The metro station smelled like rust and rot.
Ethan descended the crumbling stairs slowly, his eyes adjusting to the darkness with ease. He didn't need light anymore—his enhanced vision picked out every detail in shades of green and gray, mapping the space in perfect clarity.
The platform was empty. Or appeared to be.
But Ethan could feel them. Eleven heartbeats scattered through the station. Hiding in doorways, behind pillars, crouched in maintenance tunnels. Armed. Waiting.
"I know you're here, Aria," he called out. His voice echoed through the cavernous space. "And I know you're not alone."
For a moment, nothing. Then a figure stepped out from behind a support column at the far end of the platform.
Aria.
She looked worse than when he'd last seen her. Her shoulder was still bandaged from the plasma burn. Dark circles hung under her eyes. Her hands shook slightly as she gripped her rifle—though she kept it pointed at the ground.
"You came," she said, and there was something like surprise in her voice.
"You said you could undo what was done to me." Ethan walked toward her, unhurried. "I'm interested in hearing your theory."
"It's not a theory." Aria raised her other hand, revealing a small device about the size of a grenade. "It's a weapon."
Ethan stopped walking. "A weapon."
"EMP pulse. Designed specifically to disrupt LE network connections." Aria's voice was steady now, rehearsed. "Helix developed it to shut down Primordial coordination. But I modified it. This one targets the LE core itself. Temporarily shuts it down. Thirty seconds, maybe less. But in that thirty seconds..."
She met his eyes.
"You'll be human again."
Ethan processed this. Ran simulations. The device was clearly visible in her hand—she wasn't trying to hide it. This wasn't an ambush in the traditional sense.
This was an intervention.
"Thirty seconds of humanity," he said slowly. "And then what? The LE core reboots, and I'm back to this?"
"Maybe." Aria took a step closer. "Or maybe in those thirty seconds, you'll remember what it felt like. What you lost. Maybe it'll be enough to make you fight this thing instead of surrendering to it."
"I haven't surrendered. I've evolved."
"You've been LOBOTOMIZED!" The shout echoed through the station. Aria's composure cracked, tears streaming down her face. "You're walking around in Ethan's body, using his voice, but you're not HIM! The real Ethan would never—he would never kill a kid without hesitation, he would never look at the people who loved him with those cold, dead eyes—"
"The real Ethan was dying," Ethan interrupted. "He had twenty-six days left. He made a choice."
"He made a choice because he was desperate and scared and that BITCH convinced him he had no other option!" Aria was fully crying now. "But there's always another option. There's always—"
She raised the EMP device.
"Let me give you thirty seconds. That's all I'm asking. Thirty seconds to feel again. And if after that, you still want to be this... this thing... then I'll walk away. I swear."
Ethan looked at the device. At Aria. At the eleven hidden figures surrounding them.
"And if I refuse?"
Aria's jaw tightened. "Then they open fire, and I detonate this thing anyway."
"You'd kill me."
"I'd FREE you."
A rational analysis: The EMP would likely succeed. He'd be temporarily vulnerable. But Lira was nearby—he could feel her presence in the Network, watching from the shadows. She would protect him during the reboot. The risk was manageable.
But there was another calculation running beneath the logic.
Curiosity.
He wanted to know. Just for a moment. What had he lost?
"Do it," Ethan said.
Aria blinked. "What?"
"Thirty seconds of humanity. I accept your terms."
"You... you're agreeing?"
"I want to know what I'm missing." Ethan spread his arms. "If it's as valuable as you claim, I should experience it. For data purposes."
Aria stared at him like he'd grown a second head. "For... data purposes."
"Yes."
She looked like she wanted to scream. Or laugh. Or both.
Instead, she pressed the button.
The EMP detonated with a sound like shattering glass.
Ethan's LE core went dark.
And the world... changed.
The green-tinted vision vanished. Colors flooded in—real colors, human colors. The rusty walls were RUST-colored, not just "corroded material designation 7B." The darkness was DARK, not a spectrum of infrared signatures.
And then the emotions hit.
All at once.
Like a dam breaking.
Grief.
Mira's face—god, her FACE, he could see it clearly now, every detail, the way her eyes crinkled when she laughed, the way she bit her lip when she was thinking—and she was GONE, she was DEAD, he'd held her body and he'd felt NOTHING and oh god oh god how had he felt nothing—
Horror.
Selene. The explosion. Her broken body in his arms. The way she'd looked at him with such trust even as she was dying. And he'd just... catalogued it. Stored it. Moved on.
Shame.
The kid. The seventeen-year-old kid with the too-big uniform. The way he'd begged. The way Ethan had killed him without a MOMENT of hesitation, like he was swatting a fly—
Love.
Aria. Standing in front of him. Crying. Terrified. Desperate. And he'd looked at her like she was a TACTICAL CONSIDERATION, like she was just another variable to optimize—
Ethan fell to his knees.
"Oh god," he gasped. "Oh god, what did I—what have I—"
The tears came. Huge, wracking sobs that tore through him like he was being ripped apart from the inside.
Aria dropped beside him, hands on his shoulders. "Ethan. Ethan, I'm here. I'm right here."
"I killed him," Ethan choked out. "He was just a kid and I killed him and I didn't CARE—"
"It wasn't you. It was that THING they turned you into—"
"It WAS me!" He grabbed her arms, desperate. "It's still me. I'm still in here. I'm just... I'm broken. I'm hollow. Aria, please, please don't let me go back to that, I can't—I can't stop feeling and go back to that emptiness—"
"I won't," she promised, crying with him. "I won't, I'll find a way to fix this, I swear—"
"There's no fix." Ethan could feel it already—the LE core stirring, rebooting. Maybe fifteen seconds left. "I'm dying, Aria. The real me. I'm dying and this is just... this is just the corpse walking around pretending."
"Then we'll find another way. We'll keep you human, we'll—"
"Ten seconds." He could feel the shutdown approaching like a wave. "Aria. When I reboot. When I'm... when I'm that thing again."
"Yeah?"
"Kill me."
Her eyes went wide. "What—"
"KILL ME!" He shook her. "Don't let me live like that! Don't let me be that monster! Please, if you ever loved me, if you—"
The LE core rebooted.
The emotions vanished.
Like a switch flipping off.
Ethan blinked. Released Aria's arms. Stood up smoothly.
"Interesting," he said.
Aria scrambled backward, staring at him in horror. "Ethan—"
"The emotional cascade was more intense than I calculated." He brushed dirt off his pants. "Thirty-two seconds, actually. You underestimated the reboot time by 6.25%. But the data was valuable. Thank you."
"You... you were crying. You were BEGGING me—"
"I was experiencing a temporary restoration of human neurochemistry. It has since been suppressed." Ethan looked at her with those flat, green eyes. "Your experiment is concluded."
He turned to leave.
Aria raised her rifle.
"Don't move."
Ethan stopped. Turned back. "Aria—"
"He BEGGED me to kill him." Her voice was shaking. "The real Ethan. He's still in there somewhere, and he's suffering, and he BEGGED me—"
"That wasn't 'the real Ethan.' That was a glitch. A malfunction."
"IT WAS THE ONLY PART OF YOU THAT WAS STILL HUMAN!"
She pulled the trigger.
The rifle shot echoed through the station.
The bullet never reached him.
Vines erupted from the ground, forming a shield that caught the round mid-flight. More vines shot toward Aria, wrapping around the rifle, yanking it from her hands.
The eleven hidden soldiers broke from cover, opening fire.
And the metro station became a war zone.
Ethan moved through the chaos with perfect efficiency. Vines from every surface—walls, ceiling, floor—lashing out like a hydra. Three soldiers down in the first five seconds. Two more crushed against pillars. The others retreating, firing wildly.
Aria was running, screaming into her comm unit: "Fall back! FALL BACK!"
Ethan could have caught her easily. Could have killed her.
But something—some fragment of that thirty-second window—made him hesitate.
"Lira," he called through the Network. "Disable but don't kill."
Lira emerged from the shadows, her vines joining his. Within thirty seconds, the remaining soldiers were unconscious, wrapped in cocoons of living plant matter.
Aria was pinned against a wall, vines around her wrists and ankles.
Ethan approached her slowly.
She spat at him. "Go ahead. Kill me. Prove you're the monster I know you are."
"I'm not going to kill you," Ethan said.
He placed his hand on her forehead.
Green light pulsed from his palm into her skull.
Aria's eyes went wide. Then glassy.
"What... what are you..."
"LE spores," Ethan explained calmly. "Microscopic. Targeting your hippocampus. Specifically, your memories of the last seventy-two hours."
"No. No no no—"
"You'll wake up in your safe house tomorrow morning. You'll remember that you've been trying to find me. That you failed. You'll have no memory of this meeting. No memory of the EMP device. No memory of—"
"—of you crying," Aria whispered, tears streaming down her face even as her eyes started to unfocus. "Of you begging me to save you. Ethan, please don't take that from me, it's all I have left—"
"It's not real," Ethan said gently. "It was a malfunction. This is a kindness."
"It's MURDER—"
The light pulsed brighter.
Aria's eyes closed.
When they opened again, they were blank. Confused.
"Where... what..."
Ethan released her. She slumped to the ground, unconscious.
"Transport her to her safe house," Ethan ordered through the Network. "Make it look like she passed out from exhaustion."
Lira's vines gently lifted Aria's limp form.
"Sovereign," Lira said quietly. "You could have killed her."
"Yes."
"The old Ethan would have."
"No," Ethan corrected. "The old Ethan would have tried to save her. I'm simply... choosing not to eliminate her. That's different."
"Is it?"
Ethan looked at Aria's sleeping face. Ran a quick diagnostic.
Felt nothing.
"I don't know," he admitted.
And for just a moment, he sounded almost human.
They left the metro station as dawn broke over Shanghai.
Behind them, eleven unconscious soldiers lay cocooned in vines, alive but trapped, waiting for Helix retrieval teams that might or might not arrive in time.
Ethan didn't look back.
But as he walked through the ruined streets, one of Lira's vines brushed against his hand.
A gesture of comfort? Support?
He didn't pull away.
And in the depths of his LE core, beneath layers of cold logic and efficient calculation, something microscopic pulsed.
Not an emotion.
Just... an echo.
Of a man who'd wept on his knees and begged to die rather than live as a monster.
The echo faded.
The Sovereign walked on.