The blast door was not a lock to be picked; it was a wall to be bypassed. Jack Wilson's voice, a calm, confident presence from half a world away, became their key.
"Adler's proud of his security," Jack's voice echoed in their earpieces, "but pride is a vulnerability. The door's power conduit is routed through a secondary maintenance shaft, twenty meters to your left. Blaze, if you would be so kind as to create a very precise, very quiet, two-thousand-degree plasma meltdown at these coordinates..."
A moment later, a section of the granite cliff face glowed a dull, cherry red, then slumped and flowed like wax, revealing the armored conduit within. Bastion, the team's strongwoman, tore the conduit from the wall with a grunt of controlled effort, and the massive blast door went dark, its locking mechanisms disengaged.
They slipped inside, a river of silent, black-armored ghosts, into a world of concrete, steel, and the low, constant hum of industrial life support.
The first level of the bunker was not a military installation. It was a zoo from a nightmare.
They entered a cavernous, humid biosphere, a twisted parody of a natural habitat. The air was thick with the smell of musk and decay. Strange, phosphorescent fungi cast a sickly, green light on enclosures that housed the grotesque failures of the Chimera Project. They saw creatures that were a horrifying fusion of lizard and insect, things with too many legs and screaming, human-like eyes. It was a gallery of scientific sin, a monument to Adler's hubris.
"He's keeping them," Echo whispered, his voice laced with disgust. "The ones who didn't take the upgrades. His rejects."
"This isn't a collection," Lin Feng countered, his voice a low growl. "It's a buffer zone. A living minefield."
As if on cue, the klaxon blared. A harsh, electronic screech that shattered the humid silence.
"We've been made," Jack's voice stated, a note of frustrated surprise in his tone. "It's not a sensor trip. He's got a pre-cognitive... one of the rejects, a telepath. It must have sensed your presence. The whole level is going into lockdown. And he's opening the cages."
Heavy, armored doors hissed open all around them. From the shadows, a wave of chittering, screeching, and roaring abominations poured forth. It was a tide of biological chaos, a wave of claws, fangs, and pure, mindless rage.
"Vanguard!" Lin Feng commanded, his voice a blade of cold steel that cut through the chaos. "Formation Delta! Hold the line!"
What followed was not a battle. It was a harvest.
The team moved with the terrifying, synchronized efficiency they had perfected in the forge. They did not break formation. They did not waste a single movement. They became a single, twelve-headed engine of destruction.
Frost laid down a wall of slick, black ice, sending the first wave of charging beasts tumbling into a chaotic pile. Before they could recover, Blaze unleashed a precise, controlled sheet of white-hot fire, not a wild inferno, but a focused, searing wave that incinerated the downed creatures without wasting a single joule of energy.
From their protected rear, the team's two kinetic-types, including Bao, launched shimmering discs of pure force that decapitated the larger, more armored beasts with surgical precision. And through it all, Echo blinked in and out of existence, a phantom of death, his vibro-blades striking the creatures' exposed nerve clusters, dropping them silently and efficiently.
It was a symphony of controlled, overwhelming violence. The wave of biological chaos crashed against the unyielding wall of their discipline and shattered.
In under three minutes, the cavernous biosphere fell silent once more. The floor was littered with the steaming, grotesque corpses of Adler's failures. The Vanguard team stood in the center of the carnage, their armor unscratched, their breathing steady.
They had been a team of individuals, broken by a single B-Class monster in the Amazon. Now, they had just annihilated a horde of C-Class and D-Class Aberrations without breaking a sweat.
"The line is broken," Lin Feng reported into the comms, his voice as calm as if he were reporting on the weather. "We are proceeding to the next level."