"Move! Move! Move!" The Broker screamed, his wide frame moving with an unnatural, hydraulic-assisted speed as he slammed his palm against a hidden lever beneath his desk.
The back wall of the bunker split open with a mechanical shriek, revealing a private, highly automated fabrication laboratory. Robotic arms tipped with laser-welders hung from the ceiling like mechanical spiders, suspended over a glowing containment vat filled with a dark, shimmering liquid fabric.
"That's the Midnight Weave," Rora gasped, her tech-goggles whirring as she analyzed the fluid. "It's not just cloth... it's an active nano-polymer mesh!"
"I don't care if it's woven from the hair of the Grandmaster himself," The Broker wheezed, typing into a master console with furious speed. "Get him inside the tailoring tube! If that rail-cannon hits while the fabric is uncalibrated, the whole lab is going to detonate like a fusion bomb!"
Zayn didn't need to be told twice. He stepped into the vertical glass cylinder in the center of the room. The moment the glass doors sealed, the oversized grey jumpsuit was automatically sheared away by micro-lasers, leaving him standing in his underwear while his battle IQ monitored the countdown timer.
[Time to Impact: 04:15]
[Fabrication Status: Initializing Calibration]
[Warning: Physical Body is under severe stress from rapid atmospheric shift]
"Zayn!" Rora yelled through the comm-intercom, her fingers flying over her own portable terminal as she connected her system to the lab's main grid. "The Midnight Weave requires a biological anchor to set its baseline properties. It's going to read your Primal Core data. If your system glitches out during the synthesis, the fabric will literally shrink and crush your ribs into dust!"
"Then ensure your calculations do not contain an error margin," Zayn's voice came through the speaker, perfectly calm, his pulse rate a steady, unnatural 60 beats per minute despite the red warning lights strobing through the glass. "The current atmospheric pressure in this tube is 1.2 bars. Increase the nitrogen feed by three percent to stabilize the polymer synthesis."
The Broker looked up from his console, his cybernetic eye bulging. "How does a slave-pit glitch know how to calibrate a Grade-A nano-loom?!"
"I read the operational manual on your desk while you were panic-screaming," Zayn replied deadpanned. "It was remarkably poorly written. The grammar in section four was highly inefficient."
Before The Broker could launch into a stroke, the ceiling above the outer bunker disintegrated.
A six-inch solid titanium rail-slug, moving at Mach 7, punched straight through forty feet of solid volcanic rock and iron plating. The shockwave alone flattened the outer office, turning the desk, the cybernetic guards, and the expensive vibro-knife into a cloud of metallic shrapnel.
The blast wave slammed into the fabrication lab's reinforced glass wall, spider-webbing the thick material but failing to breach it.
"They're here!" Rora screamed, ducking behind a heavy equipment rack as the sound of boots and plasma fire erupted in the outer forge. The Orthodoxy purification squad was pouring through the hole in the roof, their white armor glowing with a harsh, unyielding light.
Inside the tube, the dark liquid polymer erupted from the nozzles.
It didn't fall like water; it drifted like smoke, wrapping around Zayn's pale limbs, his torso, and his shoulders. The moment the black fibers touched his skin, his system interface exploded with a cascade of gold text.
[New Equipment Integrated: Midnight Nano-Tunic (Prototype)]
[Quality: Tier-4 (Custom Variant)]
[Properties: 99.2% Spectral Absorption, Localized Gravity-Dampening (+10% Movement Speed)]
[System Notice: The Wardrobe Deficit has been resolved. You look terrifying again.]
Zayn felt the cold, flexible material tighten against his frame, perfectly molding to his muscles like a second skin. It was light, almost weightless, but the moment it locked into place, the gold ether leaking from his skin was instantly suppressed. To the outside world's sensors, he had completely vanished from the map.
The glass doors of the tube slid open.
Zayn stepped out into the smoke-filled lab. The oversized grey jumpsuit was gone. In its place was a sleek, pitch-black tunic that seemed to drink the very light of the room, detailed with faint, glowing gold geometric lines along the collar and cuffs—the signature marks of his Primal calibration.
He flexed his right hand. The movement was silent, smooth, and completely devoid of the friction resistance his old clothes had.
[Time to Cooldown: 11:28:00]
[Physical Output: 30% (Boosted by Equipment Efficiency)]
"Beautiful," The Broker whispered from the floor, his hand clutching a bleeding wound on his shoulder where a piece of shrapnel had caught him. "It's a masterpiece. Now... use it to kill those holy bastards before they turn my life's work into scrap metal!"
Zayn didn't look at him. He walked over to the shattered glass wall, peering through the smoke into the outer bunker. Three paladins were currently advancing through the debris, their plasma rifles raised, their gold visors scanning the room for his signature.
"They can't see me," Zayn whispered, his battle IQ calculating the tactical layout of the rubble. "Their visors are still tuned to the high-density gold signature. Because the tunic has neutralized the leakage, their algorithm is currently treating this room as an empty square."
"So what's the play?" Rora asked, crawling over to his side with her wrench gripped tightly in both hands. "We run through the vent lines?"
"Running is a linear response," Zayn said, his golden eyes narrowing as he spotted a severed high-voltage cable from the rail-cannon impact dangling directly over a puddle of conductive hydraulic fluid right beneath the paladins' boots.
He looked down at his own hands, his fingers twitching with a faint, sparks of raw, uncalibrated mana.
"Rora," Zayn deadpanned, a dark, terrifyingly quiet smile pulling at his lips. "Do you know what happens when you introduce a multi-million-volt circuit to an automated holy armor suit that relies on an ungrounded internal chassis?"
Rora blinked, her dark eyes widening behind her goggles. "They fry from the inside out."
"Precisely," Zayn said, stepping over the shattered glass into the smoke. "Let's teach the Orthodoxy a lesson in basic electrical engineering."