Chapter 22: Terminal Interruption
The silence in the hermitage was absolute, but the bond screamed at him. It was a panicked, rising tide of protest—five distinct voices forming a single wall of denial. He felt Camille’s terror, a cold knife in his gut. Sophia’s fury, a blistering heat on his skin. Lena’s desperate, buzzing fear. Ketut’s visions of fracture and loss. Isabela’s rapid-fire calculations of catastrophic probability.
He held up a hand, his face a mask of grim finality.
“Listen,” Bruce said, his voice cutting through the psychic din, low and absolute. “I’m going after them. Stay here.”
“No, you absolute fucking idiot—” Sophia began, surging forward.
“It’s not a debate,” he interrupted, his hazel eyes locking onto each of theirs. The Weaver’s authority vibrated in the air, a pressure that made the lantern flame gutter. “They want the bond. They want us. As long as we’re together, we’re one target. A single system they can study, exploit, or destroy.” He let the words hang, brutal and true. “I go alone. I become a variable they haven’t calculated. A blunt object in their precise machine.”
Camille’s eyes filled. “Bruce, please. Don’t do this. We’re stronger together, you know we are.”
“My most sacred duty in life,” he said, stepping toward her, his thumb wiping a tear before it fell, “is protecting you. All of you. That doesn’t mean hiding. It means taking the fight to the thing that wants to hurt you.” He leaned in, pressing his forehead to hers, and for a second, the bond opened completely—not with passion, but with a profound, unshakable love, a ferocious vow. “I love you all. Stay. Be ready.”
Before the wives could form another word, physical or mental, he acted.
He didn’t run. He didn’t leave. He simply unmade the space where he stood.
There was a sound like a reverse thunderclap, a vacuum pop that made their ears ache. The air where Bruce had been snapped in to fill the sudden void. He was just gone.
The transition was not gentle. It was a rending.
He emerged into sterile, filtered air that tasted of ozone and metal. The teleportation wasn’t a science he understood; it was a demand of the bond, a violent wrenching of his body through the fabric of things, guided by the crude coordinates Arina’s data had imprinted in his mind. He stumbled, his boots clicking on polished composite flooring. Nausea surged, followed by a wave of debilitating loneliness. The bond was stretched over an impossible distance, attenuated to a thin, screaming wire of connection. He felt their panic, their grief, their rage—a distant storm.
He shoved it down. He was a weapon now. A single, focused point.
The Myrmidon Project Headquarters. It wasn’t just in the side of a mountain; it was the mountain. The corridor he stood in was brutally utilitarian, lit by cold LEDs. The walls hummed with embedded technology. He could feel the immense, crushing weight of rock above him, and below… a deep, chilling descent. The facility plunged down into the earth’s belly, level upon level. He felt it in his bones, a terrible inverted spire.
And he felt the soldiers. Heartbeats. Dozens of them, radiating the alert, controlled calm of elite personnel. Their movements were a quiet patter through the structure, a deadly rhythm.
He closed his eyes, not to hide, but to see. He thought of Isabela’s lab, her lectures on neural impulse and electromagnetic grids. He felt for the power, not as a user, but as a part of the circuit. He felt the thrumming lines of energy feeding the lights, the servers, the life support, the vast generators somewhere deep below. They were like luminous veins in his mind’s eye.
He found the connection—the main nexus where the mountain’s stolen geothermal energy was converted, regulated, distributed. In his mind, he wrapped his will around it. He didn’t pull a plug. He issued a command, a fundamental negation.
Disconnect.
The effect was instantaneous and total.
The LEDs died. The omnipresent hum ceased, plunging the world into a silence so profound it was itself a noise. Distant, echoing shouts of confusion began. Emergency batteries kicked in with a thump, casting a dim, hellish red glow every hundred feet. But the core power, the generators—they were dead. A deep, permanent quiet settled over the lower levels.
In the failing red light, Bruce moved.
He became a shadow with intent. The first patrol rounded a corner, four soldiers with infrared goggles already secured. They were professionals. They didn’t hesitate. They fired.
Bruce didn’t dodge the suppressed rounds. He let the bond—the distant, thin thread of it—channel the totality of their combined resilience. The bullets struck his chest, his shoulder. They felt like hard slaps. The flattened projectiles dropped to the floor with tiny pings.
The soldiers froze for a half-second, a fatal lapse.
Bruce was among them. He wasn’t brawling. This was eradication. A palm strike to a helmeted temple transmitted force through the composite, turning the brain to pulp. A grab and twist snapped a neck with a sound like a green branch breaking. He ripped a rifle from another’s hands and used the stock to cave in the man’s face. The last soldier got a knife out; Bruce caught the wrist, crushed the bones, and drove the man’s own blade up under his jaw.
It took less than four seconds. Four bodies lay in grotesque, rapidly expanding pools of black in the crimson light.
He felt nothing. Or rather, he felt everything—the cold evil of this place seeping up from below. It was a psychic stench, the residue of screams and violated minds. He felt the echoes of the experiments: the agonizing attempts to force a bond, to replicate what he had been given. The shattered psyches, the broken bodies. This was a factory of pain.
He descended.
Stairwells. Elevator shafts. Service ducts. He was a force of nature moving through the architecture of hell. Alarms began to blare, a shrill, panicked sound in the dark. Squads converged. He met them all.
He left a tide of dead bodies in his wake. He broke them with his hands, with their own weapons, with chunks of conduit torn from the walls. He moved with a terrifying economy, a perfect machine of slaughter. The red glow painted him in the hues of a demon, his shaved head and impassive face speckled with blood that was not his own. The distant bond thrummed with each life he took, not with guilt, but with a cold, shared acknowledgment of necessity. They felt it through the wire—each jarring impact, each spurt of hot blood, each cessation of a hostile heartbeat. It was a grim, rhythmic telegraph of his progress.
He went deeper. The air grew colder. The technological sheen gave way to something more organic, more ancient. The rock here was raw, fused with crystalline structures that pulsed with a faint, stolen energy. He was approaching the source of the evil, the heart of the project.
He kicked through a final blast door, the metal shearing from its hinges with a shriek.
He entered what he assumed was the board room, or perhaps a core laboratory. It was a vast, circular chamber hewn from the living rock. In the center, instead of a table, was a massive, obsolithic plinth. And standing before it, calm as if waiting for a bus, were two men.
They were unarmed, dressed in simple grey tunics. One was tall and lean, his head shaved like Bruce’s, his eyes a vacant, electric blue. The other was shorter, stocky, with a focused stillness that screamed danger.
Bruce stopped. The slaughter-field behind him was silent.
He felt power radiating from them. It was a cheap imitation, a screeching, static-filled echo of the bond. It had no harmony, no love, no depth. It was raw amplification, forced and unstable. Some of the experiments, he realized, must have worked. Not to create a Weaver, but to forge crude tools.
The tall one smiled, a twitch of the lips. “Subject Alpha. The template. You have saved us the trouble of extraction.”
“You’re polluted,” Bruce said, his voice gravel in the quiet chamber. “You smell like burned wires and pain.”
The stocky one cracked his neck. “We are the next step. Unburdened by attachment.”
They moved.
They were fast. Impossibly fast. The tall one blurred, appearing at Bruce’s left, a fist aimed for his kidney with force enough to shatter stone. The stocky one came low, a sweep meant to shin bones.
Bruce flowed. He was the bond. He was Camille’s unyielding solidity, Sophia’s explosive speed, Lena’s flickering perception, Ketut’s predictive clarity, Isabela’s tactical analysis. He wasn’t fighting two men. He was conducting a symphony of five.
He caught the tall one’s fist in his palm, absorbing the kinetic energy, feeling the bones in the man’s hand splinter. Simultaneously, he shifted his weight, letting the stocky one’s sweep glance off a leg that had become as fluid as water.
He retaliated. A short, sharp elbow to the tall one’s throat crushed his larynx. A stamp down on the stocky one’s knee dislocated it with a wet pop.
But they were enhanced. The tall one staggered back, gagging silently, but those blue eyes still glowed. He lunged again, a frenzied series of strikes. The stocky one, despite his ruined knee, pushed up and came in, grappling, trying to use his dense strength to lock Bruce down.
They were powerful.
But they weren’t him.
Bruce stopped defending. He embraced the attack. He took a hammering blow to the ribs that would have pulverized a normal man, using the energy to pivot. He grabbed the stocky one’s head and the tall one’s shoulder. He brought them together with the sound of two bull elk colliding.
He felt skull fracture. He felt shoulder separate.
He didn’t let go. He poured the bond’s energy through his hands, not to heal, but to scour. He unleashed a concentrated burst of the very power they sought to replicate—a pure, undiluted current of connection turned inside-out into a weapon of absolute disintegration.
Their bodies convulsed. Their stolen power short-circuited. Their nervous systems fried from the inside out. The blue light in the tall one’s eyes died. The stocky one’s fierce stillness became the permanent rigidity of death.
Bruce released them. They slumped to the floor, smoke rising from their eyes and mouths, the stench of cooked meat and ozone filling the chamber.
He stood over them, breathing deeply, the distant bond now a steady, warming pulse in his core. They were powerful.
But not as powerful as he was.
He looked past their bodies, to the obsidian plinth. A spiral staircase led down from its base, into a darkness that throbbed with a familiar, ancient rhythm. The true heart lay below. The Source they sought to weaponize.
And he knew, with a certainty that vibrated through the wire connecting him to his wives, that Dr. Aris Thorne was waiting there.
The spiral stairs were not carved. They were grown, a seamless helix of the same dark, crystalline stone that seemed to drink the scant emergency lights. Each step echoed with a hollow resonance that spoke of immense depth. The air grew denser, colder, and throbbed with that same primordial rhythm he had felt in the sacred cave—but here it was amplified, distorted, and sickly. It was the heartbeat of the world, fed through a filter of surgical steel and malicious intent.
Bruce descended into the gut of the mountain.
The staircase opened into a cavern so vast the ceiling was lost in darkness. This was the Core Chamber. The walls were lined with obsidian panels alive with holographic data—neural maps that flickered and danced like captured ghosts. Violet light pulsed from seams in the floor, casting long, predatory shadows. The hum here was a physical pressure, a resonance field that vibrated his teeth and made his skin feel two sizes too small.
In the center of the chamber, connected to the floor by thick, translucent cables that glowed with internal light, stood a man.
Dr. Aris Thorne was older than his file photos suggested, his hair stark white, his body frail within a simple grey suit. He looked like a librarian. But his eyes, magnified behind thick glasses, held a universe of cold, acquisitive fascination. He was studying a holographic model that rotated slowly between him and Bruce—a shimmering, double-helix strand of energy intertwined with what looked like human neural pathways.
“The Weaver,” Thorne said, his voice amplified and projected through hidden speakers, smooth and utterly calm. “You are more efficient than my models predicted. You terminated Subjects Gamma and Epsilon with minimal energy expenditure. Fascinating.”
Bruce said nothing. He walked forward, his boots silent on the seamless floor. He felt the resonance field trying to infiltrate him, to scan and map the bond. It was like being touched by ghostly fingers. He pushed it away, a mental shove that made the holograms along the wall flicker.
“This place,” Bruce said, his voice low, cutting through the hum. “You’re milking it. Draining the life out of something you don’t understand.”
“Understanding is the harvest of data,” Thorne replied, turning from his model to finally look at Bruce with naked hunger. “And this… this is the motherlode. A naturally occurring psychic resonator. A wellspring of connection. I’m not draining it. I’m cultivating it. Refining it. Removing the messy, inefficient variables.”
“People,” Bruce growled, stopping twenty feet from the man.
“Emotion. Attachment. Fluctuation,” Thorne waved a dismissive hand. “Noise in the signal. What you have is beautiful, but it’s crude. A forest. I am creating a garden. A pure, directed instrument.” He tapped the hologram, and it zoomed in on a nexus point. “Your bond is the key. But it requires six specific locks. I have spent years identifying the neuro-signatures. The Seekers. The Anchor. The Flame. The Spark. The Lens. The Logic.” He named them with reverence. “You found them by accident. I will replicate the process with precision.”
The arrogance was a cold fire in Bruce’s chest. This man saw the five most profound relationships of his life as components. He saw Camille’s love as a structural tool.
“You’ll never touch them,” Bruce said, the promise absolute.
“I already am,” Thorne smiled, a thin crack in his face. “The resonance field is not just for scanning. At sufficient intensity, it can… suggest. It can amplify latent impulses. It can make a longing a compulsion. Tell me, Weaver, can you feel them? Right now?”
Bruce’s breath hitched. He’d been walling off the bond, shielding it from the chamber’s invasive hum. Now, he opened it, just a crack.
The wave that hit him was a tidal wave of raw, unfiltered need.
It wasn’t their need. It was a distorted reflection, a funhouse mirror version of their desire, pumped up by the chamber’s pulsating energy and focused through the thin, screaming wire of their connection. He saw them, felt them, back in the hermitage.
Camille was on her knees, her sundress rucked up around her waist, her own fingers plunging in and out of her soaked cunt with a frantic, graceless rhythm. “Need him, need him inside, need to be full, god, please,” she chanted, her mental voice a broken sob. Not lust, but desperation, a gnawing void where his presence should be.
Sophia was braced against the wall, pounding her fist against the stone, each impact leaving a smudge of blood and dust. Her body was rigid, not with her usual fiery passion, but with a frantic, angry energy that had nowhere to go. “Fuck! Fuck this! He should be here, I should be burning him up, I need to feel him!” Her thoughts were sparks flying off a grinding wheel.
Lena was a blur of motion, flickering from corner to corner, her hands frantically groping at her own body as if trying to hold herself together. “Can’t think, can’t be still, it hurts, it itches, I need him to fuck me so I can be here, I need it!” Her mental voice was a relentless, buzzing static.
Ketut and Isabela were tangled together on the floor, but it wasn’t loving. It was a frantic, clumsy search for an approximation of connection. Isabela was biting Ketut’s shoulder, her eyes wide and unseeing, mumbling calculations of dopamine deficits. Ketut was clutching her, weeping, her visionary mind flooded with horrific, fractured images of Bruce dissolving into the violet light.
Thorne was poisoning the bond. Using the chamber to pump a psychic amphetamine into their link, turning their love and worry into a debilitating, possessive hunger.
“Stop it,” Bruce snarled, taking a step forward. The cables in the floor glowed brighter.
“I’m not doing anything,” Thorne said, his eyes wide behind his glasses. “I’m merely providing the frequency. The need… that is all you. The beautiful, inefficient core of your connection. I am showing you its weakness. Your anchor is adrift without you. Your flame consumes itself. Your spark cannot ground. Your lens is cracked. Your logic is corrupted.”
Rage, pure and black, filled Bruce. But with it came a crystalline understanding. Thorne was wrong. The need wasn’t a weakness. It was the bond’s fundamental truth. It was the pull of gravity. He had been fighting it, trying to be a lone weapon. He had severed himself, and in doing so, had left them vulnerable to this distortion.
He couldn’t shut the bond down. He had to flood it.
He stopped fighting the resonance field. Instead, he opened himself completely, a conduit. He let the chamber’s amplified, invasive thrum pour into him. But he didn’t let it twist him. He took its stolen, raw power and he filtered it through the one thing Thorne could not quantify or replicate: his love for them. His specific, weathered, devoted love for Camille. His awed, passionate love for Sophia. His protective, grounding love for Lena. His reverent, wondering love for Ketut. His respectful, intrigued love for Isabela.
He took the poisoned signal and transformed it.
Back in the hermitage, Camille’s frantic fingering slowed. A warmth, solid and sure, bloomed in her core. It felt like his hand covering hers. She gasped, her eyes flying open. “Bruce?”
Sophia stopped pounding the wall. A different heat washed over her—not frantic, but deep and banked, like coals in a hearth. It was his approval, his shared strength. She sagged against the stone, a ragged breath escaping her. “You bastard,” she whispered, a smile touching her bloody lips.
Lena’ flickering stopped. She solidified, collapsing onto the floor, a wave of profound stillness washing over her buzzing nerves. It was the feeling of his arms around her, holding her fast. “Oh,” she breathed, tears of relief springing to her eyes.
Ketut and Isabela untangled. The horrific visions shattered. In their place, Ketut saw a single, golden thread, strong and bright, stretching out into the darkness. Isabela’s mind, cleared of chemical noise, presented a new equation: Unity = Strength. Attenuation = Vulnerability.
They all felt it simultaneously. He wasn’t just a distant voice. He was the bond, fully realized, broadcasting a signal of pure, defiant connection that overwhelmed Thorne’s frequency.
In the Core Chamber, the holographic models exploded into static. The violet light stuttered. Thorne took a step back, his clinical fascination replaced by dawning alarm. “What are you doing? You’re disrupting the field!”
“I’m coming home,” Bruce said, his voice no longer a growl, but a vow that vibrated in the chamber’s very stone.
He didn’t attack Thorne. He turned his will inward, to the bond, to the thread that connected him to five points across the world. He pictured the hermitage, the feel of Camille’s skin, the smell of Sophia’s sweat, the sound of Lena’s laugh, the depth of Ketut’s gaze, the precision of Isabela’s mind. He didn’t pull himself to them.
He pulled them to him.
The air in the Core Chamber screamed. Reality itself seemed to pucker and twist around Bruce. Thorne staggered, his glasses falling from his face.
And then, with another of those vacuum-pop sounds, they were there.
Camille, on her knees still, her dress disheveled, her face tear-streaked and furious. Sophia, bleeding fist clenched, planted firmly on the floor in a fighter’s stance. Lena, kneeling, breathing hard but solid. Ketut and Isabela, holding each other upright, their eyes blazing with focus.
They stood in a loose circle around Bruce, in the heart of their enemy’s sanctum. The bond was no longer a thin, screaming wire. It was a closed circuit of immense power, thrumming in the sterilized air, making the very light bend around them. The chamber’ invasive resonance field shattered against it like waves against a cliff.
Thorne stared, his mouth agape. “The energy signature… it’s geometrically increased… this is… not possible without conditioning…”
Camille looked at Bruce, her eyes soft for a second, then hardening as she took in the chamber, the cables, the frail, evil man at its center. “This the fucker?” she asked, her voice dangerously calm.
“Yeah,” Bruce said.
“Good,” Sophia cracked her neck, the sound like a gunshot in the quiet. “I’ve got some frustration to work out.”
The bond settled into a new configuration, a perfect, silent understanding. They were not separate anymore. They were one system, in six bodies. And the system had identified a corruption that needed to be purged.
They took a step forward, in unison. Thorne scrambled backward, his clinical awe finally swallowed by raw, human fear.