“I’m not your enemy,” I called into the darkness below the duct. “I need to speak to the Savior. It’s important.”
Then I jumped.
Before my feet even touched the floor, another throwing knife flashed up at me. I was ready this time. I raised my V-30 and fired in a tight burst. The rounds struck the blade and knocked it aside.
She didn’t run.
She gripped the bow in both hands and twisted.
The weapon split down the middle, unfolding into two curved blades. Their tips flickered with an eerie blue glow.
She charged.
In the span of a breath, she was in front of me. Twin knives carved two blue arcs through the air, aimed at my throat.
My plasma blade was already ignited, but I felt the threat in that blue light and didn’t dare parry. I retreated hard, boots scraping metal.
She pressed forward step by step, her twin blades spinning into a storm of blue afterimages. She gave me no opening—no second to counter.
In less than ten seconds, I was driven into a corner.
There was nowhere left to retreat.
“Lord Blin!” I shouted.
I abandoned defense. I abandoned evasion. I threw the name at her like a lifeline.
The blue blades stopped.
They hung in the air less than two inches above my head.
“What did you just say?” she demanded, shock cutting through her voice.
“Lord Blin,” I said quickly. “The way you fight—it’s like Lord Blin.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You know my master?”
“More than that,” I said. “I know Hector. Hector Lee Gibran.”
“Old man?!” Her expression flashed—disbelief, then something sharper. “Who the hell are you?”
“He sent me,” I said. “He told me to find the Savior. I’ve something I need to deliver. Something important.”
She lowered her blades and stepped back a pace, studying me as if trying to decide whether I was insane.
“Interesting,” she said. “How am I supposed to believe you?”
“I’ve—”
My words died.
My interface refreshed.
Father’s signal snapped back in, growing stronger by the second.
Desperation swallowed me.
I raised my plasma blade and slashed at her.
“You…?!” Her eyes went wide.
I couldn’t let her say anything else. I surged forward and attacked in a rapid sequence, forcing her back. My behavior was so irrational it stunned her; for a moment, she forgot to counter and retreated on instinct.
Then—
BOOM.
The duct overhead tore open. An Exiler dropped down and swung his plasma blade straight at her head.
She back-rolled out of the strike, then drove her blue-glowing blade into his waist. The Exiler toppled like a lump of iron and went still.
A Raider dropped next.
A throwing knife hit him before he landed.
She finished him with one clean cut.
More robots began to fall from the ruptured duct.
She killed the nearest attacker and bolted.
I chased with the Exilers that had arrived behind me. The corridor was short. At the far end, a gate waited.
As she approached, the gate opened automatically.
She slipped through.
It slammed shut behind her.
We almost collided with the door.
“Useless,” Father’s voice snapped across the channel, uncharacteristically sharp. “A whole group, and you can’t even stop one bio-human.”
Sparks flared on the far side of the gate. A Flamecaller cut an opening, and the rest of our team flooded in. An engineer immediately planted a comms relay beacon into the wall, impatient to restore full signal.
The Exiler she had stabbed rebooted and staggered to his feet. The blue glow on her weapon appeared to function like an EMP strike—disabling rather than destroying.
The Raider was less fortunate.
Where the throwing knife had struck him, corrosion had eaten a hollow through his chassis. He struggled upright—then snapped cleanly in two.
The Flamecaller continued cutting at the door the bio-human had used. Beyond it was a small parts workshop. When we entered, several other squads were already sweeping the area. Two Umbrals stood among them, silent and unnatural.
Father had clearly mobilized everything nearby to corner her.
But according to the public channel, no one had found a trace.
Nearly a hundred units searched the entire level. Nothing.
We descended several more floors. Still nothing. These levels produced missiles, power cores, and ammunition. It seemed the Savior didn’t want to fight here any more than Father did.
So we kept going down.
Near a stairwell, we heard dense gunfire echoing from below. Under Father’s urging, we ran.
This workshop was the largest firefight I’d seen since breaching the fortress. Plando and the Savior’s forces had been locked in a brutal stalemate. The floor was carpeted with wreckage, and units still fell at irregular intervals.
Father’s warning appeared in the public channel.
The sniper was back.
It had already killed more than a hundred of us.
Even with our additional squads, our numerical advantage didn’t translate into safety. We couldn’t pinpoint the sniper’s position. Even behind cover and layered shields, it found microscopic gaps and planted needle rounds into our heads with impossible accuracy.
I was not exempt.
I pushed my performance to the limit, but I didn’t fire at Tower Clan targets. I didn’t chase kills.
I had only one objective now.
Survive long enough to find a chance to break away from Father.
I crouched behind a slab of cover with several others. I grabbed a fallen unit’s shield and held it over my head. The unit beside me popped up to fire—
His head exploded.
Father had already begun calculating trajectories. Within seconds, a rough sniper position marker appeared on our map, and area-saturation weapons pounded the coordinates.
Then, only a few seconds later—
A violent explosion detonated inside our own line.
The entire workshop shuddered. In a single instant, dozens of our units were torn into fragments. Smoke and dust flooded the room in a choking wave.
What—
“Disperse! A ‘Tyrant’ tank is present!” Father’s warning had appeared seconds earlier, but time that short might as well have been no time at all.
Only now did I truly register the scale of the space.
This was not a fighter bay or a parts shop.
This was a vehicle assembly workshop.
While the dust still hung in the air, I saw an overhead crane hook nearby. I leapt, caught the steel, and hauled myself up onto the bridge crane before the next shell arrived.
It hit where I’d been hiding.
The public channel turned a dozen more unit indicators gray.
The crane was built to hoist massive vehicle components. It was broad and rigid. I pressed myself against the side of a crossbeam, using it as the only cover left in the room.
Father had not expected a heavy unit like a Tyrant tank inside the fortress. We hadn’t been equipped to counter it.
Retreat wasn’t possible. There was only one exit. If we rushed it together, a single shell could wipe us out. If we withdrew in small groups, the sniper would harvest us one by one.
Below, the remaining ground cover shattered under repeated impacts. There was nowhere safe on the floor.
A few units judged my position to be safer and climbed onto the crane with me.
That only drew more fire.
The crane’s frame erupted in showers of sparks.
The situation collapsed toward certainty. We were being beaten without options. Father stopped issuing new directives—perhaps he had already written this sector off. He managed an entire battlefield. When a point became unrecoverable, he shifted resources elsewhere.
It happened all the time.
Through a gap in the smoke, I finally saw it.
The Tyrant.
And I felt something close to despair, because its barrel was lifting—slowly, deliberately—until it was aligned with the crane.
With me.