In Jordan’s cell, we find Goggles and the two guards Charleen and Terry. The rest of the guards can be seen leaving the room in a hurry, weapons drawn.

As Charleen and Terry finish buckling on their rappelling harnesses, Goggles puts a hand on either guard’s shoulder. “Remember: you can’t catch him alone. Just try and slow him down. Succeed in that, we’ll have no trouble cutting him off.”

Charleen and Terry raise their hands to their heads in solute. “Yessir”, Terry mutters.

As Goggles makes to leave, he looks back at them. “Keep in mind how many lives may be riding on our success here, today. The foundation’s mission.”, he says, trodding off right after.

Charleen and Terry look at each other.

Meanwhile, down in the sewer, Jordan can be seen pulling himself along the pipe’s floor.

He is, slow-as-can-go, moving away from the shafts of light falling from his room above.

The light within the tunnel ahead of him is dim, if any light makes it in at all, bits of it further in sporting an inky black comparable to that of his dreamscape.

Jordan clenches his teeth hard as his limp legs, fused with his jumpsuit’s pants, drag against the uneven floor.

Cutting to Angosin and Wenji back in the windowed hallway, Angosin can be seen tapping his foot impatiently. He gives Wenji a sideways glance, seeing her holding herself with her back to the hall’s wall, shivering.

“That one–”, she mutters under her breath. Her eyes can be seen to be in their avian aspect. “–he just killed all of these…” Wenji trails off before hunching over somewhat, cupping both hands over her mouth.

Angosin rolls his eyes. “Just bring your birds in,” he says. “We’ll need them here to make any sort of headway through this place. We don’t want to be facing any of them–”

Angosin gestures towards the dead guards, his pallid face showing little expression even as his eyes pass over Cloud’s corpse.

“–without any cover.”

Wenji seems to swallow, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand as if she’d just held back a full-on hurl.

Angosin steps over to Wenji, taking her hand. “Come on”, he mumbles. Wenji stumbles somewhat as he leads her with him down the hallway, her eyes fixed on Hydraulics’ torn-open throat.

With his off-hand, Angosin reaches to Wenji’s back, whereon her machete can be held by a sling. 

He tugs it free, with Wenji apparently being too transfixed to react.

A buzzing sound can be heard, with a small pack of flies being visible rising from the staircase. All too quickly, they are attacking the guards’ corpses at their exposed bits.

Angosin eyes them wearily as he continues to pull Wenji further into the hall.

Meanwhile, Jordan is making good headway through the sewer-tunnel. The dark passageway grows progressively larger as he moves forward.

Even from where he is, however, he hears some banging from where he’d come. The sound of metallic grinding, as well as of something banging against the tunnel’s walls, follows him as he picks up his pace.

Only we see the source of the noise; Charleen and Terry rappelling down to the tunnel’s base.

Feeling the wall ahead of him, Jordan senses that the hall turns sharply to the right where he is.

Meanwhile, Charleen and Terry land with a resounding, metallic thud on the base of the tunnel. As they slip off their harnesses as quietly as they can, they whisper to each other.

“Hold on, I heard something about the foundation having greener methods than just dumping their waste?”, Terry says as he unclips the harness in two places at once.

“Yeah,” Charleen replies in a sarcastic tone. “That cell was reserved for an anomaly that produces high amounts of less-than-solid waste, hence the grills. You think they’d just let the shit seep out into the snow, or water?”

“It would just freeze, regardless! I nearly lost a nut out there, remember?”

As Terry says this, we see Jordan turn the corner, a small circle of red lighting up amidst the blackness as if in response.

A moment later, before Jordan has even a moment to observe the light, the space before him lights up in jets of flame.

The tunnel ahead of him is now all but blinding, tubes on its roof firing streams of blue-orange flames onto its base before Jordan.

Far behind him, Charleen and Terry perk up at the echoing sounds of roaring fire. Having finished removing their harnesses, they begin a full sprint into the tunnel, raising their sub-machine guns to light it with their attached flashlights. They see the end of the tunnel illuminated with a blazing orange from around a corner.

Hearing the clanking of footfalls behind him, Jordan whips his head back to look, open-mouthed, at the continually-spouting flames.

He closes his eyes hard as Scorched ‘El manifests before him, facing away from the flames. Jordan wraps his arms around its torso, holding tightly.

The spirit raises its arm-cannons at the wall right opposite it, where the hallway turns. Two concentrated jets of Scorcho sauce fire against the wall, shooting Jordan and the spirit straight towards the flames.

The ricocheting beams of sauce eat quickly through the wall and surrounding tunnel, with Terry stumbling to a stop too late and sinking his leg straight into the deteriorating floor.

Jordan and the spirit he’s anchoring himself to both fly straight into the fire, the sound of the many blowtorches drowning him out as he opens his mouth to scream and catches a mouthful of fire.

Jordan’s body is fully hidden in smoke and lingering flame as he collides with the tunnel floor just past the flames. He bounces, then rolls, eventually slipping down a sort of open chute at the metal corridor’s end.

Meanwhile, Angosin and Wenji have made their way to the section of the building in which Zain’s cell is located.

In the middle of the hall, just in front of the door fused shut with chunks of crystal growth, the large, fridge-like box that the two personnel had before been pushing can be seen unattended. 

A great deal of birds have joined them at this point, trailing behind them with their little bird-walks. Some look badly injured, with bent tails and wings. Some look to be experiencing painful exhaustion. Yet others have black blotches on their feathers, indicative of burning. 

Even through all of this, they continue to follow, as if they feel nothing.

“That would be it, wouldn’t it?” Angosin says matter-of-factly. 

“Yes,” Wenji responds, her eyes looking watery. “That’s the box they put him in.”

Angosin looks unimpressed as Wenji breaks into a run towards the box. 

“Imbaabaa!” she yelps.

The tears begin to spill from her yellow sclera as she collides with it, ramming her arms against its top in an attempt to slide it off.

“Angie–!” she sputters, her voice cracking as the lid budges just a bit. “–Help me!”

Angosin sighs, stepping up to beside Wenji.

Now, as he bends down to the lid, we can see the height difference between Angosin and Wenji most starkly. Angosin is at least a head taller.

All the while they are shoving the concrete-metal crate’s lid open, with an edge of Biskawaagan’s jacket just becoming visible, Angosin is taking glances at the birds behind them. 

He squints his eyes as he sees the various bugs squirming and buzzing about their feathers.

At last, we see Jordan outside. Through the all-obscuring snow-storm, we see him fall from the chute’s opening, the flames about his body disappearing with a hiss as he flumphs into a snowbank.