The van was a capsule of grim silence, its hum the only sound against the rush of the city outside.
In the back, Kai stared at his hands, Cale's usual smirk was nowhere to be seen, and Jack was a statue of weathered stone, his gaze fixed on some distant, painful memory.
They were all brooding, trapped in the gravity of their situation.
Karen's hands were tight on the steering wheel.
Her eyes, fixed on the tail lights of Vey's lead truck, cut sideways to the man in the passenger seat.
Her voice was low, meant for him alone, slicing through the quiet. "…Do you have any plan?"
Lucent didn't turn from the window. The blur of broken buildings and rusted metal seemed to sync with the frantic scroll of his thoughts. "You talking to me?"
"Yeah, to you."
The question pulled him from a dark place.
The memory of the Myriad lab was a fresh scar on his mind, not a faded wound.
The stench of antiseptic and corrupted flesh.
The searing pain of his own body turning against him with every use of Mind Accel.
The sight of that… thing… a mass of eyes and adaptive flesh, learning, evolving, making a mockery of his best glyphs.
He remembered the chilling crack of the cryo-generator rupturing, the wave of absolute cold that had been their only salvation.
That fight had been against a monster, a force of nature.
It had been horrifying, but its motives were pure, mindless hunger.
This was different.
He finally turned his head, meeting Karen's profile.
His voice was quiet, stripped of its usual sharp edge, leaving only a raw honesty.
"…This would be a more difficult fight than the one we fought last time."
Back then, in the frozen heart of that lab, he had accepted a personal fate—to burn himself out, to pay the price in his own flesh to save the others.
He had made his peace with that.
But he never imagined that desperate victory would be a prelude.
That the strange, terrifying power Zero had left in his wake, and the cryptic warning of being "experiments," would lead directly to this: a corporate army at their door, armed with technology that made his hard-won skills look primitive.
The abomination in the lab was a beast.
The Aegis-frame was above that.
And they were just specks of dust about to be swept away.
The grim silence in the van felt heavy enough to stifle the engine's hum.
Lucent's gaze drifted from the window, landing on the young man sitting behind Karen.
Kai was staring blankly at the passing ruins, his face pale.
"Hey, kid."
Kai jerked, startled by the sound of his own name.
He pointed a hesitant finger at his own chest, his eyes wide. Talking to me?
Lucent gave a single, shallow nod.
The technical litany of Kai's earlier warning was still echoing, a cold blueprint of their doom. "Anything else you can remember about that Aegis combat frame? Anything at all."
The Aegis-series.
The name itself was a corporate promise: impenetrable, divine.
This wasn't like the crude, painful augments you saw in the Junkyard—the rusted steel grafted to screaming nerve endings, the slow loss of self to the machine.
This was a surgeon's masterpiece.
A perfect fusion where the user was enhanced, not consumed.
A combat frame that enhanced the user without the grisly trade-offs of the Junkyard's back-alley augments.
Kai's brow furrowed in concentration.
He swallowed, the sound audible in the quiet. "As I've said before," he began, his voice tentative, "the frame itself… maybe it's not the most important thing. It's all about the energy source. Without it, that thing would just be a glorified, really expensive armor."
"ORX-9 Aetheric Alloy…" Lucent murmured, the words tasting like a secret he wasn't meant to know.
An Enhanced orichalcite.
Its core.
Its heart.
It was a cage for energy.
A breakthrough in energy research.
Its lattice specifically engineered to trap the dark-energy fluctuations that had been bleeding into the world since the Aether incident.
The implication was staggering, a cold knot tightening in his gut.
That suit wasn't just powered by a battery; it was feeding on the background radiation of their broken world.
It could, in theory, operate for months without rest.
An eternal, unblinking sentinel.
The comparison to their own technology was pathetic, a stark reminder of their place in the food chain.
Their conduits used self-healing quantum lattices—a marvel, once, but now a faded, second-hand miracle.
They were inherently flawed.
A poorly coded glyph, a single misaligned variable, could introduce waste heat, a flicker in the output.
That tiny inefficiency could multiply, cascading into a dead device or a catastrophic backfire that took your hand with it.
The wind whipped through a cracked window, a cold slap against his face.
His mind, that restless search engine, tried to flee—to the kids they'd left behind, to the grim set of Jack's jaw, to the vial of Q-Serin that felt like a live grenade in his pocket.
But it was useless.
It always snapped back to the Aegis.
And he had nothing but a hammer in comparison.
But a hammer could be a deadly weapon, depending on where you chose to strike.
"The plan is to target its core." Lucent's voice was flat, the statement delivered to Karen with a simplicity that bordered on absurd.
From the shadowy back of the van, a low, rough sound erupted.
Old man Jack let out a derisive snort, a crack in his stony silence. "That's some elaborate plan you got there," he grumbled, the ghost of a grim smile touching his lips. "But I didn't dislike it."
The comment broke the suffocating mood.
Cale, who had been slouched in feigned boredom as a shield against the tension, instantly perked up, his predator's instincts latching onto the shift.
"Hold on, hold on," he drawled, leaning forward, his eyes glinting with sharp amusement.
"Isn't the actual plan for the four of—" His gaze flickered to Jack, and he smoothly corrected himself, "—five of us, was to deal with the walking barbecue pit himself? You know, Blaze? The guy who just blew a hole in our home for fun?"
He looked from Lucent to Karen and back again, his expression a mask of theatrical confusion that didn't hide his genuine point.
Lucent let out a short, breathless sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "As if we can choose our opponents now. But what you said is true."
He glanced at Cale, his expression grim. "Blaze is most likely just as dangerous as that exo-armor. We can't afford to forget him."
Cale, seemingly bored with the grim tactical talk, leaned back and offered a observation so bewildering it cut through the tension. "You know, basing it on the… figure of that armored person," he said, gesturing vaguely with one hand, "wouldn't that person be a woman?"
Karen's hands tightened on the wheel. "Really? You can't clean out your mind even at a time like this—"
She stopped abruptly, the rest of her reprimand dying on her lips. Her eyes, fixed on the road ahead, narrowed in thought. "But… maybe you're onto something."
Kai, who had been quietly processing, suddenly looked up, a spark of connection in his eyes. "There's only one logical person it could be," he said, his voice gaining certainty. "It has to be Ember."
From the darkness, Jack let out a low, intrigued grunt. "Hoh. And why do you think that?"
"Think about it," Kai explained, leaning forward slightly. "If the Scorchers are backed by a corporation, then handing them a prototype to field-test makes perfect sense. It's what they do."
He paused, his brow furrowing as the next, more troubling question surfaced. "But… why wouldn't they give it to Blaze? He's their leader. He's the most powerful. It doesn't make sense to give your best weapon to someone else."
Karen's gaze remained fixed on the road, her mind working through the puzzle. "Maybe he doesn't want it," she suggested, her voice low. "Or they can't make him wear it. At least it's a small comfort knowing he isn't inside that thing."
Lucent's voice was quiet, but it cut through the van with chilling clarity. "Or he doesn't need it."
A heavy silence settled over them as the meaning of his words sank in.
The implication was far more terrifying than Blaze simply refusing the armor.
It suggested that the man they had seen—the one who could level a gate with a gesture—was operating at that level without the benefit of a million-credit corporate weapon system.
What was he, then?
Cale, ever the contrarian, broke the quiet with a scoff. "How come it can't be Cinder in there?" he challenged, shifting in his seat. "You know, the one Rook and Echo said was running around with a whole swarm of those fancy drones? Seems like she's the one who gets the new toys."
Kai looked at Cale, momentarily baffled by the tangent, before shaking his head.
The finer points of which psychopath was which seemed to miss the larger, more terrifying picture. "…Either way," he said, his voice firming with a grim finality, "that woman in the armor is a member of the Scorchers. That's the only thing that really matters right now."
Whoever was inside the polished alloy shell, she was another monster on the battlefield.
And they were running straight toward her.
The grim silence reclaimed the van, thick and heavy with their unspoken fears.
It was a fragile quiet, broken not by a voice, but by a distant, muffled thump that vibrated faintly through the vehicle's frame.
A few seconds later, another sound followed—a sharper, percussive crack that was unmistakably gunfire.
Then another.
The sporadic pops grew steadily clearer, no longer a distant rumor but a stark, approaching reality.
The dull crump of an explosion echoed, rolling over the landscape to reach them.
No one needed to say it.
The sounds were a brutal announcement, a confirmation that slammed into the van as surely as a physical blow.
They were getting closer.
The theoretical fight was now a roaring fire, and they were driving straight into the heart of the inferno.
***
The world erupted in fire and thunder.
The concussive blast from Blaze's attack had barely begun to fade, the debris still hanging in the air, when Rook's roar cut through the chaos. "Crossfire!"
It was less a command and more a raw signal for survival.
As one, he and Echo took a long, synchronized stride backward, melting into the defensive line as a dozen Talons raised their weapons.
The response was instantaneous, a deafening storm of muzzle flashes and roaring gunfire that tore into the space where Blaze stood.
He didn't flinch.
He didn't even raise a hand.
The hail of bullets meant to shred him instead slammed into an invisible wall just feet from his body.
With each impact, a faint, hexagonal shimmer of orange light flickered into existence for a nanosecond, dispersing the bullet's kinetic energy with a sound like sharp, metallic rain.
The air in front of him filled with the frantic, futile sparking of dying rounds.
Hundreds of bullets, their force stolen, simply slowed to a stop and tinkled to the ground, piling up at his feet like a mound of useless, scorched metal.
While the suppressive fire continued its futile rhythm, Echo broke from the line, moving low and fast toward the smoking crater where the barricade had been.
She dropped to a knee beside Pen's crumpled form.
The sight was brutal.
Both of Pen's hands were gone at the wrists, the ends cauterized and blackened, leaving only grotesque, smoldering stumps.
Her face was ash-white, her breath coming in ragged, shocked gasps.
But her eyes were open, wide with a pain so profound it was beyond screaming.
She was alive.
It was a small, terrible mercy in the face of such a complete and casual dismantling of their defense.
Echo's eyes, trained to assess and catalog threats in a split second, scanned Pen's body.
The damage was worse than she'd first thought.
It wasn't just the hands.
Shrapnel was peppered across her torso and arms.
But it wasn't ordinary shrapnel.
Glimmering amidst the blood and torn fabric were tiny, jagged shards of polished glass and twisted alloy—the internal components of her conduit.
The initial explosion hadn't just blown her hands off, the conduit on her hand had turned it into a frag grenade that detonated in her face.
Without a word, Echo hooked her hands under Pen's shoulders, ignoring the warm, slick blood that immediately coated her fingers.
She dragged the shuddering woman back, away from the direct line of fire, her boots scraping through the dust and spent casings.
Her voice cut through the gunfire, sharp and absolute, a command that demanded immediate action.
"Medic!"
Two Talons designated for rear support broke from their cover, rushing forward.
They carefully took Pen's shuddering weight from Echo's arms, their movements swift and practiced as they began to pull her toward a makeshift aid station.
The crossfire continued its relentless, futile rhythm, bullets still sparking and dying against Blaze's shimmering kinetic shield.
Yet he made no move to press the attack, to stop the medics, or to even acknowledge the storm of lead aimed at him.
His attention was fixed on Echo's retreating form.
A wide, unnerving smile spread across his face. "Ember," he called out, his voice carrying easily over the gunfire, almost fond. "Look at this. It's such a beautiful scene."
He watched as the medics worked, as Echo stood protectively over them for a moment before turning back to the fight.
He saw the desperation, the sacrifice, the raw will to survive unfolding before him like a performance.
Behind the seamless mask of her Aegis-frame, Ember watched the same scene.
The thought formed, clear and sharp: It was your doing though.
But she held the words inside, letting them curdle in the silence.
Speaking them would change nothing.
Knowing Blaze, he would only smile wider.
Rook's finger remained tight on the trigger, but his mind was racing, cold logic warring with a rising tide of dread.
He was witnessing, in real time, the chasm between their reality and the one their enemy now inhabited.
The initial intel about Blaze's kinetic barrier had been met with skepticism.
He knew the principle—any decent conduit could project a shield.
But it was a desperate, costly move. It required a conscious trigger, a glyph cast under duress.
More importantly, it was a finite resource, a brutal drain on a conduit's battery.
A standard Talon-issue model could maintain a barrier like that for a few seconds, a minute at best, before flickering and dying, leaving the user exposed and powerless.
This was different.
This was… perpetual.
Effortless.
Blaze hadn't moved.
He hadn't cast a spell.
The shield was just there, a constant, humming fact of the battlefield, eating a hailstorm of bullets without so much as a flicker.
The pile of spent rounds at his feet was a monument to their utter uselessness.
They weren't wearing him down.
They were just making a lot of noise.
With their current firepower, they might as well be trying to tickle him.
The realization was a cold stone sinking in Rook's gut.
They were not just outgunned.
They were playing a different game entirely, one with rules written by a power they couldn't comprehend.
Behind a different barricade, a short sprint from where Pen had fallen, Nail stood frozen.
The world had narrowed to a single, horrifying point.
The staccato roar of gunfire, the shouts of his comrades—it all became a distant, muffled hum, drowned out by the deafening rush of blood in his ears.
It had happened too fast.
One second, Pen was there.
The next, the world turned to fire and shrapnel.
His mind, still reeling, hadn't even fully registered the explosion; it was just a blinding flash and a pressure wave that hit him in the chest.
His gaze, wide and unblinking, slowly lifted from the scorched earth to the man standing at the center of the storm.
Blaze.
He was unflinching.
Unmoved.
A statue of casual arrogance amidst the chaos meant to kill him.
The hail of bullets sparked and died against nothing, piling up at his feet like metallic rain.
A hot, sharp anger had begun to boil in Nail's gut—a familiar, righteous fury at the sight of a friend broken.
But that anger withered, smothered by a cold, creeping sensation that started in his spine and spread outwards, turning his limbs to lead.
Fear.
Not the sharp jolt of a close call in a firefight, but a deep, profound dread.
This wasn't a fight.
This was a demonstration.
And they were the props.
The invincibility on display wasn't a boast; it was a simple, terrifying fact.
Blaze's grin remained, a permanent, unnerving fixture on his face as the Talons' barrage continued its futile rhythm.
He didn't even glance at the shimmering wall of hexagons eating their ammunition; his attention was a deliberate performance for the figure behind him.
"This would end too fast if I fought right now," he said to Ember, his tone that of a showman saving the main event.
He paused, letting the implication of his own restrained power hang in the air. "Go ahead. Test that toy of yours first."
Within her armored shell, Ember processed the command.
She knew him, the old him and this remade version.
He was basking in the attention, in the terror he was effortlessly generating.
He wanted a spectacle, not a slaughter.
Not yet.
"Sure," her voice filtered through the armor's external emitter, flat and synthetic.
As the relentless gunfire still pinged and sparked against Blaze's unwavering shield, she took a single, deliberate step forward.
The Talons' training held; their aim didn't break.
But as their sights tracked her, a collective, sinking horror dawned.
The bullets meant for her met the same, invisible fate.
The air around the sleek, crimson exo-armor shimmered with the same faint, hexagonal patterns of orange light, each impact dispersing harmlessly into the air.
It wasn't just Blaze.
The armor had it, too.
The invincibility wasn't a unique trait of the man; it was a standard feature of the technology they faced.
The hope that they could focus one down while the other was distracted died a sudden, quiet death.
They were staring at two perfect, unbreakable walls.