Soren didn't step into the web, neither did he try to fight the threads.
He reached down and grabbed the edge of the massive iron anvil—the same anvil Liora was hiding behind.
"Liora, move," Soren commanded softly.
Liora scrambled away, sensing the shift in the air pressure.
Soren gripped the five-ton block of solid iron.
His muscles swelled, the silver veins pulsing with blinding intensity.
With a roar that shook the foundations of the building, he lifted the anvil over his head.
Kaelen froze. "What... what are you doing?"
"Gravity," Soren said. "Breaks everything."
Then he collapsed his center of gravity.
The Black Sun began to siphon every ounce of energy into its core, spinning so fast it created a localized pull.
Then he threw the anvil; not at Kaelen, but the floor—specifically the central stress point of the smithy's foundation, caused by his Black Sun's magnetic pull.
~CRASH~
The anvil hit the ground with the force of a meteor.
The effect was instantaneous.
The floor of the smithy shattered. The shockwave rippled through the stone, snapping the anchor points of Kaelen's web.
The walls groaned and buckled inward. The ceiling beams, no longer supported by the integrity of the frame, collapsed.
The silk strands, designed to cut through flesh, were suddenly yanked out of their intended paths.
The web disintegrated, their tensions lost.
The deadly silk threads went slack, fluttering harmlessly to the ground like confetti, warping toward Soren.
Kaelen stumbled, his own Qi being dragged by the sheer gravitational weight of Soren's presence.
Deprived of his suspension, he dropped from the air, flailing.
He landed hard on the broken stones; his silk robes tangled around him.
Before Kaelen could recover, a shadow fell over him.
Soren was there.
He didn't look like a brother anymore. He looked like judgment.
"You were always arrogant, Kaelen," Soren said, his shadow looming over his stepbrother.
"You thought you were better than me because the Matron gave you honeycakes while I ate scraps.
You think you're better now because the Envoy gave you a new body. But you never built anything. You just accepted gifts."
Kaelen let out a frustrated roar, his refined composure finally breaking.
His hands seemed to charge up, glowing with a concentrated emerald light.
He struck Soren in the chest—three, five, even ten times in a second.
Each blow landed with the sound of a hammer hitting an anvil. But Soren didn't even budge an inch.
He took every hit, his Star-Iron-reinforced sternum absorbing the kinetic energy and venting it as steam.
Kaelen began to scramble back in horror, shooting a desperate blast of Green Qi from his palm.
"Stay back! The Matron... the Envoy... they will hollow you out!"
Soren swatted the blast aside with his bare hand. He reached down and grabbed Kaelen by the throat.
"My turn," He said.
The "Silk" armor Kaelen had woven around his skin offered no resistance to Soren's grip.
The sound of Kaelen's high-tensile neck grafts groaning was like a ship's hull under pressure.
Soren didn't kill him instantly. This time, there was no escaping Soren's judgment.
Kaelen's speed was useless against a grip that could crush diamonds.
Soren simply lifted him into the air, letting his feet dangle helplessly as he stared into those emerald eyes.
"You want to know the difference between an Heir and a Builder, Kaelen?
An Heir is dependent on what others have built.
A Builder, however, is defined by what he can destroy and rebuild."
You traded your humanity for speed but forgot that you would eventually have to pause at some point."
Soren's 3D vision zoomed in on Kaelen's chest.
He saw the "Core Node"—a pulsating, emerald parasite nested right next to Kaelen's heart.
It was the engine of his power, the source of the silk.
Seeing where Soren's eyes had drifted to, Kaelen instantly began to tremble.
"Please..." He gasped, his hands clawing uselessly at Soren's Star-Iron arm.
"We... we are family..."
"We never were," Soren corrected.
"If you were still human, I might have at least considered you a fellow tribesman, but now, you are just a failed prototype." Soren said, pulling back his free hand.
He didn't make a fist.
He extended his fingers, stiffening them into a spear-hand.
"Correction strike," Soren announced.
He drove his fingers into Kaelen's solar plexus.
He didn't penetrate the skin deeply; he wasn't delivering a killing blow, but a "Dismantling Strike."
Soren sent a pulse of magnetic energy directly into Kaelen's nerve cluster.
The energy traveled like a shockwave through Kaelen's nervous system; specifically targeting the Green Silk Qi, vibrating to its counter-frequency and bypassing the artificial muscles to hit the "Green Node" in Kaelen's solar plexus.
~SNAP~
The sound came from inside Kaelen, just as his parasitic node shattered.
The reaction, however, was not brief, but a short burst of violent revulsion.
Kaelen's body arched, his silks bursting as the green energy inside him was forcibly unraveled.
He coughed up a mixture of blood and emerald bile.
His eyes went wide, as the emerald light in them flickered, sputtered, and then died out completely.
The green veins on his face faded, leaving him looking gray, old, and terribly ordinary.
Soren dropped him.
Kaelen hit the ground in a heap.
He tried to crawl, his silk-grafted limbs twitching as the Envoy's energy leaked out of him. He tried to summon his silk, to stand—but he couldn't.
His connection to the Envoy was severed. He was no longer a cultivator. He was just a man in torn, dirty silk.
"Liora, watch," Soren called out, his voice echoing. "This is the fate of the Ignis Tribe."
Liora watched from the shadows, her eyes wide.
She saw the pathetic figure of Kaelen—the boy who had once been the envy of the tribe—crawling in twitches like a broken motor toy.
She saw the "Monster" Soren had become, and for a moment, she didn't see the horror one would expect from a vengeful Ghost.
She saw the justice.
"The Matron... she... she'll kill you for this..." Kaelen wheezed out.
"The Matron is next," Soren flatly replied.
Soren stood over him, watching the "Green Hue" evaporate from Kaelen's body.
"You are broken," Soren said quietly. "But now you are free."
Kaelen stared up at the ruined ceiling, tears streaming down his face.
"I... I can't feel the song anymore. The music... it's gone. It's so quiet."
"Silence is the first step to sanity," Soren said.
He turned away.
Liora emerged from the rubble, clutching still clutching the Courier's Vault.
She looked at Kaelen with a mixture of pity and revulsion, then looked at Soren.
"Is he... dead?" she asked.
"No," Soren said. "He is empty. The Envoy has no use for empty vessels. He will live, if he can learn to walk without strings."
Soren began to walk toward the exit of the smithy, his heavy footsteps echoing in the silence.
But before he could reach the door, the atmosphere in the smithy suddenly shifted.
The sharp, iron-rich scent of blood and the ozone tang of Soren's superheated skin were abruptly smothered by a wave of something impossibly sweet.
It started as a faint aroma of jasmine, but it was stronger now. Mixed with a thick scent of crushed lilies, the kind of perfume that signaled true danger to masculine primal instincts.
But within seconds, it thickened into a physical presence.
A pink mist began to curl over the threshold of the shattered smithy doors, seeping in through the floorboards.
It didn't drift like smoke; it moved with intent, pouring across the floor like a slow-motion tidal wave of heavy gas.
It was beautiful, soft, with a color dichotomic to the "Green Hue" Soren was used to seeing—yet just as parasitic, if not more.
It clung to the debris, the cooling slag, and the unconscious body of Kaelen.
Where it touched the iron tools on the walls, the metal didn't rust—it sweated.
Condensation formed instantly, dripping like oil.
Soren stood near the center of the room, his massive, Star-Iron integrated frame casting a long, flickering shadow against the walls.
His Chimera Cub—still taking the smaller form of a symbiotic entity fused to his spine—reacted instantly.
The hematite plates on its back snapped shut, sealing its gills with a distinct metallic click.
Soren's Master Builder Gene flared a warning instantly:
"Atmospheric contaminant detected.
Hazardous Pheromone.
Composition: 70% Neuro-toxin, 30% Biological Pheromone.
Neuro-toxin density: Critical.
Neuro-toxin lethality: Rising.
Status: Aggressive.
Pheromone designation: Alpha Female."
"She is here," Liora whispered, her face draining of color. "The Matron."
"Let her come," Soren growled, staring into the pink fog. "I have a message for the Oman House."
Then stopped breathing.
He didn't hold his breath; he simply deactivated his primary respiratory cycle, switching to the anaerobic reserves stored in his dense muscle tissue.
The air was no longer safe. It was a weapon.
"Liora," Soren rumbled, his voice vibrating through his chest rather than the air. "Do not breathe. Cover your face."
He tried to warn her, but Liora was already on her knees behind the anvil, clutching her throat.
The mist had reached her faster than the sound of his warning.
Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated to the point where the irises were barely visible.
She wasn't choking; she was drowning in a chemically induced euphoria.
The "Pink Mist" wasn't a poison meant to kill—it was a poison meant to enslave.
"It's... it's warm," Liora whispered, a dreamy, terrifying smile spreading across her face.
"Mother is here. She says... she says the pain is over."
Soren clenched his fists, as the heat in his veins began to rise again, steaming, as he burned away the pink mist that tried to touch his skin, filtering the air for Liora in the process.
Then upon confirming the filtration process was working, albeit slow, He looked at the doorway.
There the mist swirled and parted, revealing a silhouette that seemed to float rather than walk.
The Matron of the Ignis Tribe stepped into the smithy.
She was a vision of maternal terror.
Draped in silks even finer than Kaelen's, of deep crimson and pale pink, she looked like a queen from the old world, before the Envoy arrived.
Her face was painted in the traditional style of the Oman House—white powder, red lips, with eyes that glowed with a soft, pink light that fought back the green static of the room.
However, beneath all that makeup, Soren's 3D Energy Vision saw the truth.
She was a biochemical furnace.
Unlike Kaelen, whose "Green Hue" was wire-thin and high-frequency, the Matron was a dense, pulsating core of "Pink" energy that overlapped with the Envoy's Green.
Her internal organs were enlarged, shifting, and churning.
She wasn't just a cultivator; she was an incubator.
"You've been a very naughty boy, Soren," Her voice purred through the mist.
Her voice didn't just travel through the air; it resonated in the fluid of his inner ear, bypassing his auditory filters.
"Look at you. You've grown so... heavy."
She stepped over Kaelen's body without even glancing down.
Her "favored son" was now just debris to her.
Her eyes, glowing with a soft, predatory pink light, were fixed solely on Soren.
"I always knew the Envoy's Green was too crude for you," she continued, gliding closer.
The mist seemed to thicken around her, responding to her mood.
"You needed something stronger. Something deeper. You smell like the Void, little builder. You smell like the end of the world."
Soren didn't retreat. He adjusted his stance, his Jade-Alloy bones locking into a defensive geometry.
The heat radiating from his skin was still pushing back the pink mist by a steady few yards, creating a small circle of clear air around him and the recovering Liora.
"You are leaking," Soren stated. "Your pheromones are unrefined. You are trying to trigger a biological compliance response."
The Matron laughed, a sound that made the mist vibrate. "Compliance? No, my child. I am offering comfort.
The tribe is in pain. The Green Rot eats them, and I give them the Pink Dream to make it bearable.
I am the anesthetic."
She stopped ten feet away, the pressure in the room skyrocketing to an all-time high.
The "Pink" aura she projected was heavy, pressing against Soren's mental defenses.
It was a psychic weight, a demand to be loved, to be obeyed.
"The letters," Soren said, his voice cutting through her aura like a hammer. "I read them.
So, the Oman House has finally decided to stop lurking behind the shadows of the Ignis Tribe." Soren said, his voice a low growl.
The Matron's smile faltered for a fraction of a second. The pink light in her eyes flickered, revealing a flash of the "Green" parasite beneath.