CHAPTER 47: THE CALM BEFORE THE HEIST

He was also absolutely, positively, terrified of him.

Michael stood over the spot where the Alchemist had been, his body trembling, the dark energy receding, leaving him feeling hollowed out and sick.

[SOUL CORRUPTION: 3.0%]

The number glowed on his HUD, a quiet, damning verdict.

A new voice had joined the choir in his head.

It was a cold, calculating whisper. A whisper that knew the secrets of mutation, of alchemy, of twisting life into something new and terrible.

It was a voice that felt... useful.

He pushed it down, disgusted with himself.

Just as he was about to collapse from the sheer psychic exhaustion, one final notification flashed.

It wasn’t a warning.

It wasn’t a debuff.

It was the prize.

It was the memory.

He saw it. A flash of the Alchemist’s final moments, a memory not of this place, but of another.

A sterile, white lab.

The prick of a needle in its own arm.

And the face of a DGC scientist, looking down at it, his expression not cruel, but filled with a detached, academic curiosity.

A man with tired eyes and a familiar, weary face.

A face Michael had seen just last night, scrolling past in the torrent of data from the Legacy Drive.

Dr. Aris Thorne.

The trip back through the Gate was silent.

No one spoke.

Jax, for the first time in his life, seemed to have run out of things to say. He just kept glancing at Michael, a nervous, twitchy energy radiating from him, like a bomb-maker who had just met a bomb he didn’t understand and wasn’t sure he could disarm.

Jinx was a statue of cynical stoicism, her face an unreadable mask, but Michael could feel the waves of wary calculation rolling off her.

She wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Not exactly.

She was re-evaluating him.

He wasn’t just a kid. He wasn’t just an asset.

He was a variable she hadn’t accounted for. A force of nature that could either save them all or get them all killed.

She was trying to figure out which.

When they arrived back at the safe house, the atmosphere was thick enough to cut with a knife.

Jax immediately retreated to his workshop, the rhythmic, metallic sound of his tinkering a frantic, nervous heartbeat in the quiet of the base.

He was building his EMP.

He was also building a wall between himself and the spooky kid who ate ghosts for breakfast.

Jinx, after a long, silent staring contest with Michael, just shook her head and disappeared into her own corner to meticulously clean her rifle, a ritual of control in a situation that was rapidly spiraling out of it.

That left Michael alone in the cavernous main room, the whispers in his head his only company.

He felt isolated.

A pariah.

A monster they were forced to keep on a leash.

He slumped onto the minimalist, uncomfortable couch, burying his face in his hands.

The victory felt like a crushing defeat. He had saved his teammate, but he had lost... something. A piece of himself.

A soft, nearly silent footstep approached.

He didn’t look up.

It was Chloe. He could feel her presence, a cool, analytical island in the stormy sea of his own emotions.

"The mission was a success," she stated, her voice its usual, clinical monotone. "Jax is finalizing the pulse generator. We are on schedule to proceed."

Michael didn’t respond.

He heard the soft clink of ceramic on the table in front of him.

He looked up.

She had placed a steaming mug of tea on the low table. It smelled of chamomile and something faintly sweet.

It was such a normal, human gesture that it felt utterly alien in this place of tactical maps and psychic horrors.

He stared at the mug, then at her face.

Her expression was, as always, unreadable.

But her eyes... there was something different in her eyes. A flicker of something that wasn’t analysis.

"The mission requires control," she said, her voice a little softer than usual.

"But you are not just the mission."

She paused, as if the words were foreign, difficult to pronounce.

"Don’t forget that."

Before he could process the monumental admission, she turned and walked back to her console, her back ramrod straight, the moment of human connection over.

But it had happened.

The ice queen had just shown him the first, tiny crack in her glacial armor.

And for a moment, he didn’t feel so alone.

Two blocks away, in a different, far less emotionally complicated command center, Captain Helena Valerius stared at a screen, a deep frown creasing her brow.

"Report," she snapped at the young analyst beside her.

"The D-Rank Gate in the Queens warehouse district collapsed twenty minutes ago, Captain," the analyst reported, his fingers flying across his keyboard. "Standard ghoul nest. DGC cleanup crews are sanitizing the site now."

"Anything unusual?" Valerius pressed.

"That’s the thing, ma’am," the analyst said, turning his screen towards her. "The energy readings are... weird."

He pulled up a graph. It showed a series of standard, spiky energy flares, consistent with a Hunter team clearing a Gate.

But then, at the very end, there was a single, massive, and utterly bizarre signature.

It wasn’t a spike.

It was a void. A negative energy reading that had appeared for a fraction of a second, followed by a violent, chaotic burst of power that had destabilized and collapsed the Gate prematurely.

Valerius’s blood ran cold.

It was the same signature.

The same impossible, physics-defying black hole of energy they had registered at the Red Hook storage facility.

"It’s him," she whispered. "Echo-01."

"Cross-reference all comms intercepts from that sector for the last hour," she ordered, her mind racing. "I want to know who he was with."

"Already on it, Captain," a different voice said from across the room. It was a senior technician, a man with graying hair and a perpetually worried expression.

"We picked up a heavily encrypted, non-standard comms channel operating in the area during the event. The signal was bouncing off a dozen different ghost nodes. It’s professional. Military-grade."