The silence left by the helicopter was thicker than the mountain air. It was Wolfen who shattered it, his voice cutting through the tension with infuriating calm.
"Okay, so we're going to Kongo, then."
It was as if he'd thrown a live grenade into their midst.
"Wait, hold on," Eva sputtered, her hands clenching into fists. "Are you kidding me, Wolfen? Seriously? We can't trust that guy!"
"I trust him," Wolfen stated, his tone leaving no room for debate.
Eva's composure, hard-won over a decade, shattered. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU TRUST HIM?" she yelled, her voice echoing through the clearing. "He's a Prime Architect! They literally cut us open, Wolfen! They took away our humanity! They turned Maya into… into that! And you trust them?!"
"Eva, listen," Leo interjected, trying to be the voice of reason. "Maybe he has a good reason."
"A GOOD REASON?" She whirled on him, her one good eye blazing. "HE TRUSTS A PRIME ARTITECH! He could be leading us into a trap for all we know! 'Fulfilling a promise?' What promise? He's lying, for God's sake!"
Derek stepped closer to Wolfen, his expression deadly serious. "Wolfen. Why? Why do you trust him?"
Wolfen looked at them, a gallery of furious, frightened, and confused faces. He could have explained. He could have told them about the man behind the bronze mask, the one who would quietly leave books in his cell, who had confiscated his sketchbook not as punishment, but to preserve it, who had stopped his rampage not with overwhelming force, but with precise, almost paternal care. He could have explained that Prime 5 was a dissident, a flaw in their perfect system.
But they weren't ready for nuance. They saw the world in black and white, and right now, Prime 5 was painted in the blackest tar. So, he used the tools they would understand.
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't get angry. He simply shifted his posture, his gaze, the very texture of his presence. He used dark psychology.
He first isolated Eva's argument, framing it as emotional, hysterical. "Eva, your fear is understandable. It's a survival instinct." The condescension was a subtle knife. "But letting fear dictate our strategy is what gets people killed."
Then, he appealed to their deepest desires, the ones they had trained for ten years to achieve. "You want your sister back, don't you? This is the only lead we have. Alaska is a ghost. Kongo is a target. A hard target, but a target nonetheless."
He used social proof on the others, making Eva's stance seem like the outlier. "The rest of you see it, don't you? The logic. We have a direction. A real one."
He employed scarcity and urgency. "Every second we stand here arguing, the Kongo facility' security protocols could be changing. They could be moving them again. This window is closing."
Finally, he used a manipulation as old as time: the partial truth to sell a lie. He looked directly at Eva, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You're right, Eva. He is a Prime. He just came out of nowhere and left. But Five hates the other Primes. Especially Four. Because Four doesn't create hybrids." He paused, letting the horror of that implication sink in. "He… you don't even want to know what he does. And our sisters are in his hands. We need to hurry to Kongo. That's final."
He hadn't answered why he trusted Five. He had simply reframed the entire debate, making Kongo not a potential trap, but a desperate rescue mission from a fate worse than death, using Five's information as an unavoidable tool. He had manipulated their fears, their hopes, and their revulsion to get the result he wanted.
The fight went out of Eva. She was outmaneuvered, her valid concerns twisted into emotional baggage. She looked at the others, saw the resolve hardening on their faces, and knew she was alone. Defeated, she gave a single, sharp, furious nod.
"Fine."
The journey from the Tibetan highlands to the heart of Africa was a brutal trek across a dying world. They moved like ghosts, avoiding major population centers, their enhanced bodies carrying them through landscapes of breathtaking beauty and profound decay. And everywhere, they saw the evidence of the world's accelerating mutation.
The infected were changing. The shambling, mindless husks were becoming rarer. In their place were faster, more coordinated variants that moved in predatory packs. They saw larger, hulking forms that could tear through steel, and worse, ones that seemed to display a flicker of cunning, setting simple ambushes or using rubble for cover. The virus wasn't just spreading; it was evolving.
And then, they saw the hybrids.
It was in the ruins of a city on the Indian subcontinent. They had taken shelter in a skyscraper, and from the shattered windows, they watched the streets below. It wasn't a horde of the dead. It was an organized patrol. Creatures with bestial features, glowing eyes, and crude armor moved in formation. Some carried weapons that were a grotesque fusion of bone and technology. They weren't mindless. They were soldiers.
"The Architects…" Maya whispered, her voice barely audible. "They've released them."
It was a horrifying realization. The Architects weren't just experimenting in hidden labs anymore. They were seeding the world. They were culling the old human population and replacing it with their new, "perfected" creations. This was their newly created world, and they were its architects in the most literal sense. The sight filled them with a cold dread. They weren't just fighting to rescue two people; they were fighting against the very future of the planet.
Weeks turned into a month as they finally crossed into the African continent. The air grew thick and humid, the greenery an oppressive, vibrant wall of life. The Congo Basin was a world unto itself, a steaming, primordial labyrinth. Using the coordinates Prime 5 had provided, they navigated the dense jungle, following the winding, muddy paths of the Congo River's tributaries.
They were close. They could feel it.
It was then, in a small, relatively clear area near a riverbank, that the ambush was sprung.
It was not the dead. It was not hybrids.
It was humans.
Figures clad in a mix of faded military fatigues—some African, some old American digital camo—erupted from the jungle foliage. They moved with professional precision, fanning out to surround them. Their weapons were a mix of pre-fall military hardware and post-fall custom jobs, all pointed with deadly intent. There were at least thirty of them, a mix of grizzled veterans and hardened survivors, their faces set in grim lines.
"Don't move!" a voice barked, laced with an authority that brooked no argument.
The group froze, their own enhanced reflexes calculating the odds. They could take them, but not without bloodshed. And this wasn't the enemy they had come to fight.
Then, the circle of soldiers parted, and a man stepped forward. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his hair shot with grey but his posture ramrod straight. His face was a roadmap of hard living and command, his eyes the same sharp, assessing steel as the son he was now staring down. He wore the tattered remnants of a colonel's insignia on his collar.
Leo's breath hitched. The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The metal bat in his hand felt suddenly like a child's toy.
The man's gaze swept over the formidable, muscular group, lingering for a fraction of a second on his son's stunned face before settling on Wolfen, correctly identifying him as the leader.
"My name is Colonel Marcus Cross," he said, his voice echoing in the jungle clearing. "And you are trespassing in a sovereign territory of the Human Resistance. Drop your weapons. Now."