Chapter 245: Artificer’s Gift

The portal to the Iso-Cube looked like a wound in reality.

Seraph stood in front of it, studying the glowing oval of distorted space that led to Sterling’s most secure prison. Around her, five other resistance fighters checked their gear one last time. No powered armor. No magical weapons. Just normal guns and knives.

Because inside the Iso-Cube, nothing else would work.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said quietly. “That’s our window. Voss says the guard shift changes at exactly 0300 hours. We go in at 0301, grab Dr. Cross and whoever else we can carry, and we are out by 0315.”

“And if we are not out by 0315?” asked Marcus, one of Rook’s best fighters.

“Then the portal locks for another six hours. And we are trapped inside with Sterling’s Beta-Class Weavers and the security measures he’s built.”

Draven cracked his knuckles. “I still think this is insane. But I’ve gotten used to insane lately.”

“That makes one of us,” Seraph said quietly.

BEEP.

Her chronometer hit 0301.

“Time to move. Stay tight. Stay quiet. And for the love of everything, don’t touch anything you don’t have to.” She brought out the stolen keycard from her pocket. The one Voss had risked his life to provide.

“Here we go.”

She swiped the keycard through the portal’s access panel.

For a moment, nothing happened. Seraph’s heart stopped. Had Voss been caught? Had Sterling changed the codes?

Then the portal flared bright white, and a message appeared:

ACCESS GRANTED. FIFTEEN MINUTE WINDOW INITIATED.

“Move!” Seraph commanded.

They rushed through the portal in a single line. The feeling of going through the portal was like being turned inside out and then put back together wrong.

The Iso-Cube was nothing like Seraph expected.

She had imagined a dark dungeon. Cells with bars. Something gothic and terrifying. Instead, it was clinical. Everything was white, from the walls to the floors to the ceiling. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, making it impossible to judge distance or depth.

“Comms check,” Seraph whispered.

There was no response. The magic-nullifying field also blocked all forms of long-range communication.

Using hand signals, she led the team forward. They moved in a tight formation, with their weapons ready but not raised. Making noise would be just as deadly as making a mistake.

The corridors were confusingly connected. White walls crossed each other at strange angles that didn’t quite make sense. Seraph had studied the blueprints Voss provided, but seeing it in person made her realize how useless those maps were.

This place was designed to confuse. To make you doubt your own senses.

She kept them moving, following the path she’d memorized.

CLICK.

The sound was barely audible.

Everyone froze.

Marcus, at the back of the formation, had touched something. A line of red light now stretched across the corridor at ankle height.

A laser tripwire.

“Don’t move,” Seraph said.

But it was already too late.

The floor under Marcus’s feet began to glow with a strange, purple light.

“What…” Marcus started to ask.

Then he began to age.

It didn’t happen slowly. His skin wrinkled and loose in seconds. His hair went from black to grey to white to gone. His eyes sank into his skull. His body dried up and became very thin.

He tried to scream, but his vocal cords were dust before the sound could form.

In less than ten seconds, Marcus collapsed into a pile of aged clothes and bone pieces so old they crumbled when they hit the ground.

The purple light faded. The trap reset itself, waiting for the next victim.

Nobody tried to move. They just stared at the remains of their teammate, scattered across the floor.

“Time-acceleration field,” Draven whispered, his voice tight with horror. “He aged seventy years in seconds.”

Seraph forced herself to look away from Marcus’s remains. She forced herself to think tactically instead of emotionally. Mourning could come later. Survival came first.

“Keep moving,” she said. “Watch every step. Don’t touch anything.”

They went deeper into the facility, now fully aware of every place a trap might be. The corridors were full of sensors they couldn’t see. Pressure plates disguised as normal floor tiles. More laser grids that activated and deactivated on random timers.

Every step was a gamble with death.

They lost another fighter, Chen, when she accidentally stepped into a kinetic dampening field.

By the time they reached the prison block, they were down to four. Seraph, Draven, and two others named Kira and Torres.

The prison block was a large, circular chamber. The walls curved up to a round ceiling. And they were dozens of transparent pods floating midair.

Inside each pod was a person. Scientists. Researchers. The nation’s brightest minds. Their faces were calm, but the overhead displays showed their brain activity. They were active and being slowly drained of information.

“There,” Kira pointed. “That’s Dr. Cross.”

One of the pods held a middle-aged woman with silver hair. According to her display, she had seventeen days of usable mental activity left. After that, her mind would be completely emptied.

Seraph approached the pod carefully, scanning for traps. “Torres, can you override the stasis field?”

Torres moved forward, bringing out a portable hacking device. “Give me five minutes.”

“You have three.”

While Torres worked, Draven kept watching the entrance. Seraph moved to check the other pods, looking for more targets they could extract.

That’s when she saw it.

It was a pod that looked different. Bigger in size. And the person inside…

“That’s not possible,” Seraph said qu.

Inside the pod was a man. One of his arm missing. But his face was unmistakable.

Dr. Aris Thorne.

“He’s alive,” Draven said, moving to her side. “Sterling captured him and kept him.”

“No.” Seraph studied the readings on the pod’s display. “Look at the extraction rate. It’s ten times higher than the others. Sterling isn’t just draining him. He’s consuming him. Taking every bit of knowledge Thorne had about forced synthesis and weaponized biology.”

“Then we leave him,” Draven said flatly. “The man is a monster. Let Sterling have him.”

“Draven, he’s the nation’s best expert on the techniques Sterling is using. If we could get him out, wake him up, he could tell us how to counter…”

WOOP. WOOP. WOOP.

Alarms started making loud noises all over the facility. Red lights replaced the white ones, making everywhere red.

“Torres?” Seraph shouted.

“I don’t know what I did!” Torres quickly removed his hands back from the pod controls. “The system just went crazy!”

From corridors all around them, they heard footsteps. Dozens of them. All moving in together.

Beta-Class Weavers.

“We are out of time,” Seraph said. “Forget Cross. Forget all of them. We run. Now!”

They turned to flee, but the entrance they hadd come through was already blocked. Six figures stood there. Each one having a stable, glowing God Mark.

Sterling’s weapons.

“Alternative exit?” Draven asked, already knowing the answer.

“There isn’t one.” Seraph’s mind thought fast for options and found nothing. They were trapped in a room with no other exits. Surrounded by enemies they couldn’t fight.

“Then we make an exit,” Draven said quietly.

He stepped forward, moving to stand between the team and the approaching Weavers. Golden energy began to build around his body.

“Draven, what are you doing?” Seraph asked.

“What I should have done at the factory.” His voice was calm. “I’ve spent my whole life as a shield. Protecting. Defending”

The golden energy became stronger, crackling like lightning.

He turned to look at them one last time. “Get to the portal. I will clear you a path.”

“You’ll die!” Seraph protested.

“Probably.” Draven smiled. “But at least I’ll die doing something impossible. That’s more than most people get.”

Before anyone could stop him, he charged.

Not at the Weavers. At the pod holding Thorne.

The one the blueprints had labeled as physically unbreakable.

Draven’s golden aura changed. Became something new. All the defensive power he’d cultivated, all the force he’d learned to absorb and redirect, he compressed it into a single point. His entire body became a weapon.

“AEGIS BREAKER!” he roared.

The impact shook the entire facility.

Not an explosion. Something worse. The sound of reality itself fracturing. Of physical laws being bent past their breaking point and snapping like overstressed cables.

The quantum-locked stasis field, the unbreakable cage, cracked like glass.

And Draven, caught in the backlash of forces that should never have met, screamed.

His golden armor shattered. His body was thrown backward, smoking and broken. He hit the wall and didn’t move.

But the cage was open.

Dr. Thorne’s unconscious body began to fall.

“MOVE!” Seraph screamed at her team.

They ran. Grabbed Thorne’s limp form. The Beta-Class Weavers were rushing forward now, but the facility itself was shaking. Alarms were screaming. The broken quantum field was causing cascading failures throughout the prison’s systems.

Kira and Torres carried Thorne. Seraph ran to Draven, threw his arm over her shoulder, and dragged his dead weight with strength born of pure desperation.

“You stupid, beautiful idiot,” she gasped.

Draven’s eyes flickered open. Just barely. “Did it work?”

“Yeah. It worked.”

“Good.” His eyes closed again. “That’s good.”

They ran for the portal as the Iso-Cube began to tear itself apart around them.

Behind them, Sterling’s perfect weapons gave chase.

And ahead of them, the portal timer was counting down its final minute.

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