“Drills breach the seal at dawn.” Yara’s voice was a dry rasp. Her knuckles paled against the console edge, fixed on the red blinker behind her ear. A sour burn settled under Zhai Shen's collarbone, marrow liquefying in tiny pockets along his ribs.
“The Sovereign’s crypt,” Zhai Shen said, the words tasting like ash. “My body. The prime shell.” The memory was flat and sterile, like looking at someone else's discarded coat. “It contains the primary Helix-Matrix, the pure genetic blueprint before… before I began this experiment.”
She glanced from the corridor to his sunken cheeks. “A cure. A permanent cure for Helix-Rot. You need to get to it before the Hegemony dissects it, before they weaponize it.”
“Worse,” Zhai Shen murmured. “They will try to integrate it. To understand the circuitry, to replicate the forbidden qi within. They will become what I once was, without the restraint.” He pushed off the grimy wall, a rare surge of something akin to urgency propelling him. “We need to move. Now. If my past self’s precautions are anything to go by, that vault will not be easily breached, even by their drills.”
Yara nodded, holstering her blaster. “Sublevel twelve is restricted. We’ll have to use the old service tunnels. They’re barely maintained, full of dead tech and collapsed sections.”
Their descent into the institute’s underbelly was a journey through forgotten history. The air grew dense with ozone and sour copper. Yara tracked the service conduits on her handheld slate, stepping over rusted conduits. Zhai Shen trailed behind on dragging heels, his marrow throbbing while his inner eye caught the thin pulse of forgotten energy lines in the bedrock.
“Why did you… your past self… go into stasis in the first place?” Yara asked, her voice hushed as they squeezed through a narrow, rust-choked vent. “Why exile yourself, then leave your true flesh down here?”
Zhai Shen sighed, the sound echoing in the confined space. “Boredom. Utter, complete, soul-numbing boredom. The Obsidian-Vein Covenant had achieved ultimate power. There were no more challenges, no more worthy opponents. The stars were a dry ledger. I sought… a new game to test my patience.” The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “And I left the prime vessel as a safeguard. A failsafe, a final, utterly inconvenient trump card. With a few… *personal* traps.”
As if on cue, a tripwire of shimmering azure light materialized across their path, humming faintly. Yara froze, her hand flying to her blaster. “A plasma net?”
“No,” Zhai Shen said, his tone dry. “A Qi-imbued stasis field. Touch it, and you’ll be frozen in time until its energy dissipates. Could be a year, could be a millennium. My past self had a cruel sense of humor.” He stepped forward, his palm brushing the air just above the field. A ripple, like water, distorted the light, and Zhai Shen walked straight through the shimmering barrier as if it were not there. The field vanished an instant later, leaving only the scent of ionized air.
They skirted two more of his past defenses: a resonator that powdered scrap iron to gray ash, and a spatial knot wired to shear anything carrying electric current.
They were nearing sublevel twelve when the rumble started, not of drilling, but of heavy treads. A distinct, rhythmic thudding that reverberated through the very bedrock. “Mechs,” Yara hissed, pulling Zhai Shen behind a crumbling ferro-concrete pillar. “Vatra border regulars. Tarkin Dax must have bought his way down.”
Four sleek, slate-colored Apex-Armatures, smaller than Star Network chassis but three meters high, stalked down the tunnel floor with blue sensor lenses scanning the pipes. Their designation, ‘Hydra-Class,’ was etched onto their hardened carapaces. Dax house livery—a bisected cog—was stenciled across their pauldrons.
One of the Hydras, its pilot clearly over-eager, broke formation, its multi-jointed arm extending, a plasma cannon charging at the tip. It fired a blinding shot, not at their hiding place, but at a support beam above them. The overhead concrete sheared loose, dropping a half-ton block straight toward Yara's shoulder.
Zhai Shen moved. Not with the languid, almost dismissive ease he usually employed, but with a sudden, explosive burst of power. He shoved Yara clear with one hand, then spun, channeling a torrent of Abyssal Qi into his other palm. Black mist snapped tight around his knuckles. He drove his heel-palm directly into the chassis's lower pivot joint. Plasteel crumpled inward under the concussive burst, gears snapping like dried twigs. The bipedal frame lost purchase and dropped sideways into the rubble with a dead metallic crash.
The other Hydras opened fire, their plasma bolts tearing into the pillar where Zhai Shen had stood moments before. He was already moving, dragging Yara along a side corridor, the surge of effort leaving a raw ache in his muscles. His breath came in shallow bursts, a rare experience for him. Wasted motion, he thought, cursing the twitch of survival instinct that had made him jump. Yara stared at the shattered chassis, then back at his bleeding knuckles.
They burst into the main cavern of sublevel twelve, a vast, domed space carved from the living rock, humming with military generator hum. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and the acrid tang of explosives. The vault door, a slab of dark alloy three spans thick, lay blasted across the threshold with hydraulic bolts sheared in half. Someone had already breached it.
Inside, fluorescent green glare spilled from bank after bank of institute dialysis rigs. Wires and clear tubes snaked everywhere, connecting to a pristine, crystalline sarcophagus at the room’s center. And there, seated on the basalt dais with an arrogant tilt to his chin, sat Tarkin Dax. His eyes were closed, a grotesque network of tubes inserted into his neck and arms, pumping a viscous, ruby-red liquid directly from Zhai Shen’s preserved body in the sarcophagus into his own veins.