There was no such thing as true silence in the penthouse. Even with the security system at full lockdown—windows sealed to an opal haze, interior sensors cycling white noise through the vents—there were still the ticks, the hums, the scuttle of mana diffusing through the infrastructure. It was Owen who first heard the anomaly: a half-second stutter in the comm grid, less a sound than a skipped heartbeat. He went rigid, one hand curled around his mug, and flicked his gaze to the main table. Hazel noticed the shift and immediately started logging packet flow.
"Did anyone else—" Owen began, but the question killed itself in his throat as every light in the living room blinked. For a moment, the penthouse was awash in sick blue, the kind of color that happened only in hospitals and nightmares.
A jolt, then a wash of static. The main display—intended for mission briefings, security feeds, sometimes old anime when nobody was watching—flooded with an emergency sigil: a blinking Taira clan seal, ragged and flickering, like a flag set on fire. Then, through a filter of distortion, a face resolved. Not the cool, untouchable mask of Shiori Taira from the club, nor the polished schoolgirl mask of the official feed. This was Shiori as she really was: skin shredded at one cheek, black hair matted to her forehead with sweat and blood, eyes red from more than just the glare of the screen.
She breathed hard, like she'd been running, or like she was about to die.
"Owen. Navarro. Whoever gets this. This is… it's Shiori. The protocol must have failed, because—"
Her voice buckled, the audio gnawed away by digital interference and the sharp pulse of what sounded like sirens in the background. The image stuttered, losing frames, then came back even closer: Shiori's mouth a grim red crescent, her left hand pressed to a shoulder wound already soaking her suit.
Hazel's voice, barely audible: "Shit. How is this getting through—?"
Shiori coughed, spat something to the side, then squinted at the lens, as if it were the only eye in the world left on her. "They're not going to let you walk. That was the plan the whole time. My father—" her face cracked, and for an instant there was a child's terror inside the bones of the heiress. "My father cut a deal with Nexar. He's giving them me, and you, and everyone else. It's to save the Bridge project and keep the contract with the Lancasters. We're… I'm just a trade. And so are you."
A crash in the background, glass shattering, and Shiori's head jerked sideways, her pupils dilated. The message lagged, skipping half a second, then caught up. Owen's hand whitened around his mug. Ellen stood from the couch, silent and cold, arms folded like a barrier across her chest.
Jane's jawline was stone. She didn't blink, not once.
Shiori kept going. "He said you're mercs. That nobody expects a mercenary team to survive. That Nexar's going to do what the city council never had the stones to do and erase all the assets. I tried to warn you but—"
Another crash. A man's voice, indistinct but furious, bellowed her name. Shiori flinched, then set her mouth into a line of raw steel.
"It's too late for me. They're here already. I won't make it out. Don't come for me. You have to—" The audio clipped, then came back on a whisper: "—finish the job anyway. That's the contract. You said you never broke one."
Hazel's hands flew across her console, trying to trace the feed, find a physical location, anything that would turn this into a tactical problem instead of a slow-motion murder.
Shiori's last words, thin and deliberate: "Contract fulfilled. Don't come for me. Goodbye."
The screen went black.
Nobody in UMBRA said anything for five, ten, thirty seconds.
Jane's fist, unclenched until now, snapped the handle off her mug and sent porcelain skittering across the kitchen island. Ellen's eyes flickered once, then steadied into something colder than before. Hazel looked down at her hands as if they weren't hers, then muttered, "That was real. All of it. No deepfake, no glitch—she's done."
Owen stepped forward and, with a flick of his wrist, rewound the message. Played it again, slower, parsing every twitch in Shiori's face, every tremor in her voice, every detail in the roiling chaos behind her. There was nothing to be gained by it, not really, but he did it anyway.
He watched her die a second time, then a third.
On the fourth replay, he caught the color of the floor in the frame—a green-black tile, distinctive and sickeningly familiar. He filed it away, the way an old wound remembers how to bleed.
The room didn't thaw. If anything, the cold got deeper, until it threatened to shatter them all. Jane broke the silence first, voice so sharp it almost hurt:
"Plan's changed. We're not letting them write us out of the script."
Hazel just nodded, then began prepping a new encryption shell, already sealing the edges of the penthouse from whatever digital knife might be next.
Ellen knelt, picked up the fragments of Jane's mug, and dumped them in the trash. Then she went back to her station, drew a deep breath, and readied her blade.
Owen stared at the screen, Shiori's frozen face staring back. He didn't feel pity, or rage, or even fear. He felt the quiet gravity of inevitability.
Outside, Nueva Arcadia throbbed with the violence of a city that knew nothing would ever be the same.
Inside, UMBRA set about surviving, now that the leash was off.