But...
As he grinned triumphantly and tried to throw his weight into a roll, he didn't budge an inch.
Joker's foot remained clamped onto him like a vice.
The sudden jerk against the pressure crushed his chest, forcing a mouthful of bloody saliva to spew from his lips.
Pale and wheezing, he stared wide-eyed at the pod.
One second passed.
Two seconds passed.
Three seconds passed...
The apocalyptic bloodbath he was waiting for never happened.
The massive stretch of The Logistics Spine was utterly dead silent.
Inside the pod, there was only stillness. No thrashing, no feral roars.
Even the erratic vitals that had been spiking off the charts mere seconds ago had bizarrely flatlined into perfect stability the moment the clock hit zero.
The only movement in the room was the endless cascade of complex code crawling down the terminal.
The commander's victorious grin calcified.
The vicious triumph in his eyes was slowly swallowed by complete bewilderment.
Sprawled pathetically on the floor, he didn't even bother wiping the blood dribbling down his chin.
He just stared at the pod, utterly paralyzed.
What was going on? Why wasn't anything happening?
The purge protocol had executed flawlessly! The Primal Catalyst should have detonated in its bloodstream the second the timer died!
Why... why was the pod so quiet?
Why hadn't Specimen Fourteen gone berserk?!
"N-no way..."
His throat tightened, the words tumbling out as a mindless whisper.
Ignoring the agonizing pressure of Julian's shoe, he craned his neck violently to stare at the primary monitor.
A new prompt flashed across the screen.
[Omega Purge Protocol failed.]
[Target control privileges have been intercepted by an external source.]
The commander froze completely, as if he had been struck by lightning, his eyes nearly bulging out of his skull.
The last drops of color drained from his face.
"...What?"
He stared at the words as if they were written in an alien language.
He read them again. And again.
The purge failed?
The privileges were intercepted?!
How was that even possible?!
That was a failsafe engineered over decades, tailor-made to terminate their most elite assets.
It was an ultimate decree issued directly by The Raven himself.
How could The Panacea have possibly intercepted it?
She shouldn't have had the capability to do this!
And the most terrifying part was...
She hadn't just blocked the kill command. She had weaponized their own remote signal against them, hijacking master control over Specimen Fourteen.
And reverse-engineered the connection to track The Raven's exact coordinates.
The commander's pupils violently contracted. lay there.
hyperventilating, his breaths et
out
coming
in ragged, ugly wheezes.
It was only at this exact moment that the horrific truth finally dawned on him.
From the very beginning, she wasn't relying on luck to help the asset survive the purge.
She wasn't trying to manually sever the connection.
She had orchestrated this entire sequence from the very start!
She sabotaged the life-support systems on purpose. She leaked the rumors about the high-value cargo on purpose. She manipulated the buyers the hunters, and the ship security into blocking every single
extraction route on purpose.
It was all her...
She had systematically backed them into a corner, forcing them to trigger the
Omega Purge Protocol!
She didn't just want Specimen Fourteen!
She used the asset as bait, forcing them to open the master remote link.
So she could ride that exact signal back into the heart of their central mainframe!
This woman's true target.
From the very first second, it was—
Their entire organization!