The silence within the ruined cathedral was not an absence of sound, but an oppressive weight. Elias, standing in the center of the nave, felt the atmospheric pressure drop. Lyra wasn't just hiding; she was consuming the light.
Suddenly, the Flux surged. Behind Elias's eyes, a golden discharge seared his nerves, projecting an image overlaid onto reality: Lyra lunging from a shadow cast by a marble pillar to his left, an ebony blade aimed at his carotid. The future was two seconds away. Elias didn't wait. He pivoted forty-five degrees, his heel grinding into the dust, just as Lyra's body materialized in a hiss of cold vapor. The air instantly crystallized into frost under the impact of her power.
Lyra didn't hesitate. She slammed her palm against the floor. The shadow beneath Elias's feet turned viscous before erupting into a forest of razor-sharp spears. Thanks to his vision, Elias had already begun his leap toward a piece of fallen cornice. Mid-air, he felt the air density shift. Lyra was trying to solidify the oxygen behind him to shatter him against an invisible wall. Elias contracted every fiber of his body, forcing a violent mid-air twist to parry with his service dagger. Steel struck hardened void with the sound of a cracked bell, releasing sparks of black light that evaporated before hitting the ground.
Exhaustion began to weigh on Elias. Every second of precognition inflicted a throbbing migraine. He closed his eyes to stop the influx of useless information and focused on the resonance of the Flux. He saw the flaw: Lyra, by expanding her shadows to saturate the area, created a structural tension. She was like a spider at the center of a vibrating web. Elias dove not away from the spikes, but toward their center. He slid into a blind spot where Lyra's shadows overlapped without touching. He struck the empty air. A second later, Lyra materialized there to catch her breath. His blade pierced her shoulder. The link to the void broke, and the dark spikes dissipated like ash.
Elias applied distortion handcuffs, neutralizing her synaptic circuits, and led her toward the Glass Citadel. But as they approached the Sentinels' headquarters, a mental static flooded his mind. The Flux was jammed. At the entrance, he noticed the guards no longer wore the Seal of Time, but a stylized eye etched in dark metal: Vane's mark.
"Transfer her to the Black Wing," ordered the Captain of the Guard, a man whose eyes looked hollow, stripped of will. Elias froze. The Black Wing existed in no protocol. Despite the temporal parasite, he forced a vision. He saw a guard to his right arming a taser. Before the strike landed, Elias used Lyra's arm as a lever, flipped backward, and swept the guard's legs out. Lyra, sensing the urgency, used her remaining strength to inject a wave of cold into the handcuffs' mechanism, causing them to explode.
The Captain drew a reality disrupter. A distortion wave surged toward them, threatening to tear their molecules apart. Elias hurled his dagger into its path. The metal liquefied, but the turbulence deflected the shockwave. "Follow me, Sentinel," Lyra hissed, unfurling a cloak of absolute shadow. They dove into the service conduits, descending into the city's underbelly, where Vane's influence could not yet reach them.