The dust of dead centuries didn't muffle sound. It drank it. High in the skeletal remains of what might have been a choir loft, the air was a thick, stagnant blanket. Every shift of weight on the crumbling stone, every breath drawn, felt like a profanity in a place that had been silent for an age. Below, in the grand, fossilized nave of the Sunken Cathedral, the battle was a distant, silent light show, a pantomime of impossible violence.
Zane didn't need to see it with his own eyes. He had a better view. He lay flat on the cold stone, the high-powered optical device pressed to his face. The world was a circle of preternatural clarity, a feed of pure, sterile data. Beside him, the Thorne handler was a shadow within the shadows, a being of quiet, economical movements. She didn't lie down. She knelt, a posture of perfect, patient stillness, her own optical device a seamless extension of her matte-black helmet. They were instruments. He was just beginning to learn what that truly meant.
"The Nomad, Anya, is a known quantity," the handler's synthesized voice murmured, a dry rustle in his ear-comm. It was a voice that had never known emotion, designed for the sterile delivery of facts. "Her combat style is aggressive, efficient. Predictable."
On the nave floor, Anya was a whirlwind of controlled fury, her twin pistols spitting coherent light. But she was struggling. The Bell-Warden, the cathedral's monstrous heart, ignored her. Its attention was elsewhere. On him. On Kael.
A fresh wave of sonic disruption, a silent, visible shimmer in the optic's feed, pulsed from the Warden. Zane felt a phantom echo of it in his own shattered Frame, a high, staticky whine that made the scars on his forearms ache. He saw Kael drop to one knee, a flicker of instability. The old Zane, the hammer, would have sneered. Pathetic. The new Zane, the instrument, just watched. He cataloged the weakness, the same way his handlers had cataloged his.
"He is countering the disruption frequency," the handler noted, her voice devoid of surprise. "A targeted counter-vibration. Crude, but effective. He is not just a User. He is a technician."
Zane gritted his teeth. I was a User, he thought, the bitterness a familiar, coppery taste. He is a scavenger who got lucky. But the lie was thin, worn-out. He had seen the Gauntlet footage. He had seen the factory logs. Luck didn't look like this. This looked like a different set of rules.
The Warden struck the floor. The kinetic pulse, a ripple in the very fabric of the marble, shot toward Kael. Zane's breath caught. He remembered that feeling—the utter negation, the sense of an enemy that wasn't just attacking your body, but the laws that allowed it to exist. He had faced it with his own brute strength, a mountain trying to stop a ghost. He had failed.
Kael didn't dodge. He didn't raise a shield. He let it hit him.
Zane's mind, conditioned by a lifetime of combat doctrine, screamed Idiot!
The armor bloomed over Kael's skin. Not the jagged, aggressive shell from the Gauntlet. This was something new. Something fluid and subtle, like a film of still mercury. The kinetic wave sank into it without a sound.
"Impossible," Zane whispered, the word stolen from his lungs.
The handler was silent, but he saw her shift, a fractional adjustment of her aim. The lens of her device whined softly as it zoomed in, hungry for data.
For a heartbeat, Kael's form seemed to swell with contained energy. He was a capacitor, a living battery holding a god's power. Then, he released it. A concussive pulse, a perfect, focused echo of the Warden's own attack, blasted from his body. It struck the golem, staggering it.
The handler's professional calm finally fractured. A single, sharp intake of breath, a sound so human it was shocking. "He didn't deflect. He… he caught it. He repurposed it." Her voice, for the first time, held a trace of something other than clinical detachment. Avarice. "The enhancement… it's a feedback system. A kinetic mirror. My lord…"
Zane felt a cold, hollowing dread that had nothing to do with the battle below. He was watching Kael rewrite the laws of their world, and the Thorne agent beside him wasn't seeing a miracle. She was seeing a patent. A weapon to be stripped, studied, and replicated.
The fight below became a blur. An opening. Kael didn't hesitate. He moved with a new kind of grace, a terrifying fusion of a predator's pounce and a physicist's understanding of geometry. He used his [Shockwave Step] not as an attack, but as an engine, a tool for impossible repositioning. He was a ghost walking on thunder.
He was beside the Warden, his spear a humming line of contained fury. He wasn't aiming for the chest. He was aiming for a joint. A seam. A vulnerability in the design.
Zane saw it then. The fundamental difference. He had always fought the monster. Kael was fighting the machine.
The Warden's arm disassembled. It didn't break or shatter. It simply came apart, the ancient bonds that held it together undone by a whisper of sympathetic resonance. The creature let out its first true sound, a shriek of pure, systemic error. The sonic attack stopped. The pressure vanished.
"We have what we need," the handler said, her voice once again a flat, synthesized calm. The moment of wonder was gone, replaced by the cold, hard logic of her purpose. She was already rising, melting back into the deeper shadows of the loft. "The asset has confirmed a high-level capacity for adaptive Synthesis. He is no longer just an anomaly. He is a primary resource."
Zane stayed where he was, his eye pressed to the scope. He watched Kael stand over the broken, silent Guardian, his body a symphony of exhaustion and impossible power. He was just a boy from a backwater fort. A scavenger. A technician.
And he was everything Zane had ever wanted to be, and everything he had failed to become. The hatred he felt was so profound, so absolute, it was almost a kind of worship. It was the only thing left in his life that felt real.
"User Zane," the handler's voice cut through his thoughts. "The mission is complete. We are leaving."
He didn't want to leave. He wanted to watch. He wanted to see how it ended. He wanted to see the scavenger fail, to see this impossible new power break against some older, more brutal truth. He wanted to see the universe correct its mistake.
But he was an instrument. And the instrument had served its purpose.
He pushed himself up, the movement stiff, his scarred Frame a constant, dull ache. He took one last look at the scene below—at the Nomads gathering around their wounded, at Kael, a small, lonely figure in the heart of a dead god's tomb.
He turned and followed the handler into the darkness, the silence of their departure a far greater threat than any monster's roar. They slipped away, two ghosts leaving a third to his victory, not knowing that he was, and always had been, their true target. The board was set. The prize was Kael's soul. And now, they had a clearer idea of its worth.