They didn't decide immediately.
Decisions implied confidence.
This was alignment.
They moved through the city without speaking, folding into crowds when necessary, diverging when watched, regrouping when the pressure thinned. Silence led without directing. Andrew—Andy now, because urgency shortened names—kept track of faces that repeated too often. Lucia counted breaths.
By the time the sea smell reached them, the pursuit had quieted.
Not ended.
Quieted.
The lighthouse rose from the coast like a refusal made permanent.
It wasn't tall by modern standards. No grandeur. No romantic glow. Just stone, weathered by repetition, standing where land gave up trying to be land.
Silence stopped at the edge of the path.
"This place doesn't attract attention," Andrew said. "That alone makes it valuable."
Lucia shook her head slowly. "That's not why."
Silence looked at her.
"It watches," she said. "Without intervening."
That was closer.
They weren't alone.
Figures emerged from the structure and its surrounding outbuildings—not startled, not defensive. Familiar faces. Andy's crew. People who had stopped asking why long ago and started asking how long instead.
And among them—
Claude's force.
Not soldiers.
Not disciples.
Residuals.
People shaped by Claude's work, his systems, his refusal to finish conclusions. Some carried notebooks. Others carried nothing at all—empty hands, sharp eyes. One man had equations burned into the inside of his coat. A woman spoke only in metaphors she didn't realize were precise.
They had already been here.
Waiting wasn't the right word.
Holding space was.
Andy stepped forward. "You felt it too."
A tall man nodded. "The pressure changed."
A woman added, "Causality staggered. That usually means you're nearby."
Silence said nothing.
He didn't need to introduce himself.
The lighthouse door closed behind them with a sound that wasn't final—but deliberate.
Inside, the air was different.
Not protected.
Filtered.
The light mechanism above them rotated slowly, powered by something that wasn't entirely mechanical. Claude had modified it years ago—not to shine farther, but to remember where it had already shone.
"No one stays forever," Andy said quietly, addressing the room. "That's the rule."
Silence nodded. "We're not here to stay."
Lucia sat on the steps, hugging the teddy tighter. "Then why here?"
Silence looked up at the light turning overhead.
"Because this place doesn't resolve things," he said. "It marks them."
One of Claude's people—an older man with ink-stained fingers—spoke for the first time.
"Claude believed unresolved systems were safer than completed ones."
Andrew swallowed. "They're hunting unfinished things."
"Yes," the man said. "They always do."
A murmur passed through the room—not fear, but recognition.
Andy leaned against the wall. "Then we rest. We observe. We don't escalate."
Silence turned to him. "They won't stop."
Andy met his eyes. "Neither will we."
The lighthouse light passed over the room once—slow, steady.
No alarms.
No revelations.
Just presence.
Far from the city, far from the hall that no longer existed the same way, the opposing force recalibrated.
They had lost proximity.
Not the trail.
And somewhere between underworld and cosmos, the Fragmented Soul adjusted again—subtly disturbed by the fact that the ones it had almost claimed were now standing somewhere that refused to complete them.
The lighthouse kept turning.
Not to guide.
Not to warn.
But to say, over and over again:
Something is still here.
And for now—
That was enough.
The first explosion didn't shake the house.
It corrected it.
Walls that had learned to listen suddenly remembered how to break. The hall's long windows fractured outward in perfect silence before the sound arrived—a concussive roar that folded the air and threw light across the ceiling like a dying thought.
Andy was on his feet instantly.
"That wasn't a warning," he said. "That was confirmation."
Another impact followed—closer this time. The floor lurched, not collapsing, but reconsidering its structure. Somewhere below, alarms began screaming, then cut off mid-note.
Andrew reached for his weapon. "Opposing gang?"
Andy shook his head. His eyes were on the screens flickering back to life around the hall. "No. Gangs announce territory. This is extraction pressure."
Sylence didn't speak.
He was already moving.
"Everyone," he said calmly, voice carrying through chaos like it had practiced this moment. "Take only what you can't afford to lose."
That froze them.
Not because it was poetic.
Because it was precise.
Heaven reared, scales flaring as the air filled with hostile resonance. The female demi-dragon moved instinctively to block the hall's central entrance, wings unfurling just enough to warp the trajectory of incoming force. Something invisible struck her barrier and slid away, shrieking as it failed to define itself.
"They're probing," Andrew said. "Testing responses."
"No," Sylence replied. "They're measuring delay."
The ceiling cracked.
Not from impact—but from above.
A deep, mechanical thunder rolled overhead, rhythmic and intentional. Shadows swept across the broken windows, massive and angular.
Helicopters.
Not one.
Not two.
A formation.
Heavy-lift carriers descended in controlled arcs, rotors slicing the air into disciplined violence. Floodlights cut through smoke and debris, locking onto the structure with inhuman focus.
Andy stared. "Those aren't mercenaries."
"No," Sylence said. "They're collectors."
The opposing force breached then—not storming, not charging. They arrived. Figures stepped through distortions in space along the hall's far wall, their silhouettes inconsistent, outlines lagging half a second behind their movement.
People who existed slightly out of sync.
"Load everything," Sylence ordered. "Claude's archives. The system cores. The fragments. The things we don't understand yet."
Andrew hesitated. "We can't take all of it."
Sylence met his eyes. "We're not choosing. We're relocating consequence."
The hall erupted into controlled chaos.
Andy's crew moved fast—too fast for civilians, too coordinated for coincidence. Data racks were ripped free, sealed into armored crates mid-transfer. Relics were wrapped in containment fields that hummed angrily as if aware they were being moved without consent.
Lucia clutched the teddy, standing perfectly still as the world fractured around her. Heaven shifted, placing herself between Lucia and a collapsing pillar without being asked.
Above them, the helicopters lowered magnetic tethers, cables snapping into place with violent precision. Entire sections of the hall—walls, floors, memory—were lifted free as if the building itself had been waiting to leave.
The opposing force reacted then.
Reality buckled.
One of them raised a hand and the air folded inward, compressing into a killing arc aimed straight at Sylence.
It never reached him.
The Septet didn't appear.
It intervened.
Not directly—never that simple—but the attack hesitated. Just long enough for Heaven's roar to split the sound barrier and Andrew's shot to punch through something that had never learned how to bleed.
The enemy recoiled.
Not from pain.
From recognition.
"They know you now," Andy shouted over the chaos.
"I know," Sylence replied, stepping onto the rising platform as the helicopter began its ascent. "That's why they're rushing."
The final cable locked.
The ground below them gave up.
As the massive aircraft pulled away, the hall collapsed inward—not destroyed, but released. The opposing figures stood amid the ruin, watching the helicopters retreat into cloud cover.
None of them pursued.
They didn't need to.
Sylence looked down at the shrinking city, the lighthouse beam already visible in the distance—steady, defiant, waiting.
Claude didn't leave him a weapon.
He left him a delay.
And as the helicopters turned toward the lighthouse, carrying systems, souls, and unfinished truths—
The delay ended.
Somewhere between the underworld and the cosmos, an object that should not exist shifted again.
Not because it had been found.
But because Sylence had finally moved.
And reality, at last, had stopped waiting.