The voice didn't bounce off the cavern walls. It just wormed right into Vance's mind—a deep, disgusting baritone, tasting like rust and rot.
"Return... the pieces."
His vision blurred. The pressure coming off the nine-foot nightmare hit him like a migraine, and somehow, the cavern got even colder. Hoarfrost started forming on the black metal stones, right where that monster dragged its enormous sword.
Vance pushed himself so hard against the pillar behind him, he could feel the stone bruising his back. He wasn't breathing. He wasn't blinking.
Axiom, right next to him, shook. The mutated Lynx—an apex predator that only hours ago tried to fry a Behemoth and swallow Vance's soul—stood frozen, terror shoved deep into its instincts.
The creature stepped forward, catching the golden light from the runes.
Scrape. Thud.
Its anatomy was wrong—like something that just shouldn't exist. It wasn't just armored. The Syndicate's white-and-gold plating had been grafted onto it, fused with raw Eidolon bone. Gray bone spikes ripped through the chest, basically pinning the armor to whatever was left of its body.
And the details—those got under Vance's skin.
Right under the rusty collar, just peeking out from a shredded cape, Vance spotted three round injection ports built into the monster's neck.
He'd seen those before: proprietary bio-valves, meant to pump volatile genetic stabilizers straight into the brainstem. Vanguard didn't touch that kind of tech. Only Obsidian Cartel labs used them. And they guarded it with their lives.
Why does a Vanguard Commander have Obsidian hardware in his neck? Vance wondered. And what happened to make it look fossilized?
The monster's head snapped toward him.
Its single remaining eye—a socket leaking warped temporal energy—glared right at Vance's chest.
"Thief," the voice grated straight into his mind.
It didn't lumber this time. The whole mass of bone and steel moved so fast it turned into a blur.
"Move!" Vance screamed. The words tore his throat raw.
He didn't try to be elegant—he hurled himself sideways, diving off the dais just as Axiom shot the other way.
The fused sword smashed into the pillar.
No sparks. No clean break. The impact just obliterated the stone. Shockwaves shattered rock and sent freezing air everywhere, throwing Vance ten feet across the cavern.
He crashed into the metal floor, shoulder first, his lungs emptying with a gasp.
Vance scrambled, dragging himself backward, still on the icy metal.
The pillar was gone. Only a crater of debris remained. The corrupted Siphon stood there, hauling its sword out of the rubble. Its ruined eye found Vance again.
[Warning: Hostile Entity Classification - Tier-5 (Corrupted).]
[Survival Probability in direct combat: 0.00%.]
Tier-5. Basically a god in the Fracture, now completely insane—black blood leaking from the gear in its chest.
Vance was trapped. Axiom's lightning couldn't touch this thing.
The monster lifted its blade, ready to finish Vance off. That's when Vance realized—it wasn't hunting his face. It couldn't see. It was tracking the golden radiation pouring from the clockwork scar on his chest, drawn to the missing piece of Aethelgard Watcher like a predator sniffing for blood.
The ping. We have to hide from the ping.
"Axiom!" Vance threw his thoughts through their mind-link, rough as razor wire. Kill the engine! Freeze the gear! Now!
He felt Axiom hesitate—stopping the gear meant stopping their own hearts and losing System vision. But getting diced by a centuries-old ghost was worse.
Vance didn't wait. He slammed his will down, forcing the Astral Engine to quit grinding.
The golden gear in his chest seized.
Agony hit him instantly. Heart frozen mid-beat. Lungs shut down. The golden light vanished, snuffed out like a candle.
A moment later, Axiom murdered its own gear—the dark electricity in Vance's arm flickered and went dark.
Now the cavern was nearly pitch black, saved only by the sick glow from the monster's eye.
That massive sword crashed down.
It struck right next to Vance's boot. The shock vibrated up his leg, shattering his foot, but the blade missed his body.
He held still, flat on his back, eyes wide, vision narrowing as oxygen slipped away. No screams—he couldn't breathe. He was a corpse.
The monster towered over him.
It jerked the sword free, leaned down close. The rusted breastplate hovered just inches from Vance's face, stinking of ancient decay and ozone. Drops of black blood oozed from the gear in its chest, sizzling acid on the metal beside Vance's head.
"The resonance... fades," the voice echoed, confused, no longer drilling right into his mind.
The monster stood up. Its empty eye scanned the darkness, sweeping over Vance and Axiom. Without that golden glow, they were just meat in a tomb.
Tier-5 let out a low, rattling sigh—dust cascaded from the ceiling. It turned away slowly, dragging its sword, and wandered deeper into the ruins.
Vance held his breath—five agonizing seconds ticked by. He nearly blacked out.
Then he unlocked the engine.
His heart smashed against his ribs. He sucked in a ragged breath, biting his lip to keep from coughing. His foot screamed, but he didn't dare move.
He watched the monster's silhouette.
It headed for the far wall. The glow from its eye revealed a huge circular vault, made from that same dark metal, covered in physical locks and runes pulsing violet.
It wasn't a ruin. It was a prison.
The corrupted Commander slammed a fist against the vault.
BOOM.
"Open," the voice demanded, echoing with centuries of madness. "The Vanguard... demands... ascension."
But that wasn't what made Vance forget his mangled foot.
As the vault lit up, the monster's back became clear. For a second, Vance read the faded letters stamped into the shoulder armor:
[COMMANDER A. PRESCOTT]
[FOUNDER ID: 001]
Vance's blood froze colder than the Sub-Stratum air.
Arthur Prescott: the legend, founder of Vanguard Syndicate, Sterling Prescott's great-grandfather. Supposedly died peacefully a decade ago. A hero, immortalized in history, his bloodline perfect.
Yet here he was. Fossilized. Corrupted. Sledgehammering a prison door in the abyss, wearing hybrid armor from a rival.
Vance lay there in the dark, staring at this impossible ghost.
The Syndicates weren't just hiding resources. They were hiding the nightmare history nobody wanted to believe. And if Arthur Prescott was down here, ruined by the same power now burning in Vance's chest...
Future knowledge w
as worthless. He wasn't playing a game with preset rules.
He'd just cracked open the graveyard of the gods who wrote them.