One moment, Tamiyo was just as blind as the dozen Conservatory Enforcers—the next, she was seeing through his eyes. Echo had patched her directly into Pulse’s visor feed, her usual perspective replaced by the immediate, kinetic reality of his battlespace. The air was a swirling miasma of deep blues and cool purples, punctuated by the brilliant, blood-red silhouettes of the Enforcer squad.
They were dropping like flies.
In the brief seconds it had taken Echo to establish the link, Pulse had already closed the distance and sent two of the red figures collapsing to the floor. He moved like a phantom weaving through a field of panicked fire.
The firing squad was scrambling, their discipline shattered by the sensory deprivation. Tamiyo heard the confused shouts of nine men trying to activate their own thermal vision—but with their voices all overlapping, none of them were actually making progress.
As soon as the first one succeeded, Echo sprang her trap.
Through Pulse's eyes, Tamiyo saw the visors of eight remaining Enforcers erupt in a chaotic snowstorm of glitching, multicolored pixels and screeching noise. Echo had jammed their audio-video setups with a recursive loop of corrupted data. They were blind again, but this time, their own technology was screaming at them.
Rather than stand and wait to be slaughtered, seven Enforcers began firing blindly, their plasma rifles spitting green bolts into the darkness. Most of the shots went wide, scoring molten gouges into the server stacks. One unlucky trooper caught a burst from his own panicked squadmate, his thermal signature flaring white-hot before he crumpled to the floor.
The server core turned into a deadly disco of ricocheting plasma. Then, Pulse raised his hand again, and the blue light from his glove reverberated as a second EMP ripped through the squad.
The plasma fire stopped.
Through the feed, Tamiyo could see five Enforcers fumbling with their weapons, pulling triggers that now did nothing. Their advanced rifles had been reduced to fifteen-pound paperweights. For a few, precious seconds, they were utterly defenseless, wondering why their god had forsaken them as a silent, invisible predator systematically removed them from existence. He carved through them like warm butter.
A choked gasp.
A wet thump.
A rifle clattered to the floor.
One by one, the red silhouettes collapsed, their life-heat pooling on the ground before beginning to fade to the ambient blue of the server room.
The last one fell and everything went silent.
Tamiyo’s vision snapped back to her own perspective just as the facility’s emergency lights flickered back on. Pulse stood at the door, surrounded by a dozen lifeless bodies.
Tamiyo looked from the carnage to him, still processing what she had just witnessed. "I thought your skillset wasn't leaving a wake of bodies.”
As if on cue, the terminal beside her emitted a soft ping. The progress bar was at 100%. Tamiyo yanked the data-jack from her neck, the precious schematics now safely stored in her own internal memory.
"We're done!" she yelled, her voice echoing in the corpse-strewn chamber. "Let's go!"
She took two steps toward Pulse and the facility woke up. A deep, wailing klaxon began to blare, so loud her antennae started to vibrate. Red emergency lights pulsed to life, washing the blue server core in frantic crimson.
They were on a timer now.
Pulse led them back the way they came, sprinting this time instead of sneaking. The veins of the machine were alive with the thundering pulse of an immune response. The distant sound of armored boots on metal echoed from multiple directions.
They reached a major T-junction of intersecting hallways, and Echo yelled out,
They were trapped.
Pulse reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out two small, metallic objects, tossing them into the center of the junction. One unfurled into a compact, self-deploying mini-turret. The other was a disc-like holographic projector.
The projector flared to life, casting an AI controlled hologram of four heavily armed figures—a ragtag squad of mercenaries—nearly indiscernible from the real thing. A moment later, the mini-turret began spitting a barrage of suppressive plasma fire down both corridors.
The first Enforcer squad rounded the eastern corner, saw the "mercenaries," and immediately opened fire. Searing green bolts of plasma ripped through the holographic figures, passing harmlessly through and sizzling against the far wall—right where the second squad was emerging.
The western squad, thinking they were being fired upon by the mercenaries, returned fire with a vengeance, erupting the T-junction into a three-way firefight. The two Enforcer squads were locked in a brutal exchange with each other, their vision obscured by the smoke and the flickering, untouchable holograms—while the mini-turret shot at both of them.
With both squads distracted, Pulse led Tamiyo down a maintenance shaft she hadn’t noticed tucked away. They descended into the darkness, the sounds of the phantom firefight fading above.
The lower service tunnels were darker and grimier, filled with the tension of avoiding direct confrontation. Rounding a corner, they came across a lone security drone—sleek and saucer-shaped with a glowing red optical sensor.
It locked onto them.
Pulse reacted instinctively, raising his hand and blasting the drone with his EMP. It sputtered and clattered to the floor, disabled.
The blast, however, had been too close.
Tamiyo felt the wave of energy hit her—a jarring, full-body jolt that made her systems shriek. The specialized armor plates on her thighs and shoulders absorbed the worst of it, but a residual shock still coursed through her. Her vision glitched, her legs folded, and she dropped hard to one knee, gasping.
Pulse was at her side in an instant, a hand under her elbow to help her back to her feet. "You alright?"
She took a moment, feeling like she might hurl while her systems rebooted. The static in her vision cleared. She looked up at him with a pained grimace.
"Yep." She pushed back to her feet. "You weren't lying. That sucked."
They reached the base of the maintenance shaft they had first entered. The deep, wailing klaxon of the facility-wide alarm seemed to funnel down the shaft like it was chasing them.
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Above them, Tamiyo could hear the heavy thud of boots on concrete and the urgent bark of shouted commands. They couldn't just pop the grate and walk out, they'd likely be stepping directly into the path of a fully mobilized security force.
Tamiyo narrowed her eyes at him, struggling to reconcile the simplicity of his solution with the complexity of their problem.
He reached the top of the shaft and pushed the grate open. Tamiyo followed, her mind racing to map the cascading chaos his plan would unleash.
The air outside was a cacophony—the wailing klaxon joined by a chorus of overlapping, contradictory alarms—the high-pitched shriek of a biohazard alert, the deep, guttural thrum of a radiation warning, the sharp, insistent beep of a security breach. Strobe lights flashed in a dizzying, unsynchronized rhythm, painting the scene in a chaotic mess of red, amber, and blue.
Personnel were scrambling off in the distance, their movements disorganized and panicked. A squad in heavy combat armor was running east, while another in full hazmat gear was sprinting west. No one was looking for two quiet figures emerging from a maintenance grate, they were too busy trying to respond to their own personal apocalypse.
Pulse began to casually stroll away from the grate.
The scene around them was pure chaos.
Enforcer vehicles screamed past in opposite directions, their sirens adding to discordance of the facility's death rattles.
After a moment of no responses, she said,
Almost immediately, Echo laughed,
They moved through the pandemonium calm and unhurried, two ghosts slipping through the cracks of a system in meltdown. Several blocks away, they reached a sprawling, automated supply depot. The massive, hangar-like structure was largely deserted, any personnel likely scared off or diverted to the chaos at the research hub.
Pulse walked to a flatbed cargo drone and pulled a small multi-tool from his belt. He interfaced with the drone's primary control panel, and a few seconds of silent keystrokes later, the drone's engines whirred to life.
They boarded the platform, and the drone lifted off into the night sky, leaving the symphony of alarms and flashing lights behind them. Tamiyo couldn’t help but smile as they ascended into the air. The escape was clean, stylish, and utterly absurd.
As they continued to climb, the full scale of the chaos became clear. The sector below was a spiderweb of flashing lights and frantic movement. From this height, it looked like someone had kicked a multi-colored, neon anthill.
They flew in silence for several minutes, the wind whipping past them and the city a glittering, authoritarian jewel below. They were on course to pass right by a massive, multi-tiered bridge, a major artery connecting multiple sectors of the central transit nexus.
From inside his armored coat, Pulse produced a small but heavy, cylindrical device. With an almost casual flick of his wrist, he tossed it from the drone. It arced through the air and landed near the center of the bridge.
Tamiyo stared at him with suspicion.
<...Maybe.>
A beat of silence passed. Then, Tamiyo found her voice again.
Pulse turned to look at her and answered in a deadpan flatline,
She just stared at him, trying and failing to find a logical response to the audacity of the man.
Pulse detonated it, his gaze never leaving Tamiyo.
There was a blinding flash of white light, followed a second later by a deep WHUMP that shook the drone in mid-air. Tamiyo whipped her head around to see a massive, roiling fireball engulfing the central span of the Elysian Bridge, sending a shower of molten metal and fractured concrete into the water below.
She was dumbstruck, her mouth hanging open.
He pushed her off the drone.
Tamiyo’s custom subroutine continued to keep all emotion from showing on her face when she was in distress. But as the world became a dizzying rush of wind and blurry lights, she shrieked in their mental channel,
She hit the cold water of a reclamation canal, and a moment later, his dark shape plunged in next to her. When they surfaced, sputtering and disoriented, the burning bridge was a horrific, beautiful halo on the horizon. The dark shape of The Ghost Step was waiting nearby, hidden in shadows.
As they began swimming toward it, Tamiyo sarcastically said,
They crawled from the water dripping and exhausted. The ramp hissed open, revealing the warm, dry interior. Echo's hologram was already there, her expression a cartoonish exaggeration of distress. “C’mon! I got the meter runnin!”
Tamiyo couldn’t help but giggle as she boarded.
Pulse jumped into the pilot’s chair, his hands rapidly attacking the controls to get them airborne. Echo directed Tamiyo to a dry thermal blanket and had her take one to Pulse. Then Tamiyo sat down next to him.
The Ghost Step sliced through the sky of Solaceum, a black blade cutting through the pristine layers of the Conservatory. The burning bridge faded behind them, the chaos of their escape already a memory being sanitized by a thousand bureaucratic reports. Inside, the hum of the ship's engines was drowned out by a bouncing, cheering, pink-eyed hologram.
Tamiyo sat wrapped in the thick thermal blanket, her new clothes still dripping onto the floor. Pulse, equally drenched, sat at the helm, his hands steady as he guided them out of the planet's gravitational pull. He pulled his mask off without thinking twice and set it on the console, then glanced at Tamiyo. They locked eyes, and for a moment, neither looked away.
“Sorry I pushed you without warning,” he said carefully.
Tamiyo stared back, her mouth a flat line. “No, you’re not.”
He held her gaze a moment more, a hard expression across his scarred face. Then all three of them cracked up laughing, the genuine sound of amusement filling the cabin after a job well done. They broke free of the atmosphere into the cold black of space, the glittering web of the Conservatory's orbital defenses surrounding them.
“Last time I’ll be able to use these,” Lucien said as his clearance codes slid through.
Tamiyo glanced at the green light on the console. “Why is that?”
“They’ll connect the dots,” he said with a shrug. “We were able to slip in and out pretty easily, but once they assess the damage and see the timestamps on my codes, they’ll know who did it.”
Tamiyo tilted her head, brow furrowing. “You knew this would happen and you helped us anyway.”
He glanced at her but quickly looked forward again.
Echo chimed in beside them. “He’s kind of been looking for a reason to fully cut ties for a while now.”
Tamiyo looked back and forth between the two of them, feeling herself build with emotion. Finally, she just said quietly, “Thank you.”
Once they had cleared the primary perimeter, Pulse opened a secure, short-range comms channel. A moment later, the familiar, chaotic energy of her family filled Pulse’s ship.
“Tamiyo! You're alright!” Amalia's sunbeam voice was the first to break through.
“We were getting worried,” Inelius followed. “Did you get it?”
Tamiyo leaned forward, elbows on her knees, the warmth of the blanket beating back the residual chill in her bones. She took a deep breath, and a wave triumphant relief washed over her.
"We got it." Her own voice sounded impossibly distant. She realized she was grinning from one antennae to the other, and could do nothing to stop it.
"We found a way to save Nox."