12:42 PM JST.
As if obeying a silent command, the Vulture fleet parted, clearing a path through the sky. From the deepest, blackest part of the spatial rift, a new ship emerged. It was not a ship; it was a moving eclipse, a city of jagged, obsidian angles and cold, uncaring geometry. The Vulture mothership, a hunger given form, descended upon the wounded city.
It ignored the scattered remnants of the human fleet and the chaos below. It moved with a slow, imperial certainty towards its objective: the Shinjuku district, the location of Tokyo's central energy hub. A crown of dark energy began to form around its ventral side, a gathering of shadows that was the prelude to its main weapon. It was not charging a beam; it was opening its throat.
EAC Mobile Command Center
"They're ignoring us! All fire is having no effect!" a panicked Japanese general yelled, his face pale on the main viewscreen. "What is that thing doing?"
In the frantic, chaotic heart of the command center, Jack Wilson was a statue of pure, cold focus. He wasn't watching the battle. He was watching the data, a torrent of energy readings and spatial distortion metrics that was pure gibberish to everyone else in the room.
"It's not a perfect shield," he whispered, his eyes wide. Then louder, cutting through the panic. "It's not a perfect shield! It's a cycle!"
He lunged for a console, pushing a stunned technician aside, his fingers flying across the holographic interface. "Look! To power the main siphon, it has to ingest ambient energy! For a brief window during the charge cycle, the spatial polarization field has to drop its phase integrity to absorb power! It's a vulnerability! A keyhole!"
"How long is the window?" Mei-Ling demanded, her voice sharp as glass.
Jack's screen flashed with the final, terrible calculation. "1.7 seconds," he breathed. "God help us all, it's only 1.7 seconds." He looked up, his eyes locking with hers, his voice now a raw, urgent command. "Get me Lin Feng. Now. Patch me through to him directly."
On the rooftop of the half-ruined Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, Lin Feng stood alone, a solitary figure against a sky of fire and death. The wind whipped at him, carrying the screams of the city. Strapped to his chest and left arm was the device Jack had built for him: the Thunder and Fire Restraint. It was a sleek, black housing of conduits and capacitors, humming with a low, steady power, its purpose not to amplify his strength, but to keep it from tearing him apart.
He could feel the two energies warring within him: the clean, sharp blue of his own lightning, and the chaotic, searing red of the Titan's corrupted core. The device was a dam, holding back two raging rivers.
"Lin Feng, can you hear me?" Jack's voice, tinny and laced with static, crackled in his earpiece. "I'm looking at the mother of all bad ideas, and you're the only one who can make it work!"
Lin Feng watched as the dark energy coalesced beneath the mothership. He didn't need Jack to tell him what was at stake. "Talk to me, Doctor."
"You have one shot," Jack said, his voice a rapid-fire torrent of data. "When that thing fires, I'm going to give you a target. You'll have 1.7 seconds to hit it. Not a microsecond more. Can you do it?"
Lin Feng did not answer. He closed his eyes and took a single, deep breath. He was no longer a soldier. He was a conduit. He reached out with his will and opened the floodgates.
He brought his hands together in front of his chest. The blue lightning of his own power and the furious red energy of the Titan's ghost surged from his body, no longer at war, but forced by the Restraint to become one. They swirled, fused, and condensed between his palms into a single, blinding point of screaming, incandescent violet light. The Annihilation Fire.
"The cycle is beginning!" Jack yelled in his ear. "On my mark! Three... two..."
The mothership's siphon began to glow, the keyhole opening in its impenetrable defense.
"...ONE!"
Lin Feng roared, a sound of pure, primal fury, and thrust his hands forward. It was not a bolt of lightning. It was a spear of pure, controlled chaos, a beam of screaming violet energy that tore a path through the sky, a single, defiant thread of life against a mountain of death.
The beam struck the exact point on the mothership's shield that Jack had designated. For a moment that stretched into an eternity, there was only the silent, impossible image of the two forces meeting.
Then, with the sound of a universe shattering, the Vulture's shield of warped space cracked, splintered, and then exploded into a million pieces of black, crystalline light. The siphoning energy, its containment field breached, violently reversed, feeding back into the mothership's core.
The great ship, for the first time, screamed. It was a sound that was both metal and flesh, a psychic, agonized shriek that echoed in the mind of every living thing in the city.