Bastion’s Heartbeat

The pulse of the reactor was a living thing. Deep within Bastion's core, the re-engineered Titan heart thrummed—a molten sun trapped in a lattice of reinforced conduits, feeding power into every wall, turret, and screen. I felt it through my gauntlets, like a second pulse beneath my own, raw and untamed.

It was beautiful. And unstable.

Hypermind flashed warnings in my vision—voltage surges, coolant levels spiking, nanoforge outputs fluctuating under strain. The Titan core was powerful beyond anything humanity had built, but it wasn't made for this. It was built for destruction. I was forcing it to create.

The containment chamber was a nightmare of cables and heat. Steam hissed from ruptured coolant lines, and arcs of static cracked against the reinforced walls. My body screamed with exhaustion, but I couldn't stop. The core's power was cascading—too hot, too wild.

If it blew, it would take Bastion with it.

A voice in my comm, tight with urgency. "Engineer, reactor's throwing spikes all across the grid! Turrets are glitching, and I've got power drops on the south perimeter!"

Hart. Of course, she was keeping a soldier's eye on the defenses.

I gritted my teeth. "The core's overclocking—its bio-fusion matrix wasn't designed to run a civilization. I'm stabilizing it."

"Stabilize faster," Hart shot back. "If the defenses drop, we're a bonfire waiting for guests."

Hypermind surged new calculations—power routing solutions, coolant redistribution models. I keyed into the relay controls and rewrote the circuit load, diverting 30% of the overflow into auxiliary capacitors scavenged from the old Horizon transport.

The core shuddered, then settled, its pulse dropping from a frantic war drum to a deep, steady heartbeat.

The warning lights faded from red to amber. And then, mercifully, to green.

I slumped against the console, my gauntlet smoking from the heat of the manual override. My burned hand throbbed, but the core's hum was now stable.

Hart's voice returned, calmer but still edged. "Reading a stable grid. Turrets are back. Bio-Ward's holding."

I exhaled slowly, feeling the adrenaline bleed away. "Core's solid. Bastion lives."

I climbed from the reactor chamber into the courtyard, my body aching from hours of labor, and saw Bastion for the first time as it was meant to be.

The sky was bruised and heavy, the sun fighting through ash and cloud cover, casting Bastion in cold, filtered light. The walls—hastily reformed from salvaged barricades and twisted steel—now bristled with automated Skyweaver turrets, their barrels sweeping in synchronized arcs, directed by Hypermind subroutines.

The Bio-Ward pylons glowed with a faint, pulsing light, their subsonic field stretching beyond the walls—an invisible barrier against the lesser mutants that still roamed the outskirts. I watched as a pack of twisted, hairless wolf-things crossed the boundary and reeled back, howling in confusion before scattering into the trees.

And at the heart of it all, the reactor tower—the Titan Core, repurposed from death into survival.

Survivors worked in every corner of the courtyard. The nanoforge hissed and printed—churning out rifle barrels, plating segments, and even ration containers from scavenged materials. Priya's makeshift clinic, now powered by the core, was producing med-synth packs from the forge, saving lives with every cartridge.

Hart approached from the perimeter, her armor stripped to the combat suit beneath, every inch of her bruised and battle-worn. She paused beside me, eyes sweeping the new Bastion.

"You really did it," she said softly. "You pulled a city from a corpse."

I felt every ache in my body, every burned nerve and shattered muscle. "It's… a start."

She gave a wry smile. "Yeah, but it's our start."

The comm on my wrist cracked and hissed—a signal cutting through static. It was faint, barely holding together.

I activated the receiver. "This is Bastion."

The voice was strained, distant, but unmistakably human.

"...—Bastion… do you read?"

I stepped closer to the signal relay. "This is Bastion Command. Who is this?"

The voice returned, broken but urgent.

"This is Lieutenant Orin… New Vale Evac Center… survivors… under attack… Apex-class approaching…" Static swallowed the rest.

My stomach twisted.

New Vale. The city's main evacuation zone—or what was left of it. It was ten miles east. They should have been overrun days ago.

But they were still alive.

Hart's expression sharpened instantly. "How many?"

I tried to stabilize the signal, but it was useless. The only thing that came through was—

"...Please… help…"

Then—silence.

Hart turned to me. "Ten miles. Through Apex territory. That's a suicide run."

My voice was cold, automatic. "But there are survivors."

She paced once, her fists clenched. "We're barely holding Bastion together. You've seen the defenses—they're working, but they're still fragile. If another swarm comes, we'll lose everything we've built."

I felt the tension in my bones. She wasn't wrong.

But I stared at the smoke-stained horizon and felt something deep and unshakable.

"If we don't go," I said quietly, "then we're just waiting to die behind these walls."

Hart's voice dropped, raw and deadly serious. "You leave Bastion, you're leaving them without you. Without Hypermind. If another Apex comes, they won't survive."

I met her eyes. "If we don't try to save those people, then who are we building this for?"

In my vision, Hypermind already spun possibilities—risk models, route projections, supply calculations. And it fed me the cold truth:

Probability of Bastion survival if Apex attack occurs during absence: 42%.Probability of New Vale survivor extraction without intervention: 7%.

I felt the brutal equation of it. A cold math problem where lives were numbers.

But I wasn't a machine.

"We go," I said. "But we don't leave Bastion unguarded."

Hart folded her arms. "Explain."

I turned toward the Titan Core relay. "Hypermind's algorithms are what's holding the defense grid together. But I don't have to be here for it to work. If I build a Sub-AI shard—a fragment of Hypermind's core directive—Bastion's defenses will run on autopilot. Not as good as me, but enough to hold."

Priya's voice cut in, sharp from across the forge where she'd been listening. "And what about you? If you leave, you're taking Hypermind with you. Without it—"

I smiled grimly. "Then it's me against the Apexes."

I turned to Hart. "You in?"

Her reply was instant. "You couldn't do it without me."

Then Priya stepped forward, her one good arm clutching a med-pack. "You're going to need someone who can stop you from dying on the road. I'm coming."

I hesitated. "Priya—"

"I didn't survive this long to play nurse while you idiots get killed out there," she snapped. "So don't waste my time."

Hart grinned. "You heard the woman."

At dawn, Bastion watched us leave.

The Skyweaver turrets tracked the treeline, their optics scanning for threats. The Bio-Ward pylons pulsed their invisible warning across the earth. The nanoforge hissed steadily, printing rounds for rifles that would defend this new sanctuary.

And high above, the Sub-Hypermind shard—my fragmented echo—ran the numbers, guarding the survivors who remained behind.