The silence was a weight.
Corvin hung in the center of the brilliance, his body suspended like an insect in amber. The boiling heat of his ruined arm had gone cold. Not the cold of winter, but the cold of a void where heat had never existed.
He couldn't move. He couldn't blink.
The silver plating of his chest felt thin, as if the light were slowly peeling it away, layer by layer, searching for the meat beneath.
Then, the vision came.
It wasn't a memory. It was a reflection.
On the surface of the white void, a shape began to form. A man.
A man with warm skin, rough hands, and eyes that held the weight of a simple, human life.
Corvin.
The silver giant stared at the ghost of himself. The man in the light reached out, his face twisted in a silent plea. For a second, Corvin felt a phantom heartbeat—a rhythmic, fleshy throb that didn't belong in a chest made of metal and resonance.
It was a test. A filter.
The light was trying to find the "human" to see if it still deserved to exist.
"Gone," Corvin thought. The word didn't leave his mouth, but it echoed through the whiteness. "That man... is dead."
The reflection shattered.
The white light turned a sharp, violent violet. The pressure increased instantly, grinding Corvin's silver joints together until they began to spark.
A thought that wasn't his own slammed into his skull, cold and absolute:
THEN YOU ARE WASTE.
The suspension snapped.
Corvin was no longer being held. He was being crushed.
The white void began to contract, the walls of light closing in on him like the jaws of a celestial beast. He felt his silver ribs buckle. He felt the liquid fire in his veins scream as it was squeezed toward his center.
High above, Maren felt the ground die.
The trees that had surrounded them didn't just move; they withered. The black moss turned to white ash in seconds. The air became so thin she had to gasp for every breath.
"Kael, something is happening below!" she choked out, her hand clawing at her throat.
Kael was on his knees, his forehead pressed against the ash. "The Titan... it's purging. It found something it can't categorize."
He looked up at her, his eyes wide with a terror she had never seen before.
"It's trying to erase him, Maren. It's trying to erase everything in that hole."
Down in the violet crush, Corvin refused to be erased.
He didn't use logic. He didn't use tactics.
He used the only thing he had left: the raw, ugly will to survive that had turned him into a monster in the first place.
His ruined arm—the jagged stump of melted metal—erupted again.
But the fire wasn't white or silver anymore. It turned a dark, oily black.
He drove the blackened spike into the closing walls of light.
The sound was like a god screaming.
The violet space cracked. A jagged, dark fissure tore through the brilliance, bleeding shadows into the perfect light.
Corvin didn't wait for it to heal.
He threw himself into the crack, his heavy body tearing through the fabric of the void.
He fell again.
But this time, he wasn't falling through rot or light.
He slammed into something hard. Something cold.
Metal.
Corvin lay on his back, his body smoking, his silver frame covered in deep, jagged gouges. He looked up, and for the first time, his silver eyes flickered with something like genuine shock.
He wasn't in a layer anymore.
He was inside a hallway.
A hallway of endless, polished chrome and pulsing blue veins, stretching for miles in either direction. There were no trees. No monsters. No rot.
Just a doorway.
And on the doorway, a symbol he recognized from the world above.
A warning.