Michael stood over the hollowed-out corpse of the Phase Hound, the ghost of its dying scream still echoing in his head.
He looked at Jinx.
She looked at him.
Her eyes, usually a wild, electric blue, were wide and dark with a terror
He had saved her.
He had also just shown her the monster that lived inside his soul.
Trust, it seemed, was not on the loot table for this encounter.
He opened his mouth to say something.
A witty one-liner.
A sarcastic quip to break the tension.
"So… that happened," was all he could manage.
The words fell flat, swallowed by the suffocating quiet.
Jinx didn't respond.
She just stared, her hand still clutching her bleeding shoulder, her knuckles white.
Finally, she broke the silence, her voice a low, rough rasp.
"Get the drive, kid."
Her tone was all business. The survivor. The pragmatist.
The fear was still there, but she had locked it away in a little box deep inside, right next to the ghosts of the Rust Dogs.
Work the problem. Survive the mission. Deal with the soul-eating monster you're allied with later.
He gave her a slow, grateful nod.
He walked over to the open containment crate.
The whimpering was gone.
The scratching had stopped.
Inside, beneath a false bottom made of cheap particle board, was a single, sleek, black rectangle.
It was an external hard drive, its casing made of a matte, non-reflective polymer.
On its surface, stenciled in a faded, military white, was the monstrous, three-headed logo of Project Chimera.
This was it.
The McGuffin.
The main quest item.
The key to everything.
[LEGACY DRIVE ACQUIRED.]
[MAIN QUEST UPDATE: THE EVER-GATE'S ECHO]
[OBJECTIVE 2: ESCAPE.]
He reached in and picked it up.
It felt cool and heavy in his hand.
It felt like hope.
The moment his fingers closed around it, the world erupted in noise.
WWHHHOOOOOPP!
WWHHHOOOOOPP!
WWHHHOOOOOPP!
Blaring alarms screamed from every corner of the facility.
Bright red emergency lights began to flash, plunging the room into a frantic, pulsing strobe of crimson and shadow.
A deep, grinding sound echoed from the front of the complex as a massive steel door slammed shut, sealing the main gate.
Code Black.
The whole facility was on lockdown.
"Well, so much for the stealth approach," Michael muttered, his heart sinking into his stomach.
"They weren't trying to catch us anymore," Jinx growled, pulling herself to her feet, her face a mask of grim determination. "They were just waiting for us to take the bait."
"The drive was the trigger."
"Chloe!" Michael yelled into his comms. "We have the package, but the party's started without us!"
Chloe's voice cut through the blaring alarms, no longer calm or clinical.
It was sharp.
Urgent.
Maybe even a little panicked.
The mask was slipping.
"I see it!" she snapped. "Rourke just initiated a full-site lockdown! He's not waiting for the Ghosts anymore!"
"He's flooding the area with his own hunter-killer teams!"
"My extraction point is compromised! It's gone!"
The hope that had flickered in Michael's chest just moments ago was brutally extinguished.
They were trapped.
"New plan!" Chloe's voice commanded, a thread of steel in the chaos. "The sewer main on the east wall! It's your only way out!"
A new waypoint flashed on Michael's HUD, a frantic, pulsing green dot on the far side of the complex.
"You have sixty seconds before they flood the entire facility with pacification gas!" she yelled. "It's non-lethal, but it will knock you out for an hour. You will be captured. Do you understand?"
"Sixty seconds!" Jinx echoed, her eyes wide. "We'll never make it!"
"Then you'd better start running!" Chloe shot back.
And they ran.
They burst out of the storage unit and into a world of organized chaos.
DGC black-ops soldiers were everywhere, moving in tight, disciplined fire-teams, their energy rifles sweeping every corner.
They weren't just patrolling anymore.
They were hunting.
"Left!" Jinx yelled, grabbing his arm and pulling him down a narrow side aisle.
They ducked behind a stack of rusted oil drums as a three-man team sprinted past, their boots pounding on the wet asphalt.
A countdown timer appeared on Michael's HUD, a gift from their eye in the sky.
[52 SECONDS]
"This way!" Jinx hissed, leading him through a maze of identical-looking storage units.
She was in her element now, a rat in a maze she knew by heart.
They rounded a corner and ran straight into another patrol.
Two soldiers. They raised their rifles.
There was no time to think.
Jinx fired her pistol, the silenced shot a soft phut. One soldier grunted and went down, a smoking hole in his chest plate.
The other turned, his rifle coming up.
Michael acted on instinct.
[VOID TETHER!]
A black whip of energy shot out, wrapping around the soldier's ankle.
The man yelled in surprise as his feet were swept out from under him. He crashed to the ground hard.
Jinx was already there, delivering a single, vicious stomp to his helmet that knocked him out cold.
[37 SECONDS]
They kept moving, their synergy perfect, unspoken.
She was the eyes. The navigator.
He was the wild card. The glitch in their system.
They reached the east wall, a solid, twenty-foot-high barrier of reinforced concrete.
At its base was a heavy, circular sewer grate, bolted shut.
Their exit.
[15 SECONDS]
"I can't pick that!" Jinx panted, pointing at the massive, industrial bolts. "Not in time!"
"We need to blast it!"
She reached for her pack, then froze, her face falling.
"I used my last charge on the tunnel collapse."
She was out of explosives.
They were at a dead end.
Footsteps echoed from both ends of the aisle. Heavy. Fast.
They were boxed in.
[10 SECONDS]
"Chloe!" Michael yelled into the comms, his voice laced with desperation. "We're trapped! There's no way through!"
The sound of hissing gas began to fill the air. A faint, sweet-smelling mist.
It was starting.
Chloe's voice crackled in his ear, stripped of all its previous confidence, filled only with a grim, last-ditch resolve.
"There's no physical exit."
"You have to make one."
[5 SECONDS]
They stared at the solid concrete wall.
"What does that even mean?" Jinx yelled, coughing as the gas grew thicker.
Her words were answered by a final, desperate command from the ghost on their radio.
"The wall is reinforced, but his power isn't physical! It's a reality-distorting energy! You have to create a pulse! A massive, uncontrolled burst of Void Energy! It's the only thing that might be strong enough to destabilize the wall's structural integrity on a molecular level!"
It was a theory. A wild guess.
A prayer.
It would also drain every last drop of his power, leaving him completely helpless.
And it would be like setting off a flare in the middle of the night for every Ghost in the city.
The hissing of the gas grew louder.
The footsteps were closer.
They were out of time.
Jinx looked at him, her face a mask of grim acceptance.
"You heard the lady," she said, her voice tight. "Do your spooky, soul-eating thing."
"Do it now."