For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened. The charging Hound was a wall of ceramite and murder filling Kaine's world. The Lead Hound's plasma blade flared, the heat washing over Kaine's face even from twenty feet away.
Then, with a deep, metallic SHUDDER that ran through the entire station, the massive, reinforced bulkhead marked 7-Gamma—positioned directly to the side of the two remaining Hounds—exploded outwards.
Not from an explosion from within. It was blown out, as if the external magnetic seals had been violently reversed. With a deafening, thunderous roar, the atmosphere in the junction became a hurricane. Loose tools, debris, and the two Hounds were caught in the irresistible torrent of escaping air, screaming towards the new, yawning hole to the starry void.
The Lead Hound, with his mag-boots locked to the deck, was pulled sideways, his plasma blade carving a molten furrow in the floor as he fought the suction. The unarmed Hound charging Kaine wasn't so lucky. He was plucked off his feet with a shout of alarm, his gauntlets scraping futilely at the deck plates as he was dragged backwards into the howling maelstrom. He vanished through the breach with a final, silent scream, followed by a shower of glittering frozen atmosphere.
The breach alarms escalated to an ear-splitting shriek. Emergency blast doors began slamming down all along the corridor, trying to seal the breach.
The suction died as the section depressurized. Kaine, who had grabbed a welded pipe stanchion, gasped in the thin, icy air that remained. His ears popped painfully. Across the way, Aelia was clinging to a conduit, her white hair whipping in the residual eddies.
The Lead Hound straightened. One of his men was dead, vented into space. The other was down, crippled. His prey remained. His helmet turned, first to the sealed blast door that now isolated them in the ruptured junction, then to Kaine. The cold, mechanical fury in that gaze was palpable.
"Ingenious," the Hound's vox grated. "Costly, but ingenious. You have allies with station access. It changes nothing. This sector is now sealed. You are trapped. With me."
He took a step forward, his plasma blade reigniting with a vengeful, hungry scream. The light of it reflected in his dark visor. "Your compilation trick cannot save you now, deviate. You are wounded, exhausted. Your genetic instability is a visible stench on my scanners. You will be broken on the forge of my will, and your secrets will be excised."
Kaine pushed himself up, his body screaming in protest. The ion pistol was empty. He was backed against a wall, literally and figuratively. The mysterious voice on the comms was silent. Aelia's rifle might scratch the Hound's paint. Victor was gone. The pain in his head was a white-hot brand, the corrupted Ares-code writhing like a trapped animal.
The Hound charged. No more tactics, no more minions. Just pure, overwhelming force. A sprint that shook the deck, the plasma blade drawn back for a final, decapitating sweep.
This is it.
The thought was clear. The hollow in Kaine's chest didn't fill with fear. It filled with a final, defiant rage. Not just for himself. For the miners. For Victor's final cry. For his parents. For everyone ground under the heel of this merciless, "purifying" boot.
He wouldn't die cowering.
As the Hound closed the final feet, blade arcing down, Kaine did the only thing he could. He stopped fighting the pain, the madness, the alien thing in his skull. He reached for it.
He focused on the Hound, on the brilliant, arrogant knot of data he'd seen before. The Ares signature. But it was different now. It wasn't just in the Hound's gear. It was in the Hound himself. A faint, twisted thread. The man inside was a Grade-B Ares-line adaptant. A lesser copy. A pale imitation.
Kaine's compiler, agonized and desperate, latched onto that thread.
>TARGET IDENTIFIED: ARES DERIVATIVE (INFERIOR).
>DECOMPILING… ANALYSIS… CORRUPTION DETECTED IN SOURCE. PURGE CORRUPTION? [Y/N]
>WARNING: HOST INTEGRITY CRITICAL. FORCED COMPILATION MAY RESULT IN CASCADING GENE COLLAPSE.
The plasma blade was a microsecond from his face. The heat seared his eyebrows.
YES.
>PURGING CORRUPTION. COMPILING PURIFIED CORE…
It wasn't like on Mars. That was a chaotic surge. This was a targeted, vicious theft.
Agony, absolute and consumptive, exploded in every cell. It felt like his DNA was being unzipped, scoured with acid, and rewoven with wires of white-hot iron. He didn't grow stronger. He felt like he was being erased.
But through the pain, he saw it. The luminous code of the Ares derivative in the Hound… it frayed. A section of it, the corrupted, weakened part that linked to the Hound's own biology, unraveled and was siphoned away, pulled into the screaming void within Kaine.
The Hound, mid-swing, suddenly convulsed. A raw, human scream of shock and unbearable pain erupted from his vox—the first unfiltered emotion Kaine had heard from him. The plasma blade flickered and died. The Hound stumbled, crashing to one knee, his gauntleted hands going to his helmet as if it were splitting open.
Kaine stood amidst the dying echo of his own agony. He felt weak as a kitten. Blood trickled from his nose, his ears. His vision swam with static. But in his hand—a hand that felt numb and foreign—energy crackled. Not the red, fiery power of Ares. This was a faint, sputtering, unstable white spark. The "purified core." A shattered fragment of war-god essence, stripped of its host.
It was useless. It was dying in his grasp.
But it had been enough.
The Hound looked up, his visor focusing on the spark in Kaine's hand. The mechanical certainty was gone, replaced by a howling, primal terror. "What… what did you do?" he rasped.
The blast door behind Kaine hissed open. Aelia was there, her face pale, pulling at his arm. "Kaine! NOW! The courier!"
The Hound, weakened but not defeated, began to push himself up, a new, even more murderous intent radiating from him.
Kaine looked at the dying spark in his hand, then at the rising Hound. With the last of his strength, he didn't throw it. He crushed it in his fist.
The tiny, purified fragment of war detonated.
It wasn't a physical explosion. It was a concussive wave of pure, silent force, a negation of violence. It hit the Hound like a hammer made of anti-sound. Every system in his armor shorted out in a shower of sparks. He was thrown backwards, slamming into the far wall with a crash that dented the plating, and slid down, motionless, a dead weight in dead armor.
Kaine collapsed. Aelia caught him, hauling his arm over her shoulder, dragging him through the blast door just as it began to close again. The last thing he saw was the dark, sparking form of the Hound, lying in the ruined junction.
The mysterious woman's voice returned to the comms, a note of genuine surprise in her lazy drawl. "Well. I'll be. He actually did it. Payment for the bulkhead trick will be one very interesting story, little bird. I'll be in touch. Ta for now."
Then, darkness, warm and complete, swallowed Kaine whole. His final thought, before oblivion took him, was of Victor's last, terrified message.
They're in the lab.
The first victory was his. But the cost, he knew as he fell, had only just begun to come due.