Chapter 181 Zack Brings Up the Rear

Chapter 181 Zack Brings Up the Rear

Marcus's charred body crumpled in front of the destroyed console. The floor around him was cratered by thousands of volts of forced discharge, shattered arcs writhing across carbonized metal like dying snakes before going dark.

The self-destruct alarm at the top of the server room shrieked to life. The blood-red warning lights stopped flashing and locked into a steady, nauseating crimson. The heavy reinforced ceiling groaned under the violent thermal expansion, cracking like breaking bone as fragments and dust rained down.

Destruction was no longer a threat. It was already here.

Jack stood at the edge of the roiling heat, eyes fixed on the spot where Marcus had fallen.

His face was blank — the stillness of a statue frozen for a century. But his right hand hung at his side clenched into a fist, knuckles bone-white from the force, fingernails driven deep into his palm, thin lines of red seeping through the cracks.

Inside him, that amber-gold critical energy he had just barely suppressed surged back with a vengeance, howling, slamming against his ribs like it wanted to tear him open and shatter this cold and brutal world to pieces.

He drove it back down with every scrap of will he had, forcing it deep into his bones.

"Everyone… fall back."

Jack's voice was flat. Still as standing water. But underneath that stillness was something far more suffocating than screaming — a weight that pressed down on everyone in the room.

"Move!"

Lawrence roared and lunged forward — not toward the exit, but to Marcus's charred body. His thumb pressed to Marcus's carotid artery, shaking. Then he shot upright. Every muscle in his face was pulled tight with raw pain, his eyes shot through with red:

"Jack! He's still—"

"Lawrence!!"

Akira grabbed Lawrence by the tactical vest and yanked, his voice stripped down to something desperate and barely held together: "Go! He's not coming back! You want his borscht to have meant nothing?!"

Lawrence froze. His breath hit the air in ragged bursts of white fog. His jaw worked, grinding. His huge fists clenched, opened, clenched again.

He dragged a hand across his eyes, turned, and ran hard for the exit. As he passed Jack, his stride broke for half a second. A low, animal sound moved through his throat. Then he slammed his hand onto Jack's shoulder with everything he had.

Move.

The team cut through the collapsing corridor like a dark streak of lightning.

Zack ran at the back.

In the instant he crossed the blast door threshold, he stopped. He couldn't help it. He turned his head slowly and looked back.

The fire was consuming the server room from the inside out, chewing through that pale blue glow with savage red flame. Under the burst energy conduit, he could make out the scorched handprint fused into the wreckage.

Zack looked away. He cut the feeling clean, turned, and drove himself into the dark of the dead corridor ahead.

Behind him, the ceiling of the core server room caved in with a thunderous crash, burying everything — the grief, the courage — under tons of steel and concrete.

The way out was narrower than the way in. Scorching in some places, brutal cold in others.

The base's low-level meltdown sequence was running Adam's preset algorithm, detonating high-energy reactors section by section. The main corridor's lights were gone entirely, leaving only the faint, sickly orange glow of emergency strips along the walls.

The stench of burning plastic and melting metal filled the tight space. The steel plates underfoot vibrated in short, violent pulses — as if something massive and ancient had been trapped beneath the frozen ground and was now waking up.

Akira ran at the front, one hand locked around the tactical tablet. On the screen, the 3D map was being swallowed by deep red at a pace that hurt to watch.

Each red zone was another passage gone for good.

He ran the routes through his head at full speed. "Two hundred meters, right turn, into the maintenance conduit — we bypass the core meltdown zone. Six minutes!"

Six minutes.

Between a storm raging at minus forty-five degrees and a nuclear meltdown burning at thousands, six minutes was the only margin separating the living from the dead.

The team sprinted through the narrow conduit. The sharp percussion of boots on metal echoed back at them like a death march. Lawrence's M249 barrel cracked against the buckling walls and threw off sparks.

Seraphina moved with the heavy sniper case on her back, barely seeming to touch the ground. Nolan's breathing was ragged and maxed out, but his eyes stayed forward and his grip on his rifle stayed tight.

Jack held the rear. He caught the view behind him in his peripheral vision — a wall of fire rolling down the corridor like a red wave, the heat already clawing at the back of his neck.

The passage ahead suddenly narrowed to almost nothing.

What had been a full corridor was now twisted and compressed by the ground pressure into a razor-thin gap, just wide enough for one person to turn sideways and force through. The crushed steel panels on either side had been cooked to a sick blue-purple.

"One at a time! Go!"

Akira planted himself at the opening like a gate and shoved Lawrence through, then Nolan, Seraphina, Zack. Then he turned sideways and forced himself in.

Jack pulled in, head down. Metal burrs tore through his jacket and raked across his skin, leaving a searing line of broken flesh.

He came out the other side into sudden open space — a massive underground junction.

Three large corridors branched out in different directions. Akira's fingers flew across the screen, hunting for a route. Then his hand stopped dead in midair.

All three corridors were marked with the same deep crimson: TOTAL COLLAPSE.

Dead ends. All of them.

"We're blocked."

Akira's voice stayed hard, but there was something in the low rasp of it that had never been there before — a tightness, a texture of strain: "All three routes. Gone."

Nolan's heart skipped a full beat.

Lawrence snarled and raised the machine gun at the corridor that looked the most intact, even though he knew better than anyone that Akira's calculations didn't miss.

Jack didn't look at the screen.

He closed his eyes and pushed the critical state's awareness outward like a web in every direction, through the warped concrete walls, through the burning metal conduits, all the way to the far end of the left corridor — where he caught a hollow.

"Left."

He opened his eyes. There was a cold gold light in them. "Left corridor, end of the tunnel — there's empty space behind that wall. It's a backup exit Adam scrubbed from the map."

Akira didn't hesitate for a second. He was already running.

Behind them, the roar of flame and pressure was deafening now, and orange tongues of fire had pushed into the junction itself.

They hit the end.

A flat, featureless blast wall. Grey, cracked surface, no mechanical locks, no seams, no handles.

"Blow it." Jack's voice cut sharp.

Seraphina was already set. She pressed the barrel of her Judgment system flush against the center of the wall and pulled the trigger.

The concussive crack in that tight space was total — a white flash and a shockwave that hit like a fist.

A jagged hole blew open in the wall. Through it came a rush of freezing air, sharp with ice and snow, sweeping the stench of burning plastic clean out of the corridor in an instant.

"That's the outside! We're out!" Nolan's voice cracked with it.

Lawrence kicked through the rubble and went first. Then Nolan, Seraphina, Akira.

Jack gripped the edge of the gap and turned to Zack — the last one.

Zack hadn't moved.

He stood still in the narrow corridor, back to the blizzard and the way out, facing the wall of fire and the twisted, howling shapes of experimental subjects swarming through it toward them.

He was holding the plain folding knife. The blade caught the dim red emergency light in a cold sliver of reflection.

He was standing loose. Easy. Like a man who had set down a weight he'd carried too long, waiting for the curtain to come down.

"Zack." Jack's voice went tight as a wire about to snap. "Let's go."

Zack turned slowly.

Those grey eyes — the ones that had always been flat and dead and cold — held something now. A quiet. A clarity that was almost alarming in how clean it was.

"Something tracked us by scent and it's coming up," Zack said softly, nodding at the roiling figures tearing through the fire at the far end of the corridor. "Someone has to stay and seal this gap."

"No." Jack stepped forward. His voice was cold and burning at the same time.

"You're the one who showed me how to be a real person."

Zack smiled. It was a small thing, but it was clean — like the first snow falling on open ground. "Let me pick my own ending. Like a real person."

Jack's feet stopped moving.

Inside his chest, the amber-gold energy raged and slammed against him, pushing him forward, telling him to grab this idiot and drag him out into the storm by force.

He couldn't move.

Because in Zack's eyes, he saw something he had spent half his life wanting to see — something that had never once appeared in the eyes of a clone or a soldier bred to die. Dignity. Peace. The absolute refusal to let fate have the last word.

"And Leah. Lawrence. Little Gray. May."

Zack flipped the knife around and held it out handle-first, still warm from his grip. "Eat an extra bowl of borscht. For me."

Jack's fingers trembled as they closed around the handle, still holding the warmth of Zack's hand. He held it until his knuckles were white.

"Live."

Jack's voice was rough as dried sand. Every word cost something.

The corners of Zack's mouth moved a little deeper.

He didn't say anything else. He just turned around — easy, unhurried — and gave Jack his back. That narrow, straight spine, walking toward the blizzard, toward the way out, without looking behind him.

Gunfire and the ring of steel erupted through the roar of the fire and the screaming of the beasts.