The Western Main Building rose from the city like a grave marker stabbed into concrete.
Not sleek.
Not beautiful.
Just final.
Black composite walls layered with adaptive plating. No windows below the upper third. Signal dampeners embedded into the structure itself—this wasn't just a headquarters, it was a containment altar. A place designed to swallow people and never echo them back.
Netoshka watched it from the edge of a collapsed skybridge, rain sliding down her armor in thin, red-tinted rivulets. The city around them was quieter now. Too quiet. The slums had gone dark behind her—fires extinguished, screams spent, gangs erased.
What remained was order.
And order always came with teeth.
Inferius assembled behind her in silence.
No chatter.
No jokes.
No bravado.
Zev was gone—sedated, extracted, removed from the equation. The absence of his presence felt like a missing limb, phantom pain pulsing through the squad. No one spoke his name, but everyone felt the weight of it.
But it didn't matter as Netoshka didn't look back.
She already knew their faces.
Circe knelt beside a portable uplink, fingers ghosting through layers of interference.
Rue checked her magazines again, slower this time.
Surgien adjusted his mask, jaw tight, eyes hollowed by things he'd said that couldn't be unsaid.
Spectr stood apart, scanning angles, already halfway inside the fight.
Lyra lingered at the rear.
The rest being ready to follow her command.
Watching Netoshka.
Not with fear.
Not with doubt.
With recognition.
Circe broke the silence first.
"This place is a Synarchy nexus," she said quietly.
"Command, logistics, detention, research. All folded into one vertical structure."
"Figures," Rue muttered.
"They like their sins centralized."
Netoshka finally spoke.
"Malicer's inside."
No question.
No speculation.
A statement of gravity.
Circe nodded. "Confirmed signal ghosting matches his operational signature. He's not broadcasting—but he's present."
Surgien exhaled slowly.
"Then this isn't a raid."
Netoshka's eyes reflected the tower's dim lights.
"No," she said.
"It's an extraction—or an execution."
Approach
They moved through sublevels first.
Maintenance arteries. Old transit tunnels repurposed into kill corridors. The Synarchy loved their symbolism—forcing enemies to crawl beneath the systems that ruled them.
Motion sensors died as Circe passed. Cameras looped. Doors opened a second before they were touched.
Still, Netoshka felt it.
Resistance waiting.
Not scrambling.
Not surprised.
Prepared.
The first contact came without warning.
No shouted commands.
No alarms.
Just synchronized muzzle flashes tearing through the dark.
Synarchy soldiers emerged from hidden recesses—clean armor, white-on-black insignia, rifles already aligned. Their movements were surgical, drilled into muscle memory.
Inferius reacted instantly.
Rue's first shot shattered a helmet visor mid-step.
Spectr vanished into shadow and reappeared behind the firing line, blades flashing once—twice—three bodies falling without sound.
Surgien dragged Circe behind cover as suppression fire raked the corridor.
Netoshka stepped forward.
Reality stuttered.
She crossed twenty meters in less than a blink.
Her blade opened armor like paper. A soldier tried to raise his rifle—she took his arm, then his throat, then used his collapsing body as cover as return fire sparked uselessly off dead metal.
She didn't scream.
Didn't rage.
This wasn't the slums.
This was work.
Within seconds, the corridor was quiet again.
Bodies smoked gently where cooling systems failed.
Netoshka stood among them, chest rising and falling once—only once.
"Keep moving," she said.
Inside the Spine
The Main Building's interior was cathedral-like.
High ceilings. Clean lines. Artificial light designed to mimic daylight without warmth. Everything smelled sterile—filtered air scrubbed of humanity.
Screens lined the walls, broadcasting Synarchy doctrine on loop:
UNITY THROUGH ORDER
SACRIFICE IS STABILITY
THE INDIVIDUAL IS A VARIABLE
Rue spat on the floor.
Circe frowned.
"Signal interference just jumped. They know we're here."
"Good," Netoshka replied.
Elevator shafts loomed ahead—multiple, each guarded by auto-turrets and biometric locks.
Spectr tilted his head.
"Vertical killbox."
Netoshka stepped forward again.
"No."
She reached out—not physically, but internally.
The numbers pressed against her vision.
She let them in.
For half a second, the building disagreed with itself.
Turrets rotated wrong. Targeting logic conflicted. One elevator descended while another tried to ascend through the same shaft.
Circe stared.
"Neto—what did you just—"
"Later, lets get a Move on now before he escapes." Netoshka said.
They moved.
The First Floor of Truth
They reached an internal operations level—glass-walled offices overlooking a central data core. Screens flickered with live feeds of the city: checkpoints, drones, body cams.
And then—
A familiar emblem.
DomiTech.
Old footage. Seized archives. Interrogation stills.
Faces of people Netoshka knew.
People who were dead.
People who weren't.
Surgien stopped dead.
"They're cataloging us."
Circe swallowed.
"No. They're studying us."
Netoshka felt something cold coil tighter in her chest.
Malicer wasn't just defending this place.
He was curating it.
Gunfire erupted again—this time from above.
Special Attack Units descended on rappel lines, heavier armor, adaptive shields, weapons tuned to counter glitch phenomena.
Spectr grinned faintly.
"Finally."
The fight was brutal.
Close.
Personal.
Synarchy soldiers fought without hesitation—no fear, no mercy, no retreat. One detonated himself when wounded, trying to take Rue with him. Another locked Surgien in a grapple while screaming doctrine until Spectr put a blade through his spine.
Netoshka faced three at once.
They adapted fast—predictive algorithms compensating for her movement. One nearly caught her shoulder.
Nearly.
She broke one's neck with her knee. Shot another through the visor. The third tried to retreat.
She didn't let him.
When it was over, the floor was red and white and silent.
Inferius regrouped.
Breathing hard now.
Bleeding.
Alive.
Circe looked at Netoshka with something close to fear.
"They're escalating. Malicer's not running."
Netoshka wiped her blade clean.
"He never does."
Before the Next Descent
They secured the floor.
Barricaded entrances.
Treated wounds as best they could.
Above them, the building hummed—systems realigning, defenses waking, something vast turning its attention inward.
Lyra finally stepped closer to Netoshka.
"You're past the point of turning back," she said softly.
Netoshka didn't look at her.
"I crossed that line years ago."
Lyra studied her face—the stillness, the restraint stretched thin as wire.
"And when this is done?"
Netoshka paused.
For just a moment.
Then:
"There is no after."
She turned toward the stairwell leading deeper into the tower.
Toward Malicer.
Toward the Red Gas.
Toward the fracture point where Netoshka stopped being human and something else began to wake.
"Inferius," she said.
"We'll go down and take down this bastard as Lucretia as ordered us to do so, we will not compromise, no matter what."
And the Main Building swallowed them whole.