Chapter 76: Lighthouse’s Symphony
The axe-head rose.
Hazel lay in the dust, blood turning the ground mean, staff three meters out like a friend who couldn’t cross the last step. Rune was a streak cutting the air too far away.
Alteea Sage moved.
She didn’t take the stairs. She vaulted the rail - white coat flaring - dropped the three meters like a thrown knife, and hit the floor already turning. Two strides and she was at DRN Nine’s station. The operator sat there with a VR headset on, hands buried in twin throttles, mind inside the feed.
Alteea didn’t ask. She kicked the chair hard enough to make his world turn over. One hand flicked the manual override, the other stole the controls before the headset even finished sliding crooked across his face.
"Nine is mine," she said.
"Wha-!?" the operator blinked inside darkness, still wearing the headset, groping for reality.
Alteea wasn’t looking at the screen. She didn’t need to. Fingers on sticks, thumb on trim, she flew blind, as if the Lighthouse had nerves and she knew where they were.
"Nine feed. UP! NOW!"
On the wall, the high-right feed lurched and dove. The Abyssal’s axe-face swelled in frame. Props screamed. Alteea rolled the drone through the dirty air above the blade, cut throttle in a sliver of a heartbeat, and dropped.
The drone punched the blade-head. A bright, obscene chime - then fire and shrapnel. The craft exploded, fragments rattling across scrub. The Abyssal reeled, one long arm dragging furrows through nothing.
"Next!" Alteea said, already gone, and the woman at the adjacent desk was already out of the chair, headset lifted, station cleared like the Lighthouse knew this choreography by heart.
She slid into the seat, slipped the band over her eyes this time, breath steady. "Feed me Ten and Four. Link sticks."
"Linked"
Two angles plunged at once - one high, one low. Alteea skimmed one rotor set across the axe-face to blind it with wash, then sideswiped the shoulder seam with the other, riding the impact, refusing to let the frame tumble. A blade snapped - a second hung by wire. She piloted two now broken drones better than they could control one in perfect condition.
Hazel moved. She shouldn’t have, but she did anyway. Palms flat, she dragged herself toward the staff and made it halfway before shock made decisions for her. Blood pulsed once, then - stopped. The air around her wounds flickered as she pressed the staff’s tip against her thigh, breath sawing, voice somewhere between command and prayer. Light flowered and sealed, not regrow. Not mercy. Time.
"Gate Two is up," MED called. "Bird rolling."
"ETA?" Alteea asked, eyes and fingers and shoulders a single instrument.
"Two minutes."
"Rune" she said, and the city bent to let him hear it. "You will give me ninety seconds of pressure and you will keep breathing for all of them."
"Ninety?" Rune panted. "Too rude. Fine."
On the screen, he knifed across the camera’s frame, wingsuit easing him into impossible slides along ground that would have torn a clumsier man to shreds. He slashed at tendon-analogues again, this time hard enough to make the Abyssal flinch wrong - somewhere in a geometry that didn’t admit to flinching. The Nyx’s too-long arms whipped space into cuts where space had thought it was safe. One strike grazed a drone’s housing and left a line you could taste on your teeth.
"Ten lost a blade," DRN said, panic trying to get into his voice.
"No shit, Sherlock!" Alteea said, and banked Four into the Abyssal’s eyes, not to hit - to be seen. The blade-face turned to cut the annoyance. Ten, with two props and a lie, peeled in from the blind side and chewed with its remaining rotors, skittering down the Nyx’s axe-edge like an insult.
Alteea’s headset fed only what she needed. The world on her side of the plastic and glass narrowed into vectors and the single truth of speed. She spoke like she had always been doing this and everything else was a hobby.
"DRN, give me Twelve, then send it. It’s trash.
Rune slid. He didn’t jump or roll or dive. He changed verbs. The wingsuit flared for a breath and cut his drop’s angle like a mathematician getting bored of someone else’s formula. He passed under the axe-head as it committed to the dead drone and came up on the Nyx’s spine where spines were a courtesy and a promise. In the same motion he snapped the short blades he’d been carrying together.
Luminite was powering a twin-bladed spear, haft between his hands, edges singing like a line you weren’t supposed to cross. Rune drove the spear in.
It should have been a clean execution. It wasn’t. Abyssals don’t die pretty.
The spear sank until it shouldn’t. The Nyx folded around the steel, body learning a new shape out of spite. One long arm curled backward with a motion that disrespected elbows and reached for Rune’s head like the end of a sentence. He twisted, shoulders and hips disagreeing violently about direction, and dragged the spear to the side like he was plowing earth. The blade bit, caught, skittered, bit again.
"Hold it..." Alteea said - not to Rune, not to anyone, to the moment itself.
Alteea burned her last two drones like matches. One sliced its own props off on the Nyx’s edge and turned into an unlicensed brick midair, smashing into the creature’s knee with a crack that made the desk operators wince. The other clawed a path along the axe-face, showering fragments, then buried itself half into some place that pretended not to be important until it was.
The Abyssal screamed - not with sound, with a harmonic that made camera housings shudder and a few stomachs pitch. Rune hauled, teeth bare, and the spear did the ugly work steel was born for. The twin blades finally bit the hinge that didn’t want to exist and split it.
The Nyx fell the way towers fall: slow enough to admire, fast enough to kill you anyway if you’re under it. Rune staggered backward, wingsuit scraping dirt, rolled, and came up on one knee with the spear across his thighs like he didn’t trust physics without a chaperone.
"Target down" STRK said, voice hoarse. "Abyssal Seven Point Four... Down."
"MED" Alteea exhaled, headset coming off in a motion too smooth to be satisfying. "On my mark."
"Mark" MED breathed. The quadcopter slid into a brand new drone feed, a huge-bodied craft with four rings that threw clean circles into the air, descending like a gentle fist. It landed ten meters from Hazel, legs extending, a side door yawning open with the sound of competent hinges.
Two medics in white ran like they’d been taught by the ground itself, no flapping, all purpose. One took the staff from Hazel, laid it across her lap as if it were a person being moved, and pressed a fresh seal over the edges of light. The other cut straps and bundled limb ends with the neat violence of people who do this more than stories admit. They slid her onto a float gurney and lifted. Hazel’s jaw unclenched just enough to nod toward where Rune stood.
Rune gave them a little salute that meant too many things. He watched the quadcopter load, then turned toward the camera that wasn’t a person and made his mouth smile anyway.
"Falcon?" AIR asked.
"Returning," STRK said. "Autopilot."
On screen, the F-51 dropped out of a high cloud line and made a decision. Flaps blinked, rails at the highway lit in anticipation below the Academy. The jet came in clean, as if being flown by the idea of straight lines, and kissed the lane without ceremony. It sank into the ground like the city finally remembered where it kept its knives.
Lights in the Lighthouse shifted back toward white. The screens came back down. Alteea stood very still for one second and let the headset drop from her fingers. A single drop of sweat had drawn a line at her temple halfway through the fight. She lifted the back of her wrist and wiped it away like she would never let it have the story. Then she looked at the room as if it were a stubborn instrument that had played exactly as she’d known it could.
COMMS stood from their station first, not loud, not performative, just upright. One by one, like rows following a baton, the operators rose. Hands didn’t clap at first-screens did: status bars sliding to green, tags changing to CLEAR, audio channels closing with tidy chimes. Then, somewhere in the back, a tech put two palms together once, twice, and the sound found friends.
It wasn’t a roar. It was an ovation like after a concert that had left every person in the hall knowing they’d watched a professional do an impossible thing and make it look inevitable.
The eight were part of it without meaning to be. Hikari’s mouth had the small curve it wore when a thing had been beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Keahi had her hands on the rail and her shoulders down the way you do after not breathing. Arashi looked like an argument had been torn out of him and replaced with respect. Esen’s rings chimed once, the sound almost like a bow drawn slow. Lynea blinked hard and smiled like she’d learned a secret about control. Ichiro’s jaw had softened, the wrong, brownish gold in his shoulder dim again, quiet as a carved lie.
Kori didn’t applaud. She watched the operators stand for Alteea and let her eyes say the rest. If she and Alteea were mirrors, one was polished harsh and one polished kind, and both knew the trick of not breaking.
Alteea lifted her hand, not to ask for quiet-to accept it. The room’s clapping softened on its own. She rested the headset on the desk as if returning a leash.
"Good work" she said to everyone and no one. "We do it again tomorrow if the world asks."
She turned, found the eight, and the razor of her had already sheathed itself. The grin edged back into her mouth-not wide, not flirting with the day, just a curve that suggested she enjoyed being alive in a room that listened when she spoke.
"Well? Next time is probably be harder! And next time, on the spotlight will probably be you!"
On Alteea’s small nest of controls, on a screen, a forgotten drone’s feed. It was broken, but still transmitting. From the ground, the pure darkness that minutes ago was the Nyx’s body started dissipating. A peaceful sight, seeing the outside shadows crack, and the inside light come out. Behind, all that was left, were glowing ashes, that looked as if they were gilded.