Elias followed the pull of the Mandate through the industrial outskirts—past the shipping yards and burned-out train tunnels. The deeper he went, the fewer lights he saw. Civilization thinned, and something older took root in the silence.
His hand burned the entire way.
At the edge of a condemned rail yard, behind a barbed-wire fence marked with fake government warnings, he found it:
The Kells Site.
A decommissioned warehouse surrounded by a cracked parking lot and broken cameras. The air was thick with static—the Mandate hated this place. It pulsed like a second heartbeat in his palm.
The door was unlocked.
Of course it was.
⚙️ Inside the Lair
The warehouse was gutted—gutted, but alive.
Pipes lined the ceiling like arteries. The floor was covered in surgical plastic, and the corners glowed faintly blue with UV lights. Industrial fans churned chemical-smelling air through sealed ducts.
Cages.
Tables.
Restraints.
And sealed tanks filled with viscous fluid—each holding what looked like a human, but wrong. Limbs too long. Eyes open. Mouths moving with no sound.
Elias felt the sword unsheathe itself on instinct.
The Mandate screamed in his head.
"This is not science."
"This is desecration."
He stepped deeper, boots sticky against blood and fluid.
Then he saw it.
The slab.
In the center of the room was a surgical platform. On it: Lana Mirek's coat. Folded neatly. Her shattered phone placed on top. Beneath it—burned into the table—was the same sigil that marked the floor in her final moments.
Kells had made it a shrine.
🧪 Adrian Kells Speaks
"You came."
The voice echoed from overhead. Smooth. Relaxed.
Kells appeared behind glass, three stories up in a control booth, sipping tea.
"I wondered if the Mandate still had enforcers. Been decades. I thought they all burned out or snapped."
Elias said nothing.
The sword crackled in his hand, the scales shifting. One side glowed white-hot. The other bled smoke.
"You want me dead," Kells said. "Understandable. But let's be honest—your hands aren't clean either, Judge."
He pressed a button.
One of the tanks opened.
Inside, a twisted figure collapsed to the floor—barely alive, skin stitched with runes, eyes glowing blue. It tried to crawl. It whispered something—maybe a name. Maybe a prayer.
Kells smiled.
"I've gone beyond law. Beyond life and death. You enforce balance?" he said, laughing. "I create imbalance. That's how you control a system."
Elias raised the sword.
His voice dropped into that inhuman register, thick with divine wrath:
"Adrian Kells—guilty."
The warehouse shook.
The Mandate responded like thunder.
Before Elias could strike, the lights shut down completely.
The building sealed itself with a crash of steel doors. Pipes burst. The temperature dropped.
And from behind him—dozens of the broken, twisted figures began to move.
The sword pulsed.
This wasn't going to be a sentence.
This was going to be a war.