Three hundred wealthy guests watched a maid stop Vanessa’s attack with one hand, never realizing the woman in the gray uniform had once been trained to dismantle dangerous threats.

The blizzard picked up, whipping ice needles against their skin as Naomi supported Ethan toward the massive rusted doors of the abandoned outpost. The wind was approaching sixty knots; exposure would kill them within thirty minutes without shelter.

"This is Station Zero," Ethan wheezed, his leg leaving a trail of dark red droplets that froze almost instantly upon hitting the snow. "My father mentioned it once in his personal logs. Before they built the underwater Leviathan, they kept the neural prototypes here. In the permafrost."

"And Vanessa knew it," Naomi replied. She reached the blast door’s manual override box, tearing away the frozen padlock with a single leverage strike using a piece of debris from the transport.

Inside the recessed panel sat a biometric reader—ancient, analog, and encased behind half an inch of frosted quartz.

"A blood-lock," Ethan said through chattering teeth. "It won't respond to me. My father purged my lineage codes when I allied with you."

"It's not looking for an heir," Naomi said quietly. "It’s looking for the weapon."

She pressed her thumb firmly against the icy sensor glass. A faint hum vibrated through the steel frame. For three agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then, a sharp hiss of pneumatic pressure echoed through the cavernous wall as hydraulic locks disengaged one by one. The ten-ton blast door groaned inward, revealing a pitch-black corridor carved straight out of subterranean basalt.

"Step inside," Naomi ordered, pulling Ethan across the threshold just as a burst of automatic gunfire chipped the ice where they had stood seconds before.

Naomi spun, looking out into the white gale.

Emerging from the blizzard were four figures clad in white thermal suits, tactical rifles leveled, moving with the precision of trained apex hunters. And walking calmly behind them, draped in an immaculate fur-trimmed snow coat, was Vanessa Sterling.