Chapter 291"They're burning through the seal!" Elias screamed over the shrieking hiss of the pneumatic door, his shoulder slamming hard against the emergency locking bar as white-hot plasma began to blister the exterior metal plate. "Noah, if you don't get this bypass running right now, we’re going to be baked alive in our own tactical gear!" Noah didn't look back, his fingers moving with frantic, trembling precision across the exposed circuitry of the sub-terminal. Blood dripped steadily from his nose, spattering against the blue-lit glass of the interface with tiny, wet snaps. "I'm telling you for the tenth time, Elias, you can't rush a hardwired logic gate without shorting the entire node! If I push the frequency too high, the feedback loop will liquefy our brains before those troopers even finish cutting through the hinge!" A deafening roar echoed through the cramped utility tunnel as a massive blast of superheated gas blew

Chapter 293"Done!" Noah shrieked, his voice cracking with sheer strain as he wrenched his hands backward from the sparking sub-terminal. A blinding wall of cobalt-blue light exploded from the console, racing down the metal conduits with the speed of a freight train. Outside the melted hatch, the rhythmic, heavy thud of Coalition plasma rifles abruptly cut off, replaced by the unified, agonizing screams of armored men. The heavy steel door, which had been glowing cherry-red under sustained plasma fire, instantly plunged to sub-zero temperatures, frosting over with thick, jagged crystals of ice before a massive electromagnetic shockwave blew the charred remnants completely off their hinges. "Move, move, move!" Elias didn't hesitate, grabbing Noah by the scruff of his insulated jacket and hauling him bodily out of the smoking alcove into the cavernous primary staging bay beyond. The staging bay was a vast, cathedral

Chapter 295"The power bridge is live!" Noah screamed over the rising, deafening shriek of the massive capacitor banks overhead, his fingers flying across the cold glass of a secondary override panel with a frantic, trembling desperation. "If they close the circuit before I sever the primary trunk, every single server rack in this room is going to detonate with the force of a tactical nuke!" "Then stop them from closing it!" Elias roared, abandoning cover entirely as a fresh wave of Coalition enforcers surged onto the elevated catwalk above, their heavy pulse-rifles tracking downward with lethal, mechanical precision. Elias raised his assault rifle, the weapon kicking violently against his bruised shoulder as three-round bursts tore into the forward ranks of the advancing squad. Sparks showered from the overhead conduits as Coalition armor absorbed the impacts, but the leading officer staggered, his visor spider-webbing into a mosaic

Chapter 297"Thirty seconds is a lifetime when you're standing on top of an unexploded ordinance!" Noah yelled back, his voice pitching high into a frantic frequency that made the very air inside the sprawling sub-level chamber warp and ripple. "Look at the telemetry on the wall, Elias! The core temperature is climbing logarithmically. If we stay here for another half-minute, we won't even need the Coalition to turn us into paste—the thermal radiation alone will boil us inside our own tactical gear!" "I don't have time to read telemetry, Noah!" Elias snapped, firing another measured three-round burst from behind the battered bulkhead. The recoil slammed into his already bruised shoulder, sending a white-hot spike of agony lancing down his spine, but he didn't flinch. Two more Coalition enforcers on the upper catwalk took the rounds directly in their chest plates, the kinetic impact knocking them backward over the thin safety rail. They dropped towar

Chapter 299"Twenty seconds?" Elias barked, his knuckles turning white as he hauled back the charging handle of his rifle, the metal tasting of sulfur and stale sweat. "If I go silent for twenty seconds, those bastards across the bridge will be wearing our skin as cloaks!" "Do you want to die by a rifle round or do you want to vaporize in a five-megaton thermal bloom?" Noah screamed back, his fingers trembling violently against the obsidian glass of the terminal. His nose was bleeding freely now, twin dark ribbons tracing down his upper lip and dripping onto the glowing keys. "Silence the pulse-breaker, Elias! Now!" The air pressure in the cavernous control chamber dropped sickeningly fast, the atmospheric scrubbers whining in protest as the room’s emergency seals hissed open. Across the yawning chasm of the shattered glass bridge, the remaining Coalition enforcers stopped their advance. Their heavy, articulated combat rigs lock