The air in the transit tunnel didn't just reek of ozone; it hit the back of Mari’s throat like warm pennies and singed fat.
She dragged her blade down her jacket sleeve, but the black hemolymph didn't wipe clean. It hissed against the high-carbon steel, bubbling into a caustic gray foam that chewed through the metal and burned straight into her sleeve, biting into her forearm like drops of fucking lye.
"Goddammit!" she hissed, gritting her teeth against the burn.
Behind her—snap. Snap. Snap.
Cassian rammed 5.56 rounds into a polymer magazine. His left thumb was torn open to the bone from the Dreadstalker’s shockwave, pouring slick crimson over the brass casings. He didn't even flinch. He just shoved the lead home with frantic, mechanical violence, his breath ragged and uneven against the dark.
"You're fucking quiet," Cassian growled, his jaw locked tight as he stepped into her personal space. The raw heat radiating off his chest was suffocating, laced with the stink of gunpowder and sweat.
Mari slid the ruined knife back into its sheath, the leather tight against her thigh. "Thinking."
"That's when you usually start barking orders."
"Not tonight, Cassian."
BOOM.
A low-frequency shockwave punched through the tunnel floor, slamming through the soles of Mari's boots and rattling the enamel in her teeth. Cracks spider-webbed across the ceiling, raining pulverizing concrete dust over their shoulders.
Far above, a metallic shriek tore through the air—a sound like iron plates being fed into a fucking meat grinder.
Three minutes.
She didn't need a watch. She had the goddamn timer burned into her brain. She’d watched Cassian die in this exact transit line during Cycle Two—a Hollow ripping his throat open from behind when his bolt caught, his hands frantically trying to hold his windpipe together while his eyes went glassy and his life spilled across her boots.
Then the Spire had pulsed, and the world had turned to blinding white ash.
Memory retention: 93.1%.
The missing 6.9 percent clawed at the edges of her mind like a phantom limb. What had the wipe stolen from her? The Spire's override code? Or the precise moment a needle had punched into her cerebral cortex?
THUMP. THUMP.
Hydraulic servos whined violently through the darkness. Kaelen rounded the shattered tunnel bend, his heavy power armor humming on an empty fusion reserve. His left shoulder plate was half-melted, exposing fried, twitching bundles of synthetic muscle. His crimson visor swept the gloom, locking onto Mari with terrifying focus.
"Outer perimeter is blown," Kaelen’s vox grated, heavy with synthetic static. "They aren't hunting by scent. They're tracking the Spire's lateral emissions. Every time that violet beam fires, their DNA rewrites itself."
Above them, the ceiling cracks flashed violently violet.
"Eight minutes," Mari said.
A shadow peeled off the overhead air duct. Vesper dropped ten feet, hitting the rail ties with zero noise, his twin high-caliber pistols already drawn. He flicked a silver lighter across his blood-caked knuckles, stepping so close Mari could feel the cold edge of his armor against her side. Click. Click.
"Wonderful," Vesper drawled, a dark, dangerous smirk cutting across his face as his gaze trailed over her blood-soaked jacket. "The whole fucking squad's here. Who wants to pick how we die today?"
Mari stepped straight into his space, her hand snapping up to grab his wrist with a grip that bruised. "Put the lighter away before I shove it down your fucking throat."
The smirk died. The lighter snapped shut. Vesper’s eyes darkened, leaning down until his breath brushed her ear. "Touchy tonight, sunshine."
"The Spire isn't a weapon," Mari said, her voice dropping into a razor-cold whisper that silenced them both. "It's a collection node. That Dreadstalker we killed didn't dissolve—it uploaded combat telemetry. Ballistics, joint leverage, reaction speeds. It analyzed Cassian’s hit, synthesized hyper-dense muscle tissue, and reinforced its own joint in under two seconds."
Cassian slammed his magazine into the receiver with a heavy clack, towering over her. "So every fucking round we dump into them just teaches the next wave how to kill us?"
"Yes. Stop shooting outer armor." Mari dropped to one knee, grabbed a rusted railway spike, and slammed it into the silt between the tracks. "Central nervous nexus. Four inches below the sternum plate. There’s a gap in the skeletal armor for thermal venting. Put your steel or your lead right there."
Kaelen’s visor tilted down, his towering form casting a dark shadow over her. "How the hell do you have internal schematics for an Apex unit deployed three hundred days ahead of schedule?"
"Because I cut one open, goddammit," Mari said, standing up until she was toe-to-toe with the massive armored chest. She stared directly into the red glow of his visor. "Four hundred meters down. Third basement tier."
Cassian stopped breathing, his hand catching her shoulder hard enough to bruise through her vest. "That sector was sealed three years ago. You're out of your mind."
"I died on the floor of the server room while the coolant bled out!" Mari snapped, yanking herself free from his grip and kicking dirt over the diagram. "Now check your fucking mags!"
CRACK-BOOM.
The reinforced steel barricade at the end of the tunnel lurched inward. Iron bolts sheared off, whistling through the air like shrapnel.
Pale, mutated limbs squeezed through the bent metal. A Hollow with a split ribcage vaulted onto the curved ceiling, scuttling upside down toward Mari like a massive, skeletal spider.
"Four hours until the hard system purge!" Mari screamed over the roaring metal. "If we're above ground when the server resets, we don't wake the fuck up!"
The barricade shattered into twisted scrap.
Cassian opened fire—CRACK-CRACK-CRACK! Three heavy rounds punched straight into the lead Hollow’s chest, spraying black fluid across the tunnel wall. The creature didn't even stumble. The bullet holes bubbled with black filaments, sealing over before the empty brass hit the dirt.
"Fucking useless!" Cassian roared.
Mari lunged inside its reaching claws, her body moving with lethal, fluid precision. She drove her acid-scarred knife straight up through the bottom of its sternum, hit the soft, pulsing tissue of the nexus, and twisted hard.
Bone snapped. The Hollow went instantly limp, crashing into the ballast like a sack of wet meat right at her feet.
Mari yanked her blade free, kicked the corpse aside, and sprinted down the dark incline leading into the subterranean gut of the city.
"Target the nexus and fall the fuck back!" she roared.
Kaelen unleashed a wall of heavy kinetic fire that chewed through the tunnel mouth. Vesper’s twin pistols barked in rhythmic, lethal precision behind her, his harsh laugh echoing through the narrow shaft.
"Die, you bastard!" Vesper hollered over the gunfire.
Mari didn't look back. Her pulse hammered in her throat as she ran headlong into the pitch-black basement levels where the Spire's roots drank from the dead—straight toward the room where a synthetic voice had called her Subject Thirteen.
She wasn't trying to survive the apocalypse. She was going to tear the machine's heart out with her bare fucking hands.