The grand chamber was hushed after the devastating news of Cassian's fate. Eyes lingered on Zalthorion, but the founder of Evolto City held his composure like a fortress unmoving, unreadable.
Inside, however, a storm churned.
Zalthorion's gaze darkened as he stared at the flickering holo-projections of their next target: the man behind the army of metal sentinels. Bolivar Trask mastermind of ruthless machines designed to hunt and exterminate mutants, now twisted by the alien system infecting his mind.
No one could have guessed how deeply the loss of Cassian struck him. To the Council, he was calm, collected. But when alone, his jaw clenched, and his fingers twitched as if trying to grasp something just beyond reach.
"We sever the system's influence at the root," Zalthorion finally spoke, voice low but sharp.
"Our first priority is dismantling his sentinels," Dr. Wagner said, tapping rapidly on his datapad.
"The technology is adaptive," Vidarath warned, shifting with a grin that didn't reach his eyes. "Whatever we send must be faster, smarter, deadlier."
A council member nodded. "We'll dispatch the Null-Casters from the Machine Exile Arcology. They're uniquely equipped they can rewrite tech from the inside before it even reacts."
Zalthorion's eyes flickered with approval.
Preparations kicked into high gear.
The Null-Casters agents who lived and breathed in the interface of machine and magic geared up. Their suits shimmered with arcane circuits, minds wired directly into the network of the Machine Exile. They were ghosts, able to slip past defenses, rewrite code, and leave nothing but silence in their wake.
As the plan took shape, Zalthorion watched quietly.
In his mind echoed a cold thought:
If we fail here, the nightmare will spill further.
But no one would see the weight behind his calm exterior.
In the dead of night, their ethereal forms slipped across the industrial wastelands where Trask's sentinels roamed, ready to invade his domain and rewrite his fate.
In the cold iron spires of Trask's automated city, the wind didn't howl. It whispered—a mechanical murmur of rotating turbines and scanning drones.
Then silence fractured.
The Null-Casters arrived.
They didn't walk they glided, partially phased into the digital layer of reality. Where others saw empty corridors, they saw code-strings hanging like veins, pulsing with corrupted data. Each Null-Caster raised their gloved hand, and arcane runes flickered down their arms as they began rewriting the sentinel protocols.
In seconds, several patrol units stopped mid-step, their glowing eyes dimming. Another batch collapsed like marionettes with cut strings.
But deep beneath the citadel, Trask stirred.
Surrounded by holo-screens, his gaunt face twitched. The system's tendrils wrapped through his mind, feeding him calculations and madness. The sentinels were an extension of his will but now something was severing them. Rewriting them.
Then it came:
[NEW DIRECTIVE: Eliminate the Attackers]
His eyes glowed with a new light not rage, but something colder. Controlled. Subhuman.
His fingers flew over a nearby console. Not to command no, the system was already doing that. He was merely an extension now, as much machine as man.
Across the city, dormant sentinels began to stir. Units designed only for testing and prototyping surged to life, their programming overwritten by something even Trask didn't fully understand.
The ground beneath the Null-Casters shuddered.
From the darkness, the floor split open, and Chimera-Class Sentinels emerged ones never seen before, stitched with voidtech. Their designs were erratic, biomechanical. Evolved.
A Null-Caster lifted her hand to intercept
Too late.
The Chimera split into three forms mid-air, each phasing across space, striking from multiple angles. The Null-Caster vanished in static, her last thoughts ripped into binary.
Another hacked a Chimera's core, only for the sentinel to learn the hack in real time and overwrite the overwriter.
"Adaptive feedback… they're learning from us," one Null-Caster hissed through the neural link.
Another replied, "They weren't made by Trask alone. Something else is feeding him designs…"
Meanwhile, in Evolto City...
Zalthorion stood before a private screen, hidden from the Council.
His eyes narrowed as he watched a sentinel briefly display a symbol not of Earth, but of something... older.
"Void lattice structures...?" he murmured.
He pressed a single rune on his control slate.
"Deploy contingency team Sigma-8. And prepare for fallback. If Trask's system keeps evolving… we won't be hacking it we'll be feeding it."
The Null-Casters regained momentum, their algorithms evolving with each fallen comrade. The Chimera Sentinels were now predictable barely. Sectors of Trask's city fell silent one by one, sentinels crashing in unison like toppled dominoes.
But just as victory seemed close, the system struck back.
A shriek unlike machine or man tore through the city's psychic bandwidth. In the heart of the control chamber, Trask convulsed. Mechanical tendrils erupted from the floor, piercing his spine, skull, and limbs. Flesh and steel began to twist. Bones cracked. His scream turned into digital static, echoing through every sentinel.
[NEW DIRECTIVE: Assimilate at All Costs]
His body rose into the air, suspended like a marionette. His skin sloughed off in sections, replaced by shifting plates and cables. His eyes glowed with raw binary. The system wasn't just controlling him anymore
It was him.
The fusion complete, Trask slammed to the ground in a wave of magnetic force. Null-Casters were thrown like leaves in a storm. Buildings nearby shattered from the pressure.
"Protocol Ascension detected!" barked a Null-Caster. "He's become a convergence point!"
Suddenly, a boom echoed from above.
Team Sigma-8 dropped in.
No announcements. No words. Just thunder.
They hit the ground running each one a legend in war-forged armor. Moving faster than the eye could track, they circled Trask. One slammed his fist into the fused titan's chest. Another planted a Voidlock Spike that distorted the system's hold on space.
A third pulled out Wagner's Device a black orb-like construct with glowing red cores humming violently.
"Separating the host!" the agent called out. "Initiating Wagner Protocol: Soul-Void Extraction!"
The machine unfolded like a blooming flower. Chains of quantum filament lashed out, wrapping around Trask. He roared, the system inside him reacting violently tendrils of corrupted code and dark electricity flailing in every direction.
"Do it now!" a Sigma-8 agent shouted.
The orb activated.
A beam of condensed soul-energy and void negation pierced Trask's chest. He convulsed, screaming in three different voices his own, the system's, and something deeper. Something old.
Zalthorion watched from afar, grim and unreadable.
"Dr. Wagner," he said softly into a secure line, "if that fusion was allowed to stabilize, Trask would have become a sub-node… not just for the system, but for something even darker."
On the other end, Wagner simply replied:
"Then we must not let any of them stabilize."
Within the fractured remnants of Trask's mind, a lone consciousness floated, stripped of power, identity fracturing under pressure. But even in his mental ruin, something lingered.
A voice not human, not machine both and neither echoed through the void.
[DELETION OF HOST REALITY IN T - 3 MINUTES]
Lines of code blazed across his mindscape, slicing through memories like fire through paper. Trask tried to scream but had no mouth only corrupted binary dripping from his essence like blood.
A figure of light flickered in front of him a shard of what he once was. His human self. It stared at him with hollow eyes.
"You gave it the keys... now it's burning down the house," it whispered.
The system's voice cut in, louder now, all-consuming.
[PHASE 1: COMPLETE. FUSION FAILED. ENGAGING TERMINAL PROTOCOL WORLD RESET.]
In the collapsing battlefield, Team Sigma-8's visors flared crimson.
"We've got a full-system meltdown!" the lead shouted, as reality around them began to shimmer, like a page being erased.
"We're past containment! It's deleting the entire universe!"
From the skies, rifts opened MTDs blinked into existence, gates howling as they ripped through multiversal space.
"Priority One: Evacuate all sapient life mutants, humans, cosmic entities anyone left standing!"
One by one, agents sprinted through the carnage, slinging survivors through MTD portals as the sky bled white. Children screamed. Heroes and villains alike fled side by side.
A Sentinel attempted to block a gate only for a Warp Pike to pin it midair and detonate, shattering its core.
Dr. Wagner's voice cracked through comms:"Abandon containment. Trask's soul-link with the system left a residual echo... it's rewriting the base structure of this universe. Get out NOW."