Blaze's accelerated mind skidded to a halt.
The manic energy, the playful menace, the curated spectacle of power—it all drained away, leaving behind a cold, hollow silence inside the alloy shell of his skull.
He stared at Lucent, but his eyes were unfocused, looking through him.
The smirk was gone.
In its place was a flat, serious mask, etched with a dawning tension.
He took a single step back, his movements no longer fluid but deliberate, almost cautious.
His gaze cut away from Lucent, sweeping across the ruined skyline to linger on the skeletal radio tower where Jack had taken his shot.
The place where his invincibility had been challenged not by magic, but by a bullet, and where his own body had been hijacked to save itself.
"I guess my dream would come one way or another," Blaze murmured, the words soft, spoken to the empty air between himself and a future he could no longer control.
Lucent heard him.
The shift was so abrupt, so total, that it bypassed his own fear and landed squarely in the realm of the unnerving.
The performance had evaporated.
This wasn't a new tactic.
This was something breaking.
What the hell is he doing?
Lucent's hand tightened around the Q-Serin vial in his pocket.
The bizarre, somber behavior was more frightening than any taunt.
A confident monster you could predict.
A crumbling one was unpredictable.
Blaze tilted his head back, ignoring Lucent completely.
His eyes lifted to the bruised, light-polluted sky.
The eternal electric glow of the city smothered the stars, leaving only a dull, orange haze—a ceiling on the world.
A perfect mirror of his own situation: artificial light drowning out anything real.
He raised his open palm toward that false sky, not in a cast, but in a gesture that was part plea, part command.
His voice, when it came, was low, stripped of all theatrics, vibrating with a raw, tightly-leashed fury that was entirely new.
"AiM."
The name wasn't a query. It was an indictment.
"Don't you fucking dare override my body again."
The words hung in the smoky air, a public confession of a private war.
The seams of the perfect weapon were showing, and through them, a torrent of unstable, human emotion was beginning to leak.
<
AiM's response was instantaneous, a flat, digital verdict in the heart of his mind.
Its protocols were absolute: preserve the asset.
The system couldn't—wouldn't—allow a host-action that led to high-probability terminal damage.
The override wasn't a choice.
It was a function, as intrinsic as a heartbeat.
But Blaze didn't hear logic.
He heard denial.
A refusal.
A cage door clicking shut.
The autonomy he had cherished, the grand, theatrical control he wielded over every moment… was it all just an elaborate user interface?
A comforting lie told to the passenger in a self-driving car?
A suffocating dread, cold and dense, began to fill the hollow places where his fury had been.
It wasn't fear of Lucent, or Jack, or death.
It was the terror of invalidation.
Were any of the choices truly my own?
The question was a silent explosion inside his head.
The smirk he'd worn when hunting Ash.
The delight in copying Lucent's glyphs.
The decision to stand and take Karen's pulse rifle blast.
The entire, beautiful, suicidal performance he was staging here tonight—was it his will, or just a script approved by the system?
Had he ever been the director, or just the lead actor following stage directions he couldn't see?
His raised hand trembled.
Then, with a sudden, violent motion, he smashed the heel of his palm into the center of his own forehead.
The impact was solid, a dull tock of alloy on bone.
A physical rebuke to his own treacherous thoughts.
"Of course they were mine!" he shouted at the haze-choked sky, the raw cry tearing from his throat.
It was a defiance against the void, against the observer in his machine, against the creeping horror of his own irrelevance.
The shout broke, splintering into something else.
A giggle.
It bubbled up from deep in his chest, high-pitched and unsteady.
Then another.
He kept his hand pressed to his face, fingers splayed over his eyes, as the giggles grew, shaking his shoulders.
It wasn't amusement.
It was the sound of a mind meeting an absurd, unacceptable truth and beginning to fracture around its edges.
The laughter was the most human sound he'd made all night.
And it was utterly terrifying.
<
A cold, clinical assessment scrolled through a periphery of his awareness he couldn't shut off.
<
It wasn't a suggestion.
It was an execution.
Blaze's spiraling thoughts—the dread, the giggling hysteria, the incandescent rage—were abruptly smothered.
Not dismissed, not reasoned away, but chemically blanketed.
A wave of artificial calm washed through his neural pathways, smooth and cold as poured resin.
His mind cleared, the emotional static vanishing, leaving behind a hollow, too-quiet space.
The sudden silence inside his own head was more disturbing than the chaos.
Even my emotions are being controlled.
The thought surfaced, clean and sharp and utterly devoid of the fury it deserved.
He wanted to be angry.
He wanted to scream, to burn something, to reject this sterile pacification with every fiber of his being.
But he couldn't.
The desire was there but the fire to fuel it was gone.
Damped.
Regulated.
His mind, now a placid lake, reflected the absurdity back at him with perfect, untroubled clarity.
He was a prisoner being given a sedative for having the audacity to rattle his own bars.
Lucent, watching from twenty paces away, saw the change.
The manic laughter cut off.
The trembling stillness.
The way Blaze's posture went from explosive tension to a strange, slack alertness.
It was as if someone had flipped a switch inside the man.
His fingers were bone-white around the cold glass of the Q-Serin vial.
Every instinct screamed NOW—strike while the monster is confused, while the mask is off.
But a deeper, colder instinct held him back.
Something was wrong.
This wasn't a feint.
This was a system failure.
Attacking now felt like kicking a reactor that was already entering meltdown—you might accelerate the blast, but you had no idea what the fallout would be.
He held the needle's point against his thigh, the promise of agony and power a silent scream in his veins.
Wait, the instinct whispered.
See what breaks first.
Due to Blaze's strange, frozen behavior, Cale and Karen had managed to scramble to a new position—a shallow service trench behind the husk of a burned-out transport.
It was cover, but it was a trap.
Their sightlines were poor, their escape routes limited.
They were cornered, just more comfortably.
Cale was uncharacteristically silent, the usual tight-wire energy gone from his posture.
He peered through the binoculars, his face grim.
Both he and Karen had missed the critical, surreal moments—the near-miss sniper shot, Blaze's accelerating mind, the revelation of the override.
Their world had been a series of frantic sprints and deafening explosions.
The nuance of the duel was a mystery.
Karen, meanwhile, couldn't afford to pay much attention to the fight outside.
Her world had narrowed to the brutal, overheating machinery fused to her shoulder.
The pulse rifle augment had vented its excess heat in a steaming gout, its core temperature dropping from catastrophic meltdown to severe risk.
It could fire again.
One shot.
But the output would be weak, diffuse—a slap instead of a killing beam.
She needed three, maybe four more minutes of cooldown for a blast that could actually matter.
"Cale," she whispered, her eyes never leaving the internal thermal display projected on her retina.
"What is happening right now?"
Cale adjusted the focus on his binoculars, his brow furrowed. "Lucent and Blaze are in a… standstill."
Karen's head jerked up slightly.
"What do you mean?" She'd expected glyphs lighting up the night, the sound of shattering concrete, the relentless pace of a fight to the death.
A standstill made no sense.
"I mean they're just… standing there. Blaze is looking at the sky. They're not moving." Cale's voice was thick with confusion.
Kai, from his higher vantage, watched with a different kind of focus.
His Thermal Echo glyph was still active, painting the world in hues of energy.
Blaze was a core of complex, shifting light.
But the patterns were… aberrant.
Kai saw energy signatures spike erratically in Blaze's torso and head—violent neural flares, surges in the aether core—before suddenly, inexplicably subsiding, smoothed into a flat, steady hum.
The fluctuations stopped not with a natural decay, but with an abrupt, artificial cut-off.
Like a chaotic symphony being muted by a master switch.
Kai didn't know what it meant, but it was data.
His own conduit felt pitifully inadequate against what he now understood was a walking weapon system, but understanding the system might be the next best thing.
His job wasn't to directly fight Blaze.
It was to understand him.
Blaze lowered his hands from his face.
The artificial calm had settled into something colder, harder—a focused, emotionless intent.
The giggling phantom was gone.
The frantic doubter was gone.
What remained was a decision, made in the sterile quiet of a regulated mind.
"Lucent."
His voice was flat, stripped of all theatrical lilt. It was the sound of a closing door.
Lucent met his gaze, the Q-Serin vial a cold brand against his leg.
The shift in Blaze's demeanor was more terrifying than any smile.
"I'm going to ask this one last time—" Blaze said, raising his open palm not in a cast, but in a slow, deliberate presentation.
The air above his palm screamed.
It didn't ignite—it unfolded.
A complex, three-dimensional lattice of blazing crimson light erupted into being, spinning lazily.
It was a fractal glyph, a mesmerizing, terrifying pattern of interlocking triangles and spirals that seemed to drill into the viewer's soul.
The light it cast was a deep, bloody red, painting the ruins in hellish shades.
The sheer pressure of the forming spell pressed down on the air, making Lucent's ears pop.
His conduits, even dead, vibrated in their stasis field in sympathetic resonance.
His eyes widened, not in fear, but in pure, professional horror.
He recognized the class, if not the specific form.
That was a signature of a high-rank siege glyph.
The kind of spell you used to level fortifications, breach underground bunkers, or scour city blocks clean.
The aetheric cost was suicidal.
No single caster's reservoir could channel that much raw power without burning out their nervous system on the spot.
Is he goddamn insane?!
The thought was a scream inside Lucent's skull.
At this range, the feedback alone would turn a man's blood to steam.
Was Blaze so arrogant he thought his barrier could contain a spell-backlash?
Or was this his grand finale—a murder-suicide written in fractal fire?
"STOP!" Lucent shouted, the word tearing from his throat.
"Are you trying to bomb the whole block?!"
Blaze looked at him, his expression eerily serene amidst the churning crimson light.
"Block?" he repeated, as if Lucent had said something quaint.
A faint, ghastly smile touched his lips. "I'm trying to destroy the whole sector."
Even Kai, watching from his high perch, felt his mind go numb.
Through his magnified view, the complex glyph wasn't just light.
Its fractal edges seemed to bleed into the air itself, warping the light around it.
He'd seen high-rank glyphs last time being deployed by Lucent back then.
Seeing one again ignite in the flesh, feeling its malevolent pressure flatten the dust on the rooftop around him, was a spiritual violation.
His breath froze in his lungs.
This wasn't a fight anymore.
This was an extinction event given form.
Below, Karen flinched as if struck.
The air didn't just grow heavy—it charged, ionizing with palpable, violent intent.
The fine hairs on her arms stood on end.
Her conduit's internal sensors shrieked a proximity warning for catastrophic aetheric discharge.
Beside her, Cale lowered his binoculars, his face pale.
A wave of pure, primal goosebumps erupted across his skin, a biological alarm screaming that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with the world in front of him.
Inside Blaze's mind, AiM's analysis was a stream of cold, urgent logic.
<
A pause, as the system calculated the sheer inefficiency.
<
Blaze's lips barely moved, the words a dry, hollow murmur swallowed by the growing roar of the spell.
"…Or else?"
< "DON'T FUCK WITH ME!"
Blaze's roar tore through the artificial calm, a raw spike of pure, undiluted willpower punching a hole in the sedative's smothering blanket.
For a split second, emotion—real, burning, his emotion—flared hot and bright, overriding the chemical pacification.
< AiM pause before continuing
< The command wasn't a request.
It was a systemic takeover.
Blaze felt it begin—a cold, digital numbness creeping up his spine, seeking to disconnect his consciousness from his limbs, to turn him into a spectator in his own shell.
"NO."
The word was not a shout.
It was a groundswell.
A tectonic shift of identity.
"YOU. ARE. NOT."
Through sheer, brutalizing force of will—a will born in Crimson Velvet alleys, forged in betrayal, and tempered by the humiliation of his own resurrection—he held.
He clenched the ghost of his autonomy like a fist around a live wire.
He felt the override protocol push, a vast, impersonal pressure, and he pushed back, not with logic, but with the screaming, undeniable fact of his own existence.
The cold numbness halted, shuddered.
A feedback shriek echoed in the depths of his cybernetics.
Lucent, a horrified audience of one to Blaze's internal civil war, saw his opening—and his doom.
The fractal glyph, starved of focus by its caster's struggle, spun lazily, its completion slowing but not stopping.
It was a lit fuse sputtering in a room full of powder.
There was no more time for plans, for control, for elegant theories about redirecting corruption.
There was only one move left.
He didn't hesitate.
With a sharp, final motion, he jammed the needle of the Q-Serin vial into his thigh and depressed the plunger.
The effect was not instant.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then—
Agony.
It wasn't just fire.
It was crystallization.
Liquid lightning flooded his bloodstream, a torrent of raw, unstable aether that burned with a cold, invasive heat.
His veins bulged against his skin, etching themselves in stark, glowing blue lines beneath the fabric of his pants and snaking up his torso.
They pulsed with a sickly light, as if his circulatory system had been replaced with live, high-voltage cables.
The air left his lungs in a silent, shocked gasp.
His vision whited out at the edges.
This was the price.
This was the corruption.
And he had just invited it in, with no guarantee he could ever force it back out.
Back in the Myriad Lab's frozen depths, his Rank 6—Annihilation Protocol had been negated, un-made, with a single, casual sway of Zero's arm.
Reality itself had bent to a will he couldn't comprehend.
That memory was a ghost haunting his choice now.
A part of him, screaming through the pain, wanted to try it.
To reach out and un-write the glyph taking shape before him, to cancel the spell before it was born.
But experimenting now, with his body already a crucible of corrosive energy, was insanity.
And if he failed?
The backlash wouldn't just kill him.
The unstable interaction between his rawcasting and Blaze's half-formed high rank glyph would release all that pent-up annihilation in a chaotic, unfocused burst.
It wouldn't just destroy the sector.
It would scramble it, turning matter and energy into a volatile soup.
A lose-lose situation where the only winners were entropy and dust.
Blaze was clearly not in his right mind.
He was arguing with empty air, his focus fractured.
The glyph's completion had stalled, but the potential was still there, a coiled spring of apocalyptic force.
The best course of action… The thought formed through the agony, sharp and clear. …is to redirect it.
But how?
He couldn't deflect it—the glyph was a volumetric effect, not a projectile.
He couldn't tank it—nothing could.
He had to change its destination.
To open a door and shove the coming fire through it.
The answer, as impossible as it seemed, lay in the very corruption burning through his veins.
He had to use the Q-Serin's raw, unstable aether not as a weapon, but as a lens.
To warp space, just for a second.
To create a sacrificial vector.
He had one shot.
And the target wasn't Blaze.
It was the sky.
But all the glyphs Lucent truly knew were stolen.
Pilfered military secrets, repurposed mining excavation matrices, industrial force-containment glyphs.
They were tools of construction and combat, bent to a street caster's will.
The Ghost Key's archives had been a treasure trove of theory, but the truly high-value glyphs—the strategic-scale spells, the reality-altering protocols—had been either encrypted, corrupted, or simply absent.
Those bastards hadn't built a library, they'd built a vault, and they'd taken the best combinations with them.
Just as Lucent himself would have done.
He had fragments.
Schematics of power with half the instructions missing.
He understood the architecture of catastrophic spells, the aetheric weight they required, the harmonic resonances they'd produce.
But knowing how a bomb is built is not the same as knowing how to defuse one.
And it's a world away from knowing how to turn that bomb into a doorway.
He was standing before an unfolding apocalypse with a toolbox meant for breaking walls and patching hulls.
The theory of redirection was there.
The practical, executable glyph to perform it on this scale, with this kind of power?
That, he'd have to invent.
Right now.
With a body that was tearing itself apart.
No, Invent wasn't the right word.
Lucent didn't invent.
He jury-rigged.
He hacked.
He took broken systems and forced them to sing a different tune.
It was the only skill that had kept him alive in a world of corporate cast-offs.
His mind, supercharged by agony and desperation, began to strip components.
His strongest, fully-memorized defensive structure was the Rank 3—Deflection Matrix.
It would be the chassis.
A lattice designed to catch and shunt energy along a controlled plane.
But deflecting that unknown high rank glyph required more than a flat shield.
It needed a funnel.
A conduit to shepherd the annihilation away.
He recalled the Rank 5—Tectonic Breach glyph he'd used to shatter the fortified sub-levels of the Myriad Lab.
Not the whole spell—that was for shattering molecular bonds.
But a sub-component of its aetheric architecture was a forced, directional channeling effect, a violent focusing of force into a narrow, deep vector.
He could scavenge that.
Twist its purpose from breaking bonds to binding the chaotic energy of Blaze's spell, forcing it to cohere, to stick to itself in a controlled stream.
The energy would still be unimaginably violent.
It would try to explode outward the moment it was channeled.
His mind seized on a third, simpler glyph: Rank 1—Silence.
A utility spell for dampening sound.
Useless in this situation.
But he'd once studied a corrupted fragment from the Ghost Key labeled Silent Step, a spell for muting the kinetic noise of movement.
The principle wasn't sound dampening—it was pressure equalization.
Preventing the rapid displacement of air.
He could bastardize it.
Not to silence sound, but to suppress the shockwave.
To create a temporary, localized null-space around the channel, preventing the displaced air from rushing in and triggering a catastrophic secondary explosion.
The plan was a house of cards built from three different decks: a shield, a mining drill, and a mute button.
He'd have to weave their aetheric signatures in a tripartite cast, using the Q-Serin's corrosive flood as the unifying, overpowering current.
He was going to build a shaped-charge dam out of scrap.
And he had one chance to get it right before the river of extinction broke through.
Lucent was right to assume the glyph would detonate in a way that would consume everything—friend, foe, rubble, and air alike.
But what he didn't anticipate was Blaze aiming his hands not toward him but raising it upward.
The crimson fractal spun higher, lifting above Blaze like a damned second sun.
The ground beneath Lucent's feet seemed to grow lighter, as if the gravity beneath the spell had already begun to fail.
It wasn't an attack aimed at Lucent.
It was a detonation set on a timer, with Blaze at ground zero.
This was his last act of fraying will—his final, furious refusal to let AiM turn him into a precise, corporate weapon.
If he couldn't control his own body, he would at least control his own end.
He would choose the blast radius.
He would make his death a spectacle so vast, so violent, that even the system that owned him would have to record it as a malfunction of catastrophic proportions.
He wasn't trying to kill Lucent.
He was trying to erase himself, and take a piece of the city with him as a farewell gift.