Chapter 191 Thrilling Battle

Chapter 191 Thrilling Battle

The alarms triggered all at once — every light across the server room ceiling blazing to life, red beams sweeping in slow, methodical arcs over the equipment racks. From somewhere deep inside the walls came a low, grinding vibration, like the building's entire skeleton was coming unbolted.

Mia's voice detonated in his earpiece: "They've triggered the self-destruct! The main load-bearing columns are unlocking — sub-level three is going to collapse in two minutes! You'll be buried alive down there!"

Dubois grinned, his crimson prosthetic eye catching the light. "David. Time to die."

The heavy magnetic rail gun discharged. The entire server room went white. The round tore through the air and came straight for David.

David stepped forward. He shoved his telekinesis out hard, and the shell stopped dead in midair — the surrounding atmosphere warping into visible ripples, like heat rising off summer asphalt. Then he closed his fist.

The round reversed.

The explosion swallowed the two armored soldiers flanking Dubois before they could raise their weapons. The blast hurled server racks across the room. Cabinet doors spun through the air. Data cables whipped in every direction like severed power lines.

"Devereaux. Grab the bag. Go." David said it flat, no inflection.

Devereaux was already at the main console, tearing a tactical backpack loaded with hard drives from its mounting point. "What about you?"

David raised his left hand.

The falling ceiling stopped.

Concrete slabs, steel beams, conduit runs, light fixtures — all of it hung suspended in midair, pressing down against an invisible field. Debris rained continuously against his shoulder and bounced away. The room groaned around him like something in the grip of a closing fist.

"I'm covering your exit." David kept his eyes on the armored squad moving through the smoke ahead. "Get the drives out."

Devereaux set his jaw, shouldered the pack, and ran.

Mia was already typing. "West maintenance corridor connects to the underground rail level! Devereaux — left turn, second blast door, I'm opening it for you now!"

Dubois walked out of the fire. His chest plate was scorched black. His smile hadn't moved. "Covering the exit? Listen to yourself. You think you're the hero."

"I just don't want you walking out of here." David released a section of the field holding the ceiling behind him, letting the rear corridor cave in fast — cutting off the direction Devereaux had gone.

Then he drew his blade.

The long crimson sword cleared its sheath.

Dubois raised his mechanical arm. Missile pods unfolded from his shoulder housing. "Open fire."

The full heavy assault team fired simultaneously. Chain guns, magnetic slugs, compact missiles — they turned the narrow server room into a continuous wall of fire.

David ran straight into it.

The kinetic barrier in front of him fractured the air into wide, shattering patterns of light. The metal floor buckled under each step.

The first armored soldier barely had time to depress his barrel. The dark-red blade entered through the centerline of his chest plate. The power core split apart. The mech dropped to its knees and went dark.

The second came from the right, shield leading, driving downward with full body weight. David angled into the gap behind the shield, closed his left hand around the junction point at the mech's neck collar, and twisted hard. The entire helmet and sensor cluster separated and flew.

"Crush him!" Dubois bellowed.

Three heavy mechs converged at once. David didn't give ground. He drove his telekinesis straight down — the metal floor buckled upward in a sharp ridge, throwing all three off balance.

One sweep of the blade. A dark-red arc, low and wide. All three heavy frames separated cleanly at the waist. Sparks and hydraulic fluid spread across the floor.

Overhead, another steel beam started down.

"Load-bearing zone is almost completely gone!" Mia's voice was tight.

David raised one hand to hold the collapse — right hand kept moving, kept cutting. In the narrow corridor, the mechs couldn't spread out their firepower. It worked against them. Every step he pushed forward, another chest plate cracked open. Every swing, another core went dark.

Some of them tried to fall back. Some tried to aim.

Both options ran out at the same time.

David drove through the outer hall of the server room with the ceiling pressing against the field above him. The walls on both sides had already warped out of true. The fire suppression system had kicked on — water sheeting down in curtains, turning the air to steam where it hit the flames, bleaching the entire corridor white.

The last soldier raised a heavy rifle at point-blank range. David cut the barrel in half, reversed the blade, and drove it through the man's cockpit housing, pinning him into the wall.

Dubois stood at the far end of the passage. The floor beneath his feet had already split downward. From the darkness behind him came the low magnetic thunder of a train building speed.

He looked at the wreckage covering the floor. His expression went flat. "No wonder the General said you had to be put down before you fully came into your own."

David walked toward him, blade angled low. "He didn't have it in him. Neither do you."

Dubois turned and hit the emergency exit behind him with his shoulder, dropping down into the underground rail level.

Mia locked his position immediately. "He's heading for the private evacuation line! There's a military maglev on that track — it's already moving, speed over one-twenty miles per hour and climbing!"

The wind hit David like a wall when he broke into the rail level.

The black train was running hard through the underground tunnel, rear hatch still not fully sealed. Dubois caught the exterior ladder in one hand, pulled himself up, and looked back at David.

He raised one finger.

David didn't hesitate. He crossed the fractured platform in two strides and launched himself off the edge.

He came down on the roof of the last car. The steel panel dented beneath him.

At three hundred miles per hour, the wind pressure was like standing in front of a jet engine — continuous, total, the kind of force that would pin an ordinary person flat and keep them there.

David bent his knees and locked his telekinesis through his feet into the roof.

Ahead of him, Dubois stripped away his outer armor shell, revealing the close-fitted reinforced exoskeleton underneath. He drove a syringe into the side of his own neck — deep blue fluid, fast injection.

The veins in his throat and jaw rose immediately. Muscle mass swelled against the metal framework. The exoskeleton expanded with it. He gained another size in seconds.

He showed his teeth, voice shredded by wind: "Latest military batch. Specifically designed to put down things like you."

He launched off the roof like a battering ram.

David crossed his blade in front of him and took the hit.

The roof panels cracked and peeled away in sections. Wind stripped the fragments into the dark behind them. The force behind Dubois's fists had gone completely off the charts — each impact landed with a concussive crack. "How does it feel, David? I love breaking something strong piece by piece!"

His mechanical arm snapped out an alloy blade and drove it horizontally across David's chest.

David bent back to let it pass, then angled his blade upward and sheared the outer plating off the arm entirely. Dubois didn't react to it at all — he drove his knee up hard and pushed David back to the edge of the roof.

The tunnel wall screamed past inches away. Sparks drew long white lines through the dark.

Mia's voice cut in: "Series of tight curves ahead! The centrifugal force is going to spike — neither of you is going to be able to hold footing if you keep this up!"

"Good." David said.

Dubois pressed harder — fists, shoulder charges, knee strikes, everything built for direct impact. He knew he was on a clock. The drug could sustain this peak for maybe two, three minutes. He needed to use every second of it to break David down to something that couldn't get back up.

"What does it change?" Dubois roared over the wind, driving another punch forward. "Your parents are still dead! You still got thrown in a cell like an animal! You were always going to die down here —"

David knocked the swing wide. "You and Douglas are both going down. You'll have company."

The train hit the first major curve. Centrifugal force ripped sideways across the roof. Both of them tilted hard.

Dubois drove the reinforcement spikes in his exoskeleton into the steel and caught himself, then launched forward again immediately.

In that same moment, David dropped his center of gravity and began pulling telekinetic force inward — compressing it, focusing it into the blade.

Dubois came in screaming, both arms swinging down together, trying to cave in David and the sword at the same time.

David moved into it.

Not back — forward. One step. Feet locked. Hips rotating through the swing. Every bit of compressed force released through the blade in a single line.

A dark-red streak opened through the dark.

Dubois had just enough time to register the flash of red in front of his eyes.

His arms left his body at the shoulders. The wind took the blood and the metal fragments apart instantly. The scream had barely started when David's boot connected with his chest plate.

The plate caved inward. Dubois came off the roof. The curve's centrifugal force caught him and flung him sideways — he hit the tunnel wall at speed and vanished into the dark behind the train without making another sound.

Mia's voice was quiet in his ear: "That was clean."

David stood on the roof of the moving car, blade hanging low at his side. His breathing was steady. Ahead, at the far end of the tunnel, a pale light was beginning to show — the train was already decelerating, metal-on-metal friction carrying back along the track.

Minutes later, the maglev eased into a derelict platform on the outskirts of Vienna.

The doors didn't open. The platform was empty — paint stripped by years of weather, half the advertisement panels dark, the rest flickering. Rainwater fell through gaps in the collapsed canopy overhead and spread across the concrete. Rusted scrap and old paper collected along the rails.

David dropped from the roof. His boots hit the platform edge.

His coat had been torn open in several places. There was blood on his shoulder. The blade still carried traces of hydraulic fluid and worse.

His encrypted communicator lit up.

The screen pulsed twice, then connected.

"David. My boy." Lon's weathered face appeared on the screen — expression unhurried, voice worn down to something soft. "Do you know everything now?"