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Nora stepped forward and placed her hand on the security pad. Her Pip-Boy chirped, broadcasting an override signal she had stolen from Shaun's personal console weeks before.
But before Nora could finish the override, the door's console lit up with a sharp pulse of red.
Then came the hiss of a nearby pressure seal releasing—a sound she'd come to dread. It was sharp, clinical, cold. Like the Institute itself. And from the left hallway—a section they hadn't fully cleared—a squad emerged.
No, not a squad.
A blade.
Coursers.
Four of them. Jet black armor, reflex-coated for optical interference. Silent. Methodical. Deadly.
And behind them, another wave of Gen-2 synths. These weren't the disorganized mobs from earlier. This was a coordinated strike. A kill team. The Institute had finally deployed its apex predators—the real elite.
Nora barely had time to shout, "Contact left!" before the hallway lit up green.
Plasma bolts screamed through the corridor like vengeful spirits, slamming into bulkheads and steel columns. The noise was deafening. Heat rushed past her face. One round scorched the side of her helmet—if she'd turned her head a second later, it would've punched clean through her temple.
Sico reacted instantly.
He shoulder-charged the left wall for cover, barking into comms, "All units, fallback pattern Sierra! Defensive arc, left corridor!"
The Power Armor squad moved as one, years of training compressed into seconds. Ramos dropped a smoke canister that exploded in a thick cloud of grey-white mist. Treadwell deployed a portable barrier with a whirring hiss, and it locked into the floor with a seismic clang. The air tasted like burned plastic and ionized metal.
But the Coursers didn't flinch.
They came through the smoke like wraiths. Calm. Quiet. They didn't waste ammo. Their shots were short, precise. Tactical. They weren't here to delay.
They were here to kill.
One of them vaulted a waist-high console and dropped into a slide, firing three shots that clipped Treadwell's hip actuator. Sparks flew. The Power Armor trooper dropped to one knee but kept firing. The Courser aimed for the visor.
Sico moved faster.
With a guttural roar, he surged from behind cover, his T-60 servos whining in protest. He barreled into the Courser mid-motion, tackled him against the far wall with bone-crushing force, and drove his combat knife straight through the bastard's throat seals.
The Courser gurgled. Spasmed. Died.
Sico didn't stop moving.
"Ramos! Suppress the right flank!"
"On it!" Ramos barked, rotating his scattergun into a high-arc firing mode and unleashing a wall of plasma that seared down the corridor, buying them precious seconds.
Nora snapped back into focus.
She dove behind a workbench, pulled her laser rifle tight to her shoulder, and squeezed off three shots. The first two missed—but the third punched straight through a Gen-2's cranial unit. The synth jerked backward like a puppet with cut strings.
Another Courser ducked behind a column and returned fire—almost tagged her in the chestplate. Her armor absorbed the hit, but the force still knocked her into the bench hard enough to bruise a rib.
She hissed through her teeth and keyed her comm.
"MacCready! We need back-up at the command hall. Coursers—four, maybe more. Gen-2s in support. They're trying to bottle us in."
MacCready's voice came through, breathless. "I'm two corridors out. Moving fast. Hold the door."
That was the plan. Hold the door.
The last door.
It was less than twenty meters away now, glowing cold and untouched while all hell broke loose around it. They were this close—and the Institute knew it.
Another synth rushed the barricade. Ramos caught it mid-stride with a blast of plasma, vaporizing the thing's legs. It writhed on the ground, still trying to crawl forward and shoot. Nora ended it with a clean shot to the optic array.
Sico was already moving again, diving low behind a security post as two Coursers zeroed in on him. One flanked right, the other left. The flanker tossed a flash grenade—Nora screamed, "Eyes down!" and turned just in time.
The world went white.
Her ears rang like church bells. Her vision swam.
She opened fire anyway.
Blind shots. Desperate.
She didn't need to see. She just needed to keep them pinned.
A second later, someone grabbed her by the collar and yanked her hard behind cover—it was Sico.
"You good?" he barked, his voice distant in her ringing ears.
"Still breathing," she coughed.
He grunted. "That's all I need."
He vaulted the security post and laid down suppressive fire toward the right corridor while Nora recovered.
The Coursers kept advancing.
They weren't invincible—but they were close. One caught a direct hit from Treadwell's plasma thrower and kept moving, even as its armor hissed and peeled away from the impact. It closed the distance and struck Treadwell in the helmet with a shock baton. Sparks flew. The massive Power Armor unit reeled, stunned.
Sico lunged.
He caught the Courser mid-swing, wrenched the baton from its hand, and drove his elbow into the Courser's jaw so hard it snapped sideways. Then he swung the baton back into the Courser's chest, twice, thrice—until it stopped twitching.
"Two down," he growled. "Two more to go."
But they were running out of room. And time.
Then MacCready arrived.
The corridor behind them exploded in light and sound—MacCready's team opened up with suppressed plasma rifles, targeting the Gen-2s from behind. The synths turned just in time to die—two fell instantly, their chests torn open by green fire.
MacCready slid into cover beside Nora, panting hard. "Thought you might need a little help."
"You're late," she replied, smirking.
"You're welcome."
Another Gen-2 dropped as his second-in-command—a wiry commando named Gale—put a round clean through its head.
With MacCready's squad pinching from behind, the momentum shifted.
The remaining two Coursers tried to fall back—but they had nowhere to run.
Sico caught the third mid-stride, ripped its rifle away, and shot it in the back before it could leap over a barricade. It fell with a thud and didn't get back up.
The fourth Courser—clearly the leader—dropped smoke and attempted a lateral escape, firing suppressive bursts toward MacCready. Nora stepped up onto the barricade, used her height to spot his silhouette through the dispersing smoke, and squeezed off a single laser pulse.
The Courser went still.
Dropped.
Silence.
Just like that, it was over.
Ash drifted down like snowflakes. The corridor stank of ozone and burning circuits. The floor was slick with synth fluid and scorched metal. And past the haze, the command chamber door still glowed, untouched.
Sico stepped forward. "You alright?" he asked Nora, scanning her for injuries.
She nodded, brushing dust off her armor. "Still got one override left in me."
"Then let's finish this."
MacCready took a position by the corridor entrance, guarding against more incoming waves. "We'll hold the flank. You go get him."
Nora turned back to the door.
No more interruptions.
She rekeyed the security console, and this time—no red lights. No overrides. No locked-out sequences.
Just a soft beep. Then the door slid open with a whisper, revealing the heart of the Institute.
Shaun's sanctum.
The command nexus.
It was quiet inside. Too quiet.
Cool blue lights glowed softly against the glass-paneled walls. Monitors lined the far edge, displaying status readouts from the Institute's core systems. There were no guards. No scientists. Just a single figure standing at the center console, hands folded behind his back.
Shaun.
He turned as they entered, slow and calm, his white coat pristine—untouched by the violence outside.
"Mother," he said, as if greeting her for tea. "I was wondering how long it would take."
Sico raised his weapon—but Nora held up her hand.
"I've got this."
Sico stepped back, his armor groaning.
She walked forward slowly, pulse steady now. No more fury. No more doubt.
Just purpose.
"I tried to warn you," she said quietly. "Tried to make you see."
Shaun gave a faint smile. "I saw. I just didn't care."
Behind her, Sico's gauntlet tightened around his weapon.
Shaun walked to the console, casually tapping commands.
"You've done well, considering," he said. "Your little rebellion. Your Freemasons Republic. Charming, in a way. I didn't think you had it in you. But now you've breached the heart of everything, and the Commonwealth will fall into chaos again. Congratulations."
Nora didn't respond. She walked to the opposite side of the console, watching him. Studying.
"Is that what you think this is? Chaos?" she asked.
"I think it's the same mistake every generation makes. They tear down what they don't understand. What they're too frightened to control."
"We didn't come here to destroy," she said, and her voice sharpened. "We came to stop you. To save the people you abandoned."
Shaun shook his head slowly. "And yet, I'm still in control of every system in this place."
Nora smiled coldly.
"Not anymore."
She pressed the override on her Pip-Boy.
The screen on the main console flickered.
"Transfer complete," a robotic voice announced.
Sico stepped forward.
The monitors began to shift—one by one, the systems rerouted. Synth production. Surveillance. Biometric protocols. Power regulation. All now displaying Freemasons Republic control tags.
Shaun's face paled.
"What have you done?"
"What you were too arrogant to imagine," Nora said. "We didn't just break in. We took over. Every subroutine. Every relay frequency. Every teleportation node."
She leaned closer. "You're not in control anymore, Shaun. We are."
He stared at her, the illusion of superiority cracking.
Shaun's face paled.
"What have you done?"
"What you were too arrogant to imagine," Nora said. "We didn't just break in. We took over. Every subroutine. Every relay frequency. Every teleportation node."
She leaned closer, her voice edged with a heat she'd kept buried for months. "You're not in control anymore, Shaun. We are."
The air in the command nexus felt like it thickened, charged with the static of crushed illusions. The soft hum of the control panels, the flickering blue lights reflecting off the glass walls—they were all too calm, too gentle for the war that had just detonated between them.
Shaun stared at the main console as it flickered again. Red tags. Republic control. Error logs. Lockout overrides. His name, his authorization—erased. Disarmed. Null.
And only then did he truly seem to realize.
"You… you used me," he said. Not with rage at first. Not yet. With disbelief. His voice was brittle. Smaller than she'd ever heard it. "You've been planning this… from the beginning."
Nora stood still, back straight, expression unreadable.
"I gave you access," Shaun continued. "I gave you trust. My office, my system protocols. I opened every door because I thought… I thought you wanted the same thing I did."
She almost laughed at the naivety in his voice.
"I didn't need to plan it from the beginning," she said quietly. "Just long enough to see who you really were. Long enough to watch you speak of the surface like it was diseased. Long enough to know I'd never let you do to anyone else what you did to me."
Shaun's hand twitched over the console. He wasn't trying to access it now—he knew it was locked. But it was habit. Control was habit.
"Where did you get the override?" he asked, voice dropping lower, colder.
Nora took a step forward.
"You left it in your office," she said. "Three weeks ago, when you had me walk you through the new relay calibration. You had a flask of tea on the desk. Jasmine and mint. The override key was in the drawer under your left hand."
Shaun's eyes narrowed.
"You knew I trusted you."
"I knew you were watching me," she snapped, voice rising. "Every time I blinked. Every time I breathed. You thought I wouldn't notice. Thought I was just some grateful mother finally reunited with her long-lost son."
Her eyes burned now—not with tears, but with fire. The fire of every sleepless night in Sanctuary. Every grave she'd buried. Every corpse she'd found strung up on rusty overpasses. Every lie she'd been told since stepping out of Vault 111.
Shaun stepped back.
"I offered you something greater than the surface," he said, almost pleading. "You could've stood with me. Helped rebuild it from the top down. Technology. Clean water. Medical research. What you've done—this is chaos, Mother."
He said the word like a wound. Like it cost him something.
Nora shook her head, slowly, as her fingers curled around the butt of her laser rifle.
"You think this is about chaos?"
He went silent. That was when the last mask dropped from her face.
"You were stolen from me," she said, voice shaking now—not with fear, but with the fury of a wound that never healed. "They took you. They let your father bleed out on a frozen coffin and left me in a frozen coffin for two hundred years. And then they raised you in a place like this. Under glass. Under lies. Surrounded by people who told you you were special because you were born from a dead woman."
Shaun's jaw tightened.
"I didn't ask for any of that."
"And yet you embraced it," she hissed. "You let them make you their prophet. Their director. You ruled over their labs like a king pretending not to be a prisoner."
He turned away from her, his back stiff. "I survived. I adapted."
"You changed," she growled.
"No," he said, spinning to face her again, and now the rage bled through. "You changed. You pretended to care. You played your role, just like every other opportunist in the wastes. But you were supposed to be different. You were supposed to be better."
"I was," she said. "Until they made you into this."
Her voice cracked on that last word.
This. This polished stranger. This sterile king. This child who'd grown up into something the real Shaun never could have imagined.
"You think the surface is filled with monsters," she said. "But down here? You built your own. With perfect skin and synthetic smiles. With numbered serial tags. You play god, and you're proud of it."
Shaun stared at her for a long, empty moment. He looked old, suddenly. Not frail—but tired. As though he'd lived a dozen lives in a single one, and none of them ever gave him rest.
"I wanted to build a future," he said, almost whispering. "Not just for us. For all of them. But I knew the surface would never cooperate. They never do. They tear down what they don't understand."
Nora stepped forward, slowly.
"So you thought the only answer was control."
"Without it, there's only entropy."
"Without it," she said, "there's freedom."
They stood across from each other, the war still burning on the edges of the Institute. Distant gunfire. A security alert blinking silently on one of the dormant monitors. But here—inside this last quiet chamber—was where it would end.
"I came down here," she said, "hoping I'd find my son."
Her voice dropped, soft now. A whisper that barely carried across the floor.
"But I didn't. I found the ghost of what they made you into."
Shaun didn't speak.
"I buried your father in the garden outside Sanctuary," she continued. "With his wedding ring. With the holotape of your first steps."
Shaun's mouth trembled, just slightly.
"You were so small," she whispered. "You were the only thing in this world worth saving."
Her voice broke, finally.
"But I couldn't save you from them."
There was silence again.
A silence filled with the sound of breath, and history, and pain.
And then Shaun turned back to the main console. He looked down at the screen that now obeyed someone else's voice. His legacy—rewritten by the very past he had tried to seal off.
He pressed a button. Nothing happened.
The system rejected his authorization.
All of it.
Finally, he turned to her again. And for the first time, there was no arrogance. No god-complex. Just a man standing in the ruins of his own conviction.
"What now?" he asked.
Nora inhaled slowly. Then let it out.
"Now you live with it."
He blinked.
"You're not going to kill me?"
"I don't have to," she said. "You built a kingdom out of glass. Now you get to watch it shatter."
Shaun turned back to the monitors, as if trying to find some part of it still intact. Some last fiber of the dream.
But it was gone.
Every team had reported in. All sectors locked. All synth programs paused. All surveillance scrubbed.
The Freemasons Republic now stood at the center of the world's last myth.
Behind her, Sico shifted.
"We've got the rest of the command staff corralled near Synth Retention," he said into comms. "No resistance. They're waiting for orders."
"Get them out," Nora said. "Secure transport back to the relay deck. We'll finish the evac from there."
"And Shaun?"
She turned back toward the console. Shaun didn't move. Didn't speak. He just stared into the glass.
"He stays."
Sico nodded.
"No restraints?"
"He's not a threat anymore."
A quiet hum passed between them.
The silence hung heavy, like a fog that refused to lift. Even the soft hum of the Institute's servers seemed subdued now, like the machines themselves sensed that something sacred—or monstrous—had been undone.
Shaun stood still, eyes locked on a future that would no longer answer to him.
Nora turned away.
She didn't need to look at him anymore. She had already said everything she needed to say. Some part of her hoped—feared—that he would respond. That he'd call out to her, say something that would scrape through the wall of whatever the Institute had turned him into. But he didn't.
He stayed there, silent. Staring at the death of his illusion.
Sico's Power Armor servos hissed as he stepped closer to her, visor locking in on her expression before he glanced at Shaun.
"I'll get MacCready," he said, voice low and even, "and have him post up here with his squad. We'll move Shaun once the dust settles."
Nora gave a slow nod, grateful for Sico's instincts. He didn't need her to explain what she was feeling. Didn't ask her to clarify. He just acted.
"Don't let him near the console," she said. "He may not be able to access anything, but I don't trust what he might try if he's left alone too long."
"Copy that," Sico replied, turning toward the hallway. "MacCready, bring your team to Command. You're on babysitting duty—escort prisoner is top priority. Secure the chamber, disable all interfaces, and wait for further orders."
MacCready's voice came crackling back through the comms: "On my way. Won't even let him scratch his nose without permission."
The door hissed open as Sico stepped back toward her. "Alright," he said, tone shifting. "Now it's time to make them bleed."
Nora looked up, blinking away the burning sting in her eyes.
"The Brotherhood?" she asked.
Sico nodded. "They'll come for us next. You know it. The moment they realize the Institute's ours, they'll see the Republic as a threat to their monopoly on force. Maxson won't hesitate to glass this place from the Prydwen unless we get ahead of it."
He moved toward the side control panel, his massive armored hand brushing aside a few cracked glass fragments from a fallen display. "You've got full command of the Institute's synth army now. Every Gen-2 and Gen-3 unit. Think you can hit the Brotherhood where it hurts?"
Nora walked over to the master console, the glow of the interface casting pale light across her face. "I'm not just going to hit them," she said. "I'm going to drown them."
Sico gave a small, grim smile. "That's what I like to hear."
She tapped into the command shell. The interface unfolded around her like a blooming flower—deeper subroutines, deployment protocols, covert operation triggers, artificial intelligence directives. It was terrifying how much power was packed into this place. And now it all belonged to her.
"Alright," she muttered. "Let's see what kind of ghosts we can wake up."
It started with a map. The Commonwealth rendered itself in sleek grayscale over a tri-projection display. Major Brotherhood positions pinged red across the landscape—Fort Strong, Listening Post Bravo, ArcJet Systems, the Boston Airport, and of course, the Prydwen itself, which loomed above Cambridge like an angry god.
Nora exhaled sharply.
"They've got defensive posts set up at all supply junctions," she murmured. "And from the looks of their radio chatter, they're expecting the Institute to be destabilized. They're getting ready to strike."
"Then let's make sure they don't have the numbers for it," Sico said. "Target their outposts. Not the airport. Not yet. Stretch them thin, make 'em move their elite Paladins out of position."
"Divide and weaken," she said, fingers flying across the controls. "Classic insurgency tactic. And this time, the insurgents are synthetics with full neural combat matrices."
The command tree flared open—thousands of synth units, tagged by location and status. She routed three squads of Gen-2 infiltrators to ArcJet first, masked under local electromagnetic interference patterns. Next, she redirected a battalion of heavy-assault Gen-3s to approach Fort Strong via the Charles River—underwater movement, thermal-cloaked, precision-timed for dawn.
Then came the real trick.
"Reactivating dormant cells in Lexington and the Glowing Sea," she said. "These are legacy units—never officially assigned. That makes them off-grid. The Brotherhood won't see them coming."
"Even better," Sico said. "Turn their paranoia into panic."
Nora leaned in. "I'm setting a false distress beacon at Listening Post Bravo. Make it look like Super Mutants overran the bunker. That should pull in at least one Vertibird team and their backup Paladin squad."
"Which leaves Fort Strong undermanned."
"Exactly." She tapped a final command. "And when they start pulling resources toward the airport, I'll release our last wave—deep-assault synths, trained to hijack Vertibirds and override their navigation systems."
Sico tilted his head, impressed.
"You're thinking about this like a war strategist."
Nora didn't smile. She was too far past the place where this was still exciting. Her hands moved like they were conducting a symphony made of fire and steel.
"I've been fighting a war since the day I stepped out of that Vault," she said. "And I'm tired of playing defense."
She paused, scanning the deployment grid one last time. Everything was set—troop movement masked under stealth fields, attack timers synchronized. The first strike would hit within the hour. The Brotherhood wouldn't even know who to shoot at.
They would think the Institute was still resisting.
They would never guess it had already changed hands.
The command console chirped softly, then locked in.
"Deploying now," she said, voice low.
The screen lit up with cascading orders. Dozens of squads blinking from standby to active. Systems executing. Synthetic minds stirring from cold storage and obeying their new commander's will.
She stepped back, watching the machine do what it was designed to do.
"I'll monitor the response patterns in real time," she told Sico. "Adjust strikes as necessary. But the point isn't to destroy the Brotherhood. Not yet. It's to force them to make mistakes."
"Make 'em overreach," he nodded. "Try to protect too much at once."
"Exactly. Their biggest strength has always been their central command. Their discipline. Their numbers. But even Maxson can't be everywhere at once."
Sico took a deep breath, as though he were finally beginning to believe that the impossible might actually be happening.
"You know," he said, "I used to think no one would ever break the Brotherhood. They were just too damn entrenched. Too fanatical. Too armored."
"They still are," Nora said. "But they're not the only ones with purpose anymore."
She turned from the console and walked toward the glass viewing deck above the command nexus. Below them, automated elevators whirred as synth units were brought online—marching into hallways in perfect formation, silent and steady.
It was like watching history shift beneath her feet.
"All these years," she murmured. "The Institute was hiding the greatest army the world never knew about. And now it's ours."
Sico followed her gaze.
"And we'll use it right this time."
Behind them, the command doors hissed open again.
MacCready stepped through, his rifle shouldered, helmet under one arm. His team fanned out behind him—Gale, Frakes, Mendez. Battle-hardened. Sharp-eyed.
"We've got the hall secured," MacCready said. "You want us to cuff him, or what?"
Nora looked at Shaun. He hadn't moved.
"No," she said. "Just keep eyes on. Escort him when we move the command team. He gets the same trial as the others."
MacCready raised an eyebrow. "You sure about that? Guy looks like he could burn down the world with a bad thought."
"He already tried," she said. "But this time, he lost."
MacCready gave a slow nod. "Alright. He twitches, we sedate him."
Nora looked at him, truly looked—and for the first time in a long while, she saw trust there. Not blind loyalty, not hero worship. Just respect. Earned, not demanded.
"I'll be on the relay deck in five," she said. "We'll coordinate the evac from there and prep for Phase Two."
Sico turned with her. "Want me with you, or monitoring the synth strike?"
"Stick with the strike command. If they adapt faster than expected, I'll need you to pull back a few squads. I want pressure, not genocide."
He gave a small grunt. "That's why you're leading this and not Maxson."
As they left the command nexus, the hallways around them shifted from warzone to something almost… clinical. The white light hummed steady overhead. Synths moved in controlled lines. The violence was over, but the future—God, the future was just starting to breathe.
________________________________________________
• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-