#### **Chapter 38: No Safe Harbor**
In the ventilation shaft, the plasma cutter above sputtered and died as the soldier operating it collapsed. Renji heard a choked gasp over the comms, then silence. The kill switch had worked. But he knew it was a temporary reprieve.
"Kuro, seal the tunnel," he ordered.
"Renji, no!" Hikari cried out. "You'll be trapped!"
"There's no 'in' or 'out' anymore," Renji's voice was grimly calm over the radio. "There's only the mission. I'll find another way. Seal it. Now."
With a heavy heart, Kuro slammed a hand on a console. A series of controlled explosions rocked the bunker's foundations, collapsing the primary access tunnel and sealing Renji off from the control room.
The mountain groaned around them, the seismic charges shaking the very rock to its core. Concrete dust rained from the ceiling. The lights flickered and died, plunging Kuro and Hikari into the terrifying, rumbling darkness, lit only by the emergency red of the strobes. They were trapped.
Renji, alone in the narrow, dark shaft, began his descent. He was cut off from his family, buried alive inside a collapsing mountain, hunted by the remnants of a furious W.A.O. force. The victory had cost them everything. Their home. Their sanctuary. Each other.
The Kyro Syndicate had won the war, but in the deafening, violent aftermath, the three siblings were now adrift, shattered pieces of a family, with no safe harbor in sight. The fight for the future was over. A new, desperate fight for survival had just begun.