The air in the ventilation shaft was thick with a tension that felt heavier than the dust motes dancing in their flashlight beams. Below them, the security nexus was a picture of sterile, unyielding order. The four elite Legion guards moved with the precise, predictable rhythm of a clockwork mechanism. The technicians sat at their consoles, their faces illuminated by the cold, blue glow of scrolling data streams. It was a fortress of vigilance, and they were balanced on a knife's edge above it.
"A one-in-a-million shot," Zara whispered into her comms, her voice a ghost of sound. "Ronan, I hope you understand the difference between being a gambler and being a suicide."
"The line is thinner than you think," Ronan whispered back from his position twenty yards down a branching shaft. He had a direct view of a secondary power junction. "But I can feel it, Zara. The whole system is… brittle. It's too perfect, too orderly. They've eliminated all the normal chaos, all the minor fluctuations. It's a straight line, and a straight line is the easiest thing in the world to snap if you push in exactly the right place."
He quickly laid out his insane, brilliant plan. The tiny, cyclical power flicker he'd spotted wasn't a flaw; it was a diagnostic pulse. But if an external, city-wide power surge were to occur at the exact nanosecond the system was running its diagnostic, it could create a logical paradox in the control software. The system, unable to reconcile the expected pulse with the unexpected surge, would default to its only failsafe: a full, hard reboot.
"It would give us a window," Ronan concluded. "Maybe five seconds of total darkness and system downtime. Maybe ten, if we're lucky."
Zara was silent for a long moment, processing the sheer, reckless audacity of it. It was a plan built on a cascade of improbable 'what ifs'. It was, in short, a perfect Ronan plan. Which is why, to her own surprise, she found herself refining it instead of dismissing it.
"Five seconds isn't enough to neutralize six targets and get through a locked door," she stated. "We need to split their focus. Liam and I will drop from this main vent the moment the power dies. Our targets are the four guards. Ronan, during the reboot, you'll use a remote signal from your datapad to overload the primary data server with junk requests. The technicians will be focused on that, trying to figure out what's happening. Liam," she looked at him, "your job is to help them stay distracted. Keep them confused. Buy me the seconds I need."
It was a symphony of chaos, and Ronan was its conductor. Liam and Zara moved into position above the main grate, their muscles coiled, ready.
*Are you certain about this?* Elara's thought was a cool, steady presence in Liam's mind, a stark contrast to his own racing heart.
*Not even slightly,* Liam sent back. *But he is.* He glanced in Ronan's direction, a flicker of trust in the man's impossible confidence.
They waited, listening to the quiet countdown in their earpieces as Ronan watched the city's power grid data and the nexus's internal chronometer. The world narrowed to that single, descending sequence of numbers.
"Three..."
Zara drew two small, custom-made darts from her belt. Tipped with a fast-acting neurotoxin that induced temporary paralysis. Non-lethal, but effective.
"Two..."
Liam closed his eyes, reaching out with his mind, not to read the past, but to feel the immediate present of the technicians below, preparing to sow his own brand of quiet confusion.
"One..."
Ronan focused his will. He didn't create the city-wide power surge; he simply saw it coming, a statistical ghost, a wave of excess energy from the industrial sector. And he reached out with his power, not pulling it, but *welcoming* it, clearing its path, nudging a dozen other minor probabilities out of the way so that this one, single, improbable wave would arrive at the Oratorium's doorstep at the perfect, one-in-a-billion moment.
"Now."
The effect was instantaneous. The humming, fluorescent lights of the security nexus did not flicker. They died. The entire room was plunged into absolute, disorienting darkness and a shocking silence as the servers' fans spun down. For a split second, the only light was the faint, ghostly glow from Elara's phylactery through Liam's coat.
Then, Zara moved. She didn't make a sound as she dropped from the vent, a shadow falling through a deeper shadow. She landed in a silent crouch, a predator in her natural element. The two guards nearest the main exit door had been momentarily stunned by the blackout. Before they could even raise their rifles, she was on them. A flick of her wrist, and a dart embedded itself in the neck of the first guard. She spun, her elbow striking the second guard's temple with brutal, precise force, sending him slumping to the floor without a sound.
A moment later, Liam landed, his own movements clumsy by comparison but masked by the sudden chaos. As Zara moved on the third guard, Liam turned his attention to the two technicians. He didn't touch them, didn't make a sound. He simply projected a targeted psychic broadcast, a wave of pure, conceptual confusion, guided by Elara's focused will.
For one of the technicians, the sudden darkness was filled with the phantom smell of burning wires, the false certainty of a fire. He began fumbling under his desk for an extinguisher that wasn't there. The other technician was hit with a wave of intense vertigo, the sudden, overwhelming conviction that the floor was tilting at a forty-five-degree angle. He gripped his console, his knuckles white, trying not to fall out of his chair.
Their minds were no longer on the security system. They were trapped in their own, personalized sensory prisons.
It was all going perfectly. Which is when it all went wrong.
The system reboot was faster than Ronan had calculated. A mere four seconds after the blackout, the piercing shriek of an alarm filled the room, and the dim, red glow of emergency lights bathed everything in a bloody twilight.
The fourth guard, an elite Legion soldier with faster reflexes, was already reacting. He let out a sharp, guttural shout, raising his rifle not at Zara, but at the control consoles. He knew the priority was to protect the system.
Zara changed targets instantly, throwing a knife that knocked the rifle from his hands, but the alarm was already sounded. The technicians, shocked out of their confusion by the alarm, were scrambling at their consoles, trying to initiate a facility-wide lockdown.
A firefight erupted. The fourth guard drew his sidearm and began laying down suppressing fire. Zara, using a server bank as cover, returned fire with her silenced pistol. The room, once a place of sterile order, became a maelstrom of ricocheting energy bolts and shouted commands.
Liam knew a direct fight was a losing one. Reinforcements would be there in seconds. He needed another distraction. He pressed his hand against the server bank Zara was hiding behind, diving into its immediate past. He felt the echo of a hundred routine maintenance checks, of bored technicians running diagnostics. And he found what he was looking for: the manual activation code for the room's fire suppression system. It was a failsafe, designed to protect the servers from electrical fires.
He focused, sending a surge of pure psychic intent into the console's circuitry, mimicking the electronic signature of the command code.
For the second time in less than a minute, the room was plunged into chaos. Vents in the ceiling hissed open, and the chamber was instantly flooded with a thick, cold, oxygen-displacing foam. Visibility dropped to near zero. The roar of the suppression system was deafening.
"Now!" Zara yelled over the noise, her voice a beacon in the disorienting whiteout. "The console! Override it!"
Through the swirling foam, Liam saw the fourth guard raising his weapon for a blind shot in their direction. But a split second before he could fire, a server rack next to him, its bolts apparently loosened by a "lucky" ricochet, tipped over, pinning him to the wall. Ronan's work.
Zara lunged through the foam, a data spike in her hand. She found the master security console and slammed the spike into its main port. Her datapad lit up as she furiously bypassed the lockdown protocols, her fingers a blur. "I've opened a path to the lower maintenance tunnels," she yelled. "But the rest of the facility knows we're here. We have ten seconds!"
They scrambled for the far door, the one that led deeper into the fortress. Liam grabbed the dazed Ronan, who had just dropped back into the room from the vent, and pulled him along.
They burst through the door and Zara slammed it shut behind them, engaging its magnetic lock just as heavy, armored fists began to pound on it from the other side.
They were in a dark, narrow maintenance corridor. The alarms were no longer a distant, muffled sound; they were a screaming, facility-wide klaxon that vibrated through the very metal beneath their feet. Stealth was a memory. Their quiet infiltration had just become a loud, desperate race against time.
Through the floor, they could feel it. A deep, rhythmic, and profoundly unsettling thrum. It was a sound that felt older than the monastery itself, a vibration that seemed to warp the air around them.
It was the sound of the Historical Anchor.
"Well," Ronan said, a wild, breathless grin on his face as he looked down the dark corridor ahead. "I guess they know we're here."
The final race to the heart of the void had begun.