NOVEL NEXT Chapter 256: The Impossibilism of Heroism
Four traumatized women. One stairwell. A building packed with seventy heavily armed professionals converging on us with surgical precision.
The math wasn't just bad—it was suicidal.
I cut Margaret's zip-ties first. Her wrists were shredded raw, blood crusted over from hours of fighting restraints. She flexed her hands like she was testing whether she still owned her own body. No time for comfort—my knife was already sawing through the next set of plastic bonds, each slice releasing women who looked like they'd been broken and stitched back together with terror.
"ARIA, tactical assessment," I thought, brain sprinting.
"Thermal confirms seventy hostiles on-site," she replied, cool as ice while my pulse hammered. "Full tactical teams. Professional spacing, coordinated advances, all exits covered. Probability of surviving a direct confrontation while protecting four civilians: zero percent."
Zero percent. Fuck me.
"Options?"
"Subterranean extraction," ARIA said. "This facility sits on top of abandoned subway freight lines. Only viable route not currently occupied. Access requires structural demolition."
"Do it."
"Acknowledged. Redirecting port fuel trucks into structural columns now."
Of course she was.
Erin Vasquez crumpled the instant her restraints were gone, legs folding like wet paper. The others weren't far behind—shaking, crying, caught somewhere between hysteria and catatonia. Margaret, though—Margaret was pure steel. She got up on shredded legs like she'd been waiting for a chance to fight gravity.
"Can you walk?" I asked her.
"I can do whatever you need me to do," she said, voice steady with that terrifying mom-CEO authority that probably scared corporate boards shitless.
But Elena's voice was already breaking apart: "I can't. My legs… I can't feel my legs."
"Master," ARIA cut in, voice like a scalpel slicing through hope, "twelve hostiles entering basement level. ETA to your position: ninety seconds."
Boots hammered concrete above, closer with each second. Not guards—operators. They moved like a machine with seventy heads and one brain.
Margaret grabbed my arm, her nails biting skin. "Eros, leave us. Save yourself. Charlotte needs you more than—"
"Fuck that," I snapped, racking the stolen AK with enough venom to break metal. "Nobody gets left behind."
Even if every tactical manual in existence was screaming at me about laws of physics and manpower ratios. Four traumatized civilians, one meat shield with attitude, and me against an army. I'd officially crossed from strategy into divine comedy.
"ARIA, building schematic. Tell me there's a miracle door I've missed."
"Master, the facility has structural vulnerabilities I can exploit.... like I said that is the only way out of here.
"Can you tell me the details."
"There's an old subway tunnel system beneath this building—abandoned since the 1980s but still accessible through the basement level. I will create a distraction like I told you master, Something big enough to—"
The floor trembled. Dust poured from the ceiling like cheap horror-movie snow. Dust rained from the concrete ceiling, and the emergency lights flickered.
"What the fuck was that?" I hissed.
"Traffic accident," ARIA said casually. "I redirected a fuel truck into the north wall. Explosion has compromised integrity of support columns. Secondary collision in progress—"
BOOM. The building convulsed like a dying animal. Concrete cracked, lights flickered, women screamed.
"Jesus Christ, ARIA, you're leveling the building on top of us!"
"Affirmative. Controlled demolition provides maximum chaos while masking extraction and eliminating hostile forces."
Yeah, controlled. The kind of control you get from juggling chainsaws while blindfolded.
The basement wall split open, jagged cracks yawning into blackness. Beyond was exactly what ARIA promised: an ancient tunnel system big enough to hide a goddamn freight train. Our exit—or our tomb, depending on how much longer the ceiling stayed above our heads.
"Margaret," I barked, yanking her upright, "you're the anchor. Get the others moving, keep them focused. I'll clear the path."
Automatic fire chewed through the corridor, muzzle flashes painting everything strobe-white. Sparks leapt off concrete like fireworks. Operators had arrived, and they weren't playing games.
We had maybe thirty seconds to turn a suicide pact into a miracle.
I raked the corridor with suppressing fire, the AK-47 bucking against my shoulder, brass casings bouncing off concrete like angry insects.
It wasn't about hitting them—it was about buying heartbeats of time. But these bastards weren't rent-a-cops; they were hunters. They advanced like they'd been rehearsing this exact scenario for months: leapfrogging cover, coordinated bursts, angles tightening like a noose.
One round punched into my shoulder, the jacket eating most of it but still leaving me with fire licking my nerves. Another grazed across my ribs, wet heat blooming beneath the armor.
"Move!" I roared, yanking Erin up under one arm like she weighed nothing. Her legs were dead meat, but her eyes begged for a miracle I wasn't sure I could deliver. "Stay behind me and keep moving!"
ARIA turned the whole goddamn city into a weaponized symphony of chaos. Electrical circuits overloaded, vomiting sparks and fire. Gas lines ruptured, turning hallways into rolling fireballs. Construction equipment, hijacked like obedient war dogs, slammed into structural supports with the force of a charging bull.
"Master," she reported with unnerving calm, "I have activated the facility's fire suppression system. Halon flooding upper levels. Hostile respiratory collapse in sixty seconds."
The ceiling groaned above us like a wounded animal, concrete cracking, dust sifting down in choking curtains. I shoved the women through the jagged hole in the wall, herding them into the black mouth of the subway tunnel. The air stank of rust, mold, and forty years of abandonment.
But the tactical team was still coming—flashlights slicing through the dust, red eyes of laser sights hunting us. Their discipline didn't break, not even as the world collapsed around them.
"Eros!" Margaret screamed as a slab of tunnel ceiling came down, missing Erin by inches. Her voice cracked with a mix of terror and command. "The whole place is coming down on us!"
Dragging four shattered civilians through a collapsing underground while seventy killers hunted us—that wasn't tactics, it was suicide theater. Every step was a calculus of time, cover, and collapsing ceilings. Erin's legs buckled every three meters, dead weight pulling me toward failure.
The youngest one gasped like a fish drowning on dry land, panic reducing her to half a person. The others stumbled, their bodies moving on raw willpower and nothing else.
The math screamed at me: leave one, maybe two, increase survival odds. But every time the thought touched my mind, Margaret's eyes burned through me—steel and terror and desperate trust all welded into one command. Save them all.
That promise was crushing me more than the tons of concrete groaning above.
"ARIA," I rasped through clenched teeth, dragging Erin another step forward while spraying blind fire into the darkness behind us, "how far to the surface?"
"Two hundred meters through the tunnel, Master," ARIA reported, calm while the world collapsed. "Warning: structural instability detected throughout the network. The controlled demolition has destabilized the entire subway grid."
The tunnel stretched ahead into black infinity—salvation or another goddamn trap, impossible to tell. Above us, it felt like Miami itself was on fire, ARIA's digital fingerprints turning infrastructure into a warzone: gas lines rupturing, lights dying, systems tearing themselves apart.
And somewhere in that chaos, a realization hit like another bullet.
Being a savior wasn't about power, or tech, or supernatural gifts. It was about shouldering lives that weren't yours, carrying their terror, their fragility, their fucking hope—even when that weight felt like it was grinding your own soul into dust.
This wasn't the end of the test. It was the beginning.
And I had no fucking clue if I was strong enough to pass.
Perfect. We weren't just escaping—we were sprinting through a collapsing graveyard.
Gunfire barked behind us, echoing through the tunnel like thunder in a coffin. The bastards were still coming, even as the city above them crumbled. Professional dedication or professional stupidity—it didn't matter when the bullets were this real.
A round screamed past my ear, so close it singed the air. I turned, raking the tunnel with a burst. The muzzle flash carved three advancing figures out of the smoke—shadows with rifles and nerves of steel.
"Keep moving!" I roared, lungs burning. Margaret didn't wait for orders—she had Erin slung under one arm, dragging her forward with the kind of ferocity only a mother could summon. The other two stumbled after them, half-running, half-falling, driven more by terror than strength.
The building shook again, concrete screaming as another support gave way.