The Kronos Spire was a fresh, ugly scar on Aethelburg's skyline, an unfinished skyscraper whose skeletal frame stabbed at the sky like exposed ribs. In a derelict freight depot under its shadow, a meeting was brewing.
Anya wore ill-fitting tactical armor stripped from a fallen Kronos guard. Jax lurked in the girders above, melting into the shadows, silent. Kaelen was on overwatch, his ears hooked into the city's surveillance net, listening for the frequency of betrayal.
Their contact, a twitchy, gaunt man called the Courier, shifted nervously at the rendezvous point. "You have the sample?" he asked, his voice trembling.
Anya held up a small cryo-vial. Inside was a微量 of genetic material, purified by Kaelen's sonic filters from Elara's blood—enough to prove its value, not enough to give away their secret. "The precursors we asked for?"
The Courier gestured to a worn metal case. "The basic precursors. Enough for... a few tests."
That's when Kaelen's voice came through Anya's hidden earpiece, calm and urgent. "Anya, pull out. It's a trap. I'm reading their comms. They don't want the trade. They want a live specimen. You. They have sonic disrupter emplacements."
Too late. The depot's roll-down doors slammed shut with a deafening crash. Six Kronos heavy infantry emerged from concealment, their bulky armor humming, sonic emitters shaped like bowls mounted on their shoulders.
"Drop the sample and surrender," the lead soldier commanded through his helmet vocoder.
In the rafters, Jax let out a low growl. Not a challenge, but pure, primal anger. The trap had sprung his instincts.
"Kaelen, now!" Anya shouted.
Back at The Static, Kaelen's hands flew over his console. He didn't try to jam the sonic weapons—that was too complex. He did something simpler, smarter. He hacked into the depot's municipal power feed and sent a powerful, irregular voltage spike.
The lights flickered madly, then died. Emergency lamps flickered on, casting swaying, distorted shadows. The sonic emitters blinked with reboot indicators.
In that moment of confusion and visual distortion, Jax struck. He was not a monster, but a phantom. He dropped from the shadows, slamming one soldier into a wall with enough force to crack the concrete. He wrested the man's sonic emitter away and crushed it in his hand like a can.
Anya used the brief disruption to move. She didn't engage the remaining soldiers; she lunged for the metal case and snatched it. She fired a sonic round at the Courier, knocking him unconscious, not dead.
"Withdraw!" she yelled to Jax.
They burst out of a maintenance hatch on the side of the depot and vanished into the night, the confused and angry shouts of Kronos soldiers echoing behind them. They hadn't made a clean trade, but they had their first batch of precursors. More importantly, they had sent a message: this pack was not for the taking.