The bottom of the world smelled of wet stone and time.
They stood in the nave of the Sunken Cathedral, a cavern of impossible geometry carved by faith and shattered by the Fall. The green mist that choked the ravine outside swirled through the shattered rose window high above, a sickly, phosphorescent god-ray that illuminated a universe of dancing dust motes. Pillars the size of Enclave watchtowers, their surfaces a filigree of forgotten stories, held up a ceiling lost in shadow. The floor was a cracked mosaic of marble and obsidian, slick with a fine, dark moss. It wasn't a ruin. It was a fossil.
The slow, patient tolling of the bell had stopped the moment they'd stepped inside. The silence it left behind was a physical weight, pressing in on them, muffling the sound of their own breathing.
"No stabilizer," Anya's voice was a low, hard thing, stripped of all the hope that had led them here. She stood by the shattered remains of what might have been an altar, her combat light cutting a clinical swathe across the rubble. "No power signature. Nothing."
Corbin grunted, the sound like rock grinding on rock. "The broker lied. It was a trap."
"It was a good trap," Kael murmured, his voice barely a whisper. He let the ghosts in his soul do the looking. The Hound was a knot of low, guttural anxiety, its predator's instincts screaming that this open, empty space was all wrong. The Scuttler was a frantic chitter of pure terror, seeing a tomb with no cracks to hide in. But the Stalker… the Stalker was fascinated. It saw the architecture not as stone, but as a system. It saw the acoustics, the load-bearing points, the perfect, fatal symmetry of the chamber. It saw a cage.
And the cage was not empty.
It happened not with a roar, but with a chime.
A single, pure note rang out, seeming to come from the very stones around them. It wasn't loud, but it pierced through the silence, through the armor, through the bone, and sank directly into the core of their Aethel Frames. It was a sound like a tuning fork made of glass, and it was tuned to the exact frequency of failure.
Kael's vision swam. The world tilted violently on its axis, a wave of vertigo so profound he had to drop to one knee to keep from falling. His own Frame, the complex, hard-won harmony of his Echoes, stuttered. He felt the Hound's snarl and the Scuttler's panic and the Stalker's cold logic all devolve into a panicked, staticky whine. It was a system crash, a targeted denial-of-service attack on his very soul.
He looked up, forcing his eyes to focus. The rest of the team was reeling. Corbin, the walking mountain, stumbled like a drunk, his heavy tower shield clattering against the marble. Sil, the sniper, had her rifle half-raised, but her aim wavered, her movements clumsy and uncoordinated. Even Anya, the unshakable center of their small universe, had a hand pressed to her temple, her face a mask of pained confusion. Their Aethel Frames, their greatest strength, had been turned into an anchor, a source of inner dissonance.
From the center of the nave, where the altar had been, the rubble began to move. It wasn't a creature rising from beneath. The rubble was the creature. Stones and shattered pieces of crystalline tracery lifted into the air, drawn together by an unseen force, assembling themselves with the quiet, inexorable logic of a self-building machine.
It took a form that was only vaguely humanoid, a hulking golem of the cathedral itself. Its body was a mosaic of interlocking crystalline plates that looked like the pipes of a colossal, broken organ. Light didn't reflect off its surface; it seemed to pass through it, refracting into a thousand discordant, unsettling colors. It had no face, no eyes, just a smooth, featureless head that tilted with an air of ancient, passionless curiosity. It was a Tier-3. The thing the intel had conveniently understated.
The Resonant Bell-Warden.
It took a step, the movement silent, but the impact was a second chime, a different note, that echoed in their bones. This one was lower, a bass note of pure, physical pressure. Kael felt it, not as a sound, but as a command. An instruction to his own Kinetic Core. His body wanted to seize, to lock up. He fought it, the effort a screaming, tearing strain.
The Warden raised a massive arm, a limb of fused marble and crystal. It didn't point. It didn't gesture. It simply struck the floor.
There was no boom. No shockwave that kicked up dust. Instead, a ripple, clean and perfect, spread across the marble floor from the point of impact. It wasn't a crack. The stone itself was not displaced. It was a pulse of pure kinetic force, a focused wave of physical law, traveling through the solid matter as if it were water.
It moved with terrifying speed, aimed directly at Corbin, the largest and most immediate threat.
"Corbin, shield!" Anya's command was slurred, her own systems fighting the sonic disruption.
The big Nomad reacted on pure instinct, slamming his tower shield down. The kinetic pulse hit it. The shield, a tool that could stop a charging Chimera, didn't shatter. It didn't even vibrate. The force simply… passed through it. Corbin was thrown backward as if hit by a transport, his heavy armor screeching against the floor as he slid a dozen feet, his Aethel Frame sputtering violently.
Kael stared, the technician in his soul overriding the terror. It wasn't magic. It was physics. The pulse hadn't been a blunt-force impact. It was a frequency. A kinetic wave tuned to bypass the dense, chaotic energy of a manifested shield and interact directly with the more stable, biological system behind it. It wasn't a hammer. It was a key. A key that unlocked a body's own kinetic potential and turned it against itself.
It was the most elegant, brutal weapon he had ever seen. And it was a perfect, tailored counter to everything a Frame User was.
Except, perhaps, to him.
The Warden took another step, raising its other arm. Its attention shifted from the downed Corbin to Sil, the next logical target. Kael felt the shift in its intent, a cold, analytical targeting solution being calculated. He was not a target. Not yet. He was just a lesser, insignificant variable.
He had to change the equation.
"Maya!" he rasped, his own voice sounding distant. "The floor! Not at it. In front of it."
He didn't wait for her reply. He let the ghosts out of their cages. He didn't try to control their rage or their fear. He just listened to their natures. The Hound wanted to charge, to meet force with force. The Scuttler wanted to move, to evade, to find a new angle. He let their two opposing instincts merge, not into harmony, but into a single, explosive command. He stomped his foot.
Not down. Sideways.
The [Shockwave Step] erupted, not as a line of force, but as a focused, concussive blast that launched him across the marble floor. He didn't run. He flew, a grey blur of motion. He landed between the Warden and its intended target, his body a chaotic, unreadable signal in its perfect, ordered world.
The Warden paused. Its featureless head tilted. It had a new problem to solve.
It struck the ground again. The kinetic ripple shot towards him. Kael didn't raise a shield. He didn't try to dodge. He let his own, refined Synthesis bloom. The [Kinetic Rebound Armor] shimmered to life, a liquid-mercury film over his skin.
He let the wave hit him.
The impact was not a blow. It was a conversation. He felt the pure, ordered frequency of the Warden's attack meet the chaotic, hungry harmony of his own armor. The Hound in his soul snarled in delight, its aggression finding a perfect, pure source of energy to consume. The Tortoise groaned, its stasis a deep, gravitational well that absorbed the impact, containing it.
For a single, breathtaking moment, Kael became a capacitor for a god's power. The kinetic energy of the pulse didn't just stop; it was caught, held, and re-purposed.
Then, he released it.
A concussive pulse, a perfect, focused echo of the Warden's own attack, blasted from his body. It wasn't a defense. It was a rebuttal. The Guardian had thrown a punch, and the ghost in the machine had just thrown it back. The fight for the Sunken Cathedral had just begun, and for the first time, it was a battle between equals.