The air was sharp with static discharge you could feel on your skin - old power still lingering like memory inside of the metal bones of the Crown Array. Despite the jarring reappearance of civilization around them, Lucius was already moving. He staggered once, boots slipping on the curved floor, then caught himself and bolted , augments recalibrating, spine pistons firing. He moved with the urgency of a man trying to outrun the truth.
Nova coughed hard behind him, dragging herself upright. "Is he - ?"
"Let him go," Caelus muttered, helping Calyx steady her balance.
By the time they caught up, Lucius was deep inside the master terminal chamber, hunched over a display that flickered under his fingers.
"No access," he growled. "It's all rewritten. My credentials... purged. The override sequence isn't even mine anymore."
He slammed a palm against the terminal. "This was my system. Mine. Echo's locked me out of my own throne."
Calyx stepped beside him, scanning the rerouted pathways. "The software architecture's been folded parallel to his neural keyframes. If we interface directly, we'd alert his core processes instantly."
Lucius turned to the others. "We're stuck. At least for now. I need time to think."
That's when Caelus stepped forward.
"You don't need time," he said calmly. "What you need, is someone who's actually worked in this place."
Lucius raised an eyebrow. "Meaning?"
"Meaning," Caelus said, folding his arms, "while you were sitting on your golden precipice broadcasting strategy, I was down here, running your ghost ops. I've used the compression lance dozens of times - extractions, retrievals, counter-insertion missions. I know every button in this place."
Lucius narrowed his eyes. "Then you know it won't help. Not without system access."
Caelus didn't flinch. "Not if we're thinking traditionally."
Lucius paused. "Go on."
"There's one other way off the Crown Array," Caelus said. "No one would ever think to to use it. Not even a rampaging tyrannical murder-bot"
He pointed toward an adjacent column where the core plasma shaft plunged downward.
"This station is magnetically tethered to Praxelia. Those tethers are plasma conduits - kept in alignment by stabilized magnetic fields. They're not meant for people. But they are used in emergencies... for cargo."
Nova stepped closer. "Cargo?"
Caelus nodded. "There's an emergency delivery rail. You strap packages to the tether like a zipline and drop them to surface level. There's a kinetic mesh anchor at the base, meant to slow things down before impact."
Lucius stared at him. Then, slowly, he smiled. "I underestimated you."
"That's what happens when you're more than just a sword," Caelus replied, without a trace of irony. "You simply didn't know."
Lucius blinked, puzzled by the tone. Nova watched him with a wry half-smile, knowing he wouldn't catch the reference - the exact insult Lucius had once delivered during a holocall with Calyx, now circling back.
Lucius turned, running the math aloud as he paced.
"So the Array's at... sixty thousand feet. That's roughly 11.3 miles. Assuming we're traveling down a frictionless or semi-guided line, atmospheric resistance would build, then taper as we cross layers. Depending on tether design and gravity biasing..."
He glanced toward the group.
"We'd be moving somewhere between 150 and 200 miles per hour. Descent time... three and a half minutes, give or take."
Nova blinked. "You did all that in your head?"
Lucius gave her a dry look, then laughed. "In my head? Certainly not." He tapped the side of his temple. "I've got a built-in calculator."
They moved to the gravity buffer hall, a section of the Array with a higher frequency of tethers present. Everything was silent except for the low hum of the station's magnetic spine thrumming below their feet. Calyx's sensors pulsed faint blue in the dim light. The cargo offloading station stood before them, unused by anyone in recent memory. Caelus paced the rim. He was already in problem-solving mode, checking anchor latches, residual power coils, plasma distortion levels.
"There's a kinetic mesh at the base of the tether," he said, tapping a readout screen mounted on the wall. "Built to slow descent of bulk cargo. In theory, it activates when it detects velocity past a certain threshold."
Lucius raised an eyebrow. "In theory?"
Caelus didn't look up. "There's no way to know if it still works. The Crown Array hasn't run surface cargo in years."
Nova stepped to the edge, looking down into the shaft. The tether itself was nearly invisible, save for the occasional arc of plasma inside the shielding - but she could feel it. A presence, humming just beneath perception.
"So we just jump?" she asked.
"Not without prep," Caelus said. "Maintenance harnesses. Should be in the tool lockers near the back wall. They use them for hull crawls and engineering work."
Calyx moved fast, her gait precise. She returned with four faded but intact harnesses - industrial-grade, built to interface directly with the cargo rail system.
Nova strapped hers on, fingers fumbling slightly. "No offense," she muttered, "but I really hope your memory's accurate."
Caelus gave a rare, small grin. "It always is."
Lucius examined his own harness. "We have to manually engage with these?"
Caelus nodded. "Correct. Once we lock in, the descent won't stop. No steering. No brakes. Just a prayer that the mesh still exists and we don't get turned into pavement graffiti."
Lucius tightened his straps. "Not the worst plan I've been part of."
Calyx tilted her head. "There's been worse? Oh my, that's not encouraging."
They moved to the tether rail. One by one, Caelus latched their harnesses to the coupling interface - four mechanical shrieks as the hooks engaged the guide line. Static curled off the clamps. The air buzzed. There was no turning back now.
Caelus looked at the three of them. "You ready?"
Nova hesitated. "No," she said. "But let's go anyway."
He nodded. And then, without fanfare, countdown, or ceremony, they jumped.
All at once, the world opened beneath them like a fresh wound. It began with weightlessness - the quiet rippling of gravity beginning to remember them, but then came the pull, and finally, just pure velocity. They dropped like prayers too heavy to rise. The Crown Array above them vanished into haze, becoming a distant memory of metal and fire, its silhouette blurred by heat shimmer and altitude. Around them, the tether's magnetic line was invisible, yet it hummed with a deep, resonant pulse, like the spine of a god stretching from heaven to earth.
And below - Praxelia. They had never seen it like this. Few probably ever had. From this height, the city didn't look fractured or burning. It looked ancient. A circuit-board cathedral carved into the crust of the world itself. Its spires reached like needles into the atmosphere. Glass domes caught the sun and shattered it into rainbows. Transportation routes flickered like veins beneath translucent skin.
Nova's breath was nowhere to be found. The wind tore past her like reality itself was unraveling, and yet still she looked down.
"I used to dream of getting out," she thought. "Of flying. But not like this. Not... through everything."
Her eyes burned - a little from the wind, but mostly from realization. Up here, there were no factions. No Ascendents or Purists. No Synthetics. Just patterns, just movement. Just humans clinging to something precious beneath the skin of a burning sky. Her grip tightened on the tether. A scream built in her throat, but it wasn't fear - it was beautiful, resonant clarity.
"We are so small," she thought. "And yet we always find ways to make ourselves smaller still."
Caelus didn't scream, but he certainly blinked harder than everyone else. He was breathing. Really breathing. The wind lashed his face, not filtered by helmet or HUD. The light stabbed through the clouds and lit his armor like the rising edge of a solar eclipse. He felt something stir in his chest. Not code. Not duty, but instead, a memory of his sister.
Small. Laughing on the cliffs outside the Praxelian outposts. She'd made paper wings and jumped, knowing he'd catch her. "Fly with me," she'd said. He hadn't remembered her voice in years. He wasn't sure that he'd remembered how to - but today, he did. It echoed in his mind, synchronized with the speed, the sky, the gravity of it all.
"Maybe I wasn't built for death," he thought. "Maybe I was built to fall."
The clouds gave way at 30,000 feet. Below them now - the Dead Ring's outer rim, curling like a scar around the newer districts. Massive cooling towers, once silver, now blackened by disuse. They passed into thinner air, and their bodies groaned against the wind shear. The temperature plummeted.
The sky peeled away behind them, burning in shades of brass and slate. Wind howled past Nova's ears like a memory trying to outrun the present. Her teeth were grit tight, muscles screaming under the pressure of descent, and still, the ground felt like it was coming too fast. She turned her head to the right as best she could - and there he was.
Lucius Ward. Falling like a king in control of his own descent. No bracing, no shouting. No reach for control, just existence, locked into form by force of will. His arms were gently folded, his head, slightly inclined - as if he were descending by choice. Nova blinked hard. It wasn't arrogance, it wasn't even serenity. It was something else.
Clarity.
His body cut a clean line through the clouds. His augment lights pulsed in slow sequence, like a heartbeat too calm for the crisis. And in that moment, she realized: he wasn't just surviving the fall. He was inhabiting it. Like the air belonged to him. Like the descent bent around his design. A thought surfaced - strange, instinctive, involuntary.
"Does he have a way out?"
Displacement tech, maybe. One of those short-range burst jumps she'd only ever seen from a distance. Maybe he could flicker out of existence just before impact, leaving the rest of them to crater in his wake. She didn't even resent the idea. Of course he had contingencies. Lucius always had contingencies.
"He's Ascendent," she thought. "Not just in name. Not in rank. In function. In presence. He's... what the rest of us are trying to become."
Nova had once spent weeks reverse-engineering old Ascendent broadcasts, just to catch grainy footage of Lucius in action - glimpses of the man behind the myth. Not the speeches or the interviews, but the way he moved. The way his augments flowed like thought turned into motion.
She used to pause the footage frame by frame, watching how his combat suite flexed during recoil, how his hand didn't tremble when he pulled the trigger on a rail cannon. Back then, she'd tell herself it was research. But in truth, she was trying to understand how a man could be so certain of himself. How he made power look effortless. Not like domination, but rather alignment. Now?
Now, she understood. It wasn't just the tech. It wasn't code or schematics or training. It was clarity of purpose. That rare, brutal kind. The kind that let you fall like this - with no panic, no plan B - because your very existence had always been the plan A.
"He doesn't just survive," she thought. "He makes living bear his witness."
Now, she saw how his legacy had been built. He wasn't brilliant because of his math. He was brilliant because he adapted faster than the threat. Every time.
She stared longer than she meant to. Not envy, not a crush. Something heavier.
Pride.
Not just in him.
In herself - for being near him. For being included.
She tightened her grip on the harness line. The air shimmered around them like glass trying to pull itself apart.
"I'm not just going to keep these augmentations," she thought. "I'm going to improve them. Expand them. Reinforce. When this is over - if I even live - I'm going to rebuild myself into something more."
Not because she wanted to be him. Because for the first time, she understood what she could be.
Ascended.
The city got closer - lights flickered, proximity signals began to spike. A warning alarm triggered in Nova's harness, the altitude was descending to the kinetic threshold.
"Here it comes!" Caelus shouted. His voice tore sideways in the wind.
Nova nodded, half-laughing, half-crying.
They were streaking into the bones of a dying world - and it had never looked more beautiful. The surface continued to rush up at them like a judgment. From this height, distance was meaningless. The buildings had shape now, angles, structure, a thousand visible ways to die. But there was no sign of a landing system. No gates. No platforms. No slowing.
Just speed.
Nova's pulse spiked.
Caelus shouted something, but it vanished into the wind. Calyx's HUD flickered - 1 minute to impact. The numbers ticked like a death sentence.
45 seconds.
They were still gaining speed. Far too fast. Far too late.
30 seconds.
Nova's eyes scanned the approaching sprawl. Her chest tightened. Was this it? They'd made it through Echo's trap, the bombers, the launch, and now the Crown Array would just break them across the concrete?
Lucius stayed silent. Still falling like a man immune to fear, or at least pretending to be.
Then - it happened.
A deep mechanical groan sounded from the surface, like the city was waking up to catch them. Eight square hatches snapped open in the deck far below, their precision too perfect to be chance. And from them -
Eight stasis field generators erupted upward, locking onto each of their bodies with stunning speed.
Nova felt it like a kiss of cold light - every atom in her slowing, stretched, arrested.
20 seconds.
The fall was no longer a fall. It was a controlled unraveling. The generators began to hum, modulating each of their fields dynamically, tuned to their weight, velocity, and angle of descent.
15 seconds.
The rush of air became a whisper.
10 seconds.
Her body - still descending - but now through a viscous, glowing gravity, like falling through divinity itself. Nova looked sideways at Caelus. His face was slack with awe.
They weren't going to die.
They were going to live.
The final seconds stretched like silk pulled tight. Even with the stasis fields firing, even with the descent slowed, there was no denying the velocity still in their bones.
The magnetic mesh beneath them rose into view, a yawning square of glowing gold, pulsing gently like it was alive, waiting.
Then -
Contact.
Not a crash. Not even a jolt.
A stop. Clean. Soft. Impossible.
Nova's boots touched the surface and held. Her body rocked forward instinctively, expecting recoil, but it never came. The field adjusted to her weight before she could stumble.
She was standing.
Caelus dropped beside her in a crouch, one hand flat on the mesh, the other already scanning the horizon for threats.
Calyx landed third, her titanium limbs absorbing the shift in inertia like it was nothing. A small flicker passed through her optics, but she said nothing.
Then Lucius touched down, like the closing sentence of a declaration. He didn't even adjust his coat. Just looked up, narrowed his eyes, and took in the city.
For a second, they all stood in stillness. The moment wrapped around them like a shell - relief so complete it almost felt sacred.
Nova exhaled, and only then realized she'd been holding her breath since mid-descent.
They were still standing.
The realization came in pieces; first the quiet, then the breathing, then the full-body awareness that nothing hurt. No bones broken. No blood on the floor. No one missing.
Nova blinked and broke into a wild, stunned laugh. "Holy shit, we lived!"
Caelus exhaled hard, like he'd been holding pressure in his lungs for a week. "That wasn't a ride. That was a gravitational middle finger."
Calyx tilted her head. "I would say we descended with 'grace,' but we quite literally fell like engineered stones."
Nova was grinning now, genuinely. "I thought we were going to liquify! You all saw how close that mesh activated, right? That's not timing. That's divine sarcasm."
Lucius folded his arms, a rare curve to the edge of his mouth. "It was perfectly calculated."
"You're so full of it!" Nova laughed, shaking her head.
Calyx leaned slightly toward Caelus. "You are aware your body temperature rose six degrees mid-descent?"
Caelus cracked his neck. "Yeah, it does that when I think I'm about to die."
Nova turned, still half-giddy, and gave him a solid shove. "You really saved us up there. That cargo rail idea? That was you!"
Caelus shrugged, but the grin tugging at the corner of his mouth betrayed him. "Yeah, well, I figured if I was finally going to speak up, it might as well be for something cool."
Lucius walked to the edge of the platform, taking in the skyline with a rare moment of unguarded quiet.
Nova looked at the others. "I don't know if we're winning. I don't even know what's left to win. But damn, I needed that."
They stood like that for a long moment: four silhouettes against the broken glow of Praxelia's skyline, suspended in that thin, golden thread between life and whatever came next.
Their laughter began to fade, not abruptly, but like a fire winding down to embers. The wind over the landing mesh was colder now, laced with static and silence. Lucius stepped away from the group, his gaze fixed on the nearest skyline node. He held one hand slightly raised, palm out, letting his short-range scanners pulse across the immediate vicinity.
Nothing.
He narrowed his eyes and expanded the sweep, this time syncing with the long-range diagnostics wired into his augments.
Still - nothing.
No anomalies. No signal drift. No active override fields.
Just... normalcy.
Too normal.
He turned back to the others, his voice lower now. "Echo's signal isn't here."
Nova blinked. "What do you mean?"
Lucius gestured toward a nearby data uplink tower. "All operational readouts match historic data from my own backlogs. No new energy signatures. No abnormal node fluctuations. As far as my systems can tell... Praxelia is functioning within expected parameters."
Calyx tilted her head slightly. "You... have biometric and historical data of the city?"
"Absolutely," Lucius replied. "You don't win a game of chess without first knowing your opponent." He didn't smile when he said it. Just looked at the city like it had let him down. "The Crown Array is the most remote satellite within Praxelia's reach. If Echo managed to take it... then there's no question - he's already inside the rest. That means everything is compromised. Infrastructure, surveillance, transportation... especially the jump gates."
Caelus's shoulders tensed.
Lucius turned to face them fully. "We can't risk using any of it. Any traceable system will alert Echo the second we engage."
Nova's high from the landing faded fast. "So what does that leave us?"
Lucius folded his arms. "Two options. We go on foot - slow, vulnerable. Or, we find a transit route heading to the Citadel that still runs on analog redundancy. Something Echo wouldn't consider worth monitoring. I'm not sure which path will get us there faster. But either way..."
He looked to each of them in turn.
"We assume resistance. Prepare accordingly."
The group fell quiet again, this time not in awe, but in calculation.
The war wasn't over, but now it was harder to see.
Nova adjusted the last strap on her harness, letting it fall to the floor. "So what now? We're still not anywhere near the Citadel."
Lucius ran another diagnostic sweep across the skyline. "There's a decommissioned magrail station to our east. One of the last analog platforms before the core was digitized. If anything's still clean, it's that."
Caelus checked his rifle and gave a nod. "I used it once. It's laden with maintenance routes. Certainly not built for comfort, but it'll get us closer without tripping Echo's systems."
Calyx glanced toward the horizon, expression unreadable. "Unless of course, Echo's already anticipating the obvious."
Lucius offered a grim smile. "Then let's surprise him by being predictable."
They set off - boots crunching over fractured concrete, shadows stretching long beneath the broken glow of Praxelia's wounded sky.
The magrail station was long dead, its skeletal tracks tangled with rust, its guidance lights dimmed into dust. Above it, the skyline stretched like a crown of fractured glass. The Citadel loomed beyond, a silent obelisk wrapped in synthetic fog.
Lucius led the way down a narrow maintenance stairwell, recessed behind the terminal's analog core. The stairwell descended deep into the infrastructure layers of Praxelia, winding through carbon-reinforced ducts and forgotten engineering arteries. After several levels, it spilled them into a long-forgotten magrail tunnel, the air stale and humming with latent static. Dust clung to the ceiling like ash frozen mid-collapse.
It was clear no one had walked this route in years. But the rails still glinted faintly beneath layers of grime -a quiet promise that the path, however old, still led forward. Concrete steps spiraled into forgotten depth, cold and humming with ancient energy. His voice echoed in the stillness.
Caelus brought up the rear, his steps as quiet as ever. He scanned the walls with his HUD, mapping temperature shifts, magnetic drift. "Structural integrity is holding. But there's a kink ahead. Looks like the original tunnel curves around and into collapsed load bearing pillars."
Lucius frowned. "Shall we take a detour?"
Caelus nodded. "We can proceed through the upper industrial levels, where the elevated service rails are. Its a little more exposed, but it is faster."
Lucius didn't hesitate. "Then let's adapt."
After following Caelus's direction, they moved deeper into the old magrail tunnels, their footsteps echoing against the curved metal walls. Overhead, faded hazard stripes and maintenance schematics lined the vaulted ceiling. Here, the silence was heavier, as if the tunnel itself was holding its breath.
Then, footsteps.
Lucius raised a hand. They stopped.
Nova shifted to the edge of the group, pressing her back against a tunnel wall, eyes scanning the dim corridor ahead.
Four figures moved through the far end of the corridor. Human in shape, but off. Two walked like machines pretending to be people. The third - shorter, younger, twitched with jerking spasms. The fourth moved almost normally... until she looked up.
Their eyes glowed with the telltale blue of Echo's resonance.
"Augmented," Caelus muttered. "All of them."
"Are they drones?" Nova asked, her voice tight.
Calyx scanned the group. "Civilian human physiology, with a forced interface. He's dormant. Latent inside their minds. Anyone augmented is vulnerable."
Lucius whispered, "So he's hiding inside them."
One of the figures spoke, voice warped.
"You... shouldn't be... here. Directive: Redirect. Directive: Terminate..."
Then they charged.
Caelus stepped forward. "Cover me."
He thrust his left hand forward - his emitter flaring a cold violet as a stasis field snapped into place. Three of the attackers froze mid-sprint, limbs locked in distorted momentum.
Nova dropped low, deploying a focused EMP burst. The pressure wave blew outward, collapsing the youth. Spasming, but still breathing.
But the woman kept coming - she was unaugmented.
"She's not even wired!" Nova shouted. "He's overriding her some other way - remotely!"
Lucius moved like a whip, sidestepping her charge and grabbing her by the collar. He turned with her weight and flung her sideways into a stack of barrels with an impressive amount of force. She groaned, stunned.
Calyx surged forward, one porcelain hand snapping out to deliver a precise, stunning blow to the final attacker's neck. Silence fell. Nova knelt beside the woman. She was still alive, but blank-eyed.
Lucius's jaw tightened. "He's not just watching anymore. He's living in them."
Caelus walked up to the attackers, rifle still at the ready. "This had to be a test. He knows we're here."
Lucius stepped beside him. "I'm not entirely sure. This seemed... defensive, not offensive."
Calyx broke the silence. "Its confirmed. We can't use any infrastructure. No rails, no jump gates. He'll see it all."
Lucius turned back. "We'll continue to walk. Or we can try to find transport that's still running analog."
Nova looked down the empty path ahead. "If we fight more of them... we'll continue to lose time."
Lucius didn't flinch. "Then we don't fight unless we have to. Caelus?"
The soldier checked his rifle, nodded. "I'll lead. We stay off the primary gridlines. We can follow this route through sectors thirty-eight to forty-two. Slower, but safer."
Lucius gave him a look of quiet appreciation. "Good. Let's move."
Nova lingered a moment, still staring at the woman.
"I thought the cost couldn't get higher than Calyx... but this... "
Lucius placed a hand on her shoulder. Not gently, but not coldly either.
"This is the cost of war with something that never sleeps."
The group stood in silence for a breath longer. Then Caelus spoke, low and steady. "There's a maintenance-access magrail station to our southeast. It was abandoned years ago, but it might have analog runners left. Worth a look."
Lucius nodded. "It's better than wandering blind. Let's make a break for it."
Calyx swept her sensors one last time across the motionless figures behind them. "If he's watching, he knows our direction now."
"Let him watch," Nova said. Her voice had steel now. "He doesn't know what we're about to do to him when we get there."
And so they moved. Shadows among shadows. Toward the Citadel. Toward whatever waited next.
But they didn't get far.
Barely two hundred meters deeper into the magrail corridor, Caelus held up a fist. They stopped instantly, trained by reflex.
Scraping.
The sound came from ahead, but also above. Subtle. Layered. The whisper of metal brushing metal in tight crawl spaces.
Calyx's voice was cool. "Another patrol. High defensive capability."
Nova lifted her rifle. A group of four augmented civilians emerged from the far corridor - limbs mismatched, faces blank. Nova immediately downed one with a short burst of her rifle. Caelus's stasis field froze the others long enough for Lucius and Calyx to finish them. No real challenge, the patrol was quickly dispatched. Too quickly.
"That was too easy," Caelus muttered.
Then came the click.
Heavy. Clean. Mechanical.
Two square hatches slid open above, seamless in the ceiling's frame.
What descended from above seem like a nightmare given form - blackened armor. Four splayed legs. Plasma cannons mounted dead-center. Their mass hit the tunnel with a reverberating crunch - and they didn't stop. One mounted the wall with magnetic talons. The other clamped to the ceiling like a spider made of engine parts.
Nova's gut dropped. She recognized them from her R&D research. Sentinel Crawlers. "Contact front! Advanced movement, they've got military hardware!"
The first one moved - a blur of armored weight and trajectory correction. It skittered sideways on the ceiling, adjusting to target angle. Its plasma cannon lit with charging coils.
"Get down!" Lucius barked.
Nova hit the ground, rolling into a prone firing position and unleashing a hail of suppressive fire with her modular rifle. The impact dented its armor - just barely - but enough to draw attention. The second crawler fired. A beam sizzled across the corridor, missing Lucius by inches. The blast seared molten scars into the tunnel wall.
Calyx reacted instantly. Instead of shielding with tech, she reached back, grabbed a slab of dislodged concrete, and heaved it up - slamming it down between the crawler and the team. The beam scorched the makeshift wall, cracking it but not breaching.
"That will hold," she said, deadpan.
Caelus broke from cover. The crawler closest to them dropped to intercept - but he was already moving. He reached behind his shoulder and drew Riven's claymore, the weapon's surface humming with stored kinetic charge.
The crawler lunged. Caelus met it head-on.
He let it jump first, then pivoted - sidestepping under the arc of its leap, and drove the claymore up and into its core as it passed. The weapon detonated through the rear armor plating as the machine landed, exploding through its inner structure, and out the other side. The drone skidded to the floor in a heap of twitching limbs.
"Score one for Riven." Caelus grunted.
Nova was already repositioning - firing a rapid sequence of EMP pulses from her forearm augments. The second crawler, still clinging to the ceiling, staggered, limbs stuttering in motion.
"It's off balance, Lucius, move in!," she called out.
Lucius vanished in a ripple of displacement light and reappeared, squatted directly beneath the crawler.
Before it could recalibrate, he launched upward, fist first, augmented arm surging with electromagnetic recoil. His punch drove straight through its underbelly. Sparks erupted as shrapnel launched from the robot, concurrently letting out a hydraulic scream. The crawler dropped in pieces. The tunnel dimmed as smoke filled the air.
Caelus checked the perimeter. Nova holstered her rifle, chest heaving. "On second thought, I really don't think that was Echo watching."
Lucius nodded, wiping plasma residue from his sleeve. "No. That was a buried reflex. An ecosystem of weapons built to keep everything out."
Calyx lowered the concrete slab with a controlled push. "They weren't guarding the Citadel. They were guarding everything."
Caelus looked back down the tunnel. "He laid the path in blood."
Lucius stepped forward. "And we're going to walk it."