Round 155

The countdown timer on the wall was a stark visual reminder of their rapidly diminishing options—1:45... 1:44... each passing second a metronome counting down to capture or confrontation. Jeane's shield magic flickered around them both, its structural integrity already beginning to fray under the ambient energy shift that had followed the sudden silence.

She turned toward Silra instinctively, seeing her partner frozen mid-motion over the control panel, expression caught between concentration and uncertainty. The slim elf woman's teal eyes were narrowed in focus as she stared at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard in a posture of frustrated indecision.

"You... you didn't mention secondary systems," Jeane said, her voice tight with barely controlled panic. "What did you do?" Silra whirled to face her then, irritation flashing across her features but no denial offered outright. "I was trying to overload the pump system safely so we could escape before water pressure collapsed this section," she hissed back, her fingers still hovering over the keyboard. "But something else is tied into it—something they didn't want anyone finding in the maintenance logs."

The secondary system's humming was getting dangerously loud now—whatever Silra had triggered before Jeane arrived must be tied into something they didn't want anyone finding in the maintenance logs. The code was corrupted with layers of enchantments that shouldn't exist in corporate infrastructure, and every command she tried just made it worse instead of better.

"I'm trying to force a hard reset," she told her partner through gritted teeth, still typing furiously while keeping one eye on the security team outside. "But this thing is fighting back harder than any system I've encountered before."