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Asuka died screaming.
That was the part no one said out loud.
The forest didn't remember it the way people did. Trees stood where they always had. Smoke lifted and thinned. Snow began to fall again, light and indifferent, covering blood like it had never mattered. Nature forgave quickly. People didn't.
Siara stood where Asuka had fallen long after the others had moved away. She memorized the ground, the broken branch, the scorch mark that shouldn't have been there. Leadership wasn't something you declared. It was something that arrived the moment everyone else looked at you and waited.
No one told her to decide what came next.
They just assumed she would.
Richard hadn't spoken since the fighting stopped.
He sat on the forest floor with his back against a tree, hands loose at his sides, eyes unfocused. The air around him felt wrong—not moving incorrectly, not bending violently, just… listening. Space itself waited on him the way a weapon waited on a finger.
Siara watched him from a distance.
Once, she would have gone to him immediately. Once, she would have known what to say. Once, love had felt like a solution instead of a liability.
Now, love felt like something Phantom could use.
Luna knelt in front of Richard, her hands hovering just above his chest, not touching. Her telekinesis pressed inward, careful, surgical. She wasn't holding him together emotionally. She was holding his nervous system in place, dampening spikes she could feel but not see.
"There's a pattern," Luna said quietly. "Every time his vitals rise, something answers back."
"A signal," Pluto muttered. "Like a ping."
Siara's jaw tightened.
They didn't find the chip immediately. Phantom never did things in ways that could be undone easily. It took Tanya tearing apart old hospital scans, Pluto jury-rigging a scanner from scrap, and Luna nearly collapsing from strain before the truth surfaced.
Microscopic. Embedded deep.
Installed while Richard was unconscious.
While everyone thought the danger had passed.
Phantom hadn't saved him.
They'd tagged him.
The realization hit Richard last.
When it did, it hollowed him.
"So that's it," he said hoarsely. "I don't even get to decide when I'm myself anymore."
No one contradicted him.
The signal surged without warning.
Richard gasped, body locking as Space rippled violently around him, trees bending inward, distance stretching and snapping like rubber. Phantom wasn't pulling the trigger yet—this was testing. Pressure. Response.
Luna reacted instantly, telekinesis flooding inward, wrapping Richard's spine, his brainstem, his heart. Blood ran from her nose, then her eyes, but she didn't stop.
"They're trying to see how far they can push you," she said through clenched teeth. "I can block it—but not forever."
Richard met Siara's eyes across the clearing.
This was the part that still hurt.
Not the fear. Not the anger.
The knowing.
He saw calculation in her gaze now, layered over something older, something unfinished. She still cared. That was the problem. Caring made her hesitate, and hesitation got people killed. Asuka was proof of that.
"Don't follow me," Richard said suddenly.
"What?" Tanya snapped.
"If I stay," he continued, forcing the words out as another pulse rattled his body, "they'll use me to find you. To break you. I won't do that."
"Richard—" Luna started.
He stepped back.
Then ran.
Zane swore and went after him without a second thought. Tanya grabbed Siara's wrist on instinct, and Siara didn't pull away.
They didn't stop until the trees thinned and rust took over.
The scrapyard smelled like oil and old rain. Broken aircraft lay scattered like bones, wings torn, fuselages split open and abandoned. No cameras. No clean lines. No interest for an organization that preferred neat containment.
For the first time since the forest, Phantom's signal wavered.
Pluto wasn't there. Neither was Tim or Tango. The group was fractured now—not by argument, but by necessity. Survival scattered people faster than conflict ever could.
Tanya climbed into the cockpit of a half-dead cargo plane, fingers moving with frantic precision. "It can fly," she said. "Barely. But it can."
Richard sat on the concrete floor beneath the wing, head bowed, shaking. The chip pulsed faintly inside him, a parasite that knew it had lost clarity but not contact.
Siara approached him slowly.
This wasn't instinct.
This was choice.
"I know you think running makes this better," she said. "It doesn't."
He laughed weakly. "Then why aren't you stopping me?"
"Because if I were in your place," she answered, "I'd do the same thing."
He looked up at her then.
That was the dangerous part.
Love didn't disappear just because it stopped being useful. It lingered in the spaces between words, in the way she still knew how close to stand without making him flinch.
"I didn't mean for Asuka to die," he said.
"I know," Siara replied.
She paused.
"That doesn't make it hurt less."
The pendrive warmed in her pocket, reacting to proximity it had been waiting for.
When she activated it, the scrapyard filled with a familiar voice.
Their father.
Or what was left of him.
"If you're hearing this," the AI said evenly, "then Phantom has already crossed the line I warned them not to."
Tanya froze. Richard didn't look up.
"Phantom was never designed to protect superhuman assets," the voice continued. "It was designed to harvest them. Study them. Replicate them."
Schematics scrolled past—neural overlays, power-response graphs, Richard's vitals mapped in brutal clarity.
"The chip inside Richard is a leash," the AI said. "It will never be used gently."
Siara's grip tightened around the device.
"And the serum?" she asked quietly.
A pause. Deliberate.
"Not a weapon," the AI replied. "An insulator. Against override. Against possession. Against entities that do not consider humanity relevant."
Coordinates appeared.
North.
Far north.
Ice dominated the map.
"The next experiment was buried, not destroyed," the AI said. "Designation: ZERO. Frozen. Alive."
The plane engine roared to life outside, vibrating through the metal beneath their feet.
Richard finally stood.
He looked at Siara—not as a savior, not as something to cling to, but as someone who knew exactly what he was becoming and chose to stay close anyway.
"That serum," he said. "You're not telling me who it's for."
"No," she replied. "I'm not."
Luna arrived at the scrapyard just as the signal cut again. She collapsed to her knees, breath ragged, hands trembling from the effort of keeping Richard shielded long enough for them to disappear.
Richard caught her before she hit the ground.
Not gently.
Urgently.
Purely.
The plane lifted off under a sky that didn't care who lived or died beneath it.
Siara watched the forest vanish below them, Asuka's grave reduced to coordinates she would never forget.
Love hadn't saved them.
Power hadn't either.
Only choice had.
And the cost of those choices was just beginning to show.
Season One ended there—not with closure, not with peace.
Just a direction.
North.
Frozen.
Waiting.
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