The world ended at the edge of the ravine.
It wasn't a clean break. The land simply gave way, collapsing into a wound so deep and wide that the opposite side was a vague suggestion in the haze. And in the heart of that wound, wreathed in a sickly green mist, was the cathedral.
The name was a profound understatement. It was a mountain range of impossible architecture, a pre-Fall city of faith or folly, now drowned. The central spire, its peak shattered, still clawed at the bruised sky, a defiant skeletal finger. Flying buttresses, elegant as spun bone, arced through the gloom, connecting towers that had no right to still be standing. It was breathtaking. It was an obscenity.
"The broker wasn't lying," Anya murmured, her voice a low hum of avarice and awe. "It's untouched."
"Untouched things in the wastes are usually untouched for a reason," Corbin rumbled beside her, his heavy tower shield still slung on his back, looking comically small against the scale of the ruin.
Kael said nothing. He let the ghosts in his soul do the looking. The Hound, Lyra, was unnerved, the sheer cliff face an unnatural barrier to its instincts of pursuit. The Scuttler was in a state of chittering, existential bliss; it saw a million cracks and crevices to hide in, a whole world built of shadows. But it was the Stalker that truly understood. It didn't see stone and mist. It saw a system. A vertical ecosystem, complex and hostile. It felt the subtle downdrafts, the gravitational wrongness of the hanging structures, the faint, dissonant hum of life that had adapted to this impossible geometry.
"We go in pairs," Anya commanded, her voice cutting through the stunned silence. "Corbin, you and Sil take point. Find a stable descent path. Maya, you're with Kael. You two are the eyes and ears. I want a constant sensory sweep. We move like ghosts, or we die like tourists."
The descent was not a climb. It was a controlled fall, a negotiation with gravity on a battlefield where the only enemy was the ground itself. The path was a lie, a series of treacherous, moss-slick ledges and crumbling stonework that threatened to give way with every step. The air was thick and cold, tasting of wet stone and ancient decay. The mist was a living thing, coiling around them, swallowing sound and stealing perspective, turning the hundred-meter drop into an infinite, white void.
Kael moved with a hybrid grace he was only just beginning to understand. He didn't trust his eyes. He let the Hound's senses map the way, feeling the minute vibrations in the stone, the tell-tale looseness of a block, the faint scent of a predator's spoor on the wind. He was their early warning system. Beside him, Maya was a whisper, her Glimmer Moth Echo not a beacon but a cloak, bending the mist and the gloom around them, smudging their outlines into just another pair of moving shadows. Their communication was a silent language of hand signals and shared glances, a harmony forged in the fire of the factory.
A sudden, sharp cry from above. Sil, the Nomad scout, pointed her rifle towards the shattered belfry of a smaller, adjacent tower. "Contact! High angle!"
Kael's head snapped up. They weren't gargoyles. They were worse. Their bodies were a horrifying fusion of jagged, slate-grey crystal and avian anatomy, their wings not feathered but crafted from razor-thin shards of obsidian that chimed with a sickeningly beautiful music as they caught the wind. They clung to the high ledges like grotesque stone ornaments, their heads, featureless wedges of dark crystal, swiveling to track the team's descent.
One of them dropped.
It didn't fly so much as plummet, a living dive-bomb of stone and spite. Corbin was ready. He didn't move. He became the mountain, his defensive Echo flaring, a heavy tower shield of pure, stolid force materializing on his arm. The creature slammed into it with a deafening crack, not of flesh, but of rock on rock. The impact sent a shudder through the very ledge they stood on, but Corbin held, grunting with the effort, a human anchor against a geological assault.
Before the creature could recover, Sil's rifle barked, a single, clean shot of coherent light punching through the Chimera's crystalline chest. It shattered, dissolving into a shower of grey dust and fading Aethel.
"More of them!" Anya's voice was sharp, all business. "They're guarding the high ground. Sil, suppress. Kael, find us a new path. Now!"
The obvious route was blocked, the avian horrors controlling the open faces of the buttresses. Kael switched his senses. Click. The Stalker. The world flattened into a blueprint. He didn't see a wall of stone; he saw a system of stress fractures and load-bearing points. He saw the path not taken.
"Inside," he said, pointing to a massive, shattered stained-glass window fifty feet below them. The glass itself was long gone, but the intricate stone tracery remained, a spiderweb of impossible delicacy. "It's a shortcut."
"Through there?" Corbin grunted, fending off another diving attack. "It's a sheer drop."
"The glass isn't gone," Kael said, the words coming from the cold, analytical part of him. "It's just been… adapted."
He could see them now, a secondary threat his Hound had missed. Things were moving on the inner surface of the window's tracery, camouflaged against the bruised sky beyond. They were long and reptilian, their scales a mosaic of colored crystal that mimicked the lost glass. They skittered across the vertical surface with an insectile grace, their claws finding purchase where none should exist. Window Stalkers. Another local adaptation. Another nightmare.
"It's our only way," Kael insisted. "They're expecting us to stay outside. They're herding us."
Anya made the calculation in a heartbeat. "He's right. We punch through. Kael, you're on point. Make an opening."
It was a test. A demand. He took a breath, letting the harmony in his soul settle. He wasn't a hammer. He wasn't a scalpel. He was the architect of the battlefield. He ran to the edge of the ledge, the drop a dizzying void below. He didn't jump. He stomped.
A controlled, kinetic blast from his [Shockwave Step] erupted downwards. It didn't just propel him; it shattered the patch of ledge he stood on, sending a shower of stone and debris down onto the window below. It was a distraction. A percussive knock on a very dangerous door.
As the Window Stalkers recoiled from the unexpected barrage, Kael was already in the air, his second stomp launching him in a tight, explosive arc across the gap. He landed on the window's wide, stone sill, his [Shard Armor] flaring to life as a lizard-thing lunged, its claws screeching harmlessly across the crystalline barbs. The armor bit back. The creature shrieked, its own attack turned into a spray of kinetic shrapnel that flayed its hide.
He didn't give it time to recover. He was the zookeeper, and this was just another cage. He flowed past it, his spear a blur, finding the softer, fibrous crystal where limb met torso. A clean, surgical kill.
The rest of the Nomads followed, rappelling down in a smooth, professional cascade. The fight in the window was a chaotic, three-dimensional ballet of death. Corbin was a walking fortress, his shield a mobile wall that created pockets of safety. Anya and Sil were a whirlwind of precise, deadly fire. And Kael and Maya were a ghost and her echo, weaving through the chaos, their movements a seamless, unspoken partnership. Kael would use his Shockwave Step to blast a Stalker from its perch, and Maya's light-weaving would be there to blind it, to distort its path, sending it tumbling into the misty depths.
They cleared the window, collapsing onto a wide, sheltered balcony inside the cathedral itself, their chests heaving, their bodies a collection of new bruises and deeper exhaustion. The silence inside was different. It was heavy, expectant. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and something else, a faint, metallic tang like old blood.
They were inside. They were halfway down.
Kael looked out from the balcony, down into the swirling heart of the mist. The cathedral's vast nave was still a hundred meters below, a place of deeper shadows and older secrets. And as he watched, he heard it. A faint sound, carried on the strange, internal currents of the ravine. It wasn't the chime of the gargoyles or the skittering of the lizards. It was a single, pure, resonant note. A bell. Tolling a slow, patient funeral dirge in the heart of the sunken world.