2026-07-01 23:27:10
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Chapter 160 - Cost of Winning
They reached camp just past midday, and the gate opened before the vehicles had even fully stopped, Ferris already moving toward them with two of her medics close behind."Get him inside," Priya shouted, and hands reached in from every direction, easing Ray's stretcher out of the vehicle with careful, practiced urgency.The camp that had gathered to celebrate the rescued survivors went quiet the moment they saw him, the joy of the returning column curdling fast into fear as word spread through the crowd."What happened," Ferris demanded, falling into step beside the stretcher as they carried him toward the medical tent."Zed," Jane said, voice tight. "He shot him trying to stop the chopper, he had ead trauma from the fall might be worse than the wound itself."********They worked over him for hours, Priya and Nichole trading roles between surgeon and nurse, cleaning the wound.It stopping the worst of the bleeding, checking his pupils every few minutes for any change that might tell
Chapter 159 - Cleanup
Ray came back to himself with blood in his mouth and Zed's boots already retreating through the smoke."Get up," he snarled at himself, forcing his body upright despite the ringing in his skull.The compound around him hadn't stopped burning. More replicas had pushed through from somewhere deeper in the base and at least four of them, and Mattias's flamethrower was running low, its flame sputtering thinner with every pass."Ray!" Jane screamed through the chaos. "We need you, now!"He forced himself forward, blade raised, control ability flaring weak but present.It staggered to the nearest replica just long enough for Mattias to finish it with the last real burst of fuel his tank had left."That's the tank empty," Mattias shouted, discarding the weapon."Then we finish it the old way," Ray shouted back, and threw himself at the next replica with everything exhaustion and fury could still give him.*******It took another brutal ten minutes to bring the last of them down, Ray, Jane,
Chapter 158 - The Sweep
The base came into view just past sunrise, low buildings ringed by fencing, smoke rising faint from somewhere near the center of the compound."Positions," Jane said into the radio, and the convoy split without hesitation, three teams peeling off toward their assigned approach points exactly the way they'd rehearsed.Ray crouched at the tree line with the strike team, RPG braced against his shoulder, watching the nearest patrol move along the fence in slow, mechanical rhythm."That's a replica," Saul murmured beside him, before peeling off toward the rescue team's position. "Same walk as the last one, same everything.""Then let's see how many of him fall to the same trick," Ray said, and gave the signal.*****””The RPG round hit the fence line dead center, blowing a gap wide enough to drive a truck through, and the strike team surged forward the instant the smoke cleared.Fifth stage soldiers converged fast, but this time Ray's team came prepared for exactly that. Mattias shoot th
Chapter 157 - Eyes on the Base
Saul, Jane, and two of Mattias's most trusted fighters left before dawn, moving light and quiet toward the suspected base outside Kansas City.Ray spent the two days they were gone unable to settle into anything properly.They came back on the evening of the second day, dust-covered, exhausted, and carrying the kind of grim expressions that told Ray the news wasn't going to be simple."Talk to me," Ray said, the moment they were through the gate.******Jane laid the map out on the war table, marking positions as she spoke. "It's bigger than we thought, the perimeter's crawling with Zed replicas, not just one or two. We counted at least six, moving in coordinated patrols, same face, same voice, same everything.""Six of him," Mattias exclaimed with disbelief thick in his voice. "That's not a soldier anymore. That's an army wearing one man's skin.""There's more," Saul added. "Fifth stage inside, and they're not just standing guard. We watched a group of them through a gap in the fen
Chapter 156 - Neither Side
Nobody moved for a long moment after the feed cut out.The last image burned into everyone's mind.It was an ordinary woman turning on a man who'd clearly been trying to help her and tearing into him with a strength that had no business living in a body that still looked completely human.Priya finally spoke, her voice small and hollow. "This is my fault.""No," Nichole said, firm. "It's Wolfe's fault. And Zed's. They took something unfinished and turned it into a weapon before you ever got the chance to make it a cure.""It doesn't matter whose fault it is," Priya said. "People are dying out there because of formula I built."Ray moved to her, crouching down to her level, forcing her to look at him instead of the dark screen. "You built it to save people and he stole it to hurt them. Those aren't the same thing, and you know it."She didn't answer, but something in her shoulders loosened slightly, enough that Ray let the point rest there rather than pushing further.********Mattias
Chapter 155 - The Sample
The lab corner of the camp had grown crowded with equipment over the weeks.It was salvaged with centrifuges and refrigeration units humming quietly beside Priya's growing collection of notes, anld by the third week she and Nichole had stopped sleeping on anything resembling a normal schedule."Run it again," Priya said, exhaustion thickness in her voice and watching Nichole insert another sample into the machine."We've run it eleven times," Nichole said, but he did it anyway, because eleven times hadn't been enough yet and both of them knew it.Training was carried on outside the tent walls the whole time, Mattias's drills growing sharper by the day.Saul was running fighters through increasingly difficult scenarios meant to prepare them for whatever waited inside Wolfe's territory. Ray split his time between both worlds, checking in on Priya's progress in the mornings and driving himself through drills in the afternoons, unwilling to let either front slip while the other demanded
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