The sewer system was not water. It was a freezing, viscous slurry of industrial lubricant, biological waste, and raw, unstable Aether runoff. It was the digestive tract of the city, cold and foul.
Lysa inhaled the stench. It was less physical, more a saturation of every memory she had tried to suppress. Desperation. Rot. The toxic fear of the thousands crammed above them.
Torvin moved with a predatory silence. He was a creature of darkness and filth, perfectly adapted. Lysa scrambled behind him, struggling against the heavy resistance of the slurry. The Hunter's Mark on her wrist pulsed with the residual cold of his magic, a tether in the blackness.
The darkness was not uniform. It was absolute, compressive.
"Slow," Torvin's voice grated, cutting through the echoes. "You move heavy. Aether-tech above us. Anya's tech."
Lysa heard the name, the Aethel name, in his mouth. A spark of confusion. Why did he know the High City's hierarchy?
"You know them?" Lysa whispered.
Torvin's response was a simple, absolute negation. "I know signatures. Her logic is fast. Calculated. She reads the decay of your displacement." He stopped beneath a grated manhole cover. Light—a brief, filtered, blue-white sliver—fell onto the sludge. "She expects panic. We give her nothing. We move like rats."
Lysa tried to slow her breath. The effort to control her own chaos was exhausting, demanding more energy than the desperate physical scramble. Her mind was fighting the lingering echo of the Dark Weaver—a promise of absolute power, a terrifying, beautiful lie.
If you had taken the power, the Wardens would be yours.
She shut the thought down. The sheer mental resistance made her eyes burn.
"The Weaver," she forced out. "It's inside the Shift."
Torvin didn't turn. "Everything is inside the Rift. Everything that wants to devour. You feel the cold. You feel the promise. It is a voice only Gatekeepers hear. It feeds on your Doubt." He pointed to the north tunnel, thick with stagnant, sickly-green runoff. "North. It's the pipe that smells worst. The deepest current. No Wardens follow that scent."
Lysa nodded. She plunged into the rancid liquid, pushing the heavy weight of the fluids. She focused on the cold of the Hunter's Mark, anchoring herself to Torvin's grim, concrete presence.
High above, in the sterile control room of the Aethel Security Corps, Anya watched the map dissolve.
"The signatures are gone, Engineer," Commander Juro stated, his voice tight with impatience. "The deployment is optimized. We have sealed all major exits. Why are the signatures blank?"
Anya ignored him. Her station hummed with efficiency, the glowing projections reflecting in her focused eyes. Her algorithms were flawless. Lysa's initial Displacement had left a massive energy footprint. Torvin's escape path, even in the sewers, should have left a trail of psychic and Aetheric disturbance. But the trail stopped. Absolute nullification.
Disruptive camouflage. Low-tech, high-impact.
"They are not gone, Commander," Anya stated, her voice clipped. "They're masked. The subject is moving through the primary chemical artery—the Green Vein. The sewage is neutralizing the Aether trace."
She slammed a command onto the console. A new overlay appeared: complex predictive physics models overlaid on the sewer map. "Torvin. The Hunter. He knows the Underdrift's defenses. He is using its filth as protection."
"Then we flood the area," Juro snapped. "Sanitize the Vein. Force them to surface."
"No," Anya said, without looking up. "That would create an Aetheric backwash. We contaminate the High City's water filtration, and potentially create a volatile, uncontrolled chem-magic reaction. Instability."
Chaos is inefficient. Chaos is failure.
Anya needed to predict Torvin's logic. Torvin would seek the path of least resistance out of the city. That meant the oldest, most ignored exit.
"Predict the Foldlands vector," Anya commanded her system. The Aether-Net spat out a probability cone, pointing to a forgotten, sealed junction near the outer wall. "That junction is too old. Too small. It hasn't been used in fifty years."
"Precisely," Anya agreed, a grim satisfaction tightening her lips. "The only passage the Wardens would dismiss as an oversight. We send two squads to the junction exit. Deploy a low-frequency Rift-Stunner grid beneath the junction to neutralize any final Aether-magic before they breach the wall."
Her plan was precise, logical, and flawless. The chaos would be contained.
In the depths of the Green Vein, Torvin stopped abruptly. The air changed. Not the smell, but the sound. The distant mechanical hum of the city ceased. Pure silence. The silence of deep stone, vast pressure.
"Sound dead zone," Torvin muttered, his head cocked, listening to the lack of sound. "Anya's grid. She thinks we're heading for a fight."
He grabbed Lysa's arm, his grip unforgiving. "We change vector. Deepest shaft. The Collector's Eye. Now."
They crawled into a narrow, vertical inspection shaft, water cascading down onto them. The climb was brutal. Torvin pulled himself up using sheer, brutal strength. Lysa followed, her muscles burning, powered only by the cold necessity of not being harvested.
They emerged onto a narrow, slippery maintenance gantry, thirty feet above the main torrent. The light here was worse: a weak, orange chemical glow leaking from a distant industrial plant.
Lysa pressed her back against the cold, dripping pipe. Relief was an indulgence she couldn't afford. The cold iron mark on her wrist began to vibrate—a faint, rapid pulse.
"Three hundred paces," Torvin whispered, pulling his massive, custom-made Rift-Slicer from its sheath. The blade was matte black, designed to absorb and diffuse Aether energy. "Below us. They're tracking the heat signature. They know this is the only way down."
Torvin didn't look at Lysa. He looked at the shadows.
A sound then. Not the Wardens. Something else. Something wet. A sliding sound.
A Gutter-Beast. A low-level entity, a mutated animal that had consumed too much raw Aether runoff. It was dog-sized, but built like a spider, eight long, segmented legs propelling a blind, snarling body. Its thick hide was covered in weeping, green pustules of unstable chem-magic.
It scrambled onto the gantry twenty yards away. It wasn't interested in the Wardens or the Rift. It was interested in the heat of living flesh.
"Stay absolutely still," Torvin commanded Lysa. His posture shifted, the grace of a predator replacing the weariness of the traveler.
The Gutter-Beast sensed them. Its head—a bony, tooth-filled funnel—snapped in their direction. It charged.
Torvin met it mid-gantry. Not a retreat; a controlled, aggressive engagement.
The Hunter's movements were shockingly efficient. No wasted energy. No drama. The creature leapt, aiming for Torvin's throat. Torvin shifted his weight, allowing the beast's momentum to carry it forward, exposing its soft underside. The Rift-Slicer moved in a clean, downward arc.
A rush of steaming blood and raw, unstable Aether erupted from the creature. The Slicer cut through the beast's chitin and its spine in a single, silent blow. It fell back into the torrent below with a massive, wet splash.
Lysa watched the killing. Her mind, so attuned to the terrifying, clean power of dimensional violence, registered the brutal, physical reality of Torvin's work. Her magic was about making things not exist. His was about making things bleed.
Torvin wiped the blade on his leather armor, the silver runes briefly shining in the low light.
He turned to Lysa, his eyes cold brass. "They track heat. They track Aether. We remove both."
He climbed down to the dead creature's carcass, pulling out a heavy, bone-saw. In a minute of focused, unsettling work, he carved away a large section of the beast's stomach lining, thick with the oily, neutralizing chem-sludge.
He plastered the reeking, raw material over Lysa's shoulders, rubbing it across the Hunter's Mark on her wrist. The stench was unbearable, a physical violation. The cold iron sigil beneath the filth went completely inert.
"That," Torvin stated, his voice flat, "is a true cloak. Anya's sensors will read the heat of raw meat and chem-toxins. No living trace. We are ghosts."
Lysa struggled not to gag. The fear of the Wardens was now competing with the disgust of being coated in monster viscera.
"Why are you doing this?" Lysa finally asked, the question raw with exhaustion. "A Hunter doesn't save. He collects. What is your price?"
Torvin looked at the vast, impenetrable dark of the tunnel ahead. "The price is not yours to pay. The Rift must be closed. That is the only contract that matters now."
He gestured into the darkness. "We move. We are near the Outer Wall. The Foldlands are outside. More monsters. Worse people. But out of Anya's light."
Lysa followed him. She was coated in filth, running on pure exhaustion, carrying the weight of a world-ending power, and trusting a morally bankrupt monster-hunter.
Ahead, the tunnel opened into a massive, reinforced chamber. The air was colder here, drier, filled with the metallic thrum of huge, inactive machinery. This was the final gate, the sealed, forgotten doorway out of the city. The boundary between civilization and the true horror of the Foldlands. Lysa's heart hammered—not with fear of the outside, but with the chilling knowledge that the logic of Order had officially failed. They were crossing the line.