CHAPTER 49: THE CALM BEFORE THE BOOM

The safe house was a pressure cooker of tension and terrible ideas.

The holographic blueprint of Conduit Zero floated in the center of the room, a silent, three-dimensional dare.

Chloe stood at the head of the table, her posture as rigid and unyielding as a steel beam.

She was in her element.

"The infiltration parameters are clear," she began, her voice crisp and clinical, leaving no room for argument or common sense.

"Our entry point will be this maintenance conduit in the sub-basement."

She highlighted a thin, unassuming line on the blueprint.

"Phase one will be a complete stealth insertion."

"The plan is surgical. Silent. In and out before they even know we were there."

It was a beautiful plan.

It was a work of art.

Jax, who had been leaning against a workbench and juggling a small, deactivated EMP grenade, let out a cheerful, booming laugh that made Chloe flinch.

"Boss Lady, that is a fantastic plan," he declared, his grin so wide it looked like it was going to split his face in two.

"It’s elegant. It’s precise. It’s a masterpiece of tactical thinking."

He tossed the grenade in the air and caught it with a soft smack.

"It’s also gonna get us all killed."

Chloe’s left eye twitched.

It was a minuscule, almost imperceptible movement, but in the sterile silence of the safe house, it was as loud as a gunshot.

"Explain, Mr. Davies," she said, her voice dropping a full octave, a clear sign that someone was about to be logically and brutally dismembered.

"Happily!" Jax chirped, completely oblivious to the mortal danger he was in.

He bounded over to the holographic table, his lanky frame radiating a manic, infectious energy.

"Your stealth plan is perfect for getting past the front door," he said, waving a hand dismissively at the outer layers of the blueprint. "But the real party is in here."

He zoomed in on the lab’s core, on the dense, overlapping red circles that marked the automated defenses.

"See these little beauties?" he asked, pointing at the schematics for the pressure plates. "OmniCorp Gen-4s. They’re wired to a secondary, silent alarm. You try to bypass one, and it sends a nice little ’hello, we’re robbing you’ message to every guard in a five-block radius."

Jinx let out a low whistle from her corner. "He’s right. That’s a classic OmniCorp screw-you design."

Chloe stared at the sub-file, her face unreadable, but Michael could feel a faint, prickly wave of professional indignation rolling off her.

She had missed a variable.

And Chloe did not like missing variables.

"So, stealth is out," Jax declared triumphantly. "Which brings us to my favorite plan. Plan B."

"And what," Chloe asked, her voice dangerously quiet, "is Plan B?"

Jax’s grin turned feral.

"Plan B is always ’Boom’."

He waved his hands over the schematic, his movements a symphony of creative chaos.

"We don’t sneak past the system. We crash the whole damn thing."

"I can build a custom EMP pulse generator," he explained, his words coming in a rapid-fire burst of pure genius. "We hit them with it, and for a few seconds, the entire lab’s electrical system will have a seizure. The turrets go down. The sensors go blind. The locks disengage."

"It would give us a window," he finished, his eyes sparkling. "Maybe four, five seconds of pure, blissful chaos."

Chloe stared at him, her analytical mind processing the sheer, reckless audacity of his plan.

"Your plan has a seventy-three percent chance of catastrophic failure," she stated, her voice a block of solid ice.

"Yes!" Jax exclaimed, as if she had just paid him a compliment. "But it has a one hundred percent chance of being awesome!"

Jinx, who had been listening with a cynical smirk, finally spoke up.

"I like the boom plan better than the sneaky-sneaky plan," she said. "Less tiptoeing, more running."

Michael, who had been quietly tracing the lines of the blueprint, felt a strange, cold hum from the schematic.

He focused his [Void Sense].

"There’s a conduit," he said, his voice quiet, but cutting through their argument. "Here. An auxiliary power line. It’s not on the main schematic, but I can... feel it. It connects directly to the pressure plate grid."

He looked up, meeting Jax’s manic gaze. "Your pulse... if you hit it right there... it would work."

Jax’s grin was blinding. "See, Boss Lady? The spooky kid gets it!"

Chloe let out a long, slow breath, a sound of profound frustration.

She was a creature of control. Jax was an agent of chaos.

And right now, chaos was their only viable path forward.

"Fine," she conceded, the word tasting like defeat. "We will attempt the ’boom’ plan."

The final planning session was a whirlwind of organized mayhem.

Jax, now in his element, handed Michael two small, strange-looking grenades.

"For you, Spooky," he said with a wink. "A little party favor. Custom-made Glitch Grenades. They won’t do much to a person, but they’ll give any Chimera cybernetics a very nasty, very short-lived headache."

Jinx was checking her gear, her movements sharp and economical.

Chloe approached Michael, her face a mask of stiff, professional concern.

She held out a military-grade auto-injector filled with a shimmering, silver liquid.

"The operational status of the primary asset is paramount," she said, her voice a little too formal. "This is a high-potency healing agent. Use it only in a critical emergency."

But Michael, using his [Void Sense], felt the truth.

It wasn’t a clinical order.

It was a powerful, chaotic wave of pure, undiluted anxiety.

It was a desperate, unspoken plea for him to be careful.

The disconnect between her words and her emotions was so jarring it almost made him smile.

He took the injector, their fingers brushing for a fraction of a second.

She pulled her hand back as if she’d been shocked.

They stood in the silence before the storm, the four of them, geared up and ready.

A reaper. A scrapper. An anarchist. And an analyst who was slowly, painfully, and against her better judgment, starting to feel something.

Jax clapped his hands together, breaking the tension.

"Alright, Team Misfit Toys!" he declared. "Time to go make some beautiful noise!"

He paused, a thoughtful expression on his face.

"Hey, what do you call a ghoul who’s good with computers?"

No one answered.

"A byte-geist!" he finished, bursting into a peal of laughter.

Jinx groaned.

Michael just shook his head.

But Chloe... for a single, infinitesimal, almost imperceptible second, the corner of her mouth twitched upwards in what could almost, if you squinted and had a very active imagination, be described as a smile.

Then it was gone.

"Let’s move," she commanded, her voice all business once more.