The hallway didn't dissolve; it became a blur.
The modified hover-stretcher didn't just accelerate it detonated off the line. Driven by the military-grade Orthodoxy battery, the anti-grav pads generated a localized pressure wave that shattered the remaining glass panels along the corridor, launching the vehicle forward at an uncalibrated ninety miles per hour inside a ten-foot-wide tunnel.
The Purge Drone's targeting AI didn't even have time to calculate the intercept trajectory.
Its rotary cannons spun up, firing a stream of heavy plasma rounds, but Zayn's battle IQ had already mapped the firing rhythm. With a slight, three-millimeter tilt of his wrists, Zayn deflected the stretcher's path off the left wall, using the concrete's curvature like a half-pipe.
The plasma rounds punched empty holes into the rock behind them.
BOOM!
The stretcher didn't dodge the drone it slammed directly into its main optical sensor array at full speed. The impact was a horrific shriek of tearing aluminum and high-grade titanium. Because Zayn had aligned the stretcher's structural frame with the drone's primary sensory rivet, the kinetic force didn't break the vehicle; it channeled the entire ninety-mile-per-hour momentum into the drone's neck joints.
The Level 26 Purge Drone's head snapped backward with an explosive snap of hydraulic fluid, its massive bipedal body toppling over like a felled redwood tree.
The stretcher bounced off the wreck, airborne now, soaring straight through the shattered elevator shaft and plunging down into the roaring, orange abyss of the Sector 4 Geothermal Vents.
"WE'RE FALLING INTO A VOLCANO!" Rora screamed, her goggles flying off her face, held only by the safety strap around her neck.
Beneath them, a literal river of liquid slag and molten iron glowed with a blinding, toxic orange light. The thermal updraft was immense, a wall of superheated air moving upward at fifty miles per hour, thick with sulfur and ash.
[Warning: Ambient Temperature: 450°C]
[Midnight Tunic Status: Active Thermal Dissipation (92% Efficiency)]
[Stretcher Status: Anti-Grav Pads Overheating (Failure in 45 seconds)]
"The thermal draft is too strong!" Rora gasped, her skin blistering from the ambient heat. "We aren't going down, we're going to get cooked alive by the rising air!"
"We aren't staying in the draft," Zayn said. His eyes were wide, glowing a vibrant, fierce gold as the extreme environment forced his Primal Core to fight back against the suppression tunic. He didn't look at the lava below; he looked at the basalt rock walls of the chasm.
Every twelve feet, the mining corporations had driven heavy, iron structural pins into the rock to stabilize the canyon walls. They were old, rusted, and covered in sulfur deposits.
Weight: 140 pounds. Stretcher weight: 300 pounds. Kinetic energy of the fall: Declining due to draft. Required force to break the draft: 450 Newtons.
Zayn reached down, his fingers gripping the reinforced kinetic bracers he had scavenged from the dead paladin. He hadn't attached them to his arms; he had strapped them to the bottom of his boots.
"Rora," Zayn commanded, his voice cutting through the roar of the geothermal river. "Kill the anti-grav pads. Completely."
"Are you insane?! We'll drop like a stone!"
"Exactly. Drop us."
Rora bit her lip, a sob escaping her throat as she slammed her fist into the emergency cutoff switch. The purple glow beneath the stretcher vanished instantly. The vehicle lost its lift, entering a state of unmitigated free fall, plunging straight down toward the molten river at terrifying speed.
Ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty feet.
Just as the heat from the lava began to scorch the metal frame of the stretcher, Zayn moved. He didn't jump off; he drove his legs downward, stomping his boots—and the scavenged kinetic bracers—directly into one of the heavy iron mining pins protruding from the rock wall as they flew past it.
CRACK!
The kinetic bracer absorbed the immense impact of the fall, converting the downward momentum into a violent, horizontal pivot. The stretcher swung around the iron pin like a pendulum, its trajectory completely altering from a vertical plunge to a horizontal launch.
The vehicle shot sideways, flying straight through the dark, cool mouth of an abandoned ventilation tunnel three feet above the lava line.
They slammed into the dirt floor of the tunnel, the stretcher tumbling over twice before sliding to a halt in the pitch-black silence of the lower Outskirts.
Rora lay flat on her face, coughing up black soot, her entire body trembling. "Did... did we survive?"
Zayn slowly sat up from the dirt. His Midnight Tunic was covered in grey ash, but with a single shake of his shoulders, the nano-fibers vibrated, shedding the dirt completely and returning to their pristine, light-swallowing black state.
He checked his interface.
[Time to Cooldown: 10:41:00]
[Rank Status: Progressing... Rank 18 (75% to Rank 19)]
[Current State: Secured in the Sub-Forge Network]
"A highly efficient trajectory," Zayn deadpanned, looking back toward the glowing orange mouth of the vent they had just escaped. "The Inquisitor's data will show our signature disappearing into the lava line. They will assume total molecular incineration. We have exactly ten hours of anonymity."
He looked down at his clean sleeves. "And more importantly... the tunic didn't shrink."