Chapter 38 Here We Go
The corridor hums with low energy as we file into the mission bay one by one, shadows slipping into formation. Final checks. Secured gear. Loaded weapons. The scent of gun oil and steel clings to the air.
We’re minutes from launch.
Jace is beside me as I double-check my vest and pull my gloves tighter. His presence is quiet, steady — like it always is — but now it hums beneath the surface. A thread between us.
He waits until the others are a few steps ahead, then leans in close. “I need to talk to you.”
“Not now.”
He reaches for my hand but I pull away. “No, Jace. I can’t do this with you.”
He freezes. “Please, Isobel. I just need a moment.”
I turn and stare. “What, Jace? You’ve been icy to me all morning, and now you want to talk?”
“I just…” He runs his hand through his hair, then steps up to me, reaching for my face.
“No, Jace.” I smack his hand away.
His eyes harden. “You’re choosing him.”
I stare up into his eyes, like he can see everything inside me. “I said, not now.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. Then he lifts his hand, pulling off his ring, holding it out to me.
“Take it.” His jaw flexes.
“Your Guild ring?” I arch an eyebrow.
“Please, I just need to make sure you’re safe.”
“How will this keep me safe?” I stare at him.
“There’s a tracker embedded in the metal. Noah would be able to track it if anything happens to you.”
I stare down at the ring. It’s icy silver, most likely white gold. Cold, elite. The dark blue sapphire glints with some brightness hidden in its depths. It represents Jace perfectly.
“Fine.” I take the ring and tuck it into the inner lining of my vest, pulling the zipper to secure it. His eyes heat as it rests against my chest.
I turn before he can say anything else.
I fall into step with the team, my weapons balanced across my body, my heart steady in my chest, and Jace’s gaze burning quietly at my side.
The transport hums beneath us, low and steady, like the breath of something alive. None of us speak. The air is too thick, with sweat, with silence, with everything we left unsaid.
Jace sits across from me, rifle resting in his lap, eyes locked forward. His jaw is tight. Focused. The kind of stillness that comes before impact.
Tex is next to me, shoulder to shoulder, warm and solid. He hasn’t said a word since boarding. His leg bounces faintly, and I can see the fire in his eyes, the itch to move, to fight.
Noah’s checking their comms, recalibrating the shared channel one last time. “Ping test: green across all units.”
Luca flashes me a grin like it’s a joke, but even his edges are sharp tonight.
The cabin lights shift from white to red. Five minutes.
The dropship starts its descent, tilting lower through the trees. I can feel the change in air pressure. My stomach flips, and my fingers clench around the harness at my hips.
Outside the window, nothing but darkness and fog.
Our target lies buried beneath a mountain range that looks dead from above, no thermal signatures, no comms. But we know what’s under it.
A fortress. Mercenaries. Prototypes built to kill.
And somewhere inside, the weapon Daniel’s betting his war on.
Jace stands first.
“All right,” he says, voice low. “This is it. We drop in silent, no chatter. Single-file through the north tunnel. Suppressors on. Tex, you take point. Luca, cover rear. Noah, you’re second. Isobel, on me.”
We all nod.
He meets my eyes for half a second longer than necessary, just long enough that I feel it in my chest, and then the bay doors slide open with a hiss. Wind howls through the chamber. A metal staircase drops down, swallowing itself into the dark earth below.
We move. One by one, boots hit steel. Then dirt. Then cold stone.
By the time I reach the bottom, the dropship is already gone, swallowed by fog, the sound of its retreat muffled by the trees.
Silence presses in.
Tex signals forward, rifle up, eyes alert.
We enter the tunnel.
It’s carved from old rock, reinforced in parts with metal beams and rusted scaffolding. Moisture slicks the walls. Our footsteps echo, soft and careful. Every breath tastes like iron and dust.
Luca’s voice whispers in my ear through the comms. “Tunnel forks in thirty. Stay left.”
I move closer to Jace, just behind his right side. He glances back, just once, to check on me, and then we keep moving.
We’re ghosts now. Five shadows beneath the world, slipping into the mouth of something we may not walk out of. But we don’t stop. We move forward. The tunnel narrows before it opens into a junction chamber, stone giving way to steel.
We halt.
Noah moves ahead, crouching low, and pulls out a small device from his belt. The screen glows faintly green as he scans the doorway.
“Motion sensors. Infrared grid. Passive trip alerts,” he mutters. “Nothing lethal, not here. They’re watching movement.”
“How long to loop the feed?” Jace asks.
“Forty seconds if I’m perfect. Sixty if I mess up and we all die.”
“Don’t mess up,” Luca says dryly.
Noah flashes him a tight smile and starts working. Wires coil into the panel beside the door, fingers flying fast, and I watch his jaw tighten in focus.
Tex shifts behind us, watching the rear. His stance is loose, but I can tell he’s ready to lunge at the first shadow.
I glance up. The tunnel’s ceiling bristles with old tech, a collapsed ventilation system, security nodes blinking red. We’re in.
Too far to turn back now.
“Got it,” Noah breathes. “Looping begins, now.”
The door hisses open. We move fast.
The chamber beyond is wide, part lab, part storage. Glass consoles. Abandoned terminals. Crates stamped with blacked-out logos. There’s a faint hum in the air, like the walls are alive.
“Cameras up top,” Jace murmurs. “Noah?”
“Still looped. But we’ve got thirty seconds. Tops.”
We sweep the room.
Tex takes the right flank, disappearing behind a column of crates. Luca scales a short ladder to check the catwalk overhead. I stick close to Jace, my SMG drawn, scanning the far corners.
Nothing.
Too quiet.
Jace gestures to a sealed door on the far side. “That’s our way in. Lab’s through there.”
Noah’s already beside it, cracking the next lock.
“You okay?” Jace murmurs, low enough only I can hear.
I steady my breath. “Yeah.”
He doesn’t ask again.
The door opens with a sigh, revealing a long hallway bathed in artificial white light. Lab coats lie discarded on the floor. A coffee cup, long discarded, sits beside a crashed tablet.
It’s like the whole place was abandoned in a heartbeat.
“Keep eyes up,” Jace says. “If they knew we were coming, they’ll wait till we’re deep.”
Tex swings back into place at the front. We move forward, tight formation, boots silent on the tile.
At the end of the hall, a reinforced door stands sealed with biometric sensors glowing red.
I step closer to read the sign etched above the door in thin block letters:
SECTOR 4 — PROTOTYPE STORAGE
Luca lets out a low whistle. “Looks like we found the right place.”
Jace turns to Noah. “Can you get us in?”
“I can try,” Noah mutters. “But I’ll need time.”
Jace scans the corners. “Then we cover him.”
We form a perimeter around the door as Noah unpacks his tools again, cracking into the wall’s access panel.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Each second feels like a countdown. I flex my fingers around my weapon. We’re here. This is it.
The door slides open with a sharp hiss. Cold air rushes out, metallic and sterile.
We step inside. The lights flicker overhead, dimmer than the hallway, tinged faintly blue. The room is massive, rectangular, lined with reinforced glass cases and dark crates, each one labeled in code.
Weapons meant for people like us, to kill people like us.
Noah’s voice is a whisper through the comms. “I’ve never seen half this tech before.”
“Don’t touch anything unless I say,” Jace warns.
We move through the aisles, splitting into a wide sweep. My boots click softly against the floor. Every surface reflects ghostly shadows, warped by glass and frost.
I pause in front of one case.
Inside is something long and sleek, like a rifle, but not. Its barrel is jagged, non-standard. There’s no trigger. Only a pulse module.
This isn’t normal weaponry.
This is black market innovation. This is Daniel’s playground.
Beside me, Luca exhales low. “You feel that?”
I nod. It’s not just the chill. It’s the silence. Too deep. Too empty. Like we’re walking through a memory. Not a live facility.
Jace calls out softly, “We sweep fast. Mark anything that looks active. Extraction team is ten minutes behind.”
As the others move ahead, I pause, fingers resting on the side of one glass panel.
And I murmur, almost to myself, “This is too easy.”
The words hang in the air.
Jace hears. He stops walking, turns halfway back toward me. His jaw tightens. “Say that again?”
“It’s too clean,” I whisper. “Too quiet. No guards. No heat signatures. No dead ends. It’s like… he wanted us to get in.”
The air shifts. Behind us, the door slams shut with a mechanical shriek. A loud clunk echoes through the chamber, magnetic locks slamming into place.
Tex curses. “Shit.”
Lights above us snap red. A voice crackles to life over the comm system, deep, distorted by static. But the tone is unmistakable.
Calm. Cold. Familiar.
Daniel.
“Welcome to my house,” he says.
I freeze.
“Did you think I wouldn’t see you coming? That I wouldn’t recognize my own blood walking through my front door?”
Jace raises his weapon, eyes scanning the corners. “Cover! Now!”
We scatter, behind crates, under cover, weapons up. But no guards pour in. No assault team.
Just his voice. Filling the chamber like a ghost.
“You always had her fire, Isobel,” Daniel continues. “I almost snuffed it out, but you’ve spent too long learning from people who don’t understand what true power is.”
“Shut it down,” Jace hisses to Noah.
“I’m trying,” Noah growls, ripping into the wall’s control panel. “He’s overridden the primary circuit. We’re locked in.”
I clench my jaw. My grip tightens on my SMG.
“I should’ve killed you both the day I found her,” Daniel says. “But you…” There’s a soft, thoughtful pause. “You were a good experiment. Let’s see how far you’ve come.”
The lights cut out.
Darkness swallows the chamber.
Then— a faint, electric whirring. Something powering up. Multiple somethings.
Behind the glass, one of the crates shifts. And then another.
Inside them?
Movement.
Jace curses under his breath. “He’s not sending guards.”
He lifts his weapon as the first crate door blasts open and a humanoid form steps into the red-lit chamber.
“He’s sending machines.”
The first machine lunges from the shadows.
It’s fast. Too fast.
Metal slams into the floor with a screech as the humanoid form bounds forward, tall, silver-sleek, no face. Just a glowing red eye at its center and clawed limbs that move with terrifying precision.
Jace fires.
Rounds punch into its shoulder, sparking on contact, but it doesn’t stop. It adjusts, jerks sideways, and comes again.
“DOWN!” Jace roars.
I dive left as the bot smashes through a crate where I stood seconds before. Splinters explode across the floor.
Tex meets it head-on.
His fist crashes into the bot’s side, then again — metal-on-metal, raw power — but the thing absorbs it, twists, and backhands him across the chamber.
“Tex!” I scream.
He hits the floor hard, rolling to recover. “Still alive,” he grunts. “Bastard’s got a hydraulic core.”
More crates shatter open. Three. Five. Seven. Figures spill into the room, some humanoid, others animalistic, all fast and brutal. A storm of claws and metal limbs. Gleaming red sensors lock onto us, their prey.
Noah drops to one knee and fires a round into a jointed leg. It drops. Sparks fly. “Aim for the seams!” he shouts.
Jace spins beside me, unloading a mag into another one’s torso, then switching to a sidearm in the same breath. “Go for the connectors. They’re armoring the cores.”
“Since when do prototypes move like this?” Luca yells, ducking a spinning blade that nearly takes off his head.
I bolt forward, sliding under a table as one of the smaller machines lurches past me. Its head swivels 180 degrees. It leaps. I twist, jam one of my daggers into its neck seam — pop — and wrench it free just before it collapses in a rain of sparks.
My chest heaves.
I look up.
The room is chaos.
Red lights pulse. Jace is shouting orders. Tex grabs one bot by the arm and rips it off with brute force. Noah hurls an EMP charge across the floor, and one machine collapses in a twitching heap.
Luca’s knife slashes into exposed wiring, spraying black fluid. “I’m gonna need a damn upgrade after this!”
I duck behind cover, fire a burst of rounds into a creeping spiderlike drone. “You’re doing fine!”
A massive bot — easily twice my size — thunders toward me. My SMG’s empty. I throw it down, yank the pistol from my vest, and fire point-blank into its knee joint.
It staggers.
Jace is there in an instant, vaulting onto its back, planting a round directly into the control node. The bot collapses in a heap.
“You good?” he breathes, reaching for me.
“Still breathing.”
We spin, backs to each other, scanning the room. The last machine twitches, half-melted by Noah’s EMP, Luca finishing it with a clean strike.
And then…
Silence.
The red lights still flicker. The air tastes like ozone and metal.
I lower my weapon slowly, breath ragged.
We’re alive. Barely.