novelraw Chapter 421: Let’s Go Get My Men
Chapter 421: Let’s Go Get My Men
"Your millions were already doomed," Sera continued, not bothering to wait for a response from Mercer. After all, when you have a God complex, it is natural to think that everyone needs to sacrifice for your own benefit. "You just decided your kind should eat first."
Mercer’s lips thinned. His eyes flicked to Aerenyx again. "That thing is unstable. It will wipe out everything."
Aerenyx’s hand settled on the final main tower.
This one was larger, thicker, protected by a safety shell and a coolant bank.
It took half a second longer to rot, as if it had tried to resist. The resistance made no difference. The shell turned brittle. The locks snapped. Internal metal supports rusted and fell apart. The coolant pipe hardened, split, and poured out in slow gray sludge that didn’t even steam anymore because the temperature probes were dead.
The last tower sagged and collapsed inward.
The command core lights went out.
Emergency lights tried to switch on and failed.
Then half the facility’s power grid reset.
It wasn’t a clean reset, because there was no clean anything left here. It was a staggered cough of electricity redistributing itself now that its brain had died. Doors in the deeper wings clicked and unlocked at random. Interlocks in the containment corridors lost their logic and went open.
The decon fields dropped.
The border wall generators stuttered, then fell into a low idle.
Across Region T, cages unlatched without anyone holding the key.
Mercer heard the clicks around him like gunshots.
He spun, eyes wild. "What did you do? You just— you just destroyed the only control we had."
Aerenyx turned to him with calm interest. "Control was an illusion," he said. "You built it because you couldn’t handle the idea of being small."
Mercer’s face twitched.
Then he lunged for the emergency console by the far wall, the one powered by a separate battery line. He slapped at it with shaking hands, trying to pull up manual overrides. The screen blinked twice, went black, and crumbled inside its casing as rust ate through the wiring behind it.
Mercer froze in place, one hand still raised to a dead screen.
His breathing had gone fast. His posture had gone small. His authority was still on his face, but it didn’t fit anymore.
He turned slowly toward them.
Sera felt his fear now.
Not fear of her so much as the fear of irrelevance.
"You can’t just walk out," Mercer whispered. "You’re still inside Region T. You still need to follow protocols. You still—"
Aerenyx crossed the distance between them in three quiet steps.
Mercer flinched backward, but there was nowhere meaningful to go. No guards. No screens. No doors that were still locked on command. Just a man facing the thing his science had tried to pretend didn’t exist.
Aerenyx put his hand on Mercer’s chest.
Not violently.
Not gently.
Simply deciding where he would touch.
Mercer sucked in a breath like he expected pain to be a bargaining chip.
His eyes widened instead.
The pathogen didn’t burst outward this time. It spread inward. Mercer’s skin went gray in a fast tide from Aerenyx’s palm. Boils rose across his throat and jaw in ugly clusters. His mouth opened to speak again.
His jaw softened and slid downward.
His chest caved as his lungs liquefied.
He made one wet sound that might have been a word.
Then he collapsed.
He didn’t melt as slowly as the guards had. He didn’t deserve a slow death like they did.
He crumpled into a heap that became a puddle within seconds, his jacket folding into itself as the body inside it vanished. Bones softened into slurry. Teeth sank and disappeared. The last thing left was a smear of green-black fluid spreading across clean tile.
Aerenyx didn’t look down at him.
He turned back to Sera as if they’d stepped around a chair.
Sera watched the puddle for a beat, curious only in the way she was curious about a fire after it went out. She felt no need to honor it with words. She felt no need to mark the kill. Mercer had been a tension point in her path. Aerenyx had removed the tension. That was all.
Her creature purred approval. Good. No speeches. No mercy. Just correction.
Aerenyx moved close again, shoulder brushing hers, as if he’d never stepped away. "He was boring," he murmured.
"He was predictable," Sera replied.
"Predictable men always die confused." His black eyes slid across her face. "You okay?"
She tilted her head slightly at the question. "Why wouldn’t I be?"
Aerenyx smiled, pleased by the answer. He didn’t ask again.
The command core behind them was dead. Screens were black and crumbling. Plastics had stiffened and cracked. Metal rails were already pitted with rust. The room had gone from a fortress to a ruin in under a minute.
Outside the doors, the facility’s heartbeat had changed. Locks clicked open down the line like dominoes. Alarms stuttered and died in choppy loops. Somewhere deeper in the building, a sealed wing released a long sigh of pressure and then went silent.
Sera listened.
She could hear the cages now.
Not with ears so much as with her creature’s instinct.
The men were still alive somewhere in the wing below, but the air around them was changing. The doors that had held them were losing their logic. The path to them was opening in the way a dying animal opened its ribs.
"If we don’t move," Sera said, "someone else might find them first."
Aerenyx’s grin sharpened. "No one is finding anything first except us."
He stepped toward the door, and the dead part of the room seemed to follow him like a shadow. Sera fell into pace beside him. Their bodies moved as if they’d been walking together for a long time, not because either of them was trying to sync up, but because predators didn’t waste time bumping into each other once they picked a direction.
As they left the command core, Sera glanced once more at the puddle Mercer had become.
It was already thinning, seeping into grout lines, disappearing like he had never been important enough to stain the place.
Then she looked forward again.
"Let’s go get my men," she said.
Aerenyx’s smile was quiet, territorial, pleased. "Lead the way, Trouble."