The mist of disintegration choked the lobby, and the three huntsmen continued onward. Through a staff-only door in the main lobby, an inconspicuous slab of steel framed by four security cameras and a fifth hidden in the ID pad Midas palmed. Into a staff hallway, last door on the left, down two flights of stairs. Another locked door, another stairway, another landing. Midas's palm was their skeleton key.
The last door opened into another stairwell, this one gently curving between walls like the night sky, the stars confined into strips of light along the stairs. Uncountable steps, further into darkness. And along the way, Midas narrated; "If we're to believe the legends, Salem was the only other person in history to contact a Blackened Pool. It has to be some unholy miracle she didn't disintegrate, considering this much almost killed me." Over his shoulder, he indicated an inch and a half between thumb and index finger. Something– the walls, or the air itself, served to muffle his words. "But, as much as the darkness contaminated her, she contaminated the darkness. Forced mortality onto it. When she was slain, so were the Creatures of Grimm –all but The Vestige. Darkness in purest form. Something not-quite-mortal."
"And all this time, it's been a couple hundred feet beneath the city," Lazula added. "Go figure."
Lilly's fingers traced the wall. Lazula noticed, against the white of her skin and the white of her uniform, a thickening grey haze. "If you say it's 'not-quite-mortal,' how do we expect to destroy it?"
"I'm going to make contact with it," Midas answered. "I'll contaminate its core with my aura, my soul. Force mortality onto it, just as Salem did. When I do, I can't imagine it'll react well. That's where you two come in."
"Just us two?"
Midas's head lowered. "I don't know if I'll survive contact. When The Vestige dies, my soul will too. It might take a minute for my body to catch up."
A relative of silence followed– uncomfortable, punctuated only by their muddled footfalls. Deeper below, deeper into darkness. Uneasy thoughts, uncertain feelings. Had it been the Midas she knew before– or thought she knew– who spoke, it would've been the pain of another blade beneath her skin. Douglas, then Snow, and the entire world in the balance, why him too? But the words left The Ambassador's lips. The hand that would reach out to the Vestige was the same that pulled the trigger. Even if she placed her whole faith in his eleventh-hour redemption, her feelings were muted. Confused.
The air muffled even Caspian's urgent distress ping.
"Yeah? What's up?" she asked, with a hint of relief her attention could be pulled elsewhere.
"-production facility open–" he pleaded against the static. "Organds turned– … eeded a biometric scan!"
"You needed a bioscan?" Midas guessed.
"–es!"
"That's new."
Impetus's hilt against Lazula's palm. "You mean to tell me you had no idea we'd need a bioscan?"
"I never worked here, and I never asked questions," Midas countered, hands raised to emphasize his innocence. "I only pulled the trigger."
"They're blocking our only escape." Clarity, then Caspian's next words were almost entirely lost to static. "...to fight…"
"If we heard that correctly, please don't fight them," Lilly warned. "If you get close, they'll archive you. If that happens, it's over."
"Not to mention, those are combat units. Like any other AI, our Organds evolve through machine learning. Accelerated machine learning, rather." He bobbed a nonchalant smirk toward Lazula. "Remember the 'hacking' incident last year? Your dad wouldn't let you train them. We figured out a way around him."
"You almost killed my friend."
"Yeah. Almost. Caspian and Moka, too." His fingers rapped the guardrail. "That day wasn't the end of the androids' training, either. They learned against Grimm, against each other, against me. Organd after Organd, destroyed in the name of creating the perfect synthetic soldier." He chuckled. "Two hundred of them, actually."
"Why do I feel like this is all some sick game to you?"
Impatiently, he raised his voice for the Holoband. "There's another way out of there. Behind the Nexus, right side. Slot my Holo into the port on the desk, and a part of the wall will open. There's an admin room upstairs, and the Soul Transfer Facility beyond that." Lowered it again. "You all have two options. One–" he slapped his finger against the guardrail hard enough it rang. If it hurt, he didn't show it. "Save the world, and live to see tomorrow. Two–" as many fingers against the rail. "Die trying. At this point, option one isn't my luxury. Might as well enjoy myself."
"I… I'm grateful you're doing this," Lazula admitted, finding the words buried somewhere deep beneath betrayal, resentment. "But… why? Would have been easier to stay quiet, let The Apoptosis Project play out. You'd be one of the most powerful people in the new world. Why?"
"Guess I finally realized how much my father took from me. Finally asked myself why I should give a shit about his plan."
And they continued, silent, deeper beneath Empyrean Tower.
Two hundred footfalls synchronized into a pounding drumroll. An army's march. A countdown to annihilation. Caspian's pounded off tempo, away from the doorway, to the white halfmoon desk sticking out from the back wall. Midas's Holo snapped off his wrist, went rigid and clacked against the blank white surface beside the Holo port. His shaking hand overcorrected.
Rowan's shout didn't help. "They're getting closer!"
"I-I have an EMP! From Kraken!" Ichigo offered, and began to fumble through his bag. He pulled out a rounded steel cylinder, a couple inches long and half as wide. He turned it over in his hand, slid his thumb down its length, and a strip of green lit up in its wake.
"Gimme that!" Moka interrupted. She half-grabbed-half-tackled, a lightning storm spread across her chest and into her arm, and she flung the grenade deep into the shadowed hall. An explosion– not of heat, force, sound, but feeling; static electricity and the faintest hint of distortion in the air. A wave of mosquito-tones that pulled at Caspian's eardrums, licked the hair at the back of his neck. The androids fell.
Caspian slotted the Holo into place. A flicker of light above it, like the dot of an exclamation point, punctuated his success. Slits spread on the perfect white wall beside the desk, and an eight-by-four foot rectangle folded into the floor. Caspian led the way into the sharp-edged opening, counted everyone on their way through, and scrounged around for a second to find the switch, button, or port that would close the path behind them. It began to seal itself.
Their pounding footfalls echoed up the stairwell. He didn't count each step or story, but knew by the fire in his thighs and the tightness of his chest they had breached the ground floor and began their ascent into the tower. They arrived at a landing, and footfalls faded out– only for a moment.
An android stood from its seat near the console bank. "Now initiating the Apoptosis–"
Moka shrieked, and a crack of thunder met the noise. Lightning flung from her fist, into the Organd's chest, and it crumpled. Its final breath was black smoke. Caspian scanned the room past Undertow's barrel, holding a half-pull on its trigger. Some kind of security or monitoring room. Windowless, lightless, apart from that shed by the Holoscreens mounted up each wall to the ceiling. One displayed the room they had just left. Androids slumped in the doorway, fingers twitching, grasping, slowly returning to their approximation of life.
"We should have another minute or two to regroup, maybe put a little distance between ourselves and the androids," Caspian assessed. He flinched at an abrupt crash, a tearing of steel. Noxis's semblance-armored hand pulled back from the wound he left in the doorframe, smashed and bent in a broken spiral to stand in as a lock. "Ichigo. Do you think you'd be able to reverse it from here?"
Light flashed across his glasses as he shook his head. "Probably not. Even if I did get in in time, I'd still need biometrics." The light fell behind his glasses, tinted pink. He opened his laptop. "May as well check, though. Gimme a minute."
Shadows pulled away from Noxis's steel arm. "A minute's about all we have."
Moka pointed to the screen above her– a dark room speckled with lights alternating, like a city at night. "This says the server room's on floor thirty-five," she noted. "What if we went up there and destroyed the server towers? Maybe with lightning dust or something?"
"That might work, might also kill everyone trapped in the archives," Caspian answered. "Considering Griswold Baine planned to have Snow self-destruct while we were in her, that isn't a risk I'm willing to take."
"There's no way this is their only physical server," Ichigo mumbled, eyes bound to his screen. "We take this one out, there's still another in every other kingdom. Probably another in Vale. I'd assume the backup process is automatic."
"Oh. Right."
"We're completely off-script here," Caspian replied, and he stared blankly at the screens, looking for an answer somewhere within them. The first android pulled itself onto rigid legs. "Any idea is worth mentioning."
"I'd need days to work this through," Ichigo concluded, and set his hand atop his laptop. He didn't close it. "Need someone to open the windows or bump the AC, I'm your guy."
"Let's keep moving," Noxis decided.
Caspian watched a second android straighten to its feet, then a third. Four more in tandem, legs rigid, titanium joints grinding in a shell forged from carbon fiber and flesh. Smoke billowing from flared nostrils. Hands clutching temples. The room was hot. Barely ventilated, filled with computers and human bodies. He felt the beads of sweat that formed at his collar. An idea. Idiotic, or brilliant. Nowhere in-between.
"You can bump the AC– does that mean you can crank up the heat, too?"
"Yeah. You cold?"
"Snow overheated last night. That's why we got separated. It's probably an Organd's biggest design flaw," Caspian explained. "If we crank up the heat, we'll at least limit the amount of time they can stay active, and their combat capability. Best-case scenario, they overheat entirely."
"Say no more." Ichigo intertwined his fingers to crack them, and set to work.
"Maybe we could bait them into the server room?" Laurel suggested, fastening Snake Eyes' strap as she stood again. "It's hot as hell in there."
"That's not a bad idea," Caspian considered, and the door leading on opened in front of him. He twisted Midas's Holoband between his fingers. "I assume we're being tracked– at least through Midas's Holoband. If we leave our Holos in the server room it might throw them off, at least for a couple minutes."
Rowan turned a Holoband over in his hand. "Must have been someone in here. Just found a spare."
"Good timing. Let's use that if we need to call Lazula." Caspian turned Undertow over in his hand. Looked again at the androids on screen, lurching to life. "Moka, do you have any lightning dust I could borrow?"
"I think so…" and she started fishing around in one of her thigh pockets. She perked up, produced a tiny yellow crystal in a glass case between her thumb and forefinger. "One left!"
"Could I use it? I realized yesterday Undertow isn't bound to just hard-light."
"Mm-hm!"
Caspian thanked her, worked the crystal gingerly into the slot just beneath his thumb when he held his gun. He finished, and noticed Moka still looking at him. Head cocked slightly, tail down and wagging slowly, smiling.
"It's nice to see you like this."
"Like this?"
"Leading," Moka answered. "Confident. Or at least faking it well enough we can't tell."
Caspian shook his head, let a nervous laugh go. "I can't tell either."
"You've changed a lot since last year. I'm really glad you're here."
Caspian let a smile across his lips. They ascended a staircase beside a glass wall, watching the silent city spread beneath them.
The bottom stair left them in a short hallway, swathed by walls of a black that choked out all light. The stairs, the walls, the air itself buzzed with an uncanny energy, like static electricity that carried upon it the smell of blood. The black aether surged and waned in a two-beat pulse. Past the end of the hall, beyond the white slab door, the beating heart of something heartless. The breath of something lifeless.
Midas's palm pressed an empty space beside the door. A click deep within the wall, and the ceiling sucked in the grey slab. The Vestige had spread to the doorway, and when the door lifted it pulled the mass taut like raw black dough until it split. Sinews weaved and pulsed forward with a sickening squelch, tendrils like long fingers exploring the space beyond the door. Lazula took a step back out of instinct.
The basement of the Auxiliary building took a cue from the main– white floor, white walls, white ceiling. Lazula assumed such, as only sparse blots shone pure through the black mass that had incorporated the room. It flooded out from the central pillar in some state close to solid, shifting and growing in an uneasy, pulsating rhythm. Climbed up the walls and support columns to incorporate the ceiling. And between, more strands weaved together, connected floor to ceiling like tendons. She guessed it had spread like a virus from the central pillar. Glass ten inches thick had shattered into a jagged crown around the Vestige's core, a cluster of light and amorphous mass, like a single red atom blown up to palpable size. The same red that smoldered within the Creatures of Grimm– the source of that flame. Arcs of it flitted and whipped around it like a violent gyroscope, casting their vicious light across the walls and dark flesh.
Midas let out a breath. "Here I thought I'd prepared myself for the worst-case scenario. Never thought myself an optimist."
"We still have a chance, right?" Lilly tested.
"Preventing this is what I wanted you here for. But here's hoping."
Lilly tried to burn away the pulsing tendrils creeping through the door, the roots of destruction seeking life to extinguish. Elysian Bloom glowed white hot in the darkness, seared the fringe until it pulled back and away. But after only a few seconds unharmed it throbbed again, and began, slowly, to make up lost ground.
Lazula felt uneasy so close to the Vestige. As if staring at it too long, like a black sun, would corrupt her in some way. All at once, or slowly, imperceptibly, until she had become something else entirely. She covered her nose and mouth, took a step back. Midas did the opposite. He raised a hand level with his hip, palm toward the ground. And at his command the form crawled itself apart before him. At its edges, tiny feeler-tendrils tasted the air, quivering in reverence, regarding their master– or trying to reclaim a piece of themselves inside him.
He continued, almost trancelike, to the core. Its arcs grew wilder, lashing out, sparking, slicing him with their light. He stopped a few feet short. Raised left palm toward the core, and the light coalesced. A tether of black energy bound them, coursing with a crimson halo and feral lightning flying from it. It looked at first as though the light surged into him. Then his own energy returned to the Vestige, and the dark confluence– the ebb and flow of energy between the two– evened out. Midas pushed it back. It pushed back at Midas.
Midas faced away from Lazula. His face obscured, yet she saw his shoulders tense, rising and falling under labored breaths. A knee dropped, he clutched the floor, clutched the dark tether pulsing, writhing further out of control.
"NO!"
The crimson explosion seared Lazula's eyes. They recovered, slowly, to see Midas hunched over, shoulders heaving for breath. The tether had severed, pulled back into the roiling light. It sunk into the black mass of errant Grimm flesh, spread in glowing veins, pulsed like a heartbeat. Its slow, creeping, undulating movement accelerated, intensified. A hundred tendrils sprung for Lilly and Lazula, but a wash of flame dust and a golden shield blocked them. They retreated to the end of the hall.
Through the doorway, they watched. The form rolled and swelled, rose like a wave and surged forth to swallow Midas. The wave crashed into white walls, and the Tower's skeleton creaked and groaned against its weight. Eyes rolled open in the swell, and long-fingered hands sprouted to clutch at the shore. The Vestige, the abomination of an unholy union of human and Grimm, began to crawl. The heartbeat vibrations rose in crescendo, rattled Lazula's core, and the red light within surged.
Wings split from its form, cast a rain of liquid shadow. It took flight with a speed astonishing for its size. The crash of something colossal, steel twisting, tearing, and a rain of debris. Twilight filtered through the gap it left seven stories up the wall. In the pool of light it left, Midas knelt.
A black bud grew from his back, twisted, blossomed into six black wings that spread to envelop him. Midas– or something that once was Midas– turned halfway to her. Bone-white face like a chiseled comedy mask over shadowed skin. Black smile stretched wide, crimson glowing in veins. His slicked-back hair now strands of bone.
Lazula drew Impetus.
"Wait," something resembling his voice implored. That same core-shaking depth as Condor, when his dose of the Vestige had taken over.
"I'm not gone yet. Not entirely."
