Apocalyptic Rebirth: With a repairman system space, she rises again.-Chapter 624: A trap.

Sunshine scratched the table with her nail, "System, are you saying that this is a good idea or not?" Her voice held bits of desperation. She was in a hurry to get answers, deal with the threat and move on.

[ Neither. But I advise that you perform a controlled test on a single sac. If the liquid crystallizes and you shatter it without any problems, then proceed to total clearance. To increase your chances of success, you can shoot the mutant suppressants into the sac. They work across many species.]

Sunshine’s heart skipped a beat. It was a two-pronged approach. If freezing did not work, the suppressants would weaken whatever was inside the sacs. "I like that, thank you system."

Sunshine relayed the options to the room, skipping the part where the system sounded like a pessimistic math teacher. "We test it on one. If it shatters, we move to the rest. If it doesn’t, we use suppressants and if both don’t work... well, we will cross the bridge when we get there."

"I like those odds better than doing nothing," Elio said, already heading for the door with a grim grin. "I’ll go round up the ice people and put them in exo suits."

"Make sure they all agree to wear the exo suits because they are going out of the bubble. It is not optional." Hades instructed. The last time superhumans decided it was optional, they had died in a forest. They were not taking unnecessary risks today.

"And Elio?" Sunshine called out, her voice softening with genuine concern. "The scientists from biohazard team will be out there on the ground."

Major Elio frowned, it sounded dangerous. "Why? Is it necessary? They ate not fighters; they will just be a burden." His confusion mirrored that of the rest.

"They need to get a sample of that fluid the second the sac cracks. We need to know what we’re fighting before the rest of them decide to wake up." She replied. "If we can get a whole sac, that might even be better."

Elio gave a sharp salute and marched out, his boots echoing with a purpose that finally replaced the heavy silence of dread. Sunshine turned back to the screen, watching the pulsating pods. "May God help us," she whispered to herself mostly.

Lisha looked at her and made the sign of the cross, never had she seen Sunshine not confident before a mission and that scared her.

The meeting was temporarily ended and people left to see how they could contribute to the new mission.

Before Sunshine could step out of the command center, Lisha caught her hand, her face pale in the glow of the monitors. She pulled up a wide-angle satellite feed from a drone that made Sunshine frown. "Look at the thermal map, Suni," Lisha whispered. "The sacs... they aren’t a global event. They aren’t even in the neighboring territories. They are hovering only over Fortress Four."

Sunshine stared at the screen. The glowing yellow dots formed a perfect, suffocating halo around the areas covered by the bubble and nowhere else. "It’s the Watchers, they’re targeting us," she said, her voice grim. "We humiliated them in the last skirmish. This isn’t just an invasion anymore, Lisha. It’s a grudge match and I for one intend to win."

Forty minutes later, the sky was a battlefield of nerves. Sunshine was strapped into an exo suit, hovering alongside the Cryokinetic squads. Below them, the fortress looked like a toy city, above them, the thousands of pulsating eggs felt like a ceiling made of nightmares.

"Everyone, stay sharp." Major Elio’s voice crackled over the comms. "Keep your distance. We freeze one, we crack it, the scientists get the sample, and we get out. Do not_ I repeat, do not_ get creative."

They did not notice that the Watchers were also preparing themselves to do something. But it was because the birds were pretending to be playing as usual. They were not acting like they did when they were up to their usual tricks.

Sunshine moved nearer to one of the sacs. She took a deep, steadying breath, centering the cold energy in her chest. She stretched her hands toward the nearest sac, her fingers beginning to frost over with a brilliant blue light.

Click!

"Purple! Stop! Get out of there now!"

The voice on the radio was Zulu, and she sounded like she was screaming from the bottom of a well.

"Zulu? What are you talking about?" Sunshine shouted back, but the momentum was already gone. The blast of absolute zero had already left her palms. A beam of crystalline frost slammed into the sac, turning the yellow membrane into a milky, brittle shell of ice in seconds.

"It’s a trap, Purple! They wanted us to touch them!" Zulu’s voice was frantic, breaking through the static. "The biological signature just changed! They aren’t nurseries, they’re_"

"A trap?" Sunshine repeated, her heart stopping.

She looked at the frozen sac. It stood out like a sore thumb against the thousands of squishy, yellow pods. Suddenly, the corner of her eye caught movement. A Watcher_Pink to be precise, she emerged from the clouds above, a cruel, jagged stone in her hand. With a mocking flick of her wrist, Pink tossed the rock.

Clink!

The frozen sac didn’t just crack; it shattered like a dropped mirror. But instead of a half-formed embryo falling on the bubble, a massive, obsidian-black head lunged through the shards.

"Oh God!" Sunshine cried staring at it. "Is that.... Is that a dragon?"

[No, it is an Arcladon, supposed to be extinct.] Her system chimed in.

"Apparently not." Sunshine answered, preparing herself to face it.

The massive dragon had jagged obsidian scales and violet-veined wings. Its powerful body pulsed with blue energy, while its cold, glowing eyes watched the fortress.

"Engage to release the fire cooling system!" She shouted to the officers in the command center. "It is about to rain fire. Tell Hades to engage protocol Z."

The Arcladon unfurled wings that looked like tattered shadows, letting out a wail so loud and so shrill that the glass in Sunshine’s interceptor began to crack, forming patterns like spiderweb. It wasn’t a baby; it was a fully grown engine of destruction that had been waiting for the "shell" to be brittle enough to break.

"Abort! Abort!" Major Elio’s voice was a panicked roar over the radio. "Get the scientists back to safety."

But the Watchers weren’t done. Like a coordinated team of demonic gift-wrappers, they descended from the higher atmosphere and lifted off the bubble. They didn’t wait for the creatures to hatch. They began tearing the membranes open with their claws, slicing through the "veins" and letting the yellow fluid rain down on the fortress like a toxic monsoon.