CHAPTER 20: THE SILENT SIEGE

"What kind of problem?" Michael asked, though he already knew the answer.

The look on Jinx’s face was the same one a player gets when they realize the final boss has an un-skippable, one-hit-kill AOE attack. Game over.

Jinx didn’t answer right away.

She just traced a finger against the grimy glass of the broken window, her movements mimicking the pattern on her scanner.

"It’s a net," she finally said, her voice a low, bitter rasp.

"A Ghost Trap. The DGC’s top-of-the-line caging tech. I’ve only ever seen it in redacted mission reports."

She pointed to the three corners of the storage facility.

"There’s one on the roof of that warehouse to the north.

Another one on top of that water tower to the southeast. And the third one... it’s down there, in the main security office."

Michael squinted, trying to see what she was seeing. He saw nothing but rain and shadows.

"They’re not there physically," she explained, her voice tight with a grudging respect for her enemy’s craftsmanship.

"They’re phased. Anchored to the spot.

They’re the generators. Their overlapping phase fields are creating a sensor grid.

Think of it like a block of invisible, screaming jello that covers the entire facility from ten feet underground to a hundred feet in the air."

She tapped the screen of her scanner, showing him the dense, overlapping circles of energy.

"It’s beautiful, in a ’we’re all going to die’ kind of way. It’s a perfect, seamless cage."

"You breathe on it, it trips a silent alarm," she continued, her voice flat and dead.

"You try to tunnel under it, it fries you.

You try to phase through it with your own freaky void powers, and it’ll probably just erase you on the spot."

She slumped against the wall, the fight completely drained out of her.

"The Alchemist was right. You can’t fight them. You can’t hide from them. This is how they got us, the Rust Dogs.

They didn’t just walk into a monster; they walked into a cage just like this one. A perfectly built, inescapable trap."

Her cynical, gallows humor was gone, replaced by the weary, pragmatic finality of a survivor who knew when a fight was unwinnable.

"Mission’s scrubbed, kid."

"What?" Michael asked, stunned. "We can’t just give up!"

"There’s no ’we’ in this," she shot back, her voice sharp with old pain.

"This is a losing battle. And I, for one, am not interested in being a footnote in a DGC cleanup report. Not again."

Just as she spoke, two sleek, black vans with tinted windows pulled up to the main gate of the storage facility.

They didn’t have any markings. The doors slid open, and a dozen figures emerged.

They moved with a silent, terrifying efficiency, fanning out to reinforce the perimeter.

They wore matte-black tactical gear, no insignias, their faces hidden by full-face helmets that gleamed in the rain. They didn’t speak: they communicated with precise, economical hand signals, like a pack of wolves coordinating a kill.

DGC black-ops. Project Chimera’s private army.

"See?" Jinx whispered. "It was never just a cage. It’s a baited trap. They know we’re here. They’re just waiting for us to make a move."

Michael stared at the soldiers taking up their positions.

He stared at the invisible cage they were guarding.

His mind was a whirlwind of fear, desperation, and the cold, inhuman logic that was the lingering poison of Soul Devour.

Jinx was thinking like a scrapper. She saw a lock she couldn’t pick. A wall she couldn’t break.

But he wasn’t a scrapper. He was a gamer. A cheater. A Void Reaper.

He was starting to see the world not as a physical space, but as a set of rules.

He didn’t see a wall. He saw a system. And every system had rules. Every system had a crash state.

"You’re thinking about it the wrong way," he said, his voice quiet but intense.

Jinx just gave him a tired, pitying look. "Kid, there is no right way to look at this."

"You’re thinking about the cage," Michael pressed, his mind racing, the insane idea taking shape.

The cold echo of the Cable Hound’s logic whispered to him, seeing the Ghosts not as threats, but as nodes in a network.

"Stop thinking about the cage. Think about the guards. Think about the pillars holding up the roof."

"The Ghosts," he said, his eyes beginning to burn with a faint, purple light.

"They’re generators. They’re anchored. But they’re also hunters. They’re programmed to converge on a priority threat.

What happens if all three pillars try to stand in the exact same spot at the exact same time?"

Jinx stared at him, her brow furrowed in confusion.

"That’s... stupid. They’re anchored. Their programming wouldn’t allow a full convergence. It would risk a cascade failure of the containment field."

"Exactly!" Michael insisted, a wild, dangerous energy radiating from him now.

"A cascade failure! We can’t break the cage, but what if we can make them break it?

Force them to converge on a signal so strong, so irresistible, that their core programming overrides their stability protocols.

Their fields would have to overlap, interfere.

They’d create a feedback loop. A glitch in the system."

He turned from the window and looked at her, his expression a terrifying mix of desperation and cold, predatory confidence.

"For just a second, they wouldn’t be three separate spotlights. They’d be one big, blinding floodlight."

He took a breath, his voice dropping to a low, determined whisper. "And the rest of the stage would go dark."

Jinx’s jaw was slack.

She was looking at him like he had just suggested they could fly by flapping their arms really, really hard.

The plan was insane. It was based on an untested theory.

A guess. A prayer. It was suicide.

And it was the most brilliant thing she had ever heard.

"It’s over, Michael," she said, shaking her head, the pragmatist in her making one last stand against the sheer, beautiful insanity of his plan.

"There’s no way in."

Michael turned back to the window, his gaze fixed on the quiet, deadly fortress.

The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach.

But beneath it, the Void was humming. It whispered to him of possibilities.

Of shadows. Of paths that no one else could see.

His mother’s legacy was in that cage. His father’s freedom depended on it.

He smiled, a grim, humorless twist of his lips that didn’t reach his eyes.

"They built a cage for a ghost," he said, his voice a chilling promise that hung in the dusty air of the abandoned apartment.

"So I’ll walk in like one."