"Aaaaah! My luck is absolutely rotten today! Three Hydes and a four-star CE I have nearly a hundred copies of!"
Atiya groaned and flopped backward onto the bed, phone clutched to his chest. The gacha screen still glowed up at him. Same duplicate pulls. Same result.
Zelaine was sprawled beside him with her own phone, tapping the screen without looking up and sacarstically. "Yeah, Lily Arto-chan spooks me every single time there's a gold servant on screen. I swear the game knows exactly what I want and just rubs it in."
She tapped furiously for another few seconds, then went still as another familiar four-star CE filled her screen.
"Fuck it," Atiya announced, locking his phone and dropping it onto the nightstand. "No more multis. I'm farming mats instead. At least that's honest work."
Zelaine stretched out like a cat, her stomach rumbling loudly enough to be heard.
"I'm hungry."
Atiya kept staring at the ceiling. "Go grab evening snacks. Get some for me too."
Zelaine rolled her eyes and got up anyway.
"Okay."
She walked to the door, swiped it open, and froze.
"Babe," she said. Her voice had changed completely. "Someone is running at hyperspeed toward your room."
Atiya sat up instantly. "Who is it?"
"No idea. There's something following him and..." A pause. "He's badly wounded."
Pounding footsteps filled the corridor outside, fast and erratic, the kind that had nothing left in them but fear.
A figure burst into view. A young maintenance tech burst into view, uniform torn and bloodied, one arm pressed hard against his side. His face was pale and his eyes were too wide and he was not slowing down.
A single black butterfly trailed behind him, red markings catching the light sharp as fresh blood. It hovered just out of arm's reach.
The tech stumbled to a stop in the doorway, gasping, legs shaking under him.
"Help, please, the lower levels, something's wrong, the bugs, it's—"
He went down on one knee, blood dripping onto the floor beneath him.
The butterfly drifted forward and landed on his shoulder, wings folding shut. It looked at Zelaine and Atiya with compound eyes that had no business holding what they held.
Zelaine's shoe came down hard.
Crunch.
The butterfly smeared across the floor in a wet spread of violet ichor and crushed wings. The faint mist it had been trailing hung in the air for a moment, then dissolved.
Zelaine crouched beside the tech without missing a beat, her voice easy but her eyes moving over him quickly and carefully.
"Hey, newbie. You still with us?"
The tech coughed, both hands pressed to his side, blood seeping between his fingers.
"The entire center is under attack by Yai-beasts. But the most dangerous of all of them are the butterflies. Like the one you just squashed."
Atiya stepped closer, frowning. "If the facility is under attack, where are the alarms? Why haven't the emergency systems triggered?"
Zelaine's gaze had already moved to the corridor behind them.
The tech wheezed and kept going. "Something is wrong inside the control room. The alarms never triggered. Security feeds are looping old footage. Doors are locked from the inside and we can't override them."
Zelaine's jaw tightened. Inteja's instructions surfaced clearly and immediately in her head, the ones drilled into her before she left the branch.
'Safeguard Cornelius Correl and the researchers at all costs, especially during joint operations. I have done a good job at it, fuck.'
She cursed quietly under her breath.
'I should not have left my post. Master is going to kill me when she gets back.'
"Secretary Cerejeira and a few other staff members are heading toward the control room now." The tech forced himself upright, wincing with the effort. "I was told to find and alert anyone still in the residential wing."
He paused, breathing and choosing words carefully. "As far as I know, you two are the only ones left in this section."
Atiya's eyes narrowed. "What about Professor Correl and the delegates?"
The tech shook his head slowly. "We lost contact with the restricted labs ten minutes ago. Comms cut out completely so no response from any levels at all."
Zelaine was already standing, her hand glowed suggesting she had activated her yaicraft. She looked at Atiya.
"You good to move?"
Atiya was already too summoning his Yai circuits, faint magenta rings blooming across his palms with a low familiar hum. He rolled his shoulders once.
"Yeah." He glanced at the corridor ahead. "Let's go farm some mats."
The tech forced himself upright, one hand braced against the wall, the other still pressed to his side.
Zelaine took the lead, moving down the corridor clean and quiet. Atiya got under the tech's good shoulder and took his weight.
The station felt somewhat wrong. Too quiet and too still in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
No distant chatter from any members of the facility.
The corridor lights flickered as they ran past the residential wings.
Then they dropped to emergency red, bathing everything in a dim bloody glow. A low buzzing drone filled the air beneath the silence, distant at first, then growing with a speed that made Atiya glance back over his shoulder.
A wave of black butterflies poured around the corner behind them.
Hundreds, possibly thousands.
The red markings on their wings flashed like warning lights as they moved, a single fluid mass with wings beating in perfect sync, closing the distance fast.
Zelaine skidded to a stop.
"Shit."
Her hand went into her pocket and came out with a small marble-sized crystal orb, clear as glass, faint violet veins pulsing through it in time with her heartbeat.
She closed her fist around it.
"Crystal Yaicraft. Skill: Tyrant Cube."
She crushed it. The shards dissolved into sparkling dust that swirled briefly around her palm before reality folded in the air above her head.
A massive cube materialized out of nothing, perfect black edges and each face etched deep with glowing crimson runes.
It hung there for one still heartbeat, larger than a car, waiting for Zelaine's command to detonate.
Zelaine flicked her wrist.
The cube hurtled forward like a thrown die, plunging straight into the heart of the oncoming wave.
The swarm swallowed it whole, bodies piling over bodies until the red light of the cube disappeared entirely.
Zelaine's eyes narrowed.
"Explode."
A blinding white-orange flash erupted from inside the mass, the shockwave ripping outward in a perfect sphere and incinerating every butterfly caught within its radius.
Wings vaporized.
Bodies turned to ash mid-flight. The wave collapsed and came apart, glittering embers drifting down and settling across the floor.
Silence returned, broken only by the faint crackle of cooling metal.
Zelaine exhaled through her nose and lowered her hand.
"At least they can't stand my explosive powers."
She flexed her fingers loosely at her side. A second skill had already come and gone without any announcement, a thin transparent crystalline shell that had snapped into place around all three of them just before the blast, absorbing the heat and shrapnel without a sound.
Atiya hadn't even registered it happening until it was already done.
The walls told a different story. Yai-enforced construction, built to absorb yai attacks, scorched black and half-melted in long uneven streaks.
Rivulets of slag crawled slowly down to the floor and pooled there, still glowing faintly at the edges.
Atiya stared at it.
'She's Ascension 2, Stage 5. The walls are half-burned and she didn't even use a trump card' This is what Mom expects from me eventually.'
He swallowed once and said nothing.
Zelaine glanced back at him, a smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth despite everything. "Stop gaping, babe. You'll catch flies or butterflies. Whatever's left of them."
The tech, still leaning his full weight against Atiya's shoulder, managed a weak laugh that immediately collapsed into a cough. "That was absolutely insane."
Zelaine had already turned back to face the corridor ahead, knife returning to her hand in one easy motion.
"Keep moving."
****
Shilial's instincts moved faster than her thoughts. A light barrier snapped into existence around both of them, the pale gold surface catching the blast and holding.
She hit the floor anyway.
"Ughh."
Drip. Drip.
Blood fell from her lips onto the debris beneath her. The barrier had held but it was not perfected yet, and her body had paid the difference.
Cale was already pulling himself up from the rubble, eyes finding her immediately. "Are you okay."
She didn't get to answer.
A second bombardment hit before either of them could draw breath, this time from the front door, the concussive force rolling through the room. But Shilial had already moved, the barrier repositioning between them and the blast, the pale gold light flaring at the point of impact and holding firm.
Cale straightened up and looked at her. "That's enough. Stay back. I'll handle this."
Shilial rose anyway, blood still on her chin, her voice carrying a quiet dignity that had nothing to do with the situation being under control. "Don't you dare mock me. I was a Kaslana. The family of light." She lifted her chin slightly. "I shall light your path."
The smoke from the second blast rolled and thinned and settled.
A tall black-haired man stood in the ruined doorway, unhurried, a bomb still loose in one hand. He looked at it briefly, and fondly.
"No matter how much time passes, I still prefer this old design," he said. "It was made to kill people. Not to make a statement."
That voice.
Cale went very still. Something moved behind his eyes, quick and involuntary, a twitch that ran all the way down through his jaw and into his hands.
"How dare you come here."
Multiple red chains launched forward with the crack of activated Yaicraft, cutting through the smoke in a sharp converging arc.
The intruder stepped back once, twice, moving through the chains with a loose unhurried ease, ducking under one and rolling past another like a man who had been dodging things his entire life and found it only mildly interesting.
Cale was already moving. A golden spear materialized in his grip and he closed the distance fast, every line of his body carrying something beyond combat instinct.
"Henriech."
The name landed like something thrown.
Shilial stood behind him, momentarily still. She had heard that name before, passed between peoples as he was someone classified in the list of greatest threats to Artem family.
She had never put a face to it until now.
'Henriech. The father of Cale Artem. The man who had betrayed his own family branch decades ago. When a plot to assassinate his wife, Cale's mother Marcaella, was uncovered and laid at his feet, he disappeared after that, or been made to disappear, depending on who was telling it.'
Shilial looked at the tall black-haired man standing in the smoke with a bomb in his hand and understood exactly why Cale's hands were shaking.