Chapter 59: The First Fangs
"We're going down," I said, my voice dropping to a lethal baritone. "Aria, drop the GM Shroud just long enough for me to clear the field. I'll take their heads before they even know we're in the sky."
"No."
Mistress Vael stepped firmly into the center of the bridge, the long tails of her black-ops coat fluttering. Behind her stood Jax, Elara, and the other teenagers. Their eyes were wide, taking in the horrific feed on the screen.
"The kids take this one," Vael commanded, her pitch-black eyes locking onto mine.
"Vael, look at those wagons," I countered, the ambient $GM$ particles in the room spiking with my temper. "Those are cages rigged with drop-pins. One stray shot, and those captives are dead. Aria and I can handle this in ten seconds flat."
"And when are they supposed to learn, Nero?" Vael stepped closer, completely unyielding. "You want them to be the First Fangs? You want them to be the vanguard of the next generation of this Pack? Then stop treating them like fragile porcelain dolls. They need to face the visceral ugliness of this world on their own terms, without a Soul-Frame Architect holding their hands."
She didn't wait for my response. She looked back at the teenagers. "You want to prove that opening that hangar hatch wasn't a mistake? Then prove you can protect the weak when it actually matters. Go."
I looked at Aria, then past Vael to Jax and Elara. I didn't see fear. I saw a desperate, burning, incandescent need to be useful. "Fine," I said. "Angel, prep the secondary catapult."
The lower hangar echoed with the deep, throaty roar of Anima Frame engines cycling up.
Jax didn't take the massive, eighteen-meter Arc-Raiser titan. Instead, he initiated his newly evolved personal armor sequence. The dense sapphire orb of the SD Exia core sank directly into his chest plate, merging seamlessly with his Iron-Bear Aegis suit. The thick plating morphed violently, taking on the sleek, disciplined obsidian lines of the Exia knight while retaining the brute mass of the bear. In his gauntlets, his heavy thermal mace and Exia's razor-sharp blade fused in a flash of particles, forming the massive, jagged GM Great Sword.
Beside him, Elara spun her emerald aero-sabers, her sleek Sylphid armor humming with concentrated wind-affinity mana.
"Launch!" Vael shouted from the bridge's tactical console.
The secondary catapult fired with a concussive THOOM. The teenagers shot out of the Archangel's stealth field like streaks of localized lightning, dropping in a high-speed free-fall toward the prairie grass below.
From the bridge, I watched the live tactical feed, my Thunderheart core redlining, ready to instantly deploy if they failed. I didn't need to intervene.
Guided by Vael's cold, metronomic tactical instructions, the kids hit the slaver caravan entirely from their blind spots. Elara moved like a localized hurricane, touching down silently before exploding into motion. Her aero-sabers disabled the raptor-mounts and shattered the guards' iron weapons before they could even draw them.
Jax dropped directly from the sky into the exact center of the formation like a falling meteor. The sheer weight of his hybrid knight-beast armor shattered the slaver's front line on impact. He swung the massive GM Great Sword in a devastating horizontal arc, effortlessly cleaving the heavy yoke of the lead wagon in twain and sending the heavily armored guards flying.
Operating in perfect sync, the other teenagers formed a perimeter, suppressing the remaining stragglers with pinpoint covering fire. In less than three minutes, the mercenary slavers were entirely neutralized. With a series of heavy, targeted strikes, the thick iron locks on the cages were shattered.