a heartbeat, a statue in the mist, weighing two terrible futures.
One was a battle that could gut the Scorchers but would almost certainly get them all killed.
The other was a selfish, desperate flight that abandoned their own people to the fire.
The two terrible choices warred in Arden's head for a second longer before he shoved them aside.
He needed tools.
Now.
"Do you have any conduit with you?" he asked, his voice low and urgent.
Tenn held up her gleaming, intricate arm. "Well, my arm is a built-in conduit." The statement was simple, a fact of her existence, but it sounded absurdly advanced in their crumbling, frozen surroundings.
"Any spell apps that can help us in this situation?" Arden pressed, his eyes darting back down the misty corridor.
He was thinking of barriers, flashbangs, anything to buy them a single, precious minute to think.
Tenn's face tightened with concentration as her mind interfaced with the device fused to her very skeleton.
Her fingers twitched, a silent, internal menu scrolling behind her eyes.
Before she could answer, the decision was ripped away.
CRACK. CRACK-CRACK.
The sound was distant, muffled by the winding corridors and the dense mist, but unmistakable.
Gunfire.
Not the searing hiss of Cinder's energy weapon, but the blunt, percussive roar of ballistics.
Gideon's people.
They had already made contact.
Tenn's head snapped up, her eyes wide, the search for a useful spell forgotten.
The theoretical had just become violently real.
The battle had begun without them.
The gunfire from the comm unit and the faint, echoing reality of it from down the hall sent a fresh jolt of adrenaline through Arden.
Time was collapsing.
"Gideon, your position?" he barked into the unit.
<
Gideon's reply was a roar, punctuated by the muffled thump of a shotgun blast through the speaker.
A half-second later, a duller echo of the same sound reached their ears, a stark confirmation of how close the fight was.
They were just around the corner.
The pincer was forming, whether Arden wanted it or not.
His mind, reeling a moment before, snapped into a cold, sharp focus.
The mist was their only advantage.
They had to control it.
"Tenn," he said, turning to her. "Can you activate the sprinklers just beyond that section? The zone between Gideon and us?"
He was asking her to thicken the veil, to turn the hallway into a blinding white cage.
"Yeah, I can," Tenn said, her voice steadier now that a technical problem was in front of her.
But then she hesitated, a flicker of foresight in her panicked eyes.
She was their only engineer.
If something happened to her, the system would be useless to anyone else.
"But I think you should be the one to use it." Her fingers danced across the interface on her forearm.
A complex, miniature hologram of the base's sprinkler system bloomed for a second before she isolated a single control glyph.
With a decisive tap, she transferred the access key. "Here. I'm patching the local control to your comm. Just press and hold the transmit button. It will flood the sector right in front of Gideon's position."
She didn't explain the underlying code or the network protocols.
She gave him a trigger.
A simple, brutal button to press.
It was an act of profound, desperate trust, handing a key part of her life's work to the strategist, making him a temporary partner in her engineered survival.
Arden's thumb was a hair's breadth from the transmit button on his comm, ready to drown the hallway in a second wave of freezing mist.
Then a voice cut through the gloom from behind them, sweet and syrupy as poisoned honey.
"There you are."
Arden froze.
He didn't need to see the speaker.
That voice, laced with a theatrical, intimate menace, was etched into his nightmares.
He slowly turned, pulling Tenn partly behind him.
A shadow congealed from the mist, resolving into the pristine, nightmarish figure of Ash.
His fine suit was untouched by the grime, the frilly apron a grotesque splash of white and crimson against the grey.
He stood as if he had been there all along, simply waiting for them to notice.
But it was the sight above him that stole the air from Arden's lungs.
Hovering in the air around Ash, like a halo of damnation, were half a dozen shivering points of fire.
They weren't grand, sweeping arrows, but something far more precise and cruel—slender, needle-like darts of condensed flame, each no longer than a finger.
They pulsed with a malevolent orange light, hissing softly as they vaporized the frozen moisture in the air around them, tracing tiny, smoking arcs in the mist.
These fucking maniacs weren't just hunting them.
They were enjoying the cornering.
They were savoring it.
The gunfire from ahead—the brutal, straightforward conflict with Gideon's squad—suddenly painted a terrifying new picture.
If Ash was here, playing with them…
Then the one with the rifle, the one who fought with cold, surgical efficiency… Cinder was on the other side, dealing with the main force.
They were trapped between the artist and the executioner.
***
The air in the Red Dogs base turned to ice, and it had nothing to do with the cryo-mist leaking from the sub-levels.
It was the cold, sharp shift from chaos to a focused, murderous intent.
Gideon's roar had done more than just mobilize his people; it had snapped a tense, frayed wire.
The news crackled through the ranks: the Scorchers weren't just capricious allies anymore.
They were actively hunting their own, right here in the heart of their base.
The warehouse burning was a calculated strike.
This was a personal insult.
For Gideon, it was the final, unforgivable blow.
His pride, already battered and bleeding from the day's losses, could not absorb another.
The humiliation of being used, of having his hospitality repaid with a knife in the dark, boiled over into a pure, undiluted rage.
He was done losing for the day.
"Isla!" His voice cut across the frantic preparations, a sound like grinding rock.
A young woman with a sharp gaze and a fresh scar on her jaw snapped to attention.
Isla was new to command, but she had a steady hand with the green recruits.
"Yes, boss!"
"You cover our backs," Gideon commanded, jamming a fresh magazine into his rifle with a brutal shunk. "We're going down to deal with those f*ckers."
The order was a deliberate calculation, made with his burning anger.
He knew, with the cold clarity that sometimes comes with fury, that bringing inexperienced fighters into the confined, frozen dark of the sub-levels against the Scorchers would be a death sentence.
They would be deadweight, tripping over their own fear, getting in the way of the killing blows.
He needed hunters, not children.
His eyes swept the room, picking out faces—the grizzled veterans, the close-quarters brawlers, the few who had survived encounters with the Scorchers before.
With a series of sharp gestures and grunted names, he assembled his spearhead.
It was a hurried selection, but it was the best he had left.
They were going down to take back their home, or die in its basement.
They descended into a different world.
The familiar, grimy concrete of the basement levels was gone, replaced by an alien, freezing landscape.
A thick, white mist clung to everything, leaching color and sound, turning the hallways into a ghostly maze.
Frost crackled under their boots with every cautious step.
This was the aftermath of Tenn's desperate gamble—the cryo-generator's breath had flooded the corridors, a man-made winter born from panic.
Visibility dropped to a few meters, every shadow a potential threat.
Gideon's eyes, narrowed to slits, scanned the shifting white.
This wasn't just an obstacle; it was a perfect ambush zone.
"Deploy the shield barricade!" he barked, his voice flat and hard in the muffled air.
One of the veterans behind him moved without hesitation, hefting a heavy, rectangular unit from his back.
It was a piece of modern necessity for any faction hoping to hold a line—a deployable aether-shield.
With a low hum, he slammed it onto the frost-covered ground.
The device hissed, and panels of reinforced alloy snapped outward, planting stabilizing claws into the concrete.
In seconds, a curved, semi-transparent wall of shimmering energy bloomed from its top edge, sealing the corridor.
This was no standard-issue barricade.
This was one of Tenn's upgrades.
Gideon could see the faint, intricate glyphwork glowing along the alloy frame, siphoning aether not just for physical integrity, but to weave a secondary, shimmering barrier—a Rank 1 Kinetic Shield.
It was the difference between a sturdy wall and a wall that actively pushed back. But he also knew the cost.
The power cell whined audibly under the double load, its energy reserves draining faster with every second the kinetic field held.
It was a trade-off: superior protection for a ticking clock.
They had a strong position, but it wouldn't last forever.
Gideon thumbed his comm unit, his voice a low growl. "Arden! What's with the mist in here!"
Silence.
Only the faint hiss of the open channel and the hum of the shield generator answered him.
He clicked his tongue in frustration.
He knew, logically, this freezing fog was Tenn's work—the "cold surprise" Arden had vaguely warned him about.
But he needed confirmation.
He needed to hear a voice, to get a bearing in this blinding whiteness.
He opened his mouth to try again, to demand a status report.
FZZZT-CRACK!
A violent spark erupted from the center of the kinetic shield, a brief, blinding star in the mist.
The entire barrier flickered, the hum pitching into a strained whine.
Gideon's eyes snapped forward, reflexively tracking the source.
There, embedded for a single, impossible moment in the shimmering energy field, was a sliver of incandescent red light—a searing bullet, stopped dead in its tracks.
It glowed with vicious heat, fighting against the kinetic force holding it back before its energy bled away.
With a final sizzle, it died and fell to the frosted floor, a harmless, darkening shard.
Someone had just taken a shot at them.
A shot he never heard, never saw coming.
There had been no muzzle flash in the fog, no crack of a gunshot. Just the silent, sudden arrival of death.
His heart hammered against his ribs.
If not for the barricade, if not for Tenn's upgrade... that glowing sliver would have been buried in his skull.
He wouldn't have even known what killed him.
A slow, deliberate clap echoed through the frozen mist, the sound unnaturally crisp. Each impact was a mockery of their preparedness.
"Wow," a woman's voice, flat and utterly unimpressed, cut through the silence. "I'm really amazed that some low-tech toy managed to defend against flare flechettes like that."
A shadow deepened within the shifting white, resolving into a lean, unmistakable silhouette.
Cinder stood just at the edge of visibility, her rifle held loosely at her side, as if she were inspecting a minor curiosity, not a fortified position.
Every Red Dog fighter tightened their grip, muzzles snapping toward the shadowy figure.
Gideon's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.
The sheer, casual audacity of it—to stroll into their home, shoot at them, and then offer critique—fanned his rage from a simmer into a roaring blaze.
He didn't give her another second.
"Boys!" Gideon barked, taking a heavy step back.
It was all the command they needed.
The veteran members moved with a brutal, trained precision, shifting forward to form the new front line as their leader created distance.
"Fire!"
The command was a thunderclap.
The soldier at the barricade slammed a switch.
The shimmering kinetic field died with a fading whine.
In the same instant, the frozen air was torn to shreds.
The corridor erupted in a deafening storm of muzzle flashes and roaring gunfire.
Dozens of rounds tore into the mist where Cinder stood, chewing apart the shadows, filling the white haze with the smell of cordite and the promise of vengeance.