The Heart Chamber became a whirlwind of calculated, geometric death. Plasma cannons fired in perfect, overlapping arcs, their paths designed not just to kill, but to herd the Vanguard team into inescapable kill-zones. The floor buckled and warped, while laser-wielding drones descended in a precise, deadly ballet.
It was a battle against a perfect, malevolent intelligence. And the Vanguard team was losing.
They were a flawless weapon, but they were fighting a god in his own body. Every move they made, every shot they fired, was anticipated, countered. Frost's ice walls were sublimated by plasma blasts before they had even fully formed. Echo's teleports were tracked, a laser beam waiting for him at every exit point.
"His processing speed is too fast!" Jack yelled in their comms, his voice a frantic buzz. "He's not a person, he's a quantum supercomputer with a god complex! You can't outfight him!"
Lin Feng knew he was right. He had been fighting Adler's extensions—the walls, the drones. He had been fighting the god's limbs. He had to attack the heart.
"Vanguard!" he commanded, his voice a blade of pure authority that cut through the chaos. "Give me a path! I need a clear shot at the throne!"
It was a suicide order. And it was instantly obeyed.
His team did not hesitate. They stopped fighting to win. They began fighting to create an opening. Bastion, with a final, desperate roar, threw herself in the path of a plasma blast, her stone-skin cracking and melting, but she held, buying a single, precious second. In that second, the rest of the team unleashed everything they had, not at Adler, but at the defenses between Lin Feng and the throne, a single, focused, all-or-nothing gambit.
A corridor of chaos opened. For a single, fleeting moment, there was a clear, direct path between Lin Feng and the withered, enthroned figure of General Adler.
Lin Feng moved. He was a violet streak, a bolt of pure, contained annihilation.
"Futility," the voice of Adler echoed, a note of final, bored certainty in its tone. A shimmering, crimson energy shield materialized around the throne.
Lin Feng did not slow. He poured every last ounce of the fused, chaotic energy within him, the legacy of the Titan and the discipline of a lifetime of training, into his fist.
He struck the shield.
In the main hall outside the Heart Chamber, Sophia watched the battle on a cracked, salvaged monitor. Beside her, on a makeshift cot, Anna's eyelids began to flutter. Her breath, which had been shallow, now hitched. A single, soft sound escaped her lips. A human sound. A sigh.
The cure had worked. The machine was dormant. The girl was coming home.
As Sophia wept, a tear of pure, unadulterated joy tracing a path through the grime on her cheek, a wave of incandescent violet light erupted from the Heart Chamber, so bright it overloaded the monitor's sensors.
The impact was not an explosion. It was a cancellation. Lin Feng's Annihilation Fire, a power born of chaotic, unpredictable fusion, struck Adler's shield, a construct of pure, ordered, and perfect energy.
It was a paradox given form. The perfect defense met the unknowable attack.
Adler's crimson eyes, the eyes of a god, widened for the first and last time, not in fear, but in pure, academic disbelief. His perfect equation had just been presented with a variable it could not solve.
The shield did not shatter. It, and the throne, and the withered man fused to it, were simply... unwritten. Erased from existence in a silent, blossoming flower of violet and crimson light that consumed the entire chamber.
The voice of the perfect creator was silenced forever. The psychic pressure over the bunker vanished. The drones fell from the sky, their lights dead. The plasma cannons went cold.
The serpent was dead.
In the center of the silent, smoking, and utterly ruined chamber, Lin Feng stood alone, the last, faint crackles of violet energy fading from his armor. His gamble had paid off. The chaos of life had, in the end, defeated the sterile perfection of the machine.