"I... I didn't want to hurt them," Natalia whispered, her hands trembling. The biological programming was gone, leaving behind the crushing weight of a human conscience.
"They would have killed us," Olga said, stepping forward and placing a reassuring hand on her sister’s shoulder. "You are not Richard’s weapon anymore, Natalia. You are your own person. And right now, you are my sister."
Natalia looked up, her dark eyes locking onto Olga’s. A silent, unbreakable bond forged in the crucible of their shared trauma locked into place.
"How touching," Victor sneered, stepping over a groaning mercenary. "But we are on a clock. Did you overload the transformers?"
"Better," Olga said, pointing to the sparking terminal. "I rerouted the quantum core’s cooling system power into the secondary server banks. The Apex Engine is about to overheat. Richard has exactly ten minutes before the system initiates an automated, irreversible purge to save the hardware."
A deafening siren began to wail throughout the facility.
"He’ll have to manually override the purge from the command center," Natalia realized, her strategic mind kicking in. "Which means he has to leave the protected core and expose himself."
"Exactly," Olga smiled. "We aren't going to hunt Richard. We are going to make him come to us."
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They moved up the central stairwell, bypassing the locked elevators. They reached the command center—a glass-walled room overlooking the towering, glowing blue monolith of the Apex Engine. The room was empty. Richard had already descended to the core.
👉 But as Olga stepped into the command center to lock the blast doors, the massive screens on the wall flickered to life, displaying a horrifying live feed that made Olga’s blood run cold.
The massive screens in the command center didn't show Richard Vance. They showed a terrifying, shifting digital map of the globe, overlaid with thousands of red financial vectors.
Olga stared at the data, her forensic mind rapidly decoding the raw numbers scrolling across the screens. She had assumed Richard Vance was simply trying to hijack the global banking grid to control world wealth, just like Victor and Elias had tried. She had fundamentally underestimated her uncle's ambition.
"He isn't stealing money," Olga whispered in absolute horror. "Look at the routing nodes. He's shorting global agricultural conglomerates while simultaneously disrupting the supply chains for synthetic fertilizers in Eastern Europe and South America."
Victor stepped up to the glass, his pale eyes narrowing as he read the data. "He's weaponizing the Genesis Protocol to manufacture a global famine. If Vanguard controls the only untainted agricultural supply chains, he doesn't just control the banks. He controls governments. He controls who eats and who starves."
"He's writing a ledger in blood," Natalia said softly, her fists clenching.
Suddenly, Richard Vance’s voice echoed over the command center’s intercom.
"It's about leverage, Olga," Richard stated, his voice completely calm despite the blaring overheating sirens. "Money is an illusion. Food is absolute reality. By midnight, Vanguard Horizon will hold the biometric and agricultural keys to human survival. And you cannot stop me, because if you destroy the Apex Engine now, the corrupted algorithms will permanently crash the supply chains anyway."
Olga looked down through the glass floor. Richard was standing directly at the base of the Apex Engine, typing rapidly on the manual override terminal. He was clad in a heavy, insulated tactical suit, heavily guarded by his remaining elite forces.
"He's trapped us in a logical paradox," Victor analyzed, rubbing his jaw. "If we stop him, billions starve. If we let him win, he becomes a god."
"There is no such thing as a perfect paradox," Olga said, her eyes darkening with ruthless conviction. "Every ledger has a balancing entry. If Richard manipulated the code to crash the supply chains, then there is a backup sector holding the original, uncorrupted global parameters."
"The Svalbard Seed Vault," Natalia realized, pointing to a massive, physical steel door on the far side of the dome. "Richard integrated his server farm adjacent to the international seed repository. He used their isolated, analog sub-servers to store his backup data. It’s completely air-gapped from the Apex Engine."
"If we can physically extract those drives and upload them to Interpol, we can reverse the famine algorithm," Olga deduced.
"I’ll secure the drives," Natalia volunteered, grabbing her combat blade. "You two stop Richard from broadcasting the payload."
"No," Olga shook her head. "We stay together."
Before Natalia could argue, a massive, concussive explosion rocked the entire facility. The reinforced titanium doors of the command center violently buckled inward.
Someone was breaching the facility from the outside.
A hail of high-caliber armor-piercing rounds tore through the blast doors, shattering the hinges. A squad of heavily armed, tactical operatives clad in snow-camouflage stormed into the room.
Leading the charge was Commander Marcus Cross.
"You really need to stop leaving me out of the fun, Miss Vance," Cross shouted over the gunfire, lowering his smoking assault rifle.
"Marcus!" Olga breathed a rare sigh of relief. "How did you find the exhaust vents?"
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"I didn't," Cross smirked. "I brought a specialized bunker-buster and blew a hole straight through the ice. Interpol doesn't play by the rules anymore."
👉 "How touching," Victor Kaelen sneered, stepping backward toward the command center’s primary control console. "But I'm afraid this reunion is officially over."