The rain was cold and viscous, feeling less like a fall from the sky and more like despair seeping from every crack in the Sanctum's stone. The Observer, wrapped tightly in his sodden black robes, moved with practiced silence, each step placed precisely where shadow met pooling water. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat sounding his own funeral knell in his ears.
[Abandon the specimen. Extract core data. Rendezvous at East Gate Three.]
The processed, emotionless voice of his high-level contact was a brand searing his thoughts. He had done it! He had skirted the areas still echoing with the recent, bloody purge, the air tinged with the scent of ozone and a faint, coppery tang. Using his intimate knowledge of the Angel's Descent ancillary facilities, he had ghosted into the core database.
The terminal's cold blue light reflected off his terrified, pallid face. His fingers flew across the control panel, bypassing layer after layer of security—security that seemed curiously, conveniently degraded? He had no time to question it. Faster. Go faster! He compiled everything: the raw energy schematics of the Energy Feedback phenomenon, Cecilia's anomalous biometric logs, the resonant frequency models of the mysterious barrier. All of it was compressed, encrypted, and funneled into a palm-sized portable drive that pulsed with a faint, eerie cyan glow.
A soft beep. Transfer complete. He wrenched the drive free, clutching it in a white-knuckled grip. Its coldness was a perverse comfort. This was his talisman. His ticket to survival!
The exfiltration was unnervingly smooth. The patrolling Auric Guard were conspicuously absent. The few white or blue-robed brothers he glimpsed moved with haste, their eyes averted, refusing to meet his gaze. An uncanny silence had fallen over the sector, broken only by the rain and his own ragged breathing. This ease of passage… it's wrong. But he dared not dwell, attributing it all to the contact's masterful planning and unseen assistance. A fragile, desperate hope began to twine around his frayed nerves.
He clung to the deep shadows cast by the immense architecture, navigating the maze of corridors and stairways. The rain blurred his vision but sharpened his hearing. In the distance, he caught snippets of sharp commands, the dull thud of clashing energies, all quickly swallowed by the downpour. Each sound sent a fresh jolt of terror through him, pressing him flat against cold stone until certain the danger had passed.
East Gate Three loomed closer. Its massive arch was a darker silhouette in the rain-lashed night. The darkness beneath it looked like the gateway to salvation itself. Freedom. Life! To escape this hell with this priceless data! Visions danced in his head—selling the secrets to the Sanctum's enemies, to some hidden cabal, buying a life of luxury far from this place…
The moment his foot left the shadow of the gate's arch and touched the churned mud beyond, a wave of near-delirious relief washed over him. Fear, exhilaration, despair, and a wild, giddy joy boiled within him, a molten cocktail threatening to shatter his mind. To hell with the rendezvous! That contact was probably already doomed. Waiting meant death. He would break every promise, take the treasure, and run!
But as he stepped fully clear of the gate, ready to draw his first breath of "free" air—
Three figures solidified from the gloom ahead, emerging from the rain like specters given form.
They stood, statuesque, merging with the night and the storm. Their robes, once the white of sanctity and order, were now a grotesque canvas, plastered dark and heavy with mud and dried blood, clinging wetly to frames taut with exhaustion and recent violence. The rain streamed over their faces and soiled garments, failing to wash away the chilling, palpable aura of death that clung to them.
Wolfgang. Flanked by his two compatriots. His face was a mask of permafrost, utterly devoid of emotion. The tall priestess's gaze was a shard of ice, locked onto him with lethal precision. The shorter priest wore a faint, almost cruel quirk at the corner of his mouth, as if savoring the final twitches of a cornered animal.
The Observer's blood turned to ice in his veins. He felt his soul shudder. He was alone and the energy reserves scraped hollow by fear, the frantic escape, and the data heist. He had no one to call on, no power to summon. A lone, exhausted lamb before wolves.
"No… this wasn't…" His throat constricted, the words a dry rasp. "We had… a deal… I have the data… what you wanted…" He thrust the glowing cyan drive forward, a trembling, pathetic offering, his speech a garbled mess of pleading and justification.
The only answer was the bottomless, unyielding chill in Wolfgang's eyes. No pity. No hesitation. Not even disgust. Only the pure, frigid focus of a task to be completed.
In the heartbeat of the Observer's ultimate, paralyzing terror, as he began to crumple—
The tall priestess moved.
Her motion was a blur that defied the eye. A simple lift of her hand, and a thread of concentrated gold light, dense with annihilating power, lanced through the intervening space. It made no sound, shed no excess energy. It was the absolute pinnacle of lethal efficiency.
The Observer had no time to flinch.
The beam struck his forehead with surgical precision.
Every expression—plea, fear, despair—froze on his face. The light in his eyes snuffed out like a pinched candle wick. His arm, holding the drive, dropped limply. His body swayed, then pitched forward like a felled tree, landing with a heavy, wet thud in the mud.
The cyan drive tumbled from his grasp, bouncing once, twice, before a heavy, mud-and-blood-caked combat boot—Wolfgang's—came down upon it, trapping it firmly.
All hope, all fear, all scheming, and all the world-shaking secrets he had carried, were crushed into the filthy ground.
Wolfgang bent down, retrieved the drive without a glance at the still-warm body, and spoke to his companions, his voice low.
"Clean this up. Next location."
The rain continued its endless fall, coldly washing over the site of the brief, insignificant execution, as if nothing had ever happened.
Meanwhile, in the vast, solemn council chamber of the Holy Sanctum.
A figure, his face hidden by the mask of a high-ranking black-clad cleric, was pinned against the cold surface of the conference table by two Golden Guards. He struggled, his eyes bloodshot behind the mask, a guttural roar of grief and fury tearing from him.
"We had an agreement! I gave you the intelligence! I cleared the path for you! You promised—!"
Hongbo, seated at the head of the table, slowly surveyed the other silent, impassive high-ranking officials—their faces a different kind of mask. His gaze finally settled back on the pinned informant.
"Yes," Hongbo said, his tone laced with a veneer of regret that did nothing to soften the finality of his words. "We trusted… you."
He emphasized the last word, driving it home like a judge's gavel.
The struggle ceased. The informant understood. He was never a partner. He was a tool, used to lure his own comrades to their doom and deliver the incriminating data into the hands of their executioners, before being discarded himself.
With a dismissive wave, Hongbo signaled the guards to remove the failed collaborator. His fate was sealed.
Then, Hongbo tilted his head slightly towards a pale, trembling attendant priest.
"Inform the three of them to be thorough," he murmured, his voice low but carrying in the hushed room. "And have the Auric Guard squad assigned to East Gate Three, along with all maintenance personnel on duty tonight in that sector… processed."
"Y-yes, Your Eminence!" the priest stammered, barely able to draw breath.
Hongbo turned back to the window, to the seemingly endless deluge outside, as if he had just issued the most mundane of orders.
Tonight, every potential witness, every possible leak, every tool used in the cleansing—would be erased. A perfect, brutal, closed circle.
At dawn, the Holy Sanctum would present a clean, stable face to the world, scoured by blood. Only the ghost of the metallic scent would linger, a stubborn secret the rain would take a very long time to wash away.