Cain stopped.
The pressure he'd felt earlier intensified here, no longer subtle. It wasn't mana. It wasn't any clean system he recognized. It was procedural force—automation without judgment, logic without context.
"This place was never meant to be reactivated," Hunter said quietly, eyes scanning the shadows. "They buried it for a reason."
A distant clang echoed through the chamber.
Then another.
Heavy. Deliberate.
Roselle shifted her stance. "That's not machinery cycling."
The sound came again, closer this time. Something was moving through the corridors beyond the pillars, each step accompanied by the grinding protest of metal forced to move after decades of stillness.
Steve's screen flickered violently. "Multiple signatures just came online. Autonomous units. Old classification—city pacifiers."
Susan swore. "You're telling me they built an army under the city and just… forgot about it?"
