The Firebird was awake, and it was angry.
The colossal terraforming engine, buried miles beneath the Siberian permafrost, had been violently disconnected from Tsar Nikolai's digital leash. Without the Gold Fragment regulating its output, the ancient machine was rapidly spiraling into a chaotic thermal overdrive. The massive, golden gears grinding against the cavern walls began to glow with a furious, blood-red heat. The subterranean lake of magma churning three hundred feet below them surged violently, sending massive geysers of liquid fire crashing against the obsidian cliffs.
The cavern shook with a continuous, deafening roar, a localized earthquake that rattled the teeth in Amani's skull.
"We need a defensive perimeter!" General Volkov yelled, her mechanical voice box struggling to project over the deafening mechanical screech of the engine. She moved rapidly across the central iron platform, slamming heavy metallic barricades into place, repurposed from the shattered remnants of the Tsar's control terminal.
"A perimeter against what?" Viktor the Wolf sneered, wiping sweat and soot from his bruised face. He reached into his heavy coat, pulling out the last three Giza thermal detonators he had scavenged from the supply train. "There is only one bridge leading to this platform. Unless the Tsar has wings, he has to walk across it. Let him come. I'll blow the span right out from under his royal boots."
Viktor didn't wait for permission. He sprinted back onto the narrow, glass-and-iron bridge, slapping the highly explosive magnetic charges onto the crucial structural supports before retreating to the platform.
Amani stood at the edge of the iron grating, his violet eyes fixed firmly on the darkness of the cavern ceiling high above them.
"He isn't going to take the bridge," Amani said, his voice dropping to a low, resonant hum. The Space Shard in his pocket was vibrating so violently it felt like a trapped hornet against his thigh. The crystal was reacting to the proximity of another Fragment of Reality. "The Tsar holds the Gold Fragment. The Fragment of the Body. He doesn't need a door."
"Then how is he getting down here?" Upepo asked, stretching his legs, the blue kinetic energy rippling across his frictionless combat suit.
Before Amani could answer, the cavern ceiling groaned.
It wasn't a mechanical sound; it was the sound of millions of tons of solid bedrock fracturing under an impossible, localized pressure. A shower of dust and jagged rock fell from the darkness above, splashing into the churning magma lake.
"Above us!" Sia screamed, raising her Staff of Life and casting a protective dome of emerald energy over the Swahili Pack.
The ceiling of the cavern violently exploded inward.
A massive, glowing projectile tore through three miles of solid Siberian crust, granite, and obsidian glass as if it were nothing but wet paper. It struck the exact center of the narrow bridge with the concussive force of a falling meteor.
The impact was apocalyptic. The shockwave blew General Volkov off her feet and shattered the remaining glass fixtures in the cavern. A massive cloud of pulverized rock and volcanic ash erupted into the air, completely obscuring the bridge.
For a terrifying moment, there was only the sound of falling debris and the roaring of the red magma.
Slowly, the thick curtain of dust began to settle.
Standing in the center of the massive crater he had just carved into the unbreakable obsidian bridge was Tsar Nikolai.
He wore no helmet. He wore no environmental suit to protect him from the hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, nor did he wear the heavily shielded Praetorian armor of his guards. The Tsar was bare-chested, wearing only flowing, armored trousers forged from deep-black Void-metal.
His physical form was terrifying to behold. He stood nearly seven feet tall, but it was the texture of his skin that drew the eye. He looked as though he had been meticulously carved from flawless, living marble, threaded with veins of liquid gold. His eyes burned with an intense, unyielding, solar-flare brilliance. Embedded directly into the center of his chest, fused permanently with his sternum and ribcage, was the Gold Fragment—the Fragment of Body.
He didn't just wield the artifact; he had assimilated it. He was the Unbreaking Man.
"You have made a profound mess of my basement," Tsar Nikolai spoke.
He didn't shout, yet his voice carried an acoustic weight that made the air itself feel heavy. It was the voice of an absolute monarch, a man who had never been told 'no' in his entire existence.
Viktor the Wolf grinned, his silver teeth flashing in the red light. "Welcome to the revolution, Your Highness."
Viktor pressed the detonator.
The three thermal charges planted directly beneath the Tsar's boots detonated simultaneously. A massive pillar of white-hot plasma and explosive force engulfed Nikolai, tearing a massive, fifty-foot gap entirely out of the bridge. The structure groaned, the iron snapping like dry twigs as that section of the span collapsed into the magma below.
"Direct hit," Viktor laughed, lowering the remote. "Even a god needs ground to stand on."
But the laughter died in his throat as the flames rapidly cleared.
Tsar Nikolai hadn't fallen. He was levitating.
The golden light radiating from his chest flared, interacting with the planet's gravitational pull through sheer, brute physical density. He stepped forward, placing his bare foot onto the empty air. The air itself seemed to solidify under his absolute command, forming a golden, rippling foothold. He walked calmly across the fifty-foot gap in the bridge, stepping on thin air as if he were descending a royal staircase.
He stepped back onto the solid iron of the central platform, completely untouched by the explosion. His skin didn't bear a single scratch, scorch mark, or blemish.
"A parlor trick," Nikolai murmured, brushing a speck of ash from his shoulder.
"Fire!" Volkov roared.
The General and her dozen disciplined dissidents opened fire. A hail of superheated plasma bolts and armor-piercing kinetic rounds tore across the platform, striking the Tsar directly in the chest, face, and neck.
The bullets didn't ricochet; they simply flattened upon impact. The heavy, depleted-uranium rounds struck Nikolai's bare skin and compressed into flat, useless discs of lead before falling to the iron grating. The superheated plasma splashed against him like warm water, failing to even singe his hair.
Nikolai didn't flinch. He didn't even raise his hands to protect his eyes. He just kept walking slowly toward them, an unstoppable, golden juggernaut.
"He is immune to kinetic and thermal damage!" Volkov yelled, her mechanical eye whirring in utter disbelief. "The Gold Fragment renders his cellular structure entirely indestructible!"
Mariya Oktyabrskaya stepped forward. Her face was a mask of cold, unfeeling iron. She raised her heavy Soviet revolver, took careful aim at the Tsar's glowing left eye, and pulled the trigger.
BANG.
The heavy slug struck Nikolai precisely on the pupil.
The Tsar didn't blink. The bullet flattened against his eyeball and dropped to the floor.
Nikolai stopped walking. He slowly turned his burning golden gaze toward Mariya.
"The widow Oktyabrskaya," Nikolai said, a cruel, mocking smile touching his lips. "I recognize the scent of your grief. It smells exactly like your husband did when my inquisitors broke his knees. Have you come to join him?"
"I have come to dig your grave, you son of a bitch," Mariya spat, cocking the hammer of her gun again.
Nikolai's smile vanished. He didn't teleport; he simply moved with a physical speed that defied his massive bulk. He crossed the thirty feet between them in a fraction of a second, raising his hand to strike Mariya and shatter her into a red mist.
"Not today!" Upepo shouted.
A streak of blue lightning intercepted the Tsar. Upepo slammed into Nikolai's side at Mach 2, leading with a concentrated, frictionless kinetic punch designed to shatter heavy tank armor.
The impact echoed like a thunderclap.
Upepo bounced off the Tsar as if he had just punched a solid mountain of titanium. The speedster cried out in pain, clutching his shattered wrist as he tumbled across the iron grating. Nikolai hadn't moved an inch.
"A fast insect," Nikolai noted, looking down at Upepo. "But still an insect."
The Tsar raised his heavy, marble-like boot to crush Upepo's skull.
"Get away from my brother!"
Chacha arrived like a runaway freight train. The giant Swahili warrior leaped into the air, raising the massive Cryo-Hammer high above his head. He brought the weapon down with earth-shattering force, aiming directly for the Gold Fragment embedded in Nikolai's chest.
Tsar Nikolai didn't dodge. He simply reached up with his bare left hand and caught the massive head of the hammer in mid-swing.
The sheer concussive force of Chacha's blow cratered the solid iron floor beneath the Tsar's feet, but Nikolai's arm didn't buckle. The Giza coolant engine inside the hammer immediately vented, releasing a blast of absolute zero directly onto Nikolai's hand, instantly encasing his arm in thick, jagged blue ice.
"A formidable swing," Nikolai complimented softly.
He flexed his fingers. The thick ice shattered violently into a million pieces.
Before Chacha could pull the hammer back, Nikolai stepped inside the giant's guard. The Tsar delivered a single, brutal punch directly to the center of Chacha's chest.
The sound of snapping bone was sickeningly loud. Chacha, a man who had wrestled enraged mutant buffalo with his bare hands, was lifted entirely off his feet. He flew backward thirty feet, crashing heavily into the obsidian control pedestal and collapsing in a heap, coughing up blood.
"Chacha!" Sia screamed, running toward the fallen giant, the emerald light of her staff flaring to knit his shattered ribs back together.
Tsar Nikolai cracked his neck, the sound echoing like breaking stone. He looked across the platform, his golden eyes finally locking onto the man standing in the center.
"Gravity," Nikolai said, stepping over Viktor the Wolf, who was frozen in sheer terror. "You manipulated the fabric of space to open the gates of Sector Zero, and you manipulated it again to crush my Praetorian with the mantle of the earth. You hold the Space Shard, Amani of Arusha. But space means absolutely nothing if you cannot move the mass within it."
Amani didn't speak. He reached inward, past his fear, past his exhaustion, and grabbed hold of the Void Hunger.
He didn't lock it away this time. He let the parasitic shadow loose.
Amani's eyes turned completely pitch black, save for two violently spinning rings of neon violet. The air around him dropped in temperature by fifty degrees in a single second. The red light of the Firebird engine seemed to bend and warp around him, pulled into his orbit.
"Let's test that theory," Amani said, his voice overlapping with a terrifying, cosmic distortion.
Amani thrust both hands downward.
He unleashed a localized gravity field directly on top of Tsar Nikolai, multiplying the gravitational pull on the monarch by a factor of one hundred.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The solid black iron platform beneath Nikolai's feet violently buckled, groaning under the sudden, impossible weight. The Tsar was forced down to one knee, his golden skin flaring as he resisted the invisible, crushing pressure. The air around him screamed, literally compressing under the immense gravitational load.
"You are trying to crush a diamond with your bare hands, boy," Nikolai ground out through clenched teeth, the golden veins in his skin pulsing with blinding light.
"Then I'll just have to squeeze harder," Amani snarled, stepping forward, pushing his hands down further. He increased the gravity to one hundred and fifty times the normal atmospheric pressure.
The iron platform began to sheer. Massive bolts snapped and shot into the magma like bullets. Nikolai's knee cracked against the metal, but his skin did not break.
Slowly, impossibly, the Tsar began to stand up.
He was fighting against the raw, cosmic force of gravity with pure, unadulterated physical strength. The Gold Fragment in his chest burned like a miniature sun, supplying his muscles with infinite kinetic power. He planted his foot, the iron warping around his boot, and pushed himself upward.
"I am the Unbreaking Man," Nikolai roared, entirely rising to his feet inside the crushing gravity field. "I am the Emperor of the Ice!"
He walked forward. Every step he took required the energy of a localized nuclear detonation, but he kept moving, tearing through the gravity field like a man walking through deep water.
Amani's nose began to bleed, the dark crimson drops floating upward as his control over the spatial field began to violently destabilize. He was pushing his physical body past its absolute limits, trying to hold a god in place.
Nikolai closed the distance. He reached through the distorted space and wrapped his massive, golden hand directly around Amani's throat.
The gravity field instantly shattered with a concussive boom, throwing Upepo and Volkov to the ground.
Nikolai lifted Amani completely off the ground with one hand. The Tsar's grip was like a steel vise, slowly cutting off Amani's air supply. The Fate Changer kicked and struggled, trying to cast a Void pulse, but Nikolai's physical density grounded the magic before it could manifest.
"You fought well for a rat," Nikolai whispered, staring deeply into Amani's fading violet eyes. "But the Fragments belong to the Crown."
Nikolai reached out with his free hand, moving to tear the Space Shard from Amani's coat pocket.
From the periphery of his fading vision, Amani saw movement.
Mariya Oktyabrskaya had not retreated. She had not fired another useless bullet at the Tsar's indestructible skin.
Instead, the widow had run directly to the base of the massive Firebird engine. She stood beneath a towering, fifty-ton golden containment gear that was currently spinning wildly, glowing white-hot from the unregulated thermal overdrive.
She wasn't aiming at the Tsar.
"Hey, Nikolai!" Mariya screamed, her voice cutting through the roar of the machine.
The Tsar paused, looking over his shoulder at the insignificant widow.
Mariya raised her heavy Soviet revolver, pointing it directly at the massive, structural retaining pin holding the spinning fifty-ton gear in place on the engine wall.
"I told you," Mariya said, her indigo eyes burning with absolute, uncompromising ruthlessness. "I believe in results."
She pulled the trigger.