The resolve that had bloomed in the darkness of the server room was a cold and solid thing, a piece of machinery forged in the quiet furnace of their shared confessions. It did not feel like hope. It felt like a function. Rhys moved first, his body a study in grim purpose, leaving the tomb of dead servers and stepping back into the low, humming light of the antechamber outside the core. The air still tasted of ozone and ancient, settled dust, but the crushing weight of their hopelessness had been replaced by the sharp, clean edge of a single, terrible objective.
He did not look at Nysa. He did not need to. Their new alliance was beyond words, a system of two that ran on the shared current of their mutual ruin. He moved to a secondary diagnostic console, a smaller, dust-coated terminal that had been overlooked by Malachi’s fanatics. His cybernetic hand swept across the screen, the metal fingers leaving clean streaks in the grime. The schematic of Project Chimera bloomed into life, a web of cool blue lines against the black screen, a perfect and elegant design for a world-ending machine.
He was no longer looking for a way out. He was no longer looking for leverage. He was an engineer, and he was looking for the breaking point. It was the only thing he had ever been truly good at. His eyes, one flesh and one augmented, scanned the intricate pathways of power, the redundant safety protocols, the layers of failsafes designed by men who feared their own creation. He traced the flow of energy from the theoretical power source, a deep, geothermal tap, through the primary conduits. He saw the logic of Protocol Aurelia, the frequency wave that would erase Spirit. He saw the cold calculus of Protocol Erebus, the cascade failure that would unmake Matter. Two perfect, opposing solutions. Two forms of absolute annihilation.
His gaze narrowed, moving past the primary functions. He was hunting for something else. Not a feature, but a flaw. A buried command string from a panicked engineer. A final, desperate option for a system that had gone rogue. He found it in a sub-directory labeled ‘Decommissioning Protocol 7’. It was not a simple off-switch. It was a feedback loop, a command that would instruct the engine’s containment field to fold back into the core at the same moment it drew maximum power. A controlled, catastrophic overload. A way to make the machine eat itself.
— Here, — he said, his voice a low rasp. His finger, the one of flesh and bone, tapped the screen, indicating a single, almost hidden line of code.
Nysa moved to his side, her presence a column of quiet in the humming air. She did not understand the glowing lines, the technical jargon that scrolled past. But she understood the look in his eyes. It was the same look she had seen in oracles who had finally deciphered a true and terrible prophecy. It was the look of a person who had found the one, final answer.
— The breaking point, — she whispered. It was not a question.
— A total system failure, — Rhys confirmed. He traced the path of the overload. It would not be quick. The system would fight it, shunting power, trying to re-establish equilibrium. But the final result was inevitable. A complete meltdown. The Archive, the engine, everything within a two-kilometer radius would be reduced to a crater of fused glass and silent radiation. The Geiger counter in his pocket, the dead one he carried like a stone, would not even have time to click.
They stood there for a long moment, the two of them, a soldier of Matter and an oracle of Spirit, looking at the blueprint for their shared damnation. They could still try to use it. They could hold the engine hostage, a doomsday switch pointed at both factions, and try to bargain for their lives, for a ceasefire, for a different world. It was the logical move. The sane move. But they had both seen the faces of the men who ran their worlds. They had seen Joris Crane’s cold calculus and Malachi Voss’s burning faith. To give men like that a bigger weapon was not a solution; it was a guarantee of a larger, more perfect slaughter. The price of that gamble was the entire world.
— We don’t use it, — Nysa said, her voice gaining a strength Rhys had not heard before. It was the voice of a queen who had lost her kingdom and found a new, harder throne. — We don’t hide it. We erase it from the board entirely.
Her words were the final component clicking into place. This was the synthesis. His technical knowledge had found the weapon, and her spiritual clarity had defined its only true purpose. Destruction. Not for victory, not for one side over the other, but for the sake of the world they had both been willing to sacrifice. The price of this choice was absolute. They would become the ultimate traitors, the heretics who destroyed the greatest prize in history. Their own survival would be a statistical improbability.
— Agreed, — Rhys said. The word was a solid, physical thing in the cold air.
The choice was made. The axis of their world shifted. It was a silent, internal event, but the room itself seemed to change. The low hum of the dormant engine no longer sounded like a threat. It sounded like a countdown. The oppressive weight of their entrapment lifted, replaced by the clean, simple burden of their new purpose. They were no longer rats in a maze. They were the fire that would burn the maze to the ground.
Rhys’s hand instinctively went to the dead dosimeter in his pocket. The silence of the device was no longer the sound of Ben’s absence. It was the sound of their objective. A final, perfect quiet they would impose upon this machine.
Nysa looked at him, the last of the light in her veins now a steady, determined grey. The doubt was gone. The static was gone. All that remained was the grim, unwavering clarity of a person who had accepted the cost. They would not be saved. They would not be redeemed. They would not go home. Their purpose was not to survive the system, but to become the error that forced its final, catastrophic crash.
They had ten minutes to buy.
