The pool of fresh blood on the reactor room's cement floor widened, reflecting the dim, dying flicker of the overhead neon lights. Jason lay helpless upon the cold ground. The former operative's breathing sounded exceedingly faint, short, and broken. His body temperature dropped drastically; his lips turned blue, and his deathly pale face broke out in cold sweat due to hypovolemic shock—a critical emergency where the body loses too much blood, starving vital organs of oxygen.

No bullets remained in the magazine. No explosive energy lingered in his muscles. What remained was a suffocating silence accompanied by an agonizing, burning fire scorching his entire frame.

"Jason! Jason, open your eyes, please!" Leo screamed hysterically. The young man in his early twenties gripped Jason's jacket collar tight with both blood-smeared hands, dragging the limp operative's frame with all his might across the slick cement floor.

Leo's tears spilled down his cheeks, mingling with factory grit and soot. The young man's strength was nearly gone, yet an adrenaline surge and overwhelming terror drove him to keep dragging Jason's body away from the center of the reactor hall.

"Ugh..." Jason groaned softly. His eyelids fluttered, opening with agonizing weight through blurred, double-visioned sights. Leo's sobs hummed in his ears, distant and thrumming. "Leo... are... are you okay?"

"I'm fine! But you—your shoulder is bleeding so much, Jason!" Leo sobbed desperately, chest heaving as he successfully hauled Jason's frame inside a cramped, old machine control booth whose glass walls had long since shattered to pieces. The booth was stacked with dusty archived files and rusted, totally dead computer button panels.

Leo propped Jason up to lean against the control booth wall, then tore the remaining fabric of his shirt to re-apply pressure to the gunshot wound on Jason's right shoulder, which kept pumping fresh blood.

Jason swallowed hard against his dry, harsh throat. Every breath felt like inhaling broken glass. He stared intently into Leo's tear-soaked eyes, then shook his head slowly with his remaining wisps of consciousness.

"Listen... listen to me, Leo..." Jason rasped in a whisper, catching in his throat, sounding agonizingly weak yet heavy with profound emotional weight. "You... you have to get out of here right now."

Leo gasped, shaking his head fiercely as he sobbed. "No! I'm not leaving! I'm not leaving you here alone after you risked your life to protect me!"

"Don't be stupid, Leo..." Jason cut in with a ragged voice, a minor cough spitting a trace of blood past his lips. "They aren't hunting me... they're hunting you and the data on that laptop. If you stay here with me, we both die. Our time's up."

"I don't give a damn about the data!" Leo cried out, his voice cracking in a heart-wrenching wail. "What good is living with classified files if the man who saved me bleeds to death right in front of me?! We came in together, we walk out together, Jason!"

"Your life is worth way more than a bullet lodged in my body, kid..." Jason muttered softly, his trembling hand lifting weakly to brush Leo's shoulder with his final reserves of strength. "Take the laptop... run out through the control booth's back window leading to the drainage trench. Don't look back. That's... that's my final order as your protector."

Leo bit his lip until it bled, tears streaming down faster. He stared at Jason's rapidly paling face, realizing this high-stakes gamble had reached its absolute end. His heart shattered into a million pieces; the notion of abandoning the only person who had ever shielded him felt like an absolute betrayal of his own soul.

"I... I can't do it, Jason..." Leo whispered shakily, clutching the laptop tight to his chest. "I'm not a coward who runs while someone else is dying."

Before Jason could answer the young man, the heavy, rhythmic thud of tactical boots suddenly clattered from outside the control booth.

Clack... clack... clack...

The sound was agonizingly close. Crystal clear. Marcus's hit squad had arrived in the reactor room's main corridor, combing every inch of the space with a methodical, lethal pace.

"Check every booth and corner!" the enemy field commander's voice echoed coldly from outside. "The target can't walk far in that state. Find them!"

Leo's heart felt like it stopped beating. He held his breath tight, pressing his frame flat against the control booth wall beside a weak, slumped Jason. Through the shattered gaps of the glass wall, they caught the dark silhouettes of the mercenaries pacing slowly outside the booth, sweeping assault rifle muzzles left and right.

The footsteps drew closer. The squeak of boot rubber against the bloodied cement floor rang out right in front of the rundown control booth's entrance.

Jason clenched his weak left hand, gathering the final micro-reserves of energy left in his broken frame. Even knowing he lacked ammo or a weapon, he braced to push himself up and deliver one last stand to buy Leo a window to escape through the back window.

"Leo... get ready..." Jason whispered ever so faintly, his eyes burning sharp toward the control booth threshold.

The silhouette of a hit squad member clutching a cocked assault rifle began to edge into the booth's doorway. The weapon's dark muzzle slowly swung inward, leveling dead at their hiding spot. Tension inside the control booth peaked; the air felt frozen, and every heartbeat stretched into a punishing eternity.

Yet, right on the precipice of imminent death outside the factory grounds, an anomaly occurred.

It wasn't gunfire that shattered the silence. Instead, the roar of heavy, massive motorized engines suddenly revved savagely, tearing through the midnight quiet outside the industrial park.

Vroooom! Bzzzt!

That was followed by the wailing shriek of high-pitched military vehicle sirens splitting the air, throwing out jagged strobe sweeps of red-and-blue emergency lights that illuminated the old factory's glass walls from without.

Wee-woo... wee-woo... wee-woo!

The hitman who had been about to step inside the control booth abruptly halted his stride. He whipped his head around in shock toward the massive windows facing the exterior courtyard, then frantically raised his handheld radio.

"Command! Command, report! We hear heavy military vehicles breaching the front yard! Are there other units dispatched here?!" the mercenary barked over his radio in mounting panic.

Inside the control booth, Leo and Jason exchanged a stunned look in the dim gloom.

"Military...?" Leo whispered confusedly, staring toward the exterior courtyard where the searchlight beams of armored tactical vehicles flared brightly through the filthy factory glass. "Is... is that official government backup coming to rescue us, Jason?"

Jason furrowed his brow, his ragged breathing freezing for a beat. Instead of relief, his decades-honed operative instincts instantly tripped a blaring alarm bell deep inside his skull. In a city already thoroughly choked by corruption and the Ouroboros syndicate, there was no such thing as a coincidence. And the military never arrived right on cue without someone pulling the strings.