His voice was velvety and polite.
But the words he spoke...
Held a frigid, uncompromising finality.
Commander Richter was forced to freeze in his tracks.
He glared at the man who had seamlessly positioned himself as The Panacea's vanguard.
His face twisted in utter frustration.
Joker.
Dealing with The Panacea was a nightmare on its own.
Now, the world's most lethal arms dealer was backing her play.
Taking Specimen Fourteen back by force...
Was now a statistical impossibility.
Behind Julian's broad shoulders.
Serena didn't even bat an eyelash.
It was as if she had calculated the exact moment...
Joker would step up and clear the trash out of her way.
Her fingers continued their relentless assault on the console.
Line after line of highly classified data was forcefully dragged into the light.
A few seconds later.
Her hands suddenly stopped.
She stared at a deeply encrypted injection log on the screen.
A bone-chilling coldness slowly spread across her gaze.
So that was it.
The cocktail Obsidian Sun was pumping into Fourteen...
Wasn't just a heavy-duty sedative.
Mixed perfectly into the tranquilizer...
Was a specialized synthetic compound designed to supercharge the augmented genetics.
Under normal circumstances.
This compound rode the coattails of the sedative, seamlessly suppressing Fourteen's consciousness.
Keeping the asset trapped in a deep, chemically induced coma.
But if the dosage was remotely altered.
The sedative would instantly neutralize.
Leaving the secondary compound to run rampant.
It would violently shock Fourteen's mutated genes.
Driving his nervous system, muscle fibers, and primal killing instincts...
Into absolute, unhinged overdrive in a matter of seconds.
Simply put.
This cocktail...
Was both the leash keeping Fourteen asleep...
And the self-destruct mechanism Obsidian Sun could detonate at a moment's notice.
The second Fourteen slipped through their fingers.
Or fell into enemy hands.
All Obsidian Sun had to do was remotely tweak the chemical balance.
Fourteen would go completely feral.
A devastating, wicked smile bloomed across her pale, striking features.
"Terrified I'd find Fourteen."
"Terrified I'd claim him."
"So terrified that..."
She tapped a slender finger against the encrypted chemical data on the screen.
"You're willing to manually destroy an asset worth billions."
Those words.
Made Richter's pupils shrink to pinpricks.
She found it!
This Panacea...
Had actually managed to dissect their ultimate fail-safe with just a glance at the raw data!
Richter's stomach hit the floor.
He couldn't stall any longer.
The Panacea's grasp of their bio-engineering was terrifyingly leagues beyond what they had anticipated.
If he let her keep her hands on Fourteen...
Not only would they lose the asset forever.
But she might completely dismantle their Omega Purge Protocol.
Rather than letting Fourteen fall into the hands of The Panacea and Joker...
It was better to annihilate it right now.
At the very least...
They could bury Obsidian Sun's darkest secrets along with Fourteen's corpse.

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