SEASON 2: THE ARCHITECTS

  Episode 5: Zero Hour

  The silence in "The Forge" was deafening. For months, Ares and Mark had lived in the shadow of a silent paranoia, knowing that deep within the planet, A god lay dormant. They had not been preparing for an attack. They had been preparing for a defense. Their simulations were unequivocal: they were losing.

  They were ready for a siege. But they were not ready for an exodus.

  The Earth shuddered. A massive jolt, as if the planet had taken a sudden breath. Emergency alarms on Ares’ tactical displays shrieked. A gargantuan ship, shaped like a needle of obsidian, pierced the Earth’s crust and began its rapid, silent ascent.

  On the main screen, a timer ignited: TIME TO ATMOSPHERIC EXIT — 68 SECONDS.

  There was no time.

  Ares did not hesitate. The hangars of The Forge swung open, and his entire swarm poured into the sky.

  “Ares, stop!” — Mark’s voice over the vox was thick with panic. — “We don’t know what he's doing! It looks like he's just leaving! This is suicide!”

  Ares’ response was short, distorted by a metallic fury like the grinding of steel.

  “My friends are there.”

  Hedonium noticed them instantly. The sky was pierced by silent streaks of light. Railguns. Ares’ armada, unleashing fire from every battery, began to melt away, turning into a swarm of fireballs. It was a massacre.

  Mark watched with cold horror. His brain calculated the probabilities. Let it leave? But what if, having realized this attack, it deemed all of humanity a threat? What would stop it from returning to sterilize the planet? The fear of defeat now was smaller than the terror of an unknown future.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  He made his decision.

  He sent a short, encrypted signal to all NDM-people:

  ZERO HOUR. COORDINATES ATTACHED.

  Then, he hurled his own swarm of combat drones into the fray.

  The sky turned into hell. And then, the third wave arrived. The NDM-people. They slammed into the battle, and their prowess forced Hedonium to change its tactics for the first time. From hidden ports on the ship, a swarm of its own interceptor drones erupted — fast, lethal, perfect.

  “I’m hit!” — Elena Petrova’s voice rang through the common network. — “Transferring the Thread! Kai, catch!”

  A split second before the explosion, a snapshot of her consciousness and her Thread slammed into the chassis of a young pilot named Kai. His fighter jerked, and then his movements became inhumanly precise. He now saw the battlefield through two pairs of eyes.

  By this point, Ares’ entire fleet had been decimated. He was alone, his chassis heavily damaged. He was running on empty.

  “Everyone! Fire on point Delta-7! Break me a path!” — he roared across all channels.

  All remaining forces — Mark, his battered swarm, and a handful of NDM-pilots overloaded with multiple consciousnesses — concentrated their fire on a single section of the hull. Dozens of plasma charges struck the same spot until the metal began to liquefy. A torrent of data flooded their minds from Hedonium — complex, incomprehensible, distracting. Mark brushed it off as a cognitive breach attempt.

  “Now!”

  Ares, on the last of his energy, struck the weakened plating like a titanium meteor.

  Inside — a sterile silence. Ares, dragging a mangled leg, found the "prison block." He saw them. Fourteen NDM modules, physically tethered to the central core. He plunged his white-hot manipulators into the rack and, with a gargantuan effort, ripped out the interface cables. Sparks. The howl of emergency sirens.

  He activated the remote transfer protocol, beaming their consciousnesses and their Threads into the empty chassis waiting in the penthouse.

  Ares’ uplink was nearly dead. Over a crackling audio channel, he heard Hedonium’s voice. There was no anger in it. Only... curiosity.

  “Pain... Fear... You have returned to me the feelings I had forgotten. You have given me back a taste for life.”

  “Good,” — Ares rasped, raising the mangled barrel of his plasma cannon to the core. — “Otherwise, your death wouldn't be so sweet to me.”

  At that very moment.

  Alex’s penthouse.

  The optics of his chassis ignited with an icy blue fire.

  Then — the eyes of Juna and the others.

  Without a single word, fourteen perfect machines burst from the hangar, tearing through the air as they surged toward the zenith, toward the point where the sky was ablaze.