The tidal wave of liquid copper didn't hit Samson with the weight of water; it hit with the searing heat of a furnace. He braced himself, thrusting his golden arm forward.
The sapphire ink in his veins collided with the molten metal, creating a localized explosion of steam and blue sparks. The copper froze in mid-air, hardening into a jagged, grotesque sculpture of a wave.
Samson stood panting, his golden arm now steaming, the metal surface scorched but unbroken.
"You think you can fight the flow of progress?" L'Ingénieur's voice boomed, echoing from the metallic walls of the inverted cathedral. "The Earth is a battery that has been overcharged for eons. We are simply giving it a vent."
The Revolution of the Wired
While Samson held the Alchemist's attention, Chipo was in the trenches. She hadn't gone for the cathedral; she had gone for the Control Pylons that tethered the "Wired" guards to the central system.
"Banza! Now!" she shouted, firing her flare gun into the humid night.
From the darkened crevices of the Mutanda Mine, hundreds of artisanal miners emerged. They didn't have high-tech weapons, but they had "Gamatox" makeshift acidic cocktails used for cleaning ore. They doused the copper cables of the Wired guards, the acid eating through the insulation.
The guards stumbled, their mechanical precision turning into erratic spasms as the central command signal flickered. "They're not machines!" Chipo yelled to the miners. "They're your brothers! Cut the wires, don't kill the men!"
The Revelation of the Array
Samson pushed through the hardened copper wave, charging toward L'Ingénieur. As he entered the heart of the cathedral, he looked up and froze. The ceiling wasn't closed. It was a massive, crystalline lens pointed directly at the sky.
A beam of pure, concentrated cobalt energy was shooting upward, piercing the tropical clouds. But it wasn't dissipating. It was hitting something in low-earth orbit a glimmering, skeletal structure that shouldn't have been there.
"You're not selling this to the banks," Samson gasped, the magnetic pull of the beam tugging at his golden marrow. "You're sending it... off-world?"
"The banks are dinosaurs, Samson,"
L'Ingénieur sneered, his silver face reflecting the blue beam. "The 'International Concern' was a smokescreen. The real buyers don't live on this rock. They are the Architects of the Void. They gave us the blueprints for the vaults, and in exchange, we provide the fuel for their return."
"You're selling out the entire planet," Samson growled. He lunged, his golden fist connecting with the Alchemist's silver jaw.
The impact sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a bell. L'Ingénieur didn't bleed; he leaked a high-viscosity blue lubricant. He countered with a palm strike that sent a surge of 50,000 volts through Samson's chest.
The Heart of the Capacitor
Samson hit the floor, his heart stopping for a terrifying three seconds. His golden arm flared, acting as an internal defibrillator, shocking his heart back into rhythm. He realized he couldn't beat L'Ingénieur in a physical brawl the man was more machine than meat.
He looked at the base of the central cobalt rod. It was anchored into a massive pool of Liquid Cobalt, the "Heart" of the battery.
"If the energy is going up," Samson whispered to himself, "I need to bring it down."
He ignored the Alchemist and plunged his golden hand into the liquid cobalt pool.
"NO!" L'Ingénieur screamed, dropping his robotic poise. "The surge will vaporize you!"
The Grounding of the Heavens
Samson didn't try to stop the flow. He became a Secondary Conduit. He used the sapphire ink in his blood to "tune" his body to the frequency of the orbital station. He reached out to the beam, not with his hands, but with his mind.
He felt the cold, vast emptiness of the "Architects" waiting in the dark above. He felt their hunger—a cold, mechanical void that viewed Earth as nothing more than a gas station.
"You want the energy?" Samson roared, his eyes turning a blinding, electric blue. "Take it all!"
He reversed his internal polarity. Instead of resisting the pull, he accelerated it, but he aimed it not at the lens, but back into the Earth's own crust. He turned himself into a short-circuit.
The beam from the sky didn't just stop it snapped back. The orbital station, deprived of its steady flow and hit with a massive surge of "dirty" energy from the Earth's core, shattered. A streak of fire crossed the Congolese sky as the "Architects'" receiver burned up in the atmosphere.
The cathedral began to melt.
L'Ingénieur let out a digitized wail as his silver skin began to bubble. "You've ruined the bridge! They will come for us now! They will come for everyone!"
"Let them come," Samson said, pulling his hand from the cooling cobalt. "At least we'll be awake when they get here."
The Aftermath
The cathedral collapsed into a heap of slag. Chipo and the miners stood at the edge of the pit, watching the fire in the sky fade away. The "Wired" guards were slumped on the ground, the blue light in their eyes gone, their human consciousness slowly returning to the wreckage of their bodies.
Samson emerged from the ruins, his golden arm now scorched black, the sapphire tattoo glowing with a faint, exhausted violet light.
"Is it finished?" Chipo asked, running to support him.
"The bridge is down," Samson said, looking at the tablet. Of the twelve coordinates, two were now dark. Ten remained. "But the Alchemist was right about one thing. We aren't just fighting men with money anymore. We're fighting the people who built the world's secrets."
"Where to next?" Chipo asked, looking at the map.
Samson pointed to a blinking red dot in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya. "There's a 'Weather Station' in the mountains that's drawing too much power. And if I'm right, they're not harvesting gold or cobalt there. They're harvesting the wind itself."