Arthur didn't think. He moved.
The tentacles erupted from every seam in the floor—glistening, arterial, thick as mooring cables—and he was already inside their arc before the first one had fully extended, his Omni-blade igniting with a sharp electric hiss as it sheared through the nearest limb at its root. Corruption fluid sprayed in a wide iridescent arc. He sidestepped without slowing, the N7-Typhoon barking twice into the mass of writhing appendages ahead, plasma rounds punching smoking craters through the organic floor as the Tyrant's distributed body recoiled and then surged again.
"Absolute—Alisa—rear position! Guard them!" He didn't look back. "Nyx, Lyra, Anis—between me and Absolute! Suppressive fire, no forward advance, no contact with anything wet!"
"Commander—" Alisa started.
"Do it!"
The corridor swallowed him.
Fighting the labyrinth's anatomy was nothing like fighting Raptures in open terrain. Every shot risked triggering another muscle contraction, another wall-shift, another floor-eruption of tentacles from angles that hadn't existed thirty seconds before. Arthur adapted the only way available to him—constant movement, Typhoon in his left hand, Omni-blade deployed from his right forearm, weaving between the writhing appendages with his prosthetic legs absorbing impacts that would have shattered a biological man's knees. He was not fast. He was relentless.
The Lord-class units arrived like a tide.
Six of them in the first wave, asymmetric masses of fused hull-plating and raw muscle, their optical clusters burning amber as they pushed through the contracting corridor. Nyx's Screamin' Eagle answered with a deafening double percussion that caved in the leading unit's chest and sent the second cartwheeling into the wall. Lyra's Basilisk cracked in rapid succession, each hypersonic round threading gaps in chitinous armour that would have turned back anything smaller. Anis went wide left, grenades popping in clean arcs, and the combined percussion forced the Lord-class column to split.
Straight into Arthur.
He drove the Omni-blade through the junction between two armour plates on the nearest unit's flank, twisting, and fired three Typhoon rounds point-blank through the opening before tearing clear. A pressure blow from one Lord's appendage connected with his left side before he could clear the arc—not a tentacle, just blunt structural impact—and he felt ribs flex wrong, a hot starburst of pain radiating up through his chest that he noted and filed away and did not act on.
Keep moving.
He protected every Nikke he could reach. When a cluster of tentacles stretched for Emma's ankle during a reload gap, he dove and severed them with the blade before they found purchase, catching a glancing hydraulic strike across his right shoulder for the trouble. He rolled, came up, fired. When one of the slower Lord-class units began rerouting toward Eunhwa's exposed flank, Arthur put himself between them and held the creature's attention with short controlled bursts until Eunhwa could reposition and put three consecutive rounds through its primary optical cluster.
His coat was in pieces by the time the second wave pushed through.
Shredded at the left hem. Punctured through the back by a tensile spine that had grazed a shoulder blade rather than found the spine beneath it. He hadn't stopped to assess the bleeding. The Typhoon's power cell was reading sixty percent and dropping. The Omni-blade had cauterized its own edge twice with thermal recharge and was running warm against his forearm.
Then the Lord-class unit to his right unfolded an appendage he hadn't catalogued—longer than the others, edged along one face like a rusted prybar—and it caught his right arm at the elbow with a force that was less a cut and more a severance, the goddesium alloy shearing along a stress fracture that the Harvester had probably introduced weeks ago. The Typhoon hit the floor with a metallic clatter. His right arm hit it a half-second later.
Arthur did not stop moving.
He drove the Omni-blade—now mounted on his left Cerberus forearm, awkward, wrong-handed, absolutely manageable—through the unit's optical cluster with everything he had left, punching through until the creature's legs buckled and its amber light went dark. His breath was ragged. Ribs grinding on the wrong axis. Shoulder a ruin of heat and numbness. He turned to face the remaining units.
Alisa was already there.
She hadn't disobeyed quietly. She came in like a festival and a funeral simultaneously—pink hair loose around the rose pinned above her ear, the criminally short hem of her dress swaying with a momentum entirely at odds with the nightmare surrounding her. The seams along her forearms split open with a precise mechanical sound, chainsaw teeth spinning up to a shriek, and she drove both blades into the flank of the nearest Lord-class with a force that shook the floor. A hatch cracked along each shoulder and she launched two rockets in near-simultaneous bursts, the backwash scattering the corridor in burning debris.
"You said rear position," she said pleasantly, not looking at him, driving her right blade in a ripping diagonal sweep through a Lord-class torso.
"I did," Arthur managed.
"I decided not to."
The remaining Raptures broke against the two of them. It wasn't elegant. It was slow, grinding attrition—Alisa's rockets dwindling, Arthur's blade arm burning with lactic overload, the borrowed geometry of his wrong-handed grip degrading with every exchange. But the Lord-class units fell one by one, their optical clusters dimming in sequence, their armoured bodies crumpling against the biomechanical floor. The tentacles retracted. The bioluminescent veins drained from arterial red back through violet and into grey, a slow hemorrhagic fade. The contracting walls stilled.
The Tyrant's distributed heartbeat went silent.
Arthur stood in the ruin of the junction, chest heaving, and listened to the nothing. It took six full seconds before he was certain it was real.
"Signal's gone," Shifty confirmed quietly in his ear. "All environmental readings nominal. Commander—" A pause. "Your biosigns are—"
"I'm aware." He looked at the floor where his right arm lay, the goddesium alloy already dark without the body's warmth to conduct through it. He would not be retrieving the Typhoon today. "Get me a medical priority flag on extraction."
Alisa appeared at his side without announcement, her chainsaw blades folded away, one hand pressing carefully against his intact left arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Her eyes said it, and he acknowledged it with the briefest pressure of his remaining hand over hers before stepping forward.
"Listen carefully," he said, raising his voice to carry to the whole group. "We are not touching that Fragment until I have Andersen and Ingrid on the line. Corruption present throughout this facility, four of ours already compromised, and this thing was bait from the start. I'm not pulling it out of the floor without Command authority and a proper extraction team in place." He scanned the faces around him—Eunhwa's taut composure, Vesti's forced steadiness, the barely-contained tension in Nyx and Lyra and Anis. "Nyx. Anis. Emma. Get Scarlet and Matis secured and stable. Same careful handling as before."
Nyx gave him a look that lasted a moment longer than strictly necessary—her dark eyes running over his injuries with an expression she was deliberately not naming—before she moved. Anis went with her, jaw set, gaze forward.
Shifty was already ahead of him.
"Commander, I was running parallel lines while you were fighting. Andersen has two airships and an extraction company in transit as of four minutes ago. CEO Ingrid authorized a secure specialist team simultaneously—they weren't waiting for your call." A short pause. "Combined ETA is approximately sixty minutes. I'm feeding them your current coordinates and the corruption protocol flags for the four affected personnel."
"Good. Keep a live scan on the chamber. If anything moves, anything changes, I want immediate notice."
"Running now."
The group settled into the particular stillness of combat aftermath—the way bodies and minds recalibrate when the immediate threat dissolves and everything deferred by adrenaline arrives at once. Eunhwa was running a quiet damage assessment of her squad. Alisa had produced a field coagulant from somewhere in her impractical dress and was applying it to a gash on Arthur's shoulder with a focus that brooked no argument. He let her.
It was Lyra who moved first.
She had drifted toward the chamber's far wall with the unhurried attention of someone following an instinct she hadn't yet named, her long silver hair drifting over the shoulder of her spotter's coat as she crouched before a row of containers half-buried in the organic substrate of the floor. Cube-shaped, old manufacture, sealed with mechanical clasps that had corroded into near-permanence.
"Shifty," Lyra said quietly. "Boxes along the east wall. Any hazards?"
A beat. "Running a passive sweep—chemical neutral, no energetic signature, no biologic—Commander, I'd advise against—"
The clasp gave.
The lid rose two inches and the smell came first—copper and something older and sweeter—and then Lyra's hand froze on the lid as the gap showed what was packed inside. It took a moment for the brain to assemble the image into something coherent, because it refused to on the first pass. Nikke parts. Not scattered. Not destroyed. *Arranged.* Crammed into the container with a systematic compression that could only be intentional—arms folded at inhuman angles, torsos nested against each other, the preserved faces of at least four separate units slack and upturned.
Arthur crossed the chamber in four long strides and brought the lid down hard.
The clang of it rang through the chamber and nobody spoke. He stood with both hands flat on the closed lid for two full seconds, breathing. Then he turned.
"No one opens another box." His voice was quiet and absolute. "Not for any reason." He met Lyra's eyes. She was pale—not shaken the way someone who had seen death was shaken, but something deeper, something that reached the part of her that understood *this could have been a filing system.* He held her gaze until some of the blankness receded. "We move."
They moved.
The corridor back to the ascent shaft was quieter than any of them wanted it to be, the only sounds the wet respiration of the labyrinth's dormant tissue and the measured footfalls of two squads carrying their own wounded. The incapacitated Nikkes were borne carefully between pairs of operatives, their slack forms handled with a tenderness that military doctrine had never prescribed.
Arthur walked point with his Omni-blade ready and one arm, his goddesium legs carrying the weight of everything quietly, as they always had.
The ascent shaft opened ahead—a vertical column of pale emergency lighting punching down from the surface access mechanism, sixty meters above. The ceiling grid was intact. The ladder rungs were clear. Outside, somewhere beyond the shaft's head, extraction teams were en route.