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Chapter 14 - Chapter 13-Scorched earth

The plan was a watchmaker's dream, a constellation of precisely timed actions. Eva, the ghost, had woven her threads through the mainframe. W36T, the ember, was a coiled spring of contained violence. The moment was to be a surgical strike: an overload in Sector Gamma, a simultaneous gas attack in the Architect's quarters, and a controlled detonation at the tungsten-alloy door of Cell H-7.

It was a beautiful plan. And like all beautiful plans, it did not survive first contact with the enemy.

The first anomaly was Project Flame himself. As the digital countdown in Eva's mind reached zero, she watched his cell's feed. He did not rise, did not prepare to become the spearhead of their revolution. He remained seated in the corner, his head tilted as if listening to a frequency only he could hear. Then, he looked directly into the camera, into her eyes, and gave a single, sharp shake of his head.

Abort.

The message was as clear as if he'd shouted it. But it was too late. The cascade was initiated. Alarms, a shrill, panicked shriek they had never heard before, tore through the facility's usual hum. Red light bathed the corridors, strobing in time with the klaxons.

In the Observation Chamber, Eva's fingers flew across the console, not to advance the plan, but to contain it. She rerouted the gas, venting it harmlessly into the waste processing unit. She diverted the power surge, sending it into a dormant sub-reactor, causing a contained meltdown that plunged the western wing into darkness but spared the core. But the detonation on W36T's cell… that was a physical trigger. She couldn't stop it.

The blast was a muffled whump that vibrated through the very bones of the complex. His cell door was compromised, buckled inwards, but not fully breached. It was a symbol of their aborted revolution: a door that was neither open nor closed, a promise unfulfilled. He had chosen to remain inside his cage. The reason was a cold knot in Eva's stomach.

There was no time to ponder it. The system-wide alert had triggered a lockdown protocol for all non-essential personnel zones. This included the white room.

"CONTAINMENT BREACH IMMINENT. ALL SUBJECTS TO BE SECURED OR TERMINATED. SECURITY TEAM ALPHA TO SECTOR ECHO."

The voice over the intercom was no longer the calm, mechanical drone of the Architects. It was laced with a sharp, human panic. The perfect system was cracking.

Eva moved. This was no longer Plan A. This was chaos, and chaos was a tool she could wield just as effectively. She slammed an override code—one she had carved from Prime-07's own access logs—into the white room's command sequence. The main door hissed open.

The scene inside was pandemonium. The strobing red lights threw the sterile space into a hellish disco. Derek had Jordan and Leo backed against a wall, his rusted machete held in a white-knuckled grip, pointed at the true threat in the room.

Maya.

She was on her feet, but not transformed. Her head was cocked, a predator intrigued by the new sounds and lights. The shrieking alarm seemed to please her. A low, humming purr vibrated in her chest. Her black eyes, reflecting the crimson strobes, looked like pools of fresh blood.

"Eva!" Derek shouted, his voice raw. "What's happening?"

"The facility is compromised! We have to move, now!" she yelled over the alarm.

"Move where? And what about her?" Leo snarled, gesturing at Maya with his bat.

As if on cue, the first security team arrived. Four figures in black body armor, their faces obscured by tactical helmets, flooded the corridor outside the open door. They didn't carry standard rifles. Their weapons were bulkier, with canisters attached to the barrels.

"Halt! Return to your cells!" the lead guard barked, his weapon raised.

Maya's purring stopped. Her head swiveled towards the door, and the blank hunger in her eyes sharpened into focused intent. She took a step forward.

"Maya, no!" Derek screamed.

The lead guard didn't hesitate. He fired.

It wasn't a bullet of lead. It was a high-velocity dart, longer than a finger, made of a polished, coppery alloy. It tore through the air with a sound like a tearing canvas.

It was not aimed at Maya.

Jordan, who had been shifting to put himself between the guards and the others, took the shot directly in the chest. The impact was sickening. A wet, punching sound. He gasped, his eyes flying wide, his katana clattering to the floor. He looked down at the metal shaft protruding from his sternum, a look of profound, stupid surprise on his face.

For a second, nothing happened. Then, a sizzling sound. Smoke, acrid and chemical, began to curl from the wound. Jordan's body began to seize, his back arching violently. His veins, visible on his neck and temples, turned black and bulged, as if filling with ink. A froth, tinged with the same black, bubbled from his lips. He was dead before his body hit the floor, his life extinguished not by trauma, but by some vile, catalyzed poison.

"JORDAN!" Leo's roar was a thing of pure, unadulterated agony. He charged, not with strategy, but with a grief-stricken rage.

The guards fired again.

Two more survivors—a man and a woman who had huddled in a corner—were struck. The man took a dart in the throat, the woman in the thigh. The same, horrific process unfolded: the sizzle, the black veins, the frothing, convulsive death. Their bodies contorted into impossible shapes before going still, the smell of cooked meat and acid filling the air.

The special bullets. Designed not to incapacitate, but to annihilate. A fail-safe for subjects who could not be controlled.

The violence, the sudden, grotesque deaths, finally snapped the last of Maya's human restraint.

A guttural snarl ripped from her throat, a sound that had no business coming from a human larynx. The transformation didn't creep this time; it exploded. The obsidian scales erupted across her skin in a wave of audible cracks and pops. Her body expanded, spines shredding through her gown as they ripped down her back. Her hands became talons, her face a horned mask of feral fury, her glowing amber eyes locking onto the guards.

She was a nightmare given form, and she was between the survivors and the door.

Eva acted. She didn't try to reason with the beast. She appealed to the one thing that might still resonate in its primal brain: opportunity.

She pointed past Maya, at the stunned guards. "THEY ARE THE PREY!" she screamed.

Maya's horned head swiveled. The guards, who had been trained for disobedience, for desperation, were not trained for this. Their discipline broke. They opened fire.

Darts pinged off Maya's scaled armor, sizzling harmlessly. One embedded in her shoulder, and she ripped it out with a clawed hand, the wound smoking for a second before the scales knitted back over it. She was on them in two bounding leaps.

It was not a fight. It was a slaughter. Talons sheared through body armor like paper. A spiked tail whipped around, decapitating one guard with terrifying ease. The last one she lifted, his legs kicking wildly, and brought his helmeted head to her maw. The sound of the metal crumpling and the wet pop that followed was drowned out by Leo's continued screams of rage and grief.

The corridor was a charnel house. Blood, red and human, splattered the walls, a stark contrast to the black, corrupted blood of the poisoned subjects.

Eva grabbed Derek's arm, her grip like steel. "We have to go. NOW. While she's… distracted."

Derek, pale and shaking, looked from Jordan's black-veined corpse to the monster that was once Maya, now feasting. The choice was an impossible one: stay and be terminated, or follow the architect of this hell into a deeper circle.

Leo made the choice for them. With a final, broken look at Jordan, he hefted his bat, his face a mask of tears and fury. "I'm going to kill every last one of them."

They moved, a ragged, traumatized group: Eva in the lead, a ghost guiding the damned; Leo, a storm of grief and vengeance; Derek, his humanity in tatters; and behind them, the sound of tearing metal and a low, satisfied growling.

The plan was not in motion. It had been stillborn. But the scorched earth policy had begun. They had not freed themselves. They had simply traded one cage for a labyrinth of fire and blood, with a hungry god at their heels. And somewhere, in a buckled cell, Project Flame waited, his reasons his own, the one player who had seen the true endgame and chosen to wait.

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