Silence wasn’t real. It was artificial, like everything else in this hall. At first, I heard nothing but a thin, drilling whine somewhere deep inside my skull—the kind of sound silence makes when your eardrums burst. Then the smell came. Burnt insulation, charred flesh, and something sour that made my jaw clench.

  I tried to open my eyes. My eyelids felt glued shut with hardened resin. When I finally forced them apart, the world appeared as a gray blur. The white marble floor had turned into a filthy slurry of soot and jagged shards. The golden veins that once carried energy were now blackened, scorched trenches carved into stone.

  I was lying on my stomach. I tried to push myself up with my right arm—and almost passed out when nothing happened. I felt no pain. I felt nothing at all.

  I turned my head and looked at my shoulder.

  My right arm no longer looked like an arm. It was a chunk of burned, gray crystal, webbed with cracks that lazily leaked acrid smoke. It was frozen in an unnatural bend—a dead, heavy ballast attached to my body.

  “…Error… rebooting…”

  Zeno’s voice echoed inside my head, as if coming from the bottom of a well. It stuttered, breaking into meaningless fragments. The electric surge I’d run through myself had burned out not only the hall’s circuitry, but a significant portion of his code.

  For a moment, I was afraid.

  Not of Valerius. Of the emptiness.

  Zeno had been a parasite, a teacher, a father, and an enemy all at once. Without his constant whisper, I felt as if my sight had been taken away.

  [System Status: Critical degradation.]

  [Warning: Right manipulator fully deactivated. Neural endings destroyed.]

  “Iron… kid… breathe, damn it!”

  Someone roughly flipped me onto my back. Efrem’s face hovered above me. He looked terrible—his cheek split open, hair caked in soot—but his eyes burned with that feverish light people get when they have nothing left to lose.

  “Static field’s dead,” he rasped, grabbing me by the collar. “Doors are unlocked. We need to get out before these white walls turn into our tombstones.”

  He tried to lift me. I wasn’t heavy, but for a wounded old man, I was a burden. Every movement sent a dry crunch through my ribs.

  “Leave me…” I croaked. My mouth was full of blood and dust. “I’m… dead weight.”

  “Shut it, kid. I didn’t drag you through all those swamps just to dump you in this sterile shithole. Hold on to my neck. Left arm!”

  Efrem hooked my left arm over his shoulder. My dead right arm swung uselessly, thudding against his back like a wooden log. We moved toward the exit.

  Valerius’s hall was dying. Without magic, it lost its splendor fast. The enchanted lamps under the ceiling burst one after another, showering us with glass. Somewhere in the corridors beyond, a siren began to howl—mechanical, screeching. It didn’t need mana, running on old springs and counterweights.

  It was the Order’s emergency protocol.

  “Hear that?” Efrem stopped at the doorway. “Hermetic shutters. If we don’t make it through in three minutes, we’re sealed in this sector forever.”

  We entered a long service corridor. It had once been softly lit; now it lay in half-darkness, broken only by sporadic flashes of emergency lights. Papers, broken furniture, and… bodies were scattered everywhere.

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  They weren’t guards.

  They were the “empties”—the acolytes Valerius had drained of everything human. Without the Magister’s control, they simply sat against the walls or wandered in circles, bumping into corners like blind kittens.

  “Don’t look at them,” Efrem whispered, quickening his pace. “There’s nothing left inside. Just empty shells.”

  We reached the first intersection. Above us, a massive iron shutter began to descend with a grinding roar. A slab as thick as a hand crept downward—slow, relentless.

  “We won’t make it…” Efrem wheezed. His legs trembled.

  I looked at the shutter. A schematic surfaced in my mind on its own. I saw the cables. The counterweights hidden inside the wall shaft.

  “Efrem… right,” I pointed with my left hand. “There’s an emergency override lever in that niche. Red.”

  He dragged me over. The lever was sealed under a glass dome. Efrem smashed it with his elbow and yanked the handle down.

  Metal screamed. The slab froze half a meter above the floor. The cables went taut like strings, ready to snap at any second.

  “Crawl!” Efrem shoved me under the barrier.

  I spilled through to the other side, scraping skin against cold metal. My right arm snagged on the edge of the slab. For a moment, I thought it would be torn off—and honestly, I wouldn’t have minded. But Efrem shoved it free and then squeezed through himself, grunting and swearing.

  A second later, an earth-shaking crash thundered behind us—the cable snapped, and the multi-ton slab slammed shut, sealing the path forever.

  We sat in darkness, gasping for air.

  “Where are we?” I asked as consciousness began to blur.

  “Technical Sector Beta. Storage and disposal,” Efrem scanned the shadows. “If the old maps are right, there should be a way to the ventilation shafts. They lead to the Pit.”

  I listened. The ringing in my ears finally faded, replaced by another sound.

  Clack…

  Clack…

  Clack…

  Heavy. Measured. Like a hammer striking an anvil in a slow, funeral rhythm.

  “He’s coming,” I said without doubt. “Kyle.”

  “That’s impossible,” Efrem whispered. “The collapse—you buried him under tons of stone!”

  “For him, stone is just an obstacle,” I tried to stand, leaning on my left arm. “Valerius modified his body so it doesn’t know fatigue or pain. He’s not human, Efrem. He’s a tool. Just like me.”

  The footsteps drew closer. Kyle wasn’t running. He knew we had nowhere to go. He followed our trail like a hound, drawn by the scent of burns and fresh blood.

  “We need a place where his mass becomes his weakness,” I looked down the corridor. “Where’s the waste drop shaft?”

  “Around the corner. But it’s a thirty-meter fall. We’ll be smashed.”

  “We won’t,” I felt the scraps of copper wire in my jacket pocket—the ones I’d stolen back at the hut. “We’ll fall controlled. He won’t.”

  The corridor narrowed. The ceilings lowered. These were the Citadel’s guts—places never meant for the eyes of its masters. Everything was coated in centuries of grease and soot.

  We reached a massive circular opening in the floor. Cold air and rot wafted up from below.

  The Pit.

  The bottomless womb where the Order dumped everything it deemed unnecessary: broken devices, expired alchemicals, and defective bodies.

  Clack.

  The footsteps stopped just behind us. A figure emerged from the darkness.

  Kyle was horrifying.

  Half his armor was gone, exposing unnaturally pale flesh woven with cables. His helmet was crushed, and from beneath it stared a single red eye, pulsing with rage. His greatsword had snapped in half, becoming a jagged cleaver—but it was no less deadly.

  “O-o-object…” he rasped. His vocal cords were ruined, his voice like a rusted saw.

  Efrem drew his knife, but I placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Useless. Jump, Efrem.”

  “Are you insane?!”

  “Jump! I’ll hold him for three seconds.”

  Efrem looked at me, then at the monster raising his blade. Doubt flickered in his eyes—but he nodded.

  “Don’t you dare die down there, hear me?!”

  And with that, he stepped into the abyss.

  Kyle lunged. He was fast, despite the damage. But I was ready.

  I couldn’t fight. I had no magic.

  But I had physics.

  I dropped my body flat in front of him. My dead right arm—heavy and rigid as stone—worked perfectly as a tripwire. Kyle, accelerating into the strike, stumbled over my elbow. His enormous mass betrayed him.

  He tried to brake, driving the broken blade into the floor—but inertia was unstoppable. His body slid toward the edge of the Pit.

  At the last moment, he grabbed my collar with his massive metal hand.

  “T-t-together…” he rasped.

  We fell.

  The drop was long. Wind howled in my ears, ripping the last air from my lungs. I saw the shrinking light of the hatch above—and Valerius’s face suddenly appeared in the air as a spectral projection.

  “You’ve just opened a door I couldn’t break through for three hundred years,” he said, his tone unreadable. “Thank you, Iron. Now the truly interesting part begins.”

  I didn’t have time to ask what he meant.

  The impact with a mound of rotting rags and trash tore the last shred of consciousness from me.

  Darkness finally became absolute.

  And this time, even Zeno was gone.