A high pitched ringing filled Elios’s ears, drowning out the facility alarms still wailing in the distance.“…lios! Elios! Wake up!”The voice sounded as if it were coming from underwater. Hands were shaking his shoulder in panic.Elios’s eyes snapped open. He dragged in a sharp breath as if surfacing from the depths of the ocean. Cold air mixed with concrete dust stabbed into his lungs.The first thing he saw was Vera’s face.The female agent was kneeling beside him. White dust coated her features, dried blood clung to the corner of her mouth, and her right shoulder, where Elios had shot her, was wrapped in a hastily applied bandage already blooming red.“I’m… I’m still alive?” Elios croaked. He tried to sit up, but the world spun violently.“You were thrown five meters. Your head hit the wall. Mild concussion,” Vera reported, her voice trembling between relief and pain as she helped him upright. “If you had not woken u

Thud. Landing on the back of a giant demon felt exactly like hitting asphalt coated in dry ice. Hard, freezing, and searing against the skin. Elios slammed onto Lyra’s left shoulder. His metal-plated hand grabbed whatever it could find, in this case a thick clump of black hair sprouting from the pale flesh of the Queen. “Ugh.” Vera landed beside him, skidding across the slick, mucus-slick surface of her skin. “Hold on, Vera! Don’t fall!” Elios shouted, catching Vera’s ankle with his still weakened left hand. Feeling parasites clinging to her body, Lyra roared in fury. She shook herself in violent spasms. It was like riding a wild horse during a magnitude nine earthquake. “GET… OFF… ME… LICE!” The Legion’s voice detonated inside their skulls, blurring Elios’s vision. “Sorry, honey! I’m not really in the mood for social distancing!” Elios shot back, his teeth rattling from the tremors. Above them, the three Church gunships that had been spewing lethal firepower suddenly ceased

The purple light was blinding, hot, and promised the end of all the pain crushing him.Elios shut his eyes tightly. He could feel the Chaos energy gathering in Lyra’s palm, his wife, his queen, and now his executioner. The power was ready to erase his existence down to the last atom.He was not afraid of dying.He was simply tired. Very tired.Sleep well, my love, Elios whispered silently to himself.But the death he had been waiting for never came.Another apocalypse arrived first.GGRRRRRRR-BOOOOOM!It was not the explosion from Lyra’s hand. The thunderous roar came from below, from the deepest belly of the earth. The sabotage Elios had planted in the main reactor twenty minutes earlier had finally reached its climax.The reactor core, stripped of its cooling system, did not merely melt down. It detonated violently, triggering a chain reaction that shattered the tectonic foundation beneath Facility Zero.The floor of the frozen crater split apart with a deafening crack.KRAAAK!The