A day had passed since the crash. Khalen had killed so many breathlings that their deaths no longer startled him. His body moved before thought, each motion stripped of fear, reduced to rhythm and Breath. Click, flare, strike, burn.
Rhythm made him predictable. That was the problem.
The sound hit him before he moved.
It was not volume, it was pressure. The very Breath in the air turned solid, slamming into his chest and throwing him across the floor. The bridge behind him split with a dry, final crack, and stone slabs tumbled into the dark like teeth knocked loose.
A figure stepped from the mist, tall and skeletal, its body strung with cords of crystal that pulsed like exposed nerves. A slit ran from chin to chest, opening and closing as it sang, light spilling out in waves that made the Breath-lines in the floor flicker and stutter.
Khalen pushed himself upright, blood seeping from his ear. "Guess the locals are getting louder."
"Do not joke," OH said. "It's building charge."
The Wailer released a note.
Stone answered first. Columns bowed. The Breath veins in the walls flared, then dimmed, as if the city itself flinched. A shockwave ran through the corridor in long ripples, and the ceiling sheared apart in a slow, ugly cascade. Khalen rolled hard as molten dust rained down, hot enough to sting through cloth.
He clicked his boot and leapt, too late. The pressure caught him midair and threw him sideways into a fallen arch. Fire scattered from his palm in a useless spray.
"You're out of rhythm," OH shouted. "Recenter."
Khalen coughed dust. "Tell the floor that."
The creature moved, each step a chord of vibration. Crystals along its ribs brightened, and with every pulse the air convulsed, space tightening and loosening like lungs that did not belong to anything alive.
Khalen snatched debris, charging a fist-sized rock until it glowed. He hurled it.
The Wailer sang again.
The projectile veered sideways, shoved off-course by an invisible push, and burst against the far wall in a flash of heat and grit.
"It's bending your flame," OH warned. "It's weaponizing the sound."
"Great," Khalen muttered, ducking as another chord shattered a line of pillars. "So we can't burn it. What now?"
"I'm thinking."
"Think faster."
The Wailer pushed a higher note, and the bridge began to collapse in a chain reaction of cracking stone. Khalen sprinted, ground crumbling beneath each step. His fire sputtered, misfiring from exhaustion.
He leapt, clicked his heel midair, and surged upward with a burst of Breath, then mistimed the landing. The blast threw him forward, tumbling through dust and heat until he hit a slab face-first.
Pain flared white. His vision swam.
"Khalen."
"Still breathing," he rasped. "Not for long."
The creature loomed over him, mouth unfurling like a hinge of crystal blades. Pressure built within its ribs. The next note would finish him.
Then, for the first time, OH went quiet.
"What are you doing?" Khalen hissed.
"Something I swore I'd never do again."
A deep hum rolled through Khalen's skull. It was not a voice, it was resonance, vibrating behind his thoughts. The pitch rose until it synced with his heartbeat.
When the Wailer released another note, the air bent, then snagged. Light around Khalen warped as OH met the wave head-on, two frequencies colliding in perfect discord. The pressure lifted, not gone, but interrupted, like a fist that had lost its grip.
"That's new," Khalen muttered.
"Not new," OH said, voice trembling. "Forgotten. I'm burning memory to hold this note, move."
There was a hitch on the last word, like OH had to reach for it.
Khalen staggered to his feet, following the pulse in his skull like a battle drum. Every heartbeat aligned with OH's hum. He charged forward, weaving between collapsing columns. The Wailer's rhythm faltered, its pressure stuttering.
He reached a fallen girder, grabbed it with his single hand, and dragged Breath into it until the metal began to tremble. Flame did not bloom outward this time, it ran along the girder like a seam being lit from within, tuning itself to OH's note.
Heat was not the weapon. Resonance was.
He swung.
The girder cleaved the air, trailing a halo of white fire. When it struck, the torch flame in Khalen's other hand flattened, then steadied, and the whole corridor snapped into a sudden, ringing stillness. The blow split the Wailer from chest to skull, its ribs shattering like glass pipes.
The creature convulsed, light flickering through hollow veins, then collapsed in a heap of steaming crystal.
Khalen stood over it, panting, the girder glowing red in his grip.
"You good?" OH asked, voice faint.
"Define good."
"Alive. Mostly. That counts."
Khalen dropped the weapon and rubbed his ear. "You didn't tell me you could do that."
"Didn't think I could," OH said. "Haven't shared resonance in a thousand years. Feels… strange."
"Strange good?"
"Strange like… like dying all over again," OH said, and the pause before the second "like" felt too human to be a performance.
The quiet that followed weighed on the ruins. Not silence exactly. The city still breathed through its crystal veins, but softer now, as if it had learned to be cautious.
Khalen kicked a shard aside. "Then let's keep moving before something else learns to sing."
He turned toward the dark corridor ahead. The pulse of the core beat louder now, steady, alive. And somewhere behind them, the Wailer's broken body twitched once, releasing a final thin note that slid into the depths like a warning.
—
Aftermath
**
The echo of the Wailer's last note lingered in the air the way smoke lingers after a burn. Khalen slumped against a collapsed wall, the glow from shattered ribs painting him in blue and red. The fight's rhythm was gone now. Only his pulse remained, uneven and slow.
His stomach twisted. The hunger had been dull before, background noise beneath exhaustion. Now it roared. His limbs trembled, not from pain, but emptiness.
"You're slowing," OH said quietly. "Your Breath output's dropping."
Khalen groaned. "No kidding."
He looked around for something, anything, that could be eaten, but there was only dust and glass. The Wailer's corpse steamed faintly, light leaking from fractures in its hide.
"Been a day since the crash," Khalen muttered. "Maybe more."
"Time feels strange down here," OH said. "The deeper we go, the slower it moves."
Khalen let out a hollow laugh. "Good. That means I'll starve slower too."
For a long moment, neither spoke. The ruins groaned around them, Breath lines pulsing weakly beneath cracked floor. The air smelled of ozone and old decay.
Khalen tore off a strip of cloth from his sleeve, wiped soot from his face, and sat there breathing until his ribs stopped aching. "You ever need food, OH?"
"Not for nine thousand years."
"Right. Must be nice."
"It was inconvenient once," OH admitted. "Back when I had a body, I used to taste everything. Salt, spice, wine. The Titan took that away when it turned me into an engine."
Khalen frowned, watching a faint shimmer of Breath crawl over the Wailer's remains. "If we keep running into things like that, this trip won't be short. We'll need supplies."
"Or substitutes."
Khalen glanced at the skull on his belt. "Substitutes?"
"You're surrounded by organic matter saturated with Breath," OH said carefully. "And your metabolism has already adapted. Theoretically…"
Khalen squinted. "Don't finish that sentence."
"…you could survive on breathling flesh. Temporarily."
He stared at the steaming carcass. The smell was metallic and sharp, like burned blood and minerals.
"That's disgusting."
"Efficient," OH corrected. "And you're running out of options. Ever tried one before?"
Khalen sighed, rubbing his face. "You're serious."
"Captain," OH said, tone almost gentle, "down here, everything eats the Core. One way or another, you will too."
Khalen looked back at the corpse, its crystal bones glinting like knives in dim light. His stomach growled again.
He didn't answer.
---