Gilashot dropped from the sky like divine punishment—platinum wings cracking the air with a sonic boom as she spiraled toward the center of the chaos. Her visor locked onto the Wayfarers, each tagged in red with thermal outlines.
They saw her coming. They even braced.
It wasn't enough.
She slammed into the ground with a tremor, kicking up a vortex of snow and dirt. Her venom vambraces hissed as she spun in a wide arc, lashing out with blistering precision. The Urchin lunged first—his coral-fused arms crackling with bio-electricity. Gilashot slid low, one wing dragging behind like a scythe. Her needle-dart shot upward, striking him beneath the chin. He froze mid-charge, limbs locking.
"Sit down," she hissed.
Barracuda Lancer let out a battle cry and charged with his twin harpoons. Gilashot leapt, twisted mid-air, and fired a spread of micro-darts that sliced through his shoulder joints. He dropped one harpoon, staggered, and took a knee, blood steaming against the snow.
Twin Daggers rushed her from behind, but Gilashot's wing flared and snapped back like a whip, catching her across the ribs and flinging her into a stalled Eclipse rover.
Three down. But not without a cost.
A spine-blade—tossed in desperation—caught Gilashot in the thigh. She grunted, her wing faltering for the first time. Blood spread slowly down her leg, steaming as it hit the ice.
She landed hard, breathing heavy, gear glitching at the edges. But she stood—
Bleeding, panting, triumphant.
Phase Two: The Lab
The hatch groaned open into a side chamber—dark, flickering, the metal walls sweating with condensation and quiet dread. Tye stepped inside slowly, the light from his glove casting pale shadows on surfaces that looked barely touched in years. The air was sharp with ozone and rot, the kind of chemical stench that clung to the throat.
He passed half-assembled GEAR rigs, their cords twisted like tendons torn from some mechanical beast. One tank still hummed faintly, filled with viscous gel and what looked like a malformed hybrid—half-chimpanzee, half-octopus. Its eyes followed him as he moved past.
He ducked under exposed conduit and approached a terminal coated in frost.
It blinked to life with a static pulse, and a voice—his father's voice—bloomed in the darkness.
ZUGUN VOICE LOG 88-A:
"Hydra. Tardigrade. Human. One cannot become many unless first they endure. The cocoon is not a prison—it is a crucible. My children will carry the pattern forward. One in Japan,One in South America, China. And one here… my son. He must find the threads. They'll know him by the glove."
Tye's heart pounded. The screen behind the log bloomed with schematics—of GEAR designs, biological grafting models, and names of people. Some were redacted. One name flickered under "Subject Zero": Tye Rome.
Martinaz: "Tye. Coordinates just uploaded. The Cocoon is real. Sub-Level 7 confirms."
He turned to leave—
—and felt a pressure shift in the room. A faint mechanical hiss behind him.
Gilashot stepped from the shadows like she'd been waiting the whole time. Her visor gleamed red, one wing half-folded from the EMP feedback. She moved with a limp—but her weapon arm still hummed.
"I don't like hide-and-seek," she said calmly.
Tye squared up, pulse in his ears. "Too bad. I do."
Mandark Evac
Tye stared down Gilashot's visor, the hum of his glove building. "Sorry, but I'm late for my ride."
He slammed his fist into the ground. The glove discharged a focused arc, blinding her sensors and overloading the room's circuitry. She stumbled back with a hiss of static, momentarily disoriented.
Tye bolted down the corridor, ducking under closing blast doors, skidding through the automated defense grid that hadn't fully rebooted. Eclipse soldiers were flooding the halls—but they weren't ready for him.
Outside, Cuh and Mandark had pushed into the compound's outer ring, carving a path through stunned guards. Soule, bleeding from a scrape above his eye, laid down cover fire with a modified shock baton while Martinaz relayed each door's lock-code in real time.
Martinaz: "Left corridor, 12 meters. Gate's failing. Jump through—now!"
Tye dove just as the blast gate shut behind him. He crashed into Soule and Cuh, breathless but grinning.
"Miss me?"
"Like indigestion," Soule coughed.
Gilashot emerged from the smoke again, dragging her leg, wings cracked but flaring.
"Go, go, go!" Mandark bellowed.
Martinaz and Soule barreled through the perimeter in a thundering dune-truck. The headlights cut through the snow like knives.
"Let's goooo!" Soule screamed, skidding sideways.
Cuh hoisted Tye into the backseat while Mandark grabbed Wavi—barely conscious but still gripping his broken gauntlet—and tossed him in.
Gilashot lunged one last time—but her wounds gave way.
The truck roared down the icy trail, smashing through the last blockade and disappearing into the wind.
The Whale Song – Later
The waves hissed gently against the hull of the Salt Choir's drifting cruiser—known among them as The Whale Song. Inside the healing chamber, the air was thick with sea-salt steam and the low pulse of bio-fused walls. Tadpole Slim stood barefoot in a shallow pool, water lapping against her ankles as the bioluminescent strands of her jellyfish top pulsed with grief.
She knelt beside three stretchers—her fallen Wayfarers wrapped in mourning silk. Their GEAR still twitched occasionally, reacting to phantom nerves and neural echoes.
"They were children of the tide," she whispered, brushing sea moss from one of their masks.
A surviving Wayfarer approached slowly and held out a cracked, waterlogged bracelet. Tadpole took it.
Carved into the underside, etched in burned resin: ECLIPSE.
Her expression didn't change—but her GEAR glowed darker, thicker tendrils rising like a storm.
"He has the glove," she said quietly. "And he swims faster than we thought."
She stood, eyes on the rising tide beyond the observation glass.
"Let him run," Tadpole whispered. "I want to see where he swims."
Three Days Later – Mandark Hideout
The warehouse still smelled like ozone and victory. Scorch marks marred the walls. Ice melted slowly beneath cracked gear crates. The dust hadn't settled—it never did in the Bronze Zone.
Tye leaned back against a reinforced support beam, one arm slung in a freeze-pack brace. Across the room, Soule tossed a protein bar into the air and caught it theatrically.
"To the dumbest, wildest, most legendary damn plan we've ever pulled off."
Cuh groaned, ribs wrapped tight beneath a patchwork hoodie. "My ribs disagree."
Wavi, seated on a crate with one leg in a GEAR-boot support, smirked. "Dustwalker almost had me."
Soule elbowed him as he sat. "Almost. You stayed up longer than a cuttlefish on stims."
Martinaz, her sleeves rolled to the elbows, glanced up from a data-pad. "That's not physiologically possible."
Soule grinned. "It is when I say it in rhyme."
A silence fell—brief, but heavy.
Martinaz turned to Tye, adjusting her lenses. "So. What did you find?"
Tye stood. He walked slowly to the old brass terminal mounted on the back wall. The glove on his hand flickered, light spiraling up the fabric like static water.
He pressed his palm to the interface.
The screen pulsed once.
Coordinates loaded.
THE COCOON – ACTIVE
The End…for now