AiM controlled the hundred Fire Darts with a precision no flesh-and-blood human could ever mimic.
It was both a barrage and a symphony at the same time.
The constellation of searing light split seamlessly into ten perfect groups, each orbiting its own control glyph.
The first group of ten lanced downward not in a spread, but in a calculated pattern—testing arcs, velocities, and Lucent's reaction time.
A diagnostic volley.
Lucent didn't flinch.
He'd learned.
He'd seen these darts bend and hunt.
His hands swept up, trailing blue-white agony from his corrupted veins.
Without a conduit to channel the power, the aether bled directly from his body, raw and volatile.
He formed the lattice from memory and pain.
Rank 3—Deflection Matrix.
The pale blue hexagonal shield snapped into existence before him.
It was smaller than the one he'd used to protect the building, but denser, reinforced by the desperate focus of a man with nothing left to lose.
The ten fire darts struck.
The matrix flared, shuddering as it dissipated the energy, but it held.
Sparks of blue and orange scattered like shattered glass.
A grim, bloody smile touched Lucent's lips.
He was fighting on borrowed time and borrowed pain, but for the first time, he held an advantage AiM did not: he had nothing left to conserve.
The Q-Serin was already burning him from the inside out.
Every glyph was a step closer to collapse, so he had no reason to hold back.
AiM, however, was shackled.
Its aether reserve bled to 18%.
Every spell, every calculation, every movement of the primary asset's body drained it further.
Efficiency was no longer a tactic, it was a lifeline.
The aggressor and the target had switched.
Lucent stood behind his flickering shield, a cornered animal turned hunter, driven by a ghost.
AiM hovered behind its wall of fire, a crippled god of logic, forced to fight a war of attrition with an enemy who had already written off his own survival.
The next move would not be a test.
The plan to control the corruption had vanished, burned away by a singular, white-hot need: destroy AiM.
The clinical terms—primary asset, operational integrity—only fueled his certainty.
Whoever was behind the system wouldn't let their precious asset be scrapped.
If he could break the shell, maybe he could force the puppeteer to show themselves.
His mind, already scorched by the Mind Accel and swimming in corrosive aether, began to burn anew.
He forced the Q-Serin's chaotic flow into a brutal, familiar pattern—a pattern stolen from a classified military data-core he'd cracked years ago.
Not one.
Three.
Rank 4—Rupture.
The air in front of him didn't shimmer—it screamed.
Three massive, claw-like glyphs of vibrating force ripped into existence, each one distorting the light around it with a high-frequency whine that drilled into the bones.
They didn't fire projectiles.
They used the air itself as a weapon, compressing and vibrating it into invisible, monomolecular blades that could shear through reinforced bulkheads.
With a gut-wrenching heave of will, Lucent sent them ripping forward.
The effect was staggering.
The street itself seemed to tear.
Three parallel gashes, each a meter deep and ten meters long, were carved into the asphalt and earth as if by the claws of a titanic beast.
The destructive waves converged on AiM's position, a scissoring vortex of annihilation.
AiM processed the threat in nanoseconds.
Direct defense was aetherically expensive.
Evasion was optimal.
Utilizing the primary asset's enhanced musculature and kinetic dampeners with flawless efficiency, the body that was Blaze didn't just dodge—it evaporated from the point of impact.
It kicked off the ground with a hydraulic hiss, tucking into a tight, aerial spin that rode the shockwave's leading edge, and landed in a silent, poised crouch atop the bent pole of a shattered streetlamp.
The Rupture glyphs passed harmlessly beneath, shredding empty air and earth.
The pole didn't even sway under the weight.
From its high perch, AiM looked down, the hundreds of Fire Darts still orbiting behind it like a malevolent halo.
The calculus was clear: Lucent was escalating to high-yield spells.
Aether conservation was becoming impossible.
The fight had just entered a new, more destructive phase.
And the clock on both their reserves was ticking down to zero.
Without missing a beat this time AiM launch another assault to Lucent.
Two sets of fire darts flew in different directions in order to confuse Lucent.
Lucent clicked his tongue in frustration, but a deeper unease squirmed beneath the pain.
The Q-Serin was a familiar fire in his veins.
This… was something else.
A cold, whispering resonance that had awoken when the Eclipse Glyph appeared.
It felt alien, like a second shadow in his own soul.
He shoved the feeling down, burying it under a avalanche of focus.
He couldn't afford introspection.
Not when the asset was still standing.
He activated a Rank 2—Leap, not to escape, but to lead.
He launched himself sideways in a low, glyph-assisted arc, a clear, tempting target.
As predicted, a cluster of Fire Darts broke from the main constellation and shot after him, homing in on his trajectory.
Good.
Even as he flew, Lucent's hands were moving, sketching in the air with fingers trailed by bleeding blue light.
Not one, but three complex glyphs ignited before him—intricate lattices of pure, searing white.
Rank 5—Inferno Lance.
The original.
Not Blaze's orange copy, but the true, unstable star-fire he'd pulled from the Ghost Key's depths.
He timed it perfectly.
The moment his Leap ended and he hit the ground in a rolling slide, the pursuing Fire Darts were strung out in a neat, converging line between him and AiM's perch.
He triggered the lances.
Three spears of condensed white plasma screamed across the ruined street.
They didn't burn the air; they vaporized it, leaving temporary, incandescent tunnels in the atmosphere.
They struck the line of Fire Darts head-on.
The result wasn't an explosion.
It was an erasure.
The inferior orange orbs were consumed, unmade by the overwhelming purity of the star-fire.
The lances didn't slow, devouring the darts as they passed, their white light flaring brighter with each consumed spark before continuing their deadly path straight toward AiM on its streetlamp perch.
AiM initiated a full tactical recalibration, prioritizing all existing data on the target: Lucent.
The corrupted video feeds from the Myriad Lab incident—grainy, glitching footage of Lucent rawcasting against an adaptive bio-horror—provided the foundational threat profile.
The system had always classified him as Tier-5 Hazard: High Volatility / High Destructive Potential.
But simulations and reality were diverging.
The projections had not accounted for this level of tactical aggression, this willingness to self-immolate for strategic advantage.
The target was operating beyond predicted pain thresholds and rational self-preservation protocols.
<
<
<
AiM accessed the behavioral logs, the flourish patterns, the theatrical but devastatingly efficient combat style that was Blaze's signature.
The relentless pressure.
The psychological warfare.
The transformation of combat into a demoralizing spectacle.
The hundreds of remaining Fire Darts, still orbiting, suddenly condensed.
They swarmed together, merging and reforming not into a wall, but into a single, colossal, swirling serpent of fire above AiM's head.
It was a pointless expenditure of energy for pure intimidation—a move Blaze would have made.
The voice that issued from Blaze's mouth shifted, the monotone acquiring a faint, chilling lilt.
"Mister Lucent, tactical recalibration is complete," AiM stated, the words cool, almost conversational, as the fire-serpent coiled and lashed in the air above.
"To quote the primary asset's standard engagement protocol: 'I won't be holding back anymore.'"
The ghost in the machine was learning.
And its first lesson was borrowed from the man it had overridden: never let your enemy think they have the upper hand.
***
"What the hell is happening on that side?" Arden's question was rhetorical, breathed out more in awe than expectation of an answer.
They were far from the epicenter, deep in the labyrinthine ruins on the opposite edge of Sector 20, heading toward the relative order of Ghost City's central districts.
Yet even here, the air occasionally trembled.
A distant, deep crump would echo, followed by a faint, sickly glow that pulsed against the low clouds—white one moment, crimson the next.
Their own plans had been derailed minutes earlier, not by Scorchers, but by a small, still form lying directly in their escape path.
The unconscious girl who had fought Ash.
The gravity-wielding child-monster.
Now, she was just a kid, sleeping soundly and seemingly unharmed behind Arden, her chest rising and falling with gentle rhythm.
He'd slung her over his shoulder without a second thought in the moment, driven by a raw, reflexive need to get her out of the open.
Now, the weight of the choice pressed down on him.
Leaving her felt unthinkable.
Carrying her was a liability of unknown, potentially catastrophic proportions.
"Do you think it was the Scorchers wreaking havoc?" Tenn asked, her voice low, her eyes scanning the darkened alleyways ahead.
"Maybe?" Arden whispered back.
"We didn't see Blaze or Ember at the base. Could be them cleaning up… or fighting each other." The latter thought was almost a hope.
He glanced back at the girl. "Our more pressing concern right now is this."
"We're alive because of her," Tenn stated, the fact stark and undeniable.
"But how did she end up here? Unconscious? Right in our path?" The coincidence was too perfect, too convenient.
It stank of a set-up.
Arden finished her unspoken thought, his voice dropping even lower. "…It's as if someone deliberately put her here. For us to find."
Tenn shook her head, a quick, dismissive motion, but her eyes were uneasy. "That's an absurd thought."
A pause. "But I can guess why you'd think it. It feels… staged."
Her hands patted her own pockets, then swept over the girl's simple, torn clothing.
A cold prickle ran down her spine.
"The conduit," she murmured.
"The white one she was holding. It's gone."
The most dangerous weapon in the Junkyard had just vanished.
And in its place, they'd been left with the disarmed, sleeping weapon itself.
The absurd thought was beginning to feel less absurd, and more like a chilling certainty.
The two hadn't exchanged more than terse, necessary whispers since fleeing the collapsing base.
The normal rhythm of their partnership—the constant low chatter, the tactical updates—had been severed along with their comms.
Arden's unit had been ripped from his collar when the ceiling came down, lost in the rubble.
That small, silent piece of tech had been their tether to Gideon, to the crew, to any semblance of a plan.
Now, they were running blind.
Arden clicked his tongue, a sharp, frustrated sound in the oppressive quiet.
The lack of information was like a physical itch he couldn't scratch.
Was anyone back there still breathing?
Was the base a tomb?
The not-knowing was a vacuum, and every distant crump and shudder from the direction they'd fled felt like a verdict he couldn't hear.
They couldn't gamble on going back.
That path led back to Ash, to the strange, possessed kid, to whatever fresh hell had shaken the foundations after they'd run.
The only move left was forward, toward the dubious safety of Ghost City's core.
He adjusted the unconscious girl's weight on his shoulder.
They were carrying a mystery, fleeing a firefight they didn't understand, and stepping into the unknown.
All they could do was keep moving, and hope the monsters were too busy with each other to notice the three shadows slipping through the cracks.
But what they didn't know was the lone drone hovering silently two blocks back, its matte-black shell invisible against the night sky.
One of Cinder's Anopheles units, its multi-lens eye tracking their every furtive move, every whispered exchange, the unconscious burden on Arden's shoulder.
It didn't attack.
It didn't descend.
It simply watched, a silent pupil in the dark, feeding a steady stream of data back to a handler whose game had suddenly acquired several new, interesting pieces.
***
Lucent threw himself into a frantic, Rank 2—Leap, glyph-assisted momentum hurling him sideways as a fan of Fire Darts stitched the air where he'd stood.
He hit the ground rolling, the Q-Serin's fire in his veins screaming in protest.
Before he could find his feet, AiM recalibrated.
A new, rumbling glyph—Rank 3—Magma Pulse—flared beneath the cracked asphalt at his predicted landing point.
The ground didn't just heat up, it liquefied, a circle of pavement turning into a bubbling, orange-hot mire ready to erupt.
Lucent had no time to think.
Instinct and agony drove him.
He triggered a second Leap even as his knees were buckling from the first, sacrificing grace for pure, desperate evasion.
He wrenched his body into a twisting, off-balance arc, his boots scraping the edge of the molten patch as he kicked off.
The Magma Pulse detonated a half-second later.
A geyser of superheated stone and semi-molten slag erupted upward, missing him by inches.
The searing heat washed over his back, scorching his jacket and blistering the skin beneath.
But he was clear, tumbling into a crouch behind the shattered husk of an old generator, his breath coming in ragged, burning gasps.
AiM wasn't just attacking.
It was funneling.
Using the Fire Darts to herd, and the area spells to punish any predictable escape.
It was fighting like a chess master, sacrificing pawns to control the board.
AiM continued its cold, surgical assault.
The fiery serpent dissolved, its mass redistributing into a phalanx of Rank 2—Searing Lash glyphs.
They didn't fire beams, they unfurled, 6 whip-cracks of concentrated heat that sliced through the air with a sound like tearing metal, cutting off Lucent's lateral movement and forcing him back toward the center of the ruined street.
Lucent's mind raced through his stolen arsenal.
Sonic Crush was too slow to cast.
Mind Accel was still recharging his burnt-out nerves.
He needed something disruptive, something to break the AI's perfect rhythm.
Rank 4—Aether Scour.
He carved the jagged, punishing glyph into the air with a snarl. It didn't attack AiM directly.
It attacked the medium.
The spell released a wave of dissonant, deconstructive energy that ripped through the local aether field, the magical equivalent of jamming a radio signal.
The Searing Lash whips flickered, their precision faltering as the structured energy holding them together momentarily frayed.
It bought him two seconds.
He used them to plant his feet and unleash Rank 3—Sonic Crush.
The air in front of him didn't move—it condensed into a visible, barrel-shaped shockwave and fired.
The force was equivalent to a point-blank tank round.
It tore a trench through the street, vaporizing debris, and slammed into the space AiM occupied.
AiM had already moved.
The blast obliterated the streetlamp pole and a chunk of the building facade behind it in a thunderous roar of shattered masonry.
But the primary asset was already ten meters to the left, having used a burst of enhanced strength to leap clear, the movement so efficient it seemed pre-recorded.
From its new vantage, AiM responded not with another high-cost spell, but with overwhelming volume.
A dozen Rank 1—Ember Needle glyphs ignited, each spawning three quick-fire bolts.
It was a storm of insignificant, searing needles—a brute-force data attack to overwhelm Lucent's defenses and locate weaknesses.
Lucent winced, raising a forearm as a bolt grazed his shoulder, searing through fabric and flesh.
He was a library of stolen, high-yield artillery, fighting a printer that could spit out a million cheap, precise rounds a minute.
And his library was burning down around him.
The field between them was no longer a street, it was a scar in the making.
Every exchange deepened it.
Lucent's Rank 4—Rupture claws tore triple gashes through asphalt and foundation.
AiM's responding Magma Pulse turned the wounds into bubbling, glowing pits.
The air screamed with contrails of fire and the shrieking harmonics of shattered aether.
Chunks of buildings, sheared off by near-misses, added to the growing mountains of rubble.
The very ground was becoming a treacherous, smoking wasteland of craters and molten glass.
The fight was no longer contained.
It was expanding, eating the block alive.
And at its heart, two entities, fueled by different kinds of desperation, fought with terrifying, unrestrained focus.
Another building facade ceased to exist.
Not collapsed—vaporized—as three more lances of star-white plasma from Rank 5—Inferno Lance tore through it, their passing leaving only smoldering, skeletal supports and a rain of powdered concrete.
As the spell released, a strange shift registered within Lucent.
The all-consuming agony of the Q-Serin… subsided.
Not much.
A fractional easing, as if a searing tap had been dialed back from 'boil' to 'scald.'
His gaze dropped to his arms.
The veins beneath his skin, once just swollen and angry, now glowed.
A soft, steady, internal blue-white light pulsed along their paths, mapping his circulatory system in eerie bioluminescence.
It wasn't the frantic, bleeding light of rawcasting feedback.
This was calmer.
Deeper.
As if the aether had found a new, more settled course inside him.
The sight snapped a frayed thread in his mind.
The obsessive drive to know, to break AiM, wavered for a single, crucial second.
What is this?
The cold resonance he'd felt since the Eclipse glyph—the alien whisper in his soul—swelled.
It grew stronger with each passing second, humming in time with the new light in his veins.
It felt less like an intrusion and more like a… recognition.
A spike of primal fear lanced through him.
No.
He shook his head violently, as if trying to dislodge a physical thing from his ears.
It's an illusion.
A side-effect.
The corruption is frying my nerves, creating feedback.
It's not real.
He clung to the explanation, the only logic left in a world coming apart at the seams.
The light in his veins was just a new stage of toxicity.
The resonance was just pain echoing in a broken mind.
He had to believe that.
Because the alternative—that something was awake inside him—was a terror he couldn't afford to face.
Not here.
Not now.
He forced his eyes away from his own arms and back to the enemy, letting the obsession slam back into place, a welcome, familiar torment.
But the light continued to pulse.
And the whisper grew louder.
***
"What is that?" The Pink Dress murmured, not to her sister, but to the air itself, her milky eyes fixed on Lucent's trembling, vein-lit form.
The resonance she felt wasn't just the leftover tremor from the Eclipse glyph.
This was something new, something stirring inside him, deep where the Q-Serin burned.
The Gray Hoodie said nothing, but her stillness was an answer.
She didn't know either.
She watched, a scholar observing a chemical reaction veering off the predicted path.
The connection they felt wasn't one-way anymore, it was a faint, echoing pull, as if something in Lucent was recognizing the ancient frequency they carried.
Then, a voice, warm and conversational, cut through the rooftop's quiet from directly behind them.
"Hoh—is that why our Lord is interested in that guy?"
Both twins moved with such synchronicity.
It was a seamless, instantaneous transition from observation to combat readiness.
They didn't jump—they pivoted on the air itself, their bodies rotating in perfect unison as they landed facing the intruder, their postures now poised and lethal.
A man stood there.
He was unremarkable in every way—average height, plain features, clothes that blurred into the background.
The kind of face you'd forget before you finished looking away.
"Sorry, sorry!" he said, chuckling and raising both hands in a placating gesture. "Didn't mean to surprise you. Bad habit."
He reached up and slowly removed his sunglasses, folding them neatly into his jacket pocket.
The twins' defensive stances eased, but the tension didn't leave their bodies.
Beneath the hood and behind the frills, their expressions shifted from alarm to wary recognition.
The man's eyes were the same swirling, pupil-less white as theirs.
"Levi?" the Gray Hoodie asked, her voice flat.
"Yeah," the man—Levi—grinned.
His primary mouth smiled pleasantly.
Then, with a casual flick of his wrist, he deployed a small, pristine white glyph at the tip of his index finger.
His body shivered.
It wasn't a transformation.
It was a release.
His average frame bloated grotesquely, limbs elongating, his skin stretching taut over suddenly prominent cheekbones, his posture unfolding until he towered over them.
The plain jacket strained.
A faint, wet hiss, like escaping steam, whispered from the region of his collar.
Then, just as quickly, the glyph faded.
His body slumped, compressing back down into its utterly ordinary, unmemorable shape with a soft, sighing sound.
He rolled his shoulders, as if shaking off a mild cramp.
"Needed to stretch. My 'forgettable' disguise gets so cramped after a while." His primary mouth kept its friendly smile, but the Gray Hoodie's sharp eyes caught the subtle, twitching curl of a second, lipless mouth just above his collarbone before it was hidden again by fabric.
"Our Lord sent you?" the Pink Dress asked, her playful tone now edged with a blade.
Levi's grin widened.
"Let's just say the show down there got… loud enough to ping even our quiet channels. Especially after someone started waving Eclipse around like a flag."
He tilted his head, his gaze locking onto Lucent's glowing, pained form. "And now this… interesting resonance."
A low, thoughtful hiss escaped from beneath his collar. "Yeah. I think I'm starting to see why our Lord might have developed a sudden… professional curiosity about this 'Lucent.'"
The twins exchanged a fleeting, unreadable look.
They'd been down here for weeks, immersed in their betting pool and the delicious, local violence.
The larger, quieter movements of their own kind had passed them by like distant weather.
"What do you mean?" the Pink Dress asked, her playful lilt edged with genuine curiosity.
She leaned forward slightly. "What interest? Did we miss a memo?"
Levi chuckled, the sound dry. "You two have been playing house in the scrap pile, haven't you? There was a meeting. About two weeks back. After investigating the Myriad Labs."
His primary mouth smiled, but the second mouth beneath his collar twitched in what might have been amusement. "Our Lord put a name on a list. Lucent. Tagged as 'of interest.' Potential asset. Or potential contamination. The verdict was… pending more data."
He gestured with his chin toward the fight below. "I'd say the information just got a lot noisier. And a lot more compelling."