Victor stepped off the train and walked toward the Titan.He moved across the cracked desert floor with a stride that didn't match the situation. No fear. No hesitation. No urgency. He walked toward an eighty foot entity made of living metal the way a priest walks toward an altar.The Titan's head turned. The two red points of light in its face shifted downward. It registered Victor the way a mountain registers an ant. With total awareness and no concern.Victor stopped twenty feet from the Titan's left foot. The foot alone was larger than a cargo truck. The displaced earth around it still steamed from the heat of whatever had carried the creature through miles of underground rock."The Heart," Victor said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a device. Small. Black. A transmitter. He pressed a button and a signal pulsed outward.From somewhere in the desert, a response came. A low hum that vibrated through the ground. Then movement. A vehicle approaching from the west. An armore

Jason looked at the girl standing on the hill above Denver with dust on her clothes and fire in her eyes and the mark of the Saintess burning between her shoulder blades."The distance between where I was and where you were," Jason said, "was one thousand six hundred and thirty miles."Alencia blinked. "What?""When I decided to find you. The distance. One thousand six hundred and thirty miles. Across state lines. Through cities I had no reason to visit. Past agencies that would have paid me ten times what Unique offered."He took his hands out of his pockets."I walked into a train car and sat across from a girl who scored eight on her aptitude test. Four times. And I knew within thirty seconds that she was what I had been looking for since the day I came back to this world."Alencia's breath caught."I'm not giving up either," Jason said. "I was never giving up. I told you we were done because Leon asked me to walk away, and I wanted to give you the space to choose for yourself. Not

The battlefield outside Las Vegas was hell with better lighting.Three hundred hunters and five thousand soldiers spread across a line that stretched from the highway to the desert ridge. Tanks. Artillery. Helicopter gunships circling overhead. Mobile command centers with satellite uplinks feeding real time data to Washington.The Titan walked through all of it.Every missile hit its surface and detonated against the magical shield that surrounded its body like a second skin. The explosions bloomed orange and red and yellow and accomplished nothing. The shield absorbed the kinetic energy and the heat and the shrapnel and turned it into light that flickered once and vanished.A tank round hit the Titan's chest. The shell flattened against the shield and dropped to the desert floor like a crumpled piece of paper. The Titan didn't slow down. It didn't notice.The hunters attacked in waves. A rank teams coordinated strikes at the joints. B rank squads targeted the legs. Elemental abilitie

The Titan made its decision in silence. No roar. No dramatic gesture. Just a shift in the golden light behind its chest plate and a subtle change in the frequency of the hum that radiated from its body. The Heart of Prometheus had been burning inside it since Victor fed it the artifact, and now the Titan reached for that fire with every fragment of will it possessed. If it could not win, it would detonate. The Heart of Prometheus contained enough concentrated magical energy to level everything within fifty miles. Las Vegas. Henderson. Boulder City. Every town within the blast radius would become a crater. The Titan began to glow. Alencia felt it before she understood it. A pressure building inside the creature's chest. A gathering of energy that was folding inward instead of pushing outward. The opposite of an attack. A collapse. Jason's voice came back to her. Not a memory this time. A warning he had given her before she left Denver. "If the Titan can't win, it will try to take

Enoch Lindbergh did not panic.He had been the director of the Bureau of Paranormal Phenomena for nine years. He had sat across from S rank hunters who could level city blocks. He had negotiated with people whose abilities could reshape geography. A broken door was not enough to rattle a man with his resume.But the way Jason Ward sat down bothered him.Not aggressive. Not confrontational. The way someone sits down at their own kitchen table. Like the room belonged to him. Like the federal building and the security and the cameras and the thirty year institution behind all of it were furniture in someone else's house and he was just visiting."Mr. Ward," Enoch said carefully. "You've just destroyed federal property and incapacitated two of my security officers.""Eugene incapacitated them. I walked through the door he opened." Jason glanced at the camera in the corner. "You're recording this. Good. I want everything I say on record."Enoch's jaw tightened. "This is a national security