Chapter 148 - Severing the Bloodline Protocol
"You should have stayed in the deep, Marcus!" Vance snarled, lunging forward with a brutal downward slash aimed at my throat.
I parried the strike with the hardened carbon-fiber guard of my tactical glove, the blade screeching across the polymer. The close confines of the helicopter cabin left no room for marksmanship. I drove an elbow violently into his shattered left shoulder, exploiting his injury.
Vance gasped, his face draining of color, but his military conditioning kept him fighting. He headbutted me viciously, the impact cracking the edge of my visor and sending stars across my vision.
We crashed into the aluminum deck of the cabin, rolling across the blood-slick floorboards as the helicopter bucked in the turbulence generated by *Leviathan-01* below.
"You think you're fighting for a home?!" Vance spat blood into my face as he tried to force the combat knife toward my jugular. "Whispering Pines was never a home! Your mother financed this entire project with the hundred and ten thousand dollars you wired her over the last three years! She told you Arthur needed surgery! She told you Clara was facing eviction! Every dime went into the black-budget telemetry array beneath your private dock!"
The words hit me harder than any physical blow.
The memory burned through my mind with sickening clarity: my mother's tearful phone calls during my rare shore leaves, begging for cash transfers to keep the family afloat, to pay off Arthur’s fraudulent lenders, to keep Clara out of prison. I had drained my Navy combat bonuses, my investments, every cent of my deployment pay—$110,000 sent in good faith to protect the people who were supposed to love me.
And every single dollar had been funneled into an abyssal weapons platform.
"She lied to you, Commander!" Vance laughed through his bloodied teeth. "And now you’re going to die for a lie!"
Rage—pure, cold, and absolute—flooded my veins.
I stopped fighting the knife. Instead, I twisted my torso, letting the blade slice through my shoulder strap, and drove my right thumb deep into the bullet wound on Vance's shoulder.
His laughter turned into a blood-curdling shriek of agony.
With my left hand, I ripped the knife from his weakened grip, reversed the blade, and drove the steel hilt violently into his temple. Vance's eyes rolled back, and his body went limp against my chest.
I kicked his unconscious form away, breathing heavily, chest heaving.
In the corner of the cabin, Clara was staring at me in horrified silence. She looked at the blood on my uniform, the cold emptiness in my eyes, and shrank back until her spine hit the bulkheads.
"Marcus..." she whispered, trembling so violently her teeth clicked together. "You... you knew? Mom did this?"
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"No, Clara," I said, my voice dead and devoid of warmth as I stood up and leveled my weapon at the cockpit door. "I didn't know. But you knew you were stealing a house that didn't belong to you. And that makes you just as guilty as the monsters who built it."
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