“Which way?” John halted at the intersection, his boots skidding slightly on the dust-slick floor. Every shadow loomed like a threat, his finger tightening on the trigger as his eyes darted left, then right. The hallway ahead was swallowed in near-total darkness—what little illumination remained came from shattered light orbs, their once-soft glow reduced to a sputtering pulse.

  Behind him, Sarah clung to the tablet, its stone screen sluggishly pulsing as it tried to refresh. Her brow furrowed in frustration, fingers brushing its edge like she could will it to go faster. “Come on…” she muttered through clenched teeth. Finally, the display flickered. A river of silvery lines reshaped itself, and the path forward emerged. “To the left,” she said, voice tight with urgency, pointing to a stairwell that plunged into the black below like a wound in the earth.

  “Fantastic,” John muttered, trying—and failing—to mask the tremble in his voice. He took the first step down, followed close by Ziraya, her fingers twitching near the hilt of her blade like a predator sensing prey. Sarah trailed behind, juggling the heavy tablet and her long staff. “Watch your step,” John warned, glancing into the stairwell’s endless throat. “We’re going to love climbing this thing on the way back.” He gave a crooked grin, but before the others could answer, a deep groan echoed through the walls—like metal in pain, or something much worse.

  Everyone froze.

  John’s breath caught. He raised his weapon instinctively, scanning the gloom. “What the hell was that?” he whispered.

  No answer came. Just silence.

  And then—skittering.

  Faint. Fast. Getting closer.

  “Shit.” John’s eyes widened. “Run!”

  They bolted. The stairs shuddered beneath them as they descended at breakneck speed. John's foot nearly slipped on the edge of a step, but he caught himself, heart hammering. Ziraya surged past, her movement fluid and feral, while Sarah cursed under her breath, struggling to keep hold of the tablet before finally hurling her staff aside. It clanged and bounced down the stone steps, swallowed by the dark.

  Behind them, the sound grew louder. Metallic claws against stone. Rapid. Calculated. Hungry.

  John turned mid-run, raising his revolver just as a flicker of crimson light appeared at the top of the stairs.

  There it was.

  A nightmare of metal and flesh. Spindly legs spidered across the walls, its body low to the ground. A crossbow-limb locked onto them with surgical precision.

  John fired. The revolver kicked back hard. Sparks exploded as rounds tore into the beast. One slug clipped its armored shoulder, sending splinters of dark metal flying. The second hit a damaged leg, bending it backward with a sickening crunch. The creature staggered—just as it fired. The bolt screamed through the air like a banshee. It missed—barely—embedding itself into the wall with an earthshaking boom. Stone exploded. The shockwave lifted John off his feet, slamming him back into the stairwell. His revolver almost slipped from his grip as loose rounds spilled from his pocket, clinking down into the abyss.

  “Move!” he roared, scrambling to reload with shaking hands.

  Sarah skidded to a halt, eyes fixed on her discarded staff—too far. Instead, she raised her arms, fingers glowing. With a hiss of effort, she summoned two boulders behind them and willed a wall of stone to rise from the ground.

  Ziraya spun and slashed with one fluid motion, her blade singing as it launched enchanted arcs of air. They slammed into the creature, staggering it—but not stopping it.

  Her grin vanished the moment it lunged forward in a blur.

  A sawblade arm deployed with a mechanical shriek. The noise tore through the tight stairwell, rising in pitch until it seemed to rattle their very bones. Sparks flew as it scraped against the wall, carving stone like butter.

  An avatar of death, charging straight through Sarah’s wall like it was made of paper.

  John fired again—missed. He was panicking now, breath shallow, body trembling. The thing was too fast. Too strong. Each second stretched, a countdown to their end. Then his eyes flicked down towards the window displaying his Improbability Factor.

  His hand hovered over the worn button on his Spell Glove.

  No time for hesitation.

  “Let’s hope this isn’t a waste,” he muttered, and triggered the spell.

  A flash. A whisper of power. From his palm, a bullet-shaped flame burst forth—green, veined with oily black, like some ancient and dying star. It rocketed through the air and struck the charging monster square in the legs. The world exploded in unnatural light. Green fire engulfed the stairwell, washing everything in a sickly, blinding glow. Heat slammed into them like a tidal wave. Lips cracked. Eyes burned. Sarah screamed. Ziraya dropped to a knee, shielding herself with her blade.

  And then—

  Silence.

  No more skittering.

  Only the crash—metal and bone and shattered stone—as the creature tumbled. The stairwell shook with each impact as it slammed into wall after wall, finally crashing into a nearby step with a sound that was half explosion, half death rattle.

  John stood frozen, gun raised, arm trembling.

  Then slowly, he exhaled.

  And smiled.

  “What was that?” Ziraya’s voice cracked with disbelief. Her gaze darted from the dying glow of John’s outstretched palm to the mechanical horror writhing on the ground. It groaned—a wet, grinding noise like broken clockwork drowning in blood.

  John didn’t answer immediately. His eyes locked on the thing’s front legs. The stone there had blistered and warped, the matte black soot barely concealing the glowing slag beneath. The armor had melted and fused into the joints, solidified in place. “The armor melted,” he breathed, awe slipping into urgency. “It can’t move!”

  For the first time in minutes, hope cracked through the oppressive tension.

  But Ziraya didn’t smile. Her sharp pupils narrowed. The green fire that had erupted from John’s Spell Glove—something about it tugged at the edges of her mind like a bad dream she couldn’t quite remember. A phantom pain stung behind her eyes every time she replayed the explosion. That magic wasn’t normal. It shouldn’t exist. Her instincts screamed. But she buried them beneath focus. She tightened her grip on her sword, her muscles trembling with strain. With a sharp breath, she pulled mana deep from her core, flooding her blade with a vortex of air and crackling yellow energy. A dense miniature tornado spiraled along the edge. The sheer pressure of it distorted the air and made her ribs ache.

  “This better work!” she yelled, and swung. The spell detonated from her sword with a deafening sonic boom that shook the very walls around them. The force knocked John back a step. Sarah shielded her face, grimacing as dust rained from the ceiling.

  Ziraya collapsed to one knee, sweat pouring down her face. Her vision swam. She could barely lift her head, but she didn’t need to see it—she felt it hit. The tornado slammed into the abomination, a whirling lance of air and power. It tried to counter with its spinning sawblade, but the weapon barely slowed the impact. The blast crunched its joints, forced limbs to bend backward with splintering snaps. Its massive crossbow arm went limp, dangling like a broken puppet’s limb. Deep gouges were torn through its armored plating, revealing scorched, exposed internals.

  But it didn’t die.

  Where the armor had peeled away, its inner workings squirmed in the open air—sinew and skin fused with glowing circuits, metal gears spinning erratically as if unaware of their damage. It stumbled, dragged itself toward them, relentless. Sparks flew from its joints. Its eyes burned red.

  John raised his revolver, aimed at its head, and fired.

  The creature recoiled, its skull snapping back with a crack that echoed down the stairwell. Still, it rose again—jaggedly, wrong, twitching like something reanimated against its will.

  And then, it screamed.

  Not with a mouth, but with its body. It shoved its own sawblade into its paralyzed legs and sawed them off. Flesh tore. Metal shrieked. The air filled with a butcher-shop stench—hot blood and burning steel.

  John gagged and turned away, bile stinging the back of his throat. “Jesus—” Another shot. Then another. The armor on its head cracked, cracked again—and exploded.

  The blast scattered shards of metal like shrapnel. Beneath it, something worse was revealed. The creature’s "face" was a long, deformed skull—like a stretched bovine, only wrong. Its eye sockets gaped wide, black pits hiding spinning machinery. The jaw was cracked and too long. Its horns had been violently snapped off. But at the center, embedded in the bone like parasites, were three jewels—deep red, faceted like rubies. Veins, thick and wet-looking, pulsed from their bases and burrowed into the bone.

  The jewels moved. Slowly. Breathing. The very air around them rippled like heat rising from a black sun. John felt it immediately—that raw, bone-deep wrongness. The jewels didn’t just feel evil. They felt like they didn’t belong in this world. Like reality itself was rejecting them.

  He fired. The slug shattered the skull and sent the creature slumping. Bone and gears spilled out in a wet heap. But no one cheered. No one moved.

  Because the jewels were still moving.

  They wriggled like maggots, tearing free from the shattered skull with a loud pop. Tiny, twitching legs—vein-like and translucent—sprouted from their undersides. The red gemstones crawled across the ground, leaving trails of viscous, glowing slime.

  John staggered back. “A-Are they moving?” His voice was barely a whisper, choked by disbelief.

  Sarah clutched her staff with both hands, shaking. Ziraya stared, pale and silent, her slitted eyes wide with horror.

  A primal voice inside John roared in his head, demanding that he destroys them.

  He didn’t hesitate.

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  He raised his left hand. The Spell Glove pulsed.

  Another shot of Hyper Boiler launched from his palm like a bullet forged from nightmares. The green-and-black fire exploded mid-air, incinerating the jewels in a searing blast of heat and light.

  No shards remained. Not even ash. Only silence. And the stench of ozone and burning flesh.

  John dropped to the floor, breath ragged, heart hammering. He stared at the creature’s ruined carcass, half-dazed. Images from alternate timelines flickered through his thoughts—one where he hadn’t been fast enough. One where Ziraya had died. One where those things had won.

  A bitter smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “It’s gone,” he muttered.

  John stared at his palm, fingers still tingling with the aftershock of the spell. Wisps of greenish-black smoke curled upward like the remnants of a fire that shouldn’t have existed. “Now it’s out in the open,” he muttered, voice low and resigned, as if speaking to himself more than anyone else. He knew the truth—what had come out of him wasn’t normal. The Ship’s Mana Emulator had given him access to something powerful, yes... but also twisted. Wrong. And now there was no taking it back.

  Sarah’s voice broke through the tension. “I can’t believe it.” Her hands trembled slightly as she adjusted her glasses, her fear replaced by a burning curiosity. She approached the corpse with wide-eyed wonder, her boots crunching softly against the wreckage-strewn floor. “It looks like... a corpse.” She crouched, using her staff to lift a dislodged piece of armor. Beneath it, a hollow ribcage bristled with dormant gears and metal struts. She leaned in, brushing aside soot with the edge of her sleeve. “A corpse full of gears. Each etched with—wait, are these engravings?” She scribbled rapidly into her notebook, her eyes fixed on the largest gear nestled where a heart should’ve been.

  Behind her, tension surged again.

  Ziraya’s voice cut like a blade. “What are you, mercenary?”

  John tensed. She stood now, her weapon at her side but her eyes locked on him—not with anger, exactly, but with a wariness edged in suspicion. There was something else there too, something he couldn’t quite place. “The dwarf may be too dazzled to notice, but I saw it. Those flames—whatever they were—they were wrong.”

  He tried to shrug it off. “What do you mean? It was just a spell. A strong one, sure, but—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Ziraya snapped, her slitted pupils narrowing. “We’re linked, remember? The curse won’t let you lie to me. Not without consequence.”

  John cursed under his breath. “Damn curse.” He rose slowly, eyes flicking to her blade, still drawn. “Fine,” he said, voice sharp with fatigue. “So what if I did lie?”

  Ziraya didn’t move, but her grip on the hilt tightened.

  “I thought you were an air mage like me,” she said, her voice low, accusing. “But that wasn’t wind. That was... fire. Or something like it.”

  John gave a bitter chuckle and leaned against the wall. His revolver hung low at his side, the steel still warm. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a cigarette with fingers that shook a little more than he liked. He lit it with a flick, took a long drag, and exhaled slow. “Look. You want honesty? I lied. Big deal. You think I don’t have secrets?” He gestured at the crater where the creature had died, smoke trailing from his mouth. “You’re alive. Again. Because of me. That’s all that should matter.”

  Ziraya started to reply—but stopped.

  Something deep and buried in John’s voice struck her. And then, the tether confirmed it. She felt it: the exhaustion anchored in his bones, the raw weight of his choices pressing down like stone. And deeper still, something like... sorrow. She pulled back, startled by the honesty of it.

  Her fingers twitched on her blade. A memory stirred—her father’s voice, cold and pragmatic: “The end justifies the means, daughter. Mercy and truth are for those who can afford them.”

  Was John the same? Or just someone crushed under the cost of surviving?

  “I’m... sorry,” she said suddenly, her voice quieter than she expected. “It’s just—never mind.”

  John blinked. He looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. “You—what?”

  “Don’t make me repeat it,” she muttered, looking away, ears reddening slightly beneath her scales.

  He gave a half-laugh, not from amusement but disbelief. “Apology accepted,” he murmured, as if still waiting to wake up.

  Ziraya’s posture eased. She lowered her sword, though she didn’t sheath it. “But that spell,” she said, this time without venom. “What was it?”

  John’s lips parted, but no words came out. The curse tugged at him—pulling toward truth—while the Ship’s tether burned at the edges of his thoughts, its unseen grip clamping tighter. His head ached, splitting. “I... I don’t know,” he said at last, his voice hoarse.

  Ziraya nodded once. The sincerity in his voice resonated through the tether, undeniable.

  “I see.” Her gaze lingered on him, thoughtful now, even... concerned. She looked down at her trembling hand, the same one that had held that devastating tornado a few minutes ago. Then her eyes drifted to the crater. The jewels were gone, but their presence clung to the air like smoke that wouldn’t fade. The distortion lingered—subtle, maddening. A sharp prick at the edge of her vision made her look away.

  She turned instead to Sarah, who was still prodding at the body with unrelenting curiosity.

  “Find anything useful?” Ziraya asked, forcing her tone neutral, trying to ground herself again.

  Anything to stop thinking about the way John had looked when he said he didn’t know.

  Anything to ignore the possibility that maybe... he was even more cursed than she was.

  “It’s—” Sarah huffed, brushing a strand of sweat-damp hair from her forehead, her voice catching in her throat. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s definitely a corpse. Long-dead. Maybe even before the city fell.”

  Ziraya’s jaw tightened. “Necromancy?”

  Sarah flinched at the word, the weight of it thick in the air. “I don’t think so,” she said carefully, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen real necromancy before, but—”

  “As you shouldn’t.” Ziraya’s tone sharpened, instinct taking over. She stood tall, Enforcer authority bleeding back into her voice. “It’s forbidden.”

  “I know,” Sarah muttered with a slight pout. “But this... this doesn’t feel like magic at all. It’s like—someone used the skeleton as a scaffold. Just bones and mummified flesh to hang something mechanical on. The gears inside weren’t magic conduits—they were tools. Crude, but deliberate.”

  “An automaton?” John asked, his voice low.

  Sarah shook her head again. “Not in the traditional sense. Nothing with moving parts should be able to fight like that. It’s more like... the gears helped the body move, sure, but something else was pulling the strings. Something that was being directed—” She glanced at the smoldering crater where the jewels had once pulsed with warped energy. “—by those things.”

  John followed her gaze, his face unreadable. But his hand strayed toward the grip of his revolver again. He looked away and motioned to the nearby stairwell. “Either way, it’s dead now. We should keep moving. Find this control room and get out of here before anything else wakes up.”

  “Right,” Sarah murmured, sparing the body one last, haunted look before following after him.

  Their footsteps echoed down the cracked stone steps. Silence wrapped around them—not peaceful, but watchful, like the ruins themselves were listening. No one spoke. Each of them was too lost in their own thoughts. John glanced at the flickering blue text that hovered near his vision—his Improbability Factor. It was climbing again. His thumb instinctively brushed against the pocket full of ammo for his revolver. Empty. Just a few rounds left, maybe enough for one more serious fight. “Let’s hope there’s nothing worse down there,” he whispered, forcing a smirk that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  Beside him, Ziraya was quieter than usual, her usual alert intensity replaced by something colder, deeper. The memory of John’s spell gnawed at her. That fire—if it could be called that—still lingered in her mind’s eye. It had burned wrong. Not just destructive, but hungry. There was something older in it, something buried inside John that the spell had merely unleashed.

  A flicker of tension coiled in her chest. The curse stirred.

  She clenched her jaw as it coiled tighter—not painful, exactly, but suffocating, like invisible cords wrapping around her ribs, squeezing the breath out of her lungs. She stumbled for half a step, then caught herself. Her hand instinctively went to the sword at her side. John had saved her life—again. But the magic he’d used... it scared her. And yet, part of her wanted to understand him. Even now, some twisted echo of the tether dragged her thoughts toward his face, his voice, the ragged edges of exhaustion in his movements. “He never hesitated,” she realized. “Even when the spell cost him.” And that was the most dangerous part of all. “Foul curse,” she muttered under her breath, forcing the scowl back onto her face like armor.

  They reached the end of the stairwell—and froze.

  Gasps escaped all three at once. The hallway before them was a graveyard of chaos. Where the residential sector had been a warzone, this looked like a massacre. Walls were torn open with gouges deeper than claws could reach. Broken blades and shattered shields littered the floor. Rusted doors lay twisted and flung like scrap metal. Stone furniture had been piled up into makeshift barricades—barricades that had clearly failed.

  Something terrible had come through here.

  “Did... did that thing do all of this?” John asked, jerking a thumb behind them.

  Sarah knelt by a deep score in the wall, running her fingers along the metal-burned stone. “I—can’t be sure. But if it did, the version we fought wasn’t even at full strength.”

  John blinked. “What?”

  “The mechanisms in its chest,” she murmured, her voice distant, distracted. “They were worn down. Old. Parts of them were coated in dust and rust. Like they had been dormant for decades. Maybe longer.”

  John felt the cigarette fall from his fingers. He didn’t even notice it hit the ground. “You’re saying... that it was stronger before?”

  She hesitated. “Probably.”

  A cold sweat broke across his back. The memory of how fast it had moved, how it had shrugged off bullets and magic alike, made his stomach knot. He tightened his grip on the pistol, knuckles whitening. If it had been just dormant...

  “If I’m right, then—” His voice faltered. Images flashed unbidden across his mind: the creature fully powered, fully awake, tearing through the city like a scythe through wheat. “We’re lucky it was weak,” he finished, barely above a whisper.

  Ziraya didn’t respond. Her eyes lingered on her new sword, resting against her hip. She wasn’t a scholar, but she understood weapons. This blade had been made for offense, for battle—not ceremony. The race that forged it must have been proud, strong, warriors to the core.

  And yet, nothing of them remained.

  She looked again at the destruction, heart thudding against her ribs. Her hand twitched toward the hilt.

  Something ancient had wiped them out.

  And now that something had stirred again.

  She shivered, not from cold, but from a deep, animal sense of being hunted. Then she exhaled sharply and set her jaw. The curse burned faintly within her chest like a buried coal. She wouldn’t show weakness. Not in front of John. Not in front of anyone. “We need to keep moving,” she said, her voice clipped. “We killed whatever did this, right?”

  “Right. The shortcut is—” Sarah’s voice faltered mid-step.

  They had reached a door unlike anything they’d seen in the ruined city. It stood like a monument to forgotten gods—twenty feet tall and just as wide, made of pristine stainless steel that shimmered with unnatural clarity in the gloom. Unlike the decaying halls behind them, this door was untouched by time, as if reality itself was unwilling to let dust settle on it. Thick chains as black as obsidian coiled tightly around it, each link the size of a grown man’s forearm. They didn’t just restrain the door—they smothered it, like prison bars over something that should never be freed. Golden runes traced elaborate spirals along its surface—elegant and alien. The symbols flickered faintly, as though remembering the touch of old magic. They weaved toward the center where a massive circular engraving pulsed in a deep, sinister red.

  John narrowed his eyes. “Is that a... pentagram?” He shook his head, the thought absurd even as the design drew him in. The red engraving was far worse than a simple pentagram. It writhed with meaning—layers within layers, like a tapestry of madness. Each symbol pressed against John’s mind, demanding to be understood. The more he stared, the more the lines twisted, forming images that seemed just on the edge of recognition. His vision swam.

  Stories. That’s what they were. Symbols that each held the weight of something ancient and feral, ready to claw into his thoughts and never leave.

  He blinked hard, yanking his gaze away. His breath came fast. The last time he’d seen something like that, he’d stumbled into learning a Spell Component by mistake—nearly broke something in himself doing it.

  “That’s our shortcut.” Sarah’s voice was barely audible. She wasn’t looking at the door anymore. She was staring at the stone surrounding it—gouges, as if some monstrous thing had tried to tear it open.

  The scratches were so deep John could have lain inside them. Some were scorched black at the edges, others frozen into crystalline splinters. The entire hallway felt like it had held its breath for a hundred years, waiting for something to return.

  “Do we really have to, or—ah!” Sarah cried out and jerked back, her sleeve smoldering.

  Ziraya was already moving. In a blink, blades of compressed air shimmered around her sword. Her eyes darted from wall to wall, scanning for a threat.

  John raised his pistol. “What was that?!”

  Sarah clutched her forearm, pulling her sleeve back. The silver bracelet on her wrist had cracked—its central gemstone now a shattered mess of glowing red shards. Thin wisps of smoke rose from it, curling into the air like incense from a funeral pyre. “I—I didn’t expect it to react,” she said, voice shaking. “This was from my imp investors. They said it would glow—burn, if something related to them was really buried down here. Said it was insurance, so I couldn’t lie about what I found.”

  John’s eyes narrowed. “And it’s burning now?”

  Before she could respond, a pulse throbbed through the air, like the beat of a giant heart.

  The red engraving on the door flared. A low hum rumbled from deep within the steel, like a groan from something ancient waking up. The golden markings along the door ignited with light, racing in spirals until they merged with the crimson seal. It shuddered, resisting... and then responding.

  Everyone stepped back instinctively.

  The chains groaned. They twitched.

  John raised his gun, swallowing hard. “This can’t be good.”

  One chain snapped. The sound was like thunder in a canyon. Metal links shot across the hallway like shrapnel, embedding themselves into stone with explosive force. A second chain followed. Then a third.

  With a final, deafening crack, the last restraint gave way.

  The door trembled... and began to open.