The freezing mist clung to Arden's skin, a damp shroud that seeped into his bones.
The tremble that ran through him was a constant, low hum—was it from the cold, or the fear coiling in his gut?
He couldn't tell the difference anymore.
Ash's voice cut through the haze, light and conversational, as if they were sharing a piece of trivial gossip over a drink.
"You see," Ash began, a smile playing on his lips, "we heard something rather concerning. A little whisper about someone wanting to contact the Steel Talons."
The words landed not like a blow, but like a key turning in a lock deep inside Arden's mind.
His blood went cold, colder than the mist around them.
It was just moments ago.
The thought screamed in his head, a frantic, silent echo.
I just said that to Tenn.
In the lab.
His eyes, wide and unseeing, stared past Ash.
The sterile walls of the lab, the hum of the cryo-tank, Tenn's terrified face—the memory replayed in a dizzying flash.
He had spoken those exact words.
How?
His mind, desperate for a foothold, scrabbled for logic.
The lab.
It has to be.
They've been listening.
They've always been listening.
The realization was a sinkhole opening beneath his feet.
Their sanctuary, their last place of planning, was a glass box.
Since when?
How long had every word, every desperate whisper, been feeding directly to the enemy?
Beside him, he felt Tenn go perfectly still.
He didn't need to look at her to know her thoughts were racing down the same dark, terrifying path.
A subtle, almost imperceptible shift in her posture, the way her breath hitched and then stopped—it was a silent scream of agreement.
Her own mind would be reeling through the same timeline, arriving at the same horrifying conclusion.
Their betrayal hadn't just been discovered; it had been overheard.
Ash's smile didn't waver, but it took on a sharper, more predatory edge.
"The boss," he continued, as if confiding a secret, "figured it would make the whole plan go haywire. Even if he can crush both your little groups, it's just… messy."
He let the word hang in the frozen air, a testament to the sheer scale of the carnage Blaze was willing to orchestrate.
He took a single, silent step forward, the mist swirling around his immaculate shoes.
"So he advised us," Ash said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that was far more threatening than any shout, "to 'deal' with the smartass trying to mess things up. Personally."
The final word was a death sentence.
Panic, pure and undiluted, overrode every carefully constructed strategy in Arden's mind.
His hands shot up, palms open and empty, a universal sign of surrender.
"Wait! Wait, wait, wait!!" The words tumbled out, frantic and raw, stripped of all composure.
Ash stopped, his head tilting.
A flicker of genuine amusement lit his cold eyes, like a cat that had just seen a mouse attempt a negotiation.
"Hoh?" he murmured, the sound a soft, intrigued puff of air. "And why, exactly, do I need to wait?"
The needle-like darts of flame hovering around Ash seemed to pulse in time with his mood, their malevolent hiss the only sound for a moment.
They twitched and swayed, a chorus of deadly, eager serpents.
Arden's mind, frozen by fear just seconds before, now spun with a frantic, desperate logic. He had to find a crack in this, a lever.
Blaze.
The boss.
The information came from Blaze himself.
The image of the pyromaniac filled his head—all theatrical rage and raw, untamed power.
A force of nature, not a man who would use his brains to scheme.
A man who solved problems with fire, not with hidden microphones and intricate spycraft.
The idea of Blaze patiently wiring a room for sound felt… wrong.
It didn't fit the profile.
This wasn't a sophisticated surveillance operation.
This was something else.
He had to talk.
He forced his hands to lower, trying to project a semblance of calm he didn't feel.
His voice was still shaky, but he pushed the words out, aiming for reason.
"I-I'm a simple guy, you see," he started, the plea clear in his tone. "I-if... if Blaze doesn't want his plan to go 'haywire'... you can just tell me. We can talk. There's no need for... for this."
He gestured weakly at the hovering flechettes of fire. "And..."
Ash watched him, the amused smile never leaving his face.
He gave a slow, deliberate nod, a master encouraging a nervous student.
"...Continue."
He swallowed hard, his eyes fixed on Ash, testing his theory. "And if Blaze knew, why send you down here? Why not just... burn the whole level from the start?"
A new, unsettling thought bloomed in Ash's mind.
This man, Arden... he was too sharp.
Too perceptive for someone trapped in this grimy, dead-end place.
With just a few panicked words, he was already piecing things together, pulling at the threads Ash had carelessly dangled.
He was giving a dead man answers, and the dead man was listening too well.
The realization didn't anger him.
It delighted him.
His amusement sharpened, transforming from casual cruelty into the focused glee of a collector who has found a toy with unexpected, complex features.
It was more satisfying to break something intricate.
As if responding to his thoughts, the fiery darts hovering behind him began to spin, slow and mesmerizing, tracing a glowing wheel of death in the misty air.
"It made me wonder, too," Ash admitted, his tone light and conversational, as if they were two colleagues solving a puzzle.
"But if I say so myself... all the fun would be snuffed out if the boss did everything by himself." He paused, his gaze lingering on Arden's pale, strained face. "So, in a way, this does a kind of justice. It gives me something to... amuse myself."
The words settled over Arden, colder than the cryo-mist.
This wasn't just about following orders or eliminating a threat.
This was entertainment.
A game.
A single, clear thought cut through Arden's panic, a final, horrifying assessment:
This psychopath is so much worse than I ever imagined.
Arden had known it from the start, a cold truth that settled in his bones long before the mist filled the corridor.
Reasoning with a rabid animal was impossible.
Pleading with a force of nature was useless.
These people—Ash, Blaze, Cinder—they operated on a wavelength of pure, predatory impulse.
Talking was just the prelude to the slaughter.
Ash's smile was a razor's edge.
"So," he purred, the spinning wheel of fire darts casting a hellish, dancing light on his face. "Do you have anything else to say? It would bore me if this were the only extent of your pleading."
It was then that Tenn spoke.
Her voice was flat, stripped of the terror that gripped Arden.
It was the calm, analytical tone she used when examining a faulty conduit.
"…You could just kill us right here and now."
Arden's head snapped towards her, his eyes wide with a fresh, disbelieving horror: What is she doing?!
Tenn continued, her gaze fixed on Ash, dissecting him. "I can't understand the reason to talk with your victims."
In her mind, it was a simple question of logic.
She was trying to map the parameters of his psychosis, to understand the why behind the delay.
Was it a ritual?
A necessary part of his process?
Her curious brain sought the operational rules of the monster before them.
But Arden heard only the words.
He heard what he feared was a desperate, futile appeal to a shred of humanity.
A plea for a quick, merciful death instead of a drawn-out game.
No, Tenn, no! he screamed internally.
You don't appeal to their emotion!
They don't have any!
They feed on the fear, they savor the struggle!
You're just showing him your neck and asking how he'd like to cut it!
He braced for Ash's reaction, convinced that Tenn's quiet, emotionless statement had just signed their death warrants in the most pathetic way possible.
For a long moment, Ash was utterly still.
Then, a single, sharp bark of laughter escaped him.
It was followed by another, and then another, until he was swept up in a genuine, shoulder-shaking fit.
The fiery darts reacted in perfect, chaotic unison, their spinning orbit breaking into a wild, zig-zagging dance through the mist, painting frantic orange lines in the air.
He finally wiped a non-existent tear from his eye, his composure returning as suddenly as it had left.
The darts snapped back into their slow, menacing wheel.
"I apologize for laughing," he said, his voice still light with amusement.
He gestured towards Tenn with a graceful, almost respectful motion. "For asking that kind of question... it's just so rare."
He had heard it before, of course.
A dozen times, from a dozen different mouths in their final moments.
Why don't you just get it over with?
They always thought they were being brave, or logical.
They never understood they were handing him the perfect opening.
His smile was indulgent, like a teacher with a slow but earnest student.
"For fun, of course," he explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"This is like a hobby to me." He paused, his gaze becoming distant, almost dreamy. "A gourmet doesn't just swallow their meal. They savor the aroma, the texture, the subtle notes of flavor."
He brought his hand up, thumping his palm flat against his own chest, right over his heart.
"I," he declared, his voice dropping to a fervent, hungry whisper, "want to taste it all. The desperation. The defiance. The moment hope finally shatters. Those are the strongest emotions of all."
His eyes locked on them, bright and terrible. "And I have such a refined palate."
The chill of the underground level had long since seeped past Tenn's skin, traveling up the neural pathways connecting to her augments.
A deep, mechanical numbness was setting in, a cold that felt more final than the mere temperature.
It was in this hollowed-out state that she heard Ash's confession.
Her response was a quiet, breathless murmur, not meant for him, but a simple, stark verdict on everything he was.
"...Such a bad taste."
It was not a challenge.
It was the exhausted observation that confronted a man with a system so fundamentally flawed and inefficient that it was offensive.
Ash didn't lash out.
He simply snickered, a dry, rattling sound.
"Well," he said, his head tilting, "I don't really expect any of you to understand me."
His grin stretched, a wide, bloodless crescent in the gloom.
"Besides," he added, as if reminding a forgetful child, "I just answered your question."
Arden watched, his own fear momentarily eclipsed by confusion.
He had braced for an explosion, for the fiery darts to lash out in response to the insult.
He had seen Blaze's rage, a sudden and all-consuming inferno.
But Ash's calm was different, and in its own way, far more terrifying.
It was the calm of absolute certainty.
Tenn's judgment was as meaningless to him as the opinion of a speck of dust.
He was not offended because he considered himself so far above them that their contempt couldn't even reach him.
Arden's voice was a dry rasp, the last ember of hope sputtering in the freezing dim hallway.
He knew the answer, but some desperate, stubborn part of him had to voice the question, to make the final plea.
"…Is there no room for negotiation?"
Ash's eyes lit up, as if Arden had just proposed a delightful new game.
He brought a finger to his chin, tapping it thoughtfully.
He made a show of it, his gaze drifting from Arden's strained face to Tenn's numb resignation, savoring the tension that stretched between them for three agonizing heartbeats.
He was a connoisseur sampling the bouquet of their despair.
Finally, he let his hand drop.
The performance was over.
"No."
Ash brought his hand up, his thumb cocked, his index finger pointed directly at Arden's chest in a childish, mocking pantomime of a gun.
"Bang."
The word was a soft, final whisper.
One of the fiery darts hovering behind him vanished from its orbit.
It became a streak of incandescent orange, a needle of sun aimed at Arden's heart.
There was no time to think.
There was only a lifetime of ingrained self-preservation.
Arden's body moved before his mind could catch up.
In a single, brutal reflex, his hands shot out and he shoved—not away from the danger, but into the person beside him.
He used Tenn's body as a shield, throwing her forward into the path of the killing light.
Tenn gasped, the air driven from her lungs more by the betrayal than the physical impact.
Her world narrowed to the searing point of death flying at her face.
Her arms, both flesh and augmented, flew up in a futile, instinctual cross in front of her eyes.
She squeezed them shut, bracing for the unimaginable pain of molten metal punching through bone and brain.
A second passed.
Then another.
The pain didn't come.
Instead, she felt it—a wave of blistering heat, so intense it dried her eyes and made her skin prickle.
It was the heat of a furnace door held inches from her face.
She could feel the energy of the thing, a malevolent, humming presence frozen in the air just beyond her trembling fingers.
Slowly, terrified of what she would see, she cracked her eyes open.
There it was.
The fire dart.
Halted.
Hanging perfectly motionless in the air, its tip a glowing ember just a hand's breadth from her forehead.
It pulsed with contained fury, its light casting sharp, dancing shadows across her stunned face.
From the mist, a soft, disapproving sound cut through the silence.
Ash clicked his tongue, his head tilted in pure, unadulterated annoyance.
Blaze's order had been simple: capture the engineer alive.
But the implication, unspoken yet crystal clear, was that Tenn was to be delivered untouched.
A prized asset, not a broken tool.
And Ash had nearly broken her.
By accident or not, the result would be the same.
The thought was a splinter of ice in his gut.
Failing in such a basic, straightforward task was an insult to his pride, something he found almost incomprehensible.
The consequences of failure had always been severe, even back when Blaze was… more himself.
He'd seen that calm facade shatter into terrifying, uncharacteristic rage over a single, minor botched mission.
Now, with Blaze remade into that, the price of failure was an unknown, bottomless pit.
He hadn't questioned why Tenn was needed alive.
It was a simple logic: you preserve a thing that still has a use.
And he had almost rendered her useless.
A sudden, clean anger, hot and sharp, twisted inside him.
It wasn't directed at the order, or at his own carelessness.
It fixed squarely on the cause: Arden.
The man's pathetic, scrambling survival instinct had almost made Ash look incompetent.
Across from him, Arden was trembling.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and trickled down his temple, a stark contrast to the freezing air.
His eyes were locked on the fiery dart still hovering a hair's breadth from Tenn's face.
He watched the deadly light pulse, and he gulped, the sound loud in the tense silence.
He hadn't meant to shove her.
Not like that.
In the frantic calculus of survival, his body had solved the equation with brutal efficiency: an object to interpose between himself and death.
It was a guarantee.
A reflex.
Now, standing in the aftermath, with Tenn frozen in terror and Ash's gaze boring into him, the cold reality of that choice settled in his stomach like a stone.
The name tore through the mist, stripped of all its previous playful malice.
It was not a shout, but a raw, scraping scream of pure, undiluted fury.
"ARDEN!"
The sound was a physical force, shattering the tense quiet that had held them.
The remaining fire darts flared violently, their lazy orbits snapping into jagged, frantic patterns, painting the air with searing orange lines.
The one hovering before Tenn's face trembled, spitting embers that sizzled against the frost-covered floor.
All traces of the amused, theatrical showman were gone.
Ash's face was a mask of cold, surgical rage.
His eyes, wide and blazing, were locked on the strategist, seeing nothing else.
The carefully constructed game was over.
Arden was no longer a toy to be played with.
He was a problem that had nearly caused an irreparable error.
And he needed to be corrected.
Immediately.
The scream should have frozen his blood.
Instead, it cleared his head.
Fear was a luxury his mind could no longer afford.
What flooded in to replace it was a sharp, bewildering confusion.
Why?
Just a moment ago, Ash had been a smug artist, comparing his cruelty to a gourmet's refined palate.
Now, he was an exposed wire, spitting and sparking with a raw, unprofessional fury.
For what reason?
Arden's eyes darted from Ash's contorted face to the fire dart still hanging, inert, in front of Tenn.
The logic of the situation was broken.
If Ash's only goal was their suffering, then Tenn should be a smoldering corpse.
But she wasn't.
The dart had stopped.
It hadn't been a trick; it had been an interruption.
His mind kicked back into gear, whirring through the variables.
Did I do something I shouldn't have?
His gaze dropped.
His hand was still splayed against Tenn's back, where he had shoved her.
The point of contact felt electric now, significant.
And then, the pieces clicked into place with a chilling, final clarity.
The pristine condition of the "Dolls" in her lab.
She wasn't just a target.
She was an asset.
He isn't allowed to harm her.
The realization was a bucket of ice water.
He had just used a priceless, protected asset as a human shield in front of its furious, but constrained, keeper.
He hadn't just tried to save his own life, he had inadvertently revealed that he knew how to break Ash's rules.