The mask was gone. He'd lost it levels above, in a stretch of corridor that didn't have a name worth using anymore, and there hadn't been a second to spare on where it landed. Going in quiet had stopped being an option the moment his own face became the thing walking toward the guards. Which left going in loud.
He came off the stairwell at a dead run and took two extinguishers off their mounts without breaking stride, one under each arm, the canisters cold against ribs that had already taken enough today to register.
Two goons held the approach to the collection point, close enough together that neither had time to be more than surprised. He caved the first one's faceplate in with the base of a canister before the man's rifle cleared its sling, and the second went down under the same backswing before he'd finished registering that the first one had. Neither of them made a sound worth mentioning.
He didn't slow down to check either of them.
The door beyond them was heavier, reinforced—built to hold against exactly this. He wasn't interested in testing that theory politely. He threw the first extinguisher overhand into the seam where the door met the frame, the second a half-second behind it aimed low, and the pair slammed together against the steel with enough force to rupture both canisters at once—no measured hiss, no controlled release, just a flat percussive crack and a wall of white that took the door half off its hinges and announced him to everyone on the other side of it a full second before he actually arrived.
---
Levels below and on the other side of the tower, Sol didn't wait for an elevator either.
He'd found the shaft instead, burying his fingers in the steel seam and tearing the elevator doors apart like wet paper without breaking his stride. He dropped the entire distance, slowing himself only as much as the landing required. The loading bay below had vehicles and freight pallets lined up in neat rows for a delivery day that had stopped mattering an hour ago, and the goons posted among them had maybe half a second between the crash of the car cage giving way above them and the light that followed him down it—not fire, nothing that needed fuel, just every bit of the afternoon he'd been carrying since he stepped outside, let go all at once. Four men who'd been mid-sentence a moment ago were on the ground before their eyes finished adjusting to being blind.
He didn't linger over any of them. There was a room full of people past this one, and the day wasn't done asking things of him yet.
---
Back in the white, Lucius was already through the door.
The blast had bought him more than the usual three seconds—half the room hadn't so much as turned toward the noise before he was already on the nearest one, an elbow finding a jaw before the rifle in the man's hands had cleared level. A second went down with his own weapon turned against him. Gunfire started anyway, wild, aimed at sound more than sight, and he let the noise of it cover the sound of his own movement, which was the only advantage the room still owed him.
Two of them weren't using guns at all by the second exchange. One came apart at the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with anatomy, something dark unfolding where a man's back should have stayed flat, and he was four feet off the ground and climbing before Lucius had finished with the one in front of him.
An overturned steel security desk sat jammed near the inner partition wall, abandoned mid-panic. Lucius launched himself off the heavy edge without breaking stride, meeting the flying creature at the apex of its ascent instead of waiting for it to come back down. He locked an arm around its throat from behind before it could wheel on him, clamping down into a tight sleeper hold and driving his weight through the choke until the thrashing gave out and the body went limp in his grip. They hit the floor together behind a stack of crate containers. Only one of them got up.
By the time the room went quiet, the floor had started shaking.
Not the concussive kind. Something lower than that, patient in a way explosions never were, a groan that came up from somewhere well beneath the building's foundations and kept building instead of finishing. Dust sifted from the ceiling in a thin, steady rain that hadn't been there a second ago.
He wrapped it up faster than he would have otherwise.
Lucius stooped, ripping a rifle from the grip of a downed guard. He racked the bolt, the sharp mechanical clack snapping through the room's paralysis. The seventeen survivors were huddled behind shattered glass partitions and overturned chairs, eyes wide, chests heaving. The smell of fresh copper had them locked in place, terrified animals waiting for the next loud noise.
"With me," Lucius commanded, his voice carrying the hard, flat edge of absolute authority. "Move now, or die here." He didn't wait to see if they'd heard him before he was already at the door, checking the corridor, waving the first of them through.
The radio found him a few steps later.
"King, talk to me. We're losing camera feeds on the upper levels, but the visual feed on the corridor looked like a war zone before it glitched out. What's your status?"
"Still up. Room's clear, I've got seventeen civilians moving with me—Sol's got another group on the lower levels, loading bay. Both of us need team extractions sent in to actually collect them, now, not after. We don't have the hands to walk them out and hold a perimeter at the same time."
"Copy that. Patrol units are holding the outer line, but these feeds are dropping fast. What in God's name is happening in there? Command post felt that shockwave all the way out here."
"I don't know yet." He kept walking, kept the civilians moving with a hand and a look rather than words he didn't have time to spend. "And it's not smart to stand around finding out. Get your officers moving, Teo. Now."
He cut the channel before Teo could push for tactical specifics he didn't have, because pretending otherwise would have cost time neither of them had.
The corridor ahead had gone half dark, half the lights either failed or failing, and the line of seventeen people behind him moved the way frightened people move when someone else has decided the direction for them—close together, faster than comfortable, nobody wanting to be the one at the back.
She didn't move like the rest of them.
Fear stripped weight off a body before it stripped anything else—that was just how people ran. Everyone in that line was lighter than they'd been an hour ago, all forward motion and no follow-through. She wasn't. Every step landed flat and complete, like something had already decided how much of the floor it needed and wasn't taking her word for the rest. Whatever it was, it didn't show up the way trouble usually did to him. Nothing in her read like the metal and moisture he was used to picking out of a crowd. Just the wrongness of her weight, and how carefully she was pretending not to have any.
He angled toward her without changing his pace, close enough that another two steps would have put a hand on her arm.
The floor didn't give him the two steps.
It went out from under the whole corridor at once, hard enough that a row of ceiling tiles let go and the line of people flinched as one animal, and by the time the dust had thinned enough to see through, she wasn't in the line anymore. A door he hadn't marked as anything but a door stood open several feet to the left, and whatever had gone through it was moving considerably faster than a woman still finding her footing had any business moving.
He didn't go after her.
There were sixteen people behind him who'd handed him the only direction they had left, and whatever she was carrying wasn't worth trading all of them to find out about early.
Somewhere below the building, the thing that had been sleeping under Sentinel Forge for however many years finished waking all the way up.
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TO BE CONTINUED