Aeva didn't wait for a permission Kazuki hadn't technically given.
She pressed the disc flat against Darius's chest, over the worst of the spreading cracks, and the gold light didn't just glow this time. It poured, running down her fingers and into him like something being decanted rather than transmitted.
The effect was immediate, and wrong in a way none of them had a name for. Darius arched off the concrete with a sound somewhere between relief and agony. The black lightning under his skin didn't vanish. It turned, crawling backward along his arm toward Aeva's hand, toward the disc, toward her.
"Aeva!" Kazuki grabbed for her shoulder.
"Don't." Her voice had gone tight and controlled, a woman holding a live wire on purpose. "It's not attacking me. It's asking. It wants somewhere to go, and I'm the only open door in the room." Sweat had broken along her hairline. For one impossible second her irises went the same dull gold as the disc. "I don't think it's going to kill me."
"That's not the reassurance you think it is."
"It's the only one I've got."
Elena had Darius's head in her hands, talking to him in a low, steady stream of nothing, which Kazuki understood was just her way of keeping a man tethered to the sound of a voice. Stay with me. Look at the ceiling. Count the pipes.
That was when the far wall of the depot stopped being a wall.
It wasn't an explosion. It was worse, because it was deliberate: eight feet of reinforced concrete simply gave up, punched through by something moving fast enough that the debris hadn't finished falling before she was already three strides inside.
Kora was bigger than the file had suggested. She stood seven feet tall, in matte-grey plating layered over what had once been a human frame, and her optics swept the room in one slow arc that clocked every exit before her second foot landed.
"Found you." Her voice carried a faint electronic doubling, the sound of something organic that had been asked to stop being organic a long time ago. "Vaunt said you'd be interesting. He undersold it."
Kazuki put himself between her and the floor, where Darius was convulsing and Aeva was locked inside whatever the disc was doing to her. Neither of them could move.
"Wrong five minutes," he said.
"I don't pick minutes. I pick targets."
Her weight dropped, and Kazuki understood a half-second too late that whoever built her hadn't left speed out of the specification. She crossed the depot faster than her size had any right to allow, faster than Titus, faster than anything not built around velocity had any business being.
He got an arm up in time to turn the first blow instead of eating it whole. The impact still put him through a support column. Something in his side went with a wet, flat crack, and the taste of copper flooded his mouth before he'd finished falling.
Kenji's illusions bloomed across the room, three Kazukis and then four, a scatter of afterimages sprinting in contradictory directions. Kora's optics split-focused on them for exactly half a second. Then she pivoted, put a fist through the real one's position anyway, and the whole illusion shattered around Kenji's grunt of pain as he hit the floor.
"She tracks heat," Rina snapped, dragging Marcus's dead weight behind the workbench. "Stop making copies and"
Kora didn't let her finish. She turned away from all of them, the fighters and the illusions and the boy bleeding against a cracked column, and looked at the floor.
At Darius, seizing. At Aeva, kneeling over him, eyes gold, unable to move.
Kazuki felt it arrive in his stomach before his head caught up. He's not trying to break you. He's trying to find out what breaks first.
"No," he said.
Kora took a step toward them.
[To Be Continued...]