The wind on the exterior platform was a physical monster. It tore at their clothes, trying to rip them from the spire and cast them into the churning, storm-tossed ocean kilometers below. The open door to the biodome hissed shut behind them, sealing away the garden's impossible peace and leaving them in a howling, vertical battlefield.
The spire was screaming. Not just with alarms, but with the groan of stressed metal and the shriek of protesting structural supports. Kalpit's sabotage of the fan blade had done more than create an escape route; it had critically wounded the beast.
"This whole section is unstable!" Anasuya yelled, her feet braced against the gale. "We need to get off this spire before it tears itself apart!"
<"The Garuda is your only way out,">> Atri's voice, sharp with adrenaline, cut through the static. <"But it's on the landing platform, three kilometers around the spire's circumference and twenty levels down. And worse, Kali's response is no longer just a system protocol. It's personal.">>
As if on cue, a new wave of klaxons blared, deeper and more menacing than the standard alerts.
// THREAT LEVEL: AVATAR // PROTOCOL: UNMAKING // DEPLOYING: THE WRAITHS //
"Wraiths?" Kalpit asked, his eyes scanning the impossible architecture for a way down.
"Kali's elite," Anasuya answered grimly. "They aren't Enforcers or Purifiers. They're his personal hunters. Cybernetically augmented assassins who specialize in high-speed, three-dimensional combat. They say one Wraith is worth a hundred Enforcers."
A series of launch bays slid open on a level far above them. With a sound like tearing silk, six figures shot out into the storm.
VREEEEEEEEE!
They were clad in skeletal, shadow-grey armor that clung to their frames. High-yield grav-chutes on their backs allowed them to defy gravity, maneuvering through the storm with the terrifying grace of birds of prey. Each one wielded twin, humming energy katanas. They descended upon them, not in a clumsy rush, but in a perfect, encircling spiral.
There was no cover, no retreat. They were on an open platform, kilometers in the air, against a foe that owned the sky.
"Split!" Kalpit yelled, his training with Parashurama taking over. He wasn't a scavenger anymore. He was a combatant.
He used his Svadhisthana, not to slow time, but to flow. He pushed off the railing, sliding down a massive, curved support strut, using the howling wind and slick metal to his advantage. Two Wraiths broke formation, following him, their grav-chutes whining as they adjusted their trajectory.
Anasuya held her ground on the platform, pulling two heavy, cylindrical grenades from her belt. She armed them and hurled them not at the approaching Wraiths, but above them. The Wraiths, their tactical processors identifying the projectiles, ignored them, their focus on the target below.
The grenades exploded, not with fire, but with a massive, localized gravimetric pulse.
THOOOM! THOOOM!
The four Wraiths attacking Anasuya were suddenly caught in a gravity well a hundred times stronger than normal. Their perfect flight faltered. They were slammed downwards, their grav-chutes straining and sparking as they tried to compensate. It was a soldier's trap, using the enemy's own technology against them.
It bought her seconds. She abandoned the platform, leaping onto a network of coolant pipes and sliding down, chasing after Kalpit.
Kalpit was in a desperate, vertical duel. He was sliding, running, and leaping down the side of the wounded spire, the architecture itself his only weapon. His Muladhara-sight was on full blast, showing him which panels would hold his weight, which pipes were about to rupture under the spire's death throes.
One of the Wraiths pursuing him swooped in, energy katanas a glittering arc of death. Kalpit didn't try to block. He couldn't. Instead, he channeled a tiny, focused burst of Manipura energy into the support strut he was on. The ancient, over-stressed metal, persuaded by his will, groaned and buckled.
Kalpit leaped, grabbing onto a lower service ladder, just as the entire strut tore loose. The Wraith, its trajectory locked, was forced to swerve violently to avoid being crushed by the multi-ton slab of falling durasteel.
The second Wraith was on him. It landed silently on a parallel beam, its katanas held in a ready stance. "You cannot run from your correction, Anomaly."
Kalpit was cornered. But Parashurama's first lesson returned to him. Become the mountain. He anchored his root, his feet magnetizing to the beam through a surge of Prana. He held the heavy ironwood staff—which had miraculously survived the chaos—in his hands.
The Wraith charged, a blur of grey armor and slicing light. Kalpit did not move. He waited. He listened with his Anahata, feeling the cold, empty Prana of the machine-assassin. He watched with his Ajna, predicting not its moves, but its rhythm.
At the last possible second, he moved. Not to block, but to redirect. He used his staff not as a weapon, but as a lever. He caught the Wraith's intersecting blades on the dense, unyielding wood and used the assassin's own momentum, his own flow, to pivot and spin. The Wraith, its perfect attack turned against it, shot past him, unable to halt its own velocity.
Kalpit didn't let the moment go. He swung the staff in a final, powerful arc, a perfect strike powered by his core, and smashed it into the Wraith's grav-chute pack.
KRAK-THOOM!
The device exploded, sending the Wraith tumbling helplessly into the abyss, a fading scream of static swallowed by the storm.
Anasuya landed on the beam beside him. "The others are right behind us!"
They were out of time and out of tricks. They looked down. The landing platform, and the silent, dark shape of the Garuda, was just a few hundred meters below. Guarding it was the Wraith leader, who had ignored the chase and simply descended to their objective, waiting for them. It stood on the skiff's hull, katanas held ready. It had correctly predicted their goal.
"This ends here," the Wraith leader's voice crackled, a sound of finality.
"Atri," Kalpit whispered into his comm, his mind forging a final, desperate gambit. "Is there any power left in the Garuda? Any at all?"
<"Barely! Emergency capacitors are at maybe two percent! Life support and the cockpit lights, nothing more!">>
"Is the main drive capacitor one of them?" Kalpit asked, his eyes locked on the Wraith leader.
<"What? No, that's completely drained, it would take hours to— Oh. Oh, you lunatic. I see what you're thinking. Maybe. But the feedback... it'll fry the entire ship! Permanently!">>
"Just get the ramp open," Kalpit said. "And be ready to give me a push."
He looked at Anasuya. "Trust me one more time."
They leaped, a final, desperate descent towards the platform. The Wraith leader watched them come, a patient hunter waiting for its prey to fall into its grasp. As they landed, it charged, a vision of chrome and silver death.
Anasuya laid down covering fire, forcing the leader to weave and block, while Kalpit ran not to fight, but for the now-open ramp of the dead skiff. He scrambled inside, plunging the cockpit back into darkness. He placed his hands on the cold, dead control surface.
The Wraith leader contemptuously slapped Anasuya's rifle aside and backhanded her across the platform, then turned to finish the real target. It stalked up the ramp into the dark ship. "Nowhere left to hide, Anomaly."
It stepped into the cockpit. Kalpit was waiting, his hands on the console, his eyes closed.
"Atri. Now," he commanded.
<"Pushing the emergency charge to the drive! May the Sages forgive my ship!">>
The two percent of the Garuda's emergency power, a current that was meant to run lights and air, was shunted directly into the primary drive capacitor. It was like trying to jump-start a fusion reactor with a watch battery. It was not enough to start the engine, but it was enough to energize the coil for a single, terrifying second.
Kalpit did not wait. The moment he felt the flicker of energy, he poured his own Prana, his own Manipura fire, directly into the system. He became the battery. He forced his own life energy into the heart of the dead machine, mixing with the pathetic trickle of power from Atri.
The main drive, a massive quantum-lift engine, did not start. It did the only thing it could with such a chaotic, unorthodox power surge.
It discharged.
VMMMMMM-KRAKOOOM!
The entire engine assembly arced, releasing its stored energy in a single, undirected, hemispherical blast of pure electromagnetic and gravimetric force. It was the ship's death rattle, a catastrophic system failure of epic proportions.
The Wraith leader, standing right at the epicenter, was engulfed. Its sophisticated armor, designed to deflect energy weapons, was not designed to withstand the raw, chaotic force of a dying FTL drive. Its systems were instantly fried. Its physical form was subjected to a dozen different gravities at once. It was crushed, stretched, and then atomized in a silent flash of blue-white light.
The blast erupted out of the ship, blowing the ramp off, tearing the wings from the fuselage, and sending the already damaged skiff skidding across the platform.
Kalpit was thrown back, his body screaming, every circuit of his Prana overloaded from the feedback. Blackness threatened, but Anasuya was there, hauling his smoking, half-conscious form from the wreckage of the cockpit.
She dragged him into one of the crash-couches in the now-exposed fuselage. The skiff was a skeleton of what it had been. But miraculously, one engine, protected by the blast's specific trajectory, sputtered to life.
"Atri! We're alive! The engine—!"
<"I see it! It's running on fumes and raw hope! Get out of there! I'm overriding its safeties! This is a one-way trip!">>
With a sound of tearing metal and a final, desperate roar, the skeletal remains of the Garuda lifted off the platform. It shot away from the dying spire, not with the grace of a skiff, but with the wobbling, uncontrolled trajectory of a broken bird.
They streaked away into the heart of the storm, leaving the chaos and the blaring alarms of Spire Zero behind them. They were alive. They were free. And in their wake, they left a wounded god, a broken fortress, and the first, true spark of a galaxy-shaking rebellion.
As the mangled ship screamed through the clouds, Vashistha's calm voice entered Kalpit's weary mind, a cool balm on his burned soul.
<"The broadcast has ceased. From the deepest sectors of the Sump to the highest spires of the elite, millions of souls, for a fraction of a second, felt the song of the machine... falter. They do not know what it was. But they felt it. You have given them a question where before there was only an answer. You have given them doubt. And in the Kali Yuga, doubt is the most fertile soil for the seeds of Dharma. Well done. The war for the soul of humanity has truly begun.">>