Adventure of Selene Nyx 4

The prototype remains unconscious beneath the ring, its disabled servos ticking as Mara wedges open a maintenance hatch. Selene stays beside her, burned palm throbbing.

Below, the tunnel walls carry Euran’s distress pulse in dull bursts. Something heavy scrapes along the conduit, dragging remote extraction equipment toward the arena.

Mara lowers herself onto the hatch ladder, red armor catching the emergency strips. She keeps one hand braced on the rim and scans the darkness below.

The voice is thin and encrypted, leaking from a damaged wall relay rather than any nearby speaker. The scraping stops beneath the hatch, followed by three precise metallic clicks.

Selene slams the hatch shut above the ladder and drives Mara’s dead control wand into the emergency lock. Steel teeth bite down, sealing the ring from below.

The scraping resumes beneath the floor. Selene slips behind the maintenance gantry, burned palm tucked close, and angles her scanner toward the hatch seam.

A compact extraction crawler rises through a service grate, black armor unfolding around a signal cage. Its sensor mast sweeps past Selene’s hiding place.

Selene triggers the gantry’s exposed power bus. Blue current lashes through the crawler, locking its limbs and frying the signal cage before the breach charges arm.

Mara drops beside the disabled machine and tears open its armored housing. Below them, Euran’s distress pulse steadies, no longer routed toward the extraction team.

Selene folds the dead wand into the emergency lock and forces the sealed hatch down from its underside. The teeth release just enough for her to slip through.

She descends into the service conduit, following Euran’s steady distress pulse through wet concrete and bundled cables. The crawler’s disabled relay gives her a clean route map.

The tunnel bends beneath the arena. Emergency paint marks a maintenance alcove ahead, where a portable work lamp flickers beside Euran’s overturned tool case.

Euran sits against the conduit wall, shaken but intact, his mismatched prosthetic hand clamped around a damaged transmitter. A cable from the case leads deeper underground.

The transmitter’s recovered map reveals the extraction crawler was only the surface unit. Its command uplink now routes through Selene’s scanner, exposing the hidden control node beneath the arena.

Selene looks at Euran beneath the flickering work lamp. She reins in the adoration in her eyes, lets a soft smile show, and extends her hand across the wet concrete.

Euran takes her hand with his warm, mismatched prosthetic. Its servos whine softly, but the grip holds steady as he uses her help to rise.

The transmitter pulses between them, projecting a wireframe beneath the arena: a buried command node with three active uplinks and one route marked CROSS.

Once Euran is standing, Selene paces beside the projected map, studying the CROSS route and the prototype’s authentication residue. Her dark smile stays turned away from him.

She cross-checks the recovered uplinks against the fighter’s weapons lattice. The same government weapons-development authorization appears in both systems, buried beneath falsified civilian credentials.

The command node resolves the chain: an internal weapons bureau cell commissioned the arena test, tagged Euran as the technical fall guy, and routed retrieval through his signal.

The wireframe highlights the buried node’s uplink controls. Its records now identify the bureau cell’s authorization trail and expose the command node beneath the arena.