The lift doors slid open with a breath like a lung sealing shut behind them.
The floor they stepped onto wasn't some reinforced killbox carved out of industrial plating like Cain's briefing suggested. It wasn't an ops center stacked with terminals and lieutenants. It wasn't a panic chamber.
It was beautiful. Which was, immediately, wrong.
The chamber stretched in a long oval, tall enough that the curved ceiling disappeared into quiet darkness, lit not by harsh white fluorescents like the rest of the Arc Spire, but by low, recessed light that cast the entire space in warm amber. The walls were red oak. Not a veneer. Actual ancient wood reinforced and ribbed around smartsteel. The panels had been carved, not decoratively, not florals or saints, no, with thin, careful lines that almost looked like circuitry, or veins.
At both sides of the room, floor-to-ceiling bookcases stood in orderly, perfect rows. Real paper books. Hundreds of them, arranged by size and color and subject.
Straight ahead, on the far curve, a single wall of reinforced glass, not transparent like a regular window, but some kind of armor-hardened smartglass that projected controlled vistas only when Weiss wanted. Right now, it was showing the city, Munich at night, the rooftops washed in cold sodium light, the river a darker cut through the mass. The pale winter haze hung low over the streets like an old bruise.
And in front of that window, hands clasped behind his back, posture perfect, chin lifted like he owned the river and the streets and the dark and the cold and the night, Weiss waited.
He didn't even turn at first.
Dagger stepped out of the lift and spread, and the Meret unit spread with him like water finding terrain. Vex and Six ghosted left, guns up, they weren't carrying rifles, but their hands were weapons now. Brann, Two, and Rook took forward pressure, putting mass in the middle. Mara hung back to temperature-control the field. Silas flowed like a thin wire between columns. Nine angled for flank position without waiting to be told. Pip hovered at Six's shoulder, vibrating like always, hungry to be let off leash. Ash grinned and bounced on his toes, manic and too excited.
Ten adaptive killers.
And Weiss, alone, hands behind his back like a gentleman waiting to address an audience.
The door behind them sealed with a soft hiss.
Weiss finally spoke.
"You made better time than I calculated," he said calmly. His voice was smooth and cultured, shaped and cleaned by money, but there was an edge to it too, hard, confident, a man used to being obeyed when he didn't raise his voice. He still hadn't turned. "That's either because you're more efficient than Cain allowed for… or because my security team is underperforming."
He clicked his tongue softly. "I don't like either answer."
"Weiss," Brann rumbled.
Weiss smiled at the window. "Brann Koval. I've heard of you."
"Yeah?" Brann grinned. "You're about to feel me."
Weiss chuckled under his breath. "Please don't be vulgar in my study."
Dagger took two steps forward, slow, deliberate. "Turn around."
Weiss did.
He turned with elegant, unhurried precision, like a man walking through his own dining room in the middle of a negotiation instead of a man with ten engineered killers pointing their whole attention at his throat.
Up close, he looked older than his posture suggested. Not weak-old. Weathered-old. His hair was cut close at the sides, swept back on top, mostly slate but not fully gray. The edges at his temples were silver. Fine lines braced the corners of his mouth and eyes, but his eyes themselves were sharp. Alert. Clear. He wasn't glassy. He wasn't medicated. He wasn't rattled.
He looked… awake.
And beneath that: augmented. Subtle. But there. His left eye, at a glance, flawless. On second look, just a little too clean. The sclera too uniform. The iris too sharp at the edge. The micro-muscles too smooth. Cybernetic. High-grade. Not corp-mall trash, not battlefield patchwork. Purpose-built.
His right wrist, under his cuff, pulsed with a faint blue at the vein. Subdermal hardware. Neural assist or stim interface.
And beneath his tailored white and slate coat, under his shirt collar, Shawn caught the barest low flicker of microfilament at the base of his skull.
Combat speed assist.
This wasn't Cain's version of power, brutality and charisma and planning. This was something colder. Something honed.
Weiss looked them over, one by one. He didn't bother pretending not to stare. He studied Brann's plated mass, his coiling shoulders. He studied Mara's frost-sheen, Pip's hum, Silas' boneless slouch.
"You're the prototypes," he said softly, with something that sounded almost like pride. "He actually did it."
His eyes slid back to Dagger.
"And you," he murmured. "You must be the knife."
Pip grinned weakly. "Told you people call him that."
Dagger didn't respond to either of them.
"Weiss," he said, voice low behind the mask. "On your knees."
Weiss laughed. Not mocking. Almost delighted. "On whose authority?"
"Cain's," Brann snarled.
Weiss's smile cooled. "Cain's authority exists where I allow it."
Brann actually barked out a harsh laugh at that. "He's gonna love you."
"Quiet," Dagger said, and Brann went quiet. Instantly.
Weiss's eyes flicked to that, that response. That obedience. His smile turned sharp at the edges. "Oh," he breathed. "He listens to you. Not just fear conditioning. Not just pain avoidance. Alignment. Interesting."
"Final warning," Dagger said. "Surrender, or I put you down."
Weiss tilted his head. "You 'put me down' and what, exactly, do you think happens next?"
"We walk your corpse out," Dagger said. "We finish Cain's objective. We walk."
Weiss actually clapped once, soft, like a teacher impressed by a student's attempt even if the answer's wrong. "Adorable."
Brann took one heavy step forward. "You got about five seconds before I rip your..."
Weiss raised one eyebrow, and Brann shut up again, because Dagger hadn't told him to talk.
"You're efficient," Weiss said. "Cain will love that until he doesn't."
"We're done talking," Vex said flatly.
"I'm not," Weiss said.
He clasped his hands in front of him now, as if this were a briefing. Like the entire room wasn't a fragile fuse waiting on breath and muscle tension.
"I assume Cain told you this is about betrayal," Weiss said. "That I'm a traitor. That I stole his assets. That I'm an infection. That I split Talon."
Silas rolled his neck lazily. "Pretty close."
"Yes, he loves that language," Weiss said, amused. "Makes him feel mythic. You know what actually happened? He got slow. He got theatrical. He started playing at making Talon visible. That is not what we are. Talon is not a cause. Talon is not a flag. Talon is the machinery underneath a dying world. The skeleton. The part that stabilizes what governments break."
He smiled thinly.
"Cain forgot that."
Dagger said nothing.
Weiss kept going, voice calm, voice convincing because he believed himself. "He thinks Talon is an empire. It is not. It is an ecology. Ecologies rot if you let one predator feed unchecked. So I cut him out. Not because I wanted a throne, but because he was going to get us all killed chasing one. I took assets because they needed to be in hands that understood they were not toys for public theater. I took facilities because he'd compromised them. I took loyalists because they were loyal to Talon, not to Cain's ego. I built the Arc Spire to keep the spine intact while he ran off playing revolutionary and martyr."
Weiss gestured, almost casual, at the walls. "I'm not the traitor. I'm the immune response."
"Cute speech," Pip muttered. "Still dying."
Weiss hummed. "Eventually, yes. We all are."
Then his gaze sharpened, pinned Dagger. "But here's where you come in."
"Oh, great," Ash whispered.
Weiss ignored him. His entire focus slid in and locked on Dagger, and the air in the room went from warm to tight.
"I watched you on the way up here," Weiss said. "Do you know that? Of course you don't, Cain never told you how many eyes I laced through his own stolen tunnels. I watched you move through my floors. I watched you coordinate them." He flicked his eyes toward Brann, Mara, Nine, Rook, all of them. "I watched you hold them on your word, not Cain's. Do you understand how terrifying that is?"
Brann grinned. "Yeah, we're scary."
Weiss didn't look away from Dagger. "Cain uses leashes. You don't."
Dagger said, very evenly, "That's where you're wrong."
Weiss smiled. "You think letting them choose to obey is the same thing as a leash? No. It's worse. You told them to want to. Do you understand how rare that is? How dangerous? Cain can't make that. Cain can only fake it."
"Still not on your knees," Vex said.
Weiss spread his hands. "Here is my offer."
Six actually laughed under his breath. "Oh this is gonna be good."
Weiss didn't care. He was looking directly into the black lenses of Dagger's mask like he could see Shawn under it, like he could read every small flicker Shawn wasn't giving him.
"Leave him," Weiss said simply.
Silas made a face. "Who, Cain?"
"Yes," Weiss said. "Leave him. Walk away from his chain. Walk away from a man who will, within twenty-four hours of this, attempt to kill you and every prototype in this room to clean up his narrative. Don't pretend he won't. You are a threat to him now. Not because you're strong. Because you disobeyed. He will not keep you alive and let you retell tonight in a way that doesn't center him."
Weiss took one slow step forward.
Brann and Two both tensed. Dagger lifted a single finger. Hold. They held.
Weiss smiled, appreciating that too. "Join me instead," he said. "Not as my dog. I don't need another dog. I have plenty of dogs. I need something else. I need…" He gestured loosely at Dagger, almost reverent. "I need a counterweight."
Rook snorted. "Sounds like 'dog with extra steps.'"
Weiss flicked his eyes to Rook. "You like breathing? You can keep breathing. Nothing I'm saying gets you killed."
Rook muttered, "Didn't say I didn't like breathing."
Weiss looked back to Dagger. "Cain thinks he's order. He isn't. He is spectacle wearing order's clothes. Me? I am order the world needs to live long enough to eat itself. I am restraint. I am the check. Join that. Build with that. I'll let you run them," he nodded at the rest of the squad, "under your doctrine, not his. You keep your authority. You keep your spine. You keep them. I keep the machine out of Cain's hands. That's balance. That's how Talon survives the next decade."
Dagger watched him in silence.
Weiss's tone softened. "Or," he said quietly, "you hand me to Cain. And then you die."
No one in the squad said anything. Because that was the first real truth in the room, and they all felt it. Cain wasn't going to let them live long-term.
They all knew it.
Even Brann. Especially Brann. Dagger didn't answer Weiss. He didn't nod. Didn't twitch. Didn't move. Weiss waited a beat, two, then three, then exhaled like someone giving up on tutoring a genius child with bad habits.
"Pity," he said, voice genuinely regretful. "I would've liked to see what you became without a hand around your throat."
Then he clapped. Twice.
The bookcases hissed. Every single Meret soldier locked up on instinct.
The bookcases weren't bookcases. Or not just bookcases.
Panels along the lower halves of the shelving units split open on silent hydraulics, parting along what had looked like seamwork in the wood. The sections slid aside to reveal recessed alcoves where something slept in each, hunched and latched into sockets like statues at rest.
They woke fast. Four of them. Two on the left wall, two on the right.
They stepped out on pounding, deliberately heavy legs that made the floor hum from the mass. Omnics, but not elegant. Not subtle. Built like riot tanks on a biped frame. Two and a half meters tall. Broad torsos plated in matte black composite with hazard-yellow reinforcement at the rib joints. Shoulder assemblies like industrial cranes. Each arm ended in a triple-grip heavy weapon mount — rotating barrels, coolant feeds, ammo belts that fed from drums mounted at the spine. Their heads were narrow and armored, optics strips glowing cold white.
Juggernaut class.
But not corporate riot-control lines or military police droids. These were privately built. Illegally built. Illegal twice over. Their plating segments carried non-standard articulation. Their internal gyros hummed in a different pitch — adaptive stabilizers, probably semi-fluid, adjusting dynamically to recoil. Someone had poured real money into them. Someone had put them in a library.
"Them," Ash whispered, thrilled. "I wanna fight them."
"Adapt," Dagger said, voice dropping.
That one word hit the squad like a trigger. Vex slid low, weight on the balls of her feet, fingers flexing, spine curving like a coil about to release.
Mara inhaled and the air around her chest and shoulders dropped ten, twenty degrees, vapor feathering off her like breath in winter. Nine's fingers lengthened, bone extruding in razor curves.
Silas rolled his shoulders like water slipping off stone, joints loosening. His eyes sharpened, lazy gone. Brann grinned and cracked his neck. Gold light rippled under his skin like something molten.
Pip practically vibrated into a blur. Weiss stepped back, calm as anything, and smoothed his cuffs.
He lifted his left hand, and Shawn saw it then, the pale implant at Weiss's wrist lit and the faint glimmer under his left eye lens rotated, adjusting focal depth.
The Juggernauts leveled their guns.
Weiss said calmly, "Clean the room."
"Move!" Dagger barked.
The world detonated.
The Juggernauts didn't fire like security drones. Security drones fire for suppression. They try to corral, pin, wound. These fired to tear through.
Twin streams of heavy-caliber rounds erupted across the room in flat, punishing lines. The sound wasn't a rattle. It was an engine. A screaming industrial roar that shook the carved wood and shattered leather-bound spines off shelves.
Rook moved without thinking.
His arms snapped up as the first torrent hit, and his entire forearm structure shifted. Plating slammed outward, flattening, layering, bone and Meret-grown composite reweaving mid-stride. He took the opening volley like a riot shield takes bottles, except these weren't bottles, these were rounds meant to break light armor on IFVs, and Rook dug his feet in and held.
The kinetic impact still launched him backward into a column hard enough to shatter the plaster, but he absorbed it. He slid down, snarling, arms smoked and sparking.
"Rook!" Mara hissed.
"I'm fine!" Rook shouted, which was absolutely a lie. He spit blood, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and barked a laugh. "Saw worse in Novaya!"
Brann roared and charged.
"Brann, flank—!" Dagger began.
Brann didn't flank. Of course he didn't flank.
He barreled straight at the nearest Juggernaut, screaming like war in human shape. Bullets tore across his torso. His body moved to meet them, muscle plating up, bones thickening, skin hardening in rippling waves where the rounds tried to punch through. Brann stumbled once, twice, and then slammed into the Juggernaut full-on, shoulder first.
The force of the collision staggered the omnic.
That was the first thing that gave away what these things actually were.
Military riot-class frames? You don't stagger those with raw mass. Even Brann's. They'd just root, brace, and counter-rotate their core.
These stumbled.
Dagger's mind flicked: Not full mil-spec, then. Civilian base chassis, overbuilt. Weiss is a thief, not a manufacturer. There are limits.
Good.
Ash howled with joy and dove in behind Brann, sliding under the Juggernaut's arm while it compensated. He jammed his hands up into the plating at the omnic's hip joint, fingers digging for seams.
The Juggernaut responded. Too fast.
Its free arm whipped down like a hydraulic pile driver, caught Ash in the ribs, and launched him across the floor. He hit a bookcase hard enough to splinter real hardwood and fell in a heap of torn paper and his own laughter.
"I'm okay!" he yelled, coughing. "Oh my God, I'm okay, that was amazing."
"Less amazing if you're dead," Vex snapped.
Two slammed into the second Juggernaut like an avalanche in a hallway, going for the weapon arm. His hands locked around the rotating barrel cluster. The Juggernaut tried to pivot and drag the gun free. Two dug in. Muscles in his shoulders and back surged, cording, amplifying, microfracturing and healing in real time as he put his entire adaptive mass against the gun's pivot.
"Off," Two snarled between his teeth. "Off—"
Metal screamed. The entire arm assembly tore free, cable guts trailing like severed nerves. Two staggered back with the stolen weapon, laughing like a lunatic. The Juggernaut didn't even flinch.
Instead, its shoulder split open and grew another gun.
Adaptive modular mount.
"Are you kidding me?" Pip yelled.
The Juggernaut pivoted and opened fire point-blank at Two.
Silas slid in front of Two like a closing door, body flattening, not shielding like Rook, because Silas couldn't hard-plate like that. No. He twisted. He bent. He flowed, and the rounds that hit him didn't stop, they deflected. He wasn't blocking, he was redirecting. The spray of fire curved off his body at wild angles, chewing the ceiling, shredding shelves, tearing chunks out of pillars, missing Two by inches.
Two stared at him in stunned gratitude. "I love you."
Silas smirked. "Of course you do."
"Mara!" Dagger barked.
She didn't answer. She was already moving. Mara inhaled, slow, steady, deep.
And the temperature inside the chamber plummeted.
Condensation flashed in the air around her like she'd cracked winter open in the middle of the room. Her skin frosted over in a glittering, pale rime that spidered down her arms in delicate branches. She exhaled in a slow, controlled stream toward the legs of the Juggernaut Brann was brawling.
Ice bloomed.
Instant, violent, creeping up over the omnic's left knee joint, into its servos, under its armor plates. The Juggernaut tried to compensate. Its leg seized and skidded. Brann slammed his fist up under its chin and bent its head back with a roar, trying to break the neck assembly.
"C'mon," Brann snarled. "C'mon! C'mon—!"
The Juggernaut's optics strip flickered, then steadied. It drove its other fist down toward the top of Brann's skull.
Brann caught that fist in both hands and held it in place through sheer rage and adaptation.
His biceps bulged. Plating surged. Blood ran down his face where some of the rounds from earlier had forced their way in and he hadn't had time to finish healing yet.
"I've got it," he grunted.
"You've got it for now," Vex snapped, darting low and jamming both fists into a seam Mara's frost had made brittle, punching in and ripping out a handful of frozen components in a shower of fracturing metal.
The Juggernaut convulsed.
Then its other shoulder popped and spat a barrel.
"Oh come on," Ash wheezed from the pile of paper, grinning through blood. "They got backup guns? That's cheating."
Meanwhile...
Weiss hadn't moved. Of course he hadn't. He watched.
He watched his Juggernauts test the Meret squad, and his expression was rapture and calculation mixed in equal parts. He looked like a scientist watching stress curves and breakpoints.
Dagger had watched enough men like that in the tunnels. You couldn't trust men like that to scream when you cut them. They didn't waste breath.
Dagger moved. Weiss's left eye flickered as it was refocusing. Tracking.
Dagger was fast. Weiss was faster than he should've been. Shawn closed the distance in a blur, aiming to take Weiss by the throat and put him down clean. No theatrics.
Weiss stepped in instead of back. That alone almost cost Shawn a second. Most men backed up. Weiss moved into him.
His right hand flashed. A knife slid out from under his sleeve into his grip like it had lived there, waiting. The blade was narrow, matte, and faintly blue at the edge, the kind of micro-mono filament combat knife you didn't get on the open market, let alone keep concealed in a gentleman's coat.
He slashed for Dagger's abdomen at an angle that should've opened him hip to ribs. Shawn twisted.
The blade met his coat, cut across and sparked, hard, as it caught the weave in the armored panels layered under the cloth. The coat didn't quite stop it. He felt the bite. Felt heat. But he moved with it, turned, redirected the cut so it carved shallow instead of deep. Weiss flowed with him.
For an "old man," Weiss moved like a professional knife fighter thirty years younger and meaner. Not pretty. Not flashy. Efficient. Clinical. The arm stayed tight. The shoulder stayed relaxed. Hips driving motion, not arms. He wasn't hacking. He was cutting living meat in his mind, not fabric. Normally, Shawn's body would resist any attacks from knives, but to Weiss, it was like he was cutting butter.
He pivoted to follow the slash immediately with a stab, aiming for the seam at Dagger's lower ribs where even good armor flexed. Fast. Too fast.
That speed wasn't natural.
Weiss's implants were feeding him muscle assist, overclocking his reflex arc, dumping microcurrent pulses along nerves before his conscious mind could even say stab.
Shawn blocked with his forearm, let the knife bite there instead of the seam, and felt the blade bite through fabric, into him. Heat iced down his arm. Pain ran behind it. He ignored it. He countered.
Shawn slammed his free hand forward, aiming a palm strike for Weiss's throat, not to crush, not yet, but to disrupt, to stun, to take his balance. Weiss's left eye flared.
It wasn't light. It was focus.
That moment, Shawn understood what Weiss was doing. Weiss's ocular implant was giving him micro-slice predictive correction. A fractional anticipatory overlay. A "slowdown" effect that wasn't actually slowing Shawn, but letting Weiss see Shawn's strike in frames instead of motion. Making fast things readable.
In the moment, all Shawn felt was this: He moved.
Weiss was already where he was going to be.
Shawn's palm strike hit air. Weiss stepped around and under Shawn's arm with a practiced pivot, slashing again on the exit, trying to open inner bicep this time, going for blood flow, not show. Cold calculation. Minimum motion, maximum damage.
Shawn's respect for him sharpened by a millimeter.
Then he kicked Weiss in the chest.
No finesse. No flourish.
Just a straight, brutal, drive-through front kick that used every ounce of his own trained strength and every unnatural boost Meret had layered into him since they'd let him get this deep.
Weiss didn't get out of that in time.
The kick hit center mass. Air exploded out of Weiss in a sound that was more ugly grunt than proper exhale, and he flew backward, coat snapping, heels skidding on the polished floor. He hit one of his own antique chairs, smashed through it in a burst of splinters, and rolled.
He came up on a knee. Not down. Not stunned.
Bleeding now, a red bloom spreading across his front where the impact had caved something — but smiling.
"Oh," Weiss breathed. "You do hit like Cain said."
Dagger stalked forward.
Behind them, the Juggernauts were learning.
That was the other problem. Meret wasn't the only adaptive thing in the room.
The first Juggernaut Mara and Brann and Vex were working was limping, knee joint ruined, optics cracked, plating torn. Brann had both arms around its upper chassis now, wrestling it backward, teeth bared, a roar shaking out of him so deep it buzzed the glass in its brackets. Vex stabbed in, again and again, knuckles punching into gaps Mara had flash-frozen.
"Down," Vex hissed. "Down. Down."
The Juggernaut did something Brann hadn't expected:
It went limp.
Brann swore, momentum suddenly uncontrolled. The Juggernaut dropped its mass deadweight like a felled pillar, wrenching Brann off-balance and yanking him forward just enough that it could snap its leg in a weird, impossible side-hinge and sweep Brann's feet from under him.
Brann went down hard.
The Juggernaut rolled, planted with the ruined leg, and reconfigured. Mara actually swore, cold disbelief in her voice, as the damaged plating on its knee melted inward, away from the broken servo, and hardened across the remaining leg and torso instead.
It was triaging itself. Weiss's work had learned from Koren's.
"Dagger!" Mara shouted.
"I see it," Dagger snapped, and then he had to duck because Weiss's knife came at his throat in a smooth, whispering line that promised to open him to the bone if it hit.
Weiss moved like he had all the time in the world. He didn't.
The Juggernauts opened fire again.
Rook dropped to one knee and took the burst. This time he braced for it, muscles locking into a living barricade. The rounds hammered into his forearms, sparking off in whiplash ricochets that tore grooves through the cherry wood shelves. He hissed through clenched teeth, not in fear, but in angry effort.
Silas darted under that barrage with an ease that should've been impossible for a human skeleton. He spun, slid up along the Juggernaut's side like liquid up glass, and slammed both hands into the base of its neck, not to punch, but to wrench.
With Silas, it was never brute force.
It was leverage.
Bone and ligament that weren't human bone and ligament anymore gave him purchase where hands had no business having purchase. He locked, twisted, torqued, and the Juggernaut's head assembly popped two centimeters off alignment with a horrible grinding shriek.
The Juggernaut spasmed, auto-recalibrating.
"Two," Silas snapped.
Two slammed in like a meteor.
His fist drove into the half-dislocated neck assembly with a crunch like metal screaming. The Juggernaut's optic strip flickered, then finally, went black.
It fell.
"That's one!" Pip yelled, borderline ecstatic.
"Pip," Vex hissed, "shut up and move!"
Because the second Juggernaut hadn't gone docile when its partner dropped. It adjusted.
It flooded the room with another sweep of gunfire, this one lower, this one slicing horizontally, this one designed not to repel but to cut through legs.
"Up!" Dagger roared.
The squad jumped. Every single one of them.
Every one that could, anyway Mara, Brann, Vex, Pip, Silas, everyone left their footing for that half-second of safety above the sweep.
Rook couldn't. Rook took the line of fire across his shins. He screamed.
Not a little. Not a grunt. Not a tough-guy snarl. Full body, involuntary, hands-hit-the-floor scream.
Because the Juggernaut's gunline didn't just tear flesh. It chewed bone. Rook's lower legs vaporized in a haze of blood and shredded Meret-plated bone. He crashed flat.
"Rook!" Mara snapped.
"I'M FINE!" Rook howled. He was not fine.
He was trying to push himself upright and his body couldn't decide how to fix itself first, seal bleeding? Rebuild bone? Plate over the wound to keep him in the fight? He slapped his palms to the floor, roared like a wounded animal, and forced himself forward anyway, dragging himself like he still had calves.
Dagger saw it. He saw Weiss see it. And in Weiss's face, in that split-second split attention between his knife work and the chaos in the room, Shawn saw something like awe.
"You insane bastards," Weiss whispered, almost reverent.
Shawn used that half-second.
He stepped in, inside Weiss's line, and slammed his forearm up under Weiss's knife wrist. Not blocking this time. Controlling.
Weiss tried to twist out. Shawn's grip locked. He drove his other hand forward and caught Weiss by the throat.
He didn't squeeze. He just held. Weiss froze.
He did not panic. His breathing hitched, but his eyes didn't go wide, his knife didn't drop, his body didn't flail. He just… paused.
He knew, perfectly, what that posture was: negotiation range. Lethal potential. Talk-or-die.
Across the room, Pip yelled, "Boss, boss, boss... Rook's down...!"
"Hold formation," Dagger snapped without turning.
Because Weiss hadn't dropped his knife yet.
Under his fingers, Shawn could feel Weiss's pulse. Steady. Elevated, yes, but not frantic. Controlled. Trained.
Weiss smiled.
Close up, his smile was… wrong. Too knowing. Too calm for someone with a hand around his windpipe.
"You won't kill me," he rasped. The words pressed against Shawn's palm. "You can't."
Shawn tightened his grip the barest fraction. "Watch me."
Weiss's cybernetic left eye whirred, micro-focusing. He searched Shawn's mask like he could see through the glass. "If you kill me," he hissed, "Cain wins. He gets to frame it how he likes. 'Traitor neutralized, prototypes sacrificed themselves in glorious service.' You die clean. He consolidates. Onyx nods and moves a piece. The Elder says nothing. Talon kneels quieter tomorrow than it did today. Everything goes back into Cain's cage except Cain. You think I don't know? You think I don't know the way that man writes?"
A Juggernaut round sparked inches from Shawn's leg.
He didn't look. Weiss leaned in against the pressure at his throat, voice dropping into urgency. "But if I live...."
"Boss!" Pip screamed.
That wasn't celebration. That was alarm. Dagger's instinct made him turn his head the smallest degree.
The second Juggernaut wasn't alone anymore.
The far door, the one opposite the lift, the one that had looked like part of the woodwork, had slid open.
Weiss's soldiers poured in. Not civilians playing soldier. Weiss's people.
Uniforms slate and white, no spiral insignia, no Talon mark, just that clean black slashed emblem on their chests. Tactical harness tight. Sidearms up. Carbines already shouldered. Visors down. They flowed through the opening with precision that said drilled, not sloppy. They didn't trip over each other, didn't shout orders, didn't waste motion.
Ten of them in the first wave. Fifteen in the second. At least twenty total, flooding in and fanning like they were washing the room in gunmetal.
Brann swore. "Ah. Finally."
Ash wiped blood off his lip with the back of his hand and grinned like a lunatic. "I love this job."
Pip made a small, excited noise. "Can I go? Can I go? Boss, can I..."
"Pip," Vex snapped.
"YES?"
"Shut up and cut," Vex said.
Pip practically screamed with joy and launched himself toward the first line of Weiss's soldiers so fast that he left a sonic smear in the air.
Six hissed, "We're getting boxed," and spun to cover their flank.
Mara snapped her hands out and a flurry of frost arced through the first wave's guns, seizing slides, frosting optics, turning polished carbon fiber brittle. One of the soldiers fired anyway and the barrel cracked in his hand like shattered ice, the weapon breaking apart mid-discharge. He screamed, hand mangled.
Rook dragged himself forward on ruined legs, planted in front of that door like a bulldozer that refused to fall over, and bellowed, "COME ON THEN," while blood steamed off the stumps and pooled under him.
Silas vanished into the angle between two bookcases and reappeared behind the second line like a ghost unrolling from a shadow. He hooked an arm around one soldier's neck, twisted, dropped him, flowed aside before the carbine bursts lit the space, he'd just been in.
Nine slid low under the same fire, blades in both hands now, carving at tendons, calves, hamstrings with obscene precision. People fell screaming. Pip ricocheted off a wall and into someone's back with enough velocity to shatter a spine.
The room, already chaos, exploded.
Weiss smiled at Shawn through the pressure at his throat, voice smooth again even with the violence rising around them.
"See?" he said softly. "Balance."
Shawn's grip tightened. He could kill Weiss now. There really wasn't a reason he shouldn't. Regardless of what Weiss said, letting him live ruined whatever chances Shawn had at raising the ranks in Talon. Taking down an ex board member was no small matter.
Shawn thought of his new squad. He hated every last member. Truthfully, it didn't matter to him whether they lived or died as they were all Talon anyway. Letting Weiss live here was out of the question.
To Weiss who watched Dagger's moment of hesitation, it seemed like the calculations land behind the black glass, like a man watching gears mesh.
"Choose," he whispered.
Shawn's jaw clenched behind the mask. The Juggernaut roared. Brann howled back.
Somewhere behind them, Pip laughed like a feral child tearing into a feast.
And Dagger, Shawn Rose, Staff Sergeant of Overwatch, Blackwatch's future problem, Cain's favorite weapon and Cain's worst mistake, made his choice.