The surface of Gron-Tarh no longer looked anything like the top of a security facility.
It had become an entire continent in flames.
Beneath the artificial storm raging overhead, burning towers collapsed onto one another while crippled freighters tore through the thick clouds, trailing black smoke.
Antiaircraft batteries roared without pause, trying to hit the elves diving between the steel structures.
Entire platforms had buckled under the fighting, opening colossal craters that exposed the fortress's innards and spewed fire, drones, and containment troops.
In the center of a devastated hangar, Gordon swung his hammer and drove its heavy head into a Gron-Tarh guard's chest.
The impact crushed the breastplate like crumpled paper. The man was hurled off his feet, over a stack of ammunition crates, and disappeared into the rubble piled at the back.
"DON'T LET THEM SEAL THE CRATERS!" the dwarf bellowed into his radio, wiping away the blood running from his scalp into his left eye.
Around him, the resistance pushed steadily across the broken ground.
Mechanics used plasma cutters to slice through the joints of heavy armor, while elves seized the upper walkways and laid down precise covering fire.
Farther ahead, draconic warriors held up a massive bulkhead with their shoulders, muscles straining to the limit as dozens of fugitives crossed safely into the next sector.
They shared no uniforms, symbols, or common language.
They came from entirely different species and peoples, united only by the bitter knowledge that if Gron-Tarh survived the night, none of them would have anywhere to return to.
A tremor shook the platform as a warship emerged from behind the eastern towers, lining up its heavy cannons on the hangar.
"TAKE COVER!" Gordon shouted, throwing himself aside.
The first explosion obliterated the platform's edge, hurling soldiers and rebels into the air.
The second tore away an entire section of the metal roof, and the third blasted a deep crater into the exact spot where the dwarf had stood seconds earlier.
Rolling between glowing plates and live cables, Gordon scrambled to his feet with a growl and raised his hammer toward the gray sky.
"RIP THAT BITCH'S EYES OUT!"
Four winged silhouettes plunged through the heavy rain.
Two wove through evasive maneuvers to draw fire from the forward cannons, giving the third room to land directly on the hull and tear through the optical sensors with her claws.
The last dove straight into one of the turbines without hesitation, punching through its internal armor and triggering a chain reaction that blew the engine apart in a shower of incandescent sparks.
Out of control, the ship lost lift and slammed sideways into an artillery tower, lighting up the storm with a deafening explosion.
Four levels below, the mess hall in Sector Four had become a barricaded stronghold.
Reinforced steel tables blocked the entrances and side corridors, while guards' bodies piled up around the serving counters.
The inmates wasted no time stripping weapons, ammunition, and protective gear from the dead, before their blood had even cooled on the cold floor.
The massive bulkhead leading to Sector Five, however, remained unyielding.
Inside the security booth, Candice braced both hands on the console stained with blood.
The terminal screen kept flashing blood red with the same message.
ACCESS DENIED.
Overcome with frustration, she slammed her prosthetic fist into the panel.
The impact shook the metal casing and sent sparks flying.
"That won't make the door open," Havelyn remarked, landing on the edge of the broken window and folding her injured wing with a grimace.
"I know," Candice replied without looking away from the monitor.
"Then stop destroying the one thing that might open it."
Candice slowly turned to give her an icy stare.
Havelyn simply raised her hands defensively.
"Just saying."
The metallic crack of fresh gunfire echoed from the main hall as shots struck the steel barricades.
The prisoners immediately returned fire, holding their ground with desperate aggression.
Havelyn looked down the corridor choked with smoke and shook her head.
"We can't hold this place forever."
"We don't have to," Candice countered, adjusting the communicator at her ear.
"Just until they find that damn room."
She keyed the channel.
"Tsukumo, respond."
Only heavy static came through.
"Tsukumo, tell me you found something."
A stronger explosion rocked the mess hall entrance.
The barricade gave way a few centimeters, and the impact hurled three inmates backward.
Havelyn heaved a sigh and spread her wings.
"I'll handle that breach."
She leaped through the shattered window and struggled to gain altitude, compensating for her injured joint to keep her balance.
Skimming the ceiling, she dove straight at the first line of soldiers trying to storm the hall.
Candice remained alone at the terminal.
"Find that room..." she muttered through clenched teeth.
"Before this place comes down on everyone's heads."
At the western edge of Sector Two, Tsukumo kept his palm pressed against the wall of black metal.
The fifth gravitational pulse had led him to this blind spot in the forest, where the structure lay buried beneath a slope covered in moss and ancient roots.
There were no seams, locks, panels, or visible mechanisms anywhere along it. Only the symbol of the Messengers, a circle etched into the cold metal and crossed by three diagonal lines.
He had already searched the length of the wall twice without finding any trace of an entrance.
Worse than the lack of access, though, was what his gravitational perception revealed. Or rather, what it failed to reveal.
Any physical space, however isolated, had walls, a floor, a ceiling, and objects with measurable mass. Even a completely empty chamber should have returned an echo to his pulses.
This structure returned absolutely nothing.
It was as though someone had cut away a piece of the world and replaced it with an absolute void.
Tsukumo pressed his fingertips against the surface.
The metal was bitterly cold and far too smooth to be natural.
Suddenly, a muffled sound came from the other side.
A single footstep, slow and heavy.
He snatched his hand away and retreated half a step. The sound did not immediately repeat.
"I found the structure," he reported over the radio, keeping his voice low.
"But there's no entrance."
Candice's voice answered through the background noise of battle.
"Can you break through the wall?"
Tsukumo clenched his fist and concentrated a gravitational field on a single point in the steel.
The surrounding roots tore free of the earth, stones began to float, and the hillside itself groaned under the pressure he exerted.
The black wall, however, did not even tremble.
The gravitational force touched the metal surface and simply vanished, like water poured into a bottomless abyss.
Recognizing the futility of the effort before the wounds on his arms could reopen, Tsukumo released the technique and exhaled slowly.
"No."
"Did you just say 'no'?" Candice asked incredulously.
"The wall is absorbing the gravity."
There was a brief pause on the other end.
"Since when does a wall absorb gravity, Tsukumo?"
"Since this one was built."
A second footstep sounded beyond the metal.
This time, it seemed farther away.
Tsukumo raised his golden eyes, alert to every detail.
A third footstep followed, more distant still.
The presence inside the room was not approaching the entrance.
It was moving away.
"Candice..." he called, watching the shadows of the roots shift strangely across the steel.
"What is it?"
Tsukumo turned east, looking through the dense vegetation toward the place where he had sent Suki to keep up the attack.
"I don't think he's in the room anymore."
On the other side of Sector Two, Suki kept drawing everyone's attention.
A burst of energy tore through the trunk beside my head, spraying splinters into my face.
I lunged forward without hesitation, slid across the wet moss, and delivered a low slash that severed the first guard's legs at the knees.
Before he fell, I turned the sword in my left hand and drove the blade beneath the second soldier's chin.
Compressed air erupted through the back of his helmet, spraying blood and smoke across the leaves.
An armored vehicle emerged between the massive trunks, swinging its turret toward me.
The cannon fired.
I leaped aside, but my immobilized right arm threw off my balance in the air.
The projectile tore past within centimeters of my body, and the resulting explosion hurled me into the root of a colossal tree.
Four soldiers immediately rushed to surround me.
Acting on pure reflex, I drove my sword's point into the earth and activated the Wind Transformation.
A swirling storm erupted from the ground, ripping leaves, stones, and bodies into the air.
Two guards slammed into the rigid trunks. The third was dragged beneath the wheels of his own vehicle.
The fourth managed to stay on his feet, but when he opened his eyes, he found me right in front of him. I had already closed the distance.
The blade slipped through the joint beneath his armpit and pierced his breastplate.
I wrenched the sword sideways out of his body, leaving him to collapse lifelessly into the mud.
More troops kept coming.
Soldiers occupied the upper walkways, drones cut through the canopy, and vehicles blocked the main approaches, while entire squads descended in the service elevators, drawn by the destruction.
I wiped a trickle of blood from my chin and adjusted my grip on the sword in my left hand.
"Come on," I taunted, breathing hard but keeping a crooked smile.
"Still plenty of people standing around here."
No one answered.
Suddenly, the soldiers stopped advancing.
The drones stopped in midair, hovering without the familiar hum of their engines.
Even the armored vehicle's rumble seemed to recede and disappear.
I frowned, the smile slipping from my face.
The forest sank into an absolute, unnatural silence. No wind rustled the leaves, no vegetation crackled, and no sounds of fighting echoed from the nearby corridors.
Then the lights in Sector Two flickered.
Once. Twice.
On the third flicker, they went out completely.
The darkness lasted only a fraction of a second, but when the lights came back on, the shadows were no longer where they belonged.
They no longer matched the trees, machines, or men that should have cast them. Instead, they stretched across the ground in distorted black bands, all converging on the center of the clearing where I stood.
"What the fuck is this?"
The shadow of a nearby corpse stretched out and touched the toe of my boot.
I instinctively stepped back, but the dark stain kept advancing.
Other shadows joined it. Those of the living soldiers detached from their feet, the drones' shadows oozed down the tree trunks like heavy oil, and the darkness gathered in the canopy poured through the foliage like a thick liquid.
It all gathered a few meters in front of me.
My legs began to tremble involuntarily.
I looked down, bewildered by my own body. Something was terribly wrong.
I tightened my grip on the sword.
"Tsukumo, did everything stop where you are, too?"
My companion's voice came through the communicator, broken by heavy static.
"Suki, get out of there now!"
The darkness gathered in the clearing opened.
A figure simply stepped out of the black stain, as though he had been there all along, hidden from everyone's sight.
He was tall and grotesquely thin.
His arms were far too long for his body, ending in pale hands that held two massive daggers.
The blades' tips dragged along the ground, leaving dark furrows in their wake.
Long, greasy hair hung forward, completely covering his face.
The darkness closed again.
Yashin was in Sector Two.
His presence spilled through the surroundings.
The entire forest seemed to bow beneath the invisible weight of his existence. The horror radiating from him passed through containment walls, elevators, and pipes, reaching down into the deepest underground cells and up to the open craters on the surface.
In the mess hall of Sector Four, Candice froze, her breath catching in her throat.
Havelyn's wings lost their lift in the middle of a dive, and she crashed into a steel table, falling to her knees.
Around them, the prisoners recoiled involuntarily from their own shadows on the floor.
On the surface, Gordon felt his stomach clench into a cold knot.
Sahger stopped his spear a few centimeters from William's chest as the Four Beasts halted their attacks.
For that single instant, all of Gron-Tarh shared the same terrible feeling. The one who had merely watched the slaughter had finally decided to join the game.
Yashin drew a breath through his nose.
The sound was wet and hollow, like air passing through a torn throat.
"I smell young gods..." he said.
His voice was soft and calm, which only made it infinitely more terrifying.
"Strong... but still so young." His head tilted slightly behind the curtain of hair.
"How unpleasant."
I tried to raise my sword into position, but my left hand felt far too heavy.
The pressure did not quite paralyze my muscles, but something deep inside me refused to make any gesture that thing might interpret as a threat.
"So you finally showed up, huh?" I asked, my voice coming out quieter than I intended.
A smile took shape behind the curtain of hair.
I could not see his lips, only the distorted outline of sick pleasure.
"I didn't want to, but you've proven too important to ignore."
Yashin took a short step, and one of his daggers scraped across the stone with a piercing screech.
"You came to ruin my home."
He let out a low, slack, distorted laugh.
"You attacked..."
The shadows in the clearing bent toward him.
"...the wrong place," he whispered.
The warning in my mind did not come as a scream. It was more like a cold blow to the pit of my stomach, a visceral warning that I was already dead before I could react.
I desperately tried to summon the wind.
I tried to force my left hand to move the blade, to retreat, anything.
Beneath the skin of my arm and chest, I felt the markings of the Transformation begin to take shape.
The power fought to emerge, but my body simply was not fast enough.
Yashin moved his right dagger.
There was no fighting stance, no buildup of energy, no perceptible disturbance in the air.
Just an abrupt, almost casual gesture.
But in that same second, every distorted shadow in the clearing mirrored that icy arc.
A colossal blade, shaped from thick, sickly darkness, materialized between us.
I never even saw its path. I felt only the cutting cold passing through my flesh.
The blow tore diagonally across me, from my left shoulder down to the bottom of my right ribs.
The sound was hideous, a wet, hollow crack as skin and muscle split, exposing the ivory of my bones to the air.
Blood gushed out, hot and heavy, but I had no breath to scream.
The impact had simply emptied my lungs, leaving nothing but a suffocating vacuum in my throat.
For an imperceptible fraction of a second, I hung motionless in the air before Yashin's distorted smile.
Then the shock wave struck me with the brutality of a direct hit.
My body was catapulted upward like a missile.
I punched through the artificial forest's canopy in an explosion of snapping branches, shredded leaves, and splintering wood.
The metal ceiling of Sector Two gave way above me with a thunderous crash of divine steel.
I hurtled upward without control, piercing Gron-Tarh's innards. Maintenance corridors burst apart around me, hydraulic pipes exploded in jets of water and steam, and support girders snapped against my back.
I passed through Sector One too fast for the soldiers to make sense of the trail of blood and smoke I left behind.
On the surface, the floor's outer armor bulged and buckled under the force of my body.
The structure exploded outward in a deafening crash of twisted metal and fire, spitting me out of Gron-Tarh in a column of blood.
The force of the blow hurled me through the artificial storm and into the open sky.
Up there, the world kept spinning before my blurred eyes. The burning fortress below, the gray sky above, and icy rain striking the gaping wound in my chest.
I tried to draw breath, but my rib cage was shattered.
All I could do was fall, watching the prison shrink as my blood dissolved into the storm.
Far below, on the ruined hangar's platform, Gordon looked up in time to see a human silhouette burst through the clouds and hurtle skyward.
"SUKI!" the dwarf bellowed, his voice cracking over the radio.
In Sector Four, Gordon's desperate cry rang through Candice's communicator.
The girl went pale at once and clutched the console.
"Suki?! Answer me! Suki!"
No answer came.
Only cold static.
In front of the black metal wall, Tsukumo felt the mass of Suki's body tear through every level of the fortress at an impossible speed and disappear beyond the surface.
His golden eyes widened in shock.
"No..."
Gravity around him spiraled violently out of control.
Stones, ancient roots, and metal plates tore free of the ground, floating within a radius of dozens of meters.
"SUKI!" he roared, his voice echoing through the woods.
At the other end of the forest, Yashin slowly raised his head.
The tips of his daggers touched the earth again, and he took his first step toward the nearest shadow.
The ground sank beneath his foot, and the surrounding tree trunks seemed to bow before him.
On every level of Gron-Tarh, guards, prisoners, and invaders all understood the same terrifying truth.
The Jailer had finally left his quarters.
And the hunt had begun.