The corridor was a tomb, and the dead were the walls. A tide of shimmering, screaming history surged toward them, a solid mass of Paradox-Constructs blocking the path to the black iron door. They were a hundred meters of shifting faces and phantom limbs, a hundred meters of the workshop’s rage packed into a space meant for eight living men. The whispers of a thousand forgotten voices rose to a deafening roar, a static of souls that scraped at the mind. They were pinned down, ten meters from their goal. An impossible distance.
Alessandro Volpe cursed, a raw, guttural sound. He threw his last alchemical grenade. The brass sphere sailed through the air and detonated with a flash of corrosive green light, but it was like throwing a stone into the ocean. A small pocket of the mass dissolved with a sound like shattering glass, only to be filled an instant later by a fresh wave of fractured memories. The Italian inventor stared, his face pale in the flat, sourceless light. His pistol was empty. His tools were spent.
— There are too many, — Mikhail, the ex-Lodge loyalist, whispered. His voice was thin, trembling on the edge of a scream. He was frozen, his eyes wide with the kind of terror that unmakes a man. The constructs were a perversion of everything the Lodge taught, a chaotic mockery of the clean, sterile work of excision.
Sineus felt the cold certainty of failure settle in his gut. His perception, his unique gift, was useless here. There was no path through this, no stable current in a river that had become a waterfall of pure chaos. He had led them here. He had forged this alliance, made this plan. The weight of their lives, a burden he had chosen to accept, was now the weight of their deaths. A survival chance of five percent was not a chance; it was a statistical rounding error before oblivion.
Then, in the roaring chaos, there was a moment of stillness beside him. Elina Petrova stood looking not at him, but through him. She was a former university student whose hometown had been unwritten by a Lethe Mortar, a woman who fought for a future she could only imagine. Her face, usually alight with fierce idealism, was now calm. It was a terrifying, absolute calm. She had made a decision.
She met Sineus’s gaze, and in that one look, a silent conversation passed between them. It was not a plea for orders or a look of despair. It was a statement. A conclusion. She was handing him the bill for their shared hope.
— For a future that is unwritten, — Elina said, her voice clear and steady above the roar of the dead.
Before Sineus or Alessandro could react, she was moving. She ran from their small pocket of cover, straight toward the wall of constructs. In her hands, she clutched the Carbonari's primary disruption device, the larger machine they had used to breach the outer walls, now stripped to its volatile, humming core. It was not a grenade; it was the heart of their alchemical science, a machine designed to unmake reality. And she was turning it into a bomb.
She was turning herself into a weapon. The price of a clear path was one life, freely given.
The constructs surged toward her, a vortex of grasping, spectral hands and screaming faces drawn to the living energy of her resolve. They swarmed her, a tide of memory trying to drown a single point of light. But she did not slow. She held the device high, her fingers twisting a final dial, deliberately overloading the core. The humming rose to a piercing shriek that tore through the whispers of the dead.
The device detonated.
It was not an explosion of fire and shrapnel. It was a blast of pure, silent paradox. A wave of absolute nothingness erupted from her position, a sphere of anti-reality fifty meters wide. For a single, heart-stopping second, a perfect void opened in the corridor, a hole in the world that consumed light, sound, and memory. The wave of constructs, the screaming tide of the dead, was not scattered. It was annihilated. Every severed thread, every fractured memory, was unmade.
Then the void collapsed on itself, and the silence was absolute.
The path was clear. The corridor ahead, all the way to the black iron door, was empty. Where the wall of constructs had been, there was nothing. Where Elina Petrova had been, there was nothing. Her life, her memory, her very existence had been the price. The sacrifice was complete, a single, clean severing that had brought order to the chaos.
Sineus stared at the empty space, his breath caught in his throat. Alessandro let out a raw, choked cry, a sound of pure, animal grief. He took a staggering step forward, his hand outstretched as if he could pull her back from the nothingness she had become. The team was seven now.
The loss was a physical blow, a hollow space carved out of his own chest. He saw Elina’s face, calm and resolved. He saw Pyotr’s empty, smiling face as his mind shattered. He saw the baker, Stefan, falling with a rolling pin in his hand. A chain of sacrifices, a debt of blood that led directly to that black iron door. His grief was a cold, sharp thing, but there was no time for it. Her choice had to mean something.
He turned from the empty space, his jaw tight, his own sorrow hardening into a cold, dense fuel. He looked at the laboratory door.
— Move, — he said, and his voice was not his own. It was harder, colder, the voice of a man who had run out of choices. — Now.
He led the way, his boots echoing in the sudden, profound silence. The remaining six members of his broken team fell in behind him. They moved as one, a single entity bound by a shared, unbearable loss. They walked through the space where Elina had made her stand, the air still cold with the ghost of the void she had created.
The air smelled of ozone and a deep, chilling absence. The flat, sourceless light of the corridor seemed dimmer now, as if it, too, were in mourning.
They reached the black iron door. Whatever lay beyond could not be worse than the price they had paid to get here.
