The light didn't just fade; it was strangled.
The echoes of the collapsing ruins vanished, leaving behind a silence so heavy it felt like pressure against the eardrums. For the first time in hours, the world fell into a terrifying, unnatural stillness.
Harun and Sahil stood at the center of the dome-shaped chamber. They were portraits of ruin—caked in gray dust, dried blood, and the kind of exhaustion that makes bone marrow ache. Their breath quivered in the cold air, rising like faint ghosts. The resonance of the divine voice that had spoken moments ago still rattled in their teeth, but neither could find the breath to acknowledge it.
Then, the silence broke.
A hum.
Soft. Steady. Low frequency.
It wasn't a sound they heard with their ears; it was a vibration they felt in the soles of their boots.
Boom… boom… boom…
It was a heartbeat, buried miles beneath the crust of the world.
Harun lifted his head, blinking grit from his eyes. "Tell me you heard that. Tell me I'm not hallucinating."
Sahil stared into the black abyss of the corridor ahead, his face pale beneath the dirt. "I felt it."
The hum pulsed again. It wasn't aggressive, but it was ancient. It carried the weight of mountains.
"It's coming from below," Sahil whispered, tilting his head as if listening to a distant radio frequency. "Deeper inside."
Harun let out a shaky, ragged exhale. "Great. Because nothing dangerous ever lives in the basement."
Despite the fear clotting their throats, neither turned back. The hum acted like a magnet to the iron in their blood. It pulled them forward, a rhythmic gravity they couldn't resist.
The Descent
They moved through a narrow tunnel carved directly into the volcanic rock. As they walked, the environment began to respond. Dormant crystals embedded in the basalt walls flickered to life, bending soft trails of luminescence toward the boys' marked arms.
Sahil's veins shimmered with a sickly, unstable green light. Harun's skin pulsed with a harsh white glow.
"It's reacting to us," Sahil murmured, rubbing his aching forearm.
"Or target-locking us," Harun muttered, though his hand drifted instinctively to the brass knuckle on his right fist.
The tunnel sloped downward aggressively. The air grew frigid, sucking the warmth from their sweat-dampened clothes. Their footsteps slapped against the carved stone, too loud in the confined space.
Halfway down, the rhythm changed. The hum shifted pitch—becoming sharper, faster. Urgent.
Sahil froze. "It changed. It knows we're here."
Harun nodded, his jaw tight. "I don't think it's an invitation anymore."
"Too late to RSVP no," Sahil said, forcing his legs to move.
They reached the end of the stairs, and the world fell away.
It was a cathedral of the deep. A colossal underground cavern spread out in all directions, the ceiling lost to an endless, velvety darkness. Blue and green crystals lined the walls like frozen constellations, providing a dim, watery light.
At the center of this abyss lay a perfectly circular stone arena—smooth, wide, and ominously pristine.
And standing in the center of that arena was a nightmare carved from geology.
The Guardian
It was a Titan.
Twenty feet of volcanic stone and ancient intent. It possessed six arms, each thick as a tree trunk. Molten red light pulsed deep within the cracks of its rocky armor, like magma trapped under a tectonic plate. Its face was a jagged slab of slate with two blazing vertical slits for eyes.
And in the center of its chest sat a massive, dormant core. It glowed with the same rhythmic hum that had led them here.
Harun's breath hitched, a dry clicking sound in his throat. "This… this can't be real."
Sahil was paralyzed, his eyes tracing the geometry of the creature. "It's a guardian. A sentinel."
As if hearing the title, the hum stopped.
The cavern held its breath. The silence stretched, thin and brittle.
THUMP.
The giant's core flared like a dying star.
THUMP.
Magma flooded its veins, turning the dull stone violently bright.
"No… no, no," Harun stepped back, his boots scraping on gravel.
The Titan's eyes ignited.
It moved.
It started slowly—the sound of tectonic plates grinding together. Dust cascaded from its shoulders like snow. But as it straightened, the motion smoothed out. It didn't move like a machine; it moved like a predator.
Sahil's voice was a thread. "Harun… stay close."
"I can't control it yet!" Harun hissed, looking at his glowing hand. "If that thing hits us, we're paste."
"I know."
"Then why are we standing here?"
Sahil turned, and for the first time, the fear in his eyes was eclipsed by a desperate, terrified focus. "Because there is nowhere to run."
The Titan rose to its full height, six arms unfolding like the petals of a carnivorous flower.
Top Right: A hammer the size of an anvil.
Top Left: A serrated stone sword.
Middle: A wicked length of chain and a tower shield.
Bottom: An open palm glowing like a blast furnace.
It roared—a sound that wasn't vocal, but structural. The floor cracked. Shards of crystal exploded from the walls.
Harun whispered, "We're going to die."
The Titan charged.
The Collision
Physics seemed to break. Nothing that size should have moved that fast. It blurred, a landslide with a target.
"Move!" Sahil screamed.
The hammer came down. The impact didn't just hit the floor; it liquified it. A shockwave of splintered rock threw both boys backward.
Harun hit the ground hard, tasting copper and grit. His vision swam. The white light under his skin flared and died, sputtering like a wet match. He tried to summon the power, to pull that heat back into his veins, but panic was a loud static in his head. The brass knuckle felt like a dead weight.
Sahil rolled through the debris, scrambling up on legs that felt like jelly. The mark on his palm throbbed, green filaments racing under his skin like panicked worms. He felt the air pressure drop as the Titan swung again.
He didn't summon a tornado. He didn't know how.
He summoned a desperate shove.
A focused pockets of air, dense as a cannonball, shot from his palm. It struck the falling hammer, nudging it just inches to the right.
Those inches saved Harun's life. The stone head smashed into the ground where Harun's skull had been a split-second before.
Harun scrambled back, spitting blood. "Don't cut it that close again!"
"I didn't aim!" Sahil coughed, his laugh sounding bordering on hysteria.
The Titan pivoted, the chain whipping out like a striking cobra. Sahil raised both hands, palms out. This time, the wind obeyed his terror. A gust slammed into the chain, metal clinking against solid air, sending the weapon skidding harmlessly into the wall.
Sahil staggered. The exertion felt like it had physically scooped energy out of his chest. His vision greyscaled for a second. If his magic was a battery, he was already in the red.
"Use me!" Harun roared.
He didn't have a plan. He just had instinct. He saw Sahil falter, and something primal took over. The brass knuckle hummed—not with heat, but with hunger.
Harun clenched his fist. He stopped trying to control the white light and simply let it bleed. It rushed into the brass, turning the metal into a glowing brand.
He sprinted.
The Titan swung its shield, but Harun slid beneath the arc, boots skidding on the smooth stone. He saw the core—the glowing wound in the rock.
He punched it.
CRACK.
Gold met volcanic glass. The sound was like a bell struck in a tomb.
Pain, white-hot and blinding, shot up Harun's arm, but the impact was devastating. The brass knuckle channeled the raw energy like a shaped charge. The Titan's core fractured, hairline cracks spidering outward, leaking liquid light.
The giant stumbled.
But Titans do not fall from one punch. It roared, a sound of outrage, and backhanded the air.
The blow caught Harun mid-leap. It felt like being hit by a speeding truck. He flew twenty feet, crashing into a pile of jagged crystals.
"Harun!" Sahil screamed.
The Titan turned its gaze to Sahil, raising the serrated sword.
Sahil's knees shook. He had nothing left. No breath. No wind.
Push, his mind screamed.
He thrust his hands forward, screaming with the effort. A wall of air, transparent but solid as iron, slammed into the Titan's chest. It forced the cracks wider. The stone groaned, plates of armor shifting, grinding, misaligning.
The Titan froze, paralyzed by the internal pressure.
Harun rolled over, coughing up something dark. His ribs felt like broken china. But the brass knuckle was still glowing—a stubborn, angry ember.
"Keep… pinning it…" Harun gasped, forcing himself up.
"I can't hold it!" Sahil's nose began to bleed, the green light on his arms flickering.
"One more hit," Harun gritted his teeth, the pain focusing him into a single point of clarity. "Just give me one second."
Harun ran.
The Titan broke Sahil's hold, shattering the wind wall with a flex of its molten muscles. It raised all six arms to crush the boy sprinting toward it.
Harun didn't dodge. He screamed—a raw, wordless rejection of death—and threw his entire body weight into the punch.
He struck the center of the fractures.
FLASH.
Light erupted. It wasn't just a spark; it was an explosion. The brass knuckle discharged every ounce of power Harun had, driving the energy deep into the Titan's core.
The core shattered.
The sound was deafening—like a dam breaking. Molten light cascaded out, flooding the arena floor. The Titan stiffened, its six arms locking in place. Then, the light in its eyes flickered.
Once. Twice.
Darkness.
The twenty-foot monument to destruction collapsed.
The Aftermath
The impact of the fall shook the cavern so hard that stalactites rained down from the ceiling.
Harun fell to his knees, clutching his chest. Sahil collapsed onto his back, gasping for air that wouldn't come.
Silence returned. But this time, it was the silence of a graveyard.
"Did we…" Sahil wheezed, wiping blood from his upper lip. "Did we win?"
Harun looked at the mountain of dead stone. "We lived. That's not the same thing."
They dragged themselves toward each other, barely able to stand. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind a tidal wave of pain. Harun looked at his brass knuckle; it was smoking, the metal dull and gray, drained of all light.
Sahil looked up. The ceiling of the cavern groaned. A massive fissure was racing across the rock above them, spreading like lightning.
"The structural integrity…" Sahil murmured, his eyes widening. "We broke the load-bearing pillar."
"Run?" Harun asked weakly.
"Can't run," Sahil whispered as his eyes rolled back.
The exhaustion took them before the rocks did. They collapsed on the arena floor, limbs tangled, darkness swarming their vision.
The last thing Harun felt before he blacked out was the warmth of the brass knuckle against his palm—faint, weak, but still there.
An ember that refused to die.