Echo reached through the pain, not with energy, but with memory—not of war, but of peace. Of Mira's laugh, of Leyla's warmth against him at night, of shared silence under false stars.
He pushed that through the bond, overriding the corruption.
Leyla's eyes cleared. Mira steadied.
The Commander hesitated, confused. Emotion was a flaw in its logic—it couldn't process positive resonance.
"Now!" Echo yelled.
They attacked as one, not with combined power, but with shared intent. Leyla went low, Mira high, Echo straight ahead. The Commander tried to adapt to all three at once, and in that split-second of divided focus, Echo's Error-Sight found the flaw—a crack in its crystalline core where its emotional recursion loop overloaded.
He plunged his blade into the crack.
The Commander shattered, not into ash, but into a burst of silent, sorrowful data-streams.
The spore-colony was unguarded. Mira secured a sample in a stasis capsule as Leyla planted thermal charges.
"Two minutes to detonation!"
They ran, Mira using spatial folds to leap across crumbling corridors. As they burst onto the surface, the lab exploded behind them, a fireball of corrupted biomass lighting the dead sky.
Above, in orbit, something stirred.
A presence vast and cold turned its attention downward.
Dawn-Class.
"Shuttle! Now!" Echo screamed into his comm.
The extraction shuttle dropped from cloak, skimming the surface. They leaped aboard as the ground beneath them trembled.
From the sky, a single beam of darkness lanced down, vaporizing the ruins they'd just left.
The shuttle jumped to slip-space, leaving Xylos behind.