Day 145. 05:41 hours.
Robinson's Galleria Ortigas.
Basement Level.
The Service Corridor.
The basement of Robinson's Galleria was not a basement.
It was an ecosystem.
The corridor that the strike team had entered through the service tunnel junction branched and split and branched again — a labyrinth of passages that had been carved, not built, from the original building's substructure.
The walls showed the marks of something that had cut through concrete and rebar with the ease of a blade through flesh.
The building plans that Mei had downloaded from the Pasig facility database showed a standard commercial basement: storage rooms, utility corridors, maintenance access points.
What Jae-min's spatial awareness revealed was something else entirely — a warren of interconnected chambers and tunnels that bore no resemblance to the original architecture, the spaces expanded, modified, reshaped by forces that were not human and not gentle.
The walls were warm.
The air was thick with humidity — tropical, oppressive, the kind of dense, moisture-laden atmosphere that Jae-min associated with greenhouses and rainforests and the reptile house at the zoo he had visited as a child in Seoul.
Condensation ran down the walls in continuous rivulets, the moisture beading and dripping and pooling on the floor in shallow puddles that reflected the dim light from bioluminescent patches — clusters of something organic that grew on the walls and ceiling, emitting a faint blue-green glow that was just bright enough to navigate by and just dim enough to make every shadow seem like a threat.
The smell was worse.
Organic — not the clean organic scent of soil or vegetation, but the dense, musky, ammonia-tinged odor of a reptile enclosure that had not been cleaned in months.
Underneath the musk was the chemical undertone of Enhancement serum — the same metallic, antiseptic tang that Jae-min had encountered at the Pasig facility, the smell of accelerated biology and forced evolution, and the particular chemistry that turned human beings into something else.
Jae-min's spatial awareness mapped the basement in three dimensions, each sweep revealing more of the labyrinth's complexity.
The service corridor led north for approximately forty meters before splitting into three branches.
The left branch curved west, toward the original parking structure's western ramp.
The right branch curved east, toward a series of chambers that Jae-min's thermal imaging identified as warm, occupied, biologically active.
The center branch continued north, descending through a ramp cut into the floor, leading to the lowest level — the parking structure's fourth sublevel, where the anomaly's heartbeat pulsed at thirty-two beats per minute.
They took the center branch.
The ramp was steep — approximately thirty degrees, the concrete surface cut with deep grooves that provided traction in the wet conditions.
The temperature increased as they descended, the warmth growing from uncomfortable to oppressive, the humidity reaching levels that made Jae-min's tactical rig's moisture management systems strain to keep up.
His spatial awareness tracked the thermal signatures around them: the distributed heat of the bioluminescent growths, the ambient warmth of the geothermal systems, the concentrated thermal masses of living creatures — Enhanced guards scattered throughout the labyrinth, their body heat standing out against the background warmth like stars against a twilight sky.
Ji-yoo's gravity-shift sense complemented Jae-min's spatial awareness, reading the structural resonance of the basement through her bare feet and the contact of Soulcleaver's shaft against the floor.
She could feel the walls — their thickness, their composition, the stress fractures where the anomaly's modifications had compromised the original structure.
She could feel the creatures moving through the corridors beyond her visual range, their footsteps transmitting vibrations through the concrete that her Enhanced sensitivity interpreted as size, weight, and speed.
Gabriel was at the rear, her golden eyes scanning the ceiling, the wind moving in small currents around her — not enough to fly in the confined space, but enough to feel every air current, every pressure change, every displacement that meant something was moving in the corridors beyond.
Chocho trotted at Gabriel's heel in her small form — the white fox's blue eyes bright, her single tail low, her body conserving its charge for the moment it would be needed.
Mark Jordan walked beside Ji-yoo, his amber eyes closed, his thermal suppression field pulling heat from the team's bodies and feeding it into the frozen ground beneath the mansion three kilometers away — the particular discipline of a man whose cold immunity made the basement's warmth feel like a fever but who suppressed his own discomfort because the team needed his thermal signature masked.
Ifrit's Hell Katana slept in his soul.
The blade would manifest when it was needed.
Yue was at the point, ten meters ahead, her Jian drawn, her marble eyes on the corridor, her body in the particular coiled stillness of a woman cycling her Blink at combat readiness.
Six figures moving through the labyrinth.
Five Enhanced humans and one Enhanced fox.
The strike team.
Ji-yoo stopped.
Her bare feet pressed flat against the concrete.
Her dark eyes narrowed.
Her grip on Soulcleaver tightened.
"Contacts," Ji-yoo pressed, low. "Six — no, seven. East branch. They know we're here. They're converging."
"Fast movers," Mark Jordan measured, dry, his amber eyes still closed. "Forty-two degrees core temp. Built for speed."
"Chocho, hold," Jae-min directed, low. "Gabriel — rear. Yue — point. Mark Jordan — left. Ji-yoo — center. I've got Overwatch."
"Copy," the team echoed.
Chocho clicked once in the back of her throat.
The click was low and resonant.
The small fox's blue eyes were fixed on the east branch corridor.
She was ready.
— • • • —
Day 145. 05:50 hours.
Robinson's Galleria Ortigas.
Basement Level.
The Open Area.
The seven Enhanced guards came through the east exit at speed.
They were speed-optimized — lean, elongated bodies built for velocity, their limbs disproportionately long, their muscles wired for explosive acceleration rather than sustained power.
They moved like wolves, a pack formation that spread across the four-meter-wide exit and poured into the open area with the coordinated chaos of predators that had hunted together long enough to anticipate each other's movements.
Jae-min had positioned the team in five-point coverage at the base of the ramp.
Ji-yoo at the center, Soulcleaver manifested in her hands, the eight-foot rifle-scythe's dimensional blade shimmering.
Mark Jordan on the left flank, Ifrit's Hell Katana manifested at his side — the blade dark as a wound in reality, no glow, no shimmer, the Black Hell Flame sleeping in the metal until he called it.
Gabriel at the right flank, the wind building in her hands, her golden eyes tracking the pack.
Jae-min is at the top of the ramp, his dual Glock 19s in his hands, his spatial awareness mapping each guard's position.
Yue was nowhere visible — she had blinked to the ceiling above the east exit, her Jian drawn, her body pressed against the concrete, waiting.
Chocho sat at the junction behind Jae-min, her small form still, her blue eyes bright.
She was the reserve.
She would deploy when the moment required lightning.
The first two guards reached Ji-yoo in under a second.
She was ready.
Soulcleaver swept in a horizontal arc — a full 180-degree rotation that compressed the air in its path into a gravity-dense wavefront.
The dimensional blade caught the first guard directly across its torso, the compressed gravity amplifying the cut's force beyond anything the guard's Enhanced physiology could absorb.
The guard bisected — the upper and lower halves separating with a wet, grinding sound and flying in opposite directions, the internal structures exposed in a spray of organic matter that painted the walls and floor in shades of red and purple.
The dimensional edge had not cut the guard.
The dimensional edge had erased the part of the guard it touched — the tissue within the blade's path simply ceased to exist.
The stump did not bleed.
The stump did not regenerate.
The stump was an absence.
The second guard had tried to jump — a leaping attack that would have carried it over the scythe's arc and onto Ji-yoo's position.
But Soulcleaver's gravity field extended beyond the blade itself, a spherical zone of compressed gravity approximately two meters in radius that pulled everything within it toward the scythe's edge.
The leaping guard was caught in the field, its trajectory bending, its momentum redirected, and it slammed into the blade's edge at an angle that opened it from hip to shoulder.
The guard hit the floor in two pieces and did not get up.
The third and fourth guards split — one going high, one going low, attempting to bracket Ji-yoo from above and below simultaneously.
This was a coordinated tactic, the product of pack intelligence, and it would have worked against a baseline opponent.
But Ji-yoo was not baseline.
She stomped.
The impact of her Enhanced-strength foot strike transmitted through the floor and into the gravity-shift sense network she maintained through her bare feet.
The vibrations propagated outward in a controlled wavefront — a directed pulse that targeted the specific frequency range that disrupted the Enhanced guards' equilibrium.
The low guard stumbled, its legs going out from under it as the pulse scrambled its inner ear.
The high guard lost its trajectory, the spatial disorientation causing it to misjudge its leap and crash into the ceiling.
Ji-yoo dispatched both with quick, efficient strikes — the scythe blade catching the stumbling guard across the neck and the crashing guard across the midsection as it fell from the ceiling.
Two more bodies on the floor.
Four total.
The fifth guard had gone wide — a flanking maneuver that took it around the left side of the open area, toward Mark Jordan's position.
Mark Jordan met it with Ifrit's Hell Katana.
The katana came up in a rising diagonal slash, the Black Hell Flame igniting around the blade — jet-black, absorbing the bioluminescent light from the walls, casting no glow, casting only darkness, the flame consuming light rather than producing it.
The katana was dark as a wound in reality.
The flame around it was a void.
The heat at the blade's edge was the surface temperature of the sun, and the moisture in the humid air around the blade flash-vaporized on contact, the steam superheating and expanding in a shockwave that preceded the blade's arc.
The guard's clawed hand came down toward Mark Jordan's head.
Mark Jordan stepped inside the strike — his cold immunity making the Black Hell Flame's heat a warmth rather than a danger, his thermal control feeding the flame's energy into the blade's edge — and drove the katana into the guard's chest.
The Black Hell Flame poured from the blade into the guard's body, the heat flash-vaporizing the tissue around the wound, cauterizing as it burned.
The guard's chest cavity filled with superheated steam.
The guard dropped.
The smell of burned meat and scorched organic matter filled the humid air.
The sixth guard had circled wide to the right, toward Gabriel.
Gabriel's golden eyes tracked it.
Her hands came up.
The wind gathered.
She did not fly — the ceiling was too low, the space too confined for Mach 1.5.
But the wind did not need speed to kill.
Gabriel shaped the air into a blade — a compressed-air edge three meters long, invisible, silent, moving at the speed of a sword stroke.
The wind blade caught the sixth guard across the neck. The edge was thin enough and pressurized enough to cut through the guard's Enhanced tissue, the particular tissue of a speed-optimized guard that had been built for velocity and not for durability.
The guard's head separated from its body.
The body ran three more steps on momentum before it realized it was dead.
The head hit the floor with a wet sound.
"Six," Gabriel reported, bright, her golden eyes already scanning. "I'm counting. Six."
"Seven," Ji-yoo corrected, fierce, her dark eyes on the north exit. "One got past."
The seventh guard was the fastest.
It had used the chaos of the engagement to circle wide — far wider than the others, its speed-optimized body carrying it around the perimeter of the open area and toward the north exit, toward the corridor that led to the anomaly.
Its objective was not to fight but to flee — to warn the anomaly, to alert the deeper defenses, to deny the strike team the element of surprise.
Yue dropped from the ceiling.
She had been waiting — her body pressed against the concrete above the north exit, her breathing controlled, her Blink timing calibrated to the exact moment when the seventh guard's trajectory would bring it within range.
The displacement was instantaneous: she blinked from the ceiling to the guard's position, materializing directly in its path, Jian already in motion.
The guard reacted.
Its speed was impressive — Enhanced reflexes responding to the spatial distortion that preceded Yue's arrival, its body twisting to avoid the blade.
But Yue had anticipated the reaction.
She had fought enough Enhanced opponents in the compound's training exercises to know that speed-optimized types always dodged left — a biomechanical bias that resulted from the particular way their Enhanced musculature was structured, the right side of their bodies generating slightly more force than the left and pulling them in that direction when they evaded.
Jian's blade caught the guard at the apex of its leftward dodge, the edge opening a line across its throat that was not deep enough to be immediately lethal but deep enough to disrupt the Enhanced physiology's accelerated healing.
Blood sprayed — hot, arterial, the pressurized output of a heart that was beating at the elevated rate of a speed-optimized metabolism.
The guard staggered, its hands going to its throat, its forward momentum carrying it past Yue and into the wall of the corridor.
Yue blinked behind it.
Jian struck again — a precise thrust through the gap between the guard's shoulder blades, the blade entering the thoracic cavity and penetrating the heart.
The guard dropped.
"Chocho," Jae-min commanded, flat.
The seventh guard was down, but the corridor beyond the north exit was not clear.
Jae-min's spatial awareness had mapped three more thermal signatures — reinforcements, moving fast from the deeper chambers, drawn by the sound of combat.
The team needed to clear the corridor before the reinforcements arrived, and the team needed to do it now.
Chocho transformed.
The flash of white light was blinding in the bioluminescent gloom.
The crack of static electricity was deafening.
The temperature in the chamber spiked.
And then the ten-foot, nine-tailed white fox was there, her body filling the north exit, her nine tails streaming behind her, the arcs of blue-white lightning jumping between them illuminating the concrete in stroboscopic flashes.
She opened her mouth.
A bolt of lightning erupted — a concentrated beam of electrical energy that traveled down the north corridor at the speed of light, conducted by the moisture on the walls and the wet concrete floor.
The three reinforcement guards, forty meters down the corridor, never had a chance to react.
The bolt hit the first guard in the chest.
The charge was conducted through the wet floor to the second guard.
The charge was conducted through the wet walls to the third guard.
Fifty thousand amperes.
The particular amperage of a lightning strike.
Three guards' nervous systems ceased to function in the space of a single heartbeat.
Three guards dropped.
Chocho shrank back to her small form.
The ten-foot fox compressed into the house-cat-sized creature with a flash of white light and a crack of static.
She trotted back to Gabriel's heel, her blue eyes bright, her single tail wrapped around her paws.
She clicked once in the back of her throat.
"Ten," Gabriel reported, bright, her golden eyes wide. "Still counting. Ten."
"Clear," Jae-min reported, flat. "Ten down. No alert reached the deeper levels. Move."
The team advanced through the north exit.
The corridor beyond was narrower — approximately two meters wide, just wide enough for two people to walk abreast — and the bioluminescent glow was dimmer here, the organic patches on the walls growing sparser as they moved deeper into the basement.
The temperature continued to rise, the humidity thickening until the air felt like warm water, each breath a conscious effort that required the lungs to work harder than they should have.
Jae-min counted the heartbeats.
Each one that stopped was a weight on his chest.
He was aware, in the analytical, detached way that his Enhanced cognition processed such things, that this was not normal.
Baseline humans did not count heartbeats.
But Jae-min was not baseline, and the counting was automatic, and each absence registered as a small, specific loss — not the emotional loss of grief, but the logistical loss of a data point, a variable removed from the equation, a life that had been and was no longer.
He did not dwell on this.
Dwelling was a luxury, and luxuries were for people who were not walking through a reptilian basement in the frozen apocalypse with five teammates and a mission to erase a monster.
— • • • —
Day 145. 06:05 hours.
Robinson's Galleria Ortigas.
Basement Level — Sublevel 4.
The Defensive Chamber.
The corridor branched again.
Jae-min's spatial awareness identified the correct path — the left branch, which descended through another ramp toward the parking structure's lowest level.
The right branch led to a cluster of chambers that Jae-min's thermal imaging identified as warm, occupied, biologically active — not guards, but something else.
Enhanced subjects in some stage of development or containment.
The anomaly's production facility.
"Not our objective," Jae-min directed, flat. "Left branch. Stay focused."
They took the left branch.
The ramp was steeper than the first, the angle approaching forty-five degrees, the concrete surface wet and slick with condensation that pooled in the grooves and flowed downward.
The bioluminescent glow was almost gone at this depth, the organic patches sparse and dim.
Jae-min navigated primarily by spatial awareness.
The floor leveled out.
The corridor opened into another chamber — larger than the open area at the base of the first ramp, approximately thirty meters wide and twenty deep, with a ceiling five meters high.
The chamber had been created by the anomaly's modification of the original parking structure, the concrete walls and floor showing the carved, gouged marks of altered architecture.
It was occupied.
Jae-min's spatial awareness registered twelve thermal signatures — Enhanced guards, distributed in a loose semicircle around the northern exit, the only way forward toward the anomaly's location.
The guards were different from the ones the team had encountered in the upper corridors: larger, more heavily built, their body heat higher, and their thermal signatures more concentrated. Strength-optimized.
Or a hybrid type that combined elements of both.
"Twelve contacts," Jae-min directed, flat. "Chamber ahead. Defensive line at the north exit. Mixed profiles — speed and strength. This is a blocking position."
"They're learning," Mark Jordan measured, dry, his amber eyes on the chamber. "The first group was a patrol. Second was a hunt. This is a prepared defense. Someone's directing them."
"The anomaly," Ji-yoo offered, fierce, her grip on Soulcleaver tightening. "It is awake. It is watching. And it is not impressed."
"Then let's change it's mind," Yue returned quietly.
Jae-min assessed the situation.
The chamber's geometry was unfavorable for a direct assault — the wide, open space gave the guards room to maneuver, and the defensive line at the north exit meant the team would have to fight through twelve Enhanced opponents while advancing toward a chokepoint.
But the team had Gabriel.
And the team had Chocho.
"New approach," Jae-min directed, flat. "Yue — Blink in. Hit the right flank, work inward. Break the line. Mark Jordan — follow through the breach, hit the left. Black Hell Flame for area denial. Ji-yoo — center. Soulcleaver for crowd control. Gabriel — funnel them. Keep them in the chamber. Nobody escapes. Chocho — on my command. I've got Overwatch."
"Copy," the team echoed through the comm.
"Copy, oppa," Ji-yoo confirmed, fierce.
Yue Blinked.
She materialized at the eastern edge of the defensive line, Jian already in motion, and the guard nearest to her materialization point died before it could react — the blade entering through the side of its neck and exiting through the other side, the cut so clean and so fast that the guard's body remained standing for a full second before collapsing, the delayed reaction of a nervous system that had been severed before it could register the signal to fall.
The second guard on the eastern edge turned toward the spatial distortion.
Yue was already striking — Jian's blade carving a line across the guard's forearm that severed the tendons and rendered the limb useless.
The guard roared — a sound more animal than human — and lunged with its remaining arm.
Yue Blinked past it, materialized behind it, and drove jian into the base of its skull.
The guard dropped.
The defensive line shattered.
Mark Jordan entered through the breach.
Ifrit's Hell Katana blazed — the Black Hell Flame pouring from the blade in a jet-black corona that absorbed the chamber's bioluminescent light, casting no glow, casting only darkness, the heat flash-vaporizing the humid air around the blade into a shockwave of superheated steam that preceded his advance.
The guards on the western edge recoiled — the particular recoil of creatures whose Enhanced physiology could withstand cold and bullets and blades but could not withstand the Black Hell Flame that consumed light and produced only heat.
Mark Jordan engaged the western edge with overwhelming force.
The katana came down on the first guard's raised arms — the Black Hell Flame flash-vaporizing the tissue on contact, the limbs separating at the midpoint in a spray of superheated steam and carbonized organic matter.
The guard's body, cauterized as it was destroyed, did not bleed.
The guard dropped.
Mark Jordan stepped past it and struck the one behind it, the katana opening a line across its chest that the Black Hell Flame immediately cauterized, the tissue carbonizing, the wound smoking.
Gabriel launched.
Not at Mach 1.5 — the ceiling was too low.
But the wind gathered in her hands, and she shaped it into a wall — a compressed-air barrier that she drove across the chamber from east to west, funneling the guards inward, preventing any from escaping to the sides.
The guards that hit the wind wall were thrown back, their speed-optimized bodies no match for the pressurized air that Gabriel controlled.
They were herded.
They were concentrated.
They were pushed toward the center of the chamber, where Ji-yoo was waiting.
Ji-yoo advanced through the center.
Soulcleaver swept in wide, gravity-compressed arcs, the blade's field catching multiple guards in each rotation and pulling them toward the scythe's edge.
The effect was like a scythe cutting through wheat — the guards caught in the gravity field were dragged toward the blade regardless of their attempts to resist, their Enhanced strength insufficient to overcome the compressed-gravity force that Soulcleaver generated.
One guard was pulled off its feet and bisected mid-air.
Another was caught by the gravity wavefront and slammed into the wall with enough force to crack the concrete.
A third tried to run and found that the gravity field had anchored its feet to the floor.
Jae-min provided overwatch from the entrance.
The dual Glock 19s fired in controlled, precise bursts — Wormhole Guided Bullets that bypassed the chaos of the close-quarters combat entirely, each round emerging from a micro-wormhole directly in front of its target and entering the target's body at the most vulnerable point available: eye socket, temple, base of the skull, the thin gap between the armored plates on the neck.
The bullets were impossible to dodge — they appeared inside the target's guard, bypassing any defensive posture — and impossible to block.
Four guards fell to Jae-min's overwatch in the time it took the rest of the team to engage the remaining eight.
"Chocho, deploy," Jae-min commanded, flat.
Chocho transformed.
The flash of white light was blinding.
The crack of static electricity was deafening.
The ten-foot, nine-tailed white fox materialized in the center of the chamber, her body filling the space, her nine tails streaming behind her, the arcs of blue-white lightning jumping between them illuminating the concrete in stroboscopic flashes.
The remaining guards — four of them, clustered near the north exit, trying to form a last defensive line — saw the fox and froze.
The particular freeze of creatures that had been built by the anomaly and had never seen another Enhanced creature, and did not know how to process the information that a ten-foot white fox with nine lightning-charged tails was standing in their chamber.
Chocho opened her mouth.
Four bolts of lightning erupted — one for each guard — the bolts splitting from a single point in Chocho's throat and arcing to each target with the particular precision of an Enhanced creature that had learned to control its charge.
Each bolt hit its guard in the chest.
Each guard's nervous system ceased.
Four guards dropped simultaneously, their bodies hitting the wet concrete floor with four wet sounds in rapid succession.
"Clear," Jae-min reported, flat, his spatial awareness sweeping the chamber. "Twelve neutralized. North exit is open."
Chocho shrank back to her small form.
She trotted to Gabriel's heel, her blue eyes bright, her single tail wrapped around her paws.
She clicked once.
"Twenty-two," Gabriel reported, bright, her golden eyes on the bodies. "Still counting. Twenty-two."
"Good," Jae-min allowed, flat. "Keep counting."
The combat had lasted ninety-three seconds.
Jae-min counted.
Twelve Enhanced guards neutralized.
The chamber was clear.
The north exit — the corridor that led to the anomaly's location — was open.
Jae-min did not feel victorious.
He felt the weight of twelve absent heartbeats pressing against his chest, the cumulative mass of lives ended in the space of ninety-three seconds.
Each one had been someone's experiment, someone's project, someone's attempt to create the next stage of human evolution.
Each one had been a person, once — before the serum, before the Enhancement, before the anomaly had reshaped them into the predators that the strike team had just destroyed.
He did not allow himself to feel more than the weight.
Feeling more would slow him down, and slowing down would get people killed.
"North exit clear," Jae-min directed, flat. "Advance. Two hundred meters to the anomaly. Hardest part's still ahead."
The team moved toward the north exit.
— • • • —
Day 145. 06:14 hours.
Robinson's Galleria Ortigas.
Basement Level — Sublevel 4.
The Final Corridor.
The corridor beyond was wider — approximately four meters wide, with a ceiling height of five meters — and the bioluminescent glow was stronger here, the organic patches on the walls larger and more numerous, their blue-green light casting the corridor in an eerie, submarine luminescence that pulsed with the anomaly's 32-beats-per-minute heartbeat.
The air was warm and thick and smelled of reptile and serum and the particular organic wrongness that permeated the entire basement.
The moisture on the walls was no longer condensation — it was secretion, the particular secretion of a living organism that had grown into the building's infrastructure and was now sweating.
Jae-min's spatial awareness mapped the corridor ahead.
Two hundred meters.
The anomaly's thermal signature was becoming clearer with every step — not a single mass, but a distributed signature, the particular signature of an organism that had spread itself across the chamber's surfaces.
The walls.
The floor.
The ceiling.
The pillars.
The anomaly was not in the chamber.
The anomaly was the chamber.
"It's a distributed organism," Jae-min directed, low, his dark eyes on the corridor ahead. "The chamber is its body. The body is the chamber. We're going to be inside it when we engage."
"Inside it," Mark Jordan measured, dry, his amber eyes on the walls.
"Yes," Jae-min confirmed, flat.
"Then we're already in its stomach," Gabriel offered, bright, her golden eyes wide.
"Yes," Jae-min confirmed, flat.
"Good," Gabriel returned, bright. "Always wanted to be eaten by a shopping mall. Bucket list."
"Abby," Ji-yoo cut, fierce.
"Sorry," Gabriel returned, bright.
Chocho, in her small form at Gabriel's heel, clicked once in the back of her throat.
The click was low and resonant.
The ten-foot fox was not there yet — Chocho was still conserving her charge — but the click was the click of a creature that was ready to deploy at the first sign of contact.
Yue, at the point, was moving with the particular coiled stillness of a woman whose Blink was cycling at maximum readiness.
Her marble eyes were on the corridor ahead.
Her Jian was in her hand.
Her body was the body of a woman who was about to enter the anomaly's chamber and was not afraid.
The anomaly's heartbeat pulsed.
Thirty-two beats per minute.
Patient.
Immense.
Waiting.
Jae-min felt it through his spatial awareness — the slow, immense rhythm of a predator's heart, patient and unhurried and utterly unconcerned by the violence that was approaching it through its basement.
The anomaly did not know what was coming.
The anomaly did not care what was coming.
The anomaly had been growing for one hundred and forty-five days and had consumed every resource in the Galleria and had produced dozens of Enhanced guards and had become the chamber and was waiting for the team to enter it so it could consume them too.
Jae-min's hand drifted to his chest — to the place where Oblivion slept, the particular place in the geometry of his existence where the doomsday weapon had been waiting for one hundred and twenty-four days.
The weapon stirred.
Not fully — Oblivion did not stir fully unless called — but the particular stir of a weapon that sensed its wielder's intention and was preparing to be needed.
Jae-min's hand dropped.
Not yet.
The Glocks first.
The Wormhole Bullets first.
The team first.
Oblivion was the last resort, and the last resort was not yet.
"Strike team," Jae-min directed, flat, his dark eyes on the corridor, his dual Glock 19s in his hands. "Two hundred meters. Five-point coverage. Chocho — reserve. On my command. Hardest part's still ahead."
"Copy," the team echoed.
"Copy, oppa," Ji-yoo confirmed, fierce.
The team moved.
The corridor stretched ahead — wide, warm, bioluminescent, the walls pulsing with the anomaly's heartbeat, the air thick with the smell of the anomaly's body, the floor wet with the anomaly's secretions.
Two hundred meters.
One hundred and ninety.
One hundred and eighty.
The anomaly waited.
And the strike team advanced.
Two hundred meters.
Then the anomaly.
Then whatever came next.