[T-minus 4 Hours Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion]

The sky above the Scottish Highlands glowed with simulated fire.

Dr. Grimm stood alone in the Fortress's command centre, a matte black chamber wrapped in cable-thick glass and reinforced soulsteel. The tactical projection shimmered in front of him – Chengdu rendered in spectral relief. Not topography. Not military targets. A full soulfield overlay. Heat, resonance, psychic activity.

He watched it die in real time.

First, the outer edges collapsed – one district at a time blinking red, then grey, then black. Then the pulse went quiet. The centre was a void. No readings. No motion.

Just absence.

He didn't blink.

"Captain Hawthorne," he said without turning.

A window opened beside him – a flickering live feed from the camp outside Chengdu. Dust blurred the image, streaked with digital interference, but Hawthorne's voice cut through.

"Sir. I'm here."

Behind Hawthorne, the Institute's forward field camp looked like a last stand. Hesco barriers, sandbags, mobile soulfield jammers. A half-dozen surviving Institute soldiers patrolled with plasma rifles and arc mines. Most tents had been packed. One still smouldered, the fabric torn clean through by something with claws.

"The situation is unstable," Hawthorne said. "We've held the perimeter with a 40% casualty rate. Demonic assaults slowed after sundown, but that could be bait. We've lost all long-range drone visibility. Every probe that enters the city gets shredded."

"And the target?" Grimm asked.

Hawthorne hesitated. "No sign of Jaeger or the others. Not since they entered the sixth Circle. I assumed they were dead."

Grimm didn't answer. His eyes tracked the soulfield display. One vertical beam of red-blue fire now pierced the centre of the map – cutting through atmosphere and beyond. It wasn't labeled. The satellite couldn't understand it.

"Sir, with respect," Hawthorne said. "If we can't locate the team, and we can't breach the city, I request withdrawal. We're down to two anti-demon rounds per soldier. I won't send them in blind."

Before Grimm could respond, another voice cut in.

"Negative," said Dr. Adisa, joining the call. Her voice was sharp, clinical, the edges brittle with urgency. "We just got a signal spike."

She appeared in another window beside Grimm – her lab behind her glowing with soulfield glyphs and spooling data strings.

"Alpha and Omega's trackers just came online," she continued. "Weak. Partial. But alive. Whatever was jamming them broke for three-point-seven seconds. They're moving again."

Grimm leaned forward. His voice dropped by half an octave.

"From where?"

"East quadrant of Chengdu," Adisa replied. "Somewhere near the Circle of Joy. Approximately four kilometres from the central event."

Grimm turned back to Hawthorne.

"They made it out," he said. "Or something wearing their skin did."

Hawthorne exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing.

"Do I mobilize?"

"Prepare the VTOL for tactical medevac and support," Grimm said. "Arm your soulboud rounds. If they're still human, we extract. If not…"

"Understood."

The screen flickered once – static blooming like frost across the video. The red-blue beam in the tactical display pulsed in time with the glitch.

Dr. Adisa frowned. "That's the third interference anomaly this hour. Something is warping satellite transmission from the upper atmosphere. We're not just being blocked. The data is being rewritten."

Grimm's eyes darkened.

"This isn't just demon ritual," he said. "Something older is watching."

The feed went quiet.

Outside Chengdu, the air shifted – dead still beneath a sky stitched open by fire.

And inside the Fortress, Grimm whispered to no one, "We're out of time."

…………………

[T-minus 2.5 Hours Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion]

The Chengdu highway was gone.

Agent 714 drove over bones.

Not literal. Not yet. But the cracked concrete beneath her armoured vehicle was lined with pale ruts and scorched asphalt that felt like old marrow. The signs had long since rusted. The green paint peeled. Exit 21 to Kuanzhai Alley no longer pointed anywhere real.

Only rot and red light waited ahead.

The tactical vehicle shuddered over a collapsed overpass. It was a repurposed PLA personnel carrier – scorched, half-armoured in welded scrap and salvaged plating. She'd bolted steel slabs over the windshield herself. The targeting HUD was cracked. The radio hissed with static.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't safe. But it would get her there. And if it didn't? Then she'd walk.

Her breath fogged the interior glass, even though the AC was dead. She didn't bother wiping it away.

The city skyline – what remained of it – smouldered like a sacrificial altar. Towers once white and silver were now blackened, melted into shapes that defied gravity. She saw loops of architecture that bent back into themselves. She saw symbols etched in light floating mid-air. She saw people walking the wrong direction – away from escape. Toward it.

Toward her target.

She tapped the console twice. The screen flickered.

TARGET: WANG, QI DESIGNATION: GENERAL AFFILIATION: PLA / DEMON CLASSIFICATION UNKNOWN OBJECTIVE: TERMINATE

Agent 714's face remained unreadable. But her grip tightened on the wheel. She had memorized every contour of General Wang's face. She had seen the orders he gave. The cities he sacrificed. The child she couldn't save.

She checked the crates in the back.

One was sealed in black carbon polymer, its surface stamped with a cold military stencil:

TYPE 79 STRATEGIC WARHEAD – UNAUTHORISED ACCESS = DEATH

She hadn't opened it. She didn't need to. It was insurance – a fail-deadly measure in case the strike didn't land or the city refused to burn.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

But the main plan sat on her dashboard.

A beacon module – laser-guided, frequency-hardened, programmed to trigger a high-orbit missile the moment she locked the coordinates and armed it. The beacon would punch a corridor through the jamming, just long enough to call hell down on top of Chengdu.

Remote detonation. Zero contact.

No survivors. This wasn't an extraction. This was an ending.

She brushed her fingers across the casing. [READY FOR TARGET LOCK]

"Missiles fly fast," she muttered. "But not faster than I do."

Then she dropped the vehicle into gear, and roared into the dead city.

She accelerated through a cratered tunnel. Demonic glyphs writhed on the walls – alive, squirming under paint but none of them reached for her. They recoiled.

She was marked.

She wasn't sure what scared them more – the weapon in her backseat or the will in her chest.

She drove through the Circle of Hunger without stopping. The Circle of Mercy had been reduced to pulp and silence. The Circle of Peace? Just charred grass and cracked sky.

She passed the ruins of the Circle of Joy.

The ground glowed where Max had recently walked.

She slowed just once. To feel the silence. To confirm what the stolen Institute scanners had only hinted at: he was alive. He had passed through here. Burned through it.

A single whisper crossed her mind.

Not long now.

She kept driving.

Chengdu rose around her like a cancer.

She didn't flinch.

Not at the people lining the streets, eyes missing, mouths stitched open by prayer. Not at the women chanting psalms to a faceless god. Not at the children curled under altars carved from bone.

She saw suffering. She saw obedience. She saw rot dressed as salvation.

She didn't slow.

In the distance, a spire of fire carved the clouds open.

And in its wake, General Wang waited.

Her target.

Her death wish.

Her mission.

Agent 714 didn't pray. She didn't weep. She didn't speak.

She adjusted the detonator on her wrist, loaded the compact soul-bomb into the primary slot, and whispered only once – to herself, to history, to whatever thing might watch from the sky.

"Time to clean the wound."

She pressed forward.

Toward Chengdu's poisoned heart.

…………………

[T-minus 2 Hours Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion]

The jet's rotors hummed low, ready to climb above the smog. Agent 49 stood alone on the tarmac, the morning air thick with ash and static. Chengdu was a burning silhouette on the horizon – runes still pulsing faintly in the sky. The red-blue vertical beam wasn't visible from this distance, but he knew it was there. He could feel it. Like gravity pulling upward.

Agent 49 lit a cigarette. A leftover of a recent infiltration operation. Not habit. Not stress. Just delay. One more minute before he crossed the point of no return.

He replayed Wang's last words.

"Prepare Protocol Nine. No one else is to know."

He had obeyed. He always did.

Protocol Nine was already in motion – logistics channels in Hong Kong were compromised. Military assets diverted. Biological data moved from frozen vaults into live stasis transport. Civilian evacuation routes blocked. The south would be secured in time.

A new China. A different world. And he would be part of the first wave.

He took a drag. Exhaled.

Did he understand the ritual?

No.

Did it matter?

No.

General Wang was winning. And whatever form the world took after this – human, demon, post-faith, post-death – Agent 49 would still have his rank, his weapon, and his place.

The jet door hissed open behind him.

He didn't turn.

Instead, he looked back – once – toward Chengdu. Toward the city that had gone silent. That had become something else. He thought of the girl in the pod. Of Jaeger. Of the screaming he hadn't heard, and wouldn't need to.

His fingers hovered over the detonator at his belt. Not a missile trigger. Something older.

The device hummed once. Recognition confirmed.

A faint smile ghosted across his lips. Not happy. Not cruel.

Just done.

He crushed the cigarette under his boot and stepped into the jet.

"Orders are orders," he muttered.

The jet lifted.

Behind him, Chengdu breathed.

…………………

[T-minus 1 Hour Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion]

The outer districts of Chengdu were no longer streets. They were a sermon.

Agent 714 drove through the remains of neighbourhoods she had once mapped in her youth, now barely recognizable. Cracked pavement had been overtaken by moss-flesh and veined coral rot, pulsing faintly with red light. Streetlights bent toward the ground like mourners. Apartment buildings drooped with melted balconies and bone growths. Bodies – devout, withered, ecstatic – lay prostrate along the sidewalks, their mouths sewn open, their eyes replaced with chain-marked sigils burned into the sockets.

The audio filters on her dash picked up ambient frequencies.

Chanting.

Voices rising. Human tones stitched into something larger. Male, female, child, elder—intoning overlapping syllables in impossible rhythm, as if guided by one unseen hand. The vehicle's sensor suite flagged it as vocal interference. Agent 714 knew better.

It was a hymn.

A song of submission.

She cut the engine.

The vehicle coasted for a moment, then stopped on command – on instinct. She stepped out into the silence. Her boots struck the ruined street with a hiss, dust curling around her ankles like smoke from an old battlefield.

In the distance, she saw it.

The crater.

The Ninth Circle.

It bled fire into the sky.

Agent 714 didn't hesitate. She slung her anti-materiel rifle across her shoulder – a monstrous, reinforced coil-barrel weapon designed to punch through tanks, aircraft, and maybe even gods. She climbed the half-collapsed staircase of a nearby structure – a former apartment block – until she reached the rooftop.

From here, the view was clean. A hundred metres away, at the crater's edge, rose the broken shell of Chengdu's heart. Beyond it, something vast and vertical split the clouds – red-blue fire stretching skyward like a lance aimed at Heaven.

She dropped to prone, steadied the rifle, and adjusted her scope.

No tremble. No doubt.

She reached into her vest. Pulled out a hardened tag and clipped it to her collar. A silver badge, etched in black: SGU-714. No name. Just legacy.

Then she looked down, one last time, at the armoured vehicle parked below – nose pointed straight toward the sanctum.

It was rigged. The beacon was armed.

She'd fire her shots. Then drive the warhead in manually if she had to. Get close. Make sure Wang was dead. No ghosts. No second chances.

She whispered, "No mistakes."

The wind stirred her hair.

Her mind drifted – once, only once.

Shadow. Falcon. Her brother and sister. Active and silent. Fighting somewhere against impossible odds.

Lucky. Anchor. Her old squad. Her family. Lost in the first three months of the collapse. She'd seen their names struck from the record. Their missions erased. Their lives rewritten as mistakes.

She missed them.

Jian – no. 49.

She let the number hang in her mind, then pushed it away. Not Jian anymore. Just a designation. Another piece moved on the board by General Wang.

She already missed him the most.

Agent 714 exhaled once.

Eyes forward.

Scope aligned.

Finger on the trigger.

Behind her, the city whispered in prayer.

Before her, the world begged to burn.

…………………

[T-minus 45 Minutes Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion]

The rooftop creaked beneath her boots, scorched tiles fractured by old shelling. Agent 714 lay prone behind a collapsed billboard frame, her rifle braced against a sandbag torn from the tactical vehicle below. She hadn't moved in twenty minutes. Not because she was waiting. Because she was certain. Every breath was measured. Every nerve aligned. Her world had narrowed to crosshairs, countdowns, and the last clean shot of her life.

The beacon's targeting system pulsed red across her cracked dashboard. HUD flicker. Guidance lock confirmed. Coordinates acquired. Primary target: Chengdu, Ninth Circle. Kill vector: orbital.

Her fingers moved automatically. Glove seals tightened. Her holster clicked as she slid the trigger key into her palm rig. Her wrist display blinked: FIRING PROTOCOL: STANDBY SECONDARY DETONATOR: ARMED

Outside, the world warped.

Verrine's siphon-beam pierced the clouds now. It wasn't a flare. It wasn't a column of fire. It was a scar – burned into the fabric of the atmosphere, straight through the layers of sky and god.

Through the precision scope lens, the Ninth Circle's crater roared in silence. Dust lifted in vertical spirals, pulled toward the beam that carved the sky apart. Her thermal overlay pulsed faintly – enough to outline the target.

There. In the centre of the sanctum. Towering. Still.

A man in PLA uniform.

But his heat signature was wrong – colder than human, etched in symmetrical fire lines, as if something inside him ticked like a clock wound too tight.

GENERAL WANG – THREAT PRIORITY ONE

She tagged him with a retinal blink. The rifle confirmed with a soft vibration.

Then – movement.

Lower quadrant. Far side of the crater. Six figures. One burning blue.

She zoomed. Magnified.

Max.

Alive.

Or something close.

He moved like a revenant. His team behind him: wounded, armed, impossibly standing. She remembered the Institute footage – the Mammon breach, the screaming fire, the camera glitching from the pressure alone. Max had brought Hell with him then.

Now he carried it under his skin.

Agent 714 didn't flinch. Didn't breathe.

She adjusted the laser uplink dial. Locked it on the sanctum's centre. The warhead aboard the orbital carrier would only need one clear signal.

Her thumb brushed the trigger.

Max had made it this far. She respected that.

But this was her war.

And her kill.

But if anyone could reach the girl in time, it was him.

But she didn't adjust the targeting.

Wang was still standing. The siphon still rising. The city still praying.

She didn't trust hope.

Her thoughts were clean. Mechanical. Kill the demon. Kill the myth. Clean the wound.

A flicker of pain crossed her chest – memory, not emotion. Lucky's voice, long gone. Anchor's fist knocking against her shoulder. 49's hand on her wrist before their last mission. Jian, not a number, before Wang carved that out of them.

None of them would survive this.

She didn't plan to either.

Max could change the outcome. But she would end it.

The crater loomed. She eased the truck forward, just short of the kill zone. Parked behind the shell of a collapsed pharmacy. Stepped out. Rifle in hand. Beacon active.

Max and his team entered the shadow of the Ninth Circle.

She adjusted the trigger on her belt. One warhead in orbit. One failsafe in the backseat.

Her crosshairs rose toward the sanctum's heart. The sky bled.

Her final thought:

You don't nuke a city to kill a demon. You do it to make sure no one prays to them again.

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