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The Mark Two erupted from the hospital helipad like a comet fired from the ground up.
The reinforcements that arrived seconds too late found a parking lot full of unconscious agents, a burning helicopter, and an armored figure already climbing past rooftop altitude.
The lead agent took one look at the devastation and ordered his team to open fire.
Better equipment this time. Heavier caliber. Armor-piercing rounds. The kind of ammunition that could shred light vehicles and punch through concrete.
Against the Mark Two's gold-titanium alloy, every round pinged off like hail on a tank.
The agent stopped the barrage and reached into his vehicle for something larger. A shoulder-launched weapon. Compact. Portable. Designed for exactly this kind of target.
Ethan saw it.
He raised his left palm.
The repulsor fired before the agent could pull the trigger.
The weapon detonated in the man's hands. The blast radius engulfed the cluster of vehicles and agents around it. Not lethal at that distance — the repulsor had been aimed at the launcher, not the people — but enough to scatter the formation and eliminate any further pursuit from the ground.
Ethan climbed into the sky, trailing contrails, and left St. John's Hospital behind.
At altitude, the armor's heads-up display populated with radar data.
Dozens of kilometers ahead, between Ethan and the open ocean, a constellation of light dots was forming. Dense. Organized. The signature pattern of a military combat formation.
Callister had been busy.
Ethan studied the display and felt a cold focus settle over him. The Mark Two was a significant upgrade over Mark One in every dimension — defense, weapons, reactor efficiency, sensor capability. But the formation ahead wasn't two jets with light missiles. It was a full naval air response.
He didn't feel fear. He felt the specific, electric anticipation of a man about to test a machine he'd built against the best the opposition could throw at it.
"Eagle One, Eagle Two, launch!"
Colonel Stankin, commanding the interception operation from the carrier ARS Morley, gave the order with the flat authority of a career officer who'd been waiting for exactly this assignment.
Two fighters screamed off the carrier deck and climbed toward the incoming target.
"Remember, soldiers. No mercy. This target humiliated our Air Force last time. Two jets destroyed. Two pilots killed. Our reputation hasn't recovered."
"This time, we end it. Sink him into the ocean in front of the entire world."
The pilots acknowledged. Their weapon bays carried hardware that made the previous engagement's lightweight missiles look like party favors. Large-caliber machine guns. And medium-weight air-to-air missiles with enough explosive force to collapse a residential building.
This wasn't a repeat of the verification meeting. This was an execution.
The two jets closed on Ethan head-on.
No hesitation. No warning shots. No communication. The pilots pressed their launch buttons the moment they had tone.
A missile detached from the lead jet's bay. Nearly the height of a man. Its rocket motor ignited instantly, and the weapon accelerated toward Ethan at multiples of the speed of sound, trailing white exhaust against the grey sky.
Inside the armor, Ethan's display flagged the incoming threat and his expression went serious.
Medium-weight missile.
This wasn't the lightweight ordnance from the verification meeting. This was a weapon designed to kill armored vehicles, destroy hardened targets, and punch craters meters deep into solid ground. A direct hit from this would test the Mark Two's limits in ways Ethan wasn't eager to discover.
Taking it head-on was a gamble he couldn't afford.
He banked hard and climbed, accelerating vertically.
In the cockpits, the pilots smirked. Evasion through direction change was the most basic response, and against Aurelian missile tracking technology, the most futile. The weapon's guidance system registered the target's vector shift and adjusted instantly, curving upward in pursuit.
The missile followed. Heat-seeking. Radar-guided. Dual-track. The most advanced targeting system the Aurelian Republic deployed on carrier-based ordnance.
In the live broadcast, hearts stopped.
"He can't outrun it!"
"That missile is HUGE! Multiple times larger than the one from the verification meeting!"
"It has tracking! He can't just dodge!"
"The power on that warhead is enough to flatten a building!"
Five kilometers behind Ethan. Three. One.
Inside the armor, Ethan watched the closing distance on his display with the focused calm of a man who was not panicking but waiting.
Waiting for the right moment.
The missile entered optimal range.
Countermeasure flares. Deploy.
A disc-shaped housing on the armor's right leg assembly popped open, and a cloud of decoy flares erupted into the air behind the Mark Two. Dozens of them, each one burning at temperatures designed to overwhelm the missile's heat-seeking guidance, creating a wall of false targets between the warhead and its actual objective.
The missile's guidance system processed the new data. Hundreds of heat signatures where there had been one. Its tracking algorithms, sophisticated as they were, couldn't distinguish the real target from the decoys in the fraction of a second available.
It chose wrong.
BOOM.
The detonation lit the sky a kilometer behind Ethan. Shrapnel fanned outward in a sphere, and even at that distance, fragments peppered the Mark Two's hull with metallic pings that the armor's sensors registered as surface impacts. No penetration.
In the live broadcast, the relief was visceral.
"HE DODGED IT!"
"COUNTERMEASURE FLARES! The armor has countermeasure flares!"
"This isn't just armor — it's a complete weapons platform!"
On the ARS Morley, Colonel Stankin's composure cracked.
Decoy flares. The suit has decoy flares.
This wasn't a flying strongman. This was a miniaturized fighter aircraft wrapped around a human body, equipped with the same defensive systems that full-sized military jets carried. Whoever had built this thing had designed it for exactly this scenario.
The Colonel couldn't let this target reach open water.
"All fighter jets of Eagle Squadron. Launch. Full deployment."
"I don't care about the cost. Intercept and destroy."
The ARS Morley's flight deck erupted into organized chaos. One by one, then in pairs, then in waves, nearly forty fighter jets launched from the carrier's catapults and climbed into the afternoon sky.
They formed up at altitude. A wall of metal and thrust, arranged in overlapping defensive layers that covered every approach angle, every altitude band, every possible escape vector.
Forty jets against one suit of armor.
In the live broadcast, the Signal Bee captured the formation from a distance: a dark mass of aircraft, circling like vultures, filling the sky between Ethan and the open ocean.
"Forty jets."
"That's enough for a conventional war."
"How can one person get through THAT?"
"It's over. Even with the flares, even with the armor, forty jets is forty jets."
The formation tightened as Ethan approached. The jets closed around him from every direction. Above, below, left, right, ahead, behind. A sphere of hostile aircraft, each one armed with the missiles and guns that had been specifically loaded to counter the Mark Two's demonstrated capabilities.
From a distance, the Signal Bee's camera showed a single red and gold dot, surrounded on all sides by a swarm of grey shapes.
A beast in a cage.
No visible way out.