Chapter 1336
It was not the look of someone pushed to the brink.
Nor was she simply putting on a brave face.
It was the electric thrill of a predator locking onto its prey.
Nicholas’s gaze darkened with raw appreciation, his velvet voice dropping an
octave. “Right now, it’s her game. Let her play it out p>
“Bullshit!” Jasper lost his temper completely. “Are you out of your damn mind? She’s injured and bleeding, and you’re calling it a game p>
Jerrick’s expression turned murderous as he reached out to shove Nicholas aside.
“Jerrick. Jasper p>
Julian’s authoritative voice cut through the chaos after a brief, tense silence, stopping his younger brothers in their tracks.
He shot Nicholas a long, calculating look.
Then, he turned his attention back to the monitor.
On the screen.
Serena’s lip was split, her uniform was torn, and she looked undeniably battered.
But her eyes were astonishingly bright.
They burned with the ferocious, blinding heat of pure battlelust.
There was no panic.
And there was absolutely no hesitation.
After two seconds of heavy silence.
Julian exhaled a long breath, forcefully swallowing his suffocating dread. “He knows her better than we do p>
“If he says she’s playing a game, then we aren’t going to interrupt her p>
“We keep executing our part of the plan p>
His decisive words hit the room like cold water.
The brothers’ explosive fury was forcibly suppressed, replaced by a razor-sharp, lethal composure.
They stopped glaring helplessly at the monitor.
Julian and Jerrick directly stormed the main control sector, leveling their weapons at the Severian administrators and forcing them to surrender full access codes to Pod 10.
Meanwhile, Nicholas and Jasper doubled down on the digital assault, riding the coattails of Serena’s morning virus to utterly decimate The Obsidian Core’s mainframe.
Within seconds.
Every employee in the control center was holding their breath, terrified to even blink.
Inside Apex Simulation Pod 10.
Serena was covered in superficial wounds.
Scrapes branded her arms, bruises darkened her shoulders, and her uniform bore
the jagged tears left behind by the Apex Augments’ claws.
But the smile dancing on her lips only grew more sinister.
Over the course of their dozen relentless clashes.
She had successfully mapped out the exact limitations of these five monstrosities.
They were entirely different beasts compared to the half-baked prototypes she had faced before.
Not only possessed of terrifying kinetic strength and hyper-reactive nerves.
But worst of all, they had retained fragments of primal hunting instincts.
Unlike the mindless drones that simply charged forward to die.
These things tracked her
movements, adjusted their angles of attack to complement one another, and stinctively tried to box ber into tatal killzones.
By eliminating their biological vulnerabilities, The Obsidian Core really had leveled them up.
However.
The stronger a system was, the more glaring its structural flaws became.
She had them completely figured out.
She knew which one was the fastest.
Which one was the most aggressive.
Which one favored flanking maneuvers.
Which one was built like a tank but suffered from a split-second delay in reaction time.
And most importantly.
She knew exactly which one was the alpha dictating the entire pack’s rhythm.
Serena’s eyes flicked over to the first Augment she had clashed with, the one still wearing the hospital gown-Specimen 404.
404 was the most mechanically stable and hyper-aggressive of the bunch.
The other four might have been
larger and more heavily muscledet
but their true combat rhythm was unconsciously synchronized to 404’s lead.
When 404 lunged, they lunged.
When 404 pivoted, they shifted their formation.
They operated like a pack of rabid wolves taking cues from their alpha.
Moreover, Serena had acutely zeroed in on one fatal micro-detail.
After every explosive burst of speed, the Apex Augments experienced a microscopic
fraction of a second of bodily lag.
It was so brief it was nearly imperceptible.
Not only that, but every time they hit the peak of their frenzied charge, the veins bulging along their chests and necks pulsed in terrifying unison?