[T-minus 34 Days Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion]

The tunnels bled mist.

Agent 714 staggered through the ruin, one hand clamped tight against the gash in her side. Blood leaked between her fingers, slick and hot, painting a broken trail behind her. Every step was a jolt of agony, but she kept moving – boots scraping across cracked concrete, past slumped corpses fused into the walls.

The SANDGARDEN wasn't a bunker anymore. It was a carcass – and she was crawling through its rotting veins.

Her breath came in shallow gasps. Her vision blurred at the edges. Above her, the emergency lights flickered in arrhythmic spasms, painting the shattered corridors in sickly pulses of red and green. Somewhere deeper, the soulfields groaned – a low, terrible sound, like an animal too wounded to die.

Agent 714 knew she had minutes at best. She needed a surface exit. A call for exfil. Anything.

She stumbled into an intersection, half-collapsed, wires dangling like shredded veins. Her boots slipped in the sludge pooling across the floor. She righted herself, jaw clenched, forcing her body to obey.

A sound echoed behind her.

Bootsteps.

Not hurried.

Not uncertain.

Measured.

She froze – heart hammering – and turned.

Through the mist, two figures emerged.

General Wang – immaculate even in this ruin, as if the decay recoiled from him. His uniform was crisp. His boots untouched by blood. His face – human at a glance – was wrong when you stared too long. The flesh was too smooth. The smile stretched too thin.

And beside him: Jian – no – Agent 49.

Her brother.

Silent. Straight-backed. His rifle slung casually over one shoulder. His eyes flat, unreadable. Watching her.

For one wild heartbeat, Agent 714 thought maybe – maybe – it was backup. Reinforcements. Orders. Sanity.

But the mist didn't lie.

And neither did the way Agent 49 looked at her – like a stranger evaluating a broken weapon.

General Wang tilted his head slightly, regarding her as one might regard an insect pinned to glass.

"Going somewhere?" he asked, voice soft as velvet. Mocking.

Agent 714 said nothing.

Her rifle was still strapped across her chest, but her arms trembled too badly to lift it.

The silence dragged out, thick and suffocating.

Wang smiled.

"You're bleeding," he said, almost kindly. "You should let go."

Behind him, Agent 49 didn't move. Didn't flinch. Just stood there – the boy she'd fought beside, trained beside, bled beside – now a spectre wearing a familiar face.

Agent 714 tightened her grip on the rifle stock.

No backup was coming.

No orders would save her.

She was alone.

And she had been alone for a long time – she just hadn't realized it until now.

Slowly, painfully, she straightened her spine and faced them both.

Because if she was going to die today, she would die on her feet.

…………………

Agent 714 braced against the wall, breath coming in shallow, painful bursts. Her hands shook – not just from blood loss, not just from pain.

From the wrongness standing before her.

General Wang. Or what wore his skin now.

The thing smiled, slow and deliberate, like a man savouring a private joke.

"You're not human," she rasped. "You're... you're a husk."

General Wang's smile didn't falter.

"No," he said, voice thick with satisfaction. "I am the architect. The author of this place."

He spread his arms wide, as if welcoming her into a ruined temple.

"SANDGARDEN is mine. It always was. Just like Jade Dragon was. You simply arrived too late to understand."

Agent 714's stomach twisted.

The containment fields. The experiments. The soulfields bleeding into the earth.

All under his command.

All by his will.

"You built this," she whispered. "You let it happen."

"I shaped it," Wang corrected. "As all strong men must shape the weak."

Agent 714's mind reeled.

Had it always been this way?

Had she missed the signs – or had she just been too desperate to believe in something, anything, that made the bloodshed mean something?

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Every word peeled another layer from her chest, exposing the raw nerves underneath.

She barely noticed Agent 49 step forward from the mist.

Her brother. Her shadow. Her rival.

The only other soul who had survived the same broken childhood. The same brutal training fields. The same nights, curled back-to-back under thin blankets, whispering dreams of a life beyond orders.

And now – he stood between her and the demon. Not to fight it. To protect it.

Agent 714 looked at him – really looked – and for a terrifying moment, she didn't recognize the face staring back.

"You're siding with that," she said, voice cracking. "You're choosing this over—"

"Orders are orders," Agent 49 said, quiet and absolute.

Not even anger in his tone. Just certainty. Just the end of something that had once been alive between them.

Agent 714 staggered a half-step back.

A fresh wave of nausea rolled through her – not from her injuries. From the truth.

They were never brothers.

They were soldiers. Property. Tools sharpened until they forgot they were human.

And now – only she remembered.

Wang watched the moment with amusement – a father proud of the child who learned to kill without asking why.

"You see?" he said. "Obedience endures. Loyalty rots."

Agent 714 looked at Jian one last time.

At the boy who had once pulled her from rubble.

At the boy who had once whispered, "If we have nothing else, we have each other."

And now he didn't even flinch.

Didn't even blink.

He was already gone.

A soldier's death with a traitor's hands.

Something broke in her then – cleanly. Without sound. Not a scream. Not a cry.

Just a simple, irrevocable fracture where faith used to live.

Agent 714 dropped her weapon.

There was nothing left worth dying for here.

Not even hate.

She turned.

And she ran.

Shards of memory flashed between each step— Jian's hand gripping hers in the barracks blackout drills. Whispered promises carved in dust: "If we have nothing else, we have each other." The oath they swore when they were children: "No one left behind."

Lies, all of it. She stumbled forward anyway.

No one followed.

Behind her, the mist swallowed the only family she ever had. Behind her, General Wang's laughter echoed – soft, patient, inevitable.

She didn't cry.

There was no grief left.

Only a hollow, furious need to survive— —and the jagged, burning truth:

The world she fought for was already dead.

And she was the last fool too stubborn to let it rot without a fight.

…………………

The corridors blurred around her.

Agent 714 ran blind, boots slipping on floors slick with mist and old blood. Her lungs burned. Her ribs screamed with every breath. Her vision tunnelled.

But she didn't stop.

Couldn't.

Behind her, she heard no pursuit.

No gunfire. No footsteps.

Just the slow, rhythmic hum of SANDGARDEN breathing like a dying beast – exhaling corruption into every inch of her world.

Her legs faltered once. Knees buckling under exhaustion and injury.

She slammed into a wall, hard enough to split the skin above her brow, and for a heartbeat she almost stayed there. Let the mist take her. Let the war end.

But then she remembered Wang's voice.

"Obedience endures. Loyalty rots."

Agent 714 pushed off the wall with a ragged snarl and kept running.

Through collapsed checkpoints. Through corridors that no longer led straight but spiralled like the inside of a rotting lung. Through memories she didn't have time to mourn.

Each step tore something else loose inside her.

Faith. Duty. Brotherhood.

Her body began to betray her, muscles locking, vision dimming at the edges. The rational part of her brain screamed to stop – to lay down – to let it end.

But something deeper, older, fiercer kept her moving. Not hope.

Rage.

By the time she staggered into the upper service tunnels, she didn't know what pieces of herself were still intact.

At the last intact airlock, she collapsed against the frame, gasping, hands trembling so badly she fumbled the emergency override twice before slamming the manual release.

The blast door ground open with a shriek.

Cooler air rushed in – not clean, but less saturated with madness.

Agent 714 stumbled through, falling to her knees in the fractured twilight beyond the bunker.

Mist swirled around her ankles, carrying the smell of blood and rot and something older.

She crawled behind the shattered husk of a logistics vehicle, dragged a field dressing over her side without finesse, and bit down on a scream as the gauze stuck to open muscle.

For a long moment, she knelt there.

Alone.

Bleeding. Breathing. Broken.

She touched the side of her helmet – where once, long ago, a commlink had always buzzed with Agent 49's voice.

Nothing but static now.

The cold settled in her bones – not just the physical chill of the mist, but something worse. The knowledge that she was nothing. Not a soldier. Not a sister. Not even a weapon worth using anymore.

Just debris left over from a war that had already chosen its victors.

She pressed her forehead against the dented metal of the wreck, letting the cool bite anchor her.

No orders.

No backup.

No illusions.

Only survival.

Only war.

And somewhere out there – a single ember refusing to die.

Max Jaeger.

The man she had once dismissed as a rogue, a mistake. The man who burned like something the world couldn't cage.

Agent 714 gritted her teeth against the pain, the rage, the grief hollowing her out.

"I'm not finished," she whispered.

Not yet.

She would find him. She would drag herself across the ashes if she had to. Because whatever Max Jaeger was fighting against— It was the only war left worth bleeding for.

…………………

The mist shifted.

Max paused mid-step, his boots grinding to a halt on the crumbling road.

The others almost ran into him – Dan catching Chloe by the arm, Alyssa muttering a sharp curse, Victor twitching under his skin like his beast-form wanted out.

"Max?" Ferron asked quietly.

Max didn't answer right away.

He just stood there, frowning into the fog that writhed across the broken highway – no thicker than before, no darker.

But different.

The mist carried something now.

Not just corruption. Not just rot.

A crack.

A break in the great suffocating pressure that had been choking Chengdu for weeks.

Max closed his eyes.

And for a moment, in the hollows of the world, he felt it— Not a flare of power. Not clean or strong. But stubborn. Raw. Someone else refusing to break. A spark clawing its way out of oblivion, too furious to die quietly. A thread of something raw and unfinished, clawing its way through oblivion.

Not clean.

Not pure.

But alive.

Barely.

His eyes opened, a grim glint sparking low in the gold.

"Someone just made a choice," he said quietly.

The others stared at him, confused – but instinctively, they trusted him.

They shifted, weapons adjusting, steps tightening.

Because if something was breaking free— if someone was still willing to fight inside this rotting grave of a city— Max Jaeger would find them.

Or die trying.

Max didn't know who they were yet. But someone was still fighting – and that was enough.

He pulled the chain from his belt, the scorched metal hissing faintly in the mist.

"Keep moving," he said.

And without another word, they pressed forward into the hellish green fog, toward the heart of whatever hell waited for them next.

…………………

She reached the battered emergency hatch near the upper service stairwell – half-collapsed, the soulfield generators long dead. A miracle there was still air at all. She braced herself against the doorframe, panting, every muscle in her body shaking with the effort to stay upright.

The blast door shrieked open.

Agent 714 stumbled through it – one last gasp of survival – and collapsed into the sickly twilight beyond SANDGARDEN.

Her hand clutched the shredded field dressing at her side. Her lungs burned. The mist outside clung to her skin like a second, rotten breath.

For a moment, she just knelt there.

Alive.

Alone.

Bleeding into a world that no longer cared.

Somewhere behind her – in the death throes of a facility built on lies – metal boots crunched through the rubble.

Instinct made her turn once. Just once.

Through the swirling mist, she saw them: General Wang, no longer pretending at humanity.

And beside him— Agent 49.

Her brother— no. Not her brother.

Her ghost.

Standing motionless.

Not with hate.

Not with sorrow.

Just indifference.

Like she'd been dead the moment she chose defiance over obedience.

Their eyes locked across the ruin.

And Agent 714 realized the truth: He hadn't hesitated. He hadn't doubted. He had erased her before she even ran.

Agent 49 turned away first.

Without a word. Without a single backward glance.

The last anchor inside her – the last naive belief that orders meant anything – snapped.

Agent 714 turned too. And vanished into the mist.

No rescue. No redemption.

Only war.

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