The vibration that rattled the floor of the lift in Sector 4 was not a mechanical fault. It was an echo. It was the seismic footprint of a storm contained within a bottle, traveling through the reinforced durasteel skeleton of the facility until it found the soles of Alpha-79's boots in Sector 1.
But Alpha-79 did not feel the floor. He wasn't touching it.
He was airborne.
The world was a blur of grey steel and harsh, halogen white. Time, for him, had a different texture than it did for the others. For Beta, time was a sludge that drowned you. For Gamma, it was a sharp edge that cut. But for Alpha, time was something to be outrun.
He twisted in mid-air, his body rotating on a horizontal axis. The drone—a hulking, arachnid-like automaton built of training-grade iron and powered by a low-tier mana core—lashed out with a hydraulic pincer. The metal claw sheared through the space where Alpha's head had been a microsecond prior, the wind of its passage stirring the damp hair plastered to his forehead.
Too slow, Alpha-79 thought. The thought was cold, detached, a calculation running on a parallel track to the screaming exertion of his muscles.
He landed in a crouch, his boots screeching against the scorched metal flooring. He didn't pause. To pause was to die. To pause was to fail the Director.
He thrust his right hand forward. The Aero sigil on the dorsal of his hand flared—not the sickly flicker of Beta's Lumen, but a violent, concussive burst of dirty orange light.
He didn't just push the air; he grabbed it. He seized the atmosphere in front of him, compressing the nitrogen and oxygen into a solid, invisible hammer, and slammed it into the drone's center of mass.
BOOM.
The sound was deafening, a thunderclap trapped in a shoebox. The drone, weighing three hundred kilos, was lifted off its legs and hurled backward, smashing into the containment wall with the sound of a ground-car wreck.
Alpha-79 didn't watch it fall. He was already moving.
Target Two. Three o'clock. High.
Another drone dropped from the ceiling rails, its optical sensors glowing a menacing red. It fired a suppression round—a beanbag filled with lead shot designed to break ribs without piercing organs.
Alpha-79 saw the muzzle flash. He saw the projectile leave the barrel.
He raised his left hand. The Ionization sigil sparked.
It wasn't a clean arc of blue lightning like the instructors used. His control was raw, fueled by the volatile Orange soul burning in his chest. The electricity that erupted from his fingers was jagged, wild, spitting sparks of white and violet.
He didn't aim for the projectile. He aimed for the air around it.
He clapped his hands together—Aero meeting Ionization.
The resulting shockwave was a localized sonic boom laced with static discharge. It vaporized the suppression round in a cloud of lead dust and superheated gas. The feedback rattled Alpha-79's teeth, jarring his skeleton, but he rode the momentum, letting the blast propel him forward, through the smoke, toward the drone.
He hit the machine shoulder-first, channeling Ionization through his body armor. The drone shorted out, its servos seizing with a screech of tortured metal. Alpha-79 grabbed its sensory unit—the "head"—with his left hand.
"Break," he whispered.
He poured mana into the grip. The Ionization surged, melting the internal wiring, welding the circuits into slag. The red eye flickered and died.
He dropped the chassis. It clattered to the floor, smoking.
Alpha-79 stood amidst the wreckage, his chest heaving like a bellows. The air in the Kinetic Yard was thin, burned away by the ozone and the vacuum of his Aero strikes. It tasted metallic, like licking a battery. Sweat ran down his face, stinging his eyes, dripping off the tip of his nose to hiss on the hot floor plates.
"Simulation pause," the automated voice announced. "Resetting field."
Alpha-79 didn't move. He stayed in his stance, fists clenched, waiting.
He looked up.
High above the kill-box, behind a wall of blast-proof glass, was the Observation Deck. It was dark up there. He couldn't see faces. He could only see the silhouettes of the White Coats and the faint, rhythmic blinking of the recording consoles.
He waited for the voice. He waited for the crackle of the intercom.
Tell me I did well, he begged silently. The thought was a pathetic thing, a child's wish hidden beneath a soldier's armor. Tell me I was fast. Tell me I am worth the food I eat.
He imagined the Director up there. Quillen. The Red Shadow. The man who moved like smoke and cut like glass. Alpha-79 wanted to be him. He wanted to be the weapon that Quillen reached for when the world needed to bleed.
He straightened his posture. He wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand—a vessel burst from the pressure change. He looked at the glass with eyes that burned with a desperate, terrifying need.
Look at me.
The intercom clicked.
Alpha-79's heart spiked.
"Unit Alpha-79," the voice said. It wasn't Quillen. It was Instructor Kael. A B-Rank Vanguard dropout with a limp and a grudge against anything with talent. "Time to neutralize: fourteen seconds."
Alpha-79 held his breath. Fourteen seconds was a personal best. It was faster than the projection.
"Inefficient," Kael's voice droned, stripping the achievement down to a failure. "You wasted two seconds on the sonic clap. Excessive mana expenditure. You are treating the Ionization like a hammer, not a scalpel. If that had been a live Animatia with a reflex modifier, you would be gutted."
The words hit Alpha-79 harder than the suppression round would have.
"Reset," Kael commanded. "Again. And try not to embarrass the division this time."
The intercom clicked off.
Alpha-79 stood frozen. The silence of the room rushed back in, heavy and suffocating.
Inefficient.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling. Not from fear, but from the adrenaline crash. The Ionization sigil on his left hand felt hot, the skin around it red and irritated. The Aero sigil on his right ached, a deep, bone-bruise throb.
He wasn't a person. He was a faulty tool. A gun that jammed. A blade that dulled.
He let out a breath that was half-growl, half-sob. He swallowed it back down. Soldiers didn't cry. Soldiers didn't feel. Soldiers corrected the error.
"Resetting," he whispered to the empty room.
The floor panels groaned as hydraulic lifts cleared the debris. New drones rose from the pits—fresh steel, fresh threats. These ones were different. Smaller. Faster. Modeled after Skylax pack-hunters.
Alpha-79 shook his arms out. He rolled his neck, the vertebrae cracking.
He looked at the glass one last time. The shadows hadn't moved. They were drinking kaf, or checking datapads, or talking about their leave in Elpis. They didn't care that he was bleeding. They didn't care that his soul felt like it was being scraped raw with sandpaper.
They only cared about the number.
Fourteen seconds.
He would give them ten.
He would give them ten, or he would die in the attempt. Because if he died, at least they would have to come down here to scrape him off the floor. At least then, they would have to touch him.
"Unit Ready," Alpha-79 shouted, his voice cracking slightly before finding the steel register of the Soldier.
"Engage," the computer chirped.
The drones lunged.
Alpha-79 didn't wait. He stepped into the violence.
He moved with a suicidal aggression, abandoning defense. He let a drone rake its claws across his shoulder plate, the metal screeching, just so he could get inside its guard.
He grabbed the machine's torso. He didn't use a spell. He didn't channel. He just screamed—a raw, primal sound of frustration—and ripped the sensory cluster off with his bare hands, augmented only by the hysterical strength of his own self-loathing.
Oil sprayed across his face, hot and black. It tasted like tar.
He spun, throwing the wreckage at the second drone. He channeled Aero into his legs, blasting himself upward, defying gravity.
He was a storm. He was a disaster.
See me!
He crashed down on the final drone, driving his knee through its chassis. He pinned it to the floor. The machine thrashed, its servos whining, trying to buck him off.
Alpha-79 grabbed its head. He placed his right palm flat against the metal faceplate.
Aero. Condensed. Point blank.
"Die," he hissed.
He triggered the sigil.
CRACK.
The sound was like a whip breaking the sound barrier. The air pressure spike blew the drone's head apart. Shrapnel—gears, lenses, wiring—exploded outward, peppering Alpha-79's face and chest. A piece of jagged steel sliced his cheek, missing his eye by a millimeter.
He didn't blink.
The drone went limp beneath him.
Alpha-79 stayed there, straddling the dead machine, his chest rising and falling in ragged, gasping hitches. Blood mixed with the oil on his face, running down into the corner of his mouth.
He stared at the headless wreckage. It looked like him. Something built to serve, broken because it wasn't good enough.
He slowly looked up at the glass again. His eyes were wide, the pupils blown, staring into the dark with a hunger that was starting to look a lot like madness.
There was no voice. No click of the intercom.
Just the reflection of his own face in the observation window, small and distorted, looking back at him from the dark.
He wiped the sweat and blood from his eyes with a trembling forearm. The silence stretched out, longer than the fight, heavier than the gravity.
He realized then, with a sinking, cold certainty, that silence wasn't a punishment.
Silence was the product.
He was a machine that made silence. And when a machine worked perfectly, you didn't thank it. You just put it back in the box until you needed to kill something else.
He stood up, his knees shaking. He walked to the center of the room, assuming the neutral stance.
"Unit Alpha-79," he whispered to himself, his voice hollow. "Ready."
He waited for the next buzzer. He waited to be useful.