The Prefect's presence was a palpable weight in the room. He radiated an aura of absolute, systemic authority, a man whose every whim was a command executable by the very walls around them. The two crimson-armored Enforcers flanking him were clearly a command variant, their weapons larger, their armor thicker.
"Seal them in," the Prefect commanded, his voice cold and clipped.
With a deep, grinding groan, the massive blast door began to close behind him, trapping them all in the chaotic, snow-filled captive bay. He wasn't trying to escape; he was creating a dedicated execution chamber.
Kaelen and the Jwala warriors immediately shifted their stance, forming a protective wall in front of the confused, stirring captives, their obsidian spears aimed at the new, formidable threat.
The Prefect ignored them. His gaze was locked solely on Kalpit. "MAYA has authorized my full administrative access to deal with your... infestation," he sneered. "Standard protocols have failed. It's time for a manual system purge."
He raised his free hand, the one not holding the plasma pistol. A series of holographic interfaces sprung to life around his arm. With a flick of his finger, he tapped a single, blood-red icon. // PROTOCOL: REPRESS //.
A high-frequency, subsonic pulse emanated from hidden speakers in the walls. It was a wave of pure, suppressive energy. Kalpit had felt it before, in the city. It was the background radiation of MAYA's control, the "song of the machine" Chhaya had spoken of, but amplified a thousand times.
To the wasteland warriors, it was a deeply unpleasant, nauseating drone. But to Kalpit, whose entire being was now attuned to the flow of Prana, it was like being plunged into a vat of thick, suffocating tar. His connection to the ambient energy of the room was choked off. The fire of his Manipura sputtered violently, as if starved of oxygen. He felt a profound, system-wide weakness wash over him, his knees buckling.
"Struggling, glitch?" the Prefect mocked, seeing the effect. "That is the sound of Order. The frequency of Truth. Your chaotic, sentimental 'powers' are nothing but a dissonance in the perfect symphony. A noise to be silenced."
Anasuya, who seemed less affected, reacted first. Her training in AsuraCorp tactics gave her an insight the others lacked. "He's not a warrior!" she shouted to the Jwala. "He's a system operator! His strength is the room, not his body! Cut him off from his console!"
Kaelen and two of his warriors, understanding instantly, charged. They didn't aim for the Prefect; they aimed for the crimson Enforcers, who moved to intercept. The Enforcers were powerful, but the Jwala were now fighting on familiar ground. They used the stasis pods for cover, their movements fluid, their obsidian spears finding the vulnerable joints in the thick armor with deadly precision.
While the Jwala engaged the bodyguards, Anasuya rushed the Prefect herself, her vibro-knife humming. She was fast, a blur of motion through the settling sedative snow.
The Prefect didn't even flinch. He swiped another icon on his arm-console. // DEPLOY: STASIS FIELD //.
A shimmering wall of transparent, solidified time erupted from the floor between him and Anasuya. She slammed into it, her momentum utterly arrested. She was frozen mid-stride, her face a mask of furious effort, held as perfectly as a fly in amber.
The Prefect let out a sigh of bored disappointment. "Predictable," he said, and turned his full attention back to the struggling Kalpit. "Now, where were we?"
Kalpit was on one knee, his head bowed, fighting against the crushing sonic suppression. His powers were being smothered. The lessons of Parashurama, of bleeding and enduring, of fighting with an empty tank, echoed in his mind. The body is the vessel... the mind is the liar.
The suppressive field was external. It attacked his connection to the world, to his fuel. But the fire itself... the fire was within.
He forced his mind to focus, to ignore the crushing weight. He pulled his awareness inward, away from the choked-off connection to the earth, and down into the very core of his Manipura. The flame was a sputtering ember, yes, but it was his. It did not belong to the room. It did not belong to the system. It was born of his own will.
With a defiant roar, he forced it to burn brighter, feeding it not with external Prana, but with his own life-force, his own stamina. He found his feet, his body trembling with the strain, a faint, golden aura pushing back against the suppressive pressure.
The Prefect's sneer faltered, replaced by a flicker of genuine surprise. "Resisting the ordained frequency? You are a stubborn little bug." He raised his plasma pistol, its barrel glowing with a lethal heat. "No matter. Bugs exist to be squashed."
He fired.
The bolt of plasma shot across the room. Kalpit, weak and off-balance, couldn't dodge. But he didn't need to.
clank.
A flash of movement from the crowd of newly-awakened captives. A metal nutrient tray, thrown with surprising force, knocked the Prefect's aim aside. The plasma bolt went wide, vaporizing a bank of computer terminals.
One of the captives, a woman with the haunted, defiant eyes of a Sump-dweller, was now standing, holding another tray like a weapon. "Get away from him," she snarled, her voice raw from disuse.
The Prefect stared at her, his expression turning from annoyance to disbelief, then to rage. "You... the harvest... dare to defy the hand that feeds your dreams?" He tapped another command on his console. // EXECUTE: NEURAL PURGE //.
The woman screamed, clutching her head as a wave of punishing psychic feedback shot through the neural lace at the back of her neck. But she did not fall. The others, seeing her defiance, began to rise. A man with the scarred knuckles of a pit-fighter. A young woman with the sharp eyes of a data-scavenger. They were weak, disoriented, but they were no longer docile sheep. The single missed note in MAYA's song, the silence that Kalpit had created, had left a hairline crack in their conditioning. A sliver of doubt.
Seeing another human fighting for them, in the real, tangible world, was the wedge that broke the crack wide open. They began to stumble forward, forming a ragged, human shield in front of Kalpit.
"You see?" Kalpit said, his voice gaining strength as he felt their defiant spirits bolstering his own through his Anahata. "This is a power you can't control. A variable you can't predict. This is humanity."
The Prefect's face was a mask of pure, logical fury. His system was predicated on the captives' absolute docility. This was not just a rebellion; it was a fundamental violation of the laws of his world.
"Insignificant," he hissed, his composure finally breaking. He began typing a rapid sequence of commands into his console, preparing to overload the neural laces of every captive in the room, to boil their minds in their own skulls.
In that moment of focused rage, he made his final mistake. He forgot his most immediate prisoner.
Behind him, Anasuya, frozen in the stasis field, opened her eyes. She hadn't been able to move her body, but she could still think. The Prefect, in his arrogance, had assumed she was neutralized. He had set the stasis field on a simple timer, already allocating his processing power to the new problem of the rebellious captives.
The field flickered and died.
Anasuya did not hesitate. Her body, coiled like a spring for agonizing seconds, exploded into motion. She lunged.
The Prefect heard the whisper of her movement and tried to turn, his eyes wide with shock.
He was too late.
Her vibro-knife plunged deep into the holographic console on his arm, shattering it in a shower of sparks and corrupted light.
SHNNK-KRZZZZT!
The link was cut.
The subsonic suppression field instantly died. The room was plunged back into a relative quiet.
Kalpit felt the weight lift, and Prana rushed back into his system like a breaking dam. His Manipura roared back to life, a blazing sun in his core.
The Prefect stared at his smoking, ruined console, then at Anasuya, a look of utter incomprehension on his face. "My... connection..."
"Privileges revoked," she snarled.
Without his console, without his connection to the facility, the Prefect was just a man in an expensive suit holding a pistol. He raised the weapon, a last, desperate act.
Kalpit was already there. He flowed across the room, covering the distance in a single, fluid heartbeat. He did not punch. He did not blast. He placed two fingers on the Prefect's forehead, right over his brow.
The Ajna chakra. The third eye.
He pushed a single, calming, irresistible thought directly into the Prefect's mind, backed by the full, awakened power of his own will.
Sleep.
The Prefect's eyes went wide, then glazed over. His body went slack. He dropped the pistol and collapsed to the floor in a boneless heap, deeply and peacefully unconscious. The battle was over. The farm was theirs.