Chapter 171Natasha struck first.The attack came without telegraph — no shifting of weight, no drawing back of a fist, no gathering of visible energy. One instant she stood ten meters away. The next, her hand was driving toward Adrian's chest with force sufficient to shatter concrete.Adrian moved.Not fast enough to match her speed — nothing human was fast enough for that. But the Lancaster technique didn't require matching speed. It required synchronization. His father's training had rewired his perception to read energy patterns in real time, and Natasha's attack, for all its devastating power, followed patterns. Energy concentrated before discharge. Pathways lit up microseconds before force was applied. The system that powered her transformation operated on rhythms that Adrian's refined awareness could detect.He shifted sideways as her fist arrived, the displacement timed not to her movement but to the energy signature that preceded it. Her hand passed through the space where hi

Chapter 173The uncertainty lasted three seconds.Adrian watched it move through Natasha's expression — the micro-shifts of a face that was no longer fully human processing information it didn't want to accept. The black eyes flickered with something that might have been fear, might have been doubt, might have been the first crack in a psychological architecture as carefully constructed as her physical transformation.Then the uncertainty transformed into rage.It happened the way a dam breaks — not gradually, not with warning, but all at once, the entire structure failing simultaneously. Whatever composure Natasha had maintained, whatever control she'd exercised over the enormous energies cycling through her body, she abandoned it in a single moment of fury that Adrian's Lancaster perception registered as a catastrophic spike across every energy pathway in her system."You're lying," she said. But her voice cracked on the second word, the harmonic overtones splitting apart like a cho

Chapter 175Natasha fell to her knees.The impact cracked the frozen stone beneath her, but she didn't notice. Her hands went to her chest — to the point where Adrian's strike had landed, where the disruption had begun its cascade through every pathway and node in her transformed body. Her fingers pressed against translucent skin that was becoming more translucent by the second, the tissue losing cohesion, the boundary between inside and outside dissolving.The violet energy that had made her godlike was turning inward.Adrian watched from five meters away, his body broken, his left arm hanging useless, his ribs sending sharp signals with every breath. The Lancaster perception was still active — still showing him the complete picture of what was happening inside Natasha's collapsing transformation. He could see the cascade progressing in real time, each failing node triggering failures in connected nodes, the degradation spreading exponentially through a system that had been held toge

Chapter 177They held the memorial on a Sunday morning, in the cemetery on Greenville's eastern edge where twelve guards had been buried weeks earlier.The crowd exceeded anything the cemetery had been designed to hold. Hundreds of people spread across the grounds — military veterans in dress uniforms, civilians in dark clothing, families of the fallen holding photographs and flowers, government officials standing at respectful distances, media cameras positioned far enough away that their presence didn't intrude but close enough to record.Adrian stood at the front, beside a podium that had been set up near the newest section of graves. His arm was still in a sling. The cuts on his face had begun to heal but remained visible — thin lines that would become scars, additions to the collection his body had accumulated across a decade of warfare.The names began at the beginning."Eleanor Lancaster." Adrian's mother. Murdered ten years ago in the act that started everything. Her grave was

Chapter 179Frederick Lancaster walked unassisted for the first time on a Tuesday morning.The medical staff had been cautioning him for weeks — the serum extraction process had left his body weakened in ways that defied conventional rehabilitation timelines, and the doctors treating him had limited experience with patients whose cellular chemistry had been altered by a decade of involuntary experimentation. Recovery was uncharted territory. Patience was required.Frederick had never been patient.He'd started with the wheelchair. Then a walker, gripping the aluminum frame with hands that had been broken and reset so many times the joints bent at wrong angles. Then a cane, his steps careful and measured, each one a small war against muscles that had atrophied during ten years of captivity and a nervous system still recalibrating after the serum's effects were gradually neutralized.On Tuesday, he set the cane against the wall of the bunker's rehabilitation room, placed both feet on th