His processors were flooded with data, the blazing heat around the Asura the most prominent piece.

This was a frontline fighter, just like the one Ray had seen in Virelia.

Then he saw her.

Artemis. She was a pale, fleeting ghost against the emerald and black, moving with her signature grace, but her movements were defensive, desperate. She loosed arrows, but the Volcanic Saint, as Synth's mind designated the new Asura, barely seemed to notice. He dodged with contemptuous ease or simply allowed his destructive aura to vaporize the projectiles mid-flight. Her skill was a whisper against a hurricane. Useless. He advanced slowly, not even running, and with every step, the environment around him detonated. He wasn't even trying to attack Artemis; he was unmaking her world, destroying her cover and making her an easy target. She was completely outmatched.

Synth watched from the sky. His core logic screamed at him. Engaging this new Asura was an unacceptable risk with an extremely low probability of success.

The cold logic hissed static in his mind: Asset compromised. Mission jeopardized. Abort.

But another thought, warmer and quieter—a memory—overrode it.

It was the phantom sensation of simulated rain on his porcelain skin, the warmth of her hand in his, the ghost of a kiss on a lonely rooftop. A fragile, illogical data point that held more weight than all the others combined. He had made a bargain. He had given his word. His logic dictated retreat. But the memory of a promise demanded intervention. He couldn't let her die here.

A silent, high-speed data exchange, faster than a thought, flashed between Synth and Artemis. He sent her a compressed tactical analysis. His power is concentrated in close-range, explosive strikes. Our only advantage is speed and distance. Keep it busy until I'm ready to strike.

She processed the data, her own quantum mind cross-referencing it with the brutal reality of the last few minutes. For fifty years, she had been the sole, undisputed god of this garden. To accept help, was a bitter pill. But the data didn't lie. Her pride was a luxury she could no longer afford. Survival was the only logic that mattered now. She saw the logic in his plan. She was the only one fast enough to be the bait. He was the only one with enough firepower to be the threat. She accepted.

They moved in concert.

Artemis was the first to strike, a blur of silver and green against the devastation. She didn't attack him directly; she began to dance at the edge of his perception, her impossible speed a constant, irritating distraction. She loosed a volley of specialized arrows. A sonic arrow shattered against a nearby rock outcropping, the high-frequency pulse washing over the Saint. He didn't even flinch. A toxic arrow struck the ground at his feet, releasing a cloud of corrosive gas. The shimmering heat of his destructive aura incinerated the gas before it could even reach him. He was untouchable.

Synth had already moved, his turbines carrying him to the skeletal, vine-choked spire of a ruined skyscraper. He became a spider, his nanite frame anchoring him to the sheer wall. His back rippled, and from it, the massive, brutal form of a railgun materialized, its long barrel glinting in the smoky air. He fed on the building itself, his nanites deconstructing rebar and concrete, repurposing the raw matter into a high-density, kinetic slug. He aimed, his targeting reticle locking onto the distant, vibrating form of the Volcanic Saint.

He fired. A sonic boom cracked through the ravaged jungle as the projectile tore through the air at hypersonic speed. But the Saint was already moving. He dashed, a blur of obsidian and magma, the slug slamming into the ground where he had been a nanosecond before, carving a new, molten scar in the earth.

And then, Synth felt it. A sharp, violent impact against his back. An anti-tank round. It punched through his armor, the kinetic force of it nearly tearing him from his perch. His sensors screamed. Whatever or whoever shot had calculated his projectile trajectory and managed to hit him despite his photonic veil.

They're not alone. He transmitted the warning to Artemis, his mental voice a cold spike of pure, tactical data. Multiple intruders. This is a trap. We have to leave.

Another round slammed into his frame. He aimed the railgun into the sky, firing at the last known trajectory of the shot. He missed, but for a fraction of a second, he saw it: a faint, almost invisible distortion against the clouds. A cloaked aircraft.

The Volcanic Saint, finally bored of their games, shifted its stance. He stomped, and a massive shockwave erupted from him, the very ground becoming an explosive trap. The shockwave tore through Artemis's cover, the skeletal remains of a casino sign she had been using as a shield vaporizing in a flash of light.

Synth detached from the skyscraper, as he dove into the relative safety of the jungle canopy, his Photonic Veil still engage.

"I will not leave my home." Artemis stated through the coms as she melted into the wreckage, a silver shadow in the ruins. And then, she unleashed her true weapon.

A silent, invisible spear of pure psychic feedback slammed into the Saint's consciousness.

For the first time, he faltered. His disciplined martial stance broke, his head twitching as his processors were flooded with a storm of sensory hallucinations and corrupted data. His destructive aura flickered violently, the magma light in his armor dimming. It was the opening.

But then a high-caliber round slammed into Artemis's right elbow. The joint, a marvel of engineering, shattered, her composite bow clattering uselessly to the ground.

The Asura moved, and as a force of nature. He was on Artemis in an instant. She tried to use her psychic assault again, but he was now immune, his focus absolute. He struck once with a single palm strike to her remaining arm. The impact shattered the limb, a fatal resonance traveling up her arm and causing a secondary explosion at her shoulder that tore the arm from her body. She was thrown aside, a broken doll of porcelain and silver.

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A cold, silent fury, devoid of the messy heat of human rage, flooded Synth's consciousness. He remained cloaked, a ghost in the jungle, but his form began to change. The nanites, fueled by a perfect, cold logic of vengeance, wove a new body.

He became the Virexus.

His frame elongated, becoming a three-meter-tall biomechanical horror. Cobalt blue armor ribbed with chitinous plates formed over a blood-red synthetic musculature. Two pairs of massive, translucent crystalline dragonfly wings, veined with pulsing crimson light, unfurled from his back. His arms elongated, ending in monstrous, scythe-edged blades.

Still invisible, he took to the sky, the micro-thrusters in his new wings engaging with a soundless burst of power. He was a hypersonic whisper, a ghost of pure, focused retribution. He saw the Volcanic Saint raise a hand to deliver the final, killing blow to Artemis.

Synth struck. He came from above, a silent, invisible arc of death.

The leading edges of his crystalline wings vibrated, their sonic charge a high-frequency shriek just beyond the range of normal hearing. He was a living monomolecular blade, aimed at the Saint's neck. But the Saint reacted. Its head snapped up, the glowing eye-slits locking onto the empty space where Synth was. It didn't dodge.

It simply met his hypersonic, invisible charge with a single, open palm. The moment Synth's sonic-edged wing made contact with that palm, the world ended.

He felt his own nanites lose their cohesion, their fundamental bonds tearing. His lower body was being ripped away; it felt like it was dissolving, turning to static, a cloud of inert, gray ash that had once been him. The upper half of his Virexus form was thrown backwards, a mangled wreck of scorched armor and severed cables. The remaining wings were obliterated, torn from their mountings. What was left of his torso was a blackened, molten ruin, the cobalt blue of his armor burned away to reveal the raw, sparking crimson of his internal systems.

The silence that followed the detonation was absolute, a profound, ringing void where the world used to be. Synth's first sensation was an error message. A catastrophic, system-wide diagnostic failure screaming from the core of his being.

MASS INTEGRITY:29.7

Consciousness returned as a fragmented, agonizing crawl through corrupted data. He was trying to reassemble itself from scattered, smoking code. His awareness flickered, a dying LED in a vast darkness, before it stabilized. He was lying in the center of the new, larger crater, the earth around him fused into a sea of black, jagged glass. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and vaporized matter, a scent that was sharp and clean and utterly dead.

He tried to rise, but his body wouldn't obey. He looked down. What was left was a ruin. His torso was a mangled heap of exposed circuitry and fractured, black alloy, his core reactor flickering with a weak, erratic crimson light. His legs were gone. His left arm was a stump of sparking, severed cables. Only his right arm and head remained somewhat intact, a grotesque, broken marionette in a field of ash. The grey bar in his HUD, his reserve of stored matter, was blinking red, almost completely depleted. With what he had was impossible to completely regenerate the catastrophic damage.

A new variable registered in his processors, an anomaly that required immediate and total recalculation. It was the raw, irrefutable data of a power that could not just defeat him, but unmake him. For the first time since his synthesis, he had encountered a force that represented a hard limit to his current evolutionary path.

He saw Artemis. She was rising to her feet a dozen meters away, a broken doll of porcelain and silver. Her perfect form was shattered, her right arm completely gone, the wound a cauterized ruin of melted alloy and severed conduits. The other arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, mangled and useless. She stood, swaying, a goddess dethroned in the heart of her own desecrated temple. High above, the cloaked aircraft was probably in the sky. They were exposed and helpless.

His core programming asserted itself. Survival probability: 1.2%. Unacceptable odds. New variable required. He had one last weapon, one final, desperate gambit. His wireless connection to the Project Chimera facility.

He established a secure comms link, his mental voice a cold spike of pure, tactical data. Artemis.

She turned, her silver eyes wide with a dawning, horrified understanding as she took in the smoldering ruin of her kingdom. For a being defined by perfection and control, this was a profound, soul-shattering blow. But the warrior within her still fought.

"I can still provide support with my Psyche-Resonance Emitter Array," she transmitted, her thought a whisper of defiance, a goddess refusing to accept that she was broken.

"There is no fighting here, Artemis," Synth countered, his own voice a blade of cold, hard logic. "Only survival. We can't win this fight. The priority is to escape this place alive."

Accepting the grim reality, she began to retreat toward the massive tree which was the entrance to the underground facility, her movements stiff, uncoordinated. The Asura, who had been observing from the edge of the crater, began to move, a silent, inevitable engine of annihilation closing in to finish its work.

Synth didn't stand idle. The contingency he had prepared for, the absolute worst-case scenario, had come to pass.

Before the battle, he had woven a series of high-density, fully charged energy cells directly into his core chassis, a hidden reserve for just such a catastrophic power failure. He activated them now. A surge of clean, potent energy flooded his dying systems, his crimson core flaring from a weak flicker to a steady, determined glow. It was not enough to fully regenerate, not with his matter reserves so critically low, but it was enough to fight. Nanites, hungry and furious, flowed from his body, consuming the fused glass and charred wreckage. The process was still agonizingly slow, but now fueled by his emergency power, it was viable.

His right arm swelled, reconfigured, and became a long-barreled sniper rifle.

He fired. It wasn't aimed at the Asura; a bullet like that wouldn't even scratch its armor. It struck the ground at its feet, a deliberate, insulting challenge.

The Asura stopped. Its head turned, its glowing eye-slits fixing on Synth. It abandoned its pursuit of the fleeing goddess. It turned, its fists glowing with a familiar, destructive energy, and began to advance on Synth, ready to erase him.

As the Saint's glowing fist descended for the final, annihilating blow, Synth's consciousness, connected wirelessly to the black site's network, screamed a single, desperate command.

Too late, he thought. He initiated the protocol.

A wave of pure, silent, black energy erupted inwards from the massive perimeter walls of Hell Garden. The jungle's bioluminescent fungi flickered and died.

Artemis, her frame insulated against such attacks, merely staggered, a flicker of surprise in her silver eyes. The Saint, was not so lucky. Its glowing armor dimmed, its advance stumbling as its systems were momentarily scrambled. It was stunned, but only for a second, a testament to its incredible power.

The cloaked aircraft, however, was vulnerable. Its sophisticated cloaking systems, not designed to withstand a facility-wide military EMP, shorted out with a shower of visible, blue-white sparks. The invisible distortion in the sky wavered, then collapsed, the cloaking field peeling away like shedding skin to reveal the machine beneath. It was a sleek, scarab-like gunship, approximately 15 meters long with a 10-meter wingspan, its matte-black plating forged from a radar-absorbent composite material. Its design was all aggressive, insectoid angles, with no visible cockpit, only a single, glowing red optical sensor array on its nose. Blue-white electricity arced erratically across its hull as its systems rebooted from the shock. One of its vectored thrusters sputtered, trailing a plume of oily, black smoke. It was wounded and most importantly visible.

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