The Destruction of Lobotomy Corporation

You enter L. Corp District 12 Branch X-293. Emergency barriers slam down behind you, sealing the headquarters as red status lights pulse along the corridor walls.

Around fifty employees scatter with practiced urgency. Security shutters open over weapon lockers, and compact energy rifles rise from hands that tremble only slightly.

The corridor narrows as employees form staggered lines behind overturned desks and deployed barriers. Cameras pivot toward you, their lenses focusing in perfect unison.

A luminous boundary activates across the floor ahead. Beyond it, the assembled staff steadies their weapons and waits for your next movement.

Binah snaps her fingers. Invisible pressure shears through the corridor in intersecting arcs, slicing across rifles, barriers, and the advancing formation.

The command dies beneath a sequence of sharp impacts. Weapons clatter away as the assembled employees collapse, their bodies motionless behind the ruined defenses.

Red status lights continue pulsing over the silent corridor. The luminous threshold flickers once, then steadies, leaving Binah alone before the sealed junction.

Binah reaches for the summoned pillar, but nothing solid answers her grasp. A towering structural outline flickers in the air, then collapses into harmless bands of light before it can be fired.

The failed manifestation overloads the luminous threshold instead. Its boundary fractures into floating segments, and the corridor's sealed junction unlocks with a heavy mechanical clunk.

Beyond the opened junction, dormant machinery wakes in sequence. Conduits retract from the walls, exposing a deep access shaft and a descending lift waiting without its protective doors.

Binah casually saunters across the fractured threshold, her footsteps unhurried amid the corridor's fading red lights. The open junction waits ahead, its lift humming beneath the exposed shaft.

No weapons rise and no barrier redeploys. The machinery recognizes Binah's approach, lowering the lift platform and illuminating a clean route toward the branch core.

The lift descends smoothly as Binah steps onto it. Above, the junction seals behind her with a measured mechanical click, leaving the damaged branch silent once more.

Binah raises one arm and closes her hand. A pressure front erupts down the lift shaft toward the core, compressing the air into a thunderous ring.

The upcoming containment barriers deploy in staggered layers. The shockwave strikes them hard, buckling their emitters and bursting several panels into showers of inert light, but the main lattice holds.

The damaged lattice folds inward instead of closing cleanly. Behind it, a maintenance aperture flickers open along the shaft wall, revealing narrow service rails and a manual junction bypass.

The containment lattice continues to spark across the lift's path, blocking the direct descent. The newly exposed bypass remains open for a few seconds longer, its rails glowing with a route downward.

Binah steps onto the exposed maintenance rail and moves through the bypass with measured balance. The narrow passage carries her beneath the damaged containment lattice toward the branch core's lower systems.

Thin emitter nodes unfold from the service walls, projecting a corridor of targeting grids across the rails. Their lenses track Binah without firing.

The targeting grids retract as Binah passes. A pressure door opens at the end of the bypass, revealing the lower core chamber and a bright access console already active.

Binah reaches the console without opposition. Angela's facility access is exposed through the active interface, while warning signals ripple across the chamber's machinery.

Binah snaps her fingers. A black-and-yellow lock materializes over the active control panel, its interlocking bands clamping around the interface and freezing Angela's exposed access authority. The manifestation holds, but Binah's composure catches for one visible instant, her focus wavering before she steadies it.

The lock emits alternating pulses of warning yellow and absolute black. Beneath it, the console's permissions collapse into a single unreadable status field while the chamber's alerts continue their measured ripple.

The secured console remains directly before Binah, its blocked controls waiting beneath the stark striped seal. No defensive mechanism activates around her.

Binah leaves the locked console behind and advances through the lower core. Each sealed room she reaches buckles under a precise pressure burst, doors and equipment collapsing into inert fragments.

She crosses the wreckage without slowing. Sensor clusters rupture, coolant lines vent harmless vapor, and hidden partitions open under the continuing sweep of her perception.

Another chamber folds inward around its central machinery. Beneath the debris, a narrow signal conduit remains energized, carrying a live command pattern toward a concealed maintenance vault.

The last partition gives way. Behind it, the vault opens in a wash of cold blue light, and Ayin's active interface stands exposed among the ruined room's settling dust.

Binah snaps. The black-and-yellow lock forms again around Ayin's exposed interface, then unfolds into layered conceptual brackets that seize every functional pathway beneath the display.

Command inputs freeze, diagnostic requests return blank fields, and the vault's coordination controls become inert without damaging the underlying hardware. The interface can no longer perform its functions.

The lock holds successfully, but its structure demands sustained analysis. Binah must spend valuable time checking the nested permissions, leaving the exact scope of the lock uncertain beyond this interface.

Confront Angela about the fallen employees