"We audited the margins, Richard," Olga said coldly, stepping away from the terminal. "The world doesn't need your stability."
Suddenly, a gunshot echoed through the dome.
Natalia gasped, her eyes going wide. She looked down at her chest. A blossoming stain of red soaked through her white combat suit. She collapsed to her knees, coughing blood.
"Natalia!" Olga screamed, dropping to the floor to catch her sister.
Standing thirty feet away, holding a smoking sniper rifle he had looted from a dead mercenary, was Victor Kaelen.
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"I couldn't let you purge my trillion dollars, Olga," Victor said, his eyes devoid of any humanity. "With the clone dead, the dual authorization fails. The purge will abort."
👉 Olga looked up at Victor, her dark eyes filling with a rage so absolute, so terrifyingly cold, that the Architect instinctively took a step backward in fear.
"Marcus! Keep him pinned!" Olga roared, pressing her hands desperately against the gunshot wound in Natalia's chest. Blood spilled through her fingers, warm and terrifyingly real.
Cross didn't hesitate. He unleashed a full magazine from his assault rifle, forcing Victor to dive behind the command console.
Natalia looked up at Olga, her breath rattling. "Olga... the purge... it’s aborting..."
Olga looked at the terminal. Victor was right. The system required a continuous biometric handshake for sixty seconds to complete the catastrophic purge. With Natalia’s vital signs plummeting, the scanner was losing her biological signature.
ERROR. BIOMETRIC SIGNAL LOST. PURGE HALTED.
"I can hold it," Natalia whispered, reaching a trembling, blood-soaked hand toward the glass scanner.
"No, you’ll bleed out!" Olga cried, applying pressure.
"I am a weapon, Olga," Natalia smiled weakly, a genuine, heartbreaking expression of humanity. "Let me do what I was built for. Let me protect my sister."
Natalia forced her hand onto the scanner. The red screens flickered back to life. The countdown resumed. 45 seconds.
Victor realized his sniper shot had failed to instantly kill the clone. "No!" he screamed, abandoning his cover and sprinting toward the terminal, drawing a sidearm to finish the job.
Olga didn't wait for Cross. She grabbed the heavy combat blade Natalia had dropped and stood up, intercepting Victor directly in his path.
Victor fired twice. Olga twisted, feeling the bullets graze the ceramic plating of her hidden tactical harness. She closed the distance with terrifying speed, driving the hilt of the heavy blade directly into Victor’s face.
The Architect’s nose shattered with a sickening crunch. He dropped the gun, stumbling backward.
"You stole my grandfather's money! You destroyed my mother!" Olga screamed, a decade of repressed fury finally unleashing. She unleashed a flurry of devastating, ballet-trained strikes, systematically dismantling the old billionaire. She kicked out his knee, sending him crashing to the polished stone floor.
Victor Kaelen, the man who had terrorized the global economy for thirty years, looked up at Olga in absolute, pathetic defeat.
"Please," Victor begged, blood pouring from his mouth. "I can give you the accounts... I can give you everything..."
"Your ledger is closed, Victor," Olga said coldly.
Behind them, Richard Vance had managed to drag himself toward the emergency blast doors, desperate to escape the impending meltdown of his empire.
"The core is critical!" Cross yelled, rushing over to help Olga lift Natalia. "We have to go, now!"
Olga and Cross hauled Natalia up, supporting her weight between them. They sprinted toward the secondary maintenance tunnel, leaving Victor bleeding on the floor.
The massive blue quantum servers began to violently spark and hiss, the liquid cooling pipes rupturing under the immense thermal pressure.
"Richard locked the blast doors!" Victor screamed from the floor, realizing he was trapped in the dome.
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Olga, Cross, and Natalia dove into the heavy titanium maintenance airlock, slamming the heavy door shut behind them just as the timer hit zero.
👉 The Apex Engine detonated—a silent, localized implosion of raw quantum energy that instantly vaporized the servers, the dome, and the Architect of the shadows.
The shockwave of the quantum implosion hit the heavy titanium airlock door with the force of a freight train. Olga, Cross, and Natalia were thrown violently against the frozen rock walls of the maintenance tunnel.
Absolute silence followed. The low, omnipresent hum of the Apex Engine was gone. Vanguard Horizon’s trillion-dollar empire was reduced to radioactive ash.
Olga groaned, pulling herself up from the icy floor. She immediately scrambled over to Natalia. The clone was deathly pale, her breathing shallow and ragged.
"We need a medic, now," Olga demanded, looking at Cross.
Cross was already pulling a specialized trauma kit from his tactical vest. "I have coagulant foam and bandages, but she needs a surgical unit. My extraction chopper is waiting at the glacial ridge, but it’s a two-mile hike through the ice tunnels."
"I can walk," Natalia grunted, stubbornly trying to push herself up. She immediately collapsed, crying out in pain.
"You aren't walking anywhere, sister," Olga said fiercely. "Marcus, help me carry her."
They fashioned a makeshift stretcher out of Cross’s heavy tactical jacket and two steel pipes ripped from the tunnel wall. Working together, they carried the bleeding clone through the dark, freezing labyrinth of the Svalbard permafrost.