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De Molay snapped his fingers.

The heavy steel doors of the command center slid open again. Twelve tactical guards poured into the room, their assault rifles raised. But the crimson dots of their laser sights did not paint Elias.

They painted Alistair.

"The schism is complete," De Molay announced, the absolute certainty of victory radiating from his massive frame. "The Malta faction now controls the physical perimeter of the vault. Relinquish command of Baphomet, Alistair. And you, boy," he pointed at Elias, "hand over the cipher, and you can retain your seat at the algorithmic table in the new empire."

Elias calculated the variables. Twelve rifles. Two targets. Zero cover.

Alistair didn't flinch as the laser sights settled on his chest. He looked at Elias, a silent communication passing between the Grand Master and his newest Knight. It was the same look Alistair had given him when he offered him the sword—a demand for absolute, lethal efficiency.

"I won't give you the drive, De Molay," Elias said loudly, intentionally drawing the Commander’s attention, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet.

"Then we will take it from your corpse," De Molay rumbled, nodding to the guards.

"Baphomet," Alistair commanded, his voice cutting through the tension with the sharpness of a diamond blade. "Execute Protocol: Jacques de Molay. Authorization: Grand Master."

The quantum core behind them didn't hum. It screamed.

A blinding, strobe-light sequence of intense emerald green erupted from the core, instantly flooding the command center. At the exact same microsecond, the deafening roar of the argonite fire suppression system—the exact same system Elias had triggered in Canary Wharf—detonated in the server farm outside the glass walls.

The heavy glass partitions of the command center shattered inward, blown apart by the violent, pressurized shockwave of the freezing gas.

Visibility plummeted to zero in a fraction of a heartbeat.

The tactical guards fired wildly into the blinding white vapor, the deafening cracks of the 5.56mm rounds ricocheting off the obsidian consoles and the steel grating.

Elias didn't hesitate. He knew the layout. He knew the latency.

He threw himself horizontally across the haptic console, diving through the shattered glass partition just as a burst of automatic fire chewed through the spot where he had been standing. He landed hard on the steel gantry outside the command center, the freezing argonite gas instantly searing his lungs.

"Elias!" Alistair’s voice barked from the thick white fog, remarkably close.

Elias crawled toward the sound, finding the Grand Master crouched behind a shattered server rack. Alistair had drawn a compact, matte-black handgun, blood seeping from a shallow laceration on his forehead where the glass had grazed him.

"The extraction tunnel!" Alistair shouted over the roar of the gas and the blind gunfire. "The Malta faction controls the main lift and the culvert. We have to go deeper."

"He wants to weaponize the Grail!" Elias coughed, clutching the USB drive tightly in his fist. "If he gets control of Baphomet—"

"He cannot control Baphomet without my biometric keys," Alistair said, returning fire into the blinding fog, dropping one of the advancing tactical guards. "But he has hijacked half the server network. He’s initiating a hard fork of the ledger."

They moved low and fast, navigating the labyrinth of boiling fluorinert vats by memory. The argonite gas was beginning to dissipate, but the gunfire was growing more concentrated. De Molay’s men were flanking them, using thermal optics to track their heat signatures through the freezing vapor.

Elias drew his suppressed 9mm, providing covering fire as they reached a massive, un-marked steel blast door at the very rear of the cavern, directly beneath the roaring intake of the glacial river.

Alistair pressed his bloody palm against the biometric scanner beside the door. It flashed green, and the heavy steel slid open with a hydraulic hiss.

They scrambled inside, and Alistair hit the manual override, slamming the door shut and engaging the heavy magnetic deadbolts just as a barrage of high-caliber rounds sparked against the outer steel.

They were in a narrow, dimly lit maintenance shaft that plunged steeply downward into the bedrock of the mountain. It smelled of ozone and ancient stone.

Alistair leaned against the damp rock wall, breathing heavily. He looked older now, the pristine image of the invincible Grand Master finally cracking under the weight of the civil war he had just witnessed.

"He has the mountain," Alistair rasped, checking the magazine of his handgun. "He has the server farm. And by morning, he will have half of the Order’s dark liquidity."

"But he doesn't have the equation," Elias said, holding up the USB drive. "And he doesn't have Baphomet's core predictive matrix."

"No," Alistair agreed, a grim determination hardening his silver eyes. "But De Molay is not a quant, Elias. He is a blunt instrument. He doesn't need the elegance of the Grail equation to cause chaos. He has enough capital to brute-force a margin call on a global scale. We have been ousted from our own cathedral."

Elias looked down the dark shaft, realizing that he had just traded one manhunt for an infinitely more dangerous one. Interpol wanted him for embezzlement. The Malta faction of the Knights Templar wanted him dead for the USB drive in his hand.