The utility tunnel was a straight, dark throat. The skittering sounds of the Reavers echoed behind them, growing closer.
"We need to split up!" Lyra shouted over the noise as they ran. "It's the only way! They can't follow us all!"
Selene pointed to a side passage up ahead, a narrow pipe-access tunnel. "That goes toward the old cisterns—a maze! We can lose them there!"
Kaelen shook his head, his breath ragged. "Bad ground. We stay together."
"There's no time to argue!" Lyra insisted, her voice sharp. "Arlan and I are the fastest. We'll draw them off down the main tunnel. You two take the side passage, get to the surface, and get the evidence to someone—anyone! Go!"
It made a twisted kind of sense. Arlan and Lyra were both 3rd Order, mobile. Kaelen was still injured, and Selene's strength wasn't in endurance running.
"Fine!" Selene snapped, shoving the data-chip with the images into Arlan's hand. "Don't die!"
She grabbed Kaelen's arm and pulled him toward the narrow side tunnel. They vanished into the darkness.
Arlan and Lyra kept running straight. The two Reavers were closing fast, their red eyes glowing like coals in the dark.
"We need a choke point!" Arlan yelled.
"Up ahead! There's a pump station—a metal door!" Lyra called back.
They sprinted around a bend and saw it: a heavy, rusted metal door set into the brick wall, slightly ajar. They dove through, and Arlan slammed it shut, throwing his weight against it. He found a thick metal bar and slid it into place, locking it.
THUD. THUD. The Reavers hit the other side, scrabbling at the metal. The door held, for now.
They were in a small, square pump room. The air hummed with the vibration of old machinery. There was one other door on the opposite wall.
"We need to keep moving," Lyra said, her chest heaving. "They'll cut through that door or find another way around."
Arlan nodded, looking at the data-chip in his hand. The proof. They had to get it out.
Lyra went to the other door and pushed it open. It led to a steep, metal staircase going up. "This should take us to a surface access hatch near the eastern gardens."
They climbed, the sounds of the Reavers fading below. After three flights, they reached a hatch. Lyra pushed it open cautiously. Cool night air washed in. They were in a small, walled-in service yard behind the academy's botanical gardens. It was quiet.
"We made it," Arlan breathed, stepping out.
"Not yet," Lyra said, her voice strange. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking past his shoulder, toward the garden archway.
Arlan turned.
Standing in the archway, silhouetted by the soft garden lights, was Kieran Vance. He wasn't alone. Flanking him were four figures in sleek grey armor—Accord Null-Suit operatives. Their weapons were raised, energy cores humming.
"Hello, patchwork," Kieran said, a cold smile on his lips. "Aunt Iliana thought you might try something heroic."
Arlan's heart froze. He looked at Lyra. She wasn't surprised. She took a slow, deliberate step away from him, toward Kieran's side.
"Lyra?" The name was a whisper.
Her stellar eyes met his, and all the warmth, all the shared purpose from the Aetherium, was gone. In its place was a cold, calculating emptiness. "I'm sorry, Arlan. Truly. But some cages are too big to break. Some orders are too important to defy."
Betrayal. It hit him like a physical blow, sharper than any blade.
"The Solara family's future is with the new order," Lyra continued, her voice flat. "The Accord promised my brother would be returned unharmed once the transition is complete. And they promised my family a place in the new administration. I couldn't pass up that certainty for your... chaotic potential."
All of it. The alliance, the training, the shared goal—a lie. A play to get close to him, to monitor him, to deliver him when the time was right.
Kieran chuckled. "She played her part well, didn't she? The concerned rival, the brilliant ally. You never had a chance."
Rage, cold and absolute, flooded Arlan's veins, burning away the shock. He clutched the data-chip. "The evidence..."
"Is worthless," Kieran finished. "Who will believe it? The word of a known anomaly against the Head Proctor and the Solara heiress? You're finished, Thorne."
The Null-Suit operatives fanned out, surrounding him. The energy in their weapons built to a whine.
Arlan's mind raced. He was cornered. Outnumbered by four 4th Orders and Kieran. Lyra, a powerful 3rd Order, was against him. There was no escape.
But he wouldn't go down without a fight.
He dropped into a stance, mana flaring. Silver spatial energy crackled around one hand, dark Umbral shadow pooled around the other, and a flicker of purple Voidfire ignited in his palm.
"Take him," Kieran ordered. "The core is to be extracted intact."
The Null-Suits moved. Two fired beams of null-energy designed to disrupt magic and paralyze. The other two lunged forward with mana-draining batons.
Arlan Blinked. A three-meter teleport to the left, dodging the beams. He unleashed a Voidfire Bolt at the closest attacker. The purple fire struck the Null-Suit's chest plate. It hissed and sputtered, eating into the armor but not piercing it. The operative staggered but didn't fall.
The second attacker was on him. Arlan raised a Shadow Shield. The baton hit the darkness, and the shield wavered, the darkness destabilizing under the nullifying effect. A searing pain shot up his arm.
He couldn't win this.
He tried to Blink again, but one of the operatives fired a Spatial Lock grenade. The air around him thickened, glue-like, making teleportation impossible.
He was trapped.
He saw Lyra, watching from beside Kieran, her expression unreadable.
A baton connected with his ribs. He felt bones crack. Another hit his leg, and his knee buckled. He went down, his vision swimming.
Kieran walked over, looking down at him with contempt. "All that struggle. For nothing." He raised his hand, force energy gathering into a crushing point aimed at Arlan's chest—a killing blow.
This was it. He was going to die in a service yard, betrayed and alone.
But the cold rage wouldn't let him accept it. If he was going to die, he'd take this traitorous snake with him.
With the last of his strength and will, he did something reckless. He focused on the Sundered Shield Fragment sleeping in his core. He didn't try to control it. He poked it. Hard.
He sent a spike of pure, desperate intent into the lattice holding it: BREAK.
The fragment reacted.
A wave of silent, grey Negation exploded from Arlan's body.
It didn't hurt the Null-Suits. It didn't hurt Kieran or Lyra. It did something worse.
It negated the Spatial Lock grenade's effect. It negated the local stability of the ground. It negated the integrity of the ancient service yard's stone floor.
The world didn't explode. It unmade.
A ten-foot circle of flagstones, dirt, and pipes beneath Arlan simply ceased to exist, falling away into a sudden, bottomless pit that hadn't been there a second before.
Arlan, already on the ground, fell into the screaming void.
Kieran and the Null-Suits leaped back from the expanding edge of nothingness.
Lyra stared, her cold mask finally cracking into shock.
They peered over the edge. There was no bottom. Just deep, silent blackness, slowly closing as reality stitched itself back together over the negation wound.
There was no sign of Arlan Thorne.
"Did the fragment... self-destruct?" one Null-Suit operative asked, his voice modulated.
Kieran scowled, scanning the area with a device. "No life signs. No spatial residue. The negation field was total. He's gone. Erased." He sounded furious, not triumphant. His aunt wanted the core intact.
Lyra finally spoke, her voice hollow. "The fragment is lost, then."
"It would seem so," Kieran said, turning his glare on her. "Your part in this is over, Solara. Return to your quarters. Act normal. The operation proceeds."
Lyra nodded stiffly and walked away, her mind a storm of conflicting emotions she refused to name.
Kieran looked back at the now-solid ground. A perfect, smooth circle of new, featureless stone marked where Arlan had fallen. No body. No trace.
"Clean it up," he ordered the Null-Suits. "And report: Subject Thorne has been terminated. Asset lost."
---
Far below, in a place that was not a place, Arlan Thorne was not dead.
The negation wave had torn a hole straight down through reality, through layers of forgotten catacombs, ancient sewers, and deep, natural caverns. He fell for a long time, battered by stone and darkness, before landing with a crash in a deep underground river.
The icy water shocked him awake. He was broken—ribs shattered, leg dislocated, his core screaming from the backlash of poking the fragment.