[SYSTEM REBOOT...]
[VIRAL ENERGY: 300% (OVERLOAD)]
Pain was too small a word.
It felt like Lucas was being unmade. The lightning from the server coils didn't just burn; it vibrated every molecule in his body.
His right arm—the dead, heavy block of calcified diamond—exploded.
Shards of white crystal flew across the room, embedding themselves in the server racks. But the arm wasn't gone.
Beneath the shattered shell, raw energy swirled. The blue light wasn't solid anymore. It was fluxing. It looked like a hologram glitching in and out of reality, a constant storm of matter and sound.
[TIER 3: UNLOCKED.]
[ABILITY: PHASE-SHIFT.]
[HUMANITY INDEX: 55%.]
Lucas stood up.
He felt light. Terrifyingly light. He looked at his new hand. It was translucent, ghost-like. He could see the floor through his palm.
"Beautiful," The Banker whispered, stepping back. "The raw variable. Chaos incarnate."
"Lucas?" Elena called out from behind a server rack. "Are you okay?"
Lucas didn't answer. He looked at The Banker.
"You wanted a monster," Lucas's voice distorted, layering over itself like two people speaking at once. "You got one."
The Banker sneered. He pressed a button on his remote.
"Kill him."
The shadows of the server room shifted. Four Glitch-Walkers—the failed experiments—materialized. They screeched, flickering in and out of existence, and charged.
The first walker lunged, its claw phasing toward Lucas's throat.
Lucas didn't dodge. He didn't block.
He reached out.
His ghostly blue hand passed through the creature's phasing claw. It passed through the creature's chest armor.
Lucas clenched his fist inside the creature.
[ABILITY: INTERNAL RESONANCE.]
SQUELCH.
Lucas vibrated the molecules of the creature's heart.
The Glitch-Walker didn't scream. It simply dissolved. Its cohesive field shattered, and it turned into a puddle of grey sludge on the floor.
Lucas pulled his hand back. It was clean.
"What?" The Banker's smile faltered. "That's impossible. You can't touch them while they phase!"
"I'm not touching them," Lucas said, walking forward. "I'm becoming them."
The remaining three walkers attacked.
Lucas moved. But it wasn't running. It was a blur.
He phased through a swipe that should have taken his head off. He stepped through a server rack to flank them. He drove his hand into the second walker's skull, scrambling its brain matter with a sonic pulse.
Drop. Drop. Drop.
In ten seconds, the elite guard of the Olympus was a collection of puddles.
Lucas turned his gaze to The Banker.
The Banker's golden face was pale. He looked at his remote, then at the massive supercomputer behind him—The Oracle.
"Oracle!" The Banker screamed. "Calculate evasion path! Survival probability!"
[PROCESSING...]
[ERROR: VARIABLE UNDEFINED.]
"Your machine can't see me, Dante," Lucas said. He walked toward the platform.
The Banker pulled a gold-plated pistol. He didn't aim at Lucas. He aimed at a cooling pipe above Lucas's head.
"Ricochet vector alpha!" The Banker yelled.
BANG.
The bullet hit the pipe. Steam exploded downward, blindingly hot.
Lucas didn't stop. He walked into the steam.
The white vapor swirled around him, but where it touched his right side, it passed through him. He was intangible. A ghost.
He emerged from the steam, five feet from The Banker.
"Stay back!" The Banker shrieked. He threw the empty gun.
It bounced off Lucas's chest plate.
The Banker backed up until he hit the main console of The Oracle.
"I can pay you!" The Banker pleaded, holding up his hands. "Billions! I can erase your debt! I can buy you a country!"
Lucas reached out.
The Banker flinched, expecting to be crushed.
But Lucas didn't grab him.
Lucas reached past him. He thrust his phasing hand directly into the hardened steel casing of The Oracle's main hard drive.
"You deal in odds," Lucas whispered.
He solidified his hand inside the machine.
[ABILITY: SOLIDIFY.]
CRUNCH.
The sound of expensive electronics being crushed from the inside was deafening. Sparks showered the room. The blue lights on the millions of servers turned red, then black.
The hum died.
The Banker stared at the dark console. His mouth hung open.
"My algorithms," he whispered. "My leverage. You... you just deleted the Syndicate's financial brain."
"House loses," Lucas said.
He grabbed The Banker by his expensive lapels and hoisted him into the air.
"Lucas!" Elena yelled, running up the platform. "We have to go! The cooling system is critical! This whole room is going to overheat and melt!"
Lucas looked at the shivering, terrified man in his grip. He wanted to squeeze. He wanted to turn this man into paste for what he did to the children in the Alps, for the Glitch-Walkers, for everything.
[HUMANITY INDEX: 54%.]
If he killed him now, in cold blood... the number would drop. And he might not come back.
Lucas threw The Banker.
The small man flew across the room, crashing into a pile of dead server parts. He groaned, broken but alive.
"You're broke, Dante," Lucas said. "Run. Tell the others I'm coming."
Lucas grabbed Elena. "Hold on."
"To what?" Elena asked. "The exit is blocked by the Glitch-Walkers' sludge!"
"To me."
Lucas wrapped his arm around her waist.
[TIER 3: PHASE-CARRY.]
[WARNING: EXTREME ENERGY COST.]
The blue light engulfed them both.
Lucas ran at the solid concrete wall of the server room.
"Lucas! The wall!" Elena screamed.
"Close your eyes!"
They hit the concrete.
Cold.
For a split second, Elena felt like she was being dunked in ice water. She felt the heavy pressure of the earth pressing in on all sides, the atoms of the wall sliding past her skin like sand.
Then... air.
They stumbled out into the Vegas sewer tunnel, passing straight through three feet of reinforced concrete.
Lucas collapsed, retching. The blue light faded, leaving his arm solid again.
"That..." Lucas gasped, wiping bile from his mouth. "That feels terrible."
Elena stared at the wall they had just walked through. Then at Lucas.
"You're a ghost," she whispered.
Above them, the ground shook. The lights of the Olympus Casino flickered and died. The Oracle was dead.
[THE NEVADA DESERT - DAWN]
They stole a dusty pickup truck from a construction site on the edge of the city.
Lucas drove one-handed. His right arm—the new, shifting crystal—was wrapped in a torn piece of flannel shirt. It hummed quietly, a sound like a distant choir.
Elena sat in the passenger seat, stitching a cut on her arm. Julian, the unconscious boy from the Alps, was sleeping in the back seat.
"We hurt them," Elena said, looking at the smoke rising from the Vegas skyline in the rearview mirror. "We really hurt them."
"We blinded them," Lucas corrected. "The Banker can't predict us anymore. The Alchemist has nowhere to hide."
"So where do we go?" Elena asked. "We can't go back to the safehouse. They'll burn the city looking for us."
Lucas looked at the horizon. The sun was rising, painting the desert red.
"We need a fortress," Lucas said. "A place the virus recognizes."
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out the ancient coin The Banker had tried to bribe him with.
He tossed it to Elena.
"Look at the date."
Elena squinted at the gold coin. "1945. Antarctica."
"No," Lucas said. "Look at the symbol on the back."
Elena flipped it over.
It wasn't a symbol of the Syndicate. It was an engraving of a mountain. A specific, jagged peak rising from an island.
"I know this place," Elena realized. "My father... Alexander... he used to talk about it. The Blacksite. The Forge."
"It's where Marcus Vane started it all," Lucas said. "An island in the Pacific. Abandoned. Heavily fortified. And full of old tech."
Lucas stepped on the gas. The truck roared down the empty highway.
"We're not running anymore, Elena. We're going home to build an army."