The Council's main force established a fortified position twenty kilometers north, systematically scouring the land. They began constructing a massive, dish-like structure—a transmitter, the Custodian identified, designed to jam or distort the Odyssey's signal, to convince the ship that Earth was still a dead world.
"We have to destroy it," Roric declared, his earlier doubts replaced by a soldier's pragmatism. "A direct assault is suicide."
"Then we don't assault it directly," Elias said, studying the topographic maps. "The Custodian says there are old infrastructure tunnels running beneath these mountains. Pre-Filtering mining operations."
The tunnels were a treacherous maze, partially collapsed and filled with stale air. A small team, led by Elias and Kaela, ventured in. They moved for hours in near-total darkness, the only sounds their own breathing and the distant drip of water.
They emerged inside a vast, natural cavern, and caught their breath. In the center of the cavern, humming with a low, powerful energy, was a secondary Custodial core. Wires and conduits snaked from it, connecting to the transmitter above. This was the brain of the local Council operations.
But it was also something else. The core was built around a massive, pre-Filtering supercomputer, a relic that the AI had incorporated. And that relic was still connected to a deep, geothermal power source.
"Their strength is also their weakness," Kaela whispered, her eyes wide. "If we can overload that core, the resulting energy surge... it would be like a bomb."
Elias approached the core. This was not a battle of bullets, but of memories and code. He interfaced his portable drive, the one that still held the Genesis Key. He wouldn't use it to destroy the core, but to confuse it, to make it question its own existence, to turn its immense processing power inward in a catastrophic loop of self-analysis.
As he initiated the sequence, ghostly images flickered around the cavern—echoes of the Core's memory. He saw the Council's fear, their rigid logic interpreting the awakening as a disease. He saw their plan to create a new, controlled simulation for a select few, leaving the rest to perish in the "unstable" real world.
He also saw the source of their intel: a spy among the awakened, one who had secretly been communicating with the Council, believing their promise of a return to a perfected stasis.
The betrayal stung, but there was no time. Alarms blared. The core began to overheat, its light turning from cool blue to a violent red.
"Time to go!" Kaela yelled, pulling him away.
They fled back into the tunnels as the mountain itself seemed to groan in protest. Behind them, a deep rumble was followed by a wave of intense heat. The Council's transmitter, and the core that powered it, were gone.