Yue didn't move from the Command Deck for two hours.
She sat in Command Deck's chair after Mei wheeled herself to the Engineering Workshop to begin fabricating the relay components, and she stared at the photograph grid on the main monitor, and she did nothing else.
She didn't eat the sandwich Marie brought her.
She didn't drink the water Alessia left on the console.
She didn't respond when Jae-min called her name from the doorway, or when Ji-yoo leaned against the frame and said something sharp and provocative designed to provoke a reaction, or when Jennifer tried to enter the room and was gently but firmly blocked by Hua, who understood that some kinds of grief needed an audience and some needed absolute privacy and that Yue's grief fell squarely into the second category.
The twelve faces on the screen stared back at her.
She knew their names.
Marco Reyes.
Third-year computer engineering.
Sat in the third row of her Advanced Algorithms class, always early, always prepared, always the first to raise his hand when she asked a question nobody else wanted to touch.
He'd written an optimization algorithm for thermal flow distribution that outperformed the department's reference implementation by fourteen percent — built it from salvaged code libraries and a custom sorting heuristic he'd developed himself.
His record listed his cause of death as
"Acute Rejection Syndrome — Gamma-7 Saturation, Day two of protocol."
He'd lasted two days.
Danica Villanueva.
Fourth-year computer engineering.
President of the Mapua Engineering Society.
She'd come to Yue's office hours every week during her sophomore year — not because she needed help with the material, but because she said Yue's office was the quietest place on campus and she needed quiet to think about her thesis.
Her record said ACTIVE.
Observation Ward.
Stable vitals.
Sedated.
Rene Agustin.
Second-year electrical engineering.
The boy who asked too many questions — not because he was trying to show off, but because he genuinely couldn't stop his brain from generating queries faster than his mouth could voice them.
He'd once stayed forty-five minutes after a lecture to ask Yue about the computational limits of signal processing algorithms at cryogenic temperatures.
She'd given him extra reading.
He'd read it all and come back with more questions.
His record said ACTIVE.
Laboratory Suite A.
Bed fourteen.
IV line connected.
Luminescent fluid infusing.
Paolo — not their Paolo, a different Paolo, Paolo Mangahas — third-year industrial engineering.
He and Rene were friends.
Yue had seen them in the cafeteria together, hunched over laptops, arguing about algorithm complexity with the passionate intensity of young men who had found something in computation that gave their lives shape and meaning.
Paolo Mangahas's record said TERMINATED.
Day forty-three.
Cause of death:
"Cerebral hemorrhage secondary to Gamma-7 saturation response."
The names continued.
Each one a wound.
Each one a student she'd stood in front of in a lecture hall, chalk in hand, equations on the board behind her, talking about computational complexity and algorithmic optimization and the behavior of systems under computational stress.
She'd taught these people.
She'd graded their papers.
She'd written their recommendation letters.
She'd watched them graduate — some of them, the older ones — and she'd felt, for a brief moment in her otherwise utilitarian existence, something that resembled pride.
Now they were photographs on a screen.
Status indicators.
Data points in a pharmaceutical company's experiment log.
"They were my students." Yue thought, hollow.
They were twenty years old and they wanted to be engineers and now they're strapped to metal tables with glowing fluid in their veins and some of them are already dead and didn't know.
I didn't know.
The thought repeated.
Again.
Again.
A loop with no exit, no resolution, no mechanism for processing the information into something that could be filed away and dealt with later.
There was no "later." The information was present, immediate, absolute, and it demanded a response that Yue's existing emotional infrastructure was not designed to provide.
So she sat.
And she stared.
And the marble held.
At fourteen-thirty, Jae-min entered the Command Deck.
He didn't knock.
He didn't announce himself.
He just walked in, pulled a chair from beside the console, and sat down beside her.
Not touching.
Not speaking.
Just present.
The way he'd been present in her life since the day they'd met — a steady, quiet force that didn't push or pull but simply existed, occupying space in a way that made the space around him feel safer, more stable, more capable of bearing weight.
Yue didn't look at him.
Her eyes stayed on the screen.
He didn't ask her how she was.
He didn't offer comfort.
He didn't try to fill the silence with words that would be inadequate to the task of addressing what she was feeling.
He just sat there, and let her feel it, and the silence between them was the kind of silence that only exists between people who have learned that some pain doesn't need an audience but does need a witness.
Twenty minutes passed.
The monitors hummed.
The vibration pulsed.
The Command Deck breathed with the low, steady rhythm of machines doing what machines were designed to do.
Then Yue spoke.
"Marco Reyes wrote an optimization algorithm for thermal flow distribution in his second year," she stated, clinical.
The voice she used when she was lecturing — precise, measured, each word placed with the same care she applied to equations on a whiteboard.
"He used salvaged code libraries from an open-source repository and a custom sorting heuristic he'd developed from scratch. It wasn't elegant. The memory management was sloppy and the recursion depth exceeded safe parameters on large datasets. But it worked. It outperformed the department's reference implementation by fourteen percent, and when I pressed him on how he'd done it, he explained he'd spent three weeks reading computational theory papers and then just figured out the rest himself," Yue continued, precise.
She paused.
Her marble eyes moved across the photograph grid.
"Danica Villanueva organized a study group for first-year engineering students during her junior year," Yue continued, hollow. "She called it the 'Algo Squad.' Twenty-three students. She tutored them every Saturday morning in the library, unpaid, because she explained the first-year dropout rate was too high and someone needed to do something about it. Her group's average GPA was three point two — compared to the department average of two point four. She never once mentioned it in her resume."
Another pause.
Her finger touched Rene Agustin's photograph.
The boy who asked too many questions.
"Rene spent an entire semester trying to develop a real-time signal processing algorithm that could operate at cryogenic temperatures. Minus seventy," Yue recalled, fragile.
The faintest crack ran through the marble of her composure. "I told him it was theoretically impossible. He declared that was his favorite kind of problem."
She stopped.
Her hand dropped to her lap.
The marble resealed.
The flatness returned.
"Seven of the twelve I recognized are still in the laboratories. Two are in the Observation Ward. Three are dead," Yue reported, hollow.
She turned to look at Jae-min, her marble eyes holding his with the same absolute, unwavering steadiness she brought to everything.
"The ones in the laboratories — the ones connected to IV lines with that luminescent fluid — they're being subjected to the saturation protocol. The reports say the protocol kills approximately sixty percent of subjects within the first four days. Rene has been in the protocol for six days. Danica has been in the Observation Ward for three. The others..." She trailed off.
"I don't know how much time they have," Yue admitted, quiet.
Jae-min absorbed the information.
His face gave nothing away.
But behind his eyes, the calculation was running — the same calculation that had been running since Mei had first detected the signal, updated now with the weight of twelve specific names and twelve specific faces and the knowledge that somewhere in a frozen building four kilometers away, a boy who asked too many questions was strapped to a metal table with glowing fluid in his veins and a clock was ticking.
"We're going," Jae-min confirmed, absolute.
"How long?" Yue pressed, taut.
"Tomorrow. Dawn," Jae-min decided, firm.
He met her eyes.
"I need the night to plan. Uncle needs to assess the tactical situation. Alessia needs to prepare medical support. Aiko needs to finish the relay antenna so Mei can maintain real-time surveillance during the approach. And you—"
"I'm going," Yue interrupted, absolute.
Her voice was not louder.
Not harder.
Just the voice of someone who had already made a decision and was not interested in discussing alternatives.
"You're not leaving me here while my students are in that building," Yue added, absolute.
"I'm not leaving you here. I'm putting you on the assault team," Jae-min reassured, steady.
The words landed.
Yue's expression didn't change.
But something shifted behind her marble eyes — not surprise, not relief, but the faint, almost imperceptible recalibration of someone who had been prepared for an argument and discovered that no argument was necessary.
"The assault team," she repeated, stunned.
"Primary breaching force. You, Ji-yoo, and Uncle on point. I'll handle the infiltration — C4 placement, structural assessment, extraction route mapping," Jae-min outlined, commanding.
He paused.
"Yue, you're the breaching team's entry specialist. Your Blink lets you appear inside a room before anyone inside knows you're there — you teleport past locked doors, clear the space, and open the entrance before the rest of the team crosses the threshold. Your Spatial Awareness extends one kilometer — mine reaches three, because Saem amplifies my Space powers. Once we're within your range, you'll sense the interior layout, guard positions, anything with mass. Combined with your Blink, you're the perfect breacher. Ji-yoo handles the heavy work with Soulcleaver. Uncle coordinates. You blink through first and make sure the room is clear before anyone else enters," Jae-min continued, precise.
He paused.
"You're the only person in this mansion who can identify the students by sight. I need you in that building," Jae-min added, certain.
"I know," Yue murmured, certain. "That's why I'm going."
She stood.
Her chair scraped against the concrete floor.
She turned to leave, and then stopped, and turned back, and looked at the photograph grid one more time.
Her marble eyes moved across the faces — Marco, Danica, Rene, Paolo Mangahas, and the eight others whose names she hadn't spoken aloud but who lived in her memory with the same weight as the ones she had.
"Forty-seven beds," she stated, hollow.
She left.
Jae-min sat in the empty Command Deck and stared at the photograph grid and felt the weight of numbers that weren't numbers at all.
They were people.
They were students.
They were young, bright, driven people who had wanted to be engineers and who were now lying on metal tables with luminescent fluid in their veins and leather straps across their chests, and the world was minus seventy degrees outside and the countdown was running and Jae-min had twenty-four hours to plan an operation that could save some of them or kill everyone involved or both.
He stood.
Walked to the gymnasium.
Called a meeting.
— • • • —
The gymnasium was full.
Everyone except Marie and Paolo — the two without combat training had been assigned to mansion security during the operation, Paolo's snow and ice manipulation no substitute for the composure and experience required in a firefight, a reality he'd accepted with the white-faced determination of someone who understood that his usefulness in this context was limited to staying alive and keeping Usagi warm.
Marie had accepted her role with quiet dignity, kissing Jae-min on the forehead before the meeting and whispering something in Tagalog that he didn't quite catch but understood to mean "come back."
The rest stood in a loose semicircle around the platform — Jae-min at the front, Ji-yoo to his left, Yue to his right, Rico behind them, Alessia and Hua flanking the group, Jennifer beside Alessia, Mei in her wheelchair near the medical station, Aiko beside her, Elena near the back wall with her black eyes scanning the room's thermal signatures the way she always did — reading the heat of every body, cataloguing stress levels and adrenaline spikes and the particular fever-heat of people preparing for something dangerous.
Jae-min laid out the situation.
Everything.
The signal.
The facility.
The cameras.
The laboratories.
The Observation Ward.
The detention wing.
The guard quarters.
The one hundred and four subjects.
The sixty-three dead.
The thirty-two alive.
The twelve names Yue had recognized.
He laid out the mission.
"Infiltration and assault," he stated, commanding.
His voice was calm.
Clear.
The same voice he used in the gymnasium before a sparring session, before a training exercise, before anything that required people to trust him with their lives.
"Primary objective: extract all living subjects from the facility. Secondary objective: secure evidence of the experiments — patient records, compound inventories, daily reports, camera footage. Tertiary objective: neutralize all hostile personnel and prevent the facility from being used again," he continued, commanding.
"Neutralize," Rico repeated, flat.
He was standing with his arms folded, his dark eyes fixed on Jae-min with the particular intensity of a man who'd heard the word "neutralize" in military briefings a hundred times and knew exactly what it meant.
"Kill the guards," Ji-yoo translated, blunt.
She was leaning against the platform, arms crossed, Soulcleaver's resonance humming faintly beneath her feet — a low vibration that Jae-min could feel through the floor, the weapon's equivalent of a restless sleeper.
"He's saying we kill every guard in the building," Ji-yoo clarified, blunt.
"That's what neutralize means in this context," Jae-min confirmed, hard.
"They're armed. They're professional. They're guarding a facility where people are being experimented on and women are being—" He stopped.
His jaw tightened.
"They're not going to surrender. And even if they did, we don't have the resources to hold prisoners. This compound can barely support thirteen people. We can't add guards to the headcount," Jae-min continued, hard.
"Then we make sure there are no guards to add," Rico declared, cold.
The voice of a man who had killed people before — in combat, in self-defense, in the line of duty — and had made peace with the weight of it a long time ago.
"I'm not going to lose sleep over shooting men who are running a human experimentation lab. The question is whether we can do it without losing our own people in the process," Rico added, cold.
"That's the question," Jae-min acknowledged, grave.
He turned to Rico.
Rico stepped forward, pulling a folded paper from his jacket pocket — a hand-drawn schematic of the APB facility, based on the building plans Mei had pulled from the Pasig City municipal database and the camera feeds they'd captured.
He spread the schematic on the platform, weighing down the corners with spare magazines and a combat knife that someone had left lying around.
"Here's what we know," Rico began, clipped, his voice shifting into the efficient cadence of a military briefing.
"The facility has four above-ground floors and two below-ground levels. The laboratories and the Observation Ward are underground — Suite A and Suite B on Sub-Level One, the Observation Ward on Sub-Level Two. The detention wing is on the ground floor, east side. Guard quarters and security post are on the first floor. The lobby, loading dock, and main entrance are on the ground floor," Rico continued, clipped.
He traced the layout with his finger.
"Based on the camera feeds, we're looking at approximately sixty to eighty hostiles. Armed. Equipped for cold-weather operations. Professional posture — patrol patterns, checkpoint procedures, the works. They're not scavengers. They're a private security force funded by a pharmaceutical conglomerate, which means they're organized, disciplined, and probably well-supplied," Rico added, clipped.
"Sixty to eighty," Ji-yoo murmured, grim.
"We're ten with two Soulbound Weapons, a military colonel, a Blink-capable entry specialist, and a spatial-temporal authority that can displace matter through folded space," Rico countered, measured.
Ji-yoo was already mentally running the numbers.
Soulcleaver could clear a corridor in under six seconds at full extension — eight feet of gravity-compressed unknown metal sweeping in overlapping arcs that crushed everything in their path.
At seventy percent, which was all she'd been cleared for since the incident, it was closer to nine.
Nine seconds per corridor.
Forty corridors in the facility.
The math was ugly but survivable.
Jae-min's void tears could bypass doors, walls, and entire floors — he could put a round through a guard's skull from one room while standing in another, each bullet traveling through folded space and exiting from a tear that didn't exist until the millisecond he needed it.
Surgical.
Bloodless.
Terrifying.
"What about the subjects?" Alessia pressed, worried.
"If we breach the facility, there's going to be combat. Bullets, explosives, possibly more of those—" She gestured vaguely toward the schematic, not wanting to say the word out loud.
"—enhanced guards, if the facility has any. The subjects in the laboratories are strapped to tables. They can't move. They can't take cover. Any stray round, any explosion, any collateral damage could kill them," Alessia continued, worried.
"Which means we need to reach them before the shooting starts," Jae-min directed, focused.
"Or at least before the heavy shooting. The infiltration team goes in first — quiet, fast, surgical. We plant charges on the structural points while the facility is still calm, before the guards know we're there. The breaching team hits the main entrance at the same time, drawing the guards' attention away from the underground levels," Jae-min continued, focused.
"That's a two-pronged assault," Rico observed, analytical.
"Divide and conquer. Classic. But it splits our forces. The infiltration team goes in light — two, maybe three people. The breaching team takes the rest."
"Two for infiltration," Jae-min confirmed, decisive.
"And the breaching team?" Ji-yoo prompted, direct.
"Ji-yoo, Yue, and whoever else we bring for combat support," Jae-min answered, measured.
He paused.
His eyes moved to Alessia.
"I need you outside. Medical station, forward-deployed, within sprinting distance of the facility. The extraction route runs through the loading dock on the ground floor. You'll be waiting there with your kit," Jae-min added, measured.
Alessia's jaw tightened.
She wanted to be inside.
She wanted to be where the action was, where the people who needed her were, where her skills could make a difference.
But she was a doctor, and doctors understood triage, and triage meant accepting that you couldn't be everywhere at once.
"How far?" she pressed, direct.
"Two hundred meters from the main entrance," Jae-min specified, precise. "Close enough to receive casualties, far enough to stay clear of the blast radius when the charges detonate."
"When the charges—" Alessia's eyes widened.
"You're not planning to bring the building down with people inside," she demanded, aghast.
"The charges are insurance," he explained, measured. "We plant them during infiltration. We don't detonate them until after extraction. If the mission succeeds — if we get the subjects out — the charges stay dormant. If the mission fails — if we can't extract them, if the guards overwhelm us, if the subjects are too far gone to save—"
"Then you bury it," Rico finished, cold.
The voice of a man who'd given orders like this before, in a different life, in a different army, in a world that hadn't yet frozen.
"All of it. The facility, the evidence, the guards, the subjects. Everything. So that whoever comes after us — whoever finds this place — only finds a crater and frozen rubble," Rico concluded, cold.
"You're talking about burying living people," Jennifer whispered, horrified.
Her ice-blue eyes were fixed on Jae-min, and beneath the horror in her voice was something sharper — the precise, formal anger of a telepath who had spent her entire life feeling what other people felt and who understood, with clinical exactness, the weight of what was being proposed.
"That's war," Rico stated, flat.
The room absorbed this.
Jennifer's ice-blue eyes were wide, her lower lip trembling.
Alessia's clinical expression had fractured, revealing the woman beneath — the woman who had taken an oath to do no harm and was now standing in a gymnasium listening to a plan that involved burying living people in rubble.
Hua's analytical face was as unreadable as ever, but her violet-blue eyes were bright and sharp, and her fingers were tapping against her thigh in the rapid, precise rhythm that meant her mind was running calculations.
Elena hadn't moved from her position near the back wall, but her black eyes had gone flat — the controlled stillness of someone whose thermal sense was reading the room's collective body temperature spike and who was fighting to keep her own systems from spiraling in sympathy.
Ji-yoo spoke.
"Three breachers aren't enough for a facility that size," Ji-yoo pointed out, tactical.
"Who else do you need?" Jae-min probed, direct.
"Mei and Aiko stay outside — Mei for comm coordination and surveillance, Aiko for detonation control. Marie and Paolo stay here," Ji-yoo assessed, tactical.
"That leaves Alessia, Hua, Elena, and Jennifer. Alessia is medical — she's more valuable outside. Her Scalpel Hands and tetrodotoxin poison make her lethal at close range, but her healing is irreplaceable. If she's inside, she's fighting. If she's outside, she's saving lives. The math is simple. Elena's thermal sense makes her critical for the support team — she can track guard positions through walls from outside, identify which subjects are alive by their body heat, and warn the strike team of approaching hostiles in real time. And if things go sideways, her thermal manipulation can buy us time — she can freeze a corridor to slow an advance or superheat a surface to deny a position," Ji-yoo continued, tactical. Ji-yoo's eyes moved to Hua.
"Hua, what's your combat assessment?" Ji-yoo probed, direct.
Hua blinked. The question caught her off guard — not because she hadn't expected it, but because the answer was complicated in ways that required more than a tactical summary.
"I'm not a frontline fighter," she acknowledged, careful.
Her violet-blue eyes were steady.
"My abilities are analytical — pattern recognition, data processing, environmental assessment. In combat, I'm most effective in a support role: providing real-time tactical data, identifying structural weaknesses, tracking hostile movements through environmental analysis," she continued, careful. She paused.
"But I can fight if needed. My analytical perception extends to close-range combat — I can read micro-expressions and muscle tension and predict movement with approximately seventy-three percent accuracy at distances under ten meters," Hua added, careful.
"Seventy-three percent," Ji-yoo repeated, calculating. "That's better than most. But not good enough for a frontal assault."
"Agreed," Hua acknowledged, curt.
Ji-yoo considered this.
Then she turned to Jennifer.
Jennifer looked up.
The color had drained from her face.
She'd been quiet throughout the briefing — listening, processing, her telepathic sensitivity picking up the emotional undercurrents of every person in the room like a seismograph measuring tremors.
She could feel Rico's hard pragmatism, Alessia's surgical anxiety, Hua's analytical calm, Mei's data-driven tension, Aiko's quiet determination, Elena's thermally-clamped stillness.
She couldn't read Jae-min, Ji-yoo, or Yue — her telepathy had never worked on them, an opaque wall where their emotions should be — but she could feel the weight of the plan settling over the room like a net, and she could feel the spaces in the net where people were going to fall through.
"I'm not a fighter," Jennifer admitted, fragile. "You know that. I can't— I don't—"
"We know," Jae-min confirmed, gentle.
Relief flooded her face — and then guilt, hot and immediate, the particular guilt of someone who wanted to help and couldn't and knew that their inability to help was a luxury the people walking into that facility didn't have.
"I can do something, though," she added, urgent.
"The subjects in the Observation Ward — the ones who are sedated — if we bring them back here, I might be able to reach them. Through telepathy. I can't read minds across a room, and I've never been able to reach Jae-min, Ji-yoo, or Yue — their minds are closed to me, I don't know why. But these subjects are ordinary people. No abilities. No shields. If I make physical contact, if I touch them—" She paused. Swallowed.
"I can try to find out what they experienced. What was done to them. Whether they're... whether there's anything left of who they were," Jennifer finished, resolute.
"Jennifer," Alessia warned, grave. "The brainwashing described in the reports — the 'reorientation protocols' referenced in the daily logs — if they're deep enough, your telepathy might not be able to penetrate them. And if they are penetrable, what you find inside could be—"
"I know," Jennifer interrupted, resolute. "I know what it could be. But if there's even a chance I can reach them — if there's even a chance I can help them come back — I have to try."
The room absorbed this.
Jae-min looked at Jennifer — really looked, the way he looked at her when they were alone, the way he looked at the people he loved when he was trying to understand what they needed.
Her ice-blue eyes were bright with determination and fear in equal measure, and her jaw was set, and her hands were clasped in front of her chest so tightly her knuckles were white, and she was terrified and brave and exactly the kind of person who made the world worth saving.
"Okay," he agreed, quiet.
Jennifer nodded.
The tension in her shoulders eased — not disappearing, just redistributing, settling into a configuration that she could carry.
Jae-min turned back to the schematic.
"So. Infiltration team: me and Uncle. Breaching team: Ji-yoo, Yue, and—" He paused. Looked at the group. Counted.
"That's two for infiltration and three for breach. We need a third for the breaching team," Jae-min added, calculating.
Wait.
He counted again.
Ji-yoo, Yue — that was two for breach.
He needed a third.
"I'll go," Aiko volunteered, steady.
Everyone turned.
She was standing beside Mei's wheelchair, her shoulder-length black hair tucked behind her ears, her dark eyes steady and calm.
She was small, and her combat experience was limited to a single engagement during the compound's establishment, when a group of frozen hostiles had breached the perimeter and she'd used a salvaged wrench and a modified propane torch to hold the line long enough for Jae-min to arrive.
"Aiko," Jae-min began, cautious.
"I built the relay antenna," she declared, composed.
The voice of an engineer presenting a solution to a mechanical problem.
"I know the detonation system better than anyone. If the charges need to be triggered manually — if the remote detonator fails, if Mei loses the signal, if something goes wrong — someone needs to be inside who can initiate the sequence. That someone is me," she continued, composed.
"You're not a frontline combatant," Rico pointed out, measured.
"No. But I'm a demolition specialist. The charges are my design. The detonation sequence is my code. If something happens to the remote system — and in a combat environment, something always happens to the remote system — the backup needs to be someone who can walk to the nearest charge, input the trigger code manually, and get out before the cascade starts," Aiko countered, composed.
She paused.
"I can do that. I've practiced it. Every charge has a manual trigger input. I know the codes by heart. I know the timing. I know the propagation sequence," Aiko continued, steady.
"Manual trigger in a building full of hostile guards," Ji-yoo observed, skeptical.
"Everything is a suicide run if things go wrong," Aiko countered, practical.
The room was quiet.
Jae-min looked at Aiko — at her small frame, her steady eyes, her calm, practical voice — and he felt the particular weight of a decision that involved sending someone into danger who might not come back.
He'd carried that weight before.
He'd carry it again.
But it never got easier.
"Uncle," he called, assessing.
Rico studied Aiko for a long moment.
His dark eyes moved over her — height, weight, build, stance.
The same assessment he'd performed on every soldier who'd ever served under his command.
The assessment of a man who was calculating survival probabilities based on physical capability and combat experience.
"She's compact," he assessed, appraising.
"Then she's in," Jae-min decided, firm.
Aiko nodded.
No celebration.
No relief.
Just the quiet acknowledgment of someone who had volunteered for something dangerous and had been accepted and was now mentally preparing for the consequences.
"Strike team is set," Jae-min summarized, decisive.
"Infiltration: me and Uncle. Breach: Ji-yoo, Yue, and Aiko — Yue's Blink for room entry, Ji-yoo for heavy clearance, Aiko for detonation control. Support: Alessia, Hua, Jennifer, Mei, Elena — outside the facility. Elena on thermal reconnaissance and thermal manipulation support. Rear security: Marie and Paolo, at the mansion."
"What about Chocho?" Paolo pressed, concerned.
"Chocho stays with Marie," Jae-min decided, final.
"She can become a ten-foot nine-tailed fox with lightning," Paolo argued, desperate. "That's not just a pet — that's a weapon. She could tear through guards—"
"Paolo," Jae-min countered, patient but firm. "A ten-foot lightning fox is not subtle. We're infiltrating a building. The moment Chocho transforms, every guard in the facility knows exactly where we are. She's too conspicuous, too loud, too visible. She stays here and protects Marie."
Paolo opened his mouth to argue, caught Jae-min's expression, and closed it again.
He retreated down the corridor, Usagi pressed against his chest, muttering something about animal rights and species equality and the fundamental injustice of being the only person in the mansion with combat-relevant powers who wasn't allowed to do anything dangerous.
The meeting continued.
Tactical details.
Approach vectors.
Entry points.
Communication protocols.
Contingency plans for everything from equipment failure to hostile ambush to the entity beneath the compound deciding to do something unexpected while half the strike team was four kilometers away.
Rico handled the military planning with the efficiency of a man who'd been doing this for thirty years.
He mapped the approach route through frozen Manila — the fastest path from the mansion to the Pasig riverbank, four kilometers through snow canyons and compressed ice tunnels where one wrong step meant a broken ankle and exposure meant death in under three minutes.
The route followed the tunnel network for the first two kilometers, then surfaced at the Makati-Pasig boundary where the tunnels collapsed and the team would have to navigate open snow.
Ten meters of snow and hard-packed frozen drifts dense as concrete made the surface treacherous — the snow was concrete-hard at minus seventy, its surface a shell of ice that could support weight in some places and give way without warning in others.
Only the rooftops of the tallest buildings broke the white plain along the route, skeletal fingers of steel and concrete poking through the endless white like grave markers for a dead city.
Rico plotted waypoints at the tunnel exits, the collapsed overpass near the Pasig border, and the frozen river itself, which had been tested and confirmed to support foot traffic.
He calculated ammunition requirements, medical supply needs, and thermal suit allocations.
He identified three potential extraction routes from the facility and ranked them by risk level.
Mei handled the technical planning — maintaining the network intrusion, providing real-time surveillance during the approach, coordinating the detonation sequence from the command position.
She outlined the communication architecture: short-range radio for the strike team, encrypted channels for tactical coordination, and a dedicated frequency for the support element.
Alessia outlined the medical preparation — triage protocols, stabilization procedures, emergency surgery capacity.
She listed the supplies she'd need: portable defibrillator, surgical kit, blood plasma, painkillers, antibiotics, thermal blankets.
She estimated the number of casualties they might encounter: the living subjects, the strike team, possibly the guards.
Elena outlined the thermal reconnaissance plan — using her thermal sense to map guard positions through the facility's walls from the support position, tracking hostile movements by their thermal signatures, identifying which subjects were alive by their body heat and which were beyond saving. She would provide real-time thermal intelligence to the strike team via comm, serving as their eyes through walls they couldn't see through.
Hua outlined the surveillance plan — monitoring the facility's activity patterns from the support position, tracking guard movements through environmental analysis, identifying structural weaknesses, providing real-time tactical data to the strike team via comm.
The planning took three hours.
By the time it was over, the compound had shifted from a domestic routine into the focused, electric tension of a military operation in its final preparation stage.
The geothermal generators hummed at maximum output.
The lights burned at full brightness.
The corridors echoed with footsteps as people moved between the workshop, the infirmary, the armory, and the rooftop where the relay antenna maintained its silent vigil over the frozen city.
Jae-min stood in the gymnasium after everyone had gone.
The schematic was still spread on the platform, the paper weighted down with spare magazines and a combat knife.
The overhead lights hummed.
The floor was warm beneath his bare feet.
And beneath it all, the vibration pulsed.
Three point one seconds.
Steady.
Waiting.
"Twenty-four hours." Jae-min thought, heavy.
The weight of the timeline pressed against his chest like a slow compression, twenty-four hours already thinning with every breath he took.
Twenty-four hours to get ready.
Twenty-four hours to plan.
Twenty-four hours before they walked into a building full of monsters and tried to save people who might already be dead.
He looked at the schematic.
The facility.
The laboratories.
The Observation Ward.
The detention wing.
Forty-seven beds.
One hundred and four subjects.
Sixty-three dead.
Thirty-two alive.
And twelve of them were Yue's students.
He picked up the combat knife from the platform.
Tested its weight in his hand.
The blade caught the light — cold steel, sharp edge, the same knife he'd been carrying since before the freeze, the same knife Rico had given him on his eighteenth birthday with the words "Don't lose this" and a look that said he meant something more than the knife.
He didn't lose it.
He tucked it into his belt and walked out of the gymnasium.
Tomorrow, they went to Pasig.
Tomorrow, they went to war.