The hum of the arena underwent a sickening transformation. The high-pitched, melodic frequency of the "Siren's Song" suddenly plummeted into a guttural, sub-bass growl that rattled the marrow in their bones.
High above, the fake image of Brock didn't just flicker—it tore open. The violet light inverted, turning a predatory, ravenous black.
"What… what is this?" Glint gasped. She suddenly buckled, her knees hitting the stone. The Grimoire behind her, once her source of absolute power, began to shrivel. Its pages turned yellow and brittle, the ink literally being sucked off the paper and pulled into the air toward the black rift.
It wasn't just the book.
In the wreckage of the pillars, Argon let out a sound of pure agony. His massive muscles, built through years of chemical and physical hardening, began to atrophy in seconds. His skin sagged; his eyes grew clouded. Beside him, Blitz tried to vibrate into a phased state to escape, but his kinetic energy was being siphoned out of his pores like steam.
"Eris…" Blitz wheezed, the name of his superior escaping in a thin, ancient rasp. "She… she locked the grid… we're being harvested."
The mechanism in the basement had shifted its polarity. It was no longer a battery feeding Brakus; it had become a vacuum designed to harvest the biological "excess" of the Shadow Company's own elite. Eris wasn't just cleaning house; she was using the life-force of her best killers as high-grade fuel to complete Brakus's transformation.
Glint was the only one standing, her face a mask of frantic, terrified concentration. She began chanting a desperate, high-speed incantation, weaving a shroud of stagnant time around her own heart. It slowed the burning of her life force to a crawl, but she was trapped—powerless to move, her magic entirely consumed by the effort of simply not turning into dust.
She looked toward the center of the arena, her eyes wide with the realization that she had been a disposable pawn in Eris's grand design all along.
Brakus was at the center of the vortex. The red aura was no longer swirling around him; it was being pulled into him with such pressure that his skin began to crack, glowing with the white-hot intensity of a dying star.
"Haru! Matthew! Stop it!" Daniel screamed, dragging his broken body toward the center. He didn't know how Eris had rigged this, but he could feel the boy's life slipping away. "It's pulling everything! It's going to ignite him!"
"I see it!" Matthew yelled, his hands shaking as he stared at the terminal. "The firewall dropped because the system just shifted to 'Harvest Mode.' It's not looking for DNA anymore—it's looking for a shut-off command!"
"Then shut it down!" Haru roared, his eyes fixed on the massive crystal, which was now pulsing with a sickening, fleshy rhythm.
"I can't! There's a 'Deadman's Switch' hard-wired into the core," Matthew cried out. He had no idea who was behind the design, but the logic was flawless and cruel. "If I just cut the power, the stored energy backflows. It'll blow the whole docks, and Brakus will be at the center of the blast. He'll be vaporized!"
Haru looked at the crystal, then at the vials of Brock's essence. He saw the way the energy was flowing—a one-way street of destruction.
"There's a bypass," Haru whispered, his voice suddenly calm. He pointed to a manual pressure valve at the very base of the cooling array, submerged in a pool of electrified coolant. "If someone manually vents the excess pressure into the ground, it'll starve the rift above. The feedback loop will break."
"Haru, the coolant is caustic," Matthew whispered, his face turning pale. "And the electrical discharge... whoever touches that valve becomes the new ground for all that energy. They won't survive the jump."
Brakus let out a final, soul-shattering scream as his body began to lift off the ground, becoming a silhouette of pure, blinding energy. Daniel reached out, his hand inches from the boy's foot.
"Brakus! Stay with me!"
The checkmate was complete. Eris had won. Argon and Blitz were husks; Glint was a frozen statue of terror; and Brakus was seconds away from becoming a god of a dead district.
Unless someone pulled the plug
Haru stared at the churning, caustic pool of coolant, the blue light of the crystal reflecting in his grim eyes. He wasn't a man of magic, but he was a master of mechanics, and he knew that every circuit had a return path.
"Reverse it," Haru muttered, his voice cutting through Matthew's panic.
"What?" Matthew blinked, his hands hovering over the keyboard.
"The Deadman's Switch is designed to dump the backflow into the arena if the connection is cut. But we aren't cutting it,"
Haru said, a predatory spark returning to his gaze. "We're going to reroute the harvester. If you flip the polarity on the intake manifolds, the machine will stop pulling life-force from the arena and start sucking the stored energy back into the containment battery. It'll create a localized vacuum—it'll buy us a window of stability before the whole thing shorts out."
Matthew's eyes widened as he began slamming commands into the console. "It'll act like a black hole for the energy! But Haru, that battery wasn't meant to hold a charge this big. It'll only hold for maybe three minutes before it turns into a thermal bomb."
"Three minutes is a lifetime in a fight," Haru growled, tapping his ear-piece to open a channel. "Do it! Now!"
As the mechanical groan of the reroute echoed from the depths, the suffocating pressure on the arena floor suddenly eased. The black rift in the sky stalled, spinning in place like a dying engine.
Glint felt the weight lift. Her stagnant-time shroud shattered into glittering dust, and she gasped, her lungs burning with the metallic air. She was a shadow of her former self; her skin was sallow, her vibrant purple hair now streaked with a premature, deathly grey.
But the spite remained.
"Coward!" Glint shrieked, her voice cracking as she struggled to her feet. She wasn't looking at Daniel—she was screaming at the sky, at the invisible eyes of the woman who had betrayed her. "You think you can harvest me? Me?! I am the scion of the Grimoire! I am the ultimate witch! Eris is nothing but a vulture picking at the bones of a world I will rule!"
She stumbled, her movements jerky and weak, but her fingers clawed at the air, weaving a desperate, jagged sigil. A flicker of her old power returned—not the majestic elemental spikes, but a desperate, corrosive green mist.
"I will find you, Eris," Glint spat, a trail of dark blood running from her ear. "I will hunt you through every circle of hell. I'll peel the skin from your 'perfect' experiments and make you watch as I burn your legacy to the ground!"
She turned her gaze toward the exit of the colosseum, ignoring Daniel and the glowing form of Brakus. She was a wounded animal now, focused entirely on survival and the cold, hard promise of revenge. With a final, agonizing surge of magic, she cast a Phase-step spell, her body becoming translucent as she prepared to flicker out of the arena.
"This isn't over, Ghost!" she roared at Daniel, her eyes wide and manic. "Enjoy your little victory! When I come back, I won't just kill you—I'll erase every memory of your existence!"
Daniel winced as his communicator crackled to life, Haru's voice cutting through the static with urgent gravity.
"Daniel, listen close. We've flipped the polarity. The machine is sucking the energy back into the containment units, but it's a temporary fix. You've got three minutes before that battery hits critical mass and levels the entire colosseum. Get the kid and move!"
Daniel stood between the dying husks of Argon and Blitz and the escaping witch. His black static was still hissing around his knuckles, unstable and hungry.
"Haru's done it," Daniel whispered, feeling the shift in the air and the weight of the countdown in his chest. "But we have three minutes before this place becomes a crater."
Daniel watched the shimmering, translucent outline of Glint as she began to dissolve into the air. His jaw tightened, and the black static around his fists flared with a murderous hunger. He could end her now—one well-timed strike into her weakened form would finish the job.
But then he heard it: the erratic, wet cough of Brakus behind him.
"Daniel... get out..." Haru's voice barked again through the comms, more desperate this time. "The containment units are screaming. Two minutes and forty seconds!"
Daniel exhaled, the black energy around his knuckles receding into his skin with a painful hiss. "Go," he spat toward the fading witch. "Run back to your master. I'll be waiting when you return."
Glint didn't respond; with a final, jagged flash of green light, she vanished, leaving nothing but the scent of ozone and scorched parchment behind.
Daniel turned and sprinted toward the center of the arena. Brakus was a wreck. The red aura had retreated, leaving the boy pale and shivering, his skin cracked from the sheer volume of power that had surged through him. Nearby, Argon and Blitz lay like empty shells; they weren't dead yet, but the "Harvest" had taken everything that made them monsters.
"Brakus! Move!" Daniel hauled the boy up, throwing one of his heavy arms over his shoulder.
"Wait..." Brakus rasped, his eyes fluttering toward the sky. "The image... Brock..."
"It's a fake, Brakus. It was always a lure," Daniel said, his voice hard but grounding.
"We have to go. Now!"
"Matthew, leave the terminal! We're done here!" Haru grabbed Matthew by the back of his tactical vest, hauling him away from the console just as one of the liquid-coolant tanks shattered under the pressure.
"The seal is breaking!" Matthew shouted over the roar of escaping steam. "If we don't clear the blast radius of the primary crystal, the thermal shock will liquify the foundation!"
They scrambled up the emergency stairwell, the walls groaning as the colosseum's structural integrity began to fail. The very ground was tilting, the massive "battery" in the basement glowing with a blinding, sun-like intensity that could be seen through the cracks in the floorboards.
Daniel reached the perimeter of the arena floor just as Haru and Matthew burst through the basement access hatch.
They met in the middle of the debris-strewn entrance, the sunset outside casting long, bloody shadows across the docks.
"Do you have him?" Haru yelled, seeing Brakus slumped against Daniel.
"I've got him! Where's the transport?"
"Parked two blocks out! We have ninety seconds!"
They ran. Behind them, the colosseum began to emit a low-frequency hum that vibrated the glass in every warehouse for miles. The black rift in the sky finally collapsed in on itself, creating a vacuum that pulled the remaining stone spires inward.
They cleared the final gate and dove behind a heavy reinforced concrete sea-wall just as the three minutes expired.
BOOM.
The explosion wasn't fiery; it was a silent, localized erasure of reality. A dome of violet and white light expanded from the center of the arena, turning the stone, the machinery, and the husks of the fallen officers into fine grey ash. The shockwave hit a second later, a wall of hot air that nearly tossed their parked van into the harbor.
When the light faded, the colosseum was a hollowed-out skeleton. The "Siren's Song" was silent.
Daniel leaned his head back against the cold concrete, his lungs burning, his eyes finally fading back from violet to their natural hue. He looked at Brakus, who was unconscious but breathing, and then at Haru.
"The woman who did this," Daniel said, his voice cold and steady. "Her name is Eris. And she's just getting started."
The skyline of the docks was still scarred by the fading violet afterglow of the explosion. Miles away, in the silent, clinical sanctuary of the Shadow Company headquarters, the high-resolution telemetry monitors finally began to flatline.
Eris stood perfectly still in the center of the dark command room. The only light came from the glowing holographic displays that hovered in the air, mapping the sudden, violent erasure of the colosseum's thermal signature.
"Bio-signatures for Argon and Blitz have been terminated," a synthetic voice announced calmly. "The internal battery reached critical mass at 03:00. Total structural collapse confirmed."
Eris adjusted her glasses, her eyes tracking the final data burst sent by the Grimoire before it was vaporized. "And the witch?"
"Glint's signature was lost in the primary blast radius, Director. Probability of survival is less than zero point zero-three percent. Her arcane resonance has ceased to exist on the local grid."
A cold, thin smile touched Eris's lips. She didn't know about the frantic Phase-Step Glint had used to slip through the cracks of the explosion; she didn't know that a vengeful, grey-haired shadow was currently dragging itself through the city's gutters. To Eris, Glint was a loose thread that had finally been clipped.
"A clean sweep," Eris murmured. "The old world burns away to make room for the new."
She turned her attention to the final screen—the one tracking the boy. The data was erratic, pulsing with the remnants of the "overclock," but it was unmistakable. Brakus had survived, and the energy he had absorbed had permanently altered his cellular structure. He was no longer a subject; he was a prototype.
"The King is in the wild," she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. "And the 'Ghost' has his scent. Everything is exactly as it should be."
She reached out and swiped the holograms into oblivion, plunging the room into total darkness.
"Let them mourn their victory. They've only just begun to play their parts."
The darkness of Eris's office was more than an absence of light; it was a sanctuary for a vision that Ironwell was not yet ready to perceive. She sat back in her obsidian chair, her fingers steepled as she stared at a secondary, encrypted monitor.
On it, a small, rhythmic pulse flickered—the true signature of Brock.
"The King needs a shadow," Eris whispered to the cold glass. "Brakus has the fire, the blood, and the raw potential to lead. But he is still anchored by his heart. He needs a reason to fall."
She tapped a key, and a biological blueprint of the younger brother appeared. "Brock won't just be a lure. He will be the antithesis.
The void to Brakus's light. When the time comes, I will pit them against each other, and the grief of that collision will finally shatter Brakus's restraint. Only then will they be ready to rule the new generation."
Project Awakening hadn't just been about one boy. It had been a contagion.
Outside the spire, the Grand City of Ironwell was screaming. The night air was thick with smoke and the sound of shattering glass. The "Siren's Song" had reached far beyond the docks before the explosion, triggering latent genes in the desperate and the downtrodden.
In the neon district, a man's hands had turned into white-hot thermite, melting the storefronts as he wailed in confusion.
In the subway tunnels, the concrete was rippling like water as a teenager accidentally liquified the ground beneath a commuter train.
The Ironwell Soldiers were being overwhelmed, their riot shields shattered by sonic screams and telekinetic bursts. The city was no longer a machine of order; it was a petri dish of spontaneous, violent evolution.
The skyline of Ironwell was a jagged line of fire and strobe lights. From the height of the Executive Penthouse, the screams of the city were muffled into a low, rhythmic hum—the sound of an era dying.
The man stood at the floor-to-ceiling glass, his face a landscape of shadows. To the public, he was the face of order, the guardian of the status quo. To the world, he was a politician. But as he watched the "Siren's Song" ignite the horizon, his hands—veined with a subtle, metallic sheen—clenched the railing until the reinforced steel began to groan.
"They made their move," the leader rasped, his voice a jagged edge of panic. "Everything is out of control. It's all chaos... the Shadow Company, the Awakening... the streets are turning into a war zone. What do we do?!"
The double doors of the office swung open. No security had stopped her; no alarms had dared to chime.
Sylvis stepped into the room. She didn't look like the woman who had vanished from the slums, the desperate mother following breadcrumbs of a ghost. She stood tall, her eyes reflecting the carnage below with a terrifyingly calm clarity. She had followed the lead, traced the secret accounts, and found the man who had abandoned her and her sons to the gutter.
She walked across the plush carpet, her heels clicking like a countdown. She stopped directly behind him, her presence filling the room with a sudden, suffocating weight.
"It will be fine, honey," Sylvis said, her voice dropping into a intimate, lethal croon. She reached out, her fingers grazing the back of his neck. "Maybe it's time for you to tell them? Brakus will find out eventually. He's out there now, becoming exactly what he was meant to be."
The man flinched, his reflection in the glass trembling. For years, he had worn a new face. He had buried his history under layers of plastic surgery and a false identity, rising to the very top of Ironwell while his family rotted in the dark.
"He thinks I'm a ghost," the leader whispered. "He thinks I'm dead."
"Then show him the truth," Sylvis replied, leaning in until her breath warmed his ear. She felt the power humming beneath his skin—the same power that now coursed through their son. "You're Bronzes. You and him... you could bring unity and control to this world. You don't have to hide behind a mask of paper and law anymore."
She stepped back, her smile widening as she watched the "leader" of Ironwell finally turn around, his true eyes—the same piercing, amber eyes as Brakus—shining through the darkness of his false life.
"Just consider my offer..." Sylvis whispered.
"Diamond Bronze."
The man who had been the city's savior looked down at his hands, the metallic sheen of his hidden power finally beginning to break through his skin. The note she had found wasn't just a lead; it was a summons.
The father had returned, the mother had found him, and the family that would rule the new world was finally, bloodily reunited.