The adrenaline of the battle was finally wearing off, leaving behind the throbbing, nauseating headache that always accompanied a near-death encounter.
The cohort gathered round to share Intel on what the discovered.
"It didn't feel corrupted," Lyra panted, her fingers trembling slightly as she kneaded her temples to soothe her aching head. She stared blankly at the dark floor. "That's what bothered me the most. Usually, foreign entities in high-density mana zones show signs of chaotic decay. But this thing... its void matter was structured. And its spatial evasion wasn't a teleport; it was like it simply stepped sideways out of our timeline."
"It's got full awareness of its surroundings, too," Reo added, lazily tossing one of his daggers into the air and catching it by the hilt. "I tried to slip into its blind spot when Ingis was knocked down. Do you know what it did? It didn't turn around. It just *bent* its elbow backward at an unholy angle and tried to turn me into paste. Total party-pooper behavior."
Maya groaned, miserably checking her gauntlets where the golden plating had been charred black. "Elemental attacks completely bounced off it. I threw everything I had into that lightning torrent, and the spell just... ceased to exist the second it crossed its perimeter."
Luke listened in silence, his arms crossed over his chest as he surveyed his battered cohort. The terrifying reality of their situation hung heavily in the air.
"It would be futile to attack it at long range, and going toe-to-toe with it is dangerously stressful," Luke said, his voice cutting through the murmurs with absolute, pragmatic authority. "Since elemental magic doesn't work, Lyra, Maya, and Silvia will serve as our primary ranged distractions. Azula and Reo, you'll sneak up behind it to act as bait and disrupt its footing. While its attention is completely divided, I'll aim for the core."
He paused, letting his sharp, golden eyes sweep over each of them.
"If we are to ever encounter another one—and considering the absolute lack of Intel we started with, our chances of seeing more of those things are painfully high—we need absolute coordination. Rest up a bit. We're moving out soon."
Luke pushed himself up from the stone. His armor was remarkably pristine, gleaming under the faint, sickly light leaking through the gate without a single scratch to show for the brutal brawl.
He walked away from the campfire circle, moving toward the far edge of the enormous iron gate where a massive, jutting pillar offered a secluded shadow. Obscured from the rest of the team, he pulled a small, rune-etched stone from his pouch.
He pressed his thumb against the activation glyph.
*"What about the analysis result? Has it come out yet?"* Luke murmured quietly, pitching his voice so it wouldn't carry.
A heavy, static-laced hum emanated from the stone before Zayne's cold voice echoed directly into his mind:
*"From the intel we've managed to pull, the extracted core material doesn't match any known substance in our archives. It's neither metal nor conventional organic matter. But your field hunch was correct—while elemental magic is entirely nullified, brute physical strength and pure, unadulterated mana can crack its shell."*
"Figure that out now," Luke muttered, glancing down at his chest armor. He hadn't fully appreciated what Kaizer had bragged about regarding the craft, but surviving that fatal strike gave him a grim appreciation for it. The armor was impossibly light, offering total freedom of movement, yet it possessed a terrifying durability that bent reality itself to protect its wearer.
*"Luke,"* Zayne's voice dropped an octave, turning glacial. *"Don't forget why you were sent down there. Watch them like a hawk. Isolate the mole."*
Zayne didn't wait for a confirmation. *"If there's any additional information regarding the stone, I'll contact you later."*
The rune went dead, the soft glow fading into dull grey. Luke exhaled a slow, steely breath, slipped the stone back into his pouch, and walked back out to join his cohort, who were already strapping on their gear, waiting in tense silence.
"So... how do we actually get past this massive gate?" Maya asked, straining her neck as she tried to peer up at the towering, choked structure overhead.
"Azula," Luke called out.
Azula nodded silently. Without a word, her shadow rapidly expanded along the ground, swallowing them whole. For one suffocating minute, they existed entirely in a state of suspended, absolute dark. Then, with a sudden, localized shift in gravity, the shadow spat them out onto the edge of a vast, petrified precipice.
They had crossed the threshold.
Luke looked out over the city before turning back to the team. "Reo. Send your shadow panther to scout ahead."
A sleek, midnight-feline woven entirely from dense shadows flicked into existence beside Reo. It stretched its litgy, amorphous body, gave a silent yawn, and dissolved into the gloom. Only the faint, almost imperceptible whisper of its steps betrayed its movement.
Absolute silence crashed over the cohort. Even Reo had lost his usual jovial smirk, his expression locked in grim focus.
There was something fundamentally, profoundly wrong with this place. A heavy, suffocating wrongness that scraped relentlessly against the raw edges of Luke's instincts.
For a metropolis as majestic, sprawling, and architecturally brilliant as this to be built a mile beneath the earth, completely omitted from every known historical text and royal archive, said everything. But that wasn't what was setting off alarm bells in the back of Luke's mind.
Luke walked slowly to the stone steps that cascaded downward into the dead city, his eyes scanning the endless sea of dark silhouettes stretching out into the distance. Far across the subterranean basin, the jagged, skeletal silhouette of a massive castle loomed against the gloom like a sleeping leviathan.
His instincts were screaming at him, a primal, violent alarm he couldn't ignore.
"We'll make our way straight to the castle," Luke instructed quietly, his eyes never stopping their sweep of the shadows.
He let his mana sense roam outward, pushing it to its absolute limits. It flooded a vast expanse of the ruined streets—though it felt desperately meager compared to the sheer scale of the buried city.
He suddenly narrowed his eyes.
At the very outermost edge of his sweeping mana perimeter, he felt a flicker. It was impossibly fast, but he caught the displacement. Something—or *someone*—was actively evading detection, sidestepping his sensory net like a ghost walking through smoke.
Luke took a sharp step forward, and instantly, the presence mirrored him, sliding deeper into the blind spots of his awareness. He strained his eyes to peer into the gloom, but the city was drowned in a thick, unnatural darkness that seemed to actively swallow light and conceal whatever horrors lurked within it.
"Reo," Luke said, his voice dead calm, though the stark tension in his posture gave away the gravity of the moment. "Call your bond back. *Now.*"