It was a sound of release. The sound of reality shredding, of something big and ravenous pushing through an inadequate opening.

  His limbs bent in unnatural directions as his body trembled, each one breaking into probabilistic nightmares of what flesh might turn into when the laws of nature no longer apply.

  The wound in his chest sealed with a patch of glitching, black texture that devoured light. From his skin erupted black crystalline growths. His obsidian cybernetics sparked and hissed, melting and fusing with his flesh: wires becoming veins, chrome becoming bone.

  Reality itself warped around him. The ground developed stress fractures from proximity to whatever Draven was becoming.

  Senna's voice was horrified. "He's descending. He's becoming less human, more... concept. A living void event."

  The transformation completed with a final, bone-deep crack that echoed across the plaza.

  Then it stood—nine feet of 'mistakes were made' given form, a living argument against the concept of human ambition. Holes in its body were windows into a starless, impossible night. It threw its head back, and the sound that emerged was a wave of pure reality-negation that visibly shattered the air.

  The Aberration fixed its glowing crimson eyes, twin embers of malice in a face of shifting void, on Lia and Lucius.

  "Fun," it rasped. The voice sounded like digital static mixed with grinding stone. "Though this is just beginning."

  Lucius immediately unleashed a furious barrage of lightning towards the monster, the bolts crashing against its hide and dissipating like harmless sparks.

  It locked onto Lia, a predator locking onto the largest threat. It lunged, its speed defying its massive frame, crossing twenty yards of open plaza in the blink of an eye.

  Lia brought her Seismic Cleaver up on instinct. Its void-touched claws hit the axe blade, a soft hissing sound came from the impact, like acid eating through paper, and a fist-sized piece of Lia's divine weapon disappeared.

  She barely threw herself back as the monster's claws ripped through the newly formed opening, sending her flying backward with a concussive blast from the soles of her feet. The claws, missing her, carved five deep gouges in the permacrete floor. Where they touched, reality seemed to fray, leaving wounds in space itself that bled impossible, shifting colors.

  Lucius's body flickered, probability fracturing around him as he forced himself to split again. The echoes he'd lost to Draven were gone—those futures permanently deleted—but he could still manage seven. Barely. His digital organs screamed protests as he pushed past their safe limits, recalculating probability streams that had been corrupted by void-energy.

  Seven identical, flickering versions of himself materialized, a hall of mirrors made of lightning and spite, each one circling the Aberration from a different angle. Blood ran from his ears as the strain mounted. While six of his probabilistic clones fired continuous streams of electricity to draw its attention, the real Lucius unleashed a massive torrent of lightning, a concentrated spear of pure energy aimed at the creature's back. His storm-touched arm was smoking from the effort, the ambient suppression field of the black site making every use of his power feel like lifting a mountain.

  The Aberration spun with inhuman speed, faster than anything that size should move. Its chest split open like a blooming flower of flesh and void. A swirling, warped maw of purple energy appeared. The spear of lightning was swallowed whole. Inside the maw, Lucius could see his own divine power being unmade and broken down into component particles.

  "Senna, analyze!" Lia demanded. She thrust her hands forward, heating the air around her and the creature. Her Flash Forge ability unleashed a jet of molten metal that sprayed toward the Aberration like liquid fire.

  The creature distorted reality. The space around it warped, causing the molten stream to curve mid-flight, the slags of metal followed an arc around the Aberration before splashing uselessly against the ground behind it.

  "Fine," she growled, her voice a low threat. "Up close it is."

  A golden concussive force flared from the vents on the soles of her armored boots and between her shoulder plates. Windows shattered as a deafening boom rocketed Lia forward, transforming her into an armored missile of divine fury.

  In an instance she crossed the plaza, the ground cracking under the force of her take off.

  Her fist slammed into the creature's chest, the bio-metallic plating of her gauntlet taking the impact. The Aberration grunted as the impact forced an involuntary half-step back, its eyes widening from the sheer physical audacity of the attack.

  Lia didn't let up. The vent at her elbow fired, a sharp blast that whipped her body around. She turned the momentum into a kick, her armored leg crashing into its ribs. Bone cracked under the scales. The crystalline hide held together, but the force sent it reeling sideways. It roared, the sound raw and pissed off.

  Using another kinetic blast from her boots to push off the ground, Lia disengaged, flipping backward through the air to land, the Seismic Cleaver now held ready in a two-handed grip. She was breathing heavily, the vents on her armor hissing as they bled off excess heat. She had its attention now.

  The monster's crimson eyes, blazing with new fury, focused on the Seismic Cleaver.

  A shadowy tendril shot from the Aberration's back, faster than a striking snake. It wrapped around the axe’s haft, halting her follow-up swing. The tendril was a cord of pure void, and where it touched the divine metal, it hissed and sizzled. Another lashed out, then three more, all whipping towards her with lethal intent.

  Lia's eyes went wide. She couldn't break the grip, and couldn't dodge while holding the massive weapon. She cursed, letting the axe go and vented a powerful blast of kinetic force from her elbows, throwing herself into a desperate sideways roll as the tentacles slammed into the permacrete where she'd been standing a moment before.

  "These readings are a mess," Senna's voice came through the comms. "It's fighting its own power source. The Legacy Protocol is pushing it too hard; every time it uses a major ability, its internal temperature spikes off the charts. It's literally cooking itself from the inside out!" She paused, the sound of frantic data processing in the background. "That makes it unstable. It has to have a weak point! You have to push it, make it burn itself out!"

  Lucius’s clones converged. A mess of flashing lights and crackling energy, fists hammering its crystal hide. Each impact sent a chain reaction of lightning arcing across its body, but the Aberration seemed to barely notice. It snarled and slammed its fists into the ground.

  Jagged, obsidian-black spikes erupted violently from the floor in a chaotic, expanding wave. Two of Lucius’s clones were caught in the eruption, and they vanished without a sound.

  Lia, seeing the wave of erasure spikes racing towards her, used her own power in response. She slammed her palm onto a large, discarded industrial generator nearby. A torrent of molten metal sprayed from her forge-ports at her own feet. In a split second, it cooled and hardened into a curved ramp. She sprinted up it, using a kinetic blast from her boots to launch herself high into the air, flipping over the deadly wave of void spikes as they tore up the ground beneath her.

  While airborne, she reached out with her will. The Seismic Cleaver, still wrapped in the Aberration's tendril, tore itself free with a surge of magnetic force from Lucius’s intervention. The Cleaver flew through the air, slapped into her palm. Lia landed hard enough to crack pavement, already swinging. The axe bit deep into the Aberration's crystalline shoulder.

  This time, something broke.

  The sound was massive—a thundercrack that rolled across the plaza. The crystal shrieked as it gave way. A ring of distorted air exploded outward from the impact. The Aberration convulsed, the shockwave rattling through its whole body. A crack spread from the wound, deep and branching like lightning. Dark smoke leaked out, the kind that seemed to eat light.

  They had drawn first blood.

  The monster roared in genuine pain and rage. It swung a clawed hand, but Lia was already gone, sliding under the claws. She brought the axe's flat side up in an uppercut that caught it under the jaw. The impact snapped its head back hard enough to rattle teeth.

  Before it could recover, Lucius saw his opening. His remaining clones dissolved as he consolidated all his focus into one perfect strike. He dashed forward, his body a blur.

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  The Aberration was faster. It moved, but not in a way that made sense. It took a step, and as it did, a solid, stuttering red after-image of itself was left behind. The after-image completed the creature's previous action, a defensive stance, while the real Aberration was already standing beside Lucius, its claws plunging into his side.

  Lucius screamed, a sound of pure shock and agony, as the claws tore through his armor and flesh. He was thrown across the plaza, tumbling across the ground, lightning sputtering from the deep gashes in his torso.

  "What was that?!" he yelled into the comms, clutching his side. "It moved and attacked at the same time! That’s not a Void power!"

  "It’s not," Senna’s voice was grim. "That temporal fracture… it’s the Chimera they fused him with. Its power set is bleeding into his. Be ready for anything; his abilities are no longer just from the Void Domain."

  The Aberration turned its attention back to Lia, its red eyes burning with hatred. It stalked towards her, the wound in its shoulder already beginning to seal with fresh, black crystal. Lia stood her ground, planting the butt of the Seismic Cleaver into the permacrete.

  "You want more?" she growled, her forge-ports glowing with intensity. "Come on, then!"

  She aimed the axe like a cannon. The focusing plates around the projector at the top of the weapon retracted with sharp clicks, while the nozzle glowed with intense heat. A large, visible cone of distorted air shot from the axe, creating a loud sonic boom, a blast of pure concussive force.

  The shockwave hit the Aberration’s chest. The monster went airborne, body hurling backward like someone cut its strings. It hit a stack of shipping containers. Metal crumpled, groaned. The Aberration lay there, stunned. Its crystalline armor was a spiderweb of cracks now, spreading across its torso.

  Lia didn't hesitate. Vents fired, launching her forward. She brought the axe down, a full overhead swing aimed at its skull.

  The Aberration’s eyes snapped open.

  The Aberration phased. The axe carved through empty air where flesh had been a moment before, burying itself in the container behind it.

  Lia was overextended. The creature solidified, hand shooting out to grab her throat lifting her off the ground like she weighed nothing. Its claws dug into her armor plating. Where they touched, the metal hissed and started to dissolve.

  "Insolent gnat," it rasped.

  The claws punched through. Three of them sank into her shoulder and collarbone, the void-touched tips deleting armor, chrome, and flesh alike. Lia screamed, a raw sound of genuine agony as the matter-erasing effect spread through her augmented tissue. Her left arm went limp, the neural connections severed. Blood that should have been red came out black at the edges where the void corruption was spreading.

  Shadowy tendrils erupted from the Aberration's back again to ensnare. They wrapped around Lia’s arms and legs, pinning her limbs and holding her fast. She struggled, her immense strength useless against the cords of pure void.

  "Lia!" Lucius roared.

  Lucius pushed himself up. His side was screaming, but he ignored it. Lightning crackled across his body, wild and angry. Then he let it all out.

  A continuous stream of Chain lightning erupted from his hands. The bolts hit everything metal in the plaza: containers, light poles, floor gratings. Then they arced back, hitting the monster again and again from every angle. A cage of electrical fury.

  The Aberration roared. The voltage was too much, it bypassed its defenses, causing its crystalline form to spark and smoke. Its grip on Lia faltered, and the tendrils holding her dissolved. She dropped to the ground hard, her left side completely numb. Gasping for air, she could see the black corruption still spreading slowly through her shoulder. Her neck plate was smoking and partially deleted, and when she tried to move her left arm, nothing happened. The limb hung useless, the chrome plating around her shoulder joint eaten away to expose sparking circuitry and raw muscle beneath.

  Lucius poured more and more power into the assault, his teeth gritted, blood running down his mouth from the strain. He was succeeding, pushing the monster back, causing visible cracks to spread all over its body.

  The maw in its chest opened again, that swirling purple void-stomach.

  It began to inhale. The entire lightning storm, the dozens of arcing bolts, the ambient static, all of it was pulled from the air and drawn into the creature’s void stomach. Lucius’s attack was consumed, leaving an eerie silence in its wake. The plaza was plunged back into the dim, flickering lights. The Aberration stood tall, its body now glowing with a sickly, internal purple light, the stolen energy of the storm churning within it.

  The maw closed, and it turned its gaze to Lucius, who stood exhausted, his power spent. The corrupted energy it had swallowed was unleashed. A beam of sickly, life-draining purple light, wider and more terrible than before, erupted from its chest.

  The beam carved through the plaza. It was too wide, too fast. Lia, still recovering, could only watch in horror. Lucius tried to flicker, to create his probabilistic clones, but he was too slow, too drained. The beam caught his left leg.

  He screamed, a raw, piercing sound as the limb was instantly encased in the same black crystal that made up the Aberration’s hide. The growth didn't stop at his cybernetics, it consumed them. Spread up his thigh. His own lightning sputtered, turned purple and wrong around the wound.

  The crystal was converting his very being—flesh, chrome, and divine energy—into void-touched matter. He collapsed to the ground.

  The beam continued past him, unabated. It lanced across the plaza passing through the tunnel, and for half a second, the Nexus security team's terrified faces lit purple. Then they were gone.

  The Aberration stood over the ruined plaza, its body smoking from the exertion. It had taken damage, moved slower now. The red light in its eyes pulsed angry. But it had won.

  It dissolved into a jagged tear in reality. A wound in space bleeding dark energy onto the floor.

  Lia pushed herself up with her good arm, her left side completely dead weight. The Seismic Cleaver lay three feet away. She crawled to it, grabbed the haft with her right hand, and hauled herself upright using the axe as a crutch. Every movement sent fresh agony through her corrupted shoulder. The weapon felt impossibly heavy now; she could barely lift the tip off the ground.

  "Lucius, behind you!" she screamed.

  A new tear ripped open right behind Lucius. A crystalline, wolven claw, dripping with the cold of the void, emerged from the rift, going for his throat.

  Cole was locked in his own desperate duel, but his power was his curse. In the infinite reflections, he saw the other fight.

  "Warning," Senna's voice was a frantic staccato. "Lucius is down! I repeat, Lucius is down!"

  The warnings, the visions, broke his concentration. It was all the time Silas needed. The master Refractor saw the opening. The clones vanished, and the real Silas stood before him, creating a final spear of hard-light aimed directly at Cole’s chest.

  "Lesson's over," Silas said, almost sadly. "You have potential, but potential doesn't win fights."

  Cole saw it coming. And in a reflection in the tip of that very spear, he saw the Aberration, roaring in triumph over Lucius's fallen body, its back vents glowing cherry-red.

  The Aberration's void-black armor drank light, with no reflections on its surface to jump through and no mirror to emerge from behind it. The beast was forty feet away, already raising its claws. Even if he threw his blades, they wouldn't reach in time.

  He saw two fatal attacks about to land at the same moment.

  He had to choose.

  Save himself, or save his team. It wasn't really a choice at all.

  He ignored Silas's spear. He ignored his own defense. He poured every ounce of his will into his power. His Fractal Blades began to resonate, recording this moment, this impossible choice. They would remember.

  Then he shattered.

  He flowed through Silas's incoming attack. The spear of hard-light. It passed through his insubstantial, shard-like form. A hot poker through smoke, except the smoke screamed. The pain threatened to tear his fragmented consciousness apart. He felt a part of himself being carved away, cauterized by pure light.

  He re-formed across the plaza, stumbling, his body screaming in agony, a deep, smoking gash carved across his back. His Zeta nodes were sparking, several of them cracked and leaking bio-fluid. Warning messages flooded his vision—CRITICAL DAMAGE, SEEK IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION.

  But he was in position.

  He was directly behind the Aberration as it raised its claws for the kill. Its back vents were wide open, glowing with the heat of a dying star. Then he saw it, a single, critical node of unstable, corrupted technology at the center of the heat bloom. The system's lynchpin. The unmaking point.

  "Every creation has a flaw," he whispered. "A point where it all comes undone."

  He drove both Fractal Blades into it.

  The Aberration froze. For a moment, there was a terrible silence. Then, it convulsed. The void energy within it, no longer contained, turned inward. It began to consume itself. Its body collapsed in on itself, pulling chunks of the plaza, light, and sound with it. A silent, purple implosion that ended with a final, soft pop, leaving only a scorch mark on the floor.

  Cole landed hard on his hands and knees, the world spinning. The plaza was a wreck. Lucius was alive, his leg corrupted by black crystal that was spreading through the chrome and into the connection ports where metal met flesh. Lia was already working, using her tools to disconnect the leg at the knee joint before the corruption could spread into his organic tissue. The augmentation would need to be replaced, but he'd live.

  He looked up. Silas stood alone, observing the scene. His mirrored armor was pristine. Not a single scratch, he wasn’t even breathing heavy. He'd been holding back the entire fight.

  Then footsteps echoed from the tunnel. Senna skidded into view, her face a cold fury. Golden threads lashed out from her wrists, each one tipped with a dagger.

  Silas went still. Cole watched him look from the destroyed Aberration to Senna, then back to Cole on the ground. Whatever calculation he was running, Cole could see the answer forming.

  "Don't," Senna said cold. Her daggers hovering, all aimed at him. "I've already found the flaw in your armor. Has a resonance frequency. Make one wrong move, I'll take you apart piece by piece."

  Silas gave this small nod. Like acknowledging a loss.

  "Data gathered," he said, his voice calm. "Legacy Protocol performance: exceeds expectations. Evaluation of new Refractor: promising."

  He looked straight at Cole. "You chose them over yourself. Inefficient. Illogical. Exactly what we needed to know."

  He took one step back and dissolved into a thousand shards of glass.

  "We?" Cole asked, but Silas was already gone, leaving only the faint smell of burnt metal and the lingering question.

  The adrenaline died, and the pain hit him like a truck. Cole collapsed onto the cold ground as Senna and Lia rushed over.

  The mission was a catastrophic, terrifying success.