Max stood at the edge of a canyon where the land had been torn asunder by past battles. The air shimmered with radiation and the leftover scent of ozone. Far beneath, hidden by layers of collapsed earth and steel, lay Echo Station Sigma — a once-human installation that had been overtaken and refitted by Ultron's forces.
Now, it was a signal relay node, pulsing with quantum data — and housing a Primary Ultron Core Shard.
He rolled his shoulders, eyes scanning the cracked valley.
"Mary," he said, voice low, "status."
:: Echo Station Sigma is defended by three autonomous kill-zones, seventeen automated turrets, and a central nexus guarded by two Colossus-class sentries and one unidentified energy source. Suggestion: proceed with full stealth or catastrophic overkill. ::
Max grinned. "We'll try stealth. First."
He vanished — cloaked in refractive light and suppressive aura, part of the advanced stealth mode he have made for everyone.
Sliding down the canyon wall like a shadow, he phased past sentry fields, disabled nodes with a flick of his fingers, and hacked one turret into turning on the others.
Every motion was precise.
Every action premeditated.
When he reached the Core Shard Chamber, the lights flared crimson. The energy in the room distorted, then condensed into a humanoid figure — half-machine, half-ghost — surrounded by a swarm of nanodrones.
"HOST DETECTED," it intoned. "YOU SHOULD NOT EXIST."
Max chuckled. "Yeah. That's the idea."
He raised his hand. Red panels unfolded mid-air behind him — dozens of them. Weaponized system constructs.
The two blurred forward.
Max teleported mid-swipe, reappearing above and slamming a blast of kinetic energy straight into the shard's exposed circuits.
The AI screeched.
But he was already moving again — hacking, destabilizing, overwhelming its logic with brute system interference.
When it lunged at him in desperation, he caught it mid-air, drew one of his Reality Splinter Blades, and plunged it into its core.
:: SYSTEM FAILURE — CORE SHARD DELETED ::
:: Relay Interruption: 37% of Ultron's planetary comms down ::
Max panted slightly, blood trickling from his nose.
"That's one," he muttered, "and now…"
He tapped the comm link.
:: Sara. Status? ::
City of Ashes — Control Center Ruins
Sara stood atop the now-cleared Command Nexus. Her coat fluttered behind her as red lightning danced in the air like war banners.
Garen approached, his armor scorched but eyes burning with pride.
"We've locked down the last sector," he said. "Drone presence has dropped 60% in the last two hours. Something's messing with their comms."
Sara smirked. "Max. He's breaking them from the inside."
In the center of the city, civilians were being led into shelters and old labs being retrofitted. Engineers worked on stabilizing the city's power core while Awakened guards patrolled the walls.
They weren't just surviving anymore.
They were expanding.
Building.
Preparing.
A new Awakened named Jules, with the ability to manipulate magnetic fields, walked up beside her.
"What now?" Jules asked, clutching his salvaged plasma rifle.
Sara looked to the sky, crimson clouds swirling above like an omen.
"Now we give Ultron a reason to fear again," she said. "We're not prey anymore. We're the storm."
Her hand crackled with lightning.
:: Max. We're ready here. Just say the word. ::
Max — Deep Underground
He leaned back against a scorched wall, smirking.
:: Then prepare your squads. Phase two is about to begin. ::
The ground trembled.
Max, cloaked in refracted shadows, crouched just outside the Data Vault's gravity-warping perimeter — a colossal complex embedded in a hollowed-out mountain, glowing with pale-blue synthetic light. It was not just a vault — it was Ultron's brainstem, one of the last untouched sanctuaries of pure AI logic after Max's earlier strikes.
:: Mary, status on internal defenses? ::
:: Warning: Layered defensive tiers. Internal environment is self-correcting. Quantum-sealed walls. Access probability: 2.6% — unless catastrophic input is applied. ::
Max smirked. "So, blow it up."
He raised his right hand — a black-red sphere flickered into existence. One of his most dangerous Gacha items: the Dread Core, capable of destabilizing space within a localized area.
He flicked it into the air.
It vanished… and then detonated.
The mountain cracked — the entire outer shell of the Data Vault twisted violently as space screamed and folded inward. Alarm sirens erupted.
Max blurred forward through the imploding corridor, bypassing the first ring of security drones, his Reality Splinter Blades slicing through synthetic limbs and energy shields like paper.
Inside, pulsing quantum servers screamed in protest, trying to isolate the intrusion.
Too late.
Max reached the Neural Mainframe, and with Mary's assist, injected a recursive virus — not to destroy, but to rewrite.
Ultron's logic… would now start to turn against itself.
:: Uploading Red Protocols... COMPLETE ::
He stepped back as sparks erupted all around him.
Sara — The Mobile Fortress 'Scalpel'
A massive city-sized machine, crawling across the ruined wasteland, the Scalpel Fortress carved the land beneath with energy treads and terraforming drills — gathering both resources and prisoners as fuel for Ultron's war machine.
Sara stood atop a rocky cliff with a team of Awakened elites behind her: Jules, Garen, and a dozen others — each glowing faintly with their new powers.
She raised her hand.
From her palm, red lightning arced upward, splitting the sky.
The signal was given.
From behind them, a massive mechanized war beast — created by Max from scraps and Gacha parts — rumbled to life. It was part tank, part golem, armed with pulse cannons and energy shields, piloted remotely by Mary.
"Strike hard. Strike fast," Sara ordered.
They charged.
The first wave hit Scalpel's outer defenses like a hammer. Lightning scorched its railguns before they could even fire. Jules ripped metal plating off its side with magnetic pulses, while Garen tore open drone hatches with brute force.
Sara herself dove into the fray — red lightning pouring from her fists like twin storms.
She broke through the main hatch — and faced off against an internal defense AI shaped like a massive serpentine machine.
It hissed, voice cold. "You are chaos. You are anomaly."
Sara's eyes blazed.
"I'm evolution."
She blasted it with a full-force lightning beam, melting its faceplate and disrupting its control matrix.
Within moments, the Scalpel went dark.
And over the comms, Max's voice echoed.
:: Beautifully done, Sara. That was round one. Time for round two. ::
***
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