There was no fall. There was a dissolution.
The screaming green light did not merely illuminate; it consumed. It was a solvent, breaking down the world into its constituent parts of sensation and terror. The discordant choir of the Bleed was not a sound that traveled through the air, but a vibration that rewrote the very code of being. Luka felt his mind begin to unravel, the threads of memory and identity fraying at the edges, ready to be pulled into the formless shriek.
But the shard would not allow it.
The fragile, shimmering bubble that had formed around him as he jumped was not a physical shield. It was a bastion of *meaning*. Inside it, the shard's pure, single note held firm against the chaotic symphony, a lone lighthouse in a sea of insanity. The bubble did not block the Bleed; it defined a space where Luka's "Luka-ness" could continue to exist. It was a tiny pocket of reality in a zone where reality had been cancelled.
He landed not with an impact, but with a sudden, jarring solidity. The green light receded from his immediate vicinity, held at bay by the shard's radiance, which had shifted from amber to a fierce, crystalline blue. He stood on a gantry of blackened, corrupted metal, overlooking a scene from a nightmare.
This was the heart of the Old Geothermal Lock. It was a cavern of immense proportions, its walls alive with pulsating, cancerous growths of raw magitek—a twisted amalgamation of crystalline structures and weeping, metallic flesh. In the center, where a stable energy core should have been, was a vortex of the virulent green energy, a swirling, hungry nullity that devoured light and sense. This was the Bleed. Not a leak, but a festering, open wound in the world's fabric.
The air itself was thick, heavy with the psychic residue of despair. Phantasmal shapes flickered at the edges of his vision—the echoes of the lost Digger crew, their forms melting and reforming in endless, silent screams. The shard in his chest throbbed with a pain that was not its own, a sympathetic agony for this violated place.
*This is what happens,* a thought-impression, clear and cold, formed in his mind. It was the shard, not with words, but with concepts. *When a piece of the Whole is removed, and the balance is broken. This is a silence that screams.*
Luka understood. The Crystal of Atlan wasn't just a power source. It was a stabilizer. A tuning fork for existence. Where it was shattered, reality itself developed cancers. The Institute hadn't just failed to contain this; their tampering, their hunger for the power the Crystal represented, had likely exacerbated it. They were studying the cancer while spreading the plague.
A sharp, mechanical sound cut through the low roar of the Bleed. A grappling hook, forged of sleek, Institute-grade alloy, bit into the gantry railing a dozen feet from him. Then another.
They had followed him down.
He turned, drawing his energy-dagger. The four Hounds ascended with preternatural grace, their armored forms seeming untouched by the corrupting energy. Their opaque helms scanned the nightmarish environment, then locked onto him. The shard's protective bubble seemed to be an irritant to them; they hesitated at its edge.
"The artifact has activated a localized reality anchor," the lead Hound's synthesized voice reported, presumably to a command unit above. "Target is contained within the anomaly. Extraction will require neutralizing the host."
*Host.* The word landed with the weight of truth. He was no longer a courier. He was a host.
The Hounds raised their suppression rifles. But they did not fire at him. Instead, they fired into the swirling green vortex at the center of the chamber.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The Bleed, agitated by the foreign energy, recoiled and then lashed out. Tendrils of screaming energy whipped from the vortex, not at the Hounds, who were shielded by their specialized armor, but at the one shining, stable point in the chaos.
Him.
A whip of green fire snapped against the shard's blue bubble. The world shuddered. Luka cried out as a psychic backlash, the distilled despair of the lost, flooded his nervous system. The bubble flickered. Another tendril struck, and a hairline crack of green light appeared in the shimmering air around him.
The Hounds advanced, their movements precise even in the madness. They were using the Bleed as a weapon, hammering the shard's defenses with the very chaos it opposed.
The shard responded not with fear, but with a cold, focused calculus. The map of the chamber appeared in Luka's mind again, but this time it was overlaid with vectors of force, stress points, and energy densities. It showed him the Hounds, not as men, but as constructs of armor and vulnerable biological matter within. It showed him the corrupted growths on the walls, their unstable energy signatures glowing like beacons. It showed him the gantry beneath his feet, its structural integrity compromised by a specific, rust-weakened joint.
The plan it formed was not one of defense, but of brutal, environmental sabotage.
As a third psychic lash struck his failing shield, Luka moved. He didn't charge the Hounds. He sprinted *past* them, along the gantry. His target was not a person, but a pulsating, wart-like growth of magitek cancer on the cavern wall just beyond them.
The Hounds turned, their rifles tracking him. But they were disciplined. They held their formation, trusting their armor and their strategy.
Luka reached the growth. The shard's guidance was exact. He didn't stab it. He placed his bare palm, guided by an instinct that was not his own, directly onto a specific, throbbing vein on its surface.
The shard in his pocket flared with incandescent blue light. For a moment, he was not Luka, but a force of pure order. The chaotic energy of the growth recognized its opposite, its nemesis. It recoiled in a violent, catastrophic overload.
The growth detonated.
It wasn't an explosion of fire and shrapnel, but a blast of pure, uncontrolled reality distortion. The gantry beneath the Hounds warped, twisting into impossible, non-Euclidean shapes. One Hound was simply erased, his armor and body unmade in a flash of green static. Another screamed, a raw, human sound, as his leg was fused into the suddenly liquid metal of the floor.
The lead Hound, faster than the others, leaped clear, landing in a crouch. But his focus was broken. The precise, unified front was shattered.
Luka didn't pause. The shard was humming, a high, fierce note of triumph now. It showed him the final move. The weakened joint in the gantry, right where the Hound had landed.
He turned his energy-dagger in his hand, reversed his grip, and with all his strength, drove it not into flesh, but into the gantry plate at his own feet. The plasma blade sliced through the corroded metal. With a shriek of tortured steel, the entire section of the walkway gave way.
The lead Hound, caught mid-stride, plummeted with the collapsing metal into the seething green vortex below. There was no scream. His form was simply swallowed by the nullity, his armor offering no more protection than paper.
Silence, relative and shocking, descended. The remaining Hound, trapped and maimed, was no longer a threat. The Bleed still swirled, but without the Institute's agitation, its fury seemed to subside into a low, background groan.
The shard's blue bubble stabilized, the cracks sealing. The pure tone in Luka's mind softened, but it did not vanish. It was a part of him now.
He stood amidst the wreckage, breathing in air that still tasted of insanity. He looked at the vortex, then at the shard in his hand. It was calm again, the light within it swirling serenely.
He had come here as a fugitive, a man running from one problem into a deeper one. He had been used as a weapon, a scalpel. He had killed, not in a street brawl, but in a war he never knew existed.
He was a host to a fragment of a dead god's conscience. And that conscience had a mission far grander, and far more terrifying, than a simple delivery to a dusty archive.
Wrapping the shard once more, he tucked it away. The pull toward the Aethelburg Archive was still there, but it was different now. It wasn't just a destination for a job. It was a step on a path. The path to understanding what he carried. The path to understanding what the Institute truly was. The path to finding the other fragments, perhaps, and learning what it would mean to make the Crystal whole again.
He found a maintenance ladder leading up, out of the wound. He began to climb, leaving the silent scream of the Bleed behind him. He was no longer just Luka, the seeker from the Under-District.
He was a question, walking into a world that had forgotten how to answer. And the first answer, he knew, would be written in blood.
The climb was an ascent through layers of hell. Each rung of the rust-scaled ladder took him further from the screaming nullity below, but the Bleed's echo clung to him like a psychic residue. The shard's pure tone was a lifeline, a steady hum that sutured his fraying mind back together, but he could feel the ghost of the green fire in his synapses, a phantom ache of madness.
He emerged not into the familiar gloom of the main tunnels, but into a narrow, vertical shaft that stank of chemical runoff and ozone. A service conduit, long abandoned. He hauled himself onto a narrow ledge, his body trembling with a fatigue that was more spiritual than physical. He had been unmade and remade in the crucible below, and the man who sat there, breathing in the toxic air, was a stranger to the one who had jumped.
He became aware of a new sensation, a subtle pressure behind his eyes that was distinct from the shard's guidance. It was a… presence. A silent observer in the guest room of his consciousness. He didn't hear words, but he felt a *consideration*, a cold, ancient intelligence sifting through the aftermath of the fight, analyzing his reactions, his fears, his survival.
*You used me,* Luka thought, the accusation sharp and internal.
The response was not denial, but a flood of sensory data—the precise angle of the Hound's vulnerable neck joint, the exact tensile strength of the corroded gantry, the energy potential of the magitek growth. It was a tactical replay, a clinical report on its own efficacy. The impression it left was clear: *We survived. The method is irrelevant.*
A wave of cold revulsion washed over him. He was a weapon that had been aimed. The shard's conscience was not one of morality, but of pure, unadulterated purpose. It would burn him out, turn him into a puppet of perfect, calculated violence, if it meant achieving its goals.
*I am not your vessel,* he snarled inwardly, clenching his fists.
A different sensation then. Not calculation, but memory. Not his own. The scent of rain on clean stone. The weight of a different sun on his skin. The profound, quiet joy of a completed symmetry. A feeling of… home. It was a glimpse of the Whole, a ghost of the stability that had been lost. The memory was offered not as an apology, but as an explanation. This was what it fought for. This was what the Bleed and the Institute's greed were destroying. The violence was a means. The memory was the end.
The contrast was devastating. The beauty of the memory made the horror of the Bleed seem even more profane. It didn't justify the shard's coldness, but it framed it. He was not housing a monster. He was housing a soldier from a lost war, one who had forgotten how to be anything else.
The moment of connection shattered as a boot scraped on metal above him.
Luka looked up. The ash-haired woman stood at the top of the conduit shaft, fifteen feet above, her sonic pistol aimed directly at his chest. Her face was a mask of cold fury, a lock of her grey hair matted to her temple with blood from his earlier escape. She had not given up. She had predicted his exit vector.
"The artifact, Luka," she said, her voice dangerously calm. "Now. Or I liquefy your organs and peel it from your corpse."
There was no time for the shard's complex calculations. This was pure, desperate instinct. He was exposed on the ledge, a target in a shooting gallery.
The shard's presence shifted from observer to catalyst. It didn't show him a path. It *pushed*.
His body moved before his mind could process the suicide of the action. He didn't try to climb or retreat. He leaped *across* the shaft, a reckless, horizontal jump toward a parallel ledge that was little more than a lip of crumbling concrete. It was impossible. The gap was too wide.
But as he jumped, the world… bent.
The shard's hum became a tangible force, a lens that warped space around him. The gap wasn't shorter; his trajectory was simply *adjusted*. It was a nauseating, disorienting sensation, like being thrown by a giant, unseen hand. He landed hard on the far ledge, the impact driving the air from his lungs, his fingers scrambling for purchase on the damp concrete.
The woman's shot went wide, the sonic blast pulverizing the wall where he'd been a moment before. Her eyes, for the first time, showed a flicker of something other than cold determination: shock.
He didn't stop. The shard was alight now, a roaring furnace in his mind. It was tired of running. It wanted a statement. *This is not prey. This is a predator.*
As the woman swung her pistol back toward him, Luka didn't draw his dagger. Instead, he slammed his palm flat against the conduit wall. The shard's energy flared through him, a bolt of ordered lightning seeking chaos. The wall wasn't a wall; it was a nest of old wiring and unstable power relays, all mapped in the shard's terrifying awareness.
The conduit exploded. Not with fire, but with a catastrophic discharge of raw voltage. Blue-white electricity arced across the shaft, earthing itself through the metal rungs and pipes. The woman cried out, her pistol flying from her spasming hand as the charge raced up the metal structure she stood on. She was thrown back from the opening, vanishing from view, the acrid smell of ozone and burned insulation filling the air.
Silence returned, broken only by the crackle of dying currents and Luka's ragged gasps. He lay on the ledge, spent. He had not just used the shard's knowledge; he had been a conduit for its raw power. His arm was numb, the skin of his palm red and blistered. The line between where he ended and the shard began had been irrevocably blurred.
The presence in his mind was quiet now, satisfied. The immediate threat was neutralized. It had defended its host. It had made its point.
He slowly, painfully, pulled himself up. He looked at his burned hand, then inward, at the cold, ancient thing nestled against his soul. He had wanted to escape the gritty violence of the Under-District. Now he was wielded by a violence that could warp reality itself.
He began to climb again, each movement a testament to this new, terrible partnership. The Aethelburg Archive was no longer just a job. It was a confession booth. He was going to have to learn who, and what, was now confessing.