The fifty Giza Sentinels did not roar, nor did they issue mechanical battle cries. They operated with the terrifying, silent efficiency of an automated execution squad. As one unified, golden phalanx, the towering eight-foot-tall machines raised their heavy plasma repeaters and opened fire.
A blinding storm of superheated blue energy illuminated the pitch-black obsidian walls of the loading bay.
Amani didn't have the physical stamina left to cast a massive, room-spanning gravity shield. The violent drain of the spatial fold and the destruction of the Behemoth had pushed his mortal body to the absolute brink. Instead, he relied on the Pack.
"Chacha!" Amani roared, diving behind the thick, golden treads of the hovering Giza train.
The giant Swahili warrior did not seek cover. Chacha welcomed the fire.
He charged headlong into the storm of blue plasma, his massive Cryo-Hammer gripped tightly in both hands. Three concentrated bolts of superheated energy struck him squarely in the chest. Before the Giza medical fluid, those shots would have instantly vaporized his heart. But now, the jagged, protruding ridge of golden, calcified bone that fused his sternum together flared with blinding, kinetic brilliance.
The plasma didn't burn him; the indestructible Giza-infused bone actively absorbed the thermal impact, dissipating the deadly heat across his newly augmented skeletal structure.
Chacha let out a deafening, booming laugh that echoed over the gunfire. He was a walking juggernaut.
He closed the distance to the center of the Sentinel phalanx in three massive strides. Chacha swung the Cryo-Hammer in a devastating, horizontal arc. The weapon's Giza coolant engine screamed, venting a massive cloud of absolute zero.
The heavy hammer head struck the first three golden Sentinels. The sheer kinetic force shattered their heavily shielded torsos, while the extreme cold instantly flash-froze their internal hydraulic fluids. The three machines violently exploded into showers of brittle, frozen gold shrapnel and sparking wires.
"My turn!" Upepo yelled, darting out from behind the train.
The speedster was a blur of brilliant blue kinetic lightning. With his right arm tightly bound to his chest in a makeshift splint, he was forced to rely entirely on his legs and his good left hand.
Upepo didn't try to punch the heavy metal machines. At Mach 2, he vibrated the molecules in his left hand to a frictionless frequency. He zipped past a line of five firing Sentinels. As he passed each one, his vibrating hand phased seamlessly through their heavy golden chest plates, forcefully gripping the glowing blue plasma cores that powered them.
In less than a second, Upepo came to a screeching halt on the far side of the loading bay, holding five dripping, sparking power cores.
Behind him, the five golden Sentinels simultaneously powered down, their optical sensors fading to black before they collapsed heavily to the obsidian floor.
"Show-off," Mariya Oktyabrskaya muttered from the flank.
The widow had taken a highly tactical position behind a stack of heavy Giza shipping crates. She rested the heavy barrel of her Soviet revolver on the edge of the crate, her cold indigo eyes entirely focused. She didn't aim for their heavily armored chests. She aimed for the tiny, glowing joints connecting their rotating plasma repeaters to their arms.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Three armor-piercing rounds flew across the bay. Three heavy plasma repeaters were violently severed from their mechanical hosts, dropping uselessly to the floor.
Amani stepped out from behind the hover-train. His violet eyes burned as he tapped into the Space Shard. He couldn't crush all of them, but he could isolate the stragglers.
He pinpointed a cluster of ten Sentinels advancing on Mariya's position. Amani violently thrust his hand downward, magnifying the localized gravity directly beneath their heavy, golden feet by a factor of fifty.
The perfectly smooth obsidian floor shattered under the sudden, immense weight. The ten Sentinels were violently driven to their knees, their heavy golden armor audibly groaning and warping under the crushing spatial pressure. Their internal servos whined in mechanical agony until they rapidly snapped, completely immobilizing the squad.
"Sia! The ceiling!" Amani shouted.
Sia stepped out from the rear of the train, leaning heavily on her Staff of Life. Her emerald magic was almost completely depleted, but she didn't need to heal anyone. She looked up at the massive, intricately carved stone gargoyles and heavy stalactites hanging from the vaulted ceiling of the cavernous bay.
She slammed the butt of her staff against the floor. A final, desperate pulse of emerald life-magic shot upward, embedding itself not into flesh, but into the ancient, dormant subterranean moss and thick roots clinging to the cavern roof.
The microscopic plant life violently hyper-accelerated. Massive, thick vines thick as anacondas erupted from the ceiling, aggressively wrapping around the heavy stone stalactites. With a violent, tearing sound, the magically overgrown roots ripped the massive stones free from the ceiling.
Tons of jagged rock rained down directly onto the cluster of gravity-locked Sentinels, entirely crushing the golden machines into flat, sparking pancakes of ruined metal.
The brief, intensely violent skirmish ended as quickly as it had begun.
The loading bay fell utterly silent, completely littered with the shattered, sparking, and frozen remains of fifty elite Giza Sentinels.
Chacha stood in the center of the carnage, his heavy chest heaving, the golden bone slowly dimming back to its normal state beneath his dark skin. He rested the heavy head of the Cryo-Hammer on the floor, offering a massive, satisfied grin.
"They don't build them like they used to," the giant rumbled.
"Don't get cocky," Mariya warned, stepping out from behind her barricade and reloading her heavy revolver with fresh rounds. "Those were just the automated gatekeepers. The Praetorians guarding the throne room will not be mindless machines."
Amani walked past the wreckage, his boots crunching over shattered gold and black glass. He moved toward the far end of the loading bay, where a massive, circular elevator shaft was bored directly upward into the solid Void-crystal of the Citadel's central spire.
The heavy elevator car was a sleek, transparent cylinder of reinforced Giza glass, large enough to comfortably hold twenty men.
Amani pressed his bandaged hand against the glowing access terminal. To his surprise, the doors hissed open instantly. There were no biometric locks. There were no security codes required.
"The Tsar has entirely unlocked the path," Volkov's voice seemed to echo in Amani's memory. Nikolai was arrogant. He wanted them to ascend. He wanted to look them in the eye when he killed them.
"Pack," Amani called out, his voice hoarse but steady. "We go up."
They piled into the transparent elevator. Upepo stood near the glass, constantly vibrating his legs to burn off excess adrenaline. Chacha had to duck his massive head to clear the doorframe, taking up a quarter of the car by himself. Sia leaned heavily against the giant's leg, completely exhausted. Mariya stood perfectly still, her indigo eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling of the car, entirely ready for the bloodshed to come.
Amani hit the single, glowing golden rune on the control panel.
The doors seamlessly sealed shut. The elevator didn't jerk or shudder; it ascended with perfectly smooth, terrifying, high-speed anti-gravity acceleration.
The sheer speed pushed them heavily into the floor. As they rapidly shot upward through the core of the Citadel, the pitch-black obsidian walls of the shaft suddenly gave way to transparent Void-crystal.
They had breached the surface.
The elevator was ascending the exterior of the towering, central spire of the fortress, providing a horrifying, panoramic view of the Siberian wasteland outside.
"Look," Upepo whispered, his breath fogging the glass.
Miles away in the dark, freezing distance, the Black-Ice Barrens were glowing.
It wasn't the soft light of a sunrise. It was the apocalyptic, furious fire of an orbital bombardment. The massive Russian Armada—two thousand heavily armored gunships and bombers—were circling high above the distant mountains like a swarm of angry hornets. They were relentlessly, systematically raining superheated plasma and heavy kinetic warheads down onto the exact coordinates of the Iron Nest.
The mountain was actively melting. A massive pillar of thick, black smoke and glowing red ash was rising into the stratosphere.
Amani placed his hand flat against the cold glass of the elevator.
General Volkov and her five hundred ghosts were currently burning in that inferno, buying the Swahili Pack the time they needed to ride this elevator.
"She died as a soldier of Russia," Mariya said quietly, stepping up beside Amani, her gaze locked on the distant, burning mountain. "Do not mourn her, Fate Changer. Avenge her."
Amani nodded slowly. The Void Hunger churned violently in his chest, feeding on his deep, simmering grief and transforming it into pure, unadulterated killing intent.
The Citadel's power grid visibly flickered again. The golden lights illuminating the massive spire they were currently ascending violently dimmed, plunging the elevator into near darkness for five terrifying seconds before the failing generators kicked back in.
"He is losing power faster than we anticipated," Upepo noted, tearing his eyes away from the burning mountain. "The Firebird engine must be completely flooding the lower caverns with magma."
"Good," Chacha rumbled deeply. "Let the god bleed."
The elevator began to rapidly decelerate.
They had reached the absolute apex of the Citadel. The highest spire. The throne room of the Emperor of the Ice.
A soft, melodic chime echoed in the small car as it came to a perfectly smooth halt. The transparent glass doors slowly, agonizingly hissed open.
The Swahili Pack stepped out into the cavernous, vaulted expanse of the central throne room.
It was a terrifying monument to absolute power. The massive floor was a single, unbroken sheet of polished black obsidian, reflecting the flickering golden lights of the ceiling like a dark mirror. Towering crystal windows provided a 360-degree view of the frozen, dead continent outside.
And at the far end of the room, sitting heavily upon a massive throne carved entirely from the skull of a prehistoric Tundra leviathan, was Tsar Nikolai.
The Unbreaking Man did not look invincible anymore.
He was leaning heavily forward, his massive elbows resting on his knees. His flawless, marble-like skin was visibly pale, and the liquid golden veins running across his massive chest were pulsing erratically. The Citadel was dying, and because he had deeply tethered his own biology to the fortress's power grid to maintain his absolute invulnerability, he was physically suffering from the catastrophic energy loss.
But the Gold Fragment—the Fragment of Body—embedded directly into his sternum was burning with a terrifying, blinding intensity, desperately trying to compensate for the failing engine.
Flanking the Tsar were his last line of defense: three elite Praetorians of the Sun Guard. They stood rigidly at attention, their heavy white-and-gold armor gleaming, their plasma halberds actively crackling with lethal energy.
Tsar Nikolai slowly raised his head. His burning golden eyes locked directly onto Amani.
"You are incredibly persistent for a dead man," Nikolai's voice boomed through the massive throne room. It was slightly raspy, lacking the crushing, acoustic weight it had possessed in the cavern, but it was still the voice of an apex predator.
Amani stepped forward, leaving the Pack behind him. He reached into his heavy coat and drew the pulsing, violet Space Shard.
"Your engine is dead, Nikolai," Amani said, his voice overlapping with the terrifying, metallic resonance of the Void. "Your Vanguard is broken. Your Armada is busy bombing an empty mountain. And your lights are flickering."
Mariya Oktyabrskaya smoothly stepped up beside Amani, raising her heavy Soviet revolver and aiming it directly at the center of the Tsar's forehead.
"The Russian Empire falls tonight," Mariya stated coldly.
Nikolai let out a slow, dark, rumbling laugh that vibrated the obsidian floor. He slowly pushed himself up from the bone throne.
"You fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power, little widow," Nikolai sneered, stepping aggressively down the dais. "The Empire is not a subterranean engine. It is not an Armada in the sky. The Empire is me."
The Tsar slammed his massive fist against the Gold Fragment in his chest.
A blinding, explosive shockwave of pure, golden kinetic energy violently erupted from his body, completely shattering the massive crystal windows of the throne room and letting the howling, freezing Siberian blizzard violently rush inside.
"Come then, Fate Changer!" Tsar Nikolai roared, his eyes burning like supernovas in the freezing wind. "Show me the weight of your Void!"