Chapter 12 – Iron Veil

Section 1 – The Breach

The alarm klaxons tore through the underground base like jagged knives of sound, rattling the metal walls and shoving everyone awake into a state of grim urgency. Red emergency lights pulsed in rhythmic flashes, drenching the halls in crimson that turned every face into a mask of blood and shadow.

Nathan’s eyes snapped open before the second alarm finished wailing. He was already halfway off his cot when his instincts took over. His body hummed with that strange new energy, every nerve sharpened, every muscle wound tight. By the time his boots struck the floor, he was alert, breathing steady, heart pounding but controlled.

Something was wrong. Not a drill. Not a simulation. This was an attack.

He sprinted down the corridor, curls bouncing against his forehead, his dark eyes scanning the chaos as trainees and veterans alike scrambled to stations. The metallic tang of fear was in the air, thick and undeniable. People shouted over each other—callsigns, warnings, the bark of orders echoing down the hall like gunfire.

Raze appeared from the left corridor, her hood thrown back, the scarred half of her face highlighted in the crimson pulse. Her cybernetic jaw twitched as she snapped at a pair of recruits to hold their line. When her gaze found Nathan, it locked like a steel trap.

“They’re here,” she said, voice rough and urgent. “Iron Veil.”

The name hit harder than the alarms. Nathan had heard whispers of them in the training halls, fragments of lore from mentors’ lips when they thought no one was listening. A shadow organization, brutal and efficient. Enhanced killers with no allegiance except to their own twisted doctrine. They were the ones who had been watching him. The ones who wanted him.

And now, they were inside.

The ground shook violently as a distant explosion rocked the far wing of the base. Dust rained from the steel beams overhead, and the emergency lights flickered. The air carried a new scent now—ozone and burning metal.

Corvus’s voice cut through the chaos, amplified by the intercom: “All units, sector lockdown! Defensive positions! Contain the breach!”

Nathan ran alongside Raze as they pushed into the main hangar. What he saw turned his stomach.

The enormous blast doors, supposedly impenetrable, were torn apart as though ripped open by monstrous hands. Smoke curled from their twisted edges, and beyond them, shadows moved with precision. Figures in matte-black armor flowed into the hangar, their movements too fluid, too coordinated to be ordinary soldiers. Their helmets bore a single sigil across the visor: a jagged veil, painted in iron-grey.

Iron Veil had arrived.

The first wave of defenders met them head-on. Sparks and muzzle flashes lit up the hangar in chaotic bursts. The sound was deafening—gunfire, shouts, metal grinding against metal. Nathan’s enhanced perception slowed it all down, every detail amplified: the trajectory of bullets sparking against reinforced plating, the glint of a blade arcing through the air, the exact rhythm of boots striking the ground as Iron Veil surged forward.

“Nathan!” Raze barked, tossing him a combat baton crackling with low-voltage energy. He caught it in one hand without breaking stride, his reflexes automatic.

The first Iron Veil soldier was already on him. Nathan pivoted, baton flashing in an arc that cracked against the soldier’s helmet with explosive speed. The man staggered, but Nathan was already moving, his body a blur of practiced reflexes and raw power. A second soldier lunged from the side; Nathan ducked low, planted his foot, and spun upward, the baton striking the underside of the soldier’s jaw. The force sent the armored figure crashing into a stack of crates.

He wasn’t just fighting. He was flowing.

Every ounce of unconventional training, every explosive movement he’d honed in the quiet hours, every instinct sharpened by loss and rage—it all came alive in the chaos. His speed wasn’t superhuman, but it was devastating. His ability to read motion, to anticipate fractions of a second before others could act, gave him the edge.

Corvus appeared through the haze, cutting down an Iron Veil soldier with ruthless precision. He caught Nathan’s eye across the battlefield and gave the smallest nod—not approval, not encouragement, but acknowledgment.

“They want you alive!” Corvus shouted, slamming the butt of his rifle into another enemy’s chest plate. “Don’t give them the chance!”

The words chilled Nathan. They were here for him. The prisoner from Sector 12 hadn’t been lying. Iron Veil wasn’t here to destroy the base. They were here to take him.

As the battle raged, Nathan’s senses pushed further. He caught glimpses of Iron Veil commanders in the back line, observing, directing. Their posture was confident, too confident, as if the chaos in the hangar was just the opening act. His gut twisted—they weren’t here for a raid. This was a message.

A sudden scream snapped his attention left. One of the trainees, barely older than Nathan himself, was pinned under debris as an Iron Veil soldier raised a blade to finish him. Nathan’s body moved before thought could catch up. He launched forward, baton in hand, his legs pumping like pistons. He slammed into the soldier with explosive force, knocking him off balance. In one fluid motion, Nathan swung upward and struck the soldier across the visor, shattering it into shards. The man collapsed.

Nathan hauled the trainee up by the arm. The kid’s eyes were wide, terrified. “T-thank you—”

“Stay alive,” Nathan snapped, shoving him toward the cover of a barricade.

Another explosion rocked the hangar. The east wall split open in a rain of fire and debris, revealing yet another squad of Iron Veil soldiers pouring in. Nathan’s heart hammered. They were everywhere, relentless.

“Fall back!” Raze shouted, cutting down an attacker with a vicious slash of her blade. “Regroup at the inner barracks!”

But Nathan barely heard her. Across the smoke-choked battlefield, through the haze of sparks and shadows, he saw him.

A figure unlike the others. Taller, leaner, his armor marked with deeper, jagged sigils. His helmet bore no visor, revealing eyes that glowed faintly with unnatural light. He stood calm, untouched by the chaos, his gaze fixed squarely on Nathan.

The leader.

The one who wanted him.

For a moment, time froze. Nathan felt those eyes pierce through him, as if peeling away flesh and memory, stripping him to the bone. His hands clenched the baton tighter, knuckles white, breath ragged.

And then the leader lifted a hand, almost lazily, and gestured.

The Iron Veil soldiers surged harder, their formation tightening, pressing the defenders back step by step. Nathan realized with sick certainty—they weren’t just attacking. They were funneling him, driving him exactly where they wanted.

Raze grabbed his shoulder, shaking him back to the moment. “Move, Nathan! Don’t let them box you in!”

But it was too late.

The leader was coming.

And Nathan knew, with bone-deep certainty, that this was only the beginning of Iron Veil’s hunt.

Section 2 – Barricades and Betrayals

The defenders poured back through the interior corridors, boots pounding against steel plating as alarms screamed overhead. The crimson glow of the emergency lights made the walls look slick with blood, each pulse a reminder of the chaos closing in from the breached hangar.

Nathan stumbled into the fallback position with Raze at his side, sweat dripping down his temple, his curls sticking damp against his forehead. His chest rose and fell with sharp bursts, but his eyes remained wide, scanning, anticipating. Every clang of metal, every hiss of hydraulics, every faint vibration beneath the floor drew his attention. He could feel where the fight was moving, as if the entire base had become an extension of his nervous system.

“Shut it down! Reinforce the inner barricade!” Corvus barked, pushing past a cluster of younger recruits who were fumbling to mount barricades along the corridor. His voice was raw with authority, the kind that brooked no hesitation. “If they breach here, it’s over.”

Steel shutters ground down across the corridor behind them, cutting off the ruined hangar. Sparks showered as welders scrambled to seal weak points. Sandbag emplacements were dragged into place, makeshift though they were. It was improvisation under fire, but it was the only thing they had.

Nathan grabbed an ammo crate and heaved it into position, muscles straining, his dark eyes flicking across the room. The others worked frantically, but something gnawed at him—movements that didn’t add up, shadows in the corners that seemed to linger too long.

“Eyes up,” Raze muttered, her voice low but steady. “They’re going to probe us before they push again. Expect the unexpected.”

Nathan nodded, but the unease didn’t fade.

The first probing attack came minutes later. A ripple of smoke pushed down the corridor, too thick, too deliberate to be incidental. The defenders snapped to aim as shapes moved in the haze. Gunfire roared, bullets sparking off barricades and steel walls. Nathan moved before thought, pivoting and dragging a panicked recruit behind cover just as rounds chewed through where the boy’s head had been.

Then the smoke cleared. The corridor was empty.

“Decoys,” Corvus growled. His scarred hand flexed around his rifle. “They’re testing our nerves.”

And it worked. Whispers rose among the recruits. They spoke of Iron Veil’s reputation—their ability to infiltrate, to corrupt from within. Their voices cracked with fear, and the word traitor slipped from more than one tongue.

Nathan’s fists clenched as he listened. The memory of the earlier betrayal, the spy embedded for years, was still raw. He couldn’t blame them for fearing shadows in their own ranks. But when one of the recruits—a lanky boy with hollow cheeks and too-large eyes—cast a glance at him and muttered, “Maybe they’re here for him,” Nathan felt his chest tighten.

Raze’s voice cut the tension like a blade. “You want to live through this, you shut your mouths and focus. Iron Veil doesn’t need us tearing each other apart—they’ll do it for us.”

The boy shrank back, eyes dropping to the floor, but Nathan could feel the doubt spreading like a virus.

Hours seemed to stretch into eternity as they held the barricade. Each minute was marked by distant explosions, by the occasional tremor that shivered through the floor. The defenders rotated shifts, snatching what rest they could against the cold steel walls. Nathan didn’t rest. He paced like a caged predator, hazel eyes—no, darker now, almost brown-black in the dim light—tracking every sound, every shift of boots, every scrape of armor.

When he stopped near the barricade, one of the veterans gave him a wary glance. “You move too damn fast for comfort, kid,” the man muttered. “Feels like you know what’s coming before it does.”

Nathan didn’t reply. He just tightened his grip on his baton and turned away. He didn’t want to admit that the man was right.

Later, during a quiet moment, Nathan sat against the wall, sweat cooling on his skin, breath fogging in the chill. Across from him, one of the trainees—Elena, with auburn hair tied back and freckles smeared by dirt—watched him. She hadn’t spoken much since the attack began, but now her voice came soft, almost hesitant.

“You don’t look scared.”

Nathan looked up, surprised. “What?”

“You fight like… like this doesn’t rattle you,” she said, her green eyes searching his face. “Like you’ve already been through worse.”

For a heartbeat, the image of his family’s broken bodies flashed behind his eyes. The laughter. The blood. His stomach clenched.

“I have,” he said quietly.

Elena’s expression softened, but she didn’t press. Instead, she leaned closer, lowering her voice. “People here—some of them don’t trust you. They think you’ll snap.”

Nathan’s jaw tightened. “Maybe they’re right.”

Silence stretched between them, heavy but honest. And yet, in her eyes, he didn’t see fear. Only curiosity. Maybe even understanding.

The uneasy quiet shattered when the inner barricade shook violently. A boom reverberated through the corridor, dust raining down from the ceiling. Shouts filled the air as defenders scrambled to positions.

Through the haze of dust, Nathan caught a flicker of motion—too smooth, too precise. An Iron Veil soldier. Then another. They were already inside.

“How the hell—?” Raze snarled, spinning into a crouch.

“They knew the codes,” Corvus barked, cutting down an attacker with a burst of gunfire. “We’ve been compromised again!”

The word traitor hit harder this time. Fear surged, louder than the alarms, sharper than the gunfire. Nathan’s stomach dropped as realization struck—Iron Veil didn’t need to brute force their way through. They had someone feeding them the keys, bleeding the base from the inside.

And in the middle of it all, Nathan caught sight of that same lanky recruit with hollow cheeks. His hands trembled, his eyes darted, and in that moment, Nathan knew: fear wasn’t his only secret.

He wasn’t just afraid.

He was hiding something.

Section 3 – The Inner Clash

The barricade buckled under the weight of explosions, sparks raining down as defenders scrambled to plug gaps with their bodies, weapons, and sheer desperation. Shouts bled into one another, drowned by the grinding roar of breaching charges and the mechanical hiss of smoke flooding the corridor.

Nathan crouched low, his curls plastered to his forehead with sweat, baton in one hand and a scavenged sidearm in the other. The world slowed, sharpened. He heard the pop of hydraulics before the shutters blew apart. He smelled the sharp ozone of charged weapons a second before they fired. And when the Iron Veil unit surged forward—five shadows moving as one—his body was already in motion.

“Push them back!” Corvus bellowed, his rifle thundering.

But the Iron Veil weren’t common soldiers. Their movements were too precise, too practiced. Each strike was part of a pattern, a web designed to overwhelm. They flowed like water through the barricade, blades flashing, weapons firing in short, lethal bursts.

Nathan darted forward, almost faster than his allies could register. He ducked beneath a slash, slammed his baton across the attacker’s wrist, and followed with a snap-kick that sent the soldier sprawling. He spun into another, firing the sidearm point-blank into the enemy’s chest.

The recoil jolted his arm, but he didn’t falter. His reflexes pulled him into the next strike, then the next, anticipating angles before they fully formed. To the others, it looked prophetic. To Nathan, it was simply instinct and speed colliding into something terrifyingly fluid.

“Eyes on Reyes!” one of the defenders shouted, awe bleeding into his voice.

But not everyone was convinced. Amid the chaos, the lanky recruit with hollow cheeks hissed, “He’s too fast—unnatural.” His whisper slithered into nearby ears, planting seeds of doubt even as Nathan’s movements saved their lives.

The clash tightened into brutal close quarters. Nathan’s baton cracked against a helmet, the impact reverberating up his arm. He pivoted, caught a soldier’s blade between his forearm and elbow, twisted until the weapon clattered free, then rammed it into the wall. The enemy snarled but Nathan didn’t hesitate—he drove a knee into the man’s gut, dropping him.

One of the Iron Veil shouted something in a language Nathan didn’t recognize—sharp, guttural syllables that vibrated with command. The others shifted, refocusing on him.

They knew.

They had come for him.

Sweat blurred Nathan’s vision, but his perception didn’t waver. Every step, every twitch of muscle telegraphed intent. He flowed between strikes, his movements explosive, almost violent in their efficiency. The corridor echoed with the sound of his blows—bone cracking, metal scraping, boots slamming against the floor.

Behind him, Raze cut down another attacker, her cybernetic jaw flexing as she spat, “They’re not here to win this fight—they’re here to take him.”

Nathan’s chest tightened, but he didn’t falter. He roared as he lunged into the nearest soldier, his baton snapping into the man’s throat with enough force to crumple his armor.

The clash dragged on, each second stretching into eternity. The barricade was a storm of gunfire, smoke, and screams. By the time the last Iron Veil soldier hit the floor, the corridor was painted with blood, the air so thick with gunpowder Nathan could taste it on his tongue.

Silence fell, broken only by the labored breathing of the defenders.

Corvus lowered his rifle slowly, his scarred face unreadable. “You kept us alive,” he said, voice flat but heavy.

But even in victory, whispers curled through the ranks. Nathan heard them as clearly as he heard the fading alarms. Too fast. Too strong. Not natural. What is he becoming?

Nathan stood among the bodies, chest heaving, his baton dripping crimson. He met their stares with dark, burning eyes—eyes that had once been hazel but now seemed almost black.

He wasn’t sure if they saw him as an ally… or something else entirely.

Section 4 – Fractures in the Ranks

The corridor reeked of iron and smoke, the taste of blood still sharp in the back of Nathan’s throat. His knuckles ached, though he barely felt it; the adrenaline in his veins was still burning like a drug that refused to fade. Around him, defenders lowered their weapons in cautious increments, every sound echoing too loudly in the stillness that followed the clash.

But if Nathan expected relief, it didn’t come. What filled the silence wasn’t celebration. It was whispers.

“Too fast…” someone muttered.

“Did you see his eyes?” another voice cut in, hushed but urgent.

“He’s not like us. Not anymore.”

Nathan’s jaw tightened. He tried to focus on the bodies of the fallen Iron Veil soldiers at his feet, but every whispered word pierced deeper than any blade. They weren’t just wary. They were afraid of him.

Corvus stepped forward, his broad frame cutting through the haze. His face was unreadable, but the weight of his stare pressed down like a hammer. “Barricade the breach,” he ordered, his gravelly voice carrying easily. “Recover ammunition. Strip the enemy of anything useful.”

The recruits scrambled to obey, glad to have something—anything—to distract from the tension.

But Raze lingered by the wall, her hood shadowing her half-burned face. Her cybernetic jaw flexed as if she was chewing on words she couldn’t quite swallow. Finally, she said, low but sharp: “They weren’t here for all of us. They were here for him.” Her gaze snapped to Nathan.

All eyes followed.

Nathan felt the weight of their stares like chains. He clenched his fists at his sides, willing himself not to react, not to show the storm that threatened to break inside him.

Corvus broke the silence. “She’s not wrong.” His tone was matter-of-fact, devoid of comfort. “The Iron Veil knew who their target was. They called him by name.”

The murmurs swelled again, some hushed, others open.

“He’s bait.”

“Or he’s one of them.”

“They’ll keep coming as long as he’s here.”

Nathan’s chest tightened until the words spilled out before he could stop them. “Do you think I asked for this?” His voice cracked like glass under pressure, rawer than he wanted it to be. The recruits froze. “Do you think I wanted them to kill my family? To drag me into this nightmare?”

The silence cut deeper than the whispers.

“I’m not a veteran like you,” Nathan continued, his voice rising, his body trembling with restrained fury. “I didn’t grow up with drills or missions. One day I had a family—my mom, my dad, my siblings. And the next…” He swallowed hard, but the memory was a blade that wouldn’t dull. “The next I walked into hell. They were gone. Just laughter in the dark and blood on the floor. That’s all I had left.”

He scanned their faces, some shifting with discomfort, others fixed on him with suspicion. “And now you expect me to be this… stoic soldier? Some machine that kills without feeling? You want me to turn it all off and fight like none of it matters?”

Raze’s eyes narrowed, but before she could respond, another voice cut in. Soft, hesitant.

“Maybe he’s right.”

It was Elara. She stepped forward, her dark eyes flicking between Nathan and the others. “We can’t pretend he’s like us. His pain is fresh—raw. And yet, even with that, he’s saving our lives. Without him, most of us would be dead already.”

Her voice cracked with urgency. “If you can’t see that, you’re blind.”

The room bristled with conflicting emotions. Some nodded reluctantly, others scoffed. One recruit muttered, “Or maybe he’s just bringing them to us.”

Nathan’s fists tightened, but Elara stepped closer, her presence like a shield. “He’s not the enemy. He’s the reason we’re still breathing. Don’t forget that.”

Raze finally spoke, her voice sharp as a blade. “And what happens when the rage that fuels him turns on us?”

The question hung heavy in the air.

Nathan’s breath came ragged. He wanted to deny it, to insist he had control—but even he wasn’t sure.

Corvus cut through the tension. “Enough.” His tone brooked no argument. “Suspicion is exactly what the Iron Veil wants. We tear ourselves apart, they win without firing another shot.” He turned his gaze to Nathan. “But she’s right about one thing.”

Nathan met his eyes, jaw clenched.

“Your rage is a weapon,” Corvus said. “But weapons don’t choose how they’re used. People do. Decide what you are, Reyes—before the rest of them decide for you.”

That night, Nathan couldn’t sleep. The barracks were filled with restless breathing, but his mind replayed the fight in slow motion. Every strike, every dodge, every fearful glance from his allies. He saw his family’s faces, frozen in that basement, their laughter echoing from unseen throats. And above it all, he heard the Iron Veil soldier’s voice.

We’ve been watching you.

He sat upright in his bunk, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. His curls hung damp against his forehead, his hazel eyes now so dark they looked almost black. He flexed his hands, staring at the faint scabs across his knuckles—already healing faster than they should.

Something inside him was changing. And no amount of whispers could deny it.

Section 5 – Shadows of Temptation

The base moved like a wounded animal—breathing shallow, bleeding light. Somewhere above the barracks, a generator coughed and caught, throwing a fluttering pall of amber along the corridor before the emergency red returned, pulsing like a heartbeat that couldn’t decide whether to keep going. Sleep was a rumor. No one believed in it anymore.

Nathan drifted the way he fought—quietly, fast, always measuring angles. He wasn’t patrolling, exactly. He just couldn’t sit still inside four metal walls with his pulse thudding and the taste of iron still ghosting his tongue. Every time he closed his eyes he saw flashes: the hangar ripped open; the Iron Veil pouring in; the leader’s gaze finding him like a sighted weapon. He moved to outrun the reel, to keep the images from hardening into something he couldn’t scrape off.

The comms suite sat on the inner ring, a circular room with consoles facing outward like sentry points. Lio had installed thin panes of armored glass after the first breach weeks ago; spiderwebbed cracks traced slender veins from the corners, relics of a test no one had confessed to running. The room smelled like hot plastic and coffee that someone had abandoned hours ago, its surface shimmering with a skin of oil.

He paused on the threshold. Every screen was alive with noise: packet streams, scrambled bands of audio, error logs stacking into towers of red text. On the central display a waveform crawled—soft, shallow, almost a whisper among the alarms. Nathan wouldn’t have noticed it if the hairs on his forearm hadn’t risen first, a prickle he’d learned to trust more than reason. He stepped inside.

“Thought you’d end up here,” a voice murmured.

Elara leaned against the far console, jacket half-zipped, dark hair tied back in a knot that had surrendered to the night. An adhesive bandage crossed her knuckle; a smear of black grease ran from wrist to forearm where she’d pulled a panel out with her bare hands during the retreat. Her eyes—sharp when she needed them to be—softened as they took him in. “You’re bleeding again,” she said.

He glanced at his knuckles. The skin, split an hour ago on a visor’s edge, had already sealed, a thin new pink over rawness. “Not for long.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She tried to make it teasing, but worry threaded the words.

“What is that?” He nodded toward the lone waveform amid the storm.

“Ghost band. It started pinging right after the second breach. Too faint for the regular filters. I only saw it because I was listening for the wrong thing.” She gestured him closer and slid a pair of headphones across the console. “Before you put those on, remember Raze’s rules: if a voice starts promising you the world, you pull back. If it starts promising revenge, you run.”

“I don’t run.” It came out too hard. He softened it with a breath. “Not from voices.”

“I know.” A beat. “That’s why I’m here.”

He put the headphones on.

The first sound wasn’t a voice at all. It was a hallway. The whisper of recycled air through a duct. The hum of a relay. Footsteps—two sets—crossing grating, too even for panic. Someone exhaled softly through a filter. Then the feed sliced clean, and a tone like a struck glass bell rang and faded. Under it, low, calm, came the voice.

“Nathan Reyes,” it said, and hearing his name from that void made his skin tighten. Not distorted, not theatrical—just certain. “You are awake. Good.”

He didn’t answer. There was no mic connected, but something about the cadence made him hold his breath anyway.

“You already know who we are,” the voice continued, warm as a confession. “But names are for uniforms. What matters is purpose. Our purpose is simple: find the ones born for velocity. The ones whose bodies answer before thought can argue. We build with them. We become with them.”

Elara watched his face, reading the twitch of his jaw, the way his eyes narrowed when he was listening so hard the rest of the world fell out of focus. “I can cut it,” she said quietly. “Say the word.”

He lifted a hand—wait.

The voice was still talking, not rushing, never begging. “They will tell you this is manipulation. They will claim we are monsters. Perhaps we are. But ask yourself: when you moved tonight, when everything blurred and the world slowed to your pace—did that feel like a sin, or like relief?” A pause, almost fond. “Speed is honesty. Hesitation is the lie.”

Something in Nathan’s chest coiled. He could hear again the micro-moments—the twitch of a shoulder before a punch, the shift of weight before a lunge, the click of a trigger a fraction of a second before recoil. How he’d slipped into those gaps like a blade sliding between ribs. No vision. Just focus so absolute it cut.

He swallowed. “They’re good,” he said, mostly to himself.

Elara’s mouth pressed into a line. “They’ve had years of practice.”

The voice went on. “You’ve felt it since you were a boy. Your father saw it in your hands when you caught falling plates without looking. Your mother saw it when you crossed streets before the light changed because you’d timed the traffic by sound. They thought it was luck. It is design.”

Nathan’s fingers tightened on the console edge. He didn’t remember the plates, but he remembered a summer kitchen in Tijuana, hot with cumin and onions, his father’s laugh rolling like a low drum as he told some foolish story, the radio crackling a ranchera his mother hummed under her breath. Watching people move felt like music even then—the downbeat in their steps, the off-rhythm in their stumbles.

“How do they know that?” Elara whispered.

“They read everything,” he said, though inside it felt like something else. Like being seen by a predator: not from afar, but from the inside out.

A soft click punctuated the feed. New audio bled in—garbled, then snapping into clarity. A woman’s voice, low and poised. Praetor Veyra, Nathan guessed. Not the leader who had watched him in the hangar—someone colder.

“Deploy packet three,” she said. “He’ll be at comms by now.”

“Packet” meant payload. The center monitor flickered as raw code crawled across the screen, burrowing. Elara swore under her breath and slammed a palm into the kill switch for external write privileges. The code stuttered, hissed, recoiled. The feed laughed—not mirth; satisfaction.

“You’re learning,” the first voice said. “Good. You’ll need that.”

“Lio!” Elara called into the room’s intercom. Static. “Lio, now.”

No answer. The base was too busy bleeding to pick up.

The voice lowered, intimate. “You are not prophetic, Nathan. You are precise. You do not fly—you strike. This is what you are: a fulcrum. We name you for what you do to the world.”

Another tone chimed. On the far right screen, surveillance feeds stuttered—three frames froze, then resumed with a half-second delay. Someone was mirroring them from outside. Not brute force. Gentle hands, expert. Iron Veil was tapping on the glass instead of breaking it, letting them hear the knuckles.

Elara leaned in, shoulder brushing his. “We should shut this down.”

“Not yet.”

She stared at him. “He’s in your head. That’s the point. This is how they take people who don’t think they can be taken.”

Nathan slid the headphones down to his neck; the voice still bled into the room through one open channel, thin but visible. He spoke quietly, the way he had when he and his father used to walk home late and he didn’t want to wake the neighbors in the tenement. “When the first one hit me tonight, my body moved before I knew who he was. I didn’t think about why he was there. I didn’t think about anything. I just… answered. It felt…” He frowned, searching. “Like the world finally matched my hands.”

Elara’s lashes lowered, not in shame, but in sadness. “That’s what they’ll sell you. That feeling. They’ll wrap a doctrine around it and call it purpose.”

“Maybe purpose is the only way to carry it,” he said.

The voice chuckled, as if it had heard him. “You are afraid of what you might become in their cage. You should be. They will fear you until the day they decide to fear you more. But with us, you are what you already are—without apology. We will not ask you to be gentler than your design.”

Elara flinched. “Turn it off, Nathan.”

He didn’t. He couldn’t. Somewhere in the feed a set of footsteps stopped, and the first voice softened further. “Do you remember the night before you left for university? Your father took you to the park after dinner. He taught you how to breathe through panic—four beats in, hold, four beats out—because he said the world runs on rhythm if you listen.” A breath—someone else’s, but close. “We listened.”

Air left Nathan’s lungs like he’d been hit. He could see it: the dim public park, sodium lights smearing everything a tired orange; his father sitting with his back against a tree, tapping two fingers against his knee: cuatro… retén… cuatro. A lesson he’d stolen and rebuilt into the way he ran, the way he moved, the way he didn’t die.

“They were watching then?” Elara whispered, horror slipping through.

“Maybe not,” Nathan said, voice rough. “Maybe they’re just very good at guessing which nights matter.”

On the waveform, a new layer slid under the voice—a melody so faint he thought he’d invented it. Not a real song. The shape of one. A contour that made his chest hurt the way old songs hurt when you didn’t know the words anymore. He pulled the headphones off and the ghost of it vanished.

He turned to Elara. “I’m not going with them.”

“I know,” she said, with a certainty he wasn’t sure he deserved.

“But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t hear something true.” He set the headphones down like a weapon he had decided not to use. “I’m fast. I’m built to answer before I think. That doesn’t make me theirs. It makes me dangerous. To everyone.”

“Not to me.” The answer was too quick to be rehearsed. She flushed and ducked her head. “I mean—on our side, danger is… useful.”

He almost smiled. It felt like an old muscle, stiff from neglect. “Careful. You’re starting to sound like Corvus.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I’ll shower if it gets worse.”

The central monitor flickered again. The waveform flattened. The voice—so sure, so patient—became distant. “We will come again. Not to harm your friends. To remove what makes you hesitate. When you finish becoming, you will find us. Or we will take you before they break you.”

The line clicked dead.

Silence wasn’t silence anymore; it was the sound of exhausted circuits cooling. Elara exhaled, shoulders dropping. She keyed the room’s recorder and saved the whole stream under three redundant file paths Lio had taught her. “Corvus needs to hear this,” she said. “Raze will want to smash the screens.”

“She can smash me first,” Nathan said. “Get it out of her system.”

Elara’s mouth tilted. “She’d miss.”

He looked down at his hands. The splits had closed completely. No scar, no trace. Strength curled beneath his skin, not loud, not wild—just there, coiled and ready like a spring. He flexed his fingers and imagined iron veils and red light and laughter in basements. The old fury rose but didn’t spill; he held it where he could use it.

“What did it feel like?” Elara asked, voice low. “Hearing them talk to you like that.”

“Like standing in front of a mirror that shows you the parts you never admit to.” He met her eyes. “Like being told you’re allowed to be the thing you already are.”

“That’s not permission,” she said. “That’s a trap shaped like permission.”

He nodded. “Maybe.” He reached past her and killed the external band, then the next, then the subtle little ghost thread that had slipped in under both. The screens steadied. The room felt smaller, safer, and more false.

Bootsteps pounded the hall. Raze slid through the door with her usual economy, eyes sweeping the room, jaw ticking. “Report.”

Elara played the highlights—the voice, the packet, the promise. Raze watched without blinking. When it ended, she didn’t look at the screens. She looked at Nathan, and what showed in her face wasn’t just suspicion. It was a mentor measuring the edge of a blade.

“They’re not seducing you,” she said. “They’re practicing for when they try.”

“They already tried,” Nathan said quietly.

Raze’s gaze flicked to his hands, then up. “And?”

“And I’m still here.”

“Good.” She angled her head toward the corridor. “Stay that way. Debrief in five. Corvus wants a full accounting of who moved where and why. Lio’s tracing their entry points. Calderón’s warming up every scanner that still works. We find the leak, we plug it, we move.”

“And if there’s more than one leak?” Elara asked.

Raze’s smile was a thin, humorless slice. “Then we learn to breathe underwater.”

She left as quickly as she’d come. The door hissed shut.

Elara reached for the headphones to coil the cord; her fingers brushed his. It wasn’t an accident. The touch lasted a heartbeat longer than necessary, said more than the room had room for. “Don’t let them make you feel alone,” she said. “That’s the first step.”

“I was alone long before they arrived.”

“You aren’t now.” She squeezed once, gentle but deliberate, and withdrew. “Come on. If we make Corvus wait, he’ll growl.”

“Already does.”

They stepped into the corridor. The red light pulsed. Somewhere far away metal screamed as a door was forced into a new shape. As they walked, Nathan cocked his head. A frequency rode the air, right at the edge of hearing. Not a voice this time. A beacon. Three blips. Pause. Three blips. Closer than the first.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

Elara frowned. “Hear what?”

He almost said never mind. Instead: “Another ghost.”

She didn’t like that. “We should tell Raze.”

“We will.” He quickened. The sound pulsed again, a patient tapping on the world’s glass. Not an invitation. A countdown.

Speed is honesty, the voice had said. Hesitation is the lie.

He lengthened his stride until the corridor blurred at the edges, until air scraped his throat cold. Not prophecy. Not magic. Just focus tuned so hard the rest of him disappeared. When the next strike came—and he could feel it coming the way you feel a storm build through bone—he wanted to be where the first hit landed.

He wasn’t going to run from their voices.

He intended to answer them.

Section 6 – Debrief and Diagnostics

The debrief room looked like it had been built out of salvaged ship ribs and stubbornness—arched steel supports, cables bundled in tidy braids, a table whose surface was more scratch than finish. Somebody had set out mugs that steamed once, now ringed with cold skins. The red emergency lights here were dimmer, but they still pulsed, as if the base itself hadn’t remembered how to breathe evenly.

Raze stood at the head of the table, hood off, the scarred half of her face lit in a copper wash. Corvus took the corner like a barricade—arms folded, shoulders turned slightly so one eye kept the door in frame. Dr. Calderón had already claimed the wall display; she chopped through windows of data with quick, precise flicks. Lio, thin and wired like a live fuse, hunched over a secondary console, earbuds in, fingers spidering across keys.

Elara and Nathan slipped in together. He felt the room glance at their proximity and look away, the way you pretend you didn’t notice something you’ll definitely whisper about later.

“Report,” Raze said. No wasted syllables.

Elara plugged a drive into the table’s port. “Ghost-band transmission piggybacked our internal error channel. We caught most of it. They pushed a packet—Calderón, it tried to write to our logging array. I killed the permissions.”

Calderón didn’t look away from the window of moving numbers. “You did more than kill them. You strangled the process mid-handshake. Good.” She flipped the audio on. The room filled with that too-calm voice naming Nathan, cutting truth out of him with soft knives.

It finished. No one spoke for a breath.

Corvus broke the silence. “They knew where to find you.”

“They knew how to make it feel like I’d been waiting to be found,” Nathan said, the honesty landing like a weight on the table.

Raze’s jaw ticked. “And did you like being seen?”

Nathan met her gaze. “I liked not lying to myself about what I am. I didn’t like that it came from them.”

A muscle eased at the corner of Corvus’s mouth. It wasn’t a smile. More like an unclenching. “Good answer.”

Calderón turned from the data. She had that look she got before bad news—gentle, clinical, determined to aim the blade clean. “The voice called you a fulcrum. Not poetic. Functional. The tests we ran last month suggested your pre-motor activation spikes ahead of stimulus in a way we couldn’t diagram. Tonight confirmed it. You’re not seeing ahead; you’re moving into the space between signals. Reaction without the tax of doubt.”

“Translation,” Raze said. “He moves before thinking makes it worse.”

“Exactly,” Calderón said. “But I want fresh baselines. Now. Lio, triage the network. Trace the vector of that packet. Reyes, with me.”

Nathan felt the room’s eyes cling to him, some like hooks, some like hands. Elara’s brushed his sleeve. You don’t have to do this alone lived in the touch without needing to step out of it. He nodded and followed Calderón out, down a corridor that smelled like disinfectant and hot wiring.

The med-lab wasn’t white. White pretends. This room wore its work: smudged steel, gray tiles webbed by hairline cracks, cabinets crowded with neatly labeled supplies. A diagnostic chair sat in the center, bolted to the floor, its padded arms fitted with quick-release straps in case a patient decided they didn’t want to be a patient anymore. Above, a halo of slim sensors hung like a crown that had forgotten it was supposed to be gold.

“Shoes,” Calderón said. “Shirt.” She spoke as if speaking less would make this easier on both of them.

He obeyed, setting boots in a rectangle, peeling his sweat-damp shirt off his back. He caught himself in the reflection of a darkened screen: a young Mexican man with a toned, compact frame built for speed more than show; curls that brushed the nape of his neck, darker than they’d been a month ago; eyes that used to be hazel but now read as near-black, light drowning in the pupil. Hands that already bore fresh, pink-finished skin where they’d split an hour earlier.

Calderón noticed. “How long since the lacerations?”

“Forty minutes,” Nathan said.

She hummed, noncommittal, and set a tray—lancet, swabs, slides. “We’ll need samples after we stress you.”

Raze slipped in, ghost-quiet despite the hardware in her jaw. “I’ll observe.”

“You’ll loom,” Calderón said dryly.

“I loom faster than you test,” Raze shot back, but she leaned on the wall out of the way.

Sensors found skin. Electrodes kissed his ribs, his collarbone, his scalp. Calderón’s hands were steady, cool. She adjusted the halo until it framed him. “We’ll run a ladder,” she said. “Neuro first. Then kinematics. Then metabolic. Lio’s patched in on the back end.”

“Ready,” Nathan said.

“Breathe,” she said. “In for four. Hold. Out for four.”

He obeyed, and the old park came back—the tree, his father’s two-finger metronome, the rhythm that taught him he could choose the size of a moment. His heart listened; the readout on the monitor flattened into an elegant sine, like water resumed after a rock was removed.

Calderón’s lips pressed tight at the numbers. “Resting rate at sixty-two post-combat. That’s… not typical.”

“Nothing about him is,” Raze said.

“Stimulus,” Calderón said, and the overhead dome flashed a white square to his right. A hand-held clicker sat in his palm. “Press when you see the cue.”

He pressed. The clock ticked in microseconds. “We’ll do twenty,” she said.

He fell into the work. Cue. Press. Cue. Press. The clicks ran into each other like beads. He didn’t think. He let his hand be a lever between light and answer.

Calderón’s brows climbed. “Average eighty-eight milliseconds,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Minimum eighty-one.” She tapped notes. “Human means sit around two hundred. Elite athletes can trim to one-sixty, one-fifty on good days. I don’t have a drawer to put this in.”

“Make one,” Raze said.

“Different modality,” Calderón said. She set a tone that chirped in one ear or the other. “Respond left hand for left, right for right. No anticipation. Move only on stimulus.”

He obeyed—until the pattern in the randomness showed its teeth, and his hands were already moving by the time the sound arrived. He could feel the chirp vector in the way the room hummed, the way the dome’s capacitors loaded a hair differently before they fired.

Calderón turned a dial. “I’m staggering the onset. He’s still initiating sub-stimulus,” she said, half to Raze, half to the recorder. “Premotor potentials spike twenty-five to thirty milliseconds before cue onset.” She glanced up. “You’re not cheating. Your nervous system is reading inevitables.”

“Next,” Nathan said, not impatient, just needing movement.

They moved to kinematics. Force plates gleamed in the floor in a lane the length of a city bus. Calderón strapped a small IMU to his ankle, another at the hip, one at the sternum. Motion-capture LEDs winked to life. “Explosive two-step. Then four-step. Then loaded.”

Nathan nodded, rocked forward, and went. The plates sang under his feet—impact, elastic return, the sharp graph of time-to-peak force bunching into absurdly tight spikes. He hit the end line before he’d lifted his eyes off the start. The second pass he dropped lower and launched harder; the third he barely heard Calderón’s “loaded” before Raze had hefted a sled onto the track with a grunt. He hooked in and drove—glutes and quads firing, calves stitching power into forward motion. It didn’t feel like speed; it felt like inevitability—his body already where it intended to be with the world scrambling to catch up.

Calderón stared at the graph. “Time to peak at one hundred and six milliseconds,” she said. “Raze?”

“Translate.”

“He’s not just fast. He develops usable force so quickly that his window to act happens before most people have finished deciding to act.”

Raze’s eyes cut to Nathan. “Which is how you looked prophetic when you were just beating their decisions to the ground.”

“Nothing ‘just’ about it,” Calderón said, but she didn’t argue the premise. “Treadmill.”

He sprang up. They ran VO₂ to the edge of safe; his lungs took it like he’d been born in high thin air. He dropped into ballistic pushups, clapping, then clapping behind, then catching on fingertips because Calderón wanted to see what would fail first: muscle endurance or neural precision. Neither did. The halo recorded; his brain’s lights danced in wavelengths the software didn’t have pretty colors for yet.

Behind the glass of the observation bay, silhouettes gathered—trainees who pretended they were on their way to somewhere else; a medic rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye socket; the lanky recruit with hollow cheeks trying to look like a shadow and failing. Nathan felt their stares the way he felt the air shift before a door slid open.

The last protocol was eye-tracking. “Targets will bloom at twelve, three, six, nine,” Calderón said, the dome shifting into a matte sky full of ghost-flowers. “Land saccade on target center. Do not jump early.”

The first set bored him. The second set bored his eyes less but not by much. On the third, she randomized amplitude and added distractors; his gaze still cut directly to the target and pinned it like he was nailing butterflies to glass. Calderón exhaled a thin, awed sound she didn’t mean to let out.

“Latency at ninety to a hundred. Predictive pursuit kicks in… here.” She tapped the screen where his eye moved before the distractor fully formed. “He’s not guessing. He’s reading trajectory from noise.”

Raze spoke from the wall, voice low. “So he’s a sniper without a scope.”

“And a boxer who starts countering before the jab leaves the shoulder,” Calderón said. “And a driver who brakes before the truck decides to swerve. It’s all the same engine.”

Calderón stripped the sensors off gently, handing Nathan a towel. His skin prickled where the electrodes had kissed him; the air found each wet circle and made it cool. He nodded thanks, towel across the back of his neck, and reached for his shirt.

“That’s not all,” Calderón said softly.

Nathan looked up.

She tilted her head at his hands. “Turn them over.”

He did. The knuckles were smooth. Not even a line to say there had once been a break in the skin. “I know,” he said.

“I don’t.” She met his eyes. “Not like this. Accelerated healing isn’t unheard of in the cohort, but the curve is wrong. The microvasculature under the skin is… denser. Your oxygen saturation barely dipped under stress. Your lactate cleared as if you never asked your muscles to pay the bill.”

“Translation,” Raze said again, softer this time.

Calderón chose the unpleasant truth. “We don’t know what the ceiling is. And we may not be the ones who defined the walls.”

They let that sit with the hum of the machines.

Through the glass, a mutter rippled. The lanky recruit leaned to his neighbor, words thin enough for Nathan’s hearing to eat. “He’s a weapon. What happens when we’re the ones in front of it?”

Elara, who had appeared in the gallery without Nathan noticing, turned that way. “Weapons have aim,” she said, voice steady. “Aim depends on who’s holding them.”

“Or who thinks they are,” the boy replied, but quieter.

Raze pushed off the wall. “Enough show-and-tell. Corvus wants assignments. Iron Veil will come again, and I’d like to greet them with something louder than last time.” She paused, and the pause meant I am choosing to say this in front of you instead of in a hall you can’t hear. “I want Reyes on my unit.”

Calderón lifted a brow. “Not quarantine?”

“If he’s a fulcrum, I want him in the fight,” Raze said. “Isolating him makes him a problem. Putting him where problems go to die makes him an asset.”

“And if they try to take him?” Calderón asked.

Raze’s smile showed no teeth. “They’ll lose fingers.”

Nathan slipped his shirt on. The cotton dragged across his shoulders like a reminder he was still made of skin. “You’re not afraid I’ll snap,” he said.

“I’m terrified you will,” Raze said, and there was no flinch in her honesty. “I’m betting you’ll snap at them, not at us. Don’t make me a bad gambler.”

“Reyes.” Corvus’s voice came through the intercom, gravel and command. “Ready to sit in a room where people argue about you?”

“Always,” Nathan said. It came too smooth; Elara’s mouth tilted in a look that said liar and I get it at once.

They filed out into the corridor together—Raze ahead, Calderón scribbling notes on a patched tablet, Elara falling into step beside Nathan. The red lights throbbed. Somewhere a pipe pinged as it cooled. The base felt like a body coming down off a panic attack: shaky, exhausted, ready to jump at shadows.

Halfway to the debrief room, Lio’s voice crackled over the general channel, a little too high. “Uh—heads up. That ghost-band? It wasn’t just a broadcast. I found three beacons piggybacking our duct sensors. Two are cold. One just woke up.”

Nathan stopped walking. The air pressed against his eardrums; under the metal and breath and distant clatter he heard it again—the soft triple blip he’d noticed with Elara, now a hair louder, like someone tapping their nail against the wall from inside the wall. Three beats. Pause. Three beats.

“Location,” Raze snapped.

Lio’s keyboard clattered in the background. “South service spine, junction delta-seven. That’s… that’s right below the debrief room.”

Corvus came on, voice iron. “Lock the room down. Raze, Reyes, intercept.”

Raze was already moving. Nathan didn’t think; he matched her stride and then passed it, body tilting into speed like a promise. Elara swore and sprinted to keep up.

“Not prophecy,” he told himself as the corridor started to blur and the air pulled cold into his lungs. “Focus. Answer. Move first.”

Behind the steel and cables and concrete, something pinged again—three notes, patient as a predator’s breath. He didn’t feel fear. He felt the world leaning toward him, asking if he would answer quick enough to keep it from tipping.

He intended to.

Section 7 – The Spine

The south service spine was a throat of metal and shadow, all hard angles and sweating pipes. Condensation beaded along coolant lines and dropped in slow, measured ticks, a metronome for nerves already stretched to snapping. The beacon pulsed again—three soft blips right at the edge of hearing—then went still, as if it were listening back.

Raze didn’t slow. She moved like a blade being carried by someone who didn’t believe in scabbards—fast, straight, lethal. Nathan fell in beside her, boots whispering over grating, breath steady, the air cold against the heat still rolling off his skin from the lab. Elara kept pace half a step behind, one hand ghosting the wall to feel for vibrations, the other hovering near the holster at her hip. No one spoke. Words would thicken the air and make everything slower.

At delta-seven the corridor kinked into a low utility bay where the ceiling dropped to a tangle of ducts. A maintenance door sat slightly ajar, its latch bent in a way you could only see if you were already suspicious. Nathan’s eyes found the flaw before his mind finished the thought. He lifted two fingers: there.

Raze nodded once and pointed—Nathan left, Elara right, Raze center. She counted down with her fingers. Three. Two. One—

Nathan slid through the gap in a burst, baton up, every sense flaring. The bay smelled like coolant and cut plastic. A tool cart lay on its side, a fan spun lazily, and beside the far wall a service panel hung open, cables splayed like veins. The beacon sat in the throat of the duct—a coin-sized disc with an ugly little charm: a ragged iron chevron etched into its face.

“Iron Veil,” Elara breathed, seeing it the same instant he did.

“Don’t touch,” Raze snapped, already crossing to it. She crouched, the cybernetic hinge in her jaw ticking as she studied the device. “Lio, we’re on site. Confirm—single active?”

Lio’s voice crackled through Raze’s earpiece, tinny with strain. “Affirm. Two others went dead when you headed that way. That one’s still chirping like a smug little—” He cut himself off. “Telemetry says proximity-only. No remote payload—unless it’s sleeping.”

“Everything dangerous sleeps,” Raze said. “And wakes hungry.” She angled her head. “Reyes?”

Nathan stepped closer without getting close, letting his eyes and ears do the reaching. The duct hummed. Air pressure felt wrong—a soft push-pull that didn’t match the base’s rhythm. Beneath the beacon’s blip there was something else. A lower, longer pulse. The kind that wasn’t meant to be heard, only felt.

He pointed at the wall mount above the duct. “Someone cut the pressure regulator. It’ll cycle, build, then vent hard. If we’re standing here when it vents, we lose balance. Then they step in.” He glanced at the ceiling. “If they’re not already here.”

Raze’s head tilted, listening with the part of herself that had survived too many rooms like this. “Eyes up.”

Nathan didn’t look up. He listened up. The faintest scuff of rubber on metal. Not in front. Not behind. Overhead, right above the service lip where pipes ran too tight for a man to crawl—unless you weren’t moving like a man.

The shape dropped fast, a smear of matte black unpeeling from the shadows. Nathan moved faster. His baton snapped up, catching the descending wrist with a crack that drove a shock up his arm. The figure twisted midair to bleed momentum, landed in a low, animal crouch, and hissed through a rebreather. Segmented armor, edges soft with fabric wraps. Mask like a blank coin stamped with the iron chevron.

Iron Veil operative. Not the rank-and-file swarmers. A knife.

Raze didn’t need to be told. She went left, forcing the operative’s line into Nathan, not away from him. “You wanted a fulcrum,” she said, voice flat. “Meet him.”

The operative didn’t waste breath on taunts. He launched. Where Nathan fought like an answer, this one fought like a problem—angles that shouldn’t have existed, joints either too flexible or too disciplined to pass for human. A blade flashed; Nathan’s baton intercepted, the clash ringing stainless through the bay. Elara circled, low and smart, eyes hunting for cords, for packs, for the one piece you pull that makes the whole thing collapse.

The world compresses in fights like that. Nathan’s vision narrowed to wrists, elbows, shoulders. He watched how tension traveled through the body a beat before the strike, how weight shift betrayed intent. He didn’t think. Thinking would have cost milliseconds he didn’t have. He let the hiss of the rebreather be a countdown, the scrape of a boot a telegraph, the angle of the hips a map. When the blade feinted high, his forearm was already there. When the knee came in for a cripple, he pivoted out and answered with a heel that clanged off shin plating. He gave ground only to take it back twice as fast.

“Left ankle’s wired,” Elara called. “Don’t wrap it—shock trap.”

Raze didn’t smile, but something in her softened by a fraction. “You two can come on all my field trips.”

The operative adjusted. He’d come for a snatch-and-grab on a shaken base; he’d found choreography he didn’t own. He changed tempo, quickening into flurries, trying to force Nathan into reactivity instead of control. Nathan refused the premise. He broke the rhythm with sharp entries, shoved when he was expected to slip, slipped when he was supposed to brawl. The baton cracked against the mask once, twice, spiderwebbing the surface. The third strike would have finished it—

The beacon pulsed longer. The pressure regulator above gave a sick little cough. The air shoved outward. Not a blast—an exhale hard enough to tip balance.

The operative rode it like a wave and cut past Nathan’s guard, blade kissing the fabric at his ribs. Elara fired—not to kill, to break motion. The round pinged off the duct and punched a chip from the mask’s cheek. The operative snarled and flicked his wrist; a palm-sized disc clattered under the tool cart.

“Grenade!” Elara snapped, already moving.

“Flash,” Nathan said, reading the bevel, and slammed his palm over his own eyes as he turned his head. The world detonated white. Raze cursed—too late to cover—but she rode the blindness with feral calm, moving where she knew the walls were.

Nathan didn’t wait for sight to return. He moved through memory and math—the operative was here when the flash went, his weight was in his right foot, the pressure vent would pull air this way—he swung where the next step had to be. The baton hit shoulder with a thud that felt like justice. The operative staggered; Raze was on him in a blink, blade angled not to kill but to pin. Elara slid in and snapped a cuff over the trap ankle, metal biting metal with a satisfying click.

The light retreated from Nathan’s eyes like a tide. Shapes returned, edges sharp. The Iron Veil operative writhed once, then stilled, chest heaving, rebreather filling the bay with that soft, regular hush. Nathan stood over him, baton at the ready, breath steady.

Raze put a knee into the operative’s sternum and leaned close. “You put a beacon in my walls,” she said, almost conversational. “That’s rude.”

The mask turned toward Nathan. The voice that came out was shaped by foam and filters—flat, sexless, the kind of tone you chose when you didn’t want to give your enemies any hooks. “Reyes,” it said. Not a question.

He didn’t answer.

The operative’s head tilted, considering him with a curiosity that made something cold climb Nathan’s spine. “They can’t hold you,” it said. “They’ll try. They’ll break you trying.”

“Funny,” Raze said. “You’re the one on the floor.”

“On purpose,” the operative said. “You’re the ones in the room.”

Elara’s eyes flicked to the beacon. “Raze—”

“Lio,” Raze snapped. “Tell me something good.”

Silence. Then Lio’s breath in the channel, too fast. “It’s not a locator,” he said. “It’s a gate key. You’re sitting on a mapped junction. The disc is a handshake. If someone feeds the right pattern—”

The beacon pulsed again. Three notes. Pause. Three. Pause. Then the pattern changed—long, short, short, long—like a door code in Morse.

Nathan felt the duct shiver. The wall beyond his shoulder had always felt thick; now it felt thin. He didn’t wait for permission. He lunged for the duct mouth and jammed the baton through the mounting brace, metal biting metal with a shriek. “Kill the regulator,” he barked. “It’s cycling to force airflow. They want a pressure differential to help the hatch—”

Too late. The panel inside the duct didn’t swing open so much as it unstitched from the idea of being closed. A seam split where there hadn’t been one a moment before, revealing a black channel and the suggestion of movement inside it—too smooth to be human, too quiet to be a machine that cared what ears were listening.

“Drones,” Elara breathed. “Small.”

“Small is worst,” Raze said. “Small goes everywhere you don’t want.”

They came like a spill of beetles—palm-sized, triangular, their edges feathered with whispering rotors. Each wore the iron chevron stamped in miniature. They didn’t attack; they fanned, mapping, lenses flickering. One paused near Nathan’s face and tilted as if politely introducing itself to a future it had already logged.

“Back,” Raze ordered, but the corridor behind them answered with a second pulse—another beacon waking deeper in the spine, this one closer, louder. Three notes. Pause. Three.

“Lio!” Raze barked.

“Yeah, so, uh,” Lio said, and Nathan could hear him trying not to panic, “the two dead beacons? Not dead. Sleeping. The handshake woke them. We’ve got three hatches live now and I don’t— I can kill power to that sector but you’ll be in the dark with—”

The lights died. The bay plunged into a syrupy black. The drones’ rotors whispered, and their lenses glowed the color of old ice.

“—them,” Lio finished weakly.

Raze didn’t waste the dark. “Elara, on me. Reyes, you’re the hammer. Break what moves.”

Nathan didn’t need light. His body knew where his feet were, where the walls were, where the rush of air from the vents was bending sound. He heard the drone that drifted too close, felt the minute displacement of air as it corrected course, and smashed it out of the air like swatting a wasp. He stepped into space and hit another with an upward snap; metal pinged off the duct and rained down in metallic rain. Elara’s pistol coughed, controlled and precise, each round a punctuation mark that made room to breathe.

The operative on the floor laughed—not loud, not gloating. Just pleased. The sound turned Nathan’s mouth dry.

“You think this is about mapping,” the operative said. “It’s about doubt. Yours. Theirs.”

Raze’s blade pressed harder. “You won’t have a throat to doubt with.”

“You’ll have him,” the operative said, turning its masked face toward Nathan, “and that will be worse.”

“Don’t,” Elara said, voice sharp and close. “Don’t listen.”

But the words were only surface. Beneath them, under the drone hiss and Lio’s ragged breathing and the soft tick of cooling pipes, Nathan heard something new—a heavier vibration thrumming through the foundation, out of time with the base’s heart. Not in the duct. Beyond it. Past the wall. The kind of sound you feel in your teeth first.

“Bigger,” he said. “Something heavier inbound.”

“Define heavier,” Raze said.

“Like… person-sized,” Nathan said, listening as the thrum subdivided—two units, then four. “No. Two. And something carrying them.”

A dull clunk answered, deep and final, as if a huge magnet had kissed steel. The duct’s new seam widened another centimeter, impatient. Cold air rolled in, tasting like outside—industrial dust, evening wet, the city’s iron breath.

Corvus’s voice hit the channel like a closed fist. “Status.”

Raze’s reply was all clipped edges. “We’ve got a hatch in the spine. Drones inside. Gate key times three. Likely boarding through service cavities. We need welders, foam, and a team with nets yesterday.”

“Nets?” Corvus asked.

“Drones hate nets,” Elara said, already unspooling mesh from a side locker she’d opened in the dark by memory. “And people.”

“On route,” Corvus said. “Two teams. Hold.”

“That’s the plan,” Raze said, then, lower, to Nathan: “You hear anything that sounds like footsteps in the walls, you say it before I think it.”

“I always do,” he said.

He didn’t. But he wanted to.

The first of the “heavier” arrivals didn’t step into the bay. It pressed against the far side of the duct, testing, searching with a claw of magnetism that made Nathan’s fillings ache. The drones danced, excited, lenses brightening. The beacon pulsed faster, no longer polite—eager.

Nathan slid forward, baton low, and felt Elara’s fingers brush his elbow—a small tether, not to hold him back, just to keep him human. He exhaled four beats in, held, four beats out. The world arranged itself along that rhythm: drones, beacon, hatch, the shape of a thing trying to be born through metal where it didn’t belong.

“Lio,” Elara whispered. “If you can dump coolant into this spine—”

“Already doing it,” Lio said, and a cold wind knifed through the bay as valves groaned open. Frost bloomed along the duct edges. The drones jittered, unhappy.

“Good,” Raze said, satisfied. “Reyes?”

“Yeah?”

“Time to be a hammer.”

He stepped into the mouth of the duct and drove the baton into the beacon bracket with everything he had. Metal screamed. The disc tore free and pinwheeled across the floor, sparks hissing where its leads ripped loose. The frantic pulse cut mid-beat. The drones stuttered, lost. For a breath it felt like they’d snuffed a star.

Then the wall on the left—not the duct, not the mount—caved inward with a sound like a jaw breaking. A slab of paneling tore free and fell into the bay, and through the ragged hole something shoved itself—a dark shape wrapped in a cocoon of mesh and armor, ferried by a spider-limbed carrier that didn’t belong to any catalog Nathan had ever been shown. The carrier’s legs stabbed into decking and held. The cocoon split.

An Iron Veil operative stepped out, taller than the one on the floor, armor inked with deeper sigils. No rebreather. A face. Calm. Eyes that found Nathan in the dark like they’d been waiting for him to grow into this exact second.

“Reyes,” the newcomer said, voice human and unhurried. “Walk with me and I’ll make them stop.”

Elara’s grip tightened on his elbow. Raze lifted her blade.

Nathan’s baton was already up. He felt the next seconds gather around him like a storm coil, full of angles and velocity and choices that would not be kind.

“Corvus,” Raze said into the channel, and for the first time tonight Nathan heard strain under her iron. “We’ve got a Praetor in the spine.”

“Hold,” Corvus said. The word was a promise and a wish.

The Praetor lifted a hand. The drones froze mid-air. The carrier flexed. Behind the hole the darkness thickened with movement.

Nathan set his feet and let the world slow to the size of his hands. Four beats in. Hold. Four out.

He wasn’t going to run.

He intended to answer first.

Section 8 – The Praetor’s Offer

The ducts opened into a cavernous chamber where the hum of machinery drowned out even Nathan’s quickened breath. Pipes ran overhead like the veins of a dying beast, dripping condensation into shallow pools that reflected the flicker of dying lights. The air smelled of rust, burnt ozone, and something acidic that stung the back of the throat.

Nathan felt his skin prickle as the shadow of the Praetor loomed larger, the spider-like machine stepping down from a recess with metallic grace. Its limbs scraped sparks against the steel as it descended, each movement deliberate, theatrical. The drones froze midair, as if the Praetor’s presence alone dictated their obedience.

“Nathan Reyes,” the Praetor said, his voice smooth and resonant, carrying the weight of someone who believed every word he spoke. “You move like lightning wrapped in flesh. Even here, in the bowels of your crumbling sanctuary, I can feel it—the hunger inside you. The others only fear it. We would make you more.”

Raze growled low in her throat, stepping forward with her fists clenched. “Don’t listen to him, Reyes. He’ll twist every word.”

Elara leveled her weapon, though Nathan noticed the tightness in her grip, the flicker of unease in her eyes. The Praetor’s calm confidence unsettled them both.

Nathan didn’t move. His pulse thundered in his ears, but his body was steady, coiled. He had seen manipulation before—the way men had laughed while his family suffered—but this felt different. This wasn’t cruelty for its own sake. This was recruitment.

“You think I’d walk with you after what your kind did?” Nathan said, his voice sharp, laced with steel.

The Praetor tilted his head. “What we did… or what they told you we did?”

The words slithered into Nathan’s mind like smoke. His instincts screamed to strike, but his thoughts wavered for the barest second. What if there were truths buried in the lies? What if—

He crushed the thought. “No games,” Nathan snapped. “You came here to kill us. So try.”

The Praetor’s smile widened. “So be it.”

The spider-machine surged forward, faster than its size should allow. Steel limbs lashed out, one crashing toward Nathan with the force of a collapsing wall. He pivoted low, his body exploding sideways with whip-like speed, rolling across the slick floor as the impact dented steel where he had just stood.

Raze fired a volley of plasma bursts, each shot sparking against the machine’s shifting armor. Elara launched a grenade, but one of the Praetor’s limbs swept it aside midair, detonating harmlessly against the far wall.

Nathan darted forward, fists clenched, and struck at the joint of the nearest leg. The blow landed like a hammer, bending the limb just enough to make the machine stagger. But the Praetor countered immediately, another limb slamming down.

Nathan felt it coming before it moved. His gift—his focus, his reflexes—let him anticipate the strike. He twisted into a narrow gap between the machine’s limbs, moving so fast that Raze shouted in disbelief.

“Impossible…” Elara whispered, tracking him with wide eyes as he blurred past her field of fire.

Nathan struck again, rapid, explosive movements battering weak points in the Praetor’s armor. Sparks flew. The machine hissed. Yet the Praetor only laughed, the sound echoing like a hymn of inevitability.

“You see?” he called over the chaos. “Even now you are more than them. They crawl, they flinch, they hesitate. You carve the air itself with your speed. Why waste that here, chained to their fear?”

“I’m not chained to anyone!” Nathan shouted, launching into a vaulting strike that cracked another limb.

The Praetor’s machine reeled, then retaliated with a concussive blast from its core. The shockwave hurled Nathan across the chamber, slamming him into a wall. Pain exploded through his ribs. His vision blurred.

“Nathan!” Elara cried out, firing desperately to draw the Praetor’s attention.

Raze leapt onto one of the machine’s limbs, driving her blade into the joint, sparks spraying her scarred face. “Get up, Reyes!” she roared.

Nathan coughed, forcing air back into his lungs. His body screamed, but already he could feel something strange—the pain dulling faster than it should, the bruises fading with unnatural speed. His knuckles, bloodied from earlier fights, no longer stung. They were healing.

The Praetor noticed too. His smile sharpened. “Yes… it’s beginning. You heal faster now, don’t you? Your body darkening, adapting. Your eyes—have you noticed the change? You’re crossing the threshold, Nathan Reyes. And once you do, they will fear you more than they already do.”

Nathan staggered forward, hazel eyes glinting darker under the failing lights. His curls clung damply to his forehead, the sheen of sweat and shadow making him look almost otherworldly. He clenched his fists, the skin already fresh despite the punishment.

“You’re right about one thing,” Nathan said, voice low, dangerous. “I am changing. But I won’t ever be yours.”

With a roar, he launched himself forward, moving faster than even the Praetor’s machine could predict. His body became a blur of explosive force, fists striking in rapid succession. Each blow rang like thunder. Armor cracked, joints buckled.

Raze and Elara seized the moment, unleashing their full firepower. Together, the three of them battered the machine into staggering retreat. For the first time, the Praetor faltered.

But only for a moment.

The machine reared up, all eight limbs raised. Energy pulsed along its frame, building into a glow so bright it seared the eyes.

Nathan skidded to a stop, chest heaving. He knew what was coming—an attack powerful enough to flatten the chamber. And this time, even his speed might not be enough.

The Praetor’s voice rolled like thunder. “Kneel, or burn.”

Nathan’s heart hammered. He could dodge. He could run. But Raze and Elara would die if he did. His instincts screamed in every direction at once, searching for an opening that didn’t exist.

The glow reached its peak.

The machine struck.

Section 9 – Breaker Surge

The chamber lit like a second sun.

White fire rippled from the Praetor’s core, rolling outward in a perfect sphere that bent the air and turned every droplet of condensation into a thousand knives of light. Nathan’s pupils slammed shut. His body moved before thought could argue—left foot loading, hips coiling, hands already catching Raze and Elara by their gear straps.

“Down!” he barked.

He didn’t drag them—he threw them. One explosive pivot and his arms snapped like springs, hurling Raze behind the thickest pillar of ductwork and shoving Elara into the shadow of a load-bearing strut. The sphere hit a split-second later, a blunt, roaring force that chewed the steel where they had just stood.

The shockwave caught Nathan full on.

For an instant the world disappeared into pressure and white noise. He felt his ribs bend like reeds, his skin rippling under invisible fingers. The blast tore him off his feet and hurled him across the chamber. He met the wall shoulder-first, the impact ringing through bone. A bright, distant part of him noted angles, rebound vectors, fall options—he chose the one that kept his skull intact. He slid down in a boneless skid and hit the grate on one knee.

Breathe. Four in. Hold. Four out.

He did it with blood in his mouth.

Raze was already up, limping on a leg that had taken more blast than she’d admit. She spat copper and rage. “Reyes!”

“I’ve had worse,” he lied, and felt something inside him knit in reply, threads pulling tight under the skin, heat flaring and fading. The pain receded as if embarrassed.

Elara scrambled from cover, fury knotted with terror. “That wasn’t a threat, that was a scuttle charge. He just tried to erase the room.”

The Praetor’s machine settled, its limbs flexing, glow fading to a cruel simmer. The commander’s face was perfectly composed again, as if annihilation were a polite opening move. “You see?” he said, eyes on Nathan. “Even when you bleed the world makes room for you.”

“Yeah?” Raze leveled her pistol. “Let’s see if it makes room when I take your head off.”

She fired for the exposed neck seam. A limb snapped up, deflecting the shot with insulting ease; another limb lanced for her ribs. Nathan was already moving—two steps and a cut-angle dash—and shoulder-checked the limb off course. Bone jolted, but the vector broke. Raze’s blade flashed, carving shallow into a joint.

“Stop talking to him,” Elara snapped at the Praetor, voice sharp enough to draw blood. “You don’t get to use his name.”

“On the contrary.” The Praetor’s gaze never left Nathan. “It belongs to the future we’re offering.”

“Then take a number,” Nathan said, and vanished into the machine’s shadow.

He didn’t truly vanish, of course; he moved fast enough to make others lose track. He saw the path—the half-steps between limbs, the micro-stalls in the spider’s cycle, the way heat pooled around overworked joints. He slipped in and hammered: baton across a knee actuator, heel into a servo housing, fist like a piston into the soft grille of a sensor cluster. The machine reeled sideways.

“Left hip!” Elara called, tracking the stutter in the limb. “The actuator’s binding!”

Nathan cut under, planted, and drove a rising knee into the hip. Steel dented. The limb buckled and the machine caught itself with another leg, the whole chassis listing for a heartbeat. Raze took that heartbeat like a gift—she sprinted up a limb like a ramp, plunged her blade into the joint seam at the shoulder, and used her weight to lever it wider. The machinery screamed.

The Praetor spoke over the metal’s pain, voice calm. “Killing me here changes nothing. Another will stand where I stood. But if you walk with me now, Nathan Reyes, every one of your enemies will learn a new word: mercy.”

Nathan barked a laugh that didn’t know how to be funny. “You burned my life down and brought a broom to sweep up. That’s not mercy.”

“Your life was a cage. We broke it.”

“You broke them,” Nathan said, and threw the baton.

It spun end-over-end—too fast for the eye, exactly slow enough for the brain that had thrown it. The baton struck the Praetor’s cheekbone with a hollow, satisfying crack. His head snapped sideways; blood beaded and ran in a red, perfectly vertical line. His eyes—calm, human—flashed something that might have been surprise.

Raze whooped. “I’m framing that.”

The Praetor’s smile returned, thinner now. He raised one gloved hand.

The drones obeyed.

They cascaded from the duct mouths like a school of blades, swarming in patterns that weren’t random and weren’t human. Nets flicked from their bellies—hair-thin monofilament that sang like violin strings as it cut the air. Elara dove, rolling under one fan and slapping an adhesive charge onto a second; it popped in blue-white light and the drone fell, smoking.

“Nets!” she shouted. “Cut angles, don’t run straight!”

Raze met the cloud with contempt and steel, slicing two nets and shouldering through a third that tried to cinch her joints. Nathan vaulted onto a toppled pipe, used it like a springboard, and heel-sliced a pair of drones out of the air in one spinning motion. A net kissed his forearm and bit; he snapped his arm down and ripped free, blood beading in a neat, ugly line. The welt sealed as he watched.

The Praetor watched too. His voice warmed. “Completion looks good on you.”

“Keep talking,” Raze said, “so I don’t forget why I hate you.”

“Because you fear what stands at your shoulder,” the Praetor said mildly, nodding toward Nathan. “Because you know tools break hands as easily as they break targets.”

Raze’s jaw ticked. “Because I’ve met men who thought they could name other people.”

“Names are just the start,” he said.

Nathan lunged again—no banter—and went for the knee he’d softened. The spider snapped down to crush him; he slid under, palms finding cold deck, spine arching, movement coiling and uncurling in one fluid burst. He came up inside the machine’s reach and hammered loose the actuator with three savage blows. The limb collapsed, throwing the chassis sideways.

Elara seized the opening. She unleashed a string of shots into the spider’s core housing, walking her fire along a seam until something inside spat hot sparks and the whole machine stuttered. The drones lost half a beat, their pattern glitching as if an invisible conductor had miscounted.

“That’s your metronome,” she said through her teeth. “Keep breaking it.”

Nathan obliged. He climbed the machine—not with grace, but with rage—fists and knees and boot soles turning it from elegant predator to thrashing steel. He reached the top plate, fingers searching for a lip. Found one. Ripped. The plate tore loose and clanged to the deck. Beneath, heat shimmered over a nest of conduit and pulsing core.

The Praetor moved for the first time—leaning aside, his palm up like a man catching rain. A pulse of force—not explosive this time, but precise—knifed up and punched Nathan in the sternum. Air left him with a burred oof. He slid, fingers scrabbling, and caught the lip with abused knuckles. Tendons screamed. He hauled himself back with a sound that was mostly refusal.

“You can’t hold him,” the Praetor said to Raze and Elara, almost gently. “You can only delay the moment he realizes what he is.”

Elara’s shot snapped the air beside his head. “And what is that? Say it. I want to hear the lie.”

“An apex,” the Praetor said. “An answer that arrives before a question knows it has been asked.”

Nathan plunged his hand into the nest and tore free a bundle of lines. The spider convulsed. Drones pinwheeled. A limb fell limp, then another. The machine sank to three working legs, listing like a ship that had forgotten which way was surface.

The Praetor sighed, a man inconvenienced by weather. “Enough.”

Two of the remaining limbs stabbed down, faster than the others—reserves the spider had hidden for the perfect moment. One caught Raze and pinned her by the shoulder to the floor. The other struck Nathan across the ribs and stapled him to the torn top plate. Pain lanced. Metal bit bone-deep.

“Nathan!” Elara bolted toward him and a net found her ankle. She fell, rolled, and cut the filament in one savage swipe of her knife. “I’ve got you!”

“Stay—” Raze grunted, teeth bared, “—back.”

The Praetor tilted his head, considering the tableau—Raze pinned and still baring her teeth like a wolf; Elara fighting through a web and refusing to stop; Nathan bleeding, breath coming ragged but measured, measured, measured.

“You have admirable friends,” the Praetor said. “Don’t make them die to prove a point.”

He flexed his fingers. The limb across Nathan’s chest pressed harder, an inch from crush. Bone creaked. Nathan saw black at the edges of his vision, the world closing down to a tube with the Praetor’s face at the far end.

“Say yes,” the Praetor said, voice low and intimate, a knife offered handle-first. “Say mine, and this stops.”

A memory rose—the basement, the laughter, the hot metal table months later, the quiet of a world that had already decided who deserved to breathe. He tasted the old helplessness and set it on fire.

“No,” he said. “But I’ll make you stop.”

He forced air in against the weight. Four beats. Hold. Four out. His hands found the limb, fingers digging for purchase in the hard lines of the joint. He didn’t try to bench-press a machine; he tried to break math. He wedged one forearm under, angled his wrist, and rolled his ribcage to change the line of force. The limb shifted a hair. Tendons burned like wire.

Raze saw it. “He’s levering it,” she gasped. “Make it angry, Elara—give him slack.”

Elara emptied her pistol into the softest seam she could see, then threw the weapon when it clicked dry and grabbed the fallen top plate like a shield. She rushed the spider with a scream that had been waiting in her since the first night she’d ever been hunted. She slammed the plate into a sensor cluster with every ounce of body weight she had left. Glass exploded. The spider jerked, rebalanced instinctively—and lifted a fraction of its weight off Nathan.

He ripped his chest free, sucking in air that tasted like rust and victory. He jammed both hands under the limb and shoved, not for distance but for angle. It rose another inch. Enough.

He rolled. The limb smashed down where his sternum had been. The impact dented steel.

Raze wrenched her pinned shoulder with a sound that made Elara flinch and tore herself loose, skin and muscle surrendering to freedom. She fell to a knee, then launched, blade in her off-hand now, stabbing for the same shoulder seam she’d opened before. The blade slid in to the hilt. She twisted.

The spider screamed. The Praetor’s composure thinned. He reached for a control he no longer had.

Nathan came off the deck like a spring released. He crashed into the Praetor, not the machine—shoulder through sternum, fist into throat, knee into thigh. The man went down hard, breath shocked out of him, his palm fumbling for that precise force again. Nathan didn’t give him space to find it. He hit him again. And again. The second punch broke the nose. The third loosened teeth. The fourth was a message from a basement full of ghosts.

“Elara!” Raze barked. “Drones!”

Elara had already scooped a net and hurled it—sideways, not up, catching the densest cloud as it banked. The monofilament flowered; a dozen drones tangled, cut themselves worse trying to struggle, and died angry.

“Corvus,” Raze panted into the mic, blood soaking her sleeve. “Praetor down—temporarily. We need binds and foam. And a coffin if you’ve got one.”

“Two turns out,” Corvus replied, engine noise roaring behind his words. “Hold.”

The spider bucked under Nathan like a bull waking from anesthesia. He didn’t stay long enough to get thrown. He straddled the Praetor, saw the man’s eyes—still human, still there—and felt something terrible and clean move through him.

“Look at me,” Nathan said.

The Praetor did.

“This is the closest you’ll ever get.”

He drew his arm back for the kind of punch that ends chapters.

A new sound cut the air—a deep, hungry thoom from the far wall, followed by a shiver in the deck plates. A seam Nathan hadn’t seen—no one had seen—peeled itself open as if the base were exhaling secrets. Cold air rolled in. From the darkness beyond, the spider-limbed carrier that had delivered the Praetor pushed a second cocoon into the room.

Raze swore. “They brought a spare.”

The cocoon split.

Not a Praetor. Worse: a tall figure with a hooded helm and armor etched in unfamiliar glyphs. The helmet’s faceplate unfolded like petals, revealing a woman’s face—older than Raze, younger than Corvus, eyes like polished stone. She looked at Nathan the way collectors look at the one piece they’ve crossed oceans to steal.

“Hello, fulcrum,” she said, voice silver and soft and final. “Mother wants you home.”

She lifted her hand. Every remaining drone froze. A thin smile curved her mouth.

“Take him.”

The surviving limb hammered the deck. The spider reared. Nets hissed toward Nathan from three angles.

He turned—but for once even his speed met too many vectors at once. A net kissed his wrist, another his ankle, a third blew past his shoulder and rebounded, curling back like a living thing. He slashed one, ripped through another, and the third cinched hard around his ribs, tightening with each breath.

“Nathan!” Elara lunged.

Raze tackled her mid-stride, dragging her behind the ruined core housing. “No! They’ll string you both!”

The new commander’s eyes never left Nathan. “Good,” she murmured to her drones, to the machine, to the room. “Bring him.”

The nets hauled. Nathan’s heels skidded on the slick deck. His ribs groaned. He dug his fingers into the filament and the filament bit back, opening crescent moons in his palms that closed as they bled.

He set his feet anyway.

Four in. Hold. Four out.

He wasn’t going to kneel.

The chamber’s lights flickered, died, came back strobing. Across the comm, Corvus roared orders that dissolved into static as the new seam widened like a wound.

Nathan bent his knees, every muscle singing—then drove backward against the pull with a sound that belonged to animals and fathers and boys who had run too far to stop.

The nets held.

For now.

Section 10 – The Iron Veil’s Net

The first net hit like a whip of liquid steel, slashing across Nathan’s arms and chest with a hiss of friction. He moved to tear it free, but the cords weren’t cords at all—they were monofilament strands, shimmering faintly with embedded energy nodes. Every time he twisted against them, they pulled tighter, the filaments burrowing into his skin with surgical precision.

His breath left him in a sharp snarl. “Damn it—”

The Iron Veil commander, her face unreadable behind a mask of obsidian etched with faint crimson glyphs, lifted a gloved hand. Another drone obeyed instantly, firing a second net. This one wrapped Nathan’s legs before he could pivot away. He crashed to one knee, sparks scattering from the monofilament as it cinched.

“Your speed is impressive,” the commander said, her voice amplified and metallic. “But speed without control is chaos. And chaos belongs to us.”

Raze lunged, blades flashing. She hacked at the strands holding Nathan’s arm, but the monofilament resisted even her edge-tempered weapons. Sparks erupted, acrid smoke rising, but the filaments held.

“Get back!” Nathan barked, more out of desperation than command. “They’ll—”

A third drone pivoted, needle-point arms releasing an electrical pulse. The shockwave slammed Raze across the chamber, her body colliding with a shattered pillar. She coughed blood but forced herself to her knees, eyes burning with rage.

Elara’s bowstring thrummed, her arrows finding their mark in two drones’ cores, reducing them to heaps of twisted metal. But for every one that fell, two more shifted into position, wings whirring.

The commander advanced slowly, as if savoring the inevitability of the capture. “You see, Nathan, even your allies know it now—no blade can sever what binds you. These nets are tuned to your frequency. You will tire. You will stop. And then you will come with us.”

Nathan’s pulse hammered. He could feel the world slowing again, that razor-sharp awareness sparking behind his eyes. Every flicker of drone wings, every crackle of energy nodes, every twitch of the commander’s hand—he caught it all, a living equation in his mind. His muscles begged to explode outward, but the nets were designed for people like him. For Enhanced. For prey.

He drew in a ragged breath. “I’m not your damn weapon.”

The filaments tightened, biting deeper into his skin. He could feel tiny rivulets of blood sliding down his forearms. His body trembled, not from weakness, but from something darker rising. He tilted his head up, his gaze meeting the commander’s mask. Behind hazel eyes now darkened to near black, a storm gathered.

Corvus’s voice thundered through the comms, though distant. “Hold them off! Reinforcements inbound!”

The commander tilted her head, amused. “No reinforcements will matter. He is already ours.”

Nathan’s chest expanded with a violent breath. He pushed against the nets, every muscle straining. The filaments screamed as they cut into his flesh, embedding deeper, but instead of faltering, he leaned into the pain. The sharp sting lit him up like fire racing through his veins.

Raze staggered forward again, ignoring her own bloodied ribs. “Nathan—stop fighting like prey. Use it. Use what’s inside you.”

Her words pierced the haze.

Nathan’s lips curled into something between a grimace and a smile. He bent forward, pulling the filaments tighter across his back and chest until his skin blistered with heat. And then—he snapped upward with explosive force.

The floor cracked beneath him.

The net glowed red-hot, the monofilament fraying as his body blurred, movements too fast for the drones to track. His arms tore apart one restraint, then another, blood streaking the air. Sparks sprayed across the chamber as half the net dissolved under the sheer torque of his muscles.

But before he could rip himself completely free, the commander’s hand cut the air in a sharp gesture. Another drone fired a fourth net, this one reinforced, glowing with crimson glyphs like her armor. It struck Nathan square in the chest, knocking the wind from him. His knees slammed into the fractured stone.

Raze screamed his name.

The commander’s voice lowered, intimate, a whisper Nathan could somehow hear over the chaos. “You cannot escape this forever. Mother wants you. And Mother always gets what she wants.”

Nathan’s breath rasped, body shaking violently as the crimson-threaded net constricted. This one wasn’t just cutting into his skin—it was burrowing deeper, pressing against nerves, searing him from the inside out. His vision flickered, his awareness expanding and collapsing in bursts of white-hot agony.

But even then, as pain threatened to blind him, a single thought seared through his skull: I will not be theirs. I will never be theirs.

He slammed his forehead into the ground, forcing himself awake through sheer brutality of will. Blood spattered, the taste of iron filling his mouth. His allies screamed his name, but Nathan’s gaze locked only on the commander’s mask, his voice breaking in a raw growl:

“You’ll have to kill me to take me.”

The commander did not flinch. “Then perhaps we shall.”

The drones adjusted, nets sparking with lethal intent. For the first time, Nathan felt the edge of true capture pressing in, suffocating, crushing. His power boiled beneath the surface, clawing to be unleashed—but would it be enough?

The chamber trembled, the sound of reinforcements drawing near. But whether they’d arrive in time—or whether Nathan would be consumed by his own rising fury—remained unseen.

And for the first time since his family’s death, Nathan felt the cold fingers of inevitability brushing his shoulders.

Section 11 – A Mentor’s Gambit

The crimson filaments dug deeper, every nerve screaming as though his very veins had been set alight. Nathan’s jaw clenched until his teeth creaked, his chest heaving against the merciless grip of the Iron Veil’s net. The commander’s shadow fell over him, cold and deliberate, her masked face tilting as though she were studying the anatomy of a specimen about to be claimed.

Then the doors at the far end of the chamber thundered open.

Corvus stormed in first, his frame cutting a silhouette of authority even in the chaos. Behind him, a squad of instructors and veterans spilled into the chamber like a flood, weapons blazing. Bolts of plasma fire streaked across the air, slamming into drones and carving arcs of molten steel.

“Nathan, hold on!” Corvus roared, his voice commanding even through the static of battle.

The commander did not falter. Instead, she gestured, and two drones swung into place like shields, intercepting the incoming fire with bursts of shimmering energy. Sparks showered the floor, throwing jagged light across Nathan’s straining form.

Raze staggered to her feet, her blades glinting in the dim light. Blood trickled down her cheek, but her voice carried iron. “They’re trying to take him alive. That’s their mistake.” She hurled herself forward, carving through two drones with lethal precision, forcing the commander to draw back several steps.

Corvus was already moving toward Nathan, but his eyes flicked to the nets with visible alarm. The crimson filaments weren’t just restraints—they were invasive, burrowing deeper every second. He crouched beside Nathan, one hand pressing against his shoulder, voice low and urgent.

“Listen to me. You have two choices: give in to this thing, or burn it out of your system. And if you burn it out, it’s going to hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt.”

Nathan’s reply came through gritted teeth, raw and defiant. “Then let it hurt.”

The commander’s head tilted again, almost curious. “So eager to destroy yourself. Mother will savor breaking you.”

Her words poured gasoline on Nathan’s rage. He drew in one last breath, the sound ragged, guttural. And then he pushed—not against the net, but through it.

The world exploded.

A sound like tearing metal filled the chamber as the crimson filaments glowed white-hot, snapping one by one under the torque of his body. Blood sprayed, muscles tearing and knitting in the same breath. The floor beneath him cracked in spiderweb fractures, the air itself vibrating as though caught in his fury.

Corvus threw up an arm against the shockwave, teeth gritted. “Gods above…”

Nathan rose, the tatters of the net hanging from his arms like burned ribbons. His darkened eyes locked on the commander, no fear in them now—only hunger.

“You don’t get to have me,” he growled. “Not now. Not ever.”

The commander hesitated for the first time, her stance shifting almost imperceptibly. Behind her mask, her breath quickened, as though even she hadn’t calculated for this.

“Instructor!” one of the trainees shouted over the chaos. “What do we do?”

Corvus’s voice cut like a blade. “We don’t stop him. We aim him.”

And for the first time, the instructors stopped trying to restrain Nathan. Instead, they opened fire at the drones around him, carving a path, funneling the Iron Veil’s forces toward him like prey being herded toward the predator in their midst.

Raze fell in at his side, her face pale but eyes blazing. “Let’s see how far this goes.”

Nathan didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He moved—an explosion of speed and precision, a storm wrapped in flesh. His fists shattered reinforced plating, his kicks ripped drones into pieces, his voice a guttural roar as he carved through the chaos.

The commander raised her hand again, a signal for retreat. She hadn’t come to die here, and she knew it.

“Fall back,” she ordered, her voice sharp. “This is only the beginning.”

The Iron Veil withdrew, their drones collapsing into smoke and shards, their shadows vanishing through cracks in the walls. The commander lingered for a moment longer, her masked gaze locked on Nathan. “You will break,” she said simply, before vanishing into the dark.

Nathan stood in the wreckage, his body trembling, blood streaking down his arms—but his eyes burned with something more dangerous than exhaustion. He had embraced it now, the rage, the speed, the fire inside him. And for better or worse, everyone in that chamber understood it.

Corvus’s voice was quiet, almost reverent. “The boy is gone,” he murmured. “What stands here now… is something else.”

The silence that followed wasn’t relief. It was fear, laced with awe.

And Nathan, chest heaving, lips cracked with blood, almost smiled.