The underground train hurtled through a canyon of phosphorescent crystal, the hammering of wheels on rails beating like the heart of a dying man.
Raine leaned against the carriage wall, four streams of power winding slowly through his body, knitting shut the corroded wound in his shoulder.
Emerald-hued Life Weave Mending stitched his ruptured vessels with the precision of a master seamstress; silver-blue Moonlight Purification bled away the lingering toxins; dark-red Dragonblood Surge forced torn muscle to knit anew; and the golden flicker of Shackles of the Gods bound it all together in relentless cycles.
With each completed circuit, the four-colored sigils on his skin shimmered faintly, casting light over the infant in his arms—and the child's body was growing more unnatural by the moment.
The right half was now entirely overlaid with the delicate tracery of gearwork; beneath the skin, the silhouettes of intricate mechanisms writhed as if alive.
The left half was the mirror opposite—its form turning translucent, edges dissolving into drifting motes of light.
Worst of all was the skull-shaped brand blooming across his chest, now swollen to the size of a fist. Within its hollow blackness, something new was forming—a mechanical eye, slowly opening.
"He won't survive to the next station," Ravenna said, tearing open a packet of coagulant powder with her teeth and scattering it across her severed arm.
The purple-gold veins etched into her skin had already faded, and the half-grown limb of raw energy flickered like a failing enchantment.
"We need a place—any place—that can cut that mechanical rot out of him."
The carriage lurched violently.
Outside, in the crystal groves, shadows streaked past—Abyss Stalkers, faceless automata with limbs bent in impossible angles, skittering along the cliff walls.
In their breastplates, energy cores pulsed in perfect time with the keyhole in the infant's chest.
"Devourer scouts," Raine muttered, his emerald left eye catching the telltale glint of their frames.
"They're riding his signal right to us."
The words had barely left his mouth before three Stalkers hurled themselves at the windows.
Their arms liquefied mid-flight, shaping into drills that shrieked against the bulletproof glass.
Raine's Frostwhisper blade swept in a gleaming arc, Winter Nova detonating in a ring of ice that froze the nearest machines where they struck—but already, more shadows were pouring from the crystal thickets.
Ravenna kicked open the carriage's side door, the wind whipping her blood-matted short hair.
"Off the train! Let this tin coffin draw them away!"
With one arm, she scooped up the infant and leapt. Raine followed close behind.
The three of them plunged into the phosphorescent fungus fields at the canyon floor just as the runaway train slammed into the tunnel ahead.
The explosion lit the crystal walls in molten gold, and at least twenty Stalkers were dragged into the inferno.
"Smart," Raine said, hauling Ravenna upright—only to see half a shard of glass buried in her side.
"When did this happen?"
"While you were hauling that iron-whiskered bastard to safety."
She yanked the glass free, blood welling instantly.
"Nothing serious… wait—where's the little bastard?"
The infant was floating three meters away, his mechanical right eye fixed on something deeper in the fungal glow.
Following his gaze, they saw it—a rusted metal door set into the rock face. The markings had long since worn away, but a strange green light seeped through the crack—identical to the energy that bled from the spire beneath the Glass City.
"A dwarven emergency shelter?" Raine's emerald sight pierced the corroded steel, revealing a dense mesh of mechanisms within.
"No… some kind of laboratory."
The infant suddenly spoke, his voice layered with a cold electronic echo:
"Prototype… tuning chamber…"
The violet-gold tracery on Ravenna's skin flared in alarm.
"Hell—this little bastard's been serviced like a machine?"
Before either of them could stop him, the infant placed his small hand on the lock.
The gearwork in his right eye spun, triggering God-Eclipse Directive: Open.
The rusted machinery moved as though guided by an unseen hand—cogs meshing, hydraulic pistons shoving—until the door creaked inward.
A wave of rotting cold washed over them.
What lay within made even battle-hardened Raine's stomach knot.
Twelve incubation pods stood in a ring, seven already shattered, their glass strewn with scraps of unidentifiable flesh.
In the remaining five floated the mutilated bodies of children from various races—some missing their lower halves, some with heads replaced by machinery. The most intact bore the budding shape of a skull in its chest.
On the central console, scattered notes in scrawled dwarven script recorded horrors:
"Forty-third fusion—failure. Prototype remains sole viable subject."
"Council demands mass production, but… consciousness devours the host."
"Must acquire pure-blood elf for next subject—"
The record ended there, the final page drowned in dried blood.
Ravenna's boot crunched down on an empty vial.
"So the dwarves and the Council were in on it—turning living children into vessels?"
The infant drifted toward the innermost pod.
Inside lay the body of a dwarf, clad in a blood-stained lab coat pinned with the badge of a Chief Engineer.
In her rigid right hand she clutched something tight.
The infant's mechanical green eye flickered twice, and for an instant—impossibly—there was a trace of human sorrow.
Raine pried open the stiff fingers.
A pocket watch rested inside.
When he snapped it open, the inner cover revealed a faded photograph: a younger Ironsbeard, his arm around a bespectacled dwarven woman, and between them a girl in a dress—her right eye clear and bright, her left gleaming with mechanical green light.
"Erika…" Raine's voice tightened as memory struck—the final, haunted gaze of the mechanical archer.
"She was… a survivor of the conversion?"
The infant snatched the watch from his hand.
A wash of black light swept across the photograph, and somewhere in the machinery, a projection array hummed to life.
A final recording bloomed across the laboratory wall.
"I am Chief Engineer Gildedbeard," said the dwarven woman in the image, her face streaked with blood. Behind her, muffled detonations shook the air.
"The Council betrayed us. The Devourer was never meant to fight the Abyss—it is the Abyss!"
She lifted a limp elven infant into her arms, then lowered it gently into an escape pod.
"The elf is the only successful fusion. They must never take it—"
The wail of alarms cut her words.
She slammed a red switch, and every incubation pod began to fill with hissing, corrosive fluid.
Her gaze softened, trembling.
"Erika… if you see this… I'm sorry, my child."
The recording ended in silence.
The pocket watch in the infant's hand warped suddenly, its glow fading away—and from somewhere deep within the laboratory came the roar of hydraulics.
A door was opening.
A hidden chamber was waking.
Pain ripped through the stump of Ravenna's arm.
The violet-gold tracery on her skin flared, twisting into a jagged arrow pointing straight toward the sound.
"Something… is calling my alchemy matrix!"
They burst into the hidden compartment—and what they saw sent all three of Raine's inner energies into a frenzy.
Suspended in a containment field was a human heart.
Not forged of brass, not an alchemical construct—flesh and blood, alive, beating.
And etched across its surface were the exact same violet-gold lines as those on Ravenna's severed arm.
"That's…" She stumbled back a step.
"My… original heart?"
The skull-shaped brand on the infant's chest flared, lancing a beam of black-green light into the heart.
The connection snapped into place—and the entire laboratory convulsed.
Machines screamed into overload.
Red strobes and alarms erupted, and on the wall screens, the vast shadow of the Devourer's eye took shape.
"Traitors… return the core…"
Raine's Frostwhisper was in his hands in an instant.
Threefold power locked into The Final Barrier, cutting the signal—but too late.
The ceiling above them buckled and collapsed.
Six mechanical tendrils burst through the wreckage, each ending in a split, writhing face sculpted from the City Lord's will.
"Run!"
Raine threw Ravenna over his shoulder.
She clutched the heart as if it might vanish, while the infant hovered unmoving, the gearwork in his right eye locking on the intruders.
In his chest lock, the mechanical pupil narrowed to a pinprick—
God-Eclipse Directive: Dominate engaged.
The two lead tendrils froze mid-lunge, then turned and tore into their own kin.
But four others swept around the chaos.
One reared high—its sucker-mouth spewing a torrent of thick, glistening Neural Parasite Web.
Raine's blade flashed, Dragonflame Tempest roaring down the arc.The fire seared away part of the
webbing, but not enough.
The burning cords split apart—yet the rest surged on, sticky filaments closing over them.
A silver-blue arrow whistled down through a ventilation shaft, striking clean through the base of a tendril.
A familiar woman's voice rang out:
"This way!"
At the mouth of the shaft, the one-armed half-elf Erika braced a modified crossbow between her legs, her crystal left eye flickering like a storm.
"Move!"
The duct was wider than it looked, but still tight enough to scrape raw flesh on jagged metal edges.
Raine brought up the rear, Frostwhisper lashing out behind him in bursts of Frostpath to slow the pursuit.
At the lead, Erika crawled with an unnatural gait—her spine clearly rebuilt, bending in feline reverse-joints that carried her forward with eerie grace.
"You're not dead?" Ravenna panted.
"Twice," Erika replied, her voice buzzing with digital distortion.
"Once in the Glass City. Once at the rail station. The Devourer likes to collect the minds of its enemies."
The tunnel suddenly dropped away into a vertical shaft, and they slid headlong into an underground river.
The current seized them, but Erika steered toward a jag of rock, hauling herself into a hidden grotto.
In its center sat an old steam locomotive, its frame carved with anti-tracking sigils.
As Erika coaxed the engine to life, Raine caught sight of the Devourer's brand on the back of her neck, black blood seeping from its edges.
"You're infected," he said.
"Since the day I was born," she answered, pulling up a shimmering map.
"Listen—The Devourer's weakness is in the Gear Station's core. There's a First-Forge dwarf design there—the Purification Furnace. But it needs two keys to start—"
She pointed at the skull-shaped brand on the infant's chest.
Then to the heart in Ravenna's arms.
"—The resonance of machine and life."
The engine jolted violently as the river began to boil.
Mechanical tendrils surged up through the water, lashing toward them.
Erika slammed the throttle forward, the locomotive screaming through the collapsing tunnel.
"Get them to the Gear Station!"
She ripped the crystal eye from her own socket and shoved it into Raine's hand.
"Use this to get past the checkpoints!"
Before anyone could react, she had already vaulted from the locomotive, triggering the final Self-Destruct Rune buried in her body.
In the blaze that swallowed her, her last cry thundered down the tunnel:
"Tell Uncle Ironsbeard… the Gildedbeard family… has no traitors!"
The flood of mechanical pursuers was swallowed in the blast, bought them a fleeting reprieve.
Raine clenched the crystal eye in his palm.
Within it, the last stored image flickered—a young Erika sobbing in the laboratory, while beyond the glass, Ironsbeard pounded with bleeding fists against the unyielding pane.
The steam engine roared into a vertical shaft, climbing fast.
Through the reinforced glass above, they saw the night sky—and the moon, already two-thirds eclipsed by a grinding wheel of shadow.
Between its spokes, a sickly green light flowed, as though some vast and hidden thing were slipping through.
The infant convulsed.
From the skull brand on his chest, a lance of light pierced the roof, linking to the moon above.
His voice was no longer a child's—pure machine now:
"Descent Protocol… final phase…"
Gritting her teeth, Ravenna tore open her collar and pressed the still-beating heart into her chest.
The violet-gold tracery writhed like a living thing, spreading fast.
Her head tipped back, and a scream tore from her throat—inhuman, shrill, unending.
"Aaaahhh—!"
The markings raced to cover her entire body.
From the stump of her arm, a new limb bloomed—wholly of violet-gold.
And then—impossibly—the beam from the infant's brand refracted, part of its energy streaming into her heart.
The mechanical voice cracked into a roar of rage:
"Life key… refuses connection…"
All four of Raine's inner forces surged into chaos at once.
He seized both the infant's and Ravenna's hands as the locomotive burst from the earth, leaping across the chasm toward the Gear Station.
And in the moonlight, he saw the full horror—
Over the ruins of the Glass City, a machine-tree of impossible scale was growing, its trunk a knot of writhing tendrils, its branches clawing at the sky.
In the great eye split open at its heart…
Reflected there was the infant's face.