Neon Crucible

The Las Vegas Strip burns on the retina as Aiden's beastly claws sink into the car's AR navigation screen. The holographic projection of Caesar's Palace was collapsing, revealing the Blood Altar three hundred metres below ground, the neon tubes that wrapped around the casino risers actually glass conduits filled with plasma.

'Fifteen per cent efficacy remaining on the cerebral cortex inhibitor.' Leah stuck a nerve stabiliser into Aiden's carotid artery, 'Bite the slot machine when you see it, that's the Bloods' pain resonator.'

Aiden heard his bone marrow playing Chopin's Funeral March as the conversion van burst through the revolving doors of the Wynn Hotel. The crystal chandelier in the casino's dome burst, and the falling Swarovski shards reconfigured themselves in the air into a cage of thorns, pinning him to the blackjack table.

'Buy-in.' The Dutchman ripped off his human skin mask to reveal the mechanical jaw of a Masksala squire, 'The bet is on his sister's ventricular valve.'

The roulette wheel began to spin, each numbered grid the face of Emily in agony. As the ivory ball fell into the 28th notch, Aiden found his right paw turning into a quantum superposition state - existing in the chip stacks of the seven croupiers at the same time.

Leia's hacking dagger stabbed into the base of the roulette wheel, 'This is the Neural Memory Gambit, wager on the big moments of your life!'

Aiden's pupils were suddenly flooded with a sea of images: the moment he deflected a baseball bat for his sister at the age of thirteen, the moment he awakened his night vision in the freezer, the moonlight trajectory of the axe swing that severed the vampire. When the memory fragments settle on his mother's dying bed, all the casino slots spit out a torrent of silver coins at the same time.

'Emotionally redundant data exploitation, beautiful!' The Asian woman smashed through bulletproof glass tossing in the holy relic revolver, 'but the real gambling only begins now.'

Mashsara emerges from the poker pyramid, the dark pattern on his suit a flowing Dead Sea Scrolls. When the ancient bloodbender snapped his fingers, the entire casino was plunged into absolute darkness, with only the shimmering light from the gamblers' carotid arteries flickering like star charts in the void.

Aiden's night vision evolved with spectral analysis, and he saw that there was a World War II-era nuclear test well buried underneath the casino, and the coffin of Mashshara was drawing energy from the radioactive dust. The moment the wolf's paw gripped the revolver, the hilt emerged as a reflection of his sister bound by a data chain.

'Russian roulette, modern version.' Maskala filled the nest with five Uranium-235 bullets, 'Each empty shot you fire will unlock one of Emily's soul shackles.'

The sound of the firing pin of the first shot stilled all the dice in the air. Aiden sniffed the cesium 137 radiation on the trigger and suddenly realised that the trajectory trajectory matched his sister's brainwave mapping perfectly. As the second shot grazed his temple, the casino dome revealed a holographic projection of the mushroom cloud from the 1945 atomic bomb test.

As the smoke from the fourth shot cleared, Aiden noticed that the revolver had turned into the shape of an IV stand. A hologram of Oppenheimer's eulogy lights up at the location of Mashshara's heart, and the flowing radioactive dust is reconfiguring itself into the outline of a Nazi clock.

'The last two shots were chain reactions.' The Blood Elder's skin crackled with nuclear detonation codes, 'Hit me and it triggers a nuclear explosion, don't hit and it's ...'

Emily's scream suddenly spilled out of all the playing cards. Aiden's bestial pupils shrink into Fermi Paradox symbols as he pulls the trigger at his temple - the shockwave of the fifth shot topples the casino floor, revealing the boiling pool of plutonium solution below.

Maskala's sneer freezes on her face, and what floats out of the nest of bullets is actually the remnants of Aiden's moonlight from when he swung his axe at the convenience store. All of the casino's mirrors blew up at the same time, and Leia took the opportunity to catapult the EMP into the nuclear test silo, 'He's tampered with the probability cloud! Jump!'

The silver hairs on Aiden's back evolved graphene shields as he crashed into the pool of plutonium solution holding his sister's data-spirit. Maskala's roar turned into infrasound that shattered half of the Las Vegas Strip, and as the nuclear blast shockwave caught up with her, Aiden saw his own shadow split into two separate individuals in the radioactive dust - his human form being consumed by his werewolf form.

Dawn sunlight poured into his wounds like liquid mercury as he broke out of the ground. Aiden kneels at the edge of the Hoover Dam and discovers that his sister's spirit is absorbing the nuclear radiation to grow a photonic plexus. The car radio suddenly auto-plays 'God Bless America' and a husky female voice chants the modified lyrics, 'Holy blood flows in Silicon Valley, wolves are reborn on the dark web ...'

The Asian woman wiped her wolfsbane dart and said in a hushed voice, 'What you have just won is not a victory, but a promotion to Sequence 6, Plutonium Heartbreaker.' She pointed to the ghostly blue light pulsing inside Aiden's chest, 'The amount of radiation in your body right now is enough to kill all the Blood Servants in a ten-mile radius.'

Emily's spirit suddenly opened her eyes in a quantum entangled state, and a holographic map of the Nevada desert emerged from her fingertips. At the coordinates of Area 51, Maskala's coffin was in orbit as a black hole swallowing military satellites.

The guard towers of Area 51 twisted into giant ribs in the sandstorm, and Aiden's radiant vision penetrated three thousand metres of rock. The coffins of Mashshara were gnawing away at the iridium-alloy skeletons of military satellites, and the metal remnants of those that had crashed into the earth grew bleeding tubes of ground vines.

'This is a Navajo forbidden land.' The aboriginal shaman slashed Aiden's protective suit with a flint knife, 'The stars cry out from your core.'

As the wolf's claws touched the thunderbird totem on the petroglyphs, Aiden's consciousness suddenly plummeted into a superconducting quantum interferometer. He sees the truth of the 1947 Roswell incident - it wasn't a flying saucer that crashed, but a blackstone obelisk brought by Maskala from ancient Babylon, etched with a holographic representation of Cain's genetic chain.

Leia's augmented reality glasses suddenly burst into sparks, 'He's reconstructing the Blood bible with alien energy!'

It wasn't the desert that surfaced in the sandstorm, but the datamined battlefields of ancient Mesopotamia. Ghosts of Assyrian cavalrymen held up bronze spears embedded with wafers, and chariot wheels were actually spinning blockchain nodes. The plutonium core of Aiden's chest resonates with the obelisk, leaving uranium-238 decay trails with every step.

'Quantum wolfing countdown initiated!' The Asian woman jabbed a neural synchroniser into her temple, 'Remember, every reality realm death weakens you in the main world.'

Aiden's molecular structure began quantum tunnelling as memories from seven parallel worlds flooded in simultaneously. In one fragment of reality, he saw himself wearing the insignia of the Silvermoon Brotherhood and hand-delivering his sister to the altar of the Bloods; in another realm, Mashsara was using his spine to decode the doomsday programming on the Obelisk.

The aboriginal shaman suddenly performs a rain dance, and the cumulonimbus clouds in the crater actually coalesce into plasma giant wolves. The moment Aiden's quantum claws touched the Obelisk, footage of nuclear testing in the 1950s suddenly overlaid reality - twelve wolf-headed, radioactive spectres stood up in the mushroom cloud, humming an altered version of The Star-Spangled Banner Will Never Fall.

'Resonate with the bloodline!' Leia tossed in the cryopod, in which hovered the frozen right eye of the Brotherhood leader from thirty years ago.

Aiden pressed the eye into the obelisk's groove, and Maskala's coffin suddenly hissed like a supernova explosion. An image that made all the Bloods tremble emerged on the surface of the black stone: the genetic chain of Cain was being rewritten into a werewolf RNA helix, and the rewriter's signature field was clearly Emily's golden blood code.

'So my sister is the real...!' Aiden's quantum state body suddenly collapsed, the memories of the seven realms superimposed into blood-coloured equations on his retina.

Mashsara tore through the rift in space-time and descended, his suit transformed into flowing dark matter, holding a scepter that was actually the focusing lens of the Hubble telescope. As the Deadlight sweeps across the desert, Aiden completes his quantum wolf-ification in the last 0.7 seconds - the claws of a wolf that exists in seven timelines at once penetrate the quantum heart of the Blood Elder.

The Obelisk disintegrates into a swarm of nanites, and Aiden falls to his knees in the real desert. The spirit of his sister emerges from the void, her hair wrapped in galactic cantilever-like bands of light. The shaman's drums suddenly stilled, and everyone's heartbeats synchronised to the fluctuating frequency of cosmic microwave background radiation.

'What you killed was only the seventh incarnation of Mashsara.' Leia's flat panel displayed the anomalous output of nuclear power plants across the globe, 'His essence is drawing on the Earth's core energy in Yellowstone.'

Aiden was about to speak when he suddenly vomited black blood with a chip in it. The Asian woman picked up the writhing metal worm with magnetic tweezers, 'That's the price of promotion to Sequence 5 - every cell of yours is being formatted with Cain code.'

The roar of turbine engines came from across the dunes as a convoy of Harleys converted into mobile churches sliced through the night. The werewolf priest at the head of the group removed his windscreen goggles, revealing mechanical prosthetic eyes that flashed with the iris patterns of the Brotherhood's leader.

'Welcome to the true Brotherhood of Silvermoon.' His exhaust spewed holy grey smoke, 'Now, it's time to meet the other occupant of your body.'

Aiden's plutonium core suddenly projected his sister's complete gene tree, and somewhere at the end of the hidden chromosome, Mashsara's face curled up and grew like an embryo.