Cosima locked her gaze onto the frosty chamber, recognizing the valve assembly. She knew Miro’s designs. The chronium core relied on pressurized liquid nivalium to suppress thermal runaway. A sudden breach, a rapid depressurization… it wouldn’t just vent cold. It would flash-vaporize, creating a localized cryo-surge. A deadening pulse of sub-zero ether. Enough to disable ether-tech. Donato's mercenaries, armed with custom-fabricated Ferox carbines, would find their discharge coils ruined. But they would all be trapped in the heart of that freezing maelstrom. He was engineering a flash-freeze to short every coil in the chamber, but it would lock them in the frost alongside his family.
Her numb fingers keyed commands into the brass-cased datapad she had slipped from her coat. Stolen from the Regulus Academy network archives, her access codes were meant for esoteric data retrieval, not civic infrastructure. Yet, the main Velletra canal system, a marvel of interconnected ether-hydraulics, shared a foundational architecture with the academy's own power grid. A backdoor. An oversight left behind by municipal engineers decades ago.
Strings of hex code scrolled across the phosphor screen beneath her thumbs. She was bypassing three separate security protocols, routing through a municipal traffic controller, then a district-level energy conduit, all to gain control of a mechanism designed to withstand a century of storms. The city’s main floodgates.
Donato watched the boy draw a bead on the glass, a slow grin splitting his bearded jaw. “A grand gesture, Miro,” he murmured, his voice a silken thread of menace and perverse pride. “To ensure no one interferes with your true target. To silence the Vanzettis by denying them any path to recovery.” He nodded toward the boy's leveled arm. “A scorched-earth policy.”
Before Donato could finish his thought, Miro fired.
The shot was deafening, a sharp crack that echoed off the chronium walls. The bullet punched through the frosted glass of the primary cryogenic tank with a sickening crunch.
A shriek of tearing metal followed, a violent hiss that rapidly escalated into a roaring torrent. The cryogenic liquid, under immense pressure, geysered into the room. A blinding white vapor, denser than any fog, billowed out, instantly coating everything it touched in a layer of crystalline frost. Crystalline frost snapped across the bronze flagstones, rime encrusting the iron rivets of the floor.
Mercenaries cried out, their shouts muffled by the expanding mist. Their ether-carbines, designed to channel volatile plasma, sputtered out. The ethereal glow within their barrels died, replaced by a dull, internal snap as the delicate internal mechanisms froze solid. A guard, trying to fire, found his weapon brittle, the barrel shattering into a thousand icy shards at the impact of his own trigger finger. Other rifles cracked mid-charge, internal glass chambers fracturing into dead slag.
Donato, shielded partly by his massive frame and the sheer force of his will, recoiled. The smile vanished, replaced by a mask of cold fury. He looked at Miro, now just a dark silhouette against the swirling, incandescent mist. “You turn your teeth on me?” he snarled, stepping past the hiss of venting coolant. “After all I offered? You think to sever all our tools, Miro?”
Even as the cryo-mist intensified, Miro remained utterly still, the revolver held steady in his hand, a spectral, frozen figure. He tilted his head and blinked, still beaming as if pleased with a parlor trick.
Gallo, who had been scrambling on the floor, seized the moment of Donato’s distraction and the general disarray. Gallo glanced from a shattered rifle stock to Cosima, his boots sliding in the thickening frost. He lunged, a desperate, pathetic shove, aiming to send Cosima stumbling directly into Donato’s path, a human shield.
“Take her, old man!” Gallo shrieked, his voice cracking. “She’s the one who knows everything! The real schemer!”
Cosima stumbled into the open floor. Donato leveled an insulated pocket-pistol that still hummed with dull green ether, and pulled the hammer back.
The ether-bolt, a searing green streak, whistled through the freezing air.
Miro moved. A blur of motion, swift and precise. He intercepted Cosima’s fall, pulling her behind him, shielding her with his own body.
The discharge caught Miro in the left shoulder, scorching through wool and spinning him half a turn. He grunted, a sharp intake of breath, but his grip on Cosima remained firm. The burn smoked against his collar, pungent and alkaline against the freezing vapor. He hadn't fallen. He hadn't flinched.
Donato fired again, a guttural roar ripping from his throat, pure rage contorting his features. “You defend her? You choose *her* over everything?”
But the second shot never found its mark.
A lower thrum cut under the roar of the ruptured tank, vibrating through the bedrock of the Palazzo. A distant, booming thunder that vibrated through the very foundations of the estate, growing in intensity with alarming speed. It wasn't the reactor. It was something external, something immense.
The rumble peaked into an avalanche of pressurized brine, rattling the brass pipework overhead. The massive, reinforced chronium walls of the reactor room began to tremble violently. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ancient stone, widening with terrifying speed.
The floodgates of the Velletra canal system, miles away but now irrevocably breached, had opened. The ocean, funneled through the city’s meticulously engineered waterways, now surged with an unstoppable force.
With a final, catastrophic groan, the far wall of the Palazzo de Ferox imploded inwards. A colossal wave of churning, dark canal water, carrying debris and the screams of those caught in its path, burst into the room. It smashed through the cryo-mist, through the remaining guards, through the heart of the estate itself.