The smell of the open bunker hit Marcus like a physical blow.
It didn't smell like the burning ash of the beach. It didn't smell like the ozone of destroyed automated turrets or the coppery tang of dead scavengers.
It smelled like sterile chemicals. Cold concrete. And deep, undisturbed water.
It was the smell of Board terraforming infrastructure.
Marcus stood at the threshold of the heavy, open blast doors. Behind him, the beach of Naples was a chaotic, burning hellscape. The hyper-oxygenated jungle roared with chemical fire. The five hundred surviving scavengers of the Styx were cheering, looting the bodies of dead clones, their pockets heavy with glowing blue Amps.
They had won the beachhead. They had killed the Burner Mech.
But the Warlord's thirty-six-hour clock was still ticking. And Nero was waiting inside.
Marcus turned around.
Decimus stood ten feet away, his spear planted in the black, glassy sand. His legionnaire armor was covered in mud and ash, but he stood perfectly straight.
The scavengers around him had stopped looting. They were looking at Marcus.
They didn't look at him like a desperate Warlord anymore. They looked at him like a god who had just wrestled a mechanical demon and won.
"Decimus," Marcus commanded, his voice raw from the smoke.
The legionnaire slammed his fist against his chestplate. "Warlord."
"Hold this door," Marcus ordered, pointing his combat knife at the sand. "Do not let anyone inside. Not one scavenger. If the Board sends reinforcements from the city, you hold the line. If we don't come back out, you take the Amps, buy a boat, and get these people as far from Naples as you can."
Decimus didn't blink. He didn't ask questions.
"The Legion holds," Decimus said, his voice hard as iron.
Marcus nodded once. He turned his back on the burning beach.
He stepped over the thick steel threshold of the bunker. Marcia followed instantly, her shotgun raised. Narcissus ducked his massive, twelve-foot frame to clear the doorframe, his heavy hydraulic legs whining with every step.
Lucilla hesitated. She looked back at the cheering scavengers, then into the pitch-black hallway. She clutched her datapad to her chest and ran inside.
The moment she crossed the threshold, the bunker reacted.
A deafening hiss of pneumatic pressure echoed through the concrete walls.
The massive, foot-thick steel blast doors slammed shut. The boom shook the floor.
The chaotic noise of the burning jungle, the cheers of the scavengers, and the roar of the ocean were instantly cut off.
The silence inside was absolute. And so was the darkness.
Marcus instinctively tapped his right temple.
"JARVIS. Night vision overlay."
Nothing happened. The gold lines of his Neural Link remained dead. The tactical wireframe didn't paint the walls green. He couldn't see his own hands.
He was entirely blind.
His heart rate spiked. The Warlord's phantom limb throbbed. He was a Warlord without his oracle, locked in a pitch-black box with a manic clone.
"I can't see," Lucilla whimpered in the dark.
A sharp snap echoed in the corridor.
Suddenly, a harsh, eerie blue light flooded the concrete space.
Marcia stood beside Marcus. She had pulled one of the glowing blue Amps from her naval coat pocket and snapped the thick plastic casing in half. The highly charged, chemical luminescent core spilled its brilliant blue light across the damp walls.
She held the broken battery up like a torch.
"Better?" Marcia asked, her scarred face illuminated by the harsh blue glow.
Marcus let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. He looked at her. He didn't need an AI to tell him she was the only reason he was surviving this analog nightmare.
"Better," Marcus grunted.
He took the makeshift torch from her hand.
The blue light cast long, monstrous shadows down the sloping corridor. Narcissus's massive frame blocked out half the tunnel, a walking mountain of riveted battleship steel and heavy anchor chains.
"Stay close," Marcus ordered.
They began to walk down the sloping concrete ramp. The air grew colder with every step. The walls were lined with thick, insulated pipes carrying coolant and power deeper into the earth.
There were no automated turrets. There were no traps on the floor.
Nero wasn't trying to kill them in the hallway. He was inviting them in.
They reached the bottom of the ramp.
The corridor opened into a wide, heavily reinforced security checkpoint. Thick, bulletproof glass separated the hallway from a small guard booth overlooking a massive steel door.
Marcus held the glowing blue Amp up to the glass.
Inside the booth sat four Board clone-troopers.
They were in full black environmental armor. Their pulse-rifles were still strapped to their backs. They hadn't fired a single shot.
They were dead.
Marcus leaned closer to the glass. His eyes narrowed.
The clones hadn't been shot. They hadn't been stabbed.
Their sleek black helmets were warped. The reinforced visors were bubbled outward, cracked, and coated in a thick, dark, dried sludge on the inside. The heavy environmental suits were melted directly into their flesh.
They had been baked alive inside their own armor.
Lucilla gagged, covering her mouth with her hand. She turned away from the glass.
"Nero," Marcia whispered, her grip tightening on her shotgun. "He didn't just burn the beach. He cooked his own men."
"They were just guards," Lucilla said, her voice shaking. "They were his own troops."
"He doesn't have troops," Marcus said coldly, staring at the melted visors. "He only has props. He killed them just to show us he could."
Marcus realized exactly how dangerous Nero was.
Executive Vane was ruthless, but he was logical. Vane killed for profit, for efficiency, for the Board's bottom line.
Nero was a chaotic, manic copy. He didn't care about the Board. He didn't care about terraforming Naples. He was playing a game, and the rules were entirely his own.
Marcus stepped away from the glass. He walked to the heavy steel door at the end of the checkpoint.
It wasn't locked. The electronic keypad was glowing green.
He pushed the heavy handle down. The door creaked open on well-oiled hinges.
The Vanguard stepped through.
The claustrophobic concrete corridor instantly fell away.
They stood on a narrow, grated metal catwalk suspended high in the air. The cavern before them was massive, carved directly out of the bedrock beneath the ruined city.
Marcus held the glowing Amp out over the railing.
The blue light barely reached the bottom.
Fifty feet below them lay the main reservoir. It was a massive, subterranean lake of pure, perfectly still, crystal-clear drinking water.
It was an ocean of life.
It was enough fresh water to fill the Carrier's tanks ten times over. It was enough to save the five thousand scavengers dying of thirst on the Styx.
"We found it," Marcia breathed, lowering her shotgun slightly.
"Look up," Marcus said, his voice devoid of victory.
Suspended directly above the dead center of the massive underground lake, hanging from thick, heavy industrial chains bolted to the cavern ceiling, was a massive metal cylinder.
It was twenty feet long, covered in flashing red Board warning lights.
It was a heavy terraforming payload.
Thick, transparent tubes ran from the cylinder, dripping a thick, highly corrosive green sludge down toward the pristine water below. The drops sizzled as they hit the air, stopping just inches above the surface, caught by a thin, transparent containment field.
It was a massive, suspended bomb of toxic acid.
If it dropped, the entire water supply of Naples would turn into boiling, radioactive sludge in seconds.
And strapped to the side of the massive cylinder was a large, digital red timer.
It was ticking down from thirty minutes.
"The present," Marcus whispered, remembering Nero's words on the intercom.
He didn't need JARVIS to calculate the Warlord's math. If they couldn't shut off the payload in thirty minutes, the Carrier died. The Legion died.
"There's a control terminal on the far side of the catwalk," Lucilla said, pointing a shaking finger across the chasm. "I can access the containment field from there. I can lock the payload in place."
"Move," Marcus ordered.
He took a single, heavy step forward onto the metal grating of the catwalk.
CLICK.
The sound was sharp, metallic, and terrifyingly loud in the silent cavern.
The entire suspended metal walkway violently shuddered.
Marcus froze. He didn't breathe. He didn't blink.
He slowly looked down at his heavy, melted combat boot.
The metal grate beneath his heel had sunk exactly a quarter of an inch.
A small, red light illuminated directly under his boot on the catwalk floor.
The digital timer on the massive acid bomb suspended over the water suddenly beeped.
The thirty minutes vanished.
The numbers reset.
00:03:00.
Three minutes.