The cellar of the ruined chamber smelled of cold stone and old iron. Runes glowed faintly along the walls—little rivers of light that shifted whenever the group moved. They'd set up a small workspace on the broken platform: Mina curled in a blanket with her eyes closed, Riku wiping grime from Eclipsera, Arin checking bowstrings, and Ren leaning on his sword, impatient and watchful. Kai, meanwhile, was surrounded by a mess of instruments, coils, and a single soldering iron that he kept eyeing like a sleeping animal.
"Okay," Kai announced, voice all enthusiastic nerves. "If my readings are correct, these glyphs are… layered. Think of them like—uh—an onion of information. Peel one and you cry. Peel two, you cry smarter."
Ren snorted. "Lovely. Do your crying outside."
Kai didn't register the jab. He adjusted his goggle-lens, flicked a tiny switch on a round device, and pressed it to the wall. The gadget emitted a soft blue chirp and, for a moment, the runes pulsed in response, arranging themselves into a series of pictographs.
Riku leaned in. "What do you see?"
Kai's finger traced the flow like a conductor. "The First Soul War," he said slowly, as if tasting the phrase. "Look: a line of figures—guardians—holding a crown of light, then something—someone—smashes the crown, and the light scatters into shards. Those shards fall into the world and become… relics."
Mina's eyes opened slightly. "So the relics are pieces of a greater whole."
"Exactly!" Kai exclaimed. "Fragments of a divine core. Whoever shattered it turned the balance into shards. The Ten Generals either guard those shards… or were corrupted by them." He tapped his chin. "And the Celestial Gate—this gateway—TM (trade-marked by Kai) was what connected the heart of that core to the flow of souls. After the fracture, the flow became—err—chaotic."
Arin squinted. "So if we put the relics back together, the flow might restore?"
Kai's grin was too bright. "Possibly. Or the fabric of reality rips and we all become a very dramatic pile of dust. There's a twenty percent chance of that. But the historical data—" He stopped as Ren's tone cut across the murmur.
"You sound dangerously sure for a guy who calls it 'possibly.'" Ren said. "What if you're wrong? What if this is a trap—like someone arranging the shards to lure greedy fools?"
Kai barked a short laugh, then turned serious. "Then we die spectacularly and leave behind a very functional workshop." He looked at Ren. "You don't have to like me, big guy. But I know how to read machines souls left behind. Half my life is coaxing things back to a whisper. You've lived more with blades. That doesn't make either of us wrong."
Ren's jaw tightened. The tension was small and bright, like a struck wire. Riku watched them both carefully. A spark of rivalry could be useful—kept them sharp—but he could smell the way Ren bristled at anyone who thought they could out-plan him.
Before the argument could widen, Kai's device hiccuped, then screamed a sharp, high tone. The walls' ambient glow shifted to a jagged red.
"That's not good," Kai muttered, frantically checking dials. "That's—someone's tuning into the same resonance." He looked up at the others. "They're localized. Moving fast. Lots of signatures. Small, clustered, and hungry."
"Goon signatures," Arin said flatly. "Too many to be a scouting party."
Riku's hand went to Eclipsera. "How many?"
Kai swallowed. "Fifty."
Silence dropped like a stone.
Ren laughed once, a brittle sound. "Well then. Fifty is inconvenient."
Mina's expression tightened. Though she'd come back from death, the fragility of life had not left her; now her anger was quiet and sharp. "They took our ritual, our ruins—I don't care why. We stop them."
"Group formation," Arin ordered. "Riku, Mina, Ren—we hold the entrance. I take the high arc. Kai, do whatever weirdness is in your bag of tricks. Protect the relic map."
Kai's fingers danced over his tools. "Copy that. Deploying—uh—temporary misdirection arrays, sonic dampers, and—if things go pear-shaped—an electromagnetic squall that will at least make them dance awkwardly."
Roku tested his blade. "We don't get to be awkward."
They moved into position like a living machine. Riku planted Eclipsera at the front, its edge humming with a resolve that the others fed into. Mina raised a thin veil of light around them, a fragile bubble that might buy a moment. Ren grinned like someone who loved the noise of battle even when he'd paid for it with blood. Arin's arrows hung like notes on a string, waiting.
The goons crashed from the blackened ridge in a tide of rusted armor and wild eyes. Fifty bodies, exactly as Kai had said—rushing, yelling, swinging crude blades. Their leader, a scar-faced brute, hacked a path with a serrated cleaver and bellowed unintelligible orders.
Riku's first strike opened a path. Eclipsera moved like a river through reeds; soul-energy sliced and popped as the goons met the blade. Ren was a whirlwind, taking two to the chest and laughing as he stepped between a teammate's fall. Mina's luminous pulses mended cuts and knocked back surges of ether. Arin's arrows were cruel and exact, pinning shields and severing necks of morale.
Kai's weird machines began to hum and crackle at the edge of the field. He threw the first little disc—an odd, humming coin—into the sea of bodies. The coin sang a note that made armor plates ring and helmets vibrate, unbalancing formations. A second burst sent a cloud of glittering dust—actually micro-resonators—that clung to the goons' eyes and mouths, causing coughing fits and blind swings.
"Not bad," Ren shouted over the melee, parrying a heavy blow that would have cleaved his shoulder. "Your tinkers work!"
Kai shouted back, grinning despite the danger. "Told you! A man of science in a world of sorrow!"
But numbers pressed. For every one goon felled by blade or arrow, two more took its place. Fifty became a living crush. The bubble around them thinned. Mina's light flickered with strain as she tried to hold the flow long enough for them to strike and fall back.
Then a pair of goons managed to slip the line, charging at the machine table where Kai worked, their blades aimed for his little heart.
Arin saw them and let loose a long string of arrows—fifteen at once. The volley was a blur: they sang, they struck, and two bodies crumpled. One wounded goon stumbled forward; the other fell, clutching his throat.
Kai stumbled, smacking a coin back into the air that sent a stuttering pulse directly into the ground beneath the intruders' feet. The goons lost footing; a chain reaction toppled five of them like birds from a wire.
Riku ran a spear of Eclipsera through the leader's gut. The brute's eyes went wide, then dim. That moment of weakness allowed the tide to be forced back, the rest of the goons stumbling, leaderless.
When the dust settled, the fifty lay broken — some dead, some unconscious, some crawling away with teeth bared in a fury Riku felt down in his marrow. The group stood amid the ruin, breathing hard, bleeding, but together.
Ren laughed, a raw, wet sound. "Weird gizmos save the day. The world is unpredictable."
Kai wiped agent-splatter off his goggles, looking pleased and exhausted. "See? Practicality with personality!"
Mina sank to a nearby stone, hands trembling. She had kept them alive and paid a toll; the cost showed in her slow exhales. Riku knelt beside her, hand resting gently on her knuckles.
Arin sheathed an arrow and studied the field. "They knew about the runes," she said at last. "They came for something."
Riku looked at Kai. "You sure these were goons hunting treasure and not—" he looked to the murals in his mind—"not something larger?"
Kai tapped his metal-chested chin. "They had coordinates. Someone told them where to strike. That suggests an organized buyer or a broker—someone with interest in relic fragments. This isn't random raiding."
Ren's eyes flicked to the west, where the mountains swallowed the horizon. "Then someone is moving pieces. Faster than we are."
Mina closed her eyes. "Then we stop them. If fragments fall into the wrong hands—"
"—they could become anything," Arin finished. "We need to move faster."
Riku rose, pulling Eclipsera free of the last corpse dragging it with a hiss. "Then we go. We can't let brokers and bandits be the ones to stitch the world back together."
Kai slung a battered satchel over his shoulder. "And I'll bring science. And perhaps some crackers."
Ren cracked a smile for the first time since Mina's fall. "If you bring crackers, Kai, you're officially our hero."
They left the field behind like a lesson, blood and gears marking the earth. In the quiet after, beneath a sky that didn't care for their triumph, the runes still glowed faintly, as if contemplating whether the next whisper was worth answering.