Chapter 282: A Fight

The cold crimson laser dot hovered over the back of Nicholas’s head.

In the silence of the ruined rail yard, the only sound was the faint whistle of the wind passing through the rusted supports of the grain silo.

Nicholas didn’t flinch or turn around. His dark blue eyes remained fixed on the unconscious clone lying in the gravel, but he was already aware of exactly where the laser was coming from.

Beside him, Zero narrowed his eyes beneath his dark cowl. His hand shifted slightly on the grip of his longsword, his Qi ready to move at a moment’s notice. Vixen also shifted her stance, faint ripples moving around her fingers as she prepared to redirect any incoming shot.

"High catwalk. Two hundred yards out," Vixen murmured. "Want me to fold the silo into the dirt?"

"Hold," Nicholas said calmly.

High above the tracks, a figure sat casually on the narrow railing of the silo’s upper walkway. He leaned against a rusted beam, a cigarette glowing between his fingers as smoke drifted into the cold night air.

Sniper lowered the long barrel of his customized rifle and switched off the red laser sight. He rested the weapon across his knees and took another drag before looking toward someone hiding beneath the service ladder.

"Told you," Sniper said lazily. "Guy just cracked the fake’s chest like a walnut. You walk out there with your bad jaw and your party fog, you’re getting turned into a stain on the tracks."

Hidden beneath the ladder, Hexi clutched his bruised ribs. His face was pale and swollen beneath the dirty gauze wrapped around his injuries, but his eyes remained fixed on the unconscious clone and the glowing shard inside his chest.

"Shut up," Hexi hissed through gritted teeth. "That power... look at what’s in his chest! That’s not normal Qi! If we can get that stone—"

"We aren’t getting anything," Shadow whispered from the darkness. Her small frame was wrapped in an oversized coat, and her dark eyes remained fixed on Zero and Vixen. "The swordsman is looking right at us. If he draws that blade, I can’t get us through the shadows fast enough. I’m tired, Hexi. I want to go back to the garage."

Sniper flicked his cigarette over the railing and watched it disappear into the darkness before standing up and slinging his rifle over his shoulder.

"Smart girl," he said. "Come on, boss. Let the big heroes play with their new toy. We’ve got cheap noodles waiting at home."

Hexi glared down at Nicholas for several seconds, his bloodshot eyes lingering on the glowing green shard. Finally, he turned away and disappeared into the industrial shadows with Shadow and Sniper.

On the ground below, Zero relaxed his grip on his sword.

"They’re retreating. The impure squad that served Vance."

"Let them run," Nicholas said, looking down at the clone. "They aren’t the priority."

Selena jogged across the tracks, stepping over the broken remains of railcars. Behind her, an armored Association transport rolled into the yard with its floodlights blazing, followed by four containment operators wearing thick, pressurized suits.

"Is he down?" Selena asked, slightly out of breath as she reached Nicholas.

"Unconscious."

Nicholas knelt beside B and pulled aside the remains of his torn combat shirt. The transport’s harsh lights fell across the clone’s chest, revealing a jagged, glowing shard of emerald-green crystal embedded directly in his sternum. It was about the size of an arrowhead, pulsing with a deep, steady vibration that made the ground beneath their feet hum faintly.

Selena dropped to one knee beside Nicholas and pulled an optical scanner from her belt. She held it over the crystal, watching the readings climb rapidly.

"The resonance signature..." Her eyes widened. "It matches the frequency data we recovered from the Saharan dreadnought. This isn’t an artificial battery."

"It’s a fragment of a master power stone," Zero said, stepping closer. His eyes remained fixed on the shard. "One of the seven stones Ikar scattered across the world fifty years ago. Someone found the Earth stone, broke off a piece, and fused it into this clone’s body to act as an artificial heart."

"That explains the bottomless output," Nectron said, rubbing the back of his neck as he looked around the wrecked rail yard. "He wasn’t using normal human Qi pathways or holding anything back. He was drawing raw energy straight from an alien power core. If he’d known how to control that power instead of swinging it around like a lunatic, he could’ve flattened the whole county."

"The stone is connected to his circulatory system," Selena said, watching the faint green veins spreading across B’s pale chest. "If we try to remove it here, his energy pathways could collapse and cause a massive explosion. We need to get him into maximum-security containment before the research team attempts to remove it."

Nicholas stood, brushing the gravel from his trousers.

"Lock him down."

The containment operators moved in. They secured heavy energy-suppression cuffs around the clone’s wrists, ankles, and neck. The devices hummed to life, surrounding B with a faint field that weakened his Qi and prevented him from using his abilities if he woke up.

Four operators lifted the unconscious clone onto a magnetic gurney and moved him into the reinforced containment bay of the armored transport. The heavy doors slammed shut behind him.

"Transport is secured," the lead operator reported to Selena. "Heading straight for central headquarters."

"We’re riding escort," Selena ordered, gesturing toward the second transport. "Nobody takes their eyes off that vehicle until the cell doors in Sub-Level 9 are sealed."

The underground levels beneath the Grayland Association headquarters were cold, sterile, and quiet.

Sub-Level 9 was the deepest and most secure vault in the entire facility, buried four hundred feet beneath the city. It had been built to hold high-tier anomalies, rogue experiments, and threats too dangerous for the normal hero prisons. The walls were reinforced with thick, lead-lined rock, while energy-dampening generators kept the area almost completely free of ability resonance.

The heavy elevator doors opened, and the containment team wheeled the gurney down the brightly lit corridor.

Eric and Dana were already waiting outside the main containment vault.

Eric stood with his hands in his trench coat pockets, his tired eyes following the gurney as it passed. Dana held a secure tablet, adjusting the vault’s dampening fields to match the strange energy coming from the green crystal.

"The media lines are already blowing up," Eric said as Nicholas, Selena, Zero, and Vixen approached. "Reports from Chicago confirm the attacks stopped the moment you engaged him in Calumet. The public thinks Phantom personally took down a rogue terrorist. For now, the panic is under control."

"He’s not just a rogue terrorist, Eric," Selena said, stepping toward the glass observation window. "Look at his chest."

Inside the reinforced cell, the operators transferred the clone onto a suspended stasis table. Heavy clamps locked around his arms and legs while four dampening emitters above him filled the room with a steady blue light.

Eric stepped closer to the glass. His jaw tightened when he saw the emerald shard pulsing beneath B’s skin.

"The Saharan artifact..." he muttered. "One of the seven stones."

"A fragment of one," Nicholas corrected, standing with his arms crossed. "The energy output is massive, but it’s only a piece. Someone found where Ikar hid the Earth stone, broke off part of it to power their experiment, and left the rest."

Dana tapped her tablet and brought up the high-resolution scans of the animal hide recovered from Egypt.

"The deciphering team just finished mapping the coordinates on the parchment," Dana said. "The markings point to an ancient fault line running deep beneath the Appalachian Mountain Range in eastern North America. The energy coming from the shard in B’s chest matches the readings from the Appalachian anomaly almost perfectly."

A sudden, ragged cough echoed through the intercom.

The clone’s head moved.

B’s eyes slowly opened. His vision was blurred, and his breathing was heavy beneath the suppression field. He pulled against the restraints, but the dampening emitters immediately flared, weakening the Qi in his muscles.

B looked through the observation glass.

His dark blue eyes locked onto Nicholas.

A slow, twisted smile spread across his bruised face. Blood stained the corner of his split lip, but there was still amusement in his eyes.

"You think... you won?" B’s raspy voice crackled through the intercom. "You locked me in a box... original. But you can’t lock the sky."

Nicholas stepped closer to the glass, his expression blank.

"Who put the stone in your chest?"

B laughed softly, the sound rough and strained.

"The Master... sees further than your little hero club," B said. "You found the ship in the sand, didn’t you? You heard the voice from the stars. The harvest is coming... and you’re running around playing cop with stolen time."

His smile widened.

"The stone in the mountain... it isn’t waiting for you," B whispered. "It’s already waking up. And when the beast of the deep crumbles the peaks... you’ll see that Earth was never meant to survive."

A final, strained laugh escaped him before his head fell back against the metal headrest. The suppression field forced him into unconsciousness again.

The observation deck fell silent.

"The Master..." Selena murmured, looking at Nicholas. "He mentioned Dr. Malik Vance. If Vance’s syndicate has access to the Appalachian coordinates, they might already have teams operating in the mountain sector."

"We move immediately," Nicholas said. His voice was cold and steady. "Zero, Vixen, Selena. We prep our gear and fly out to the Appalachian ridge before sunrise."

"I’ll have the long-range transport fueled on the private tarmac," Eric said with a firm nod. "Find that stone, secure it, and bring it back. We cannot let another fragment fall into the hands of those monsters."

Thirty minutes later, in the upper briefing wing of the Association building, Selena was laying out satellite maps of the dense, fog-covered Appalachian valleys.

"The primary entry point is an abandoned mining sector known as Sector 4," Selena explained, pointing to a red marker on the mountain map. "It was shut down fifty years ago, shortly after the initial outbreak, because of a series of underground cave-ins. The geological readings show a massive cavern system three miles beneath the mountain."

Before Nicholas could respond, the heavy double doors swung open with a loud bang.

Julie marched into the room wearing a fresh khaki vest, matching boots, and a shiny handheld camera mounted on a new silver stabilizer.

"Pack your bags, team!" Julie announced, spinning around with a triumphant grin. "The documentarian is fully restocked, fully charged, and officially cleared for the American wilderness arc!"

Selena pressed her fingers against her nose and let out a long, tired groan.

"Julie, I swear on my career, if you bring that camera near a classified extraction site again—"

"I have exclusive distribution rights signed by the Director himself!" Julie interrupted proudly, holding up a digital permit on her phone. "The public needs to see our heroes conquering the great unknown! And look at this stabilizer, Phantom! Carbon composite! Smooth as silk!"

Nicholas didn’t even look up from the map.

"Forty percent."

Julie’s triumphant smile disappeared instantly.

"Forty?! It was thirty in Egypt!"

"Hazard pay for mountain hiking," Nicholas said flatly, picking up his duffel bag from the bench. "Take it or stay in Grayland."

Julie clutched her camera to her chest, staring at him in disbelief before stamping her foot.

"You are an absolute monster! Fine! But I get exclusive first-look angles!"

"Deal," Nicholas said, turning toward the door.

Meanwhile, four hundred feet below in Sub-Level 9, the deep hum of the underground generators vibrated through the cold concrete.

Inside the dark containment cell, the clone remained strapped to the stasis table, the blue suppression fields bathing his pale face in light.

Then, deep inside B’s chest, the emerald crystal flickered.

It wasn’t a normal surge of energy.

The shard gave off a sharp pulse, sending a silent wave through the bedrock. The signal traveled thousands of miles east through the earth, heading straight toward the forgotten depths of the Appalachian Mountains.

In the observation room, the automated seismic monitors suddenly began screaming.

The digital graphs shot upward as sensors across the eastern seaboard detected a massive, unnatural tremor moving beneath the mountain peaks.

Something colossal had just opened its eyes in the dark.