The self-destruct sequence sent a new wave of chaos through the facility. The floor shuddered violently, and the red emergency lights began to flash with a frantic, terminal urgency.
"Jax, can you stop it?" Kiera yelled, her voice barely audible over the screaming alarms.
Jax's head twitched, his eyes flickering as he processed a billion lines of code simultaneously.
"The purge protocol is deep-core, hard-wired into the reactor itself. It's a physical kill-switch, not just software. I cannot stop the overload," he responded, his voice a dispassionate chorus of system alerts.
"I can only… delay it." A holographic timer appeared on a nearby wall, its crimson numbers starting at 180 seconds and immediately beginning to stutter, slowing down, then speeding up, as Jax fought a digital tug-of-war with the reactor's fail-safe systems.
He was buying them seconds at the cost of his own immense, newly-awakened processing power.
"The other prisoners!" Ryu shouted, his mind snapping back to the gallery of broken souls they had left behind.
"We can't leave them!" Joric was already one step ahead.
"Their cells are on this level! The energy shields are down!" He pointed down a corridor that was now intermittently lit by the sparks of exploding conduits.
"We can get them to the emergency freight elevator, but it's on the far side of the fusion core!" It was a suicidal path, a race through the heart of a dying machine.
Kiera didn't hesitate.
"Ryu, you're with me! Joric, get to that elevator control and bypass the lockdown! Jax, we need your body! Can you move?" The question was absurd.
Jax was a quadriplegic, a man whose muscles had atrophied. But then, the neuro-link halo around his head glowed with a fierce, blue light.
The abandoned, half-finished cybernetic enhancements that had been fitted to his limbs, remnants of Vex's earlier experiments, sparked to life.
With a groan of protesting metal and atrophied muscle, Jax's body rose from the chair, his movements stiff, puppet-like, but functional.
He was piloting his own flesh like a remote-controlled drone.
"Affirmative," his synthesized voice echoed.
"Mobility is… suboptimal, but achievable." Their escape was a portrait of desperation.
Kiera and Ryu raced back to the detention block, using Ryu's kinetic pulses to blast open jammed doors while Kiera fought off the few remaining Vanguard soldiers who chose loyalty over survival.
They found the prisoners, the 'failures,' huddled in their now-open cells, blinking in the flashing red light, their minds too shattered to comprehend the chaos.
It was like trying to herd frightened, confused children through a warzone.
As they guided the dazed prisoners through the shaking corridors, Joric was fighting his own battle, wrestling with the elevator's archaic control panel.
Meanwhile, Jax, his body moving with a clumsy, unnatural gait, acted as their shield. He would raise a hand, and a wall of plasteel shutters would slam down behind them, blocking a pursuing squad.
He would gesture, and the automated fire-suppression systems would activate, flooding corridors with dense, disorienting foam.
He was the ghost in the machine, and he was tearing his own house down to clear a path for his friends.
They finally reached the freight elevator, a massive platform designed to lift reactor components. Joric had managed to override the lockdown, its heavy doors creaking open.
They herded the last of the prisoners inside just as the corridor behind them was consumed by a fireball from a ruptured plasma conduit.
But as the doors began to close, a final, horrifying obstacle appeared. Vex himself stood before them, having descended from his observation room.
He was flanked by two massive, hulking figures, clad in a new, even more advanced form of armor, their faces hidden behind impassive black helmets.
"I am so very disappointed in all of you," Vex said, his voice calm amidst the chaos.
"But I will not leave empty-handed." His eyes were locked on Ryu.
"I am taking my prize."