The suppression field hummed like a subterranean hive, drowning the air in heavy, dead silence. No silver rifts. No thermal sparks. No dimensional folding.
Just four people in a cold room surrounded by sixty heavily armed guards and a director who made the mistake of leaving us on our feet.
Director Vance smiled behind her reinforced glass catwalk. "Kill the men. Frame the two Tiaras. We only need their marrow intact."
"Charming," Echo spat.
Before the guards could squeeze their triggers, Echo fired.
BOOM.
The heavy street-sweeper roared, the slug tearing through the lead operator's chest plate and hurling him over the railing. The concussive blast blew open a gap in their formation, and I moved.
Without my spatial acceleration, my body relied on pure, raw muscle memory. I closed the distance to the nearest guard in two strides, ducking under a pulse-rifle barrel and driving my right blade upward through his visor. Metal groaned; bone snapped. I yanked the steel free, spun behind his falling body, and used him as a human shield as a wall of automatic fire chewed through his armor.
"Kyle! Flank left!" I shouted over the deafening thunder of gunfire.
"I'm on it! Though I'd like the record to show I signed up for stealth operations, not gladiatorial slaughter!" Kyle yelled, sliding across the slick steel grating. He drew a pair of heavy-caliber ballistic pistols—devoid of electronic targeting—and put three rounds directly into an elite guard's neck seam.
Beside him, Lyra was a blur of silver-and-crimson movement. Denied her spatial claws, she relied on raw, predatory momentum, vaulting off a metal support beam and driving a combat bowie knife into a soldier’s collarbone before using his falling weight to sweep two others off the ledge.
"They're too slow!" Lyra laughed, her eyes wild. "No tactical grid to think for them!"
She was right. The Reclamation guards were trained to coordinate through networked HUDs and spatial dampeners. Strip away their high-tech hive mind, and they were just men in heavy suits trying to track four apex predators who knew how to kill in the dark.
Echo moved like a whirlwind of kinetic destruction at my left. BOOM. CLICK-CLACK. BOOM. Every shell she pumped out tore through flesh and armor, her movement mirrored so closely to mine that we drifted into an uncanny rhythm. I parried a stun baton, sliced the wielder’s wrist, and Echo blew him backward before he could drop his pin.
"Not bad for a copy," I muttered, ducking a rifle butt.
"I'm the upgraded model, original," Echo smirked, vaulting over a fallen chassis and driving her boot into a commander's chest, caving the armor inward.
Above us, Director Vance's confident composure began to fracture. She slammed her hand against the control console. "Activate the stasis coils! Flood the floor with cryogenic gas!"
Hissing vents opened along the perimeter. White, freezing vapor began pouring across the grating, instantly riming our boots with frost.
"Kyle!" I called out. "The control panel on the catwalk—can you jump the override without your grid?"
"Without my grid?!" Kyle ducked behind a pillar as bullets chipped away the steel. "Tiara, that’s like asking a surgeon to do brain surgery with a butter knife!"
"Can you do it or not?!"
"Of course I can! I’m a genius!" Kyle sprinted toward the access ladder, dodging a burst of fire as Lyra provided covering shots.
Echo and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the base of the central cylinder, surrounded by a ring of twenty remaining guards. The cryogenic gas was rising to our knees, slowing our reflexes, numbing our toes.
"Seventeen of us," Echo murmured, looking up at the glass tanks where our dead doubles floated in frozen liquid. "Seventeen times they put us in cages."
"Eighteen is a bad lucky number for them," I said, flipping my blades into a reverse grip.
We moved together.
It wasn't a fight; it was a synchronized execution. Two identical blades, two identical instincts, cutting through the remaining guards before the gas could lock our joints. Every stroke I missed, Echo covered. Every angle she exposed, I closed.
Above, Kyle jammed a metallic wire directly into the open circuitry of Vance's console. "And... eureka, you fascist lab rats!"
CLACK-CLACK-CRACK.
The suppression field flickered. The heavy magnetic hum abruptly died.
Instantly, the silver spatial energy spiraled back around my wrists like a hungry serpent. Thermal heat erupted from my core, flash-boiling the cryogenic gas around us in a massive explosion of steam. Echo’s eyes flared ablaze with raw crimson light, her shotgun barrel glowing cherry-red.
Director Vance stumbled back from the railing, her face pale as death. "Impossible... the field—"
I didn't use the stairs.
I folded space, stepping directly through the air to appear two inches in front of her glass booth.
I raised my hand, the sovereign aura crackling across my fingers until the reinforced glass spider-webbed into a thousand pieces.
"You spent a century trying to build the First Assassin," I whispered as the glass shattered inward.
Echo stepped through the rift right behind me, leveling her smoking shotgun directly between Vance's eyes.
"You should have left her dead."