The steel shutters sealed the bank with the heavy, final thud of a coffin lid.
Alex stood in the center of the grand lobby.
The room was vast, built entirely of polished white marble and illuminated by a dozen massive silver chandeliers. It was completely empty. There were no clerks. No guards. No tellers.
Just thick steel grates bolted over every exit and window.
Alex's golden eyes spun. Click. Whirr.
He scanned the cavernous room for thermal signatures.
Nothing. The room was ambient room temperature.
Then, a sudden pneumatic hiss echoed from the high ceiling.
A thick brass tube descended from a circular vent above the center of the room. It stopped ten feet above their heads.
"Mr. Miller," a voice crackled through the brass tube.
The voice was distorted by the metal, but it was perfectly clear. It didn't sound like a cornered villain or a desperate man.
It sounded like a tired, ruthless CEO conducting a board meeting.
James Rothschild.
Alex didn't look up at the tube. He stared straight ahead at the steel grates.
"Your bank is insolvent, James," Alex said. His voice was cold, flat, and perfectly pitched to carry up the pneumatic line. "I am here to liquidate the board."
A dry chuckle echoed down the tube.
"You hyperinflated my currency," Rothschild said smoothly. "You destroyed my communication network. You murdered my collection agents. You are a very aggressive auditor, Mr. Miller."
Rothschild paused. The mechanical clack-clack-clack of a Babbage Engine echoed faintly in the background of the transmission.
"But you are standing in my vault," Rothschild continued. "I understand your condition. You are a biological furnace. I know exactly how many calories you burn. I know exactly what your son requires to survive."
Napoleon raised his flintlock pistol, aiming it at the brass tube.
"Leave the boy and the ledger, Glitch," Rothschild ordered. "Step back out into the street. I will open the shutters, and I will let France keep its Emperor."
Alex looked at Napoleon. The General was sweating, his eyes darting around the empty marble room.
Alex looked at Charles. The boy was shivering violently, his golden eyes wide with sudden, terrifying hunger.
"Your offer is rejected," Alex said.
Rothschild didn't argue. He didn't threaten them again.
He simply hung up.
A loud click echoed through the brass tube.
Instantly, six massive brass vents along the ceiling slammed open.
Rothschild wasn't using silver bullets in the lobby. He was using physics.
A thick, heavy white mist poured out of the vents. It didn't drift down like fog; it plummeted to the floor like a physical weight.
It was a super-chilled, pressurized chemical gas. A Victorian precursor to liquid nitrogen.
The temperature in the grand lobby plummeted instantly.
The polished white marble floor cracked loudly under the sudden, extreme flash-freeze. The sound echoed like rifle fire.
Napoleon gasped. The General dropped to his knees. The moisture in his lungs instantly crystallized. He began coughing violently, his lips turning a bruised, sickening blue in seconds.
Charles screamed.
The boy collapsed onto the freezing marble. His oversized grey coat instantly stiffened with thick, white frost. His thermodynamic void was violently activated, but there was no ambient heat to drain. The room was actively bleeding the thermal energy from his small body.
Alex gritted his teeth.
His internal furnace flared. The sudden, massive drop in external temperature hit him like a physical blow. The damp wool of his coat froze solid.
The room was plunging past zero degrees. Minus ten. Minus twenty.
If he didn't act, Napoleon and Charles would be dead in less than two minutes.
Alex grabbed Napoleon by the collar of his grey coat and hauled the General to his feet. He grabbed Charles by the back of his collar.
He pulled them both tight against his chest.
Alex closed his eyes.
He forced his biological furnace past its safe operational limits.
115 degrees. 120 degrees. 125 degrees.
Steam violently exploded from Alex's body, instantly vaporizing the freezing chemical mist in a ten-foot radius around them. The marble floor directly beneath his heavy boots began to hiss and steam.
He became a living, human radiator.
He pumped massive amounts of raw thermal energy into Napoleon and Charles.
Charles stopped screaming. The boy clung to Alex's heavy coat, violently draining the heat pouring off his father. Napoleon stopped coughing, gasping for the superheated air radiating from Alex's chest.
But the cost was catastrophic.
Alex was burning through his internal caloric reserves at a suicidal rate. Biological bankruptcy was imminent. His muscles screamed. His bones ached with the sheer, agonizing effort of fighting the hostile environment trap.
He couldn't hold this temperature for long.
A sharp, piercing sound cut through the hiss of the freezing gas.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
Alex's golden eyes snapped open.
The cheap plastic Casio watch in his inner coat pocket was vibrating violently against his ribs.
He reached into his coat with a trembling, frostbitten hand. He pulled the digital watch out.
The LCD screen was flashing wildly.
The countdown had hit a critical milestone.
10:00:00.
The sheer thermodynamic stress Alex was putting on the room, combined with the impossible biology of the Golden Ichor, was interacting with the timeline glitch.
He was pushing too hard. He was breaking the physics of 1804.
The heavy silver chandeliers hanging from the ceiling suddenly groaned.
They didn't swing. They floated upward.
Gravity locally reversed for exactly two seconds.
The heavy glass shards from the broken streetlamp on the floor floated up to eye level, spinning slowly in the freezing mist. Napoleon gasped, his boots lifting an inch off the cracked marble.
Then, a violent burst of blue static filled the center of the room.
A glitching, translucent afterimage of Alice the Drifter appeared. She wasn't solid. She was a flickering recording of her final moments, screaming silently in the freezing mist. Her mouth was open in an endless, agonizing howl.
She vanished in a flash of bright green light.
Gravity snapped back.
The heavy silver chandeliers crashed back down to the ceiling mounts. The glass shards shattered against the marble floor. Napoleon collapsed onto his hands and knees.
Alex realized, with cold terror, that his very existence was tearing a hole in reality. If he burned this hot for much longer, he wouldn't just die. He would trigger the catastrophic event the watch was counting down to.
He had to end this. Now.
Alex looked down at the floor.
The polished white marble was covered in a thick layer of solid white frost. The extreme cold from the chemical gas had flash-frozen the stone.
Cold makes stone brittle.
Alex calculated the structural integrity of the floor. The main vault of the Bank of England was directly beneath the lobby. The marble was supported by heavy iron girders, but the stone itself was weakened by the violent temperature shift.
"Step back," Alex ordered.
His voice was a deep, vibrating rumble that shook the remaining glass in the chandeliers.
Napoleon dragged Charles two feet away.
Alex drew every ounce of heat from his extremities.
His boots froze to the marble. His left arm turned black with frostbite. His coat stiffened into a solid block of ice.
He pulled all the remaining thermal energy in his body into his right fist.
His knuckles began to glow.
First a dull red, then a bright cherry, and finally a blinding, incandescent white. The sheer heat radiating from his hand was enough to instantly boil the chemical mist around him.
Alex raised his glowing right fist high above his head.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't calculate the physical cost to his own bones.
He punched the frozen marble floor with the impossible kinetic force of a cannonball.
CRACK-BOOM.
The brittle, flash-frozen stone shattered completely.
The impact sent a violent shockwave across the grand lobby. A massive, jagged crater opened in the center of the floor. The heavy iron girders beneath the marble groaned, buckled, and snapped under the sudden, massive stress.
The floor collapsed.
Alex, Charles, and Napoleon plummeted into the pitch-black abyss of the subterranean vault in an avalanche of shattered marble and freezing white mist.
They hit the solid stone floor of the vault twenty feet below.
Alex rolled, his internal furnace immediately stabilizing as they escaped the chemical trap above. He pulled Charles to his feet. Napoleon landed hard, his flintlock pistol clattering away into the darkness.
Alex's golden eyes spun, adjusting to the absolute pitch black of the vault.
Click. Whirr.
He scanned the cavernous subterranean room.
It was massive. Larger than the lobby above. The walls were lined with thousands of thick iron safe-deposit boxes.
But Alex wasn't looking at the money.
He was looking at the heat signatures at the far end of the vault.
There were a dozen of them.
But they weren't human. They were glowing, violently hot, and mechanical.
A heavy, synchronized mechanical whine echoed through the darkness. The sound of massive brass gears grinding. The hiss of pressurized steam.
"Sire," Napoleon whispered, scrambling for his pistol in the dark. "What is that?"
Alex stared at the glowing signatures.
"Rothschild didn't liquidate his assets," Alex said softly.
A dozen heavy, pneumatic hammers revved in the darkness.
"He invested in heavy machinery."