The silence in the cathedral was absolute—not the calm of a sanctuary, but the dead stillness that follows a hard system crash.
Zayn stood over the hollowed-out shell of Bishop Aurelius, holding the severed fusion core in his palm. The crystal was still hot, humming with residual frequency as tiny blue arcs of static danced across his knuckles. High above, through the jagged wounds in the clerestory, night air rushed into the nave, smelling of wet asphalt and low-grade fuel smoke from the sector below.
He didn't admire the kill. He opened his stats window, his eyes skimming the pale amber readouts hovering over the dead marble.
[Primal Core Status: 100% (Overclocked)]
[Current Rank: 20 — Sovereign Anomaly]
[Acquired Item: Core of Aurelius (Grade-A Power Cell)]
[Alert: Uplink Severed. Satellite Telemetry Signal Lost in Sector 4.]
"Zayn?" Rora's voice came through his ear-comm, buried under a heavy blanket of white noise. "Zayn, do you copy? The whole sector grid just dropped off the board! Every telemetry tower between Spire-4 and the drainage basin went dark three seconds ago!"
"The Bishop is offline," Zayn said softly, tossing the pulsing core from his right hand to his left like a heavy brass coin. "The central hub has lost its local node."
A sharp beat of silence ran down the comm line. He could hear Rora breathing—fast, ragged bursts of air—followed by the rapid, frantic clicking of keys as she scrambled to analyze the massive void in the regional data flow.
"You... you killed him," she stammered, her voice dropping into a panicked whisper. "Zayn, you didn't just break a patrol sentinel or trash an escort drone. That was a tier-three prelate! The Board's orbital array doesn't just log a prelate's death as a casualty—it logs it as a localized structural collapse!"
"Then their system is overly dramatic," Zayn deadpanned. He squatted down, grabbing Aurelius by his unbleached linen collar and dragging the lifeless body toward the shadow of the grand altar. "A man is just a terminal with high access privileges. When you pull the plug, the machine stops running. It isn't a tragedy; it's an electrical event."
"An electrical event that's about to bring down a tactical strike team!" Rora yelled into the comm, the audio clipping from her sheer volume. "Listen to me! In less than four minutes, the high-altitude relays are going to trigger an automatic protocol sweep! If Sector 4 doesn't broadcast an encrypted handshake from the Cathedral's master terminal, they won't send inspectors—they'll initiate a scorched-earth cleansing pulse from the upper tier!"
Zayn paused, his hand resting on the gold-embossed trim of the altar rail. He tilted his head slightly, his golden eyes scanning the massive console built into the side of the pulpit—a bank of ivory keypads, fiber-optic ports, and glowing blue diagnostic displays that were currently flashing a silent, rhythmic orange warning.
[System Warning: Uplink Handshake Required]
[Time Remaining: 03:42]
[Manual Override Access: Denied — Prelate Class Biometrics Required]
"They require a biometric handshake," Zayn observed, his tone entirely devoid of urgency.
"Yes! And Aurelius's bio-signature is dead!" Rora cried out. "The moment his core stopped pulsing, his genetic encryption key expired! You can't just slap his hand on the scanner, Zayn! The board's security algorithms look for active neural feedback!"
Zayn looked down at the dead prelate's face. The thin silver seams along Aurelius's cheekbones were cold and rigid.
"An active neural feedback loop is just an electrical signal running at sixty hertz," Zayn said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "Rora, patch your terminal into the cathedral's sub-floor junction box."
"Why?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Zayn, what are you doing?"
"I am going to spoof a Bishop."
He dropped the heavy fusion core back into the open cavity of Aurelius's chest. He didn't reattach the high-grade fiber lines or fix the torn metal housing. Instead, Zayn extended his index finger, letting a thread of raw, golden Primal energy gather at the tip—a concentrated needle of static, refined by his newly unlocked Rank 20 core.
He drove his finger straight into the dead prelate's temple port.
BZZZZT.
Aurelius's body jerked violently on the marble floor. The silver seams on his cheeks snapped open with a high-pitched hiss, and his milky-white optical lenses flared back to life, glowing with an artificial, violent yellow light as Zayn forced his own energy straight into the corpse's dormant neural array.
"Zayn!" Rora screamed through the comm. "The terminal just registered a massive voltage spike in the nave!"
"Inputting handshake," Zayn said softly, his golden eyes burning brighter as he mapped the prelate's brain activity through the conductive thread of his own power. He grabbed Aurelius's lifeless right hand, dragging the dead fingers up to the pulpit's biometric reader and slamming the palm against the glowing blue glass.
The scanner flashed orange. Then yellow.
The console hummed, a deep, mechanical pulse vibrating through the ivory casing as the cathedral's central mainframe tried to resolve the strange, erratic signal coming from the prelate's nervous system.
[Biometric Scan in Progress...]
[Neural Rhythm: Anomalous]
[Energy Signature: Volatile]
[Verifying Encryption Key...]
Zayn leaned down, his face inches from the dead prelate's ear. "Validate," he whispered into the corpse, driving another surge of golden static through the temple port.
The terminal chimed—a high, pure chime that echoed through the empty cathedral like a funeral bell.
[Handshake Confirmed.]
[Welcome, Bishop Aurelius.]
[Sector 4 Operational Status: Secure.]
[Orbital Sanction Suppressed.]
The orange warning lights flickered out, replaced by a soft, steady green glow that bathed the grand altar in calm, clinical light.
Down in the dark, damp drainage tunnel beneath the cathedral, Rora collapsed against the moss-covered concrete wall, her handheld terminal slipping from her numb fingers and landing in the murky water with a soft splash.
"You... you forced a dead man's brain to sign a security clearance," she rasped, staring blankly at her screen as the sector's telemetry lines stabilized back into a smooth, green baseline.
"I didn't force him," Zayn replied, withdrawing his finger from the prelate's temple. Aurelius's body instantly collapsed back onto the stone, the yellow light in his lenses fading into absolute blackness once more. "I simply provided the necessary current. The machine did what it was built to do."
He turned away from the altar, his Midnight Nano-Tunic shifting back into its soft, light-absorbing state as he stepped over the broken stone toward the grand double doors.
"Get your gear, Rora," Zayn said, his voice flat, precise, and completely focused on the next calculation. "The Orthodoxy thinks their Bishop is sitting up here praying. That gives us roughly twelve hours before someone notices he isn't answering his mail."
"Twelve hours?" Rora whispered, pushing herself up from the wet wall. "Twelve hours to do what?"
Zayn stopped at the threshold of the cathedral doors, looking out over the vast, glowing ocean of toxic smog and rusted metal spires that made up Sector 4.
"Twelve hours to dismantle the rest of their grid."