The throne room on Sublevel 3 was dead silent.
Silas stared at the main monitor, at the crumpled form of his prized speedster lying motionless on the polished floor. The biometric feed for 'Quicksilver' was a flat line. The arrogant smile was gone from Silas's face, replaced by a rigid, bloodless mask.
"Impossible," he whispered, the word barely audible.
Quicksilver wasn't just fast. His temporal-burst augmentation, a direct gift from the Oracle, made him untouchable. He didn't just move through space; he clipped through the edges of time. In every simulation, against every conceivable opponent, his victory was a 100% certainty. The system had guaranteed it.
And this... boy... had plucked him out of the air like a common housefly.
The remaining three Echoes, who had been watching from the shadows of the throne room, stirred. One, a mountain of a man whose skin shimmered with a diamond-like sheen, took a half-step forward. This was 'Juggernaut'.
"He nullified the augmentation," Juggernaut's voice was a low growl, like grinding stone. "He didn't overpower it. He unmade it."
"He is an anti-system," a woman's voice hissed from another corner. She was slender, wrapped in shadows that seemed to cling to her form like a second skin. This was 'Nyx,' the assassin. "He does not play by the rules because he operates on a level where our rules do not exist."
"Then we will drag him down to ours," Silas snarled, his composure finally cracking. He slammed his fist on his console. "All of you, engage. Now. No more games, no more one-on-one duels. Corner him in the maintenance tunnels. His advantage is speed and perception; take that away. Juggernaut, you are the wall. Nyx, you are the blade in the dark. Geist," he addressed the final, unseen Echo, "you are the chaos. Break him."
The three remaining Echoes dissolved into the shadows, their orders received. Silas sank back into his throne, his knuckles white. The hunt had become an extermination. The ladder Ravi was climbing was about to collapse on top of him.
The maintenance tunnels were a stark contrast to the sterile corridors above. They were a web of narrow, dimly lit passageways filled with thick pipes, humming electrical conduits, and the constant, rhythmic dripping of water. The air was heavy with the smell of ozone and rust.
Ravi moved through the labyrinth with an unwavering sense of direction.
"Okay, I'm back," Ayla's voice crackled in his head, sounding strained. "I had to re-route my signal through the water reclamation system's network. It's… messy down there, Ravi. The schematics are a century old. A lot of these tunnels are unmapped. It's the perfect place for an ambush."
"They're already here," Ravi stated, stopping at a t-junction. The air had changed again. It was thick with a new kind of pressure. One direction was filled with a sense of immovable, brute force. The other pulsed with a quiet, predatory malice.
"I'm seeing massive energy signatures converging on your position! Three of them! They're trying to box you in!"
Ravi looked to his left, down the corridor humming with raw power. "The wall."
He looked to his right, into the deeper darkness. "The blade."
He then looked up, at the ceiling crisscrossed with pipes and shadows. "And the chaos."
From the left, heavy, booming footsteps began to echo, growing closer. With each step, the floor trembled, and dust rained down from the ceiling. A moment later, Juggernaut appeared, filling the entire width of the narrow tunnel. He was over seven feet tall, a behemoth of muscle and chrome. His skin had taken on a crystalline, translucent quality, glowing faintly from within.
"End of the line, anomaly," Juggernaut growled, cracking his massive knuckles. The sound was like boulders grinding together. "You broke my brother, Quicksilver. I'm going to turn you into a fine red paste."
Simultaneously, the shadows to Ravi's right deepened unnaturally. They coalesced, rising from the floor like black ink in water, forming the slender, deadly shape of Nyx. She held two short blades that seemed to be forged from solid darkness.
"Don't be so crude, Juggernaut," she purred, her voice a venomous whisper. "A fine paste is messy. I prefer a single, clean cut to the heart."
Ravi stood between them, a calm island in a sea of imminent death. He showed no fear, no surprise. Only a quiet, analytical focus.
"The wall blocks the path," he said, assessing the situation aloud. "The blade waits for an opening." He glanced up again. "And the third one… hides."
A laugh, distorted and digital, echoed through the tunnel, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was the third Echo, Geist.
"Hiding? No," the voice buzzed. "Just changing the game board."
As he spoke, the lights in the tunnel flickered violently and then died, plunging the corridor into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The humming of the conduits ceased. The only light was the faint, internal glow from Juggernaut's crystalline skin.
"Ravi! He's a technopath! He's seized control of the local grid! I've lost all sensor feeds! I'm blind!" Ayla yelled in his mind, her voice filled with panic.
In the suffocating darkness, Ravi could hear Nyx's soft, predatory footsteps circling him. He could feel the immense, static pressure of Juggernaut holding his ground. And he could sense Geist, a ghost in the machine, flitting through the pipes and wires around them.
"You took away our speedster's advantage," Geist's voice buzzed, now seeming to come from the pipe right next to Ravi's ear. "So we took away yours. You can't fight what you can't see, perceive, or predict."
Juggernaut let out a low laugh. "Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Welcome to our world, Zero."
He charged. It was not a sprint, but the inexorable advance of an avalanche. His footsteps were thunderous, his mass shaking the very foundations of the tunnel.
Nyx lunged from the opposite direction at the same moment, her shadow-blades aimed at Ravi's back, silent as death itself.
It was a perfect pincer attack, executed in total darkness, designed to crush and kill any target caught between them.
But they had made a fatal miscalculation. They assumed Ravi needed light to see.
Ravi didn't move. He didn't dodge. He simply closed his eyes and let his perception expand. He didn't see with light; he perceived the world as a system of energy. He saw the faint bio-signatures of the two assassins. He saw the raging torrent of power that was Juggernaut. He saw the flickering, nervous spark of Geist, hopping from conduit to conduit.
And he saw the flaw in their attack.
He reached down, his fingers touching one of the large, high-voltage power conduits running along the floor. The same conduits Geist was using as his playground.
"You think this is your world," Ravi's voice cut through the darkness, calm and resonant. "But you only borrow the power." He paused, his fingers gripping the thick, insulated cable.
"I own it."
He pushed a sliver of his own energy into the conduit. It wasn't an overload. It was a command. A single, undeniable instruction sent through the entire sublevel's power grid.
[ RE-ROUTE: ALL POWER. TARGET: THIS LOCATION. EXECUTE: NOW. ]
For a nanosecond, there was absolute silence.
Then, every light, every system, every reserve battery in the entire three-sublevel facility surged to life, redirecting their full, unrestrained power to the single spot where Ravi stood.
The tunnel didn't just light up. It ignited.
The pipes and conduits glowed cherry-red, then white-hot. The air itself crackled and turned to plasma. It was as if a small sun had been born in the narrow passageway.
Geist, the technopath, screamed—a short, digital shriek of agony as a universe of raw data and power surged through his consciousness, vaporizing his mind instantly. His presence vanished like a blown fuse.
Juggernaut, caught mid-charge, roared as the intense energy surge bypassed his diamond-hard skin, attacking the cybernetics within. His internal systems cooked. His augmentations failed catastrophically. His crystalline skin shattered like glass, and he stumbled to his knees, his massive form smoking.
Nyx, blinded and seared by the sudden, impossible wave of light and heat, recoiled with a cry of pain, the shadows that formed her blades dissipating like mist in the morning sun.
The surge lasted for two seconds and then vanished, plunging the tunnel back into darkness, leaving only the afterimage of a star burned into their eyes and the smell of ozone and cooked electronics.
Ravi stood in the center of it all, completely untouched. The torrent of energy had flowed around him, obeying its true master.
He opened his eyes and looked at the kneeling, broken form of Juggernaut and the staggering, disoriented Nyx.
"The wall is broken," he said, his voice the only sound in the ruined tunnel. "The blade is dull." He took a single step forward.
"The silence is next."