Gravity was not a law; it was an opportunity.
High above the Guild Hall, amidst the screaming wind and the tear of the ship's slipstream, Persya and Roui fell not as two men, but as a single kinetic weapon.
Persya roared, the sound torn from his throat by the wind. He unlocked the final safety on his internal furnace. Augmentation flooded his slate-grey frame, not just strengthening his muscles, but exponentially increasing his density. He became heavier than lead, a falling anvil of flesh and rage.
Beside him, Roui matched the dive. He reached out, gripping Persya's harness with white-knuckled force. He didn't look elegant; he looked terrified and exhilarated. He slammed his eyes shut and channeled Terrazation into his very skin. The grey granite sheen of Stone-Skin flared, then hardened, turning his body into a diamond-hard prow for their living missile.
"Brace!" Persya bellowed.
They hit the marble roof of the Guild Hall.
There was no crunch. There was only a deafening BOOM that shook the foundations of the city.
The impact didn't just break the roof; it liquefied the stone at the point of contact. The shockwave ripped outward, blowing the Aero-Signifer guards off the parapets like leaves in a gale. A crater, twenty feet wide, punched through the ceiling, showering the interior of the hall with a rain of marble dust and broken bodies.
Through the smoke and the falling debris, the rest of Squad Aurora descended. Isla's Hydro bubble cushioned their landing in the center of the devastation.
They stood up, weapons drawn, coughing in the dust.
They were in the Great Hall. But it was no longer a place of contracts and ale. The long tables were gone. The stone floor had been inscribed with massive, glowing runes of Schismite purple. The air was heavy, vibrating with a low, sickening hum that rattled their teeth.
And in the center of the room, hovering above the ruined floor, was Scribe Varrick.
He was unrecognizable. The dried-out bureaucrat was gone. In his place was a juggernaut.
He wore the Animus Prime—a suit of armor that seemed to be woven from liquid metal and solidified agony. The surface of the plate shifted constantly, forming the screaming, silent faces of the Signifers he had fed to the seals.
Squad Iron-Will. Squad Leonis. Squad Storm-Breaker.
They were all there, trapped in the metal, their Mana Souls burning as fuel for Varrick's ascension.
"You are persistent," Varrick said. His voice wasn't amplified by a spell; it resonated directly in their skulls, a chorus of a thousand stolen voices speaking in unison. "Inefficient. But persistent."
He drifted lower, his armored boots touching the ground without a sound. The purple energy of the ritual swirled around him, obedient as a pet.
"We aren't here to talk, Varrick," Aurora said, stepping forward. Her axe was heavy in her hands, the Kristal Biru pulsing with a violent blue light that struggled against the overwhelming violet glare of the room. "We're here to shut you down."
Varrick tilted his head, the helmet of the Animus shifting to form a mask of pity.
"Shut me down?" Varrick scoffed. He raised a gauntleted hand. The air in the hall grew heavy, crushing down on them like deep ocean pressure. "You still think this is about me? About power? You children. You look at the world and see villains and heroes. I look at the world and see a math problem that is running out of variables."
He gestured to the glowing runes on the floor, to the conduits pumping raw soul-mana into the armor.
"The seals are failing, Aurora. Not one. All of them," Varrick stated, his voice cold and absolute. "The ambient mana of Elysium is insufficient to hold back the Void. The Primordials are silent. The Heroes are dead or gone. If I do not act, the Third Schism happens tomorrow."
"So you murder your own people?" Roui spat, stepping up beside Persya, his stone-skin fading to reveal his bruised, defiant face. "You feed them to the meat grinder to keep the lights on?"
"I engage in Necessary Attrition," Varrick corrected sharply. "What is the life of a squad against the survival of a continent? I harvest the few to save the many. It is simple accounting."
He clenched his fist. The faces on his armor screamed silently, their light flaring brighter.
"But heroes... heroes are unpredictable. They are variables I cannot control. They die foolishly. They fail." Varrick's eyes glowed with a terrifying, fanatical light behind the visor. "So I built something better. The Animus Prime. A hero that does not fear. A hero that does not hesitate. A hero made of pure, distilled power."
He spread his arms, and the hall shook. The mana pressure spiked, cracking the remaining windows.
"I am not a villain," Varrick roared, the stolen souls amplifying his voice to a deafening thunder. "I am the Architect of survival! And you... you are just waste material."
The Animus Prime flared. The air turned toxic. The floor beneath Varrick's feet began to transmute into magma.
"The audit is closed," Varrick declared, raising a hand wreathed in the screaming violet light of stolen souls. "Total liquidation."
The air pressure in the Great Hall spiked, pressing down on the squad with the weight of a collapsing ocean. The floor beneath Varrick bubbled, the marble transmuting into a roiling pool of superheated slag. He was preparing to wipe the board.
Aurora didn't flinch. She didn't look at the terrifying display of magical supremacy towering above them. She looked to her right, at the battered, one-armed man who had been her shield since they were children in the slave pits of Basilea Elpidos.
"Persya," she said. Her voice was low, cutting through the roar of Varrick's power. She didn't issue a complex order. She simply nodded at the ground between them.
Persya understood. He always understood.
He stepped forward, the heavy Mithragnite counterweight at his belt clanking against his hip, compensating for the limb he had left in the foundry. His slate-grey skin was pale, etched with exhaustion, but his eyes burned with the stubborn, orange fire of his internal furnace.
"Statistically," Persya grunted, planting his feet on the trembling floor, "a foundation is only as strong as its weakest molecular bond."
He slammed his remaining gauntleted fist into the stone.
"Recomposere!"
He didn't just crack the floor; he unzipped the world. Channeling the last reserves of his mana into the Guild Hall's foundation, he commanded the atomic lattice of the marble to sever. A massive slab of the floor, twenty feet wide and three feet thick, ripped free from the bedrock with the sound of a tearing mountain.
It was an immense weight, a burden that should have crushed a single man. But Persya didn't lift it with muscle; he lifted it with physics and sheer, bloody-minded will. He pivoted, the counterweight swinging, turning his body into a trebuchet of flesh and iron.
"Heads up, Scribe!" Persya roared, the veins in his neck glowing like molten gold.
He hurled the slab.
The massive piece of masonry tumbled through the air, rotating slowly, a makeshift asteroid aimed directly at the Architect.
Varrick sneered, the faceplate of the Animus Prime shifting to an expression of bored disdain. "Crude. You throw rocks at a god?"
He raised a hand, preparing to disintegrate the debris with a wave of Schism energy.
But he had miscalculated. The rock wasn't the weapon. It was the cover.
"Now!"
Aurora was moving before the slab even left Persya's hand. She didn't run; she flowed, a streak of blue-and-silver violence drafting in the wake of the flying stone. She poured Infusus into her legs, pushing her muscles past the tearing point, accelerating until the world blurred into tunnels of light and sound.
The slab hit Varrick's defensive field. BOOM.
The stone shattered instantly against the barrier of Null-Mana, exploding into a blinding cloud of dust and gravel. Varrick's vision was obscured for a microsecond—a single heartbeat of grey confusion.
That was all the Blade needed.
Aurora burst through the cloud of debris. She didn't look like a hero; she looked like a demon. Her face was a mask of white dust and black blood, her teeth bared in a snarl, her bioluminescent eyes leaving trails of blue fire in the air.
She was airborne, leaping from the falling fragments of Persya's shield. She raised her Battle Axe high. The Kristal Biru core in the haft shrieked, reacting to the proximity of the Schismite armor. The blue veins in the steel flared white-hot, turning the weapon into a star held in her hands.
"This isn't a rock, Varrick!" Aurora screamed, bringing the axe down with the force of a collapsing star. "It's an eviction notice!"
Varrick scrambled to raise a guard, but he was too slow. The calculator had failed to account for the variable of rage.
CRACK-THOOM.
The axe struck the Animus Prime directly on the chest plate.
The impact was cataclysmic. A shockwave of colliding mana—the volatile blue of the Kristal Biru clashing against the corrupted purple of the Schismite—rippled outward, shattering the remaining windows of the Guild Hall and blowing the dust cloud away in a violent ring.
The armor held, but it screamed. The faces trapped within the metal wailed in a chorus of agony as the axe bit deep, carving a glowing furrow into the chest plate.
Varrick was hammered backward, his levitation matrix failing under the kinetic load. He crashed into the floor, skidding through the transmuted magma, throwing up sparks of burning stone.
Aurora landed on her feet, skidding to a halt, her chest heaving. Her axe smoked, the metal glowing cherry-red from the discharge.
She looked at Varrick, who was struggling to rise, the perfect image of the "God" marred by a smoking gash in his silver shell.
"You forgot the first rule of the Vanguard, Varrick," Aurora panted, leveling her weapon at him. "The bigger they are, the louder they crunch."
Varrick stood up. The gash in his armor began to bleed—not blood, but a thick, black ichor that hissed as it hit the ground. The faces on his armor were no longer moaning; they were shrieking in a frenzy. The damage hadn't stopped him; it had destabilized him.
"You..." Varrick's voice distorted, layering over itself, the sound of a thousand angry ghosts. "You dare damage the vessel? You dare risk the containment?"
The air around him began to vibrate. The Schismite was reacting to the trauma. The floor began to warp, gravity fluctuating wildly.
"You wanted a fight?" Varrick roared, spreading his arms. The Animus armor expanded, spikes of purple crystal erupting from its shoulders and back. "Then witness the Great Cost!"
"Formation: Phalanx!" Aurora roared, her voice cracking against the psychic scream of the Animus Prime.
They moved not as five broken soldiers, but as a single, desperate organism. The blood oath sworn in the Ningen shrine had forged a bond tighter than steel, a synchronization of souls that Varrick's calculus could not quantify.
Persya took the point. He didn't run; he bulldozed. With his Mithragnite counterweight swinging at his hip to balance the void where his left arm used to be, he channeled every drop of his remaining mana into Augmentation. His slate-grey skin flushed a violent, blinding orange, his internal furnace roaring to life like a dying star.
He slammed his single gauntleted fist into the magma-slicked floor, but he didn't slip. Roui was right behind him, his Aether-Glaive pulsing with Terrazation. The noble slammed the butt of his weapon down, instantly cooling the molten stone into a jagged, stable path of obsidian directly beneath Persya's boots.
"Come and get me, Architect!" Persya bellowed.
Varrick sneered, raising a hand. A wave of Schism energy, purple and necrotic, washed over the hall. It was a tide of unmaking.
"Shield!" Roui screamed, stepping into the slipstream of Persya's charge. He flared his Null-Plate, pushing his Stone-Skin to the breaking point. The purple wave hit them. Roui's armor screamed, the anti-magic metal glowing cherry-red as it fought to dampen the reality-warping energy. He held. He didn't break.
Behind the wall of muscle and stone, the artillery opened fire.
Alyia, bracing her Heafon Wand on Isla's shoulder for stability, fired. She didn't have the mana for a Flamebeam, so she improvised. She fired a staccato rhythm of Ionization bolts, timing them perfectly to strike the joints of Varrick's armor.
Crack-thrum. Crack-thrum.
The lightning didn't pierce, but it magnetized the Schismite plates, stiffening the armor, fighting Varrick's movements.
Isla moved like water. She didn't attack Varrick; she attacked his environment. She whipped tendrils of Hydro magic from the ruptured aqueducts, but she didn't freeze them. She vaporized them. A cloud of superheated steam engulfed the center of the room, blinding the Animus sensors and scrambling Varrick's visual lock.
"Now, Aurora!" Persya shouted, launching himself off the obsidian path.
He hit Varrick like a cannonball. One-armed, battered, and bleeding, the hybrid slammed his shoulder into the Animus chest plate. It wasn't just a tackle; it was a Recomposere strike. Persya tried to fuse his own armor to Varrick's, to grapple the god.
Varrick staggered. For a second, the juggernaut faltered.
Aurora was there. She Lumen-Stepped off Persya's back, using him as a launchpad. She appeared in the air above Varrick, her axe wreathed in the blue flame of Kristal Biru.
She brought the axe down. Not on the armor. On the helmet.
CLANG-CRUNCH.
The visor cracked. Varrick screamed—a sound of human pain mixed with the wailing of trapped souls.
"You are nothing!" Aurora shrieked, hacking wildly, abandoning form for pure violence. "Just a thief in a stolen suit!"
For a heartbeat, it looked like they might win. They were driving him back. Persya was grappling his left arm, Roui was parrying the tendrils of void energy, and Aurora was cracking the shell.
Then, Varrick laughed.
It was a wet, gurgling sound that vibrated in the floor.
"Variables," Varrick choked out, the black ichor leaking from his visor. "You are... persistent variables."
The Animus Prime didn't just glow; it opened.
The screaming faces on the armor stretched, their mouths opening wide. They didn't release sound. They inhaled.
A vacuum of mana sucked the air from the room.
" Void-Release: Event Horizon. "
The shockwave was absolute. It wasn't a blast of force; it was a reversal of gravity.
The squad was lifted off their feet. Aurora was flung backward, smashing into a pillar high above the floor. Roui and Persya were slammed into the ceiling, then dropped hard as gravity reasserted itself with crushing weight.
Varrick rose. The damage to his armor knitted itself together, healed by the consumption of the souls within. The glowing blue veins of Squad Iron-Heart faded from the plating, consumed to repair the cracks.
He was stronger now. Desperate.
He pointed a finger at Persya, who was struggling to rise, his counterweight dragging him down.
"The Wall falls first."
Varrick clenched his fist. The floor beneath Persya turned to liquid Void-Glass. Persya sank to his waist. Then the glass hardened instantly, trapping him.
Varrick walked toward him, a blade of pure, purple Schism energy forming in his hand.
"Persya!" Roui screamed, scrambling over the debris, his leg dragging.
Varrick backhanded Roui without looking, a telekinetic blow that sent the noble flying into the far wall with a bone-breaking crunch.
"No more games," Varrick hissed, standing over the trapped Persya. He raised the energy blade. "I will harvest you first. Your soul is... durable."
Persya looked up. He didn't beg. He spat blood onto Varrick's pristine armor. "Do it. See if I choke you on the way down."
Aurora was too far. Roui was down. Isla was out of mana. Alyia was watching through her scope, her finger trembling on the trigger of a dead wand.
Varrick brought the blade down.
The blade of Schism energy descended. It was a tear in the world, a purple void aiming for Persya's neck.
Persya didn't flinch. He looked the end in the eye, his slate-grey face set in a grimace of defiance. He wouldn't give the Architect the satisfaction of a scream.
Time seemed to stutter.
High above on the shattered balcony, Alyia Embrahem watched through the cracked lens of her Heafon Wand. Her internal chronometer, usually a comforting metronome of logic, was screaming a single, terrifying output.
Variable A (Persya): Survival Probability 0.000%.Variable B (Squad): Survival Probability 0.000%.Variable C (Varrick): Shield Integrity 100%.
The equation was balanced. It was perfect. It was a death sentence.
"Logic dictates..." Alyia whispered, her voice trembling. She looked at her wand. The Kristal Biru core, fused by Persya's own hand weeks ago, pulsed with a faint, dying light. It was empty. She was empty.
She looked at Persya. She saw the way he knelt, broken but unbowed. She saw the "Wall" that had shielded her from the world's cruelty, the man who had let her touch his arm when he wouldn't let anyone else near him.
"Logic," Alyia said, her voice breaking, "...is insufficient."
She didn't reload. She didn't aim. She reached deep inside herself, past the exhaustion, past the fear, into the very core of her Mana Soul.
She grabbed the Kristal Biru lens not with her hand, but with her spirit. She didn't draw mana from it; she poured her very life into it. She reversed the polarity of her own soul.
Warning: Critical Soul Fraying Imminent. Synaptic Overload initiated.
She didn't care. She forced the connection. Her crystalline skin began to glow, not with the blue of Ionization, but with a blinding, burning white. The air around her screamed as she became a living capacitor.
"Persya!"
The scream didn't sound like her. It was raw. It was human.
She vaulted from the balcony. She didn't use a spell to slow her fall; she used Augmentation—a clumsy, brute-force imitation of what she had seen Persya do a thousand times. She hit the ground running, her boots cracking the marble.
She was a comet of white fire.
Varrick turned, sensing the spike in mana. "Another variable?" he sneered, raising his free hand to casually backhand the pest.
He was too slow.
Alyia didn't stop. She didn't attack him. She dove.
She threw her body between the purple blade and Persya's neck.
She slammed the tip of her overloading wand directly into the Schism blade.
"DETONATE."
ZZZ-CRACK-BOOM.
The sound was not an explosion; it was the shriek of physics breaking. The Kristal Biru shattered. Alyia's Mana Soul shattered.
A sphere of blinding, white lightning erupted from her chest. It wasn't a directed bolt; it was an omnidirectional supernova of Ionization.
It hit the Animus Prime armor at point-blank range. The Schism blade shattered into purple dust. The force field protecting Varrick overloaded instantly, unable to process the chaotic, suicidal density of the energy.
Varrick was blasted backward. The juggernaut was lifted off his feet and thrown across the hall, crashing into the far wall with enough force to crater the stone.
The Void-Glass trap holding Persya shattered, turning into harmless dust.
Silence rushed back into the hall, deafening and cruel.
Smoke drifted from the center of the crater. Persya was alive. He was covered in ash, his ears ringing, but he was whole.
And in his lap lay Alyia.
She was small. So terrifyingly small. Her crystalline skin was dull, the inner light extinguished. Her glasses were gone, revealing eyes that were no longer sharp amber, but a soft, fading hazel.
"Alyia," Persya croaked. He reached out with his one good hand, his fingers trembling uncontrollably. "Alyia. Status. Give me a status."
She blinked. Her breathing was a wet, rattling sound. She looked up at him, her vision unfocused.
"Status..." she whispered. She tried to raise her hand to adjust glasses that weren't there. "Variable... corrected."
"You idiot," Persya gasped, pulling her closer, ignoring the heat radiating from her burnt armor. Tears cut tracks through the grime on his slate-grey face. "You calculated the odds. You said it was zero. Why did you..."
"The math..." Alyia breathed, a small, bloody smile touching her lips. She reached up, her hand brushing the scar on his jaw—the same way she had massaged his bruise in the safehouse. "The math was wrong, Persya. It didn't account for... preference."
"Preference?" Persya choked out.
"I prefer..." She coughed, her body convulsing. "I prefer a world with you in it. Even if... I am not there to see it."
"Don't say that," Persya begged, pressing his forehead to hers. "Isla! Isla, get here!"
"No," Alyia whispered, her voice gaining a sudden, terrifying clarity. She wasn't speaking like a machine anymore. She was just a girl dying in the arms of the man she loved.
"Listen to me. My core... it's gone. The feedback... it liquefied the lattice. I can feel the silence, Persya. It's... it's quiet. No more numbers."
"Alyia, please," Persya sobbed, his iron composure shattered completely. "I can't be the Wall without the Eyes. I don't know where to look."
"You don't need to look," she murmured, her gaze locking onto his. "You just need to stand. Be the mountain, Persya. Be the rock that the wave breaks against."
Her hand slipped from his jaw to his chest, resting over his heart.
"I solved it," she whispered, her eyes drifting shut. "The equation. The variable was... love. It was always love."
"Alyia?" Persya shook her gently. "Alyia!"
"Calculation... complete."
She exhaled. The chest beneath his hand stopped moving. The tension left her frame, leaving her heavy and still.
"NO!"
The roar that tore from Persya's throat was not human. It was the sound of a mountain cracking. It was the sound of the earth screaming.
Across the room, Isla collapsed, her hands covering her mouth, a silent wail racking her body. Roui stared at the ceiling, tears streaming freely down his face, his hand clutching the un-sent letter to his father. Aurora stood frozen, her axe hanging limp in her hand, watching the light go out of her friend.
Then, a sound broke the mourning.
A laugh. Wet, pained, but undeniable.
From the rubble against the far wall, Varrick rose.
The Animus Prime armor was a ruin. The helmet was gone, revealing Varrick's face—bloodied, burned, and manic. The chest plate was cracked open, leaking black soul-ichor.
But he was standing.
"Inefficient!" Varrick screamed, stumbling forward. He pointed a shaking finger at Persya holding Alyia's body. "A waste! A variable deleted for a momentary delay! Do you see? This is why you fail! You spend lives like copper coins for sentiment!"
He raised his hand. The purple energy flickered, weak but still lethal.
"She died for nothing!" Varrick roared. "I am the Architect! I am the future! And I will not be stopped by a glitch!"
Persya didn't look up. He gently laid Alyia back onto the stone floor. He smoothed her hair. He closed her eyes.
When he stood up, the air in the room changed.
The temperature plummeted. The ground began to tremble, a low, rhythmic vibration that matched the beating of a heart.
Persya turned to face Varrick.
His slate-grey skin was no longer pale. It was turning a deep, bruised purple. The veins in his neck weren't glowing orange; they were burning with a violent, violet light.
He didn't say a word. He didn't roar. He simply took a step forward.
THOOM.
The floor under his boot didn't just crack; it turned to dust.
Aurora looked at him, and for the first time in her life, she felt fear. Not for herself. For Varrick.
Because the man standing there wasn't Persya anymore. It was the Calamity.
The floor under Persya's boot didn't just crack; it turned to dust.
The air around him warped. The dying ember of his internal furnace did not extinguish. It imploded, then reignited with a cold, terrifying ferocity.
The orange glow in his veins, the mark of his Augmentation exertion, bled away. In its place, a deep, resonant Sapphire Blue flooded his circulatory system. It shone through his slate-grey skin not like fire, but like the heart of a glacier, or the deepest trench of the Fossa Caligo.
He had skipped a tier. Fueled by the raw, unadulterated trauma of watching his world die in his arms, Persya had bypassed the Purple stage entirely. He had ascended to Blue Tier—the Competent Stage—in a single, violent heartbeat.
Varrick stared, his visor leaking black ichor. "Impossible. The energy required for such a lattice jump... it should kill you."
"I am already dead," Persya said. His voice was devoid of inflection, a flatline given sound.
He raised his remaining hand. He didn't rush. He didn't scream. He simply clenched his fist.
"Recomposere."
The spell didn't travel; it manifested. The marble floor beneath Varrick didn't liquify this time; it atomized. The molecular bonds holding the stone together simply ceased to exist at Persya's command.
Varrick fell.
He caught himself with a blast of Aero, hovering erratically. "You act out of emotion! Inefficient!"
Varrick thrust his hands forward, unleashing a barrage of Schism energy bolts—void-purple lances meant to unmake matter.
Persya didn't dodge. He swiped his hand through the air. He didn't block the magic; he transmuted the air in front of the bolts.
Crack.
A wall of solid, transparent diamond—formed instantly from the carbon in the air—materialized inches from his face. The Void bolts shattered against it.
Persya walked through the diamond wall, phasing it back into gas as he passed, then hardening it again behind him. He was rewriting the battlefield in real-time.
"Inefficient?" Persya stepped onto the air. He hardened the oxygen beneath his boots into invisible platforms. He walked up the sky toward the hovering Architect. "Inefficiency is letting you speak."
He vanished.
Flash-Augmentation at Blue Tier was not a blur; it was a teleportation of kinetic force.
Persya reappeared directly above Varrick. He brought his single fist down.
BOOM.
The impact broke the sound barrier inside the hall. It struck Varrick's Animus force field. The field didn't just buckle; it shattered like cheap glass. The blow continued, driving Varrick down into the crater of the Guild Hall.
Dust and debris exploded upward.
Varrick lay in the rubble, his armor screaming. The faces on his chest plate were silent now, their mana drained to cushion the blow. He scrambled backward, his movements jerky and panicked.
"No," Varrick gasped, trying to summon a shield. "The math... the variables..."
Persya landed. He reached out, tearing a massive iron support beam from the wall with a gesture of Recomposere, twisting the metal as if it were wet clay. He fashioned it into a crude, jagged spear.
"Your math ended when she did," Persya stated. He raised the spear.
But Varrick was not the Architect for nothing.
" System Override: Emergency Siphon. "
The Spire above them pulsed. The lights of Limani tis Adelphótitas flickered and died.
Varrick didn't draw from the Animus; he drew from the city. He drained the mana grid of the entire district, funneling the raw energy into his broken suit.
The Animus Prime roared back to life, not purple, but a blinding, chaotic white. The armor expanded, growing extra limbs of hard-light and scrap metal. Varrick rose, suspended in a storm of stolen power.
"I AM ELYSIUM!" Varrick shrieked, his voice overlapping with the hum of the overloaded grid.
He fired a beam of concentrated mana—thick as a tree trunk—directly at Persya.
Persya crossed his arm and the iron spear to block. The beam hit him. It pushed him back, his boots carving trenches in the stone. His Blue aura flared, struggling against the sheer weight of an entire city's power.
"He's too strong!" Isla cried out, shielding her eyes from the glare. "He's draining the grid!"
"He's alone," Aurora said.
She stood up. She looked at the axe in her hand—the Kristal Biru core was dim, but her heart was beating a war drum. She looked at Roui, who was propping himself up on his Aether-Glaive, blood dripping from his chin.
"We don't let him stand alone," Roui whispered. "Not again."
Something snapped inside them. The grief, the rage, the exhaustion—it all coalesced into a singular point of clarity. They had watched Alyia die. They were watching Persya fight a god.
They refused to be spectators.
Aurora screamed. It wasn't a cry of pain; it was a command to her own soul.
The orange light of her Novice tier shattered. A violent, regal Purple erupted from her chest. Her Infusus didn't just coat her axe; it exploded outward, creating a visible aura of blue flame that shaped itself into the wings of a phoenix.
Roui slammed his glaive down. The ground shook. His aura flared—not grey, but a deep, rich Purple. His Terrazation and Tenebrae fused. Shadows solidified into obsidian armor around him, darker than night and harder than diamond.
They had ascended. Advanced Tier.
"Persya!" Aurora shouted, Lumen-Stepping into the air, moving faster than she ever had before.
She didn't attack Varrick. She attacked the beam.
She swung her axe, wreathed in Purple-tier Infusus. She cleaved the mana stream in two, diverting the energy around Persya.
"Now!" Roui roared.
He cast a spell he had never dared try. Gravity-Well.
He slammed his glaive into the ground. The shadows beneath Varrick turned solid and heavy. They grabbed the Architect's ankles, pulling him down with the weight of a mountain.
Varrick faltered, his beam cutting out. "More variables? How?!"
Persya didn't answer. He dropped the iron spear. He didn't need it.
Aurora landed on his right. Roui stood on his left.
"Together," Aurora said, her eyes burning with blue fire.
They charged.
It was an execution.
Roui moved first. He thrust his glaive, extending a Shadow-Reach blade that pierced Varrick's shoulder, pinning him to the wall.
Aurora followed, Lumen-Stepping directly onto Varrick's chest. She ripped the Schismite plating off with her bare hand, reinforced by Infusus.
Varrick screamed as his armor was dismantled. "You are dooming the world! The Void will take us all!"
"Then we'll kill the Void too," Persya growled.
He stepped into the pocket. He grabbed Varrick by the throat with his single hand. His Blue mana flared, overpowering Varrick's white noise.
Persya didn't crush Varrick's throat. He used Recomposere on the Animus core embedded in Varrick's chest—the battery of souls.
"Release," Persya commanded.
He reversed the flow. The souls trapped in the armor—Iron-Heart, Leonis, the rookies—screamed one last time as they were vented into the aether, free at last.
The armor died. Varrick fell to the floor, a broken, shriveled man in a pile of scrap.
He looked up at them. Three titans of mana standing over him. The Wall, the Blade, and the Shield.
Aurora raised her axe for the final blow.
HUMMMMMM.
The air in the Guild Hall froze. Not from cold, but from pressure.
A sound like a bell tolling underwater filled the room.
Behind the cowering Varrick, space twisted. It didn't tear like the Void; it folded neatly, precise and geometric.
A portal opened. It was a perfect circle of golden light, rimmed with rotating arcane rings.
A figure stepped through.
She was tall, draped in robes of white silk and gold bullion that seemed to float in zero gravity. Her face was hidden behind a porcelain mask of perfect, symmetrical beauty.
But her aura... it was suffocating.
It wasn't Blue. It wasn't Purple.
It was a deep, blood-red crimson that radiated power like a dying sun. Red Tier. Expert Stage.
She raised one hand. She didn't cast a spell. She simply willed the air to solidify.
Aurora's axe stopped inches from Varrick's neck, hitting an invisible wall that rang like steel.
The squad was thrown back by a pulse of pure kinetic force, sliding across the floor.
"That is enough," the figure said. Her voice was melodious, calm, and terrifying.
She stepped over Varrick, looking down at him with the disdain one might show a broken tool.
"Asset Varrick," she said. "You have exceeded your budget. And your utility."
"Lady Thorne!" Varrick gasped, reaching out a bloody hand. "The audit... I can explain! The variables... they evolved!"
Lady Aris Thorne, the Treasurer of the Asphodel Conclave, looked up at Squad Aurora. She assessed them—Persya's blue rage, Aurora's purple fire, Roui's obsidian shell.
"Impressive," she murmured. "Unexpected yields. Varrick was a fool, but he did find quality ore."
"Get out of the way," Persya snarled, trying to stand, but the Red-tier pressure pinned him to the floor.
"Not today, little rock," Thorne said dismissively. She snapped her fingers.
Golden chains of Lumen erupted from the portal, wrapping around Varrick and dragging him backward into the light.
"The Conclave does not leave its books unbalanced," Thorne stated, stepping back into the portal. "Varrick belongs to us. His debts are... internal."
She looked at Aurora one last time.
"You have broken the seal, children. Do not mistake this victory for freedom. You have simply moved to a higher tax bracket."
The portal snapped shut.
Varrick was gone. The pressure vanished.
The squad was left alone in the ruins of the Guild Hall. The silence was absolute.
Alyia was dead. Varrick had escaped.
Aurora fell to her knees, her axe clattering to the stone. She looked at Persya.
The blue light in his veins faded, leaving him grey and hollow. He walked over to where Alyia's body lay. He picked her up, cradling her against his chest.
He didn't cry. He didn't speak. He just looked at the spot where the portal had been.
"We aren't done," Roui whispered, limping to join them, his hand resting on Aurora's shoulder.
"No," Aurora said. She stood up. Her eyes were dry. "We're just starting."