"He's gone," Vincent rasped, the word sounding like a death sentence.
Klaus froze. He looked at the Vincent, then at the flickering, unstable rift behind him. For a split second, the "mush" in Klaus's brain cleared—he saw the blood, he saw a friend's agony, and a phantom of a memory clawed at his throat. But it was gone as quickly as it came, replaced by the cold directive of his HUD.
"Target re-acquired," Klaus's comms unit chirped.
"Vincent, the rift is closing!" Sonia screamed, dragging herself toward him.
Vincent grabbed Yunli's arm and reached for Sonia, his fingers digging into their sleeves. He looked at the AXILE specialists surging through the doorway.
"We're leaving," Vincent growled.
He didn't wait for them to move. He collapsed the space around the three of them, pulling them into the shrinking event horizon of the rift just as Scarlet's blade sliced through the empty air.
The room imploded. The windows of the hotel suite shattered outward as the vacuum of the closing portal pulled the oxygen out of the air.
When the light faded, the room was empty.
Klaus stood in the center of the ruins, his gun still raised. He looked down at the floor, seeing the flour-dusted footprints Vincent had left behind.
"The boy," Klaus whispered into his comms, his voice hollow. "He jumped with the others. They're out of the hotel."
Through the earpiece, Ian's voice returned—no longer calm, but vibrating with a new, dark obsession. "Let them run for now, Klaus. They are heading for the bridge. But they are carrying a ghost with them. And a ghost is very easy to track."
On the desk in the bakery, the skull of Oscar sat in Tess's hand, its empty sockets staring into the dark. The game had changed. It was no longer an auction or a mission.
It was a hunt.
The silence in the ruined hotel suite was absolute, save for the low, rhythmic hum of the tactical reactor Klaus held in his gloved hand. It was a "Frequency Compass," a prototype from Division Three designed to lock onto the unique bio-signatures of MACE operatives.
Klaus looked at the digital display. Three pulses—Sonia, Yunli, and the jagged, flickering signal of Vincent—were jumping across the map of Paris. They weren't moving through the streets; they were blinking across the grid, the distance of each jump staggering.
"They're tearing the fabric," Klaus whispered, his voice a gravelly rasp. "That guy is burning his body to bypass the city's dampeners."
Behind him, Scarlet and the armored specialists prepared to descend to the street. Klaus didn't wait for the elevator. He turned and sprinted toward the shattered balcony, his boots crunching on the glass.
"Maintain the perimeter!" Klaus commanded over the comms. "All units, return to your vehicles. Hot pursuit on the southern transit line. I'll track them from the skyline."
With a powerful leap, Klaus cleared the gap between the hotel and the neighboring apartment complex. He moved with a terrifying, mechanical fluidness, his reinforced suit absorbing the impact as he rolled and rose into a full sprint across the zinc rooftops. He was a black shadow against the moonlit snow, avoiding the crowded boulevards below to keep the mission's "spectacle" contained. Below him, the roar of AXILE armored APCs ignited, their sirens silent but their speed lethal as they began a synchronized chase through the labyrinth of the city.
The South Port of Paris
The air at the Seine's edge was freezing, the river water thick with slush. Vincent stumbled out of a final, unstable rift, his boots hitting the rusted metal of the pier. He didn't fall, but he swayed, his eyes so bloodshot they looked like twin orbs of rubies. The capillaries had shattered under the pressure of the multi-kilometer jumps; he was seeing the world through a veil of red.
"Vincent, stay with us!" Yunli cried, catching him by the shoulder. Her own red hair was wild, her servant's uniform torn and stained with the soot of the bakery.
Behind them, Sonia was already signaling toward the dark water. From the depths of the harbor, a sleek, needle-shaped silhouette broke the surface. It was an Ultra-Speed Submarine, a MACE extraction vessel coated in radar-absorbent polymer.
The hatch hissed open. Two MACE agents, clad in grey tactical gear, surged out to haul the exhausted team inside.
"Go! Go! Go!" Sonia screamed, glancing back at the rooftops.
In the distance, she could see a lone figure—Klaus—leaping from a cathedral spire to a warehouse roof, closing the distance with impossible speed. Behind him, the headlights of a dozen AXILE vehicles began to crest the hill, their engines screaming in the night.
"Seal the hatch!" the pilot roared.
The submarine submerged just as a volley of kinetic rounds from Klaus's sidearm hissed into the freezing water, leaving trails of steam. By the time the AXILE convoy reached the pier, the water was still. The reactor in Klaus's hand went flat, the signals vanishing into the deep thermal layers of the river.
Klaus stood at the edge of the pier, his chest heaving. He looked out at the dark water, his hand tightening around the reactor until the casing cracked. They were gone.
The AXILE Command Hub
Ian sat in his chair, the glow of the monitors reflecting off his round spectacles. When the notification of the "Extraction Confirmed" flashed across his screen, he didn't scream or throw his glass. He simply let out a long, slow sigh, the sound of a man acknowledging a minor setback in a much larger game.
"The boy has more grit than I calculated," Ian murmured, tapping his fingers on the armrest. "No matter. We have the neural imprints from the skull. The 'Eye' is safe. The auction was a success."
He turned his head as the door to the lab slid open. Mahito stood there, his two blades sheathed at his back, his expression unreadable.
"The theater is over, Ian," Mahito said, his voice cold and final. "I have the serum. I have seen your 'Divisions.' I have fulfilled my role as your guest, and I find the air in this city has grown... stale."
"Leaving so soon, Mahito?" Ian asked, a thin smile playing on his lips. "The Dark Magic user was looking forward to a demonstration of your swordsmanship."
"I do not perform for witches," Mahito replied. He turned on his heel. "I have my own war to return to. Do not let your obsession with MACE distract you from the shipment. If the rest of the serum isn't at the docks by dawn, our next meeting will not be so 'civil.'"
Mahito led his group—the silent, disciplined shadows of the Yakuza—out of the compound and down to the private docks. Their personal ship, a massive, black-hulled vessel, waited for them. The crates containing the Division technologies were loaded with precision.
As the ship pulled away from the Parisian coast, heading toward the open sea, Mahito stood on the deck, looking back at the glowing lights of the AXILE tower. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, blood-stained scrap of cloth—a piece of Vincent's bakery vest he had snagged during the fight.
"The boy is a door," Mahito whispered to the wind. "And doors are meant to be opened."
The ship vanished into the fog, leaving the broken city behind, while in the depths of the ocean, the MACE submarine sped toward a hidden base, carrying a team that was broken, mourning, and ready for revenge.
End of Season 1