The shriek of the dying engine was the only song left in the world. It was a serrated, climbing sound that scraped away thought, leaving only the raw data of survival. With less than four minutes on the red timer, the core chamber had become a vortex of collapsing architecture and desperate violence. Dust and concrete powder rained from the unseen ceiling, a slow-motion avalanche that promised to entomb them all. Rhys and Nysa fought in the epicenter of the noise, a two-person system of impossible fusion. His movements were all hard angles and brutal economy, the logic of the Compact stripped down to pure function. Her presence was a warp in the air, a spiritual static that introduced error into the enemy’s perfect faith.
They were pinned behind a bank of shattered servers, the metal glowing cherry-red where plasma bolts had struck. Two of the Final Purity cultists remained, their silver light unwavering in the pulsing crimson of the alarms, their advance slow and inexorable. Rhys risked a glance, saw one raise a plasma rifle, and shoved Nysa down as a bolt of energy turned the server rack above them into molten slag. The heat was a physical blow. He was out of ammunition; the final, useless click of his sidearm’s firing pin was a sound lost in the engine’s scream.
But Malachi Voss was not fighting. He stood near the central console, untouched by the chaos, his stillness a pocket of absolute vacuum in the storm. He watched the timer on the main screen dip below three minutes, his head tilted with the detached curiosity of an engineer observing a cascade failure. There was no panic in his milky, light-filled eyes. There was only recalibration. He had lost this engine. The thought did not register as defeat, but as a change in variables. The equation had been simplified.
Ignoring the firefight, Malachi turned and moved with a chilling grace toward the fused, skeletal form of Character_9. His objective had shifted. While his last two followers kept the traitors occupied, he made a final push for the data core, the nexus of the dead engineer’s prison. Rhys saw the move, a flicker of motion at the edge of his vision. He had no weapon, no path forward. The price of their grand, world-breaking choice was this: they had to hold their ground and guard the countdown, leaving the antagonist a clear path to the system’s heart.
Malachi reached the console. He did not touch the dead man, but placed his hand on a smooth, unmarked panel beside him. For a moment, his fingers became translucent, phasing into the metal as if it were water. A low click, and a hidden compartment slid open. From within, he retrieved a small, rectangular crystal of absolute black. It was no bigger than Rhys’s thumb, but it seemed to drink the pulsing red light of the alarms, a shard of physical night. It was the Charon Relay, the map to the underworld of forgotten doomsday machines.
He held it up, a dark star between his fingers, ensuring Rhys and Nysa could see it. The engine’s shriek seemed to bend around him, the noise of a dying world paying him homage.
— This isn't the only temple, — Malachi’s voice was a calm, resonant whisper that cut through the din, a signal of pure, unwavering purpose.
The words landed like a physical impact, a truth that fractured their victory before it was even complete. They had not won. They had only pruned a single, diseased branch from a forest of them. The revelation was a cold weight in Rhys’s gut. This was not an ending. It was a prelude.
As if summoned by his pronouncement, the entire chamber gave a violent, structural lurch. A colossal section of the ceiling, a slab of concrete and twisted rebar the size of a hauler, tore free from the darkness above. It fell with a sound that was not a crash but a deep, final groan, impacting the floor between them and Malachi. The shockwave threw Rhys and Nysa back against the servers. Dust exploded outwards, a thick, choking cloud that reduced visibility to zero.
Through the grey haze, Rhys saw Malachi’s silver form turn. The antagonist and his last follower were retreating, swallowed by the dust and the collapsing architecture. They were gone.
Rhys scrambled to his feet, his empty pistol feeling like a useless weight in his hand. Nysa was beside him, the faint light in her veins dimmed to thin, grey lines, her breath coming in ragged gasps. They were alive. They were alone. The timer on the nearest intact monitor read 01:27. They had let him go. They had traded the future for these last hundred seconds, and the silence where the phantom Geiger click used to be in Rhys’s mind felt heavier than any sound.
The engine’s scream was the only thing left. A single, pure note of annihilation.
The air tasted of shattered rock and finality. The ground trembled without pause.
