Julian did the sum in the time it took the thin man to turn back to his keyboard.
The broadcast was out. It was on every wall, every phone, and every outdoor screen in New Kong, and nothing he did tonight would put it back in the box. But a signal had to come from somewhere, and when the city started asking where, there would be a room, a server rack, a dozen faces, and a name at the bottom of a lease.
He didn't have to stop the signal. He only had to make sure it had never existed here.
"Pull the plug," Julian said. "All of it."
"Boss, the feed's already—"
"I'm not trying to stop it. I'm making sure it never started in this room." Julian made himself breathe slowly. "Every drive. Every rack. Every account tied to this facility, every key, every log. Nothing stays on this network and nothing stays in this building. Physical destruction. Burn it all."
The two enforcers by the door moved without needing a second order. One stepped toward the server racks. The other set a heavy case on the desk, opening it to reveal neat rows of thumb-sized incendiary charges.
"And the rest of us?" The thin man's voice went fragile. He had understood a second before anyone else. "What about us, boss?"
Julian looked at him, then past him, along the row of twelve keyboards and at the young woman who had reported the accepted transports with such pride. They had all been paid well to believe he was infallible.
"Everyone in this room knows what was done here," Julian said gently. "And anyone who knows can be questioned."
Julian turned and walked out through the reinforced service door at the rear before anyone could react. Once he was clear on the other side, his enforcers pulled the door shut, and the magnetic lock engaged with a heavy, mechanical thud. Julian hadn't touched a key—the building's security protocols obeyed him completely.
Through the thick reinforced glass, the thin man lunged forward, hammering his fists against the door.
"Boss! Julian! Please!"
"I'm sorry," Julian muttered to the empty hallway, surprised to feel a mild pang of regret—the fleeting sympathy a man feels before deleting a corrupted file.
Behind the glass, the ceiling vents hissed open.
Julian didn't stay to watch. He had always preferred results over faces. His two enforcers joined him, leaving the incendiary charges to do their work, and together they moved briskly down the rear service stairwell. The muffled thuds against the glass faded into silence behind them.
The service exit opened into an alley colored like rust. The sun had dipped below the skyline, leaving a streak of dark red wedged between two corporate towers.
Julian pulled a cigarette from his case and lit it on the third try. He dialed a private number.
It rang three times.
"Julian," Victor's voice came through, cold and unhurried. "I am in the middle of something."
"We have a problem," Julian said simply. "We need to meet."
A precise pause followed. "Where?"
"I'll send the location. Bring Father."
Julian ended the call without waiting for a reply and stepped into the gathering dusk.
---
In the command tent, the list scrolled on.
Names ran down the central tactical monitor in steady white text. The comms technician had stopped trying to trace the breach; his hands rested motionless in his lap.
Toby remained anchored against the support beam, staring at the monitor where the names continued to scroll in silence. A line of text scrolled up. Toby's eyes locked onto it.
The date stamped beside it was two months prior to the agreement he had signed. Two months before the corporate representatives had sat across from him in a carpeted office and promised his crew was alive and waiting.
Another name scrolled past. Then another. Names he knew by heart.
"Liam," Toby whispered.
He turned from the support beam and walked straight for the tent's main exit flap, moving before anyone could react.
"Stop him," the commander ordered sharply.
Nobody moved. Outside, the guard at the flap didn't even raise his rifle as Toby pushed past him, taking long, heavy strides down the wooden planks of the floating dock toward the pier.
"Where is he going?" Teo muttered, watching Toby's retreating back.
Leah stared at the monitor, where the names continued to scroll in silence. "Away from here."
---
Out on the plaza, the battle raged in complete chaos.
Sol felt the fading sunlight from within his own body—a cold, hollow thinning behind his ribs. The sky over the plaza had turned the dark shade of cooling ash, and the golden radiance beneath his skin dimmed slightly with every breath he drew. Night was approaching, the one tactical disadvantage he couldn't simply overpower.
He couldn't afford to worry about the dark now. The plaza was an absolute warzone.
"Fight!" Lemon's voice thundered from the rubble. "Hold the line!"
Vanguard riflemen continued pouring automatic fire down into the perimeter, their muzzle flashes lighting up the dust. The collared captives scattered in terror, caught in the crossfire between Vanguard guns and the advancing NCC armored line.
Orange lunged out of the smoke from Sol's left, her silver-clad forearms swinging like steel beams. Sol blocked the strike with his bare forearm, the impact echoing like a hammer on an anvil, and used her momentum to pivot, driving a golden palm into her shoulder and throwing her back against a fallen concrete pillar.
"Look around you!" Sol demanded, his voice echoing over the gunfire. "Your formation is breaking! Pull your people back!"
"I don't care about the formation," Orange snapped, springing off the pillar with lethal speed. Her silver forearms reshaped into jagged blades. "My job is to keep you busy until he's off this island."
Before Sol could respond, the ground beneath them shuddered in a heavy, rhythmic cadence.
The Beast Machine charged into the plaza. Its six mechanical legs slammed into the paving stones, crushing fallen marquees like paper beneath its massive armored chassis. Its heavy back turret pivoted toward the upper slope, locking onto the Vanguard firing positions.
The pilot didn't hesitate. The heavy cannon roared.
The ledge where the Vanguard riflemen were positioned detonated in a fountain of pulverized stone and fire. The shockwave ripped through the plaza, sending debris flying in all directions.
Through the dust, Sol saw the Beast Machine's turret rotating again, adjusting its elevation. The main gun was lining up directly on a cluster of collared captives pinned against the lower rocks—collateral damage in the pilot's line of fire.
Sol didn't hesitate. He surged forward, throwing his body directly into the projectile's trajectory.
The high-explosive round detonated against Sol's chest.
A blinding flash lit the plaza, followed by a deafening roar. When the smoke cleared, Sol was on one knee in a shallow crater, smoke rising from his scorched armor, his left arm numb from the impact. But behind him, the captives remained untouched.
Orange stood twenty feet away, her silver blades lowered slightly as she watched him rise, her cold expression unreadable.
---
On the far side of the elevated ledge, Lucius operated with lethal focus.
Lemon slammed his hands into the stone, raising a three-foot wall of solid reinforced concrete between them. Lucius swung The Lord up, aligned his sights, and pulled the trigger.
The heavy round smashed through the center of the wall, disintegrating the concrete in a shower of dust and flying gravel. Jack erupted through the opening before the dust could even settle, his bone blades extended.
"Splendid shot!" Jack roared with delight, leaping through the air. "Let's see another!"
Lucius snapped the cylinder open, ejecting the spent heavy casings onto the stone with a metallic clink. He grabbed three fresh rounds from his coat lining, loaded them in a single fluid motion, and snapped the heavy frame shut just as Jack landed in front of him.
Lucius used the heavy steel barrel of The Lord to catch Jack's initial blade strike, locking the weapon against the bone edge.
"Magnificent!" Jack cackled, pressing his weight down.
Before Lucius could disengage, Lemon brought his palm down on the ground behind them.
The slab of bedrock beneath Lucius' boots violently fractured and vaulted upward like a catapult. The sheer force launched Lucius backward off the elevated ledge, sending him flying forty feet through the air. He crashed directly through the upper glass floor of the adjacent three-story Administration Building, disappearing into the dark interior amidst a shower of shattering glass and collapsing metal frames.
Jack jogged to the broken edge of the ledge, peering over into the ruined building structure. "Oh! Straight through the window! Bravo!"
"He isn't dead," Lemon said flatly, turning back toward the slope.
"Of course he isn't!" Jack grinned, shaking dust from his shoulders. "That would ruin the fun!"
---
At the eastern edge of the island, Berry glided toward the shoreline, carried by four massive red tentacles that walked in a rolling, spider-like rhythm. Above him, his other three limbs held the heavy metal cylinder tight against his chest.
The sun had finally dipped completely beneath the horizon. With the ambient heat fading, Berry felt his strength surging back through his limbs, his tendrils pulsing with dark energy. Below the cliff edge, a dark, unmarked transport boat waited in the swell with its running lights cut.
Berry reached the edge of the rocks. Just as one of his thick red tentacles was about to step down into the ocean water, he paused.
The water had gone completely, unnaturaly still.
The rolling waves that had slammed against the rocky shore all evening froze in an instant. The sea around the entire perimeter of the island flattened into glass.
From the dark ocean surface, massive columns of seawater suddenly erupted. They rose into the night sky, coiling and shaping themselves into colossal water dragons. Dozens of them surged upward simultaneously from every shore of the island, their serpentine bodies weaving together as they curved high into the sky.
The water dragons stretched across the sky above the island, interlocking their massive fluid forms until they spanned the entire upper atmosphere, creating a vast, shimmering dome of water over all of Sentinel Forge.
An instant later, a sharp crack echoed through the air.
The fluid dome froze solid. Flash-frost raced across the water dragons, instantly transforming the liquid arches into thousands of tons of jagged, impenetrable ice that sealed the island off from the rest of the world.
Berry froze, his lead tentacle hovering inches above the frozen sea. On the plaza below, the gunfire ceased as heroes, Vanguard fighters, and soldiers alike looked up at the massive frozen ceiling spanning the sky.
Then, at the exact central apex of the frozen dome where the ice dragons met, something dropped.
It descended straight down—a single, massive sphere of condensed liquid that fell like a meteor toward the center of the island.
It struck the ground between the plaza and the cliffs with a sound that shattered every remaining pane of glass on the island, exploding outward in a shockwave of raw force and crushing pressure that sent every person on the island to their knees.
Silence fell over Sentinel Forge.
Bloody Berry pulled his tentacles back, his crimson eyes wide, as absolute dread settled over the frozen island.
---
TO BE CONTINUED