The access panel shimmered with a faint, blue light, cutting against the aggressive red strobes across the hallway. Zong Qiyuan’s gaze lingered on the blast door, then settled on the circuit array. He reached out, his hand trembling not from fear, but from the systemic shudder of his dissolving biology.
“Step aside,” a voice rasped, startlingly close.
Lu Bo, his stolen gene-inspector uniform hanging loose over knobby joints, shoved past Qiyuan. “Absolutely not. You don’t get to do that. You saved my hide, Grandmaster. You don’t just… choose to die.” He fumbled with a multi-tool, jamming its prongs into the access panel’s ports. Sparks erupted, then died as the tool’s cheap casing buckled under the strain.
“Lu Bo, there is no time,” Qiyuan murmured, skin pale as chalk as the failsafe poison crawled through his ribs.
“There’s always time for a scrapper!” Lu Bo barked, grease dripping from his forehead as he yanked two copper braids free. “They make these things too fancy, Grandmaster. Too many safety protocols. Too many layers of… *logic*.” He grumbled, muttering about redundant firewalls and over-engineered pressure seals, his hands flying with surprising speed. “What are they trying to do, keep the air in or out? Decide already, Vance!”
Shi Yuxuan watched, her ocular implants whirring as she tracked Lu Bo’s fingers, then Qiyuan’s still features. Her targeting heuristic flagged the boy's posture as a fatal efficiency failure, yet the cybernetic cooling lines in her throat tightened unprompted.
“Their atmospheric controls are tied to a subnet,” Lu Bo announced triumphantly, pulling a twisted mess of wires free. He then spat on a connection, pressing it against a bare circuit board. A violent surge of power coursed through the panel, making it glow ominously, then settle into a steady, green hum. “There! Overridden! The vent sequence is… reversed! They’ll have air for days now, maybe even weeks!”
Qiyuan stared at Lu Bo, a faint smile gracing his lips. The sudden reprieve, the unexpected denial of his accepted fate, was a bewildering sensation. “You truly are… a miracle, Lu Bo.”
Before Lu Bo could preen, the deck plates shrieked beneath their boots. The lights above flickered wildly, then exploded in a shower of sparks as the ceiling directly above them began to crack, jagged fissures spreading like spiderwebs. A metallic groan, deep and resonant, echoed from above.
“Void take me!” Lu Bo yelped, pointing a grease-caked wrench toward the fractures overhead. “That’s not a stress split, that’s a hull breach!”
The ceiling exploded inward, raining down twisted steel and shattered duracrete. A colossal shadow blotted out the emergency strobes, swallowing the hallway in gloom. Vance’s broadcast bellowed through external speaker horns. “You think you can escape, Qiyuan? You think you can steal my creations, defy my will? I am Director Vance, the architect of Neo-Pangu! And I will crush you all!”
Through churning plaster, a multi-limbed iron frame descended, iron bulk scraping both sides of the corridor. Its plating gleamed with an obsidian sheen, its articulated limbs ending in massive, crushing pincers, each the size of a shuttle. Red optical sensors flared, locking onto them with predatory intent. It was the ‘Titanomachia,’ a walking fortress designed to level star-cities. Vance sat inside the glassite pod, his sneering projection cast across the chest chassis.
Qiyuan felt a violent cough tear through him, black blood spattering the sterile floor. His vision blurred, the edges of his perception darkening. The crude needle wires pinning his pressure points snapped under internal pressure. Black droplets hit his collar. The Dreadnought’s shadow loomed, its massive foot lifting, preparing to stomp.
*Not like this.* The hundred lives in the vats were still breathing. In his gut, the remnants of his cultivated Demonic Qi flared against the poison, black fire churning through cracked meridians.
He shoved Yuxuan and Lu Bo backward, his knuckles hard against their armor plates. “Run!” he commanded, his voice a guttural roar that belied his fragile frame.
Summoning the memory of the Mountain-Sundering Palm, he drove his right hand downward. Pitch-black qi wrapped his skin like liquid ink as palm met cold ferro-steel.
A ripple, invisible at first, spread outward from his palm. The floor beneath him buckled, then exploded. The sub-level groaned, shockwaves rattling the lower pylons of the Gene-Forge. Cracks tore along the bulkhead plating, ripping open the deck. Somatic vibration punched through bedrock, snapping load-bearing crossbeams below.
The colossal Dreadnought Mech, poised to crush them, suddenly lost its footing. Its multi-ton weight, now without a stable base, became its undoing. A sickening groan of twisting metal echoed as the entire section of the corridor, the floor, the walls, the very structural integrity, gave way. The deck beneath the Titanomachia ruptured into a canyon of sheared girders. Vance howled over the intercom, the transmission dissolving into static as the dreadnought pitched sideways into the drop.
“Qiyuan!” Yuxuan shouted as the deck plates beneath him sheared away. He dropped through the void, fingers numb. Overhead, torn loose from a smashed security rack, tumbled a sealed silver cylinder: the Prime Codex.
Ignoring the warning klaxons in her audio array, Yuxuan kicked off a falling girder, vaulting over the drop. Her mechanical gauntlet snapped shut around the cylinder. She spun in the air, using her momentum to slam the Prime Codex, its cool metallic surface, into the glowing chest injector on Qiyuan’s deteriorating body. The capsule hissed, embedding itself. The pure, pristine human genome, a beacon of order, clashed violently with the wild, destructive chaos of Qiyuan’s dying Demonic Qi. A blinding, explosive somatic reaction erupted, engulfing Qiyuan in a searing, ethereal light that ripped through the very fabric of his being.