There was no sound scarier than a familiar one in the wrong place. The mimicked lullaby was a violation, a ghost in the machine using a dead man's memory as a weapon. Ren backed away from the data player, his mind racing. Brute force was suicide. Running blindly was a death sentence. That left one option: think.
He was a technician. A fixer. He understood systems, stress points, and chain reactions. The Aberration was a system of its own, but the tunnel—the tunnel was his system.
He glanced up. Above them, a web of thick, rust-covered coolant pipes and heavy machinery clung to the ceiling, remnants of a forgotten era of the city's construction. Most of it was inert, but it was heavy. All it needed was a push.
The distorted lullaby grew louder, echoing from a side passage just ahead. The Mimic was close.
Ren picked up a loose piece of scrap metal from the floor. Without hesitation, he hurled it down the opposite corridor. It clattered against a far wall, a sharp, jarring sound that cut through the eerie music.
The lullaby stopped.
A moment of absolute silence, then a wet, scraping sound from the side passage. The Mimic was taking the bait. It was moving toward the noise, which would take it directly under the heaviest section of the derelict machinery.
Now or never.
Ren looked up, his eyes unfocusing as he pushed his perception past the physical world. The shimmering tapestry of Covenants appeared, a brilliant web of gold. He located the massive structural support holding the pipes and machinery in place. Its Covenant was thick and powerful, but decades of neglect had left it frayed. He saw the weak point—a single, flickering thread.
The scraping sound was getting closer. He could feel the vibrations through the floor.
Concentrate.
He reached out with his mind, grabbing hold of the flickering thread. The strain was immediate, a sharp, stabbing pain behind his eyes as if a needle were being pushed into his brain. The Covenant resisted, stable and strong despite its age.
[System Lag] impending…
The white text was a stark warning in his vision. He ignored it.
The scraping was just around the corner. He could hear a low, static hiss, the sound of reality being erased.
Pull.
With a final, desperate surge of will, he yanked the thread. The Covenant snapped.
For a split second, nothing happened. Then, with a low groan that turned into a deafening shriek of tortured metal, the structural support dissolved into a shower of grey dust.
The laws of physics, for a moment suspended by the Alpha's ancient power, reasserted themselves with brutal finality. Tons of metal, pipes, and machinery, their anchor to reality gone, plunged downwards.
The Mimic, a formless shadow with a flickering, human-like face, had just entered the kill zone. It looked up, its copied expression one of silent horror, just as the ceiling came down. The impact was cataclysmic, a thunderous crash that shook the entire tunnel. The Aberration was obliterated, crushed into nothingness beneath a mountain of twisted steel.
Ren felt a surge of grim, savage triumph. A "Hell Yeah" moment, sharp and pure. He had done it. He had fought the impossible and won.
Then the [System Lag] hit him like a tidal wave.
The sound of the crash finally reached his ears, a full two seconds late. The world swam, the dim lights smearing into incoherent streaks. He stumbled, his legs refusing to obey his commands, and fell to his knees, gasping. The triumphant feeling was washed away by a wave of nausea and disorientation.
He had won, but the cost was absolute vulnerability.
When his vision finally cleared, he saw the path ahead was clear. The path behind, however, was completely buried under the wreckage. There was no going back.
He got to his feet, his body aching but his mind sharp with a newfound clarity. He was not a victim anymore. He was not a cog. He had a weapon—the most dangerous weapon of all in a city built of rules.
He could break them.
He looked down the dark, unknown tunnel, the only way forward. He was alone, hunted, and armed with a power that was trying to kill him.
For the first time since the Fracture began, he felt a flicker of hope.