The massive blast door hissed open, not with the screech of rust that had plagued their journey so far, but with the smooth, expensive hum of precision hydraulics. Air pressure equalized with a soft thump that vibrated in their chests.
Eiden, Emily, and Linda stepped through, leaving the damp, rotting brick and the smell of stagnant water of the Water Lock behind.
They were in a different world.
The corridor ahead was blindingly white, a shock to eyes adjusted to the gloom. The walls were paneled in sleek, brushed steel that reflected their disheveled forms like distorted ghosts. The floor was polished marble, so clean it looked like liquid. It didn't smell like a school basement, or even a bunker. It smelled of ozone, filtered air, and money. It looked like the inside of a Swiss bank vault—or a high-tech prison designed to hold something that must never see the sun.
"This," Linda whispered, her voice echoing too loudly in the sterile silence, "is definitely where the gold is. You don't build this for paperwork."
"Or the prisoner," Eiden said, checking the magazine of the pistol he'd taken from the guard in the chem lab. He had three bullets left. His ribs felt like broken glass inside his chest, grinding with every breath, but the adrenaline was a cold fire keeping him upright. "This is a containment unit."
They walked down the hall, their footsteps sharp and intrusive. At the far end, fifty feet away, was a single, massive door made of black titanium. There was no keyhole, no handle, no hinges. Just a glowing blue digital keypad and a biometric retina scanner.
But standing in front of it were three men.
They weren't the standard security guards in blazers. They weren't the Syndicate thugs in leather jackets.
They were giants. Dressed in full-body tactical armor that looked like segmented insect shells, matte black and absorbing the light. Their faces were hidden behind black ballistic masks with glowing green lenses that tracked Eiden's movement with robotic precision. They held military-grade assault rifles across their chests, fingers already on the triggers.
Akuma's "Shadow Squad." The elites. The ones who didn't exist on any payroll.
"Get back," Eiden hissed, shoving Emily and Linda behind a thick steel pillar just as the first bullets tore through the air.
TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
The sound was deafening, amplified by the steel walls into a chaotic storm of noise. Bullets sparked off the steel, chewing up the marble floor where they had just been standing, sending razor-sharp shards of stone flying.
"We can't fight them!" Emily yelled over the gunfire, pressing herself flat against the pillar. "They're wearing Class-4 armor! That's ceramic plating! My pistol won't even scratch them, I might as well throw rocks!"
"And I can't get close," Eiden grimaced, clutching his side as a fresh wave of agony washed over him. "Not like this. If I try to brawl them head-on, they'll cut me in half before I take two steps."
The shooting stopped, replaced by a terrifying, rhythmic sound.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The three Shadows began to advance. They moved in perfect unison, a phalanx of death. They didn't run; they marched, confident in their invulnerability.
Eiden peered around the edge of the pillar. The green lenses of their masks flared.
"They have night vision," Eiden noted, pulling back as a suppressor round chipped the pillar near his eye. "Those lenses. They're seeing heat signatures. They know exactly where we are."
He looked up. The hallway was lit by long, harsh strips of fluorescent lights running the length of the ceiling.
"Emily," Eiden said, his mind racing. "Can you hit those lights?"
"The lights? Why? We'll be blind!"
"We're already at a disadvantage," Eiden said. "Blinding them is our only equalizer. If we overload their sensors with a sudden change, they'll be blind for a few seconds. It's our only chance."
"And then what?"
Eiden looked at Linda. She was cowering on the floor, hugging a red fire extinguisher she'd grabbed from the wall in a panic, rocking back and forth.
"Linda," Eiden said. "Give me that."
"No! It's my emotional support cylinder! It's the only thing I have!"
"Give it to him!" Emily snapped, grabbing the canister and yanking it free.
She shoved the heavy red tank at Eiden.
"On my mark," Eiden said to Emily, hefting the extinguisher. His muscles screamed in protest. "Shoot the lights. All of them. Create chaos."
He looked at the advancing Shadows. They were twenty feet away. Close enough to smell the gun oil.
"NOW!"
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Emily fired. She didn't miss. The overhead lights shattered in a cascade of sparks and glass, plunging the hallway into sudden, suffocating pitch darkness.
The Shadows paused, their night vision systems whining as they automatically kicked in to amplify the ambient light, turning the dark into a green-hued day.
That was when Eiden threw the fire extinguisher.
It sailed through the dark, spinning end over end, a heavy missile.
"Shoot it!" Eiden roared into the blackness.
Emily fired her last bullet blindly into the dark, aiming for the sound of the metal tank clattering on the marble.
CLANG-WHOOSH!
She hit the valve. The extinguisher exploded mid-air, creating a massive, expanding cloud of freezing white chemical powder.
In the confined hallway, the effect on the Shadows' night vision was catastrophic. The white powder reflected the infrared beams, turning their vision into a blinding, solid wall of white flare. It was like staring into the sun.
"CONTACT LOST! VISUALS COMPROMISED!" one of the Shadows shouted, his voice distorted and metallic through his mask.
"Move!" Eiden yelled.
He didn't run at them. He ran low.
He slid across the slick marble floor, under the spray of their blind suppressing fire that chewed up the walls above him. He got inside their guard, into the cloud of white dust.
He couldn't punch through the armor. But armor had joints. Armor had gaps.
He swept the leg of the lead Shadow. The giant crashed down with a heavy, metallic thud that shook the floor. Eiden scrambled onto his back like a wild animal, grabbed the man's helmet with both hands, and smashed it against the marble floor. Once. Twice. The green lenses shattered. The man went limp.
The other two turned, but they were blind and confused in the chemical fog, firing wildly.
Emily was there. She didn't shoot. She used the heavy steel butt of her empty pistol, stepping out of the smoke and striking the second guard hard in the exposed neck seal of his armor. He gurgled, dropping his rifle, and fell.
The third guard swung his rifle like a club, catching Eiden in the shoulder. Eiden grunted, pain radiating down his arm, but he spun with the impact. He used the momentum to drive his elbow into the guard's throat, right where the armor met the helmet.
The guard fell back, gasping for air. Eiden ripped the mask off, revealing a terrified human face, and delivered a final, knockout blow.
Silence returned to the hallway, broken only by the hiss of the empty fire extinguisher spinning on the floor and their own ragged breathing. The chemical dust settled like snow on the black armor of the fallen guards.
"Remind me," Linda said from the darkness, coughing in the white dust, "never to make you angry. Ever."
They stood before the black titanium door.
It was seamless. No handle. Just a keypad with glowing blue numbers that seemed to mock them.
"It's a code," Eiden said, wiping blood from his lip. "Hazel didn't get this far. We don't have it."
"Blow it?" Emily suggested, looking at the unconscious guards' belts where grenades hung.
"Reinforced titanium," Eiden shook his head. "We'd bring the ceiling down on our heads before we scratched this door. It has to be a code."
He looked at the keypad. "Four digits. Thousands of combinations. We have minutes before backup arrives."
Emily stepped forward. She looked at the keypad, seeing her own reflection in the black metal.
"My father..." she whispered. "He's a complicated man. A monster, maybe. But he's sentimental about the strangest things. He hoards memories like he hoards gold."
She hovered her hand over the keys.
"He used a date for the safe in his London office. The day he started his company."
She typed: 1-9-2-0.
BEEP-BEEP. Access Denied. A red light flashed.
"Try your mother's birthday," Linda suggested, her voice small. "He loved her, didn't he? That's what the stories say."
Emily nodded slowly. "June 15th."
She typed: 0-6-1-5.
BEEP-BEEP. Access Denied.
"We have one more try," Eiden warned, looking at the display. "It's a military lock. Three strikes and it locks down permanently. We'll never get in."
Emily closed her eyes. She tried to get inside the mind of Akuma Cronus. She thought about the man who built a fortress to hide a secret. The man who refused to sell this land because of "memories."
"His memories," Emily whispered. "Could it be..."
She looked at the keypad. Her hand trembled.
"My birthday," she said. "April 12th."
She typed: 0-4-1-2.
The keypad paused. The blue numbers froze.
DING. A green light bathed them.
The massive locking mechanisms inside the door began to churn and clank, heavy bolts retracting deep within the walls. The heavy door groaned and hissed, breaking a hermetic seal that had held for decades.
Emily stared at the green light, a chill running down her spine that was colder than the Water Lock.
"Why?" she whispered, her voice breaking. "Why my birthday? Why lock his darkest secret with the day I was born?"
The door swung wide.
A blast of cold, stale air hit them, carrying the scent of metal and time.
Floodlights flickered on, one bank after another with a heavy thrum-thrum-thrum, revealing the room beyond.