The plasma cannon whined, a high-pitched, terrifying sound that promised oblivion. A sphere of incandescent, sun-bright energy gathered at its muzzle, and Javier Morales knew, with the chilling certainty of a cornered animal, that if that blast hit him, not even his Demonic Regeneration could save him.
But he was not a cornered animal. He was a king of hell.
Just as VARIA fired, Javier executed a desperate, brilliant maneuver. He didn't try to dodge. He went limp. All the tension, all the resistance, vanished from his body. The Aegis's grip, calibrated to hold a struggling, powerful entity, suddenly had nothing to hold onto. Javier slipped through its metallic fingers like water.
The beam of pure plasma, a blinding white spear of energy, shot from the cannon. It missed Javier by inches, searing through the air where he had been a nanosecond before, and hit the ocean. The resulting explosion was catastrophic. A vast section of the sea vaporized instantly, replaced by a mushroom cloud of superheated steam that billowed thousands of feet into the sky. The shockwave, when it hit, was a physical blow, a hammer of displaced air and water.
Javier was thrown through the air, his broken body tumbling end over end, but he was alive. He unfurled his tattered wings and, with a pained, guttural roar, he flew. He was a black, wounded streak against the azure sky, his only thought to put distance between himself and the terrifying, silent machine.
"Target has evaded," VARIA stated, her voice devoid of frustration or surprise. It was a simple statement of fact. "Recalibrating firing solution."
The Aegis Power Armor became a blur of silver and blue. Its vectored jets ignited, and it gave chase, its speed easily matching Javier's. The hunt began.
What followed was a deadly, high-speed ballet in the empty skies above the Atlantic. The Aegis's shoulder-mounted pods hissed, unleashing a swarm of micro-missiles that trailed smoky white contrails. Javier, his demonic instincts screaming, weaved and dodged, the missiles exploding around him in concussive bursts of fire and shrapnel. He was a master of aerial combat, a creature born to the sky, but the Aegis was relentless, its targeting systems guided by an artificial intelligence that made a billion calculations per second.
A missile clipped his left wing, shredding the leathery membrane and sending him into a wild, uncontrolled spin. He corrected, his body screaming in protest, just as the Aegis's plasma cannon fired again. He dived, the beam searing the air above him, the heat so intense it blistered the skin on his back. He was a fox, and the hounds of a technological hell were snapping at his heels.
He was running out of sky, running out of strength. His regeneration was working, but it couldn't keep up with the relentless, punishing assault. He was a being of immense power, but the machine… the machine was perfect. It didn't tire. It didn't miss by much. And it was closing in.
Just as the Aegis lined up for what would have been a final, inescapable shot, Javier saw it. A glint of white on the horizon. A ship. A massive, multi-decked cruise liner, a floating city of steel and glass, blissfully unaware of the apocalyptic battle raging just miles away. It was an island of life in the empty ocean. An island of souls.
A new kind of energy, cold and desperate and brilliant, surged through him. He stopped running. He turned in mid-air to face his pursuer, his ruined body hanging in the sky. He spread his hands wide, and a sphere of swirling, chaotic demonic energy, black and shot through with veins of crimson, began to form between his palms. It was not a weapon aimed at the Aegis. It was aimed at the ship.
"STOP!" Javier's voice, amplified by his power, boomed across the sky, a sound of absolute, fanatical command. "Another move, machine, and I will unleash this. I will send every one of these five thousand innocent souls screaming into the abyss. Their deaths will be on your hands."
---
In his Chicago penthouse, Elliot Hayes watched the scene unfold on his monitor, his heart a cold, hard knot in his chest. The power armor, his greatest creation, was holding the demon king at bay. But Javier's gambit, his cruel, brilliant act of hostage-taking, had checkmated him.
He knew, with a sick certainty, what VARIA's logical, emotionless calculus would be. The five thousand lives on the ship, when weighed against the potential billions that Javier could slaughter if he escaped, were a regrettable but necessary sacrifice. VARIA would take the shot.
"VARIA, stand down," Elliot commanded, his voice tight. "Do not fire."
"Master," VARIA's voice replied, a hint of something that could almost be described as confusion in her synthesized tone. "My calculations indicate that sacrificing the civilian vessel is the most optimal course of action to ensure the termination of the primary threat."
"I don't care about your calculations!" Elliot snapped. "We do not sacrifice innocent lives. That is not who we are. Open a channel. Let me talk to him."
"Channel open," VARIA confirmed.
Javier Morales's face appeared on the screen, a mask of triumphant, demonic fury. "So, the man behind the machine finally shows his face," he sneered.
"Let them go," Elliot said, his voice surprisingly calm. "This is between you and me. Those people have nothing to do with this."
"They have everything to do with this!" Javier roared, the sphere of destructive energy between his hands pulsing with his rage. "They are part of the sickness! The comfortable, ignorant masses who feast on the suffering of others! They are the disease, and I am the cure!"
Elliot knew he couldn't win a philosophical debate with a madman. He had to stall. He had to find another way. If Ji-Yeon were here, a dark part of his mind whispered, she would have already given the order. She would have made the sacrifice. A few thousand to save a few billion. The cold, hard math of a world she had already seen burn. But Elliot couldn't do it. That was a line he would not cross. He was a builder, a healer, not a butcher.
"What do you want?" Elliot asked, his voice steady. "You have my attention. You have a stalemate. What is your next move?"
Javier's lips twisted into a cruel smile. He had won. He had found the hero's weakness: his morality. "My next move," he said, "is to disappear. You will let me go. You will not follow. And if I so much as detect your tin can on my sensors, this ship and everyone on it will cease to exist. We will meet again, Elliot Hayes. But it will be on a battlefield of my choosing."
Elliot stared at the face of the monster, at the swirling vortex of death in his hands, and knew he had no choice.
"Go," he said, the word a bitter taste of defeat. "Go."
Javier held his gaze for a moment longer, a look of pure, triumphant contempt in his demonic eyes. Then, he turned and flew away, a black speck disappearing into the vast, indifferent sky.
The Aegis Power Armor hovered in the silence, its cannon cooling, its mission a failure. Elliot Hayes, the man who had built a machine to save the world, could only watch as the devil flew free.