The darkness lasted less than a second before the amber sphere at the center of the atrium flared into a blinding, raw violet. With the main grid severed, the receiver’s containment field buckled. The eight heavy pedestals surrounding the sphere began to groan, their copper coils superheating until the air smelled of scorched insulation and ozone. The golden rift inside the glass sphere widened by six inches, spitting jagged lances of arc-light that left black, glassified scorch marks across the marble floor. "Fire!" the Vanguard commander roared. A wall of blue plasma bolts cut through the gloom. Bastion didn't dodge. He sprinted straight toward the vanguard line, raising his right arm as he moved. A golden Aegis Barrier flared into existence three inches from his forearm—a flat, hexagonal plate of compressed kinetic light that took the brunt of the plasma storm. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP. The bolts detonated against the barrier, spraying superheated blue sparks across his face and chest. The kinetic force pushed him back half a step with every hit, his boots carving dark skid marks into the pristine white marble. "Overload the shield!" the officer bellowed, stepping behind a heavy marble pillar. "He can't hold the frequency!" He was right. Bastion felt the three gold lines near his wrist burning like white-hot needles sunk into his bone. His vision blurred around the edges, flickering with static. Deep inside his mind, the memory of his sixteenth birthday—the smell of sweet pine bread his mother had baked—shriveled into grey ash and blew away. Not yet, he growled silently. Not until the glass breaks. Bastion violently collapsed the Aegis Barrier inward, absorbing the kinetic energy of thirty plasma charges into a single, dense point at his elbow, and unleashed it outward in a devastating Aegis Slam. BOOM. The shockwave tore across the room. The four front-line Vanguard soldiers were lifted clean off their feet, their heavy armor screaming as the plates buckled inward. They slammed into the perimeter glass walls of the dome, spiderwebbing the five-inch-thick reinforced glass before collapsing into motionless heaps. "The pedestals, Voss!" Cipherblade’s voice cracked through the ear-piece over a roar of electronic feedback. "The field is cascading! You have less than forty seconds before the spatial feedback tears the floor open!" Bastion veered left toward the first anchor pedestal. A Vanguard enforcer lunged into his path with a crackling shock-spear aimed at his throat. Bastion didn't check his stride. He ducked under the spear tip, seized the soldier’s wrist joint, and twisted until the iron arm-cuff sheared through the synthetic under-suit. He drove a heavy, calcified elbow directly into the man’s visor plate, shattering the faceplate, then hurled the soldier's two-hundred-pound body straight into the second approaching enforcer. He reached the first pedestal. The copper coil was glowing cherry red, humming with a high-pitched scream that made his nose bleed. Bastion pulled his right fist back, his knuckles encrusting in thick, crystal-like armor. Anchor Knuckle. He slammed his fist directly into the pedestal’s primary junction box. BANG. The heavy iron housing exploded in a shower of copper wire and liquid cooling gel. The thick beam of golden arc-light linking the pedestal to the central rift snapped like a frayed rope, whipping across the ceiling and blowing out a row of floodlights. "One down!" Bastion spat, wiping a line of blood from his upper lip with his sleeve. "Three left!" Cipherblade yelled. "The commander is manually bypassing the safety locks on the console—he's going to force the frequency dump early!" Bastion turned toward the central console. The Vanguard officer was hammering commands into a heavy, reinforced data terminal mounted beside the receiver's glass sphere. Beside him, three remaining heavy enforcers drew short-barreled scatterguns and formed a tight wall of steel. "You're too late, Voss!" the officer yelled over the deafening roar of the destabilizing rift. "The frequency anchor is already written into the Sprawl's core! Even if you smash this room, your sister's voice belongs to the Council!" "She's not a battery," Bastion rasped. He closed the distance in three long strides. The three enforcers raised their scatterguns in unison, but before they could squeeze their triggers, two slender, humming daggers of hard-light purple plasma shot down from the dark rafters above. THWIP. THWIP. The Data Daggers sheared clean through the barrels of the first two scatterguns, melting the steel into glowing orange slag. A shadow dropped from the vaulted ceiling. Cipherblade landed silently between the two disarmed soldiers, his carbon cowl slick with rain, his violet visor glowing in the dark. With fluid, terrifying speed, the hacker spun, sweeping the feet out from under one enforcer while driving a Null Spike straight into the neck-seal of the second. The third enforcer raised his sidearm, but Cipherblade caught the man’s wrist, glitched three inches to the left in a split-second phase-shift, and slammed the soldier's head against the edge of the iron pedestal. "Go!" Cipherblade barked through his scrambler, not looking back as he re-armed his hard-light blades. "Get the officer! I'll take the pedestals!" Bastion didn't hesitate. He vaulted over the fallen enforcers, stepping straight onto the central console platform. The Vanguard commander pulled a heavy plasma sidearm from his hip holster and fired point-blank at Bastion's chest. Bastion didn't raise a shield. He took the plasma bolt squarely on his left shoulder plate, the superheated energy scorching through his heavy canvas coat and searing his skin. He didn't even flinch. He grabbed the officer by the collar of his golden neck-guard, lifted the three-hundred-pound armored man off his feet, and drove him backward into the central glass sphere of the receiver. CRACK. The five-inch glass of the containment sphere spiderwebbed. Amber fluid erupted from the crack in a high-pressure stream, splashing across the floor and hissing as it touched the hot copper coils. Inside the sphere, the golden rift writhed like an enraged animal, its light turning from pure gold to a violent, screaming crimson. "You fool!" the commander gasped, his hands clawing at Bastion's iron grip on his collar. "If you break the containment without a dampener, her frequency will scatter across seven sectors! She'll be erased completely!" Bastion leaned in close, his face inches from the officer's gold-trimmed visor. Rain and blood dripped from his chin onto the officer's neck plate. "She’s already scattered," Bastion whispered. "I'm just opening the door." Bastion pulled his right arm back. The gold lines on his wrist flared with every ounce of kinetic energy remaining in his frame. The skin calcified into a thick, jagged gauntlet of pure crystalline light. He didn't hit the officer. He let go of the commander's collar, reached past his head, and drove his Anchor Knuckle straight into the center of the cracked glass sphere. BOOM. The glass sphere disintegrated into a million glittering shards. A blinding, silent shockwave of pure harmonic energy exploded from the core. The remaining three pedestals shattered instantly, their iron frames twisting like soft wax. The massive glass dome above the atrium blew outward into the night sky, sending a shower of glass raining down over the neon rooftops of Sector 7. The Vanguard commander was thrown fifty feet across the floor, crashing through the ruined security doors into the corridor beyond. Bastion stood in the center of the blast radius, his cloak whipped around his legs by the howling wind blowing through the shattered roof. The crimson rift was gone. Floating in the empty air where the receiver had stood was a single, hovering strand of pure, gold light. It flickered softly in the rain, wavering like a candle flame, before drifting slowly downward toward Bastion's chest. It sank through his coat, through his shirt, and straight into his collarbone—right where the wrapped canvas vial rested in his pocket. The tiny glass vial in his tunic vibrated once. A soft, clear chime echoed inside his mind—no longer three overlapping voices, but a single, quiet tone: "...Kael." Bastion dropped to one knee on the wet marble, his right arm returning to normal flesh. The crystalline armor dissolved into golden dust, leaving his skin pale, raw, and bleeding. Deep inside his mind, the cold void opened wide again. He reached for his ninth-grade graduation from the Oakhaven Academy. He reached for the face of his first instructor. Grey dust. Nothing. He stayed on his knee, his forehead pressed against his calloused knuckles as the rain poured through the shattered dome, washing the blood and copper ash from his face. A soft pair of boots stopped on the wet marble beside him. Cipherblade stood over him, his violet visor dim, his black coat soaked through. He looked down at Bastion, then out through the shattered glass wall at the city below. All across Sector 7, the massive holographic billboards advertising Council law were flickering, glitching, and dying one by one. The glowing golden lights of The Glass Spire had gone dark, leaving the tower as a black shadow against the neon skyline. "The receiver is dead," Cipherblade said quietly, his vocal scrambler crackling with static. "The Council's main feed just flatlined across three sectors." Bastion pushed himself up slowly, his legs trembling from the exertion, his left hand resting over his pocket. "Did we save her?" Bastion rasped. Cipherblade looked at the dark sky-bridges in the distance, where the red warning lights of approaching Vanguard gunships were already cutting through the storm. "We saved her frequency from being burned," Cipherblade said, turning his back to the wind. "But the High Council just declared total lockdown on the Sprawl. Every enforcer, every Splicer bounty hunter, and every judge in the upper spires is coming for this tower." Bastion pulled his wet hood back over his head, his dark eyes locking onto the approaching red searchlights in the rain. "Let them come," Bastion said.
Chapter 4: THR RECEIVER SHATTERED
Chapter 4 · 1670 words · ~9 min read