The transition from the cacophony of the Guild Hall to the silence of the Archives of the All-Seeing was jarring. It felt less like walking into a room and more like stepping underwater. The air here was cool, smelling of cured vellum, dust, and the sharp, chemical tang of preservation spells.
"I hate this place," Persya muttered, his heavy boots squeaking on the polished marble floor. "It smells like dead people's thoughts."
"It smells like leverage," Roui whispered back, though he kept his voice low. Even the confident noble seemed cowed by the towering shelves that stretched up into the gloom, accessible only by floating ladders and Levitation discs.
Aurora claimed a long table near the back, dropping the black scroll onto the wood. "We have six hours before the transport leaves for Lacus Mortis. Varrick expects us to pack our bags and write our wills. I'd prefer to find out what exactly is going to try to eat us."
She pointed a finger at Isla. "You're on history. If this 'Cathedral' was important enough to sink, someone wrote about it."
She pointed to Alyia. "Maps. Topography. Structural integrity. If the floor is going to collapse, I want to know where."
"And us?" Roui asked, leaning against a stack of encyclopedias.
"You check the mission logs," Aurora said, her eyes narrowing. "Find out who went there last. And why they didn't come back."
"And I will check the bestiary," Persya said, already walking toward the section marked Planar Anomalies. "If the Void is leaking, we need to know what breathes it."
The squad dispersed into the labyrinth of paper.
For the first hour, the only sounds were the turning of pages and the soft scratching of Isla's quill. The young healer was in her element, surrounded by stacks of crumbling texts bound in Sköll-skin. Her large, dark eyes darted across lines of faded ink, her lips moving silently as she translated ancient dialects of the Old World.
"It wasn't a church," Isla said suddenly, breaking the silence.
The squad gathered around her. She pushed a heavy tome toward the center of the table. The illustration showed a massive, spire-like structure, but half of it was underground, inverted like a spike driven into the earth.
"The 'Cathedral' isn't a place of worship," Isla explained, tracing the diagram with a pale finger. "It's a Geomantic Anchor. Built three hundred years ago during the Void Wars. The architects didn't build it to honor a god; they built it to plug a hole."
"A hole in what?" Roui asked, squinting at the text.
"Reality," Alyia answered, dropping a rolled-up blueprint onto the table. Her amber eyes were wide, her pupils constricted to pinpoints. "I cross-referenced the coordinates with the geological surveys. Lacus Mortis sits on a fault line. Not a tectonic one. A magical one."
She pointed to a series of concentric rings on the map. "The Cathedral is the seal. But the surveys show structural degradation in the lower levels. The 'Mana-Surge' Varrick mentioned... it's not random energy. It's pressure escaping."
Persya slammed a heavy book shut, dust puffing into the air. "And I found out what lives in the pressure."
He opened the book to a page marked with a red warning rune. The sketch depicted a creature that looked like a shadow given teeth—amorphous, shifting, with too many limbs.
"Void-Leeches," Persya growled. "They don't eat meat. They eat mana. They drain a Signifer dry in seconds. If we go in there charging up our flashy new weapons, we're just ringing the dinner bell."
"So," Aurora summarized, leaning back in her chair. "Varrick is sending us to a leaking dam that holds back hell, inhabited by monsters that eat magic, armed with weapons that radiate magic."
"He's trying to overload the system," Roui realized, his face paling. He held up a thin, dusty ledger he had found in the Restricted Section. "I found the last mission report. Squad Iron-Will. Purple Tier. They went in two years ago."
"And?" Aurora asked.
"Listed as 'MIA - Structural Collapse'," Roui read. "But look at the equipment manifest. They were carrying experimental Mana-Capacitors. Huge batteries."
"They weren't sent to fix it," Persya realized, his voice dropping to a horrified whisper. "They were sent to feed it. The seal needs raw mana to hold. Varrick sends squads in, the Leeches kill them, the mana is released, and the seal resets."
Silence descended on the table. It was a cold, heavy thing. They weren't just being sent to die; they were being sent as fuel.
"We can't go," Isla whispered, her hands trembling. "It's suicide."
"If we don't go, we're arrested," Aurora said, her voice hard. She stood up, looking at the map, then at the diagram of the seal, and finally at her squad.
"We don't go as fuel," Aurora declared. "We go as engineers."
She tapped the map. "Alyia, you said the leak is structural. That means it can be patched. Not with mana, but with matter."
"Persya," she turned to the hybrid. "Can you Recompose the seal? If we get you close enough?"
Persya looked at the blueprint. He traced the lines of the anchor, his mind racing through the physics of the stone. "The material is Void-Glass. Extremely dense. But... if I had enough heat... and a stabilizer..."
He looked at Roui's Null-Plate. Then at Alyia's wand.
"I can't do it alone," Persya said. "I'd need Alyia to superheat the fracture, and Roui to hold back the Void pressure with a Terrazation shield. It would drain us dry. We'd be helpless against the Leeches."
"That's where I come in," Aurora said, hefting her axe. "I keep the Leeches off you. Isla keeps us from dissolving."
"It's a narrow path," Alyia calculated. "Probability of success: 12%. Probability of death: 88%."
"Better than 100%," Aurora grinned. "We aren't going to feed the seal. We're going to fix it. And when we come back, Varrick won't have a 'tragic accident' to report. He'll have a miracle he can't explain."
"Grab the books," Aurora ordered. "We have a train to catch."
The Iron-Lung Express was not a passenger train designed for comfort. It was a Yeraltı-forged beast of black iron and brass, designed to haul ore from the Shadow Border to the refineries of Phos-Frourio. It smelled of burning ozone and stale sweat, and it rattled with a bone-shaking intensity that made sleep impossible for anyone but Aurora Aksnes.
She lay sprawled across two crates of munitions in the cargo car, her hat pulled over her eyes, the rhythmic thud-hiss of the Aether-piston engine serving as a lullaby.
Roui Mirtout sat opposite her, perched uncomfortably on a barrel of salt-pork. He was frantically polishing a smudge from his Null-Plate pauldron, his reflection distorted in the curve of the metal.
"There is no dining car," Roui noted, his voice tight. "I checked. There is a coal stoker named Gorm who offered me a rat on a stick. I declined. Politely, of course."
"Caloric intake is irrelevant if we are dissolved by Void-Leeches," Alyia said from the corner. She sat cross-legged, her Heafon Wand disassembled on a cloth. Her movements were jerky, precise, mechanical. She was re-aligning the Kristal Biru lens Persya had grafted onto the tip. "Efficiency of the seal repair drops to 0% if biological functions cease."
Isla sat by the sliding door, watching the landscape blur past. The lush greenery of the Alsos Giganton had given way to the grey, twisted scrubland of the Shadow Border. The sky here was bruised, a permanent twilight of violet and bruised orange.
"It's getting colder," Isla whispered, hugging her knees. "Not winter cold. Empty cold."
Persya stood by the door, guarding it despite the train moving at sixty miles an hour. He watched Aurora sleeping, his jaw set. He looked at the glowing blue veins in her axe, then at the pulsing crystal in his own gauntlet.
"We are walking torches," Persya growled, turning to the group. "Look at your weapons. That Kristal Biru isn't just powerful; it leaks mana radiation. To a Void-Leech, we don't look like food. We look like a lighthouse in a storm. As soon as we step off this train, every hungry thing in Lacus Mortis is going to know we're there."
Aurora shifted, lifting the brim of her hat with one finger. Her blue eye cracked open, glowing in the dim light of the cargo car.
"Then we don't give them time to eat," she murmured. "We hit the spire fast. Shock and awe. Or rather... shock and thaw."
The train whistle shrieked—a lonely, mechanical scream that echoed off the canyon walls. The brakes engaged, sparks showering past the open door.
Lacus Mortis awaited.
The train didn't stop at a station; it slowed near a rusted supply drop point overlooking the basin. The squad leaped from the moving car, boots skidding on gravel that felt too loose, too dry.
The view stole their breath.
The lake was vast, a sheet of black, glass-still water that reflected no stars. In the center, inverted like a dagger driven into the earth, was the Sunken Cathedral. It wasn't a ruin; it was a corpse of architecture. Spires pointed down into the abyss, and the 'roof' was a flat plaza barely breaking the surface of the black water.
Surrounding the spire, the water rippled. Not from wind, but from movement beneath the surface.
"Mana readings are... chaotic," Alyia said, adjusting her glasses. She pointed her wand at the lake. "The seal is leaking. The ambient mana density is lethal. If we stay here too long without shielding, our own mana souls will start to resonate with the dissonance. We will fray before we even cast a spell."
"There," Isla pointed.
On the shore, half-sunk in the mud, lay the wreckage of a previous expedition. A Vanguard standard—purple and gold, the colors of a high-ranking squad—rotted on a broken pole. Near it were crates, untouched.
"Squad Iron-Will," Roui whispered, the humor gone from his face. "They didn't even make it to the water."
Persya knelt, touching the ground. His Recomposere senses flared. "The earth here... it's wrong. The molecular bonds are loose. It's like the ground forgot how to be solid."
They stood at the edge of the killing field. The Spire was five hundred meters away across the black water. The shore was littered with the supplies of the dead. And the water was churning.
Aurora hefted her axe, the blue veins pulsing in sync with her heartbeat. She looked at her team.
"Alright," she said, her voice devoid of its usual laziness. "We have a choice. How do we cross the graveyard?"
"Shock and thaw," Aurora repeated, the corner of her mouth twitching upward. It wasn't a smile; it was the grimace of a soldier bracing for recoil. "Persya, make me something that slides."
Persya didn't argue. He knew that look. He stepped toward the rot of the Iron-Will camp, his boots sinking into the mud that felt too loose, like the earth had forgotten its own cohesion. He grabbed the splintered remains of the Purple Tier squad's supply crates and the rusted iron of a transport cage.
"Cover your eyes," he grunted.
He slammed his gauntleted palms onto the debris. Recomposere flared—a jagged, sickly orange light that cut through the violet twilight. The wood groaned, fibers unspooling and re-knitting instantly. The rust screamed as the iron oxide was purged, the metal flowing like liquid mercury before snapping into a rigid lattice. In seconds, the trash was gone. In its place sat a low, wide sled, its runners reinforced with scavenged iron, its prow curved like a blade.
"Get on," Persya ordered, his breath steaming in the unnatural cold. "And hold onto something that is attached to the floor. I didn't add seatbelts."
Roui scrambled onto the sled, dragging Isla with him. Alyia sat cross-legged in the center, clutching her wand, her amber eyes wide behind her glasses.
Aurora didn't board. She stood at the back of the sled, her boots digging into the gravel. The blue veins in her axe pulsed in sync with the crystal in Persya's gauntlet.
"On my mark," Aurora said. She closed her eyes, and the air around her began to distort. Infusus flooded her muscles, doubling, then tripling her density. Lumen gathered at her heels, not as a soft glow, but as a pressurized jet of photons waiting to break.
"Mark!"
She shoved.
The sled didn't accelerate; it vanished from the shoreline.
They hit the black water at sixty miles an hour. The surface tension of the lake, hard as concrete at this speed, shattered under the reinforced runners. A geyser of black, freezing slush erupted behind them, a rooster tail of darkness.
Then the lake woke up.
"Contact!" Alyia screamed, her voice thin against the wind. "Multiple signatures. Depth: Zero. They are breaching!"
The water around them boiled. Shapes erupted from the surface—amorphous, shifting nightmares that looked like oil slicks given claws. Void-Leeches. They didn't roar; they made a sound like tearing paper, a static hiss that clawed at the mind.
One lunged for the sled, its body stretching into a spear of shadow.
"Down!" Aurora roared. She didn't let go of the sled. She activated Lumen-Step, blinking forward instantly to the front of the craft. Momentum carried the axe in a golden arc.
CRACK.
The blade bit into the Leech. There was no blood, only a violent dissipation of grey smoke as the Kristal Biru edge disrupted the creature's cohesion. But the impact jarred the sled, sending it skidding sideways across the water.
"Correction!" Persya bellowed. He slammed his hand onto the back of the sled, dumping a pulse of Augmentation into the frame to stabilize it against the G-force. "Keep it straight, Aurora! We are drifting!"
"I'm busy!" she shouted back, cleaving another shadow in two.
They were a lighthouse in a storm, just as Persya had predicted. The mana radiation from their weapons drew the Leeches like moths to a flame. Dozens of them swarmed, a tide of hungry darkness chasing the golden blur of the sled.
Roui, pale as the moon, gripped the side of the sled with one hand and raised his Aether-Glaive with the other. "I hate this! I hate this so much!"
He channeled Tenebrae. Shadows detached from his cloak, forming a whipping tendril that lashed out, catching a Leech mid-air and flinging it back into the wake.
"Hold on!" Aurora screamed.
The plaza of the Sunken Cathedral loomed ahead—a flat expanse of stone barely breaking the surface.
They hit the lip of the plaza not with grace, but with the violence of a car crash. The runners sparked against the ancient stone, screeching a high-pitched wail that echoed off the inverted spires. The sled spun 180 degrees, throwing gravel and ice, before slamming into the base of a moss-covered statue.
Silence fell, heavy and suffocating.
"Is everyone... attached?" Persya groaned, checking his limbs.
"Structure intact," Alyia wheezed, adjusting her glasses which were now hanging from one ear.
They scrambled off the sled, weapons raised. The plaza was vast, the stone slick with black slime. Ahead, the massive double doors of the Cathedral stood sealed. They were made of Void-Glass, dark and semi-translucent, humming with a low, ominous vibration.
The "Mana-Surge" Varrick had mentioned was palpable here. The air tasted like copper and ozone. The doors weren't just locked; they were leaking purple energy, small arcs of lightning jumping between the cracks.
"We made it," Isla whispered, her hands glowing with a soft Hydro light as she scanned the area. "But... the noise. We rang the dinner bell for the whole lake."
"Then we don't stay for dessert," Aurora said, hefting her axe. She looked at the massive doors. "How do we get in?"
Alyia approached the seal, her wand tip glowing. "Analysis: The locking mechanism is arcane, not mechanical. It's overloaded. The pressure inside is keeping it sealed."
Persya touched the stone frame. "I can't Rot this. It's Void-Glass. It has no molecular bonds I can unzip without blowing us all up."
Roui looked at the leaking energy, then at the dark water frothing at the edge of the plaza. The Leeches were regrouping.
"We have three options," Roui said, his voice surprisingly steady. "And we have about two minutes before those things realize we've stopped moving."
"Going down," Persya grunted.
He didn't wait for a vote. He dropped to one knee, driving his gauntleted fist into the hairline fracture running through the wet stone.
Recomposere surged—a jagged, sickly orange flare that illuminated the panic in Roui's eyes. Persya didn't just break the stone; he unzipped it. He visualized the molecular bonds of the plaza floor—ancient limestone, reinforced with mana, but brittle from centuries of cold—and simply commanded them to let go.
CRACK-BOOM.
The sound was less like an explosion and more like the earth clearing its throat. A ten-meter section of the plaza disintegrated into a cloud of gravel and dust.
Gravity, eager to reclaim them, took hold.
The squad fell.
The world tumbled into a kaleidoscope of darkness, falling debris, and the shrieking wind of their own descent. They dropped past the shattered floor, past the sub-layer of pipes, and into the yawning throat of the Sunken Cathedral.
They hit water.
It wasn't a graceful dive. It was a brutal, freezing impact. The water was black, stagnant, and tasted of copper and old decay. The cold was instantaneous, a physical blow that sought to seize the lungs.
"Surface!" Aurora's command was a bubble-distorted roar.
They kicked upward, breaking the surface of the subterranean pool with gasping breaths. Isla was already moving, her Kaeloid Membranes flaring as she grabbed a flailing Roui by his collar and hauled him toward a stone ledge.
"Up! Move!"
They scrambled onto the damp stone, coughing up brine. Persya was the last out, shaking water from his armor like a wet dog. He looked up.
High above—or rather, far "below" their feet, given the inverted architecture—a shaft of weak light filtered down from the hole they had made. Through the gap, they could see the silhouettes of the Void-Leeches peering down, chittering in frustration. They were hesitant to enter the dark, confined space.
"That," Roui wheezed, wringing out his cloak, "was uncontrolled."
"It was effective," Persya countered, checking the seal on his gauntlets. "We are inside. And we aren't dead."
Alyia adjusted her glasses, which were miraculously unbroken but crooked. She activated the Glow-Quartz tip of her wand, casting a stark white light over their surroundings.
They were in an atrium, but it was wrong. The Sunken Cathedral was built inverted. They were standing on what should have been the ceiling. Stone arches curved upward from the floor, meeting in a vaulted abyss below them. Statues of forgotten saints hung upside down from the "roof," staring at them with stone eyes.
The air was heavy, thick with the smell of ozone and something sweeter—rot.
"The structural integrity is... compromised," Alyia whispered, her amber eyes darting across the inverted pillars. "But the mana density here is lower. The Void-Glass walls above were trapping the radiation. Here, it flows."
"Flows where?" Aurora asked, checking the edge on her axe.
"Down," Isla said. She was staring over the edge of the platform they stood on. Below them, the inverted spire narrowed into a dark throat. "The water... it's draining deeper. Into the tip of the spire."
Suddenly, a sound echoed from the darkness below—a rhythmic, metallic clanking, like a hammer striking an anvil, followed by a low, resonant hum.
CLANG. thrummmmm... CLANG. thrummmmm...
"That's not a monster," Roui whispered, his hand gripping his Aether-Glaive white-knuckled. "That's a machine."
"It's the seal," Persya realized. "Or what's left of it. Trying to reset."
Above them, the chittering grew louder. A Void-Leech dropped through the hole, landing in the water with a splash. Then another. They had overcome their hesitation.
"We have company," Aurora hissed, her internal furnace flaring, turning her skin a faint orange. "We can't fight a swarm in here. We need to move."
They had three paths.
To their left, a flooded corridor spiraled downward, following the flow of the water. To their right, a dry maintenance catwalk—rusted but intact—led toward the source of the metallic clanking. Above, the hole was filling with Leeches.
"Cover your ears," Persya growled.
He didn't wait for an acknowledgment. He slammed both gauntleted fists into the base of the nearest inverted archway. The stone here was ancient, load-bearing limestone treated with mana-hardener, but to Persya's Recomposere sight, it was just a math problem waiting to be solved.
He found the stress point—the keystone of the arch. He didn't push; he pulled. He unraveled the atomic bonds holding the stone together, turning solid rock into dust.
CRACK-THOOM.
The arch failed. The ceiling above them—the floor of the plaza they had just fallen through—groaned in protest. Tons of debris, liberated from gravity's hold, crashed down into the breach. The shrieking chitter of the Void-Leeches was cut short, replaced by the wet, crunching sound of chitin being pulverized by falling masonry.
A massive cloud of dust and ancient mortar billowed out, coating the squad in grey powder. The hole was gone. The light from the surface was extinguished, leaving them in the gloom of the cathedral's depths, illuminated only by the bioluminescent veins in Aurora's axe and the Glow-Quartz on Alyia's wand.
"Messy," Aurora coughed, waving the dust away from her face. "But effective. Remind me never to let you remodel my kitchen."
"Rear security established," Persya grunted, wiping a smear of grey dust from his slate-grey face. He leaned heavily against a pillar, the orange glow in his veins dimming as he fought off the early tremors of Soul Fraying. "But now we are trapped in here with whatever is making that noise."
CLANG. thrummmmm...
The rhythmic metallic pounding echoed from the darkness to their right. It was louder now, a heartbeat of iron and stress.
"Catwalk," Roui whispered, pointing with his Aether-Glaive. "It's the only path that isn't underwater or buried."
They moved onto the maintenance walkway. It was a rusted, skeletal structure of iron lattice, suspended over a black abyss that stretched down into the spire's inverted tip. The air grew colder, smelling of ozone and stale water.
As they advanced, the source of the sound revealed itself. Suspended in the center of the void, held by massive chains of Null-Iron, was the Geomantic Anchor's primary cooling mechanism. It was a colossal piston engine of brass and Void-Glass, designed to pump liquid mana through the seal to keep it stable.
But it was failing.
A massive blockage—a calcified growth of purple crystal and black slime—had fused the main gear. The piston was hammering against it, trying to complete its cycle, sending tremors through the entire structure.
"It's not just broken," Alyia analyzed, her voice tight. She adjusted her glasses, staring at the blockage. "That creates a resonant frequency. It's calling them."
Standing on the central platform, guarding the jammed engine, was a nightmare.
It was a Sentinel Construct—an ancient automaton left by the Cǣg cræftes builders. But it had been corrupted. Its brass plating was warped, burst open by pulsing veins of purple corruption. Its head was gone, replaced by a writhing mass of Void-Leeches that acted as a collective brain. One of its arms ended in a massive, spinning rotary saw; the other held a shield made of scavenged Null-Plate—likely peeled from the corpse of a member of Squad Iron-Will.
It stood directly between them and the manual release valve needed to flush the engine.
"That," Roui breathed, shrinking behind his shield, "is an affront to good engineering. And hygiene."
"It's blocking the valve," Isla said, clutching her wand. "If we don't clear that blockage, the Anchor overheats. If the Anchor overheats..."
"...the seal breaks, and we all dissolve," Persya finished. He flexed his gauntlets, but his movements were sluggish. He was running on fumes.
The Construct swiveled. The mass of leeches on its neck hissed, and the rotary saw spun up with a shriek of tortured metal.
"Persya is drained," Aurora noted, stepping to the front, her axe humming with a hungry blue light. "We need to end this fast, or the noise brings the rest of the hive."