The air, which had smelled of rain just moments ago, now felt heavy, almost breathable, like mist. Jake coughed, spitting out dirt and the lingering taste of ozone. He pushed himself upright, his muscles screaming a protest that was instantly muffled by the sheer, encompassing silence.
"We went dark," Liora repeated, slowly pushing herself up. She looked like a ship that had just survived a rogue wave—damp, scraped, but still afloat. She was nursing her left arm, which she held tucked tightly against her ribs. "The Ordo has no idea where we are. We're completely off the map."
"Off the map," Jake echoed, his voice shaking. He looked around.
The tunnel was visually identical to the one they had left: concrete walls, rusted rails, crushed gravel. But the walls here were covered in flowing, stylised script that resembled something between Arabic and Celtic knots—not in English or any language Jake knew. The air was a dry, slightly metallic cold, and it felt like the very space around them was humming.
Liora took a slow, deep breath, then winced, pressing harder on her side. "I ruptured a minor mana line during the jump. I'm compromised and running on auxiliary reserves for a few hours. How about you? Any lasting effects from the Limbus exposure?"
Jake tested his body, rotating his shoulders. "Physically, I'm just bruised. But the jump… it felt messier than before. When we hit this place, it was like the world bounced back. The walls shivered."
Liora nodded grimly, her eyes sharp. She pointed to a tiny hairline fracture in the concrete about a foot away. A faint, violet shimmer was bleeding out of it, disappearing almost as quickly as it appeared.
"The tear we used to escape the Morsus was high-yield and highly unstable. We didn't just jump dimensionally, Jake. We tore the fabric of reality near a critical, pre-existing seam," Liora explained. "This place is now suffering the aftershock. The humming you hear is dimensional friction. We are in an area of extreme instability."
She reactivated her lumen charm, casting their faces in a stark, accusing light. "My Path, Death (The XIII Arcana), is fundamentally about Severance and stability. It gives me the intuition to know when a connection needs to be cut and when a structure is failing. And right now, this structure is screaming."
Liora's voice dropped to a harsh whisper. "The problem isn't just that we're off the map; it's that we are compromised. That violent jump left a ripple signature—a clear, energetic wake that a skilled pursuer could follow, and my Path tells me someone is trying to follow it right now."
"Who?" Jake demanded. "The Morsus?"
"Worse. The Shadow Group," she said, her expression hardening. "Praefectus Cato's team. They specialise in tracking and containment. The Magus wanted to neutralise you; they want to capture you intact and use you as a tool. Their methods are brutal, and they won't stop until they seal off the tear we just made."
She looked away, sweeping her light over the strange, flowing script on the wall. "We need to find out where we are. We need to find the access point back to the surface, and we need to move fast."
Liora took a step toward the wall, translating the flowing knots with agonising slowness.
"That's not just graffiti. That's a language. And that language is repeating one word, over and over, in the dialect of an Arcana long thought extinct."
"The Bridge. The Bridge. The Bridge."
"It means we've landed in a transit junction," Liora said grimly. "A hidden network connecting major Arcana sites. This is a choke point. The Order might not know where we are, but the Shadow Group will know how to use these corridors to corner us."
Suddenly, the cold, metallic air was replaced by a wave of heat and the smell of sulfur. From down the tunnel, a sickening sound of concrete being ground into dust echoed toward them.
Out of the darkness, a figure materialized. It was tall, clad in charcoal-grey tactical armor—a Pursuit Sentinel. Optimized purely for speed and capture, it covered ground at an impossible rate, gliding over the rubble and rails with the cold, absolute certainty of a predator.
"Vade! (Go!)" Liora screamed, gripping her injured arm and nodding desperately down the track.
Jake didn't hesitate. He took off, scrambling over the rails and the crushed rock, Liora right behind him, her movements already stiff and labored due to the ruptured mana line in her arm.
He risked a look back. The Sentinel was closing the distance far too quickly. Its featureless black helmet caught the low light, its silence making its terrifying speed the only focus of the world.
"It's too fast, Liora! We won't outrun it!" Jake panted, the air burning in his lungs.
Liora stumbled, catching herself on a girder. She knew he was right. The Sentinel was designed to run until its target dropped, and she was already half-crippled. They needed a break, and she was the only one who could provide it.
"Go, Jake! Keep moving! Find cover!" she yelled, stopping dead in the center of the tracks.
The Sentinel was less than fifty feet away. Its speed was so great that it was now just a blurring shape of gray and black.
Liora twisted her right hand, ignoring the searing, paralyzing pain from her left side. She channeled the dregs of her auxiliary mana—the emergency reserves that were meant to last hours—and drew it into a hyper-focused sphere between her palms. This was reckless. Her injury made controlling raw mana agonizingly difficult and volatile.
She threw her focus outward, painting a localized field of intense, downward pressure directly in the Sentinel's path. Her voice ripped through the tunnel, strained and raw, speaking the command in Latin:
"MORA MOMENTUM!"
The spell was instantaneous. The air where the Sentinel was running suddenly turned thick and viscous, shimmering like heat haze over asphalt. A shockwave of pure gravity hit the Sentinel like a physical wall.
The effect was dramatic: the Sentinel didn't stop, but its body visibly sank. The charcoal armor scraped against the tracks, throwing up sparks as the speed of its glide was instantly cut by eighty percent. The Pursuit Sentinel fought the drag, its mechanical systems groaning against the unnatural weight, but it had to slow to a jog.
Liora gasped, clutching her chest. The backlash was immediate and brutal. A thin stream of crimson blood leaked from her nose, and her legs gave out beneath her. She hadn't just drained her auxiliary reserves; the strain on her compromised internal pathways had forced a minor, immediate expulsion of mana and bio-fluid. The pain was blinding, but she forced herself to crawl toward the side of the tunnel, fighting to stay conscious.
"Liora!" Jake shouted, running back toward her.
"No! Go! Get ahead!" she choked out, her vision tunneling. "The effect is unstable! It'll only last twenty seconds, maybe less! Now, Jake!"
He hesitated for a split second, seeing the dark flush beneath her eyes, but he obeyed. He knew that the only way to save her was to find a safe way out. He turned and sprinted, his mind reeling from the speed of the Sentinel and the desperate, painful sacrifice Liora had just made. The rhythmic, dragging jog of the Sentinel was already starting to speed up behind them.