The Sanctum wasn’t just a base for a while now; it was an organism. And like me, it had grown a thicker skin.

  I stood on the walkway overlooking the central hub of the Veiled Path, letting the ambient mana of my Tier 7 evolution wash over the facility below. When I evolved, the core of the Sanctum — linked irrevocably to my own Soul — had pulsed in sympathy, expanding the physical and metaphysical boundaries of our home.

  The caverns beneath the earth had deepened, the obsidian walls reinforcing themselves with a natural, carbon-dense lattice that mimicked my new biology. What was once a rough-hewn cave system now looked like a forgotten city of the ancients, glowing with soft, bio-luminescent runes that stabilized the massive mana output of the Forge.

  “Look at the laminar flow, Master! Just look at it!”

  Leoric’s voice screeched from the comms, echoing with pure, unadulterated joy.

  I glanced down at the Forges. Leoric was suspended in a gravity harness near the new Void-vents we had installed. Instead of the chaotic roaring flames of the past, the magma flowed in smooth, pressurized currents, feeding the array of high-efficiency thermal converters he had built overnight with his new Matter Manipulation.

  “It’s beautiful, Leoric,” I admitted, leaning on the railing. My grip didn’t dent the metal this time — I was getting better at checking my mass at the door. “But are the stealth parameters holding?”

  “Holding?” Leoric scoffed, his voice tinny. “Master, since your Domain evolved, the Veiled Path doesn’t just ‘hide.’ To the sensors outside, this entire mountain range registers as a gravitational null-zone that perfectly integrated into the surroundings. We are a phantom geological feature. You could denote a massive nuke in the kitchen and the Empire’s scanners would interpret it as a mild seismic event.”

  I smiled. The sense of security was palpable, the walls felt solid. The forge was humming, pumping out refined alloys for the army. The Library was growing.

  It felt like we were finally entrenched.

  “Alright,” I pushed off the railing. “If the house is secure, let’s go see what’s for dinner.”

  By “dinner,” I meant the Void entities Zareth was pulling out of his hat.

  We had designated the remote slate quarry three hundred miles north of Bastion as the “Ballroom” — Zareth’s euphemism for a kill-box.

  The landscape was jagged and harsh, battered by the winds coming off the ice fields, but today, the loudest sound wasn’t the wind. It was the frantic, offended screeching of things that shouldn't exist.

  I stood on a high ridge next to Freja, watching the chaotic ballet below.

  “And you say he is... on our side?” Freja asked, leaning on her hammer. She was staring wide-eyed at Zareth, who was floating in a meditative lotus position in the center of the quarry, sipping from a teacup while a portal made of screaming faces swirled behind him.

  “He’s very useful,” I assured her. “Efficient looting.”

  “He is apologizing to the horrors,” Freja noted, her brow furrowed. “I can understand him. He is telling the monster he is terribly sorry for the inconvenience of its upcoming death.”

  Below us, Zareth waved his hand politely. The portal dilated, and a beast that looked like a crab made of black slime and serrated glass skittered out.

  “Invitation accepted!” Zareth called out pleasantly. “This one is a Void-Sheared Carapace! Excellent durability for shield plating!”

  “My turn!”

  A golden comet slammed into the crab.

  Rexxar didn’t just engage; he announced himself. His new Heavy Light aura slammed into the beast before his claymore did, stunning it with sheer gravitational pressure.

  “HA!” Rexxar roared, ducking under a pincer strike that could have snipped a tank in half. “You lack conviction, shellfish!”

  He pivoted, the Lion’s Pride armor gleaming. He grabbed the creature’s leg — a limb made of solidified Void Essence — and heaved. With his upgraded Strength stat, he flipped the three-ton beast onto its back.

  “Yield to the Pride!” he shouted, bringing his blade down in a clean execution.

  The crab shattered into valuable loot.

  “Next!” Zareth chirped, jotting down notes in his floating book. “Do we have a volunteer for a slightly more... geometric opponent?”

  “Us,” Lucas signaled from the northern flank.

  It was time for the squad rotation. We had turned this into a training drill, cycling teams to get them accustomed to fighting enemies with exotic physics.

  Jeeves had already taken a solo run earlier, dispatching a Shadow-Drake with a display of efficiency that terrified me slightly. He hadn’t even wrinkled his suit; he just expanded his own shadow until it ate the drake’s shadow, causing the physical body to collapse.

  Now, it was the strike team’s turn.

  Anna stepped forward, flanking with Lucas and Silas. Bjorn, the other high Tiered primary shield-bearer — towering with a shield made from a Titan-Beetle carapace — took the vanguard. Freja jumped down from the ridge, electricity arcing off Mjolnir’s Echo as she landed with a thunderous crunch.

  “Sending the invitation... now,” Zareth murmured.

  He rang a small silver bell.

  The Void rippled. A shape emerged that hurt to look at. It was a Prism-Construct — a floating octahedron surrounded by spinning rings of purple light. It fired lasers of concentrated gravity.

  “Shields!” Lucas barked.

  He and Bjorn slammed their bulwarks down. The gravity lasers hit, and instead of blocking, the tanks angled their shields. They worked perfectly in sync, deflecting the beams into the ground rather than tanking the full damage.

  “Now, Silas!”

  Silas didn't appear; he simply ceased to be hidden. He was standing on top of the floating prism. He drove two daggers into the rotation rings, jamming the kinetic spin.

  “It’s stalled!” Silas shouted, jumping clear as the machine whirred in protest.

  “Freja, drop the hammer,” Anna ordered. She drew Final Word.

  The purple arrow she nocked wasn’t aiming at the machine; it was aiming at the concept of its durability.

  Simultaneously, Freja launched herself into the air, calling down a lightning bolt thick as a tree trunk.

  The arrow decidedly hit, with Anna using her Inevitable Outcome, forcing it to breach the monster’s defenses.

  The lightning hit a microsecond later. The prism exploded into a shower of high-grade mana crystals.

  “Clean,” I nodded, impressed. “Their coordination is getting seamless.”

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  I leaped down from the ridge, softening my landing with a gravity-cushion. The team was already harvesting the loot, their morale high. Leoric’s collection drones buzzed in like vultures, scooping up materials that would eventually become new gear for the vanguard.

  “This is insane,” Freja muttered, wiping sweat from her brow as she looked at the pile of resources. “Back in Noren, we would hunt for weeks to find one monster of a much lower grade. We’d track it, starve it, bleed for it. This guy... he rings a bell and orders takeaway.”

  “It’s a different kind of warfare,” I said, picking up a shard of the void-crystal. It felt cold and buzzy. “The Empire has resources we can’t match in volume. We have to match them in quality. Zareth is our shortcut to parity.”

  Zareth floated over, descending until his feet touched the dusty ground. He bowed to Freja.

  “I hope the service was to your liking, Lady of Storms?”

  Freja looked at him, then at the grimoire that was currently licking its pages. She tightened her grip on her hammer, then sighed.

  “The fight was good. The loot is good. You are... disturbing. But you are helpful.”

  “High praise,” Zareth beamed.

  I waved the others off to rest and rehydrate, keeping Zareth back for a moment. The sun was dipping below the canyon walls, casting long shadows that seemed to crawl toward the summoner affectionately.

  “Zareth,” I said, reaching into my inventory.

  I pulled out the object that had been haunting my thoughts since the duel with Korthos.

  The bracelet.

  The rusty, unremarkable loop of oxidized iron. It felt lifeless. Cold. But every time I channeled mana into it — Tier 6, Tier 7, Flame, Void — it just swallowed the energy without reaction. No heat. No glow. Just absorption, no matter how much I fed it.

  “Have you ever seen something like this in your travels through the doors?” I asked, tossing it to him.

  Zareth caught it with a hand gloved in shadow. He brought it up to his eyes — those swirling galaxies contracting in focus.

  He turned it over. He tapped it with a long fingernail. Then, he held it up to the tear in reality he kept partially open behind his back.

  “Curious,” he whispered. The voices in his speech layered over each other.

  “Curious good or curious run?” I asked.

  “Curious... absent,” Zareth handed it back, wiping his hand on his robe as if the metal felt wrong. “I checked its resonance against the Void. It doesn't exist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything casts a reflection in the Void, Sovereign. You cast a blinding sun. That rock casts a pebble’s shadow. This bracelet... there is a hole in the Void where it should be. It is not shielded; it is fundamentally rejecting the concept of definition.”

  He looked at me, his smile gone for the first time.

  “The Chronicle couldn’t identify it either?” he asked, referring to Kasian.

  “No. Kasian’s database drew a blank. No history, no record. Just a grey spot.”

  “If the Chronicle cannot read its past, and the Void cannot see its present...” Zareth adjusted his collar, looking uneasy. “Then it is likely not of this System at all. Or it is something the System has forgotten how to render.”

  “A blind spot in the code,” I mused, putting the bracelet back into my subspace storage.

  “Perhaps doing nothing is the point,” Zareth offered cryptically. “Perhaps your plan of constantly feeding it mana until it shows results is the way to proceed?”

  “Perhaps.”

  We walked back toward the camp, the twilight deepening. Zareth hesitated at the perimeter of the field lights where the soldiers were laughing and eating stew.

  “Sovereign,” Zareth stopped. “Regarding living arrangements. The Sanctum is magnificent. However... I perceive that my presence is causing... mild existential distress among the general populace. A young human man fainted yesterday because my shadow blinked at him.”

  I stifled a laugh. “Yeah. You’re high-octane nightmare fuel, Zareth. Even if you’re polite about it.”

  “I prefer not to sour the morale,” Zareth said. “I would request permission to maintain my primary residence... Elsewhere.”

  He gestured vaguely at the air.

  “You want to live in the Void?”

  “In the interstice,” he corrected. “Just between the walls of the Sanctum. I can anchor a small pocket dimension to your Soul. I will be close — always within shouting distance — but I will remain unseen unless summoned or required. It is cozy in the nothingness. Quiet. And I won’t accidentally drive the people to madness.”

  “Man in the wall,” I nodded slowly. “Stealthy. And probably for the best. Good idea.”

  Zareth bowed deeply. “Thank you, Lord.”

  With a shimmer, he didn’t teleport away; he just sank into the empty space beside him and vanished, leaving the air tasting faintly of ozone and old parchment. Even when using Void Perception at max, I could barely detect a faint disturbance in the Lattice, something I would have barely noticed had I not already known he was there.

  “Very stealthy,” I commented.

  I walked into the camp alone, but knowing he was lurking in the folds of reality was oddly comforting.

  I joined the circle near the fire. Rexxar was retelling his battle with the crab, embellishing the size of the pincers with every sentence. Lucas was polishing his shield, looking content. Anna leaned against Freja, sharing a flask.

  It felt... normal. For a given value of normal that included magic and warfare.

  “Eren!” Rexxar hailed me, waving a turkey leg. “Come! The stew is thick, and the victory is sweet! Even Leoric came up from his hole to eat!”

  Leoric waved a grease-stained hand from a pile of mechanical parts he was using as a chair. “This crab meat is full of mana! I wonder if eating it raises resistances or maybe even stats?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I laughed, grabbing a bowl and sitting down on a log next to Anna.

  She bumped my shoulder with hers. “You look heavy, big brother. And not just because of your Domain.”

  “Just thinking,” I stirred the stew. “About how far we’ve come. From that cave... to this.”

  “We’re building something that lasts,” Anna said softly. “You can feel it.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured. “We are.”

  For an hour, I let myself relax. I listened to Bjorn laugh at one of Silas’ dry jokes. I watched Kaelen, now huge and majestic, chasing fireflies on the perimeter, his fur sparkling like the galaxy. I let the warmth of the fire soak into my armor.

  It was a good night. A victory night.

  Then, the vibration started.

  It wasn’t a sound. It was a mental ping that hit me, Anna, Jeeves, and Rexxar simultaneously — the frequency of the comms crystals linked to the high-priority scout network.

  I put my bowl down. The chatter died instantly. They saw my face.

  “Report,” I said to the air, projecting my mana to amplify the crystal.

  Nyx’s voice filtered in.

  Usually, Nyx sounded like silk over steel. Cool. Collected. A hint of arrogance.

  Now, she sounded... hollow.

  “Eren,” her voice was a whisper, carried on the wind of the western mountains.

  “Nyx? Are you compromised? Have you reached your destination?” I asked, standing up. The fireside warmth evaporated.

  “I have,” Nyx said. “I infiltrated a group heading towards Delta 3. In preparation for next week’s assault.”

  “What’s the status?” I signaled for the others to gather round. The map of the region appeared in my mind’s eye.

  There was a long silence on the line. I heard the wind howling on her end. A dry, rasping wind.

  “There is no Delta 3.”

  I frowned. “They retreated?”

  “No,” Nyx replied. “There is no city.”

  A cold knot formed in my stomach. “Define ‘no city’.”

  “I am standing in the plaza,” Nyx said, her voice trembling slightly. “Or where the plaza was. There is no rubble. There are no bodies. There are no ruins.”

  She paused, and I could hear her taking a breath through her teeth.

  “It’s sand, Eren. Grey dust. Miles of it. The buildings... the walls... the people... they were ground down. Atomized. I walked through the dust in a habitation block. I found... piles. Clothing. Armor. Just sitting there on the dunes. But the people inside them are gone.”

  I froze.

  Rexxar stopped chewing. Anna’s hand went to her bow.

  “Delta 3 had a population of two million,” Freja whispered, her face pale.

  “Dust,” Nyx repeated. “Something came here. There is no evidence of a fight. It looks like it just... eroded everything. It turned stone and bone into powder and kept walking.”

  I closed my eyes.

  The sensation I had felt earlier — the ominous presence I detected when the drop pod landed in Alpha-Prime. The absolute nature of the threat.

  This wasn’t like Vayne playing games. This wasn’t the strategic brutality of the Empire we dealt with.

  “Entropy,” I whispered. “Advanced, weaponized decay.”

  “It’s a graveyard,” Nyx’s voice broke. “There’s nothing to save. Nothing to liberate. It’s just silence.”

  I looked around the fire. The joy was gone. The happy mood had been severed by the knife of reality. The warm light of the fire suddenly looked very small against the encroaching dark.

  “Come home, Nyx,” I said, my voice heavy with the gravity of Tier 7. “Do not track it. Do not engage and immediately leave.”

  I cut the link.

  I looked at the map in my head. Delta 3 was erased. Two million lives snuffed out.

  “You guys continue with the Hunting, I will make sure Zareth knows to summon appropriate level Void beasts,” I told them, drawing my cloak tight around me as the chill of the night set in. “I need more time to train.”

  The enemy wasn’t just waiting in their fortress anymore. They had sent the reaper out to clear the board.