**Chapter 35: The Trap**
The summons didn't come as a threat. It came as a notification on the *Crimson Oath* network, flashing directly onto Su Yuan's retina in a polite, gentle gold.
**[ SYSTEM ALERT: SIGNAL INSTABILITY DETECTED IN UPPER TIER NODES. ]**
**[ REQUESTING MAINTENANCE. ]**
**[ LOCATION: THE OBSIDIAN HALL. GALA IN PROGRESS. ]**
Su Yuan stared at the message. He was knee-deep in stripped copper cabling, standing in the basement of the safehouse. The air here was thick with the smell of ozone and wet rat fur. Li Wei was stripping a bundle of fiber-optics nearby, his hands trembling slightly.
"They want me back," Su Yuan said. He didn't look up from the coil of wire in his hands.
Li Wei paused. "It's been three hours. You said we had forty-eight."
"The diagnostic I forced into their targeting array probably flagged a manual review," Su Yuan said. He dropped the wire. It hit the concrete with a dull slap. "Or Lady Vermilion is impatient."
"Don't go," Li Wei said, his voice jumping an octave. "Send a proxy. Send the drone."
Su Yuan wiped grease from his hands onto his trousers. "They have twelve active nodes up there. High-grade souls. If I lose them, the Soul Cannon is just a pile of junk metal. I have to stabilize the connection."
He checked his internal status.
**[ SOULNET: STABLE. ]**
**[ LOWER CITY NODES: 11,502. ]**
**[ UPPER CITY NODES: 12. ]**
**[ ENERGY RESERVES: 84%. ]**
He felt strong. The constant, thrumming background noise of eleven thousand desperate souls in the Lower City was a tide that kept his energy topped off. He could crush a tank with his mind right now, provided he didn't care about the headache afterward.
"Keep building the array," Su Yuan ordered. He grabbed the white suit jacket from the back of a rusted chair. It was stained with soot on the cuff. He didn't bother cleaning it. "If I'm not back in two hours, fire the cannon blind."
"Blind?" Li Wei choked. "Boss, that'll take out half the sector."
"Better us than them," Su Yuan lied. He walked out the door.
***
The Obsidian Hall was not designed for people. It was designed for specters.
The walls were made of black glass that absorbed all reflection, making the room feel infinite, a void suspended three miles above the earth. The floor was transparent, offering a vertiginous view of the smog layer far below, lit by the strobe-light flashes of lightning storms in the waste sectors.
Su Yuan stepped out of the lift.
The air was different here. It didn't smell of jasmine this time. It smelled of sterilized metal and cold electricity.
The party was in full swing.
There were more people than before. Maybe a hundred. The elite of the elite. They moved like sharks in a tank, silent, predatory, holding drinks that glowed with bioluminescent additives.
Su Yuan scanned the room.
**[ SCANNING... ]**
**[ SIGNAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED. ]**
**[ LOCAL NODES: 45. ]**
Forty-five. The rings had spread. The twelve initial buyers had been busy showing off their new toys. He could see them—flashes of red metal on manicured fingers, winking in the low light.
Baron Kael was there, laughing near a floating sculpture of ice. He saw Su Yuan and raised a glass.
" The mechanic returns!" Kael shouted. The noise dampened instantly, swallowed by the acoustic dampeners in the ceiling.
Su Yuan ignored him. He walked toward the center of the room where Lady Vermilion sat on a high-backed chair that looked suspiciously like a throne.
She wasn't drinking. Her hands were folded in her lap. She watched him approach with the stillness of a viper waiting for a mouse to cross the line.
"You said there was instability," Su Yuan said, stopping five paces away.
"There is," Vermilion replied. Her voice was soft, barely a whisper, yet it carried perfectly to his ears. "The signal coming from these rings... it's invasive. My engineers traced the packet data."
Su Yuan kept his face blank. "It's a two-way connection. Efficiency requires access."
"Access," she repeated. She stood up.
The room went quiet. The music—a low, ambient drone—cut out.
The guests stopped moving. They turned toward the center, their faces masks of polite curiosity.
"We found the backdoor, Architect," Vermilion said. "We found the siphon."
Su Yuan's muscles tensed. He reached out with his mind, grabbing the handle of the *Whisper Blade* beneath his coat, and simultaneously pinging the SoulNet.
*Connect.*
**[ WARNING: CONNECTION FAILURE. ]**
**[ ERROR 404: EXTERNAL NETWORK UNREACHABLE. ]**
Su Yuan froze.
The hum of the Lower City—the eleven thousand souls that fuelled his power—vanished.
It was like stepping off a cliff. The silence in his head was deafening. The massive ocean of energy he swam in was gone, replaced by a vacuum.
He looked at the black glass walls.
"Containment field," he said. His voice sounded thin in the dead air.
"A Faraday Cage for the soul," Vermilion corrected. She walked down the steps of her dais, her heels clicking like gun hammers. "Did you really think the Bureau of Anomaly Control wouldn't recognize a spiritual parasite when we saw one?"
Su Yuan looked around. The guests weren't just guests.
Baron Kael wasn't smiling anymore. He had drawn a weapon—a slim, silver rod that hummed with kinetic suppression energy.
The exits were sealed. The elevator doors had fused shut.
"You're not a socialite," Su Yuan said. He realized his mistake. He had judged her by her boredom, assuming it meant passivity. He was wrong. Boredom in a predator just meant they were hungry.
"I am a Curator," Vermilion said. "And you, Su Yuan, are a Class-S deviation. You are the source of the signal disrupting the Genesis Protocol."
She stopped three feet from him.
"We allowed you to enter. We allowed you to distribute your little trinkets. It made tracking you so much easier."
"You trapped yourself in here with me," Su Yuan said. He tried to sound confident, but his mind was racing. Without the Lower City nodes, his reserves were dangerously low. He was running on battery power.
"We are Spire Elite," Kael sneered, stepping forward. "We are augmented. Shielded. You are a mechanic with a knife."
Vermilion raised a hand. "Surrender the Admin Access codes, Su Yuan. Deactivate the SoulNet. And we will simply lobotomize you instead of vaporizing you. You could live a very peaceful life as a servitor drone."
Su Yuan looked at her violet eyes. He saw no mercy there. Only calculation.
He looked at the ring on her finger. The *Crimson Oath*.
She hadn't taken it off.
None of them had.
Why? Arrogance? Or did they think the containment field nullified the ring's effects?
"You cut the line," Su Yuan whispered.
"We severed the external link," Vermilion agreed. "You are alone."
Su Yuan smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the baring of teeth that preceded a throat being ripped out.
"I'm not alone," he said.
He held up his hand. The prototype ring on his finger caught the light.
"I'm in a room with forty-five high-grade batteries."
Vermilion's eyes widened. She looked down at her hand.
"System," Su Yuan roared, his voice cracking with the strain. "ACTIVATE PROTOCOL: FORCED SLEEP."
**[ COMMAND ACKNOWLEDGED. ]**
**[ TARGETS: LOCAL NODES (45). ]**
**[ OVERRIDE: AUTHORIZED. ]**
The reaction was instantaneous.
It wasn't a gentle drifting off. It was a system crash.
Lady Vermilion didn't scream. Her eyes simply rolled back into her head. Her knees buckled. She collapsed forward, hitting the floor with a heavy, wet thud.
Behind her, Baron Kael dropped like a puppet with cut strings.
All around the room, the elite of the Upper City—the untouchable gods—slumped over. Wine glasses shattered on the floor. Bodies crumpled into heaps of expensive silk and velvet.
Silence returned to the Obsidian Hall.
Su Yuan stood alone in the center of a field of unconscious bodies.
He breathed heavy, ragged gasps. The energy cost of the command had been massive, but the return...
He felt the surge.
The connection to the Lower City was gone, yes. But he was now directly, parasitically linked to forty-five Class-A and Class-S souls in the immediate vicinity.
He wasn't just borrowing their power. He was devouring their consciousness to fuel his own.
**[ LOCAL PROCESSING POWER: CRITICAL LIMIT. ]**
**[ ADMIN PRIVILEGE: TELEKINESIS (UNBOUND). ]**
The doors at the far end of the hall burst open.
"SECURE THE TARGET!"
Guards. Not the drone units. These were the Praetorian Guard. Human, heavy armor, carrying null-void pikes designed to rip through energy shields.
There were twelve of them.
They charged.
Su Yuan didn't draw his knife.
He looked at the table of hors d'oeuvres to his left. It was a slab of marble weighing easily four hundred pounds.
*Move.*
The marble slab tore itself from its pedestal. It flew across the room with the speed of a thrown baseball.
It caught the first three guards in the chest.
The impact sound was wet and crunchy. Armor crumpled. Bones turned to powder. The guards were swept off their feet and pinned against the black glass wall, crushed by the stone.
The remaining nine didn't hesitate. They opened fire.
Blue bolts of plasma screamed across the room.
Su Yuan didn't dodge. He couldn't. He was exhausted.
Instead, he grabbed the unconscious body of Baron Kael.
Telekinetically.
Kael's body lifted from the floor and jerked into the air, hovering in front of Su Yuan as a meat shield.
*Thwack. Thwack. Hiss.*
Three plasma bolts hit the Baron. His expensive suit burned. His flesh sizzled. He didn't wake up. The *Forced Sleep* command held him in a coma deep enough to sleep through surgery.
"Hold fire!" the lead guard screamed. "He's using the hostages!"
Su Yuan dropped Kael's smoking body.
"I'm not using hostages," Su Yuan said, his voice echoing with a strange, metallic reverb. The SoulNet was overlaying his vocal cords. "I'm using resources."
He reached out with both hands.
The containment field generators. They were embedded in the corners of the room—pillars of chrome and blue light.
*Crush.*
He made a fist.
The pillar in the northeast corner imploded. Metal shrieked as it folded in on itself, sparks showering the unconscious guests.
The containment field flickered.
A gap.
Through the static, he heard it. A faint, distant whisper.
*...Boss? Boss, signals are...*
The Lower City.
"Open," Su Yuan grunted.
He swept his hand sideways. The shards of the broken marble table lifted from the floor. Hundreds of jagged stone knives.
He hurled them.
The storm of stone shredded the air. The guards raised their shields, but the sheer kinetic mass was too much. They were battered backward, armor chipping, visors cracking.
Su Yuan ran.
He didn't run away from them. He ran toward the window. The floor-to-ceiling glass that looked out over the drop.
"He's going for the edge!" a guard shouted.
A pike thrust toward him. Su Yuan felt the hum of the void-tip. It would deconstruct his atoms on contact.
He ducked, sliding on the polished floor. He grabbed the guard's ankle with his mind and *pulled*.
The guard flipped, his face smashing into the floor.
Su Yuan stood up. He was at the window.
Below him, three miles of empty air.
He looked back.
Lady Vermilion was stirring. Her willpower was strong enough to fight the sleep command. She pushed herself up on one arm, blood trickling from her nose.
"You..." she wheezed. "You can't escape... the Spire sees..."
Su Yuan looked at her.
"The Spire sees everything," he agreed.
He raised his hand. The *Whisper Blade* was suddenly in his grip.
He slashed the glass.
The *Whisper Blade* didn't care about the structural integrity of the reinforced polycarbonate. It cut through the atomic bonds like a hot wire through styrofoam.
The window shattered.
The pressure differential was violent. Air screamed as it was sucked out of the room. Glass shards, napkins, and expensive appetizers were ripped into the night.
The guards were thrown off balance.
Su Yuan stepped onto the ledge. The wind roared, tugging at his white jacket.
"The Spire sees everything," Su Yuan shouted over the gale. "So make sure it sees this."
He jumped.
Gravity took him. The stomach-churning drop hit him instantly. The Obsidian Hall shrank to a speck of light above him.
He was falling into the clouds.
**[ WARNING: TERMINAL VELOCITY APPROACHING. ]**
**[ IMPACT IN: 12 SECONDS. ]**
Su Yuan closed his eyes. He didn't panic.
He reached out into the void.
The containment field was gone. The distance was closing.
"Connect," he whispered.
**[ CONNECTION RE-ESTABLISHED. ]**
**[ LOWER CITY NODES: 11,502 ACTIVE. ]**
The roar of the souls returned. It was beautiful.
"System. Cushion the fall. Distribute the kinetic force."
**[ CALCULATING... ]**
**[ DISTRIBUTION: 0.04% DAMAGE PER NODE. ]**
He hit the smog layer.
He didn't deploy a parachute. He didn't have one.
Instead, as he plummeted toward the rooftops of Sector 7, he braced himself.
Ten feet from the ground.
*Impact.*
He slammed into the roof of a hab-block.
But he didn't splatter.
At the exact moment of impact, Su Yuan transferred the kinetic energy of his fall into the network.
In the Lower City, eleven thousand people suddenly felt a sharp, heavy shove against their shoulders. Some stumbled. Some dropped a cup of tea. A sleeping drunk fell off his bench.
On the roof, Su Yuan landed in a crouch. The concrete cracked under his feet in a spiderweb pattern, but his bones held.
He stood up.
He was alive.
But his cover was gone.
He checked the holographic billboards that lined the street below.
The image changed. The advertisements for synthetic meat vanished.
A face appeared. High resolution. Sharp.
His face.
**[ WANTED: ARCHITECT. ]**
**[ DESIGNATION: TIER 1 THREAT. ]**
**[ REWARD: CITIZENSHIP. ]**
"Citizenship," Su Yuan muttered. He wiped the blood from his nose.
Every desperate soul in Sector 7 would be hunting him now. He had turned the entire city into a bounty hunter.
He touched the earpiece.
"Li Wei."
"Boss! You're alive? The signal went dark!"
"Start the cannon," Su Yuan said. He started running, leaping across the gap to the next building. "And burn the safehouse. We're moving."
"Moving where?"
Su Yuan looked up at the sky. The golden lights of the Upper City were distant, mocking stars.
"To the sewers," Su Yuan said. "The rats are the only ones who don't watch the news."
He checked the status of the *Crimson Oath*.
**[ UPPER CITY NODES: 45 (RECOVERING). ]**
**[ STATUS: HOSTILE / INFECTED. ]**
He hadn't just escaped. He had left a virus in the penthouse.
Vermilion would wake up with a headache. And every time she used her soul, every time she accessed the Spire's network, Su Yuan would be there, a ghost in the machine, listening.
The trap had sprung. But the prey had taken the bait and the trap with him.
Su Yuan vanished into the shadows of a ventilation shaft, the sirens beginning to wail in the distance.
**[ SOULNET EVOLUTION: 34%. ]**
**[ NEXT SKILL UNLOCK: MASS HALLUCINATION. ]**
The game had changed. Hide and seek was over.
Now, it was war.