The silence after the storm of the hack was the most terrifying part. For a long moment, Ren leaned against the cold plascrete wall, his body a trembling, empty husk. He had tampered with the very reality of the machines, and the effort had cost him dearly. But there was no time for recovery. He was a ghost in the machine, and he had to reach its heart before the system found a way to reboot itself.
He forced himself to his feet and turned his attention to the reinforced maintenance door. The electronic lock was complex, but it was powered. And where there was power, there was a system to be manipulated. He placed his palm on the control panel beside the door. He didn't have the strength for another full-scale hack, but he didn't need one. He sent a single, fine kinetic thread into the panel's circuitry, not to rewrite its code, but simply to complete a circuit, mimicking the "open" command. With a soft hiss of hydraulics, the heavy door slid open.
He slipped inside, the door closing silently behind him. He was in a sterile, white corridor, lit by cold, unforgiving LED panels. The air smelled of ozone and recycled air. This was the Pagoda's domain: clean, efficient, and utterly devoid of life or warmth. There were no human guards here, only the occasional cleaning drone humming quietly past, its sensors completely ignoring him. His invisibility, for now, was absolute.
But where was the prototype? The facility was a maze of identical-looking corridors and unmarked doors. He couldn't risk opening them at random. He closed his eyes and fell back on his most fundamental sense. He listened not for sound, but for power.
Project Aegis, a device capable of projecting a wide-spectrum resonance net over several square miles, would require a colossal amount of Aetheric energy. It would be the hungriest thing in the building. He extended his senses, feeling for the flow of power through the conduits hidden in the walls and floor. He found it almost immediately: a massive river of raw energy, a torrent of power being drawn from a central reactor somewhere deep in the facility, all flowing towards a single destination.
He had his path. He followed the river of power.
He moved silently through the deserted corridors, a phantom in a white labyrinth. The deeper he went, the stronger the thrumming of the power conduits became, a low, resonant hum that he could feel in his bones. He passed laboratories filled with strange, inert devices and server rooms whose humming walls radiated a palpable heat.
As he neared his destination, he heard something that made him freeze: voices. The sound of calm, professional conversation. Human researchers. His invisibility to the machines meant nothing here. He flattened himself into an alcove as two people in pristine white lab coats walked past, their faces illuminated by the glow of a data slate they were examining.
"...the resonance fluctuations are still outside of predicted parameters," one was saying.
"The core is stable," the other replied dismissively. "The field requires calibration, not panic. We will initiate a low-yield diagnostic pulse at 0300."
They passed by, their conversation fading down the corridor. Ren's blood ran cold. A diagnostic pulse. It sounded ominously like the sweep he had barely survived at the Baron's estate, but this would be at the source, an order of magnitude more powerful. His time was even more limited than he thought.
He continued forward, his movements now laced with a new urgency. He reached the end of the corridor, which opened into a large, shielded observation chamber with a massive, triple-paned pane of armoured glass looking down into a cavernous laboratory below.
And there it was.
It was not a single machine, but a web. In the center of the lab, suspended by massive power conduits from the ceiling, was a perfect, crystalline sphere, ten feet in diameter. It glowed with a soft, internal blue light. But radiating out from this core, filling the entire chamber, was an intricate, shimmering web of pure energy—the Aegis net itself, contained in its testing environment. It was beautiful, complex, and utterly terrifying. It was a cage of pure logic, designed to catch souls.
Around the lab, a half-dozen Pagoda researchers moved with calm, detached efficiency, monitoring data screens and making minute adjustments to the power flow.
Ren stared down at the heart of his enemy's ambition. He had found it. But it was active, powered, and surrounded by its creators. The problem was no longer infiltration. The problem was how to destroy a star while it was still burning.