Classical music has a logical structure. Introduction, exposition, development, and recapitulation.

  What happened at the Wire Opera House wasn't music. It was a sonic riot.

  "Presto agitato!" roared the Maestro, strumming the exposed strings on his own chest with violence.

  An invisible shockwave swept the theater. The rows of empty seats exploded into shards of metal and rotten upholstery.

  The porcelain dolls advanced on us, their movements rapid and spasmodic, accompanied by the irritating sound of wooden joints knocking: toccata-toccata-toccata.

  "They're too fast!" yelled Valéria, firing her shotgun. The buckshot pulverized the head of a ballerina doll, but the headless body kept coming, its ceramic hands sharp as razors.

  "They have no brains!" Gristle swung her giant cleaver in a horizontal arc, turning three dolls into firewood. "Doctor, where do I hit to make them stop?!"

  "Cut the wires!" I replied, dodging a ventriloquist dummy trying to bite my ankle. "There are no visible wires, but there are mana threads! They're controlled by the Maestro's frequency!"

  Arthur (the Parasite) projected thermal vision onto my retina. The theater was crisscrossed by lines of blue vibration, all connecting the Maestro's chest to each of the thousands of dolls.

  It was an acoustic neural network.

  "Luna!" I called. "You're our jammer! I need you to cut the signal!"

  Luna was crouched behind a steel column, shielding herself from shrapnel. She looked at the Maestro, floating above the stage, preparing a devastating new chord.

  "He's in A Major! It's too high-pitched! If I try to cover that, my lungs will burst!"

  "Don't try to cover it! Use physics!" I slid across the waxed floor, kicking the ventriloquist dummy's head away. "Destructive Interference! Sing the same note, but invert the wave phase! Cancel his sound with yours!"

  Luna's eyes went wide.

  "Active noise cancellation..." She smiled, adjusting the crystal on her baton. "Okay. Let's see who has more vocal range."

  The Maestro opened his arms. The strings in his chest glowed red.

  "Symphony of Torn Flesh, Second Movement!"

  He unleashed a sonic screech capable of liquefying internal organs.

  In the same instant, Luna leaped from behind the column. She didn't sing lyrics. She emitted a pure, sustained note, perfectly tuned to the monster's, but in the opposite "time."

  VMMMMmmmm...

  The sound in the theater died.

  It was bizarre. The Maestro was screaming, Luna was singing, but the result was absolute silence. The waves collided in the air and canceled each other out mathematically.

  The dolls stopped. Without the sonic command, they were just inanimate trash.

  The Maestro looked at Luna (or rather, turned his violin face toward her), confused. The vibration in his chest was locked.

  "Audacity..." his voice faltered, coming out like radio static. "An amateur soprano... challenging a virtuoso?"

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  "Now!" I shouted.

  While he was focused on Luna, I ran.

  I activated the suit's adrenaline injectors. The world slowed down.

  I jumped onto the grand piano. The Maestro floated two meters above me.

  He noticed me too late. He tried to change frequency to attack me.

  "Adagio..."

  "Emergency surgery," I snarled, leaping from the piano toward him.

  My Mithril scalpels, dipped in Oil of Silence (extracted from Library Mimics), gleamed.

  I didn't aim for the head. I aimed for the chest.

  I aimed for the strings.

  ZWIP! ZWIP!

  I severed the main tendons.

  There was a horrible sound, like steel cables snapping under tension: TWOIING!

  The Maestro screamed—a mute, choked sound.

  The gut strings came loose, whipping the air. The sound box in his chest cracked.

  Without the strings, the magic dissipated.

  He fell.

  He hit the stage with the weight of a solid log.

  The dolls in the audience collapsed all at once, as if their strings had been cut too.

  I landed beside him, panting. Silence returned to the Opera, but now it was a natural silence, just the sound of our breathing and the lake water lapping against the foundations.

  The Maestro tried to crawl, scratching the floor. The varnish on his face was cracked.

  "My... masterpiece..." he whispered, his voice now just a breath of wind in hollow wood. "The music... stopped..."

  I approached him.

  [POST-OPERATIVE ANALYSIS]

  [INDIVIDUAL: HIGH COMPLEXITY SONIC GOLEM.]

  [CORE: ALCHEMICAL SCORE LOCATED IN BRAIN.]

  "The music didn't stop, Maestro," I said, sheathing the scalpels. "It just changed key. You were playing a requiem. We prefer something more... alive."

  Valéria and Gristle climbed onto the stage, kicking the remains of the dolls out of the way.

  "Is he dead?" asked Gristle, poking the monster with her foot.

  "Neutralized. Without the magical vocal cords, he's just a broken instrument."

  Luna approached, her face sweaty but radiant.

  "I did it! I throat-canceled a Rift Boss!"

  "It was impressive," I admitted. "But don't celebrate yet. His performance was protecting something."

  I walked to the grand piano.

  Now that the Maestro was no longer connected to it, I could see the details. The keys weren't ivory; they were bone. And there was a golden inscription on the lid: Janus.

  "Janus. The god of doors and passages," Valéria murmured.

  I played a key. A low middle C.

  The sound echoed deeply, making the stage floor vibrate.

  But it wasn't just sound.

  The entire piano began to descend. The stage beneath it was a hidden hydraulic elevator.

  "Everyone on the piano!" I ordered.

  We climbed onto the instrument's lid as it sank slowly into a square shaft that opened in the floor.

  The Maestro was left behind, lying on the stage, looking at the ceiling as the moonlight faded away.

  We went down.

  We passed the water level of the lake. Through the glass walls of the elevator shaft, I could see dark aquatic creatures swimming in the black water outside. Eels with human faces. Fish made of shadow.

  We continued descending.

  The air grew colder, but also cleaner. The smell of rot vanished, replaced by the smell of ozone and old paper.

  Finally, the elevator stopped with a soft CLUNK.

  We were in a circular underground chamber, lit by cold blue flame torches.

  The walls were covered in metal filing cabinets, floor to ceiling. Thousands of drawers.

  In the center of the room, there was an old surgical table, rusted iron.

  And on the table, a corpse.

  Not a monster. A human.

  Skeletal, dry, wearing a lab coat that was disintegrating. He clutched a diary against his chest.

  "The Crypt of Genesis," I said, stepping off the piano. My voice echoed in the silent room. "It's not a magical tomb. It's a dead archive."

  I walked to the corpse. The badge on the coat was still legible, protected by plastic.

  I read the name. And I felt my own blood run cold.

  Dr. Hélio Veras.

  Director of Research - Project Symbiosis.

  Luna stopped beside me, reading the name. She looked at me, eyes wide.

  "Arthur... 'Veras'?"

  I touched the badge. My hand trembled slightly.

  "My father," I whispered. "He disappeared on Rift Day, thirty years ago. They said he died in the first wave."

  I looked around, at the files.

  "He didn't die in the first wave. He came here. He knew what was happening."

  The Parasite inside me vibrated. Not hunger. Not rage.

  It was recognition.

  [BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE CONFIRMED: CREATOR.]

  I took the diary from my father's skeletal hands. The leather cracked.

  "Let's see what you hid down here, Dad."

  I opened the first page.

  There were no dates. Only a sentence written in shaky, blood-stained handwriting:

  "We didn't open the Rifts to let the monsters in. We opened the Rifts because we needed to run from what was coming from the sky."

  I closed the book. The silence in the room was deafening.

  The history I knew—the history the world knew—was wrong.

  "Valéria," I said, my voice hard. "Start copying the files. Everything."

  "Luna, watch the elevator."

  "Gristle, if anything moves in these shadows, kill it."

  I hugged the diary to my chest.

  The search for the Solar Knight's cure was over. But the search for the truth about the end of the world had just begun.