The building fought back.
Not metaphorically.
Not symbolically.
It resisted them.
The moment Inferius breached past the seventeenth floor, the atmosphere changed—pressure tightening like a fist closing around the lungs. The lights dimmed into a sterile blue-white, stripping the halls of warmth, of shadow, of comfort. Every surface reflected too cleanly, too evenly, like a surgical theater scaled to skyscraper size.
Netoshka felt it immediately.
Not danger.
Intent.
"This floor's different," Rue muttered, weapon raised.
"No offices. No civ layout."
Circe's overlays jittered, static crawling across her HUD.
"…This is a kill zone."
Before anyone could respond, the floor sealed.
Steel shutters slammed down over stairwells and elevator shafts in synchronized impact thunder. Bulkhead doors irised shut at both ends of the corridor, cutting retreat cleanly and perfectly.
Then the lights cut.
Total darkness.
For half a second, nothing moved.
Then—
Red lines ignited in the dark.
Laser lattices crisscrossed the corridor in impossible geometries, not aimed at vitals, not even aligned to human anatomy—designed to slice, shear, segment.
Netoshka reacted before thought.
"DOWN!"
Reality stuttered as she glitched forward, grabbing Rue and dragging her beneath the lattice as beams screamed overhead, carving molten grooves through wall plating. Zev—still pale, still shaking—hit the floor hard as Spectr rolled him behind a support column.
The air filled with a low mechanical hum.
Then footsteps.
Heavy.
Measured.
Unhurried.
From the far end of the corridor, silhouettes emerged—five of them at first, then ten, then more, resolving into towering forms wrapped in layered composite armor. Not Synarchy troops. Not secret police.
These were something else.
Black and gunmetal plating fused directly into flesh. Helmets without visors, only angular slits glowing a dull predatory amber. Weapons integrated into their forearms—rotary cannons, blade-launchers, gravitic anchors.
Circe's voice dropped to a whisper.
"…Special Attack Unit confirmed."
Surgien swore under his breath.
"They're not here to delay us."
"No," Netoshka said quietly.
"They're here to erase us."
The SAU didn't shout warnings.
Didn't issue surrender protocols.
They advanced.
The first one raised its arm—and the corridor detonated.
Suppressive fire turned the space into a storm of tungsten and force-waves. Walls peeled apart like paper. Support beams screamed as rounds punched through them, chewing the building's skeleton.
Inferius scattered.
Spectr returned fire immediately, plasma rounds slamming into an SAU's chest—only to disperse harmlessly across a reactive energy field.
"Shields!" Rue barked. "Directional—front-loaded!"
Netoshka moved.
She didn't sprint.
She vanished.
The world fractured into corrupted frames as she glitched through the kill zone, reappearing directly in front of the lead SAU. Its head tilted—a fraction too slow.
Her blade drove straight through its throat seam.
Metal screamed.
The SAU didn't fall.
It grabbed her wrist with inhuman strength and threw her down the corridor, her body smashing through reinforced partitions before she hit the far wall hard enough to crater it.
Pain flared—then vanished, suppressed by something colder.
She rose as the SAU advanced again, chest sparking, systems recalibrating.
"Not dead," she muttered.
"Good."
She glitched again—shorter this time, tighter—and rammed her fist into the SAU's chest.
Reality buckled.
The impact wasn't physical.
It was conceptual.
The armor imploded inward as if the idea of containment had been revoked. The SAU collapsed in on itself, frame folding, systems screaming as its mass crushed itself into a dense, twitching knot of metal and flesh.
It stopped moving.
The others adapted instantly.
Two SAU units altered firing patterns, switching to wide-area suppression. Another deployed gravitic anchors—black spikes slamming into the floor and walls, distorting space locally, disrupting glitch vectors.
Netoshka felt it.
The air thickened.
Movement resisted.
"They're countering you," Circe warned.
"Localized reality anchoring."
Netoshka smiled.
"Then I'll stop being subtle."
She inhaled.
And let it bleed through.
The lights flickered violently as pressure rolled outward from her, warping the corridor. The anchors screamed, metal bending as the laws they enforced began to argue with her existence.
She charged—not glitching, not hiding.
A blade storm met her.
She tore through it.
An SAU swung a mono-edge cleaver—she caught it barehanded, fingers sinking into energized metal as if it were clay, and ripped the arm free, impaling the unit with its own weapon before driving it into the floor headfirst.
Another fired a graviton pulse.
Rue tackled Zev out of the way as the blast crushed the corridor inward, folding walls, ceiling, and floor into a deadly funnel.
Netoshka walked through it.
Each step left cracks spiderwebbing behind her.
Spectr coordinated the rest of Inferius with cold precision—flanking maneuvers, suppressive arcs, Surgien dragging wounded through falling debris while Circe screamed targeting data over the chaos.
"This building wasn't designed to survive SAU deployment," Surgien shouted.
"It won't," Netoshka replied.
She grabbed an SAU by the head and slammed it through three floors, riding the impact down into the level below. The structure groaned, alarms shrieking as load-bearing systems failed.
She landed in a knee-deep crater of shattered concrete and sparking cables.
The SAU twitched once.
She crushed its skull.
Above her, the rest of Inferius broke through the collapsing floor, regrouping amid smoke and debris.
The corridor—once pristine—was now a slaughterhouse of twisted metal, burning armor, and broken architecture.
And still, more SAU units deployed.
Elevator shafts burst open as reinforcements descended on mag-lines. Ceiling panels exploded as drop-teams slammed down behind them.
Circe's voice trembled.
"There's too many. This is a containment purge. Malicer's buying time."
Netoshka looked up through the ruined ceiling—toward the upper levels, toward the heart of the building.
"Good," she said.
"Let him watch."
She turned back to the advancing SAU forces, eyes empty, posture relaxed in a way that promised annihilation.
"Inferius," she ordered calmly.
"Room-by-room. Floor-by-floor."
"No retreat."
The SAU surged forward.
And the building descended into hell.