Doom went through the palace wall like a projectile and hit the ground outside in a cloud of broken stone and dust.
Nolan did not watch him land. The moment Wen Wu's attention shifted with the impact, he drove the power armor forward and swung the Warscythe in a hard, flat arc at Wen Wu's waist.
Wen Wu did not move like a man reacting. He moved like a man who had already decided what to do. His feet drove into the ground, kicking up a small drift of dust, and several rings snapped back to his hands from orbit. He brought them up in a tight defensive guard, and the Warscythe's edge caught against the metal of the rings and stopped.
This was the first time in Nolan's experience that anything in the real world had blocked the Warscythe on the strength of its material alone.
He was still processing that when the rings that had not returned to Wen Wu's hands came down on the back of the power pack like hammers. The impacts landed in rapid sequence, each one carrying the force of something considerably heavier than its size suggested. The power armor tilted forward under the accumulated force, and Nolan had to release the Warscythe to keep his footing. He stepped sideways through Shadow Step before the next strike arrived, and the Warscythe clattered away across the palace floor trailing green light.
Nolan straightened, both magnetic boots planting hard.
Then he ran directly at Wen Wu.
The electro-fibre bundles in the power armor's arms activated as his fist came forward, and the punch that left his gauntlet was not a punch so much as a focused detonation. It hit the rings flying to intercept it and scattered them, and the gap that opened was enough. He was inside Wen Wu's orbit again, close enough that the rings could not build up the speed they needed.
Wen Wu moved well. He was fast in a way that did not look like speed but like efficiency, every step exactly where it needed to be, giving ground without giving openings. The ten rings worked in constant motion around him, striking at the vibranium shell from changing angles, probing for something that would slow Nolan down. After the initial ambush strike, none of them found it. The vibranium took everything and returned nothing useful to the attacker.
Wen Wu's foot stopped.
Not through his own choice. Something locked it to the floor, an invisible weight pressing down through the sole of his boot, and his expression shifted in the fraction of a second before he forced himself free of it.
That fraction was enough.
Nolan opened the wings.
The black and red psychic extensions spread from the back of the power pack, and with them came the projection: the Red Thirst and the Black Rage, poured outward and into Wen Wu in a single pulse.
The effect was immediate and total.
Wen Wu's composure broke apart. The expression that replaced it was not his. His body was still moving, still powerful, but the control behind the movement was gone, replaced by something that did not think and did not aim and did not stop. The ten rings exploded outward in all directions, striking the walls, the floor, the columns, everything within reach, filling the palace with a continuous ringing crash of impacts.
Nolan walked through it.
The rings hit the vibranium shell from every angle on his approach and accomplished nothing. He reached Wen Wu, both hands extended, and closed his grip.
The sound that followed was brief.
Nolan let what remained fall from his hands and looked down at the vibranium shell, the thick coating of blood and the darker material mixed into it. He shook the eyepiece clear once with a slight tilt of his head.
The ten rings were drifting upward slowly, hovering without a master, their purple light dimming by degrees as though searching for something to orient toward.
He held out one palm.
The rings found it. They came to his arms in sequence with a series of small, precise impacts, settling into position against the vibranium shell as though they had always been there.
Doom came back through the gap in the wall a few minutes later, the dark green cloak marked with pale stone dust, the power armor's gait slightly adjusted for something that was probably a damaged joint.
He looked at what was on the floor, and at the rings on Nolan's arms, and said nothing about either immediately.
"Lord Primarch. The operation succeeded." A pause. "But what he said before the end. Is it worth considering?"
Nolan was turning his forearms over slowly, examining the rings against the vibranium surface, watching the way the purple light shifted with the movement.
"Doom. Does it change anything for us?"
He did not wait for the answer.
"S.P.E.A.R. eliminated an enemy they have been unable to remove for decades. We established a direct presence on the Asian continent and acquired something valuable in the process. If everything Wen Wu said was true, none of that changes. Every party here obtained what they came for." He lowered his arms. "As for Wen Wu and his city, their luck ran out. That is all."
"I understand, Lord Primarch."
Doom's helmet dipped once.
Nolan turned and walked out of the palace without looking back. His voice carried the same flat, unhurried quality it always did.
"Tell David to fire the remaining cyclone missiles. The mountain city ends tonight."
The launches came in sequence, each volley overlapping the last, the missiles drawing bright lines across the dark sky before they came down across every quarter of the city simultaneously. The agents still fighting the Scyllax units in the outer sections looked up at the incoming light with expressions that had no time to become anything more than what they were.
Some of them charged the Scyllax units one final time, throwing themselves forward with nothing left to conserve.
Some of them knelt in the ice and the rubble and turned their faces upward and prayed, calling on the name of the man who was already gone.
The next volley answered both.
The fires spread across the mountain city from a dozen separate points and joined into one. The sounds of the dying and the sounds of the explosions wove together in the cold desert air above the burning stone, rising and then fading, as the mountain city that Wen Wu had built with his own hands across centuries became, in the span of a single night, something that would need to be described in the past tense.
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