The elevator's hum was a promise of violence. Jane, Ellen, and Owen rode it to the penthouse, silent as tombstones, the city's weather pulsing around them like a heartbeat gone septic. By the time the doors parted, midnight had detonated into a storm, lightning webbing the skyline and filling the windows with surgical-white strobes.
Inside, the living room was transformed. Rain hammered the glass walls, painting the floor in rippling bands of blue. At the table, Hazel hunched over the Arcana Bridge, every light in the room tuned to the device's slow, unblinking pulse. Shiori and Mouse sat nearby, eyes wide, as if bracing for whatever new horror the night might offer.
The adults entered as a unit, boots leaving wet imprints on the polished floor. Owen's gaze went straight to the Bridge, but it was Jane who spoke first.
"Brief," she said. Not a command, but a requirement.
Hazel sat back, voice catching on the edge of exhaustion. "The Bridge isn't a weapon. It's an IMC—Integrated Magical Core. With an AI overlay, and a perfect mana matrix. It doesn't just let you channel magic, it records it. Replicates it. Copies anything it sees."
Owen's face darkened. "So it's not just equality they're selling. It's power replication." His hand closed around the back of a chair. "No wonder Lancaster kept it in the vault."
Ellen moved to Hazel, squeezing her shoulder. "Demonstration?"
Hazel nodded. She tapped a control on the Bridge, and the device projected a filament of light—ice, then fire, then void, each spell flawless, each transition clean. "It remembers every spell it's seen, then plays it back. Doesn't matter who cast it. Or what they were born as."
Mouse whistled. "That means anyone could…"
"Anyone could be an S-Class," Jane finished. She paced the length of the table, boots squeaking on the glass. "Or worse. The Wraiths hinted Golden Dawn's cells were already awake in Financial. They'll want to hijack the Bridge, or destroy it."
Hazel's eyes met Jane's, searching for something. "What do we do?"
Jane's reply was instant. "We move before they do."
Owen's voice was sharp. "We can't hold this place. Not with Nexar scanning every channel. We need another safehouse."
Shiori spoke for the first time. "They're using satellite triangulation, not just local nets. My father's people can burn the entire block if they have to."
Ellen's gaze was flat, cold. "We let them. We draw a line. Make them overcommit. Then we vanish."
Jane drew a map on the holo-table—districts in red, safe corridors in yellow, every street a potential ambush. "If we want to keep the Bridge, we need allies. Or a way to erase its tech, forever."
Hazel hesitated. "Can we even destroy it?"
Owen smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Everything breaks, eventually."
The table grew crowded with plans: names, dates, threat models. Mouse chirped in with what he'd gleaned from the street, Shiori filled in the boardroom politics, and Ellen mapped a route through the undercity where even the WMO wouldn't follow.
Jane watched them, reading the current that ran under the words—fear, hope, the raw shock of survival. She looked at Owen, then at Ellen, then at Hazel. "We're not enough. Not for this."
Owen tensed. "You're not calling—"
Jane cut him off. "It's time to bring in Yuki and Ayaka. If anyone can help us outthink Taira, it's their own blood."
For a minute, the room was quiet, save for the rain and the Bridge's slow pulse. Then the team began to move. Hazel packed the Bridge into a shielded case, Owen pulled a set of burner weapons from a floor compartment, Ellen readied the counter-surveillance charms. Jane watched it all, memorizing every gesture, every face, the gravity of what they were about to do.