The approach was tense. Sylvia led them along a path of scree and half-erased boulders, her movements precise. She pointed out invisible patrol routes—the Stalkers moved in set patterns even during the fluctuation, but their reaction time was halved.
"See that one?" she whispered, indicating a Stalker drifting near the border. "Its patrol loop brings it back here in ninety seconds. We have a window."
They slipped past the border into the zone.
The sensation was immediate and vile. Damien's Storm-Eyes saw the world here as a negative image—everything was outlined in the absence of something else. His mana felt sluggish, like moving through viscous oil. Lyra gasped, her illusion magic sputtering. Brom's earth-sense went dead. Only Kiran seemed energized, his void core humming in sympathetic resonance with the zone.
"This way," Sylvia hissed, moving low and fast across the featureless gray plain toward the central spire.
They encountered the first real resistance halfway in. A pair of Stalkers, drifting erratically in the fluctuating field, crossed their path. Damien didn't hesitate. He signaled Brom with a hand-chop motion.
Brom understood. He didn't use his hammer. He stomped, using World-Drummer's Cadence to create a localized tremor in the unnaturally solid ground. The vibration disrupted the Stalkers' forms, making them flicker violently.
Lyra seized the moment. She pointed her staff and wove a Reality-Edit: Spontaneous Growth. In the dead gray earth at the Stalkers' feet, vibrant, thorned vines of pure foxfire energy erupted—an imposition of chaotic creation in the realm of erasure. The Stalkers recoiled, their void-nature rejecting the sudden life.
Kiran moved. His void-daggers flashed, not to erase, but to connect. He plunged them into the distracted Stalkers, using his own void as a conduit to siphon their essence into himself. He grimaced, veins standing out on his neck as he processed the foreign void-energy, using it to seal the cracks in his own core. The Stalkers dissolved, leaving behind their cores.
"Efficient," Sylvia murmured, impressed despite herself.
They reached the base of the Void-Nexus spire. Up close, it was terrifyingly beautiful—a fifty-foot tall shard of perfect black crystal that seemed to drink the fading sunset light. A low hum, the sound of silence given frequency, vibrated in their bones.
"Now," Damien said.
Brom hefted Mountainfall. He charged, his World-Spine shard flaring, and brought the hammer down on the base of the spire with all his might.
The impact should have shattered mountains. The crystal rang like a giant bell, and a web of hairline fractures appeared. But it held.
The zone reacted. The fluctuation ended abruptly. The erasure field stabilized and intensified. The remaining Stalkers—eight of them—converged on their position at terrifying speed. The Nexus itself pulsed, and from its apex shot a beam of pure void-energy toward Brom.
"Brom, shield!" Damien yelled.
Brom raised his hammer, channeling earth-energy. The void-beam hit. It didn't blast; it erased. A quarter of Mountainfall's head simply ceased to exist, along with a chunk of Brom's left shoulder. The Stone-Giant roared in pain, stumbling back, his stone-flesh turning gray and inert where the beam had touched.
Lyra screamed, throwing up a Mirage Realm of mirrored images to confuse the Stalkers. Sylvia cursed, her chain-sickle whirling to entangle the closest one. Kiran stood before the Nexus, his hands outstretched, trying to siphon the void-energy now raging from it, but he was being overwhelmed—the sheer volume was threatening to erase him.
Damien assessed the collapsing situation in a heartbeat. Brom was out of the fight. Lyra was on pure defense. Sylvia was holding one Stalker. Kiran was in a dangerous tug-of-war. Seven Stalkers were closing in.
Cold blood. Ruthless calculus.
He made a decision.
He Rime-Slipped past the converging Stalkers, not toward Kiran to help him, but toward the Nexus itself. To where Brom had cracked it.
He sheathed his Twilight Rend daggers. Instead, he pulled out the vial of volatile chaos-energy he'd harvested from the Chimera's core.
The plan had been to use it as a last-resort weapon. This was that moment.
He slammed the vial into the largest crack at the Nexus's base. Then he placed both hands on the crystal and activated his Glacial Devourer at its maximum, not to consume the void-energy, but to force-feed the chaos-energy into the Nexus.
Chaos was the opposite of Void's perfect order. It was infinite, messy potential against infinite, sterile absence.
The Nexus shuddered. The void-beam firing at Kiran stuttered. The crystal began to glow with internal, conflicting energies—black void and rainbow chaos warring within it.
The Stalkers, connected to the Nexus, writhed in agony.
"Kiran! NOW!" Damien roared, his own meridians screaming as he acted as the conduit for the catastrophic reaction.
Kiran, bleeding from his eyes from the strain, screamed and pushed his void-siphoning to the limit. He wasn't just taking energy now; he was creating a vacuum in the Nexus's flow, pulling the warring energies out through Damien.
It was a feedback loop of annihilation. Damien forced chaos in, Kiran sucked the mixed energies out.
The Nexus cracked wider. Then it imploded.
Not an explosion. An inversion. A sphere of absolute silent darkness swelled from the spire, then collapsed inward to a single point, which winked out.
The erasure field vanished. The remaining Stalkers dissolved into mist. The gray, dead earth began to bleed color and texture back in with painful slowness.
In the center lay the prize: a Void-Nexus Core, now stabilized but pulsing with dangerous power, about the size of a human heart. Next to it, twenty-three Stalker cores glimmered.
Silence, then the sounds of pain.
Brom was on his knees, clutching his ruined shoulder, his face a mask of stoic agony. Lyra was sobbing as she ran to him, foxfire already knitting stone-flesh. Kiran collapsed, unconscious again, but his aura was stronger, denser—he'd absorbed a massive amount of refined void-essence. Sylvia leaned on her chain-sickle, breathing hard, a deep gash on her thigh from a Stalker's claw.
Damien stood. His hands were blackened and blistered from channeling the chaotic backlash. Internal damage notifications flashed in his vision. But he was functional.
He walked to the core and picked it up. It was cold, heavier than it should be, and it made his Storm-Eyes ache to look at it.
Sylvia limped over. "My half."
Damien looked at her. Then at Brom's missing shoulder. At Kiran, unconscious. At Lyra's tears.
"We incurred heavy losses," he stated coldly. "The operational cost has increased. You get one-third of the Nexus core, and five Stalker cores."
Sylvia's blue eyes flashed with anger. "We had a deal."
"The deal was for success under planned parameters. Parameters changed due to unforeseen Nexus defense mechanisms. Your contribution remained at the support level. One-third is equitable." His tone allowed no argument. It was a statement of accounting.
For a moment, she looked like she might fight. Then she looked at his blackened hands, at the chilling emptiness in his storm-swirled eyes, and at the still-flickering void-energy around Kiran. She saw something in Damien she recognized in the worst Shattered Land predators: a being that would kill her over a core fragment without a second thought.
"Fine," she spat. "One-third. Give it."
Damien used a dagger to cleave the core. He handed her the smaller piece and five Stalker cores. She snatched them and turned to leave.
"Wait," Damien said.
She froze, hand going to her dagger.
"You fight well. You know this land. We will have further targets." He wasn't asking. He was presenting a new variable. "You work with us again. Payment per operation. Better terms than hunting Stalkers alone."
She stared at him. "Why would I tie myself to you? You're a walking catastrophe. The Tower wants you. The Order wants you. You just blew up a Void-Nexus."
"Because," Damien said, his voice utterly cold, "we will be hunting bigger things. And you want to survive. With us, your survival probability increases. Against us..." He let the implication hang.
Sylvia swallowed. She was trapped. Saying no might mean he'd decide she was a liability to eliminate. Saying yes meant stepping onto a path leading to cosmic battles.
"...I'll think about it," she said finally, a feeble defiance.
"We are at the black glass cliffs for three more days. Decide by then." He turned his back on her, dismissing her, already focusing on extracting Brom and Kiran.
Sylvia watched him for a long moment, then vanished into the recovering landscape, her payment in hand, her future uncertain.
Lyra looked up from healing Brom, her face streaked with tears and dirt. "Damien... Brom's shoulder... it's not regenerating. The void-erasure... it's permanent damage."
Damien walked over. He examined the wound. The stone-flesh was dead gray, unresponsive to earth or healing magic. A permanent crippling injury. Brom, the unmovable mountain, was now flawed.
"Can you fight?" Damien asked Brom directly.
Brom met his gaze, pain in his deep eyes. "Right arm. Hammer. I can fight."
It was enough. Damien nodded. "Then we adapt." He looked at the remaining two-thirds of the Void-Nexus core in his hand. The hunger in his Glacial-Phoenix Constitution stirred. This would accelerate his integration of Void aspects dramatically.
They gathered their wounded and their prizes, and began the slow, painful trek back to the cave. They had conquered a Singularity manifestation. The cost had been high. But the conquest continued. And Damien's cold heart calculated that the gains—a weakened but alive team, a new volatile asset in Sylvia, and a major step in his devouring path—still outweighed the losses.
For now.