The silence that followed Kwandezi's transmission was absolute, a cold, pressurized vacuum that felt heavier than the vault door. He had just declared war on the most intelligent, and perhaps most dangerous, of the Founding Families, using their own secure network to do it.
Captain Akanni was the first to move. He pushed his massive, exhausted frame off the pile of crates, the movement a low groan of strained muscle and metal. He walked over to the comms unit and, with one sweep of his massive hand, smashed the console, reducing it to a shower of sparks and fractured plastic.
"There," Akanni growled, his red-glowing eyes fixed on Kwandezi. "No more 'invitations.' You just painted a target on this vault so big it can be seen from orbit. You're arrogant, boy. You're letting the monster talk for you."
"The monster is the only one they'll listen to," Kwandezi retorted, his voice a flat, cold monotone. He turned his back on them, walking to the far corner of the vault where the kinetic coil emitters—the vault's non-lethal defense system—were housed in the wall. "I didn't invite them to talk. I invited them to a trap."
Aisha, who had been frozen by the sheer audacity of Kwandezi's declaration, finally found her voice. "A trap? Kwandezi, that was Commander Elara of the Scholars. Not some Ironclad grunt. They're analysts. They won't just send a squad; they'll send something smart. Something we can't fight."
"Everything can be fought," Kwandezi stated. He placed his hand on the primary emitter, the purple light in his eyes flaring as he analyzed its internal structure. "They won't risk their own soldiers on an unknown anomaly like me. They won't risk a political loss by sending a VDC squad to die. They'll send a machine. Something logical. Something engineered. And anything engineered has a flaw."
He began his work. He wasn't just rewiring; he was transmuting. He plunged his will into the emitters, his Molecular Transmutation ability flowing through the wires. He didn't just want to use the vault's defenses; he wanted to perfect them. He began to unweave the standard copper wiring, transmuting it into a perfected, zero-resistance conduit, and sharpening the emitter nodes from blunt, non-lethal stabilizers into focused, lethal kinetic spears. He was turning a crowd-control device into a weapon of war.
Akanni watched him for a long moment, the complexity of their situation settling on his broad shoulders. He was a Scion, a leader, a man of protocol, and he was now a fugitive taking orders from a teenage anomaly in a vault, waiting for an army of geniuses to come kill them. He snorted, the sound rough.
"Operative Aisha," Akanni commanded, turning away from Kwandezi. "Give me the briefcase."
Aisha handed it over. Akanni popped the latches, his gaze falling on the financial ledgers. He sifted through them, his expression hardening. "Thorne's treason. The Ironclad's greed. The Banisher's complicity... It's all here. The evidence to burn the old world down."
"It's the evidence the Scholars want," Aisha said, her voice low. "They don't want to burn the world, Captain. They want to own it. They're the only ones left with a functioning, centralized command structure. If they get this data, they can frame themselves as the heroes who exposed the rot, and use Protocol Zero to unite the remaining Chapters under their banner."
"They can't be trusted," Akanni stated. He found what he was looking for: a small, sealed bag of high-energy VDC ration bars, stale and old, packed by Thorne for his escape. He ripped one open and tossed it to Aisha.
"Eat," he commanded. "You're no good to me exhausted."
Aisha took the bar, the simple act of normalcy—the Kaiju No. 8 grind of survival—feeling surreal in the face of their imminent doom. She tore the wrapper, the sound loud in the vault. "What about you?"
"I'm a Scion. My body is... more efficient," Akanni lied, trying to mask the tremor in his hands. He was starving, his Geokinetic power having burned through his reserves. But he was the Captain, and the Captain ate last. He turned to Kwandezi, who was still deep in his communion with the vault's technology. "Asset! You need fuel. Your power isn't self-sustaining."
Kwandezi didn't turn. "My power feeds on the Void. But the Host... the Host feeds on chaos. And you just rang the dinner bell."
Aisha paused, the ration bar halfway to her mouth. "You're enjoying this."
"I'm focused," Kwandezi corrected, his voice a low, dangerous hum. "This is a problem to be solved. A system to be broken. Zaire was predictable. This... this is new."
His instincts, honed by a lifetime of survival, were buzzing. His battle IQ was fully engaged, running a thousand simulations of the Scholars' inevitable attack. He felt a strange, cold clarity. The apathy was gone, replaced by the sheer, intellectual thrill of the hunt.
Aisha's Aegis mesh interface, which she had jury-rigged to the vault's internal sensors, suddenly pinged. A single, soft chime.
"They're here," she whispered, dropping the ration bar.
Akanni moved to the vault door, pressing his hand against the meter-thick alloy, his Geokinetic senses reaching out. "I don't hear troops. No boots. No dropships on the roof."
"They're under us," Kwandezi said, his eyes snapping open. The purple glow was back, bright and intense. "In the old transport shafts. The ones we used."
Akanni felt it, too, a split second later. A rhythmic, hydraulic thud... thud... thud... It wasn't the chaotic scramble of a Void-borne. It was the measured, powerful tread of a machine. It was coming up the outside of the skyscraper.
"It's climbing the tower," Akanni breathed, his eyes wide.
Aisha ran to her console. "I have a visual... gods..." She projected a grainy, external security feed onto the vault wall.
It was a nightmare of cold, Scholar logic. It was a 20-meter-tall, spider-like construct, a bio-mechanical dreadnought. It had six hydraulic legs, each tipped with diamond-boron drills that were sinking into the tower's steel façade, allowing it to climb. Its central "body" was a heavily armored chassis, and its "head" was a rotating, multi-lensed optical array, glowing with a cold, blue light. It wasn't a repurposed VDC machine. It was a purpose-built monster-killer.
"An Aegis-Nullifier," Akanni whispered, his voice full of a dread Kwandezi had never heard. "The Scholars' ultimate trump card. It's not designed to fight. It's designed to breach. It emits a localized dampening field that cancels Scion-level power."
As he said it, Akanni's glowing red eyes flickered and died, his connection to the earth severed. He slumped, his face ashen. "My power... it's gone."
The Aegis-Nullifier reached their floor. It stopped, its hydraulic legs anchoring it to the building. Its blue optical array focused directly on the vault door, as if it could see them through the meter of solid alloy.
"It's cutting," Aisha said, her voice trembling as a new sensor reading appeared. "It's not using a drill. It's using a... a focused Molecular-Decoupling beam."
A thin, white-hot line began to glow on the vault door, sizzling as it unwove the alloy, atom by atom.
"It'll be through in ninety seconds," Akanni said. He drew his sidearm, a standard, useless VDC plasma pistol. "That's it, then."
"No," Kwandezi said. He was smiling. A genuine, terrifying, cold smile. "It's not. The dampening field... it's beautiful."
"Boy, have you gone mad?" Akanni snarled.
"It's dampening your power, Captain," Kwandezi explained, walking to the vault door, his Ultimate Transmuted blades in his hands. "It's designed to stop your kind of brute force, earth-moving energy. But it's not designed to stop me."
He placed his hand on the vault wall, next to the sizzling, melting line. The dampening field washed over him. It didn't hurt. It didn't stop him. It simply focused him. The field was designed to stop Scion-level power, not the alien, chaotic, anti-physics of the Void Host.
"The Scholar's logic is flawed," Kwandezi whispered, his purple eyes blazing. "They built a cage for a lion, but they didn't know they were hunting a dragon."
He turned to his repurposed kinetic coil emitters. "Akanni, Aisha, get to the back of the vault. Cover your heads."
The sizzle of the decoupling beam was almost through. The vault door groaned, a perfect, circular section of it about to fall inward.
"Let's see," Kwandezi said, his hand on the trigger he had just built, "if their machine is engineered to survive its own physics."