The sound of the Caster's discharge still hung in the air, and the smell of ozone mixed with charred paper filled the workshop.
The space where the first Shadebinder had stood was empty. The Banishment Rune had not simply killed the creature; it had shattered its physical definition entirely, leaving only a slowly settling cloud of ash and a dark stain spreading across the floorboards.
The Journal floated near the center of the room. Cyan and gold light glowed faintly from the open page, and fresh script appeared in elegant handwriting:
"Efficient. Sterile. A period placed before the sentence was finished. Do you feel the 'weight' of the shortcut, Scion?"
Alucent didn't have time to read the words. The flash from the muzzle had lasted less than a second, but that had been enough to see what waited above.
The rafters were covered with them.
At that moment, the silhouettes released their grip and dropped. They fell in a coordinated wave, dozens of six-armed forms descending on the workshop floor with barely a sound.
Raya moved before the first one landed. She stepped forward and placed herself between the swarm and the workbench, her Weaveblade already drawn. Three Shadebinders oriented toward her immediately, their combined eighteen arms beginning to move in overlapping arcs.
She pivoted on her left foot as the first set of claws came in, bringing the amber blade up in a tight horizontal arc that deflected two strikes with the flat of the edge. The impact traveled up her forearm, and she adjusted her grip to compensate. A third claw came from below, hooking the hem of her coat and tearing the fabric, while a fourth swiped at her throat. She twisted away and ducked under the horizontal slash, her boots sliding on the oil that had spilled across the floor during the initial breach, and parried the follow-up thrust in the same motion.
She's reading them, Alucent thought as he watched her move. Predicting trajectories through muscle tension and joint angles. This has to be Traditional Threadweaving. Alucent thought with a hint of something close to admiration.
One Shadebinder had been difficult in the tunnels. She was engaging three simultaneously, and the strain was visible in the tightness of her shoulders and the controlled shallowness of her breathing.
To the left, Gryan shouted.
The mechanic caught a lunging Shadebinder by two of its arms using his hydraulic prosthetic, the brass fingers closing around the chitinous limbs with a grinding sound. He pivoted his weight and slammed the creature against the iron frame of his forge, pinning it there with his shoulder.
"Load the next one, Alucent," Gryan said through gritted teeth as the creature thrashed against his grip. "Don't let the pressure drop."
Alucent looked down at the Caster.
The brass was hot. He could feel the heat radiating through the wooden stock and into his palms. He flipped the latch on the side of the barrel to vent the excess steam, and a jet of scalding vapor hissed out and burned the back of his left hand. He ignored the pain and racked the slide to eject the spent casing. The brass cylinder tumbled onto the table, still glowing faintly, hot enough to raise blisters on contact.
This isn't a firearm, Alucent thought as he reached into his pocket for a fresh casing. On Earth, a semi-automatic pistol uses the recoil energy to cycle the next round automatically. The entire process takes a fraction of a second. This requires manual venting, manual extraction, manual loading. Every shot is a ritual. It is too stressful and slow, every reload is a window where something can kill me.
He shoved the Thread 2 casing into the chamber and snapped the barrel shut.
As he raised the weapon to aim, the Journal drifted into his peripheral vision. The map on the page was updating, red dots shifting and multiplying as the creatures moved, and the constant flickering sent pulses of pressure through his temples. The migraine was building with each update.
Then the pattern changed.
The Shadebinders that had been circling the perimeter stopped. They turned away from Raya, away from Gryan, and oriented toward the workbench.
They weren't looking at the Voidshard.
Wait, They want the book?, Alucent realized.
A Shadebinder broke from the group and scrambled across the debris toward him. He tried to track it with the Caster's barrel, but the Journal's map flickered and went blank. The cyan and gold light dimmed, and the page showed only empty parchment.
The artifact was refusing to help.
Alucent understood immediately. The Journal required payment for direct combat analysis. It demanded Observation.
If you want to see their weakness, you must look at what they are. The journal wrote.
The Shadebinder was three meters away and closing. Alucent lowered the Caster slightly and focused his intent. He activated the ability the Journal had named Record of All.
He looked directly at the creature—not at its physical form, but at its nature.
The workshop fell away. The sounds of combat, the hiss of steam, the scrape of metal on chitin—all of it receded. Alucent saw the Shadebinder not as a monster, but as a structure.
It was a collection of variables. Load-bearing calculations distributed across a framework of joints and tension points. Kinetic vectors expressed as limb positions. A syntax of magical binding holding the physical components in alignment.
The code is messy, Alucent analyzed, his mind falling into the familiar patterns of data review. Whoever wrote this creature did so hastily, sacrificing elegance for speed. There are errors in the architecture, inefficiencies in the structural logic. Alucent critized inwardly.
He had always seen most thing as data, his job as a data analyst back while he was Elias Reed on earth had rewired his brain to analyze things based on data and mathematics, so right at this moment, record of all worked that way. He traced the lines of force through the creature's frame.
The fourth arm on the right side serves as a fulcrum for the upper body's balance. If removed, and the load distribution fails. The entire system should collapse.
The overload hit him a moment later. Raw information pressed against the inside of his skull, and blood vessels in his eyes strained under the pressure. His vision flooded red at the edges, and a black fluid began to seep from the corners of his tear ducts. The VMO-bleed.
The pain was immediate, but the answer was clear.
"The fourth arm," Alucent shouted, his voice hoarse. "The junction is the anchor. Sever it."
Raya didn't hesitate. She was engaged with the lead Shadebinder, trading blows in a rapid exchange that left no room for distraction. When the creature lunged with its upper right limbs, she dropped to one knee and let the attack pass over her head. Then she reversed her grip on the Weaveblade and drove it upward in a single fluid motion, severing the fourth arm at the shoulder joint.
The creature staggered. Its remaining limbs twitched as the balance calculations failed, and its legs crossed over each other in an attempt to compensate. The reflexes that had allowed it to evade attacks vanished as the structural anchor was removed.
It was no longer a predator. It was a target.
Alucent raised the Caster, sighted along the barrel, and pulled the trigger.
A sharp sound filled the room as the Thread 2 Piercing-Force Casing discharged. A needle-thin beam of concentrated Runeforce punched through the staggering Shadebinder's chest, exited its back, and continued into the creature directly behind it. The force carried both of them backward and pinned them to the stone wall, where they twitched once before dissolving into dark sludge.
"Clear," Raya called out. She was breathing heavily as she brought her blade down on the last Shadebinder near the door, removing its head with a clean stroke.
Gryan released the creature he had been restraining and brought his hydraulic fist down on its skull. The impact produced a cracking sound, and the thrashing stopped.
The workshop was silent except for the hiss of steam escaping the Caster's vents.
Alucent lowered the weapon. The brass barrel was glowing a dull red, the metal stressed near its limit. He leaned against the workbench, his hands trembling as the immediate tension faded.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his glove. The fabric came away stained with blood and black ink.
The fight was over, but something was wrong with the room.
Alucent looked at the walls. The stone bricks seemed less solid than before, their texture flattening out as if someone had erased the depth from a drawing. The iron frame of the forge looked less like metal and more like a sketch rendered in graphite. The suppression wards on the windows had burned out entirely, and the Definition of the building was failing. The Void's intrusion had damaged the structure at a level beyond the physical.
The Journal floated back to his side. Cyan and gold light glowed faintly from the page, and fresh script appeared:
"You have defended the nest but burned the tree. The Weaver has your scent now. The Caster's 'noise' is a beacon louder than blood."
Raya sheathed her Weaveblade and walked over to the workbench. She looked at the smoking weapon in Alucent's hand, then up at his face. She studied the darkened veins around his eyes and the blood drying beneath his nose.
She didn't offer a compliment.
"You're bleeding again, Alucent," she said in a low voice as she checked the buckles on her armor. "And not just from your nose."
"I know," Alucent muttered.
He grabbed a rag from the table, wrapped it around the hot barrel, and slid the Caster back into his holster.
He looked at the Journal. The page hadn't gone blank after the fight. Before the Shadebinders had fully dissolved, the Record of All had captured a fragment of their source-code. The script was still shifting, resolving into a series of coordinates and a name:
The Iron Vale Maintenance Hub.
Alucent stared at the words for a long moment.
"He isn't just hiding in the shadows," Alucent said, his voice raspy. "Veyris is using the city's own industrial veins to expand the Void. The Maintenance Hub is where the Runeforce distribution lines converge."
Gryan swore quietly. He walked to the back of the room, grabbed a heavy leather coat from a hook, and slung his backup toolkit over his shoulder.
"If he takes the Hub, he can overwrite the district's safety protocols," Gryan said. "He could vent the boilers and kill thousands."
Raya adjusted her gloves. "Then we don't let him take it."
The walls of the cottage flickered, and for a moment, a section of plaster turned transparent to reveal the grey fog of the Void pressing against the outside.
Alucent grabbed his pack and slung it over his shoulder. The Journal closed and floated into the open pocket.
"We're not hiding anymore," Alucent said, looking at the two of them. He wiped the last of the ink-blood from his cheek with his thumb. "If he wants to write my ending, he'll have to do it to my face."
After saying That, he walked toward the shattered door, stepped over the dissolving remains of the creatures, and led them out into the dark.