Hiss—
Inside the server room filled with artificial darkness, nerve gas crawled along the floor like a snake.
Vision was completely blocked.
Only the faint afterglow of the console, cut off from even emergency power, dimly illuminated Leon's pale face.
"Leon, don't stop. They are... right in front of us."
Jayn closed her eyes. Sight was already meaningless.
She tightened her grip on the handle of the Sky Hammer on her back.
The high-sensitivity Aether sensor built into the hammer's core vibrated minutely, reading the airflow around her.
Whoosh.
A chilling tearing sound grazed her left cheek.
Without a moment to think, Jayn swung the hammer to the left.
Clang—!
Sparks flew in the empty air where steel clashed with steel.
In that momentary flash, the figure of an assassin wearing red goggles was revealed like a ghost.
"Found you."
Jayn ignited the hammer's booster.
Bang!
With a heavy impact sound, the assassin was flung into the darkness.
But she couldn't relax.
The waves detected by the sensor were not just one.
Three, no, four. The 'Shadow Scribe's' hounds were narrowing the encirclement without even making a footstep sound.
"Damn it, why is this purple code so persistent!"
Leon clung to the console, trying to ignore the slaughter happening behind his back.
Covering his nose with his sleeve without a gas mask, he typed the code while holding his breath.
"I'm reverse-engineering Adrian's defense system... If I plant a virus and cause an overload, the ventilation system will go haywire and force the doors open!"
Just then, another shadow fell soundlessly from the ceiling above Leon's head.
It was too far for Jayn to react.
"Leon! Above!"
*
At the same time, the sky above the Archives.
"Cough...!"
Vent Steel spat out the blood pooling in his mouth and yanked the control stick.
His black fighter twisted at an almost impossible angle, dodging the enemy's blue laser beam by a hair's breadth.
Warning alarms rang tearing at his ears.
"Damn it... Shows they are shadows. Clinging on persistently!"
What entered Vent's vision was not a standard Imperial fleet.
Black ships engraved with a snake emblem.
They were pressuring Vent's fighter from all sides without even making propulsion sounds.
They weren't trying to shoot Vent down. They were playing with him.
Like a cat cornering a rat, they were pushing him toward the Archives, cutting off his retreat.
'No. If I get pushed back here, those kids' retreat will disappear.'
Vent bared his teeth and laughed. It was a smile bordering on madness.
"Fine. Let's see who is the crazier one."
He pushed the throttle to the max. The engine screamed.
Instead of running away, Vent's fighter dared a head-on breakthrough into the center of the enemy formation surrounding him.
"Move! You damn ghosts!"
Ka-boom!
A missile fired by Vent shot down one of the lead enemy ships.
Vent, soaring through the flames of the explosion, nose-dived vertically along the outer wall of the Archives.
"Jayn! Leon! Get out right now! Holding them back has reached its limit!"
Along with his desperate shout, the gun barrels of the Shadow Ops covering the sky simultaneously focused on Vent.
This was a suicide act. But someone had to do it.
To make a tiny crack, that single 'Eye of a Needle', for the children trapped in that darkness to come out.
*
"Captain! High energy reaction from the rear! This is... a Warp Signature!"
Above the Archives, an urgent warning alarm rang in the communication network of the Shadow Ops chasing Vent's fighter.
The pitch-black dark clouds burned red and swirled.
Tearing through the center, a massive predator of steel revealed itself.
It was Adrian's flagship, the Fenrir.
"How dare..."
From the bridge of the Fenrir, Adrian Valentine's eyes looking down at the battlefield distorted coldly.
His gaze was fixed not on Vent's fighter, but on the black ships, the Shadow Ops, surrounding the Archives without his permission.
He realized.
Vent's provocation was a lure, and the real trap had been dug behind his back, from within the Empire.
The deception of the Scribe who involved Intelligence Bureau assassins in a sacred military operation.
And the rampage of low-class mercenaries trampling on the Archives, which was practically his territory.
This was an indelible insult to him as a soldier.
"This is the jurisdiction of the Arkelos Project. Whether rats or shadows, no one leaves here alive without my permission."
Adrian raised his command baton.
"All fleet, open fire. No need for IFF (Identification Friend or Foe). Shoot down everything that is not my unit."
Ka-bang! Ka-boom!
The main cannons of the Fenrir spewed fire, tearing the sky apart.
As the overwhelming firepower of the Imperial Regular Army poured down, the formation of the Shadow Ops chasing Vent collapsed in an instant.
"Wh, What?! The wolves are back!"
Caligo of the Chrome Hounds, who was in the opposite airspace, was also flustered.
Adrian's return was unexpected. But then, the Scribe's chilly order struck his ears again.
"Kuhaha! You should have said that sooner!"
Caligo burst into laughter filled with madness and turned the control stick.
"Did you hear that, mutts! No need to catch them! Turn that old pile of rocks into dust!"
The Chrome Hound ships turned their direction all at once.
Their target was no longer Vent or the Fenrir.
It was the main building of the 'Forgotten Archives' where Jayn and Leon were trapped.
Boom! Bang!
Hundreds of missiles and shells struck the outer walls of the ancient ruin.
The massive stone building carved out of a mountain range screamed and shook.
*
"Ugh!"
Inside the server room, Leon, dodging the assassin's blade in the darkness, rolled on the floor and screamed.
The ceiling cracked open, and a concrete block the size of a house fell down.
The entire building was engulfed in terrible vibration. Even the Scribe's assassins lost their balance and stumbled at the unexpected collapse.
"They're bringing the building down!"
Jayn shouted, dodging the falling rocks.
The situation was the worst.
Outside, Adrian, the Scribe, and Caligo were tangled in a chaotic war killing each other, and in the aftermath, the Archives were becoming a collapsing prison.
Rumble— Bang!
One wall of the server room was torn away with an explosion. Through the gap in the pierced wall, the battlefield outside was glimpsed along with acrid smoke.
It was a hellscape where red beams and flashes of explosions embroidered the night sky.
"We'll all die at this rate! We'll be buried!"
Leon coughed and shouted. The entrance was still locked, and the only open wall was a sheer cliff of a thousand feet.
Even that was collapsing moment by moment due to indiscriminate shelling.
Jayn planted her hammer into the shaking floor to balance herself.
The assassin wearing red goggles rushed at her again through the debris.
But Jayn's eyes were staring at the chaos beyond the crumbled wall, not the assassin.
"No... there is a way."
She took a small device out of her bosom. The bio-frequency data of sky fish she had obtained risking her life during her long days as a Junker.
And the crude portable sonic amplifier Leon had made for her as a pastime long ago.
"I'll turn this mess... into a more perfect chaos."
Simultaneously with Jayn's declaration, her thumb pushed up the switch of the amplifier.
Whirrr—!
High-frequency waves, inaudible to human ears but minutely vibrating the atmospheric Aether, were shot out into the battlefield through the amplifier.
"Die!"
In that fleeting moment, the assassin with red goggles rushed through the crumbled debris, aiming for Jayn's neck.
Jayn held the amplifier to her chest with her left hand and swung the Sky Hammer short with her right hand.
Clang!
Sparks flew, and the assassin's dagger bounced off. But the impact pushed Jayn's body backward.
Her heel stepped on empty air.
"Ugh! Jayn!"
Leon hurriedly snatched Jayn's waist.
The two balanced precariously at the edge of that breathtaking cliff, the torn-away wall.
"Damn it, no retreat...!"
Leon looked down and turned pale.
Below his feet, the abyss of darkness with no known end opened its mouth, and the empty air in front was the battlefield itself.
Ka-bang! Boom!
Adrian's Fenrir fleet, Caligo's Chrome Hounds, and the Scribe's Shadow Ops.
Beams and missiles poured out by the three entangled forces were embroidering the night sky like fireworks.
Fierce storms and roars struck the eardrums of the two.
Behind them, assassins narrowing the siege with invisibility cloaks on.
In front, raining gunfire.
The moment they jumped, they were destined to become honeycombs or fall to their deaths.
"Nothing's happening! Isn't the device broken?"
Leon shouted as if screaming.
The assassins only hesitated for a moment, raising their swords again to strike Jayn's neck.
"Wait."
Jayn closed her eyes and felt the wind without even wiping the cold sweat flowing on her forehead.
She was sure.
That sound she heard when crossing the 'Ghost Current' risking her life in her Junker days.
It was time for the masters of the sky to answer.
1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds...
And then.
Woooo— Wooooo—
From beyond the abyss, far below the bottom of the clouds, a magnificent vibration sound began to be heard.
A sound like a whale's song, or the low notes of a pipe organ.
At that massive resonance that seemed to swallow all the gunfire of the battlefield, Adrian, Caligo, and the assassins aiming for Jayn's neck all stopped moving at once.
"Wh, What is that?!"
Leon pointed below the cliff with a trembling hand.
Tens of thousands of blue stars were rising from the pitch-black darkness. No, they were not stars.
Massive lifeforms shining brilliantly as if embracing the Milky Way inside their translucent bodies.
Fantasy monsters that inhabit the deepest parts of the sky and grow by eating Aether storms.
It was a swarm of 'Star Cluster Jellyfish'.
The frequency Jayn transmitted was their courtship signal for the mating season.
Hundreds, thousands of house-sized jellyfish soared through the clouds following Jayn's signal.
Zzzzt! Crackle!
They weren't just huge.
The powerful bio-electric pulse spewing from the jellyfish's tentacles began to messily shake the electromagnetic field around the Archives.
The Imperial Army's state-of-the-art aiming devices spun around and went dead. Precision-guided missiles lost their targets and collided with each other in mid-air.
"Aaargh! My eyes!"
The assassins who had surrounded Jayn and Leon threw off their goggles screaming in pain.
The intense electromagnetic waves emitted by the jellyfish had burned out their sensitive thermal sensors.
The stealth equipment also crackled and was forcibly deactivated, revealing their figures nakedly in the air.
The sky, which had been full of flashy beams and explosions, was covered in the blue, dreamlike light of the jellyfish in an instant.
Those massive bodies swam between ships, blocking vision, and the battlefield became a maze in the fog where identifying friend or foe was impossible.
"This is it...!"
Jayn swept back her fluttering hair and looked down at the confused assassins and the paralyzed fleets.
Her blue eyes flashed, reflecting the light of the jellyfish.
"Now their eyes are blinded. Now is the chance."
*
As the storm of blue light swept the battlefield, the Empire's precise killing machines became lumps of scrap metal drifting in the air.
"Aaargh! I can't see!"
Assassins who lost both vision and sensors swung their swords meaninglessly in the air.
Using that gap of chaos, Leon crawled to the connection port of the main server exposed near the collapsed wall.
"This is the last chance...!"
Leon plugged the portable data bank into the port with trembling hands.
Sparks flew, and encrypted data poured down like a waterfall on the portable terminal's screen.
The 'Truth' that Adrian tried so hard to hide, and the Scribe tried to burn away.
"Found it...!"
Leon shuddered and put the data bank into his bosom.
"Jayn! Secured it! This isn't just a simple purge list. Why the Empire burned your home, all those orders are in here!"
Rumble— Bang!
At that moment, the ground of the Archives screamed terribly.
The outer wall supports, unable to withstand Caligo's indiscriminate shelling, finally collapsed.
"Leon!"
Jayn snatched Leon's arm.
The floor they were standing on was torn away entirely and began to tilt down the thousand-foot cliff.
Behind them, blinded assassins were crawling emitting murderous intent, and in front was only falling death.
In that desperate moment, the communicator in Jayn's ear crackled.
It was Lilia.
"Lilia! Where are you! We are right now...!"
From the pitch-black cloud bottom, piercing through the sea of blue light spewed by tens of thousands of Star Cluster Jellyfish, a familiar engine sound soared.
Vroooom—!
The Lumina Lip, still rattling because it wasn't fully repaired, but the most welcome scrap metal ship in the world.
The ship pierced through the jellyfish swarm like an acrobat and thrust its side cargo bay toward the edge of the collapsing cliff.
Lilia's shout had no hesitation.
Jayn and Leon looked at each other. No explanation was needed.
Jayn grabbed Leon's shoulder and shouted toward the empty air in front.
"Jump!"
The two kicked off the floor and threw their bodies into the air.
In the moment gravity pulled them, below was a faraway abyss and above was pouring fire.
But their bodies did not crash.
Thud! Roll!
Jayn and Leon rolled roughly into the open cargo bay.
"Got them!"
Lilia cheered from the helm and sharply turned the control stick.
The Lumina Lip soared vertically as soon as it picked up the two, dodging the falling building debris.
However, some of the assassins left on the cliff edge did not give up and tried to jump onto the ship.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
Just then, a black shadow dive-bombed from the sky above and poured machine-gun fire.
It was Vent's fighter.
At Vent's covering fire, the assassins screamed and fell into the abyss.
Vent's fighter stuck next to the Lumina Lip with a flashy roll maneuver.
"Let's go, Lilia! Full speed!"
Jayn shouted, catching her panting breath.
The Lumina Lip and Vent's fighter disappeared into the curtain of blue light created by the Star Cluster Jellyfish swarm.
Following that, the massive Forgotten Archives, which had endured for hundreds of years, completely collapsed with a roar and sank into the black smoke.
In the hell where Adrian's anger, the Scribe's murderous intent, and Caligo's madness were tangled, they finally survived.
Holding the Empire's ugliest secret in their arms.