24991125 | 2334

  Hydro Intake Tower 1 | Console Terminal | Platform 01

  30°04′12″ N

  31°21′03″ E

  Kurt exploded into action.

  He came out of concealment.

  Gun and knifer ready.

  The Aquifer drowned him in water and noise.

  Water screaming down the outer ring.

  Turbines howling.

  The tower humming.

  Mist slapped against his face.

  Lights fractured into halos.

  Depth and details vanished into streaks of blur as he ran past .

  Harbinger 03 turned to face him.

  Met him.

  Kurt vaulted over the console terminal.

  03 stood near the center of the gantry.

  His posture loose, balanced.

  Kurt’s reversed the grip upon his knife.

  He plunged down.

  03 met his knife with his sheath.

  Kurt landed.

  He fired three rounds.

  03 took a stride to his left.

  Towards his knife-wielding side.

  Kurt compensated.

  03 rammed the pommel of his katana into Kurt’s face.

  Kurt staggered back.

  For a heartbeat.

  He dashed forward, three more rounds.

  He refused to relinquish the advantage.

  03 whirled, narrowing his profile.

  The shots streaked past him.

  One grazing the back of his cloak.

  03 lashed out.

  He drew his katana.

  A hiss.

  A flash.

  Kurt let himself slide.

  He tilted his body and head back.

  The katana streaked past him.

  A hairbreadth from his face.

  It nicked his shades.

  Kurt slid under 03.

  He danced away as Kurt’s handcannon cracked.

  Three times.

  Rounds stitched the gantry, sparks flying as steel rang under impact.

  03 spun mid-air.

  He landed upon the handrail.

  Perfectly balanced.

  Reversing his grip upon his katana. He plunged towards Kurt, prone on the floor.

  Kurt kicked back.

  His smooth trenchcoat and slick gantry aided him in the move.

  03’s katana shared through the gantry.

  Kurt kip-upped to his feet.

  03 dashed towards him.

  Kurt fired again.

  A step, a pivot, a slide of the foot along wet metal.

  03 stride through the space the bullets streaked by. He drew as he moved.

  Steel sang.

  A fluid arc.

  Whispering death.

  A flash of steel.

  Kurt took a step forward.

  The flash missed.

  Out of the blade path.

  His elbow met 03’s solar plexus.

  A crushing blow

  03 swooned.

  Kurt lashed out with his knife.

  03 blocked his knife with his wrist.

  Kurt punched again.

  03 slammed a knee into Kurt’s midsection.

  A blow that drove the air out of Kurt.

  He staggered back.

  Kurt barely had time to register the draw before the distance collapsed.

  03 was on him.

  Kurt dropped the gun and went in with his shoulder, driving his weight forward.

  The impact carried them both sideways, boots skidding dangerously close to the rail.

  Kurt threw an elbow.

  03 turned with the blow.

  Kurt’s strike glanced off his armored plating.

  He followed with a knee aimed for the midsection.

  03 interposed a hand, caught and twisted his knee away.

  Kurt stumbled.

  03 answered with a short, brutal kick that caught Kurt behind the knee.

  Kurt staggered, pain flaring hot.

  He caught the rail with one hand, the world tilting sickeningly as the drop yawned beneath him.

  03 pressed.

  His katana flashed.

  A singing arc.

  A controlled cut to end the fight.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Kurt brought his forearm up just in time, the blade skimming his sleeve.

  The reinforced kelvar-weaving and armor-plating of his trenchcoat took the blow.

  Heat and pressure burning through fabric and skin.

  He snarled and drove forward again, fists now, close and ugly.

  They traded blows at arm’s length.

  Fist. Block. Elbow.

  A headbutt that rang Kurt’s skull and filled his vision with white.

  03 swung the sheath as a club.

  The reinforced spine cracking against Kurt’s cheek.

  Something popped. Kurt gasped.

  He lashed out with a low kick.

  Catching 03’s ankle, knocking him just off balance.

  Buying space.

  Kurt rolled, came up with his sidearm, fired from the hip.

  03 turned with the shot, blade intercepting the round in a shower of sparks that sprayed harmlessly into the mist.

  03 turned the riposte into a seamless counter.

  The sheath slamming into Kurt’s wrist.

  The gun skittered off the gantry and vanished into the void.

  Kurt lunged.

  Tackling 03 around the waist.

  He clasped his hands around 03’s waist and suplexed him

  03 crashed to the deck.

  Momentum carried them into the gantry rail.

  Metal screamed.

  Water roared below them.

  For a heartbeat, they were locked together.

  Their faces intimately close.

  Almost touching, breath steaming in the cold mist.

  03’s eyes were calm.

  Kurt drove a punch into his throat.

  03 absorbed it, grimaced.

  He answered with a short, precise strike to Kurt’s solar plexus.

  The pain was blinding. Kurt folded involuntarily, instincts screaming as his body betrayed him.

  03 rose first.

  The katana came down.

  Kurt rolled aside.

  Barely.

  The blade sheared through the railing of the gantry where his neck had been but a moment ago.

  Kurt scrambled to his knees, vision tunneling, ribs screaming with every breath.

  He knew he can’t beat this man.

  This wasn’t a contest he could win.

  03 advanced.

  His blade low.

  The tip angled toward Kurt’s centerline.

  No rush. No flourish. Just inevitability.

  03 sidestepped.

  Revealing the three Harbingers behind him.

  They had their guns trained on him.

  Kurt dashed behind cover as they opened fire.

  The console terminal absorbed the punishment unflinchingly.

  Kurt saw the Harbinger moving towards the railings.

  He coughed, tasted blood, and hit his comm.

  “Frost,” he said, forcing the words out. “Take the shot.”

  24991125 | 2335

  Hydro Intake Tower 1 | Upper Service Crown | Eastern Nile

  30°04′12″ N

  31°21′03″ E

  The helmet came free, it bounced once upon the gantry and disappearing into the void.

  Illeana’s breath caught.

  The face that turned toward her was not the one she expected.

  Recognition hit her like a physical blow.

  “No,” she whispered.

  The man looked up—not directly at her, but in her direction.

  His eyes.

  Focused. Alive.

  She knew those eyes.

  “X,” she said, voice barely audible. “It’s X.”

  Silence on the channel.

  Confirm visual.

  “I have visual confirmation,” she said.

  Her hands were steady.

  Her heart was not.

  “It’s him.”

  Below, the man designated Harbinger Zero-Three—did not run.

  He lowered his weapon.

  He walked toward the intake gantry, toward the place where the water curved inward and vanished.

  Intent radiated from him, unmistakable now.

  Illeana tracked him instinctively.

  The Hyperion tracing the outline of his body as he moved.

  The targeting reticle hovered over his chest.

  “Kurt,” she said. “He’s not pursuing the fight. He knows.”

  Frost. Take the shot.

  The Harbingers opened fire.

  She saw Kurt dived for cover.

  X reached the edge of the gantry.

  Illeana’s finger tightened.

  She could end it.

  Right here.

  One pull.

  One decision.

  The Hyperion rail does not discriminate.

  She did.

  Frost. Kurt crackled sharply in her ear.

  Take the shot.

  X stopped.

  He looked down at the water.

  He reached up and drew his katana across his own wrist.

  A deep score.

  Blood spilled free, dark against pale skin.

  Frost.

  A single drop of crimson against the grey steel.

  Droplets pooled.

  Flung outward by motion and mist.

  They struck the rushing water.

  Vanished. Swallowed by the flow.

  Illeana froze.

  The system around her shuddered.

  A rumbling.

  From the deep.

  A subtle hitch in the Aquifer’s endless correction.

  Her optics flickered as sensor noise spiked.

  Frost. What is happening?

  “I don’t know, boss,” she whispered. “But I don’t like it.”

  Illeana’s finger never completed the squeeze.

  She stayed prone, rifle aimed at empty space, heart hammering as the water below churned.

  Illeana. Why didn’t you take the shot?

  She closed her eyes.

  “I couldn’t,” she breathed.

  She heard shouting then.

  24991125 | 2335

  Hydro Intake Tower 1 | Upper Service Crown | Eastern Nile

  30°04′12″ N

  31°21′03″ E

  Adam saw the charging figure.

  Blsck trenchcoat

  EVECorp.

  Enforcer.

  A man in black broke from the service corridor.

  His coat snapping in the wind, moving with the practiced economy of a skilled warrior.

  The trenchcoat was matte black, layered, swallowing light.

  “EVECorp!” one of the Harbingers yelled.

  He watched as 03 turned to face him.

  Zora and Gideon raised their weapons.

  “No!” Adam cried, throwing his hand up.

  “You will hit our brother!”

  They relented.

  Adam watched as the EVECorp Enforcer and 03 collided.

  They came together.

  Their blows inhumanly fast.

  Precise.

  They shrugged off blows that Adam had thought impossible.

  The Enforcer fired in their direction.

  “Take cover!” Adam cried.

  He saw 03 overpowered the man.

  Never a doubt.

  He had never seen his brother lost a fight.

  He had also never seen an EVECorp Enforcer as skilled as this one.

  He felt the battle shifted before he saw it.

  03 delivered the decisive blow.

  The Enforcer staggered back.

  The sound of the Aquifer returned.

  Constant, crushing.

  The Harbingers moved on instinct, fanning out.

  Rifles coming up in disciplined arcs.

  “Fire!,” Zora shouted.

  Her words was drowned out by roaring cascade water.

  The Harbingers opened fire

  The Aquifer fractured with weapons fire across the main platform.

  The Enforcer dived behind the control terminal as gunpowder stitched the gantry in his wake.

  Rounds sparked off reinforced plating, chewing into composite housings and sending fragments skittering across the deck.

  The terminal’s shielding held, ancient redundancies doing what they were designed to do.

  Adam dropped to a knee and fired.

  Calm, measured, shots to deny movement rather than kill.

  He knew not how the Enforcer found them.

  He knew not why the Enforcer was hunting them.

  He knew they just need to keep him pinned.

  This was not a duel. This was containment.

  The Enforcer stayed down.

  Pinned.

  Adam signaled, two fingers cutting left.

  The Harbingers adjusted, tightening the angle, overlapping fields of fire.

  The man in black was trapped behind the console.

  No way out.

  A sheer drop yawning on one side, water screaming below.

  Steel ribs and pipes to the other.

  “Hold your fire,” Adam said. “He’s pinned.”

  Then the shots came from above.

  The distinct crack of Hyperion Rails.

  03 moved.

  The shot grazed his helmet.

  But as fortune had it, the shot did not penetrate.

  “Sniper!” Zora shouted.

  Adam peered up.

  The first impact punched through the platform railing, showering sparks and twisted metal.

  A second followed.

  Then a third in precise, brutal succession.

  Each strike tearing chunks out of infrastructure that had been designed to withstand centuries of pressure.

  Adam flattened instinctively, pressing close to the deck.

  He scanned upward, eyes burning as he tried to pierce the mist and glare.

  There.

  Movement.

  High above, silhouetted against light and falling water.

  Too high.

  He quickly repositioned.

  “Zora,” Adam called, “can you get the shooter?”

  Zora shook her head, her eyes still trained upon the console terminal.

  “We can’t reach her,” Zora said, not bothering to even train her rifle upward.

  “She’s out of range.”

  “I can –“ Gideon began.

  “No.” Adam said, forestalling him. “Not yet.”

  He turned his attention back to the sniper.

  “Brother!” he called to 03, “withdraw!”

  03 walked up to the railings

  He raised his katana and, without ceremony, slashed his own wrist.

  Blood welled, dark and vivid against pale skin, ran down his forearm, and gathered at his fingertips.

  A single drop fell free, tumbling through fire-lit mist and screaming air, swallowed instantly by the depths below.

  A rumbling.

  He cursed softly.

  They were exposed here.

  Pinned between the man in black and a shooter they couldn’t engage.

  The platform that had seemed so solid moments ago now felt fragile.

  A suspended island in a machine that did not care who stood on it.

  “Cover!” Adam ordered.

  The Harbingers pulled tighter.

  Their weapons tracking impossible angles, bodies pressed to metal that vibrated harder now,

  Then voices rang out above them.

  Not over comms.

  Voices.

  A chorus, raw and fierce, cutting through the noise.

  “Tuba lil-mujahideen! Aasha muqatiloo Dawud al-Aswad!”

  Long live the fighters of David Black!

  Adam looked up.

  Figures had emerged near the sniper’s position.

  Men clad in desert cloak and archaic armor, cowls snapping in the wind, faces hidden.

  Al-Fidāqīn.

  They moved with purpose, not urgency.

  The movement of men going to their deaths.

  The sniper snapped to them.

  A shot.

  One fell.

  But the man behind him retrieved a silver cylinder.

  Adam’s blood ran cold.

  “Nuclear,” Zora breathed. “Compact. Old design.”

  A relic.

  A weapon from an age when escalation was measured in absolutes.

  The sniper ran.

  She vaulted the railing in a single, fluid motion.

  Disappearing into the mist.

  Another shot rang out.

  The head of the Al-Fidāqīn brother turned to crimson mist.

  The device dropped from lifeless hands.

  It triggered.

  There was no sound at first.

  Just light.

  “Take cover!” Adam cried as his optic filters were overwhelmed.

  A white flash.

  A new sun.

  An instance that erased shadow and color alike.

  A crushing compression.

  Adam was slammed against the deck.

  The world folded inward, then tore itself open.

  The gantry above vanished in a storm of fire and debris, steel and concrete shredded into incandescent fragments.

  The blast ripped through the upper structure of Hydro Intake Tower One, shearing turbines, collapsing service levels, knocking entire sections out of alignment.

  The tower screamed.

  Not in sound, but in vibration.

  Its carefully-calibrated internals de-synchronised.

  Adam lay stunned, ears ringing, vision swimming.

  The Aquifer convulsed.

  Water surged where it shouldn’t.

  Flow vectors spiked.

  Pressure alarms wailed and then died as power bled out.

  The outer ring continued to feed water into a system that could no longer absorb it evenly.

  The failure cascading.

  Through the settling smoke and drifting debris,

  Adam saw him.

  03 stood at the railing, untouched.

  His coat was torn, his armor scorched, but he moved as if none of it mattered.

  He approached the edge calmly, the abyss below yawning wide.

  A cathedral of falling water and darkness.

  The Enforcer rose from behind the shattered terminal.

  Weapon hanging uselessly at his side.

  He stared at 03, disbelief and fury etched across his face.

  03 did not look at him.

  Above them, nuclear fire licked the night.

  Below them, the cold abyss accepted the offering.

  03 turned then, finally meeting Blade’s gaze.

  His eyes did not burn with hatred, not with triumph.

  Acceptance, perhaps. Or certainty.

  X turned, blood still running down his arm.

  He retuned to his brothers.

  And in the depths below, the Aquifer began, very gently, to come apart.

  Adam realized with terrible clarity then.

  Terminus Est.