Every breath was like swallowing hot grit. The burn clawed from his throat deep into his lungs. Adrenaline and overloaded Mark-energy roared through his veins, masking the deeper bodily pain with a perilous, floating haze. His vision darkened at the edges. The rasp of his own breathing filled his ears, along with the sickening, minute crackle of the translucent cyan energy barrier clinging to his form.
The barrier hadn't shattered. Not yet. It was a glass dome hammered relentlessly, its shape held by will alone. Where it was damaged, energy streams—possessed of a desperate, living instinct—flooded in to patch, to fuse, glowing faintly. Then new pressure came, and the fresh repairs webbed with fresh fractures. Break, mend, break again. Each cycle devoured the foundational power in his Marks and eroded his iron will.
Executor 74 could feel it: the connection points between the barrier and his own energy channels were overheating, screaming with overload pain.
"Damn it…" A guttural snarl, tasting of blood. He forced another mouthful of metallic fluid back down, teeth grinding. "Must… hold."
Retreat was impossible. Behind him lay the Sanctum's will, the dignity of the Accords, the… final value of soldiers already reduced to scorched earth. More crucially, the thing in the Tower had to be contained, stalled—to buy time and create an opening for the true 'Purification' to follow.
The complex Mark patterns on his arms, chest, and forehead erupted in agonizing light. Not the glow of healthy power, but the brutal, sacrificial burn of tapping the deepest reserves. The energy channels beneath his skin bulged and writhed as if trying to burst free, bringing tearing agony.
As his Marks overloaded, the air around him began to visibly warp and boil—not from heat, but from raw energy density warping reality itself. Fine arcs of electricity skipped and snapped across his tattered robes and exposed rune-suit.
Ahead, the 'rift' on the Black Tower's surface churned again—more violently, more unstable than before. Something worse was thrashing inside, fighting to be born.
Executor 74 knew his state was spiraling toward the edge. Alone, his chances were slim. He might fail the core objective: to delay.
His gaze, sharp as an ice-pick, stabbed toward the plain's edge—to his Grey Cloak colleague, still standing rigid, the great book in hand. The one he'd warned. That figure remained, hooded, but a flicker of bloodshot, tormented eyes might have shown beneath. Pages of the book fluttered unturned. Around him hung the residue of spent energy and a deeper, obscure turbulence—as if a violent conflict raged within.
No time for hesitation.
The last vestige of 'individual' calculation vanished from Executor 74's eyes, replaced by absolute mission logic. He drove power into his legs, cracking the dry earth, and became a streak of light trailing unstable arcs. Not toward the emerging golem. He veered sharply, streaking back across the plain at terrifying speed, aiming straight for his book-holding colleague.
"SKREEEEE—!!!"
A new, more piercing shriek of metal and energy tore from the Tower's rift.
What surged out this time was not the hulking humanoid golem.
It was a sphere—or a crude approximation of one—a mass of fused slag and cables. The moment it cleared the rift, it began to spin with insane velocity, a berserk top. As it whirled, countless snapping, gnashing 'mouths' across its surface spewed chaotic webs of crimson annihilation beams in all directions.
It was a dark star of pure, random destruction, rolling and spinning, spraying lethal light, grinding toward where Executor 74 had just stood.
The Executor seemed oblivious to the storm of death at his back—or had calculated it in. His entire focus was on the approaching colleague. His dive was absolute, precise. Not toward an ally, but toward the final… critical component of his tactical objective.
Inside the Tower, the view-screen's image tightened the air.
"What?!" Loren's teacup jerked. Scalding liquid sloshed over the rim, burning his fingers. He barely kept hold, his voice shrill with disbelief. "He's… what is he doing?! Not fighting that… that spinning thing! He's going back?! Toward the one with the book?!" It looked like madness, self-sabotage.
Erika didn't cry out, but his clenched fists whitened at the knuckles. He leaned forward, eyes razor-sharp, heart pounding a heavy drumbeat in his chest. This defied all combat sense. Ignore the new, dire threat to attack an apparently spent ally? There was a colder, more absolute logic at work here.
The Sorcerer on the sofa shed his lazy demeanor. He sat up slightly, placing both feet on the floor. His gaze became a physical probe, locked on the grey streak hurtling toward the other Cloak.
"The Sanctum's 'cleaners'… so… efficient even with their own."
He said 'efficient' softly. The word dripped with icy, leaden sarcasm.
On the screen, Executor 74 was upon his colleague. The book-holding Grey Cloak shuddered, instinct making him recoil, his hands tightening on the tome. But 74 was too fast, too resolved. His hands shot out with surgical precision—not to strike the man, but to slam down upon the cover of the glowing, unstable great book.
"Ghk—AAAGH!!"
The moment 74's hands made contact, the frenzied, near-explosive light from his overloaded Marks found a new, closer, more 'suitable' outlet and reservoir. A torrent of violent energy surged down his arms and flooded into the book.
The book-holding Cloak emitted a short, piercing shriek—utterly inhuman. His body convulsed, spasming violently. His hood jerked back, revealing half a face twisted in ultimate agony and disbelief. The great book in his grasp, injected with this catalytic power, erupted in blinding, unstable white fury. Pages weren't turning—they were being violently ripped and shredded by an unseen force, the sound a roaring "WHOOOSH-RIP—!!!"
Then came the image that would sear itself into Erika's mind forever.
The blinding light from the book, along with the residual energy around the Cloak, his vitality, the very essence of his presence—all of it was violently siphoned away, as if by a vortex opening at the book's heart. This amalgam—light, energy, life, being—formed a turbid, horrific stream that did not dissipate, but surged back, up the Executor's arms, into his body.
The book-holding Cloak faded, thinned, turned translucent like dew under a cruel sun. And the book in his hands, its light swelling to a critical peak—
THUMP.
A soft, dreadfully final sound.
The book disintegrated. Not into paper, but into a storm of ash-bright motes and energy fragments.
These fragments did not scatter. They obeyed an absolute command, swarming like homing insects, pouring into Executor 74—into his outstretched hands, his exposed skin, every one of his blazing Marks.
He had consumed his own.
It all happened in the space of two, three heartbeats.
And now, the spinning, beam-spewing golem was upon him. The chaotic web of crimson death, searing the very air, fell toward the Executor's undefended back.
Executor 74 whirled around.
The cyan barrier was utterly gone. In its place wreathed a new, unstable, terrifying corona of energy—a turbulent mix of dark gold, sickly white, and remnants of undigested cyan. It erupted from every pore, every Mark on his body like a pent-up volcano. The power made his frame seem to swell, to loom taller. His tattered robes whipped in the violent updraft. The force blew his hood partly back, revealing the lower half of his face—skin pale as aged plaster, lips a bloodless, ruthless line, the corner of his mouth twitching with the agony of containing this torrent and the backlash of his consumption. An expression of extreme pain and fanatical resolve.
Facing the engulfing net of crimson annihilation, he did not dodge. He made no move to defend.
He threw his head back and roared—a sound not human, but like countless soul-shards screaming in a energy forge.
Then he took it all—the stolen, life-mingled power, the last dregs wrung from his own over-strained Marks—and shoved it forward in an act of near self-annihilation.
A thick,twisted, wildly violent energy torrent erupted from his joined hands—a dying star's final supernova. It clashed, tangled, detonated within itself, and smashed head-on into the golem's destructive web.
KABOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!!!!
An explosion of unprecedented scale swallowed the view-screen. Light blotted out the spinning golem, the Executor, the plain. The Tower's very base seemed to shudder. At the heart of the blast, a madly expanding sphere of white hellfire grew, its edges showing shattered golem fragments and unstable, black, spatial rift-like streaks—the fabric of reality tearing.
The Tower's internal screen glitched and wavered violently, filled with static "ZZZZZT—!"
The Sorcerer snapped his fingers gently.
A steadying energy flow stabilized the system. The image cleared, though fine digital snow danced at its edges. The view showed only the slowly contracting sphere of devastation and the land around it—scoured, blackened, as if by divine wrath.
The Sorcerer sank back into his sofa, as if the cataclysmic clash had been a mildly exciting interlude. He picked up his now-perfectly-temperatured tea and took a leisurely sip. Then he glanced at the two youths beside him, frozen in their chairs, faces etched with the aftermath of shock.
He smiled. It was a smile of deep understanding and pure, aesthetic appreciation for cruel theater.
"See?" he said, his tone regaining its casual, conversational ease, though each word carried immense weight. He nodded toward the screen, toward the settling ruins of the battle.
"Now it's getting interesting."
The view-screen still showed the slow contraction of the blast's aftermath.
The residual energy at ground zero pulsed like a wound not yet cooled, a faint glow deep in the image.
Erika and Loren said nothing.
What they had just witnessed had redefined their understanding of 'combat' and 'sacrifice.'
Then, a different movement began in the room.
The Sorcerer of the Black Tower rose from the sofa.
The motion was crisp, devoid of hesitation. He did not glance back at the screen. The clash of consumption and self-immolation no longer held his interest. He turned and walked to a section of the wall between bookshelves, placing his hand on an unremarkable spot and pressing.
Click.
A dark wooden panel slid inward.
Behind it was not storage space, but a vertical console set flush with the wall. Complex layers of mechanisms were stacked within. Tiny, dormant runes and status indicators glowed softly, like a precision organ awaiting activation.
The Sorcerer reached his hands inside.
His fingers began to move.
There was no wasted motion, no pause. A sequence of presses, rotations, and dial adjustments, executed with a cold, practiced certainty—the routine of someone who had done this countless times. From the depths of the console came a low, mechanical hum as energy streams were re-routed, calibrated, awakened.
Seconds later, it stopped.
He withdrew his hands.
Several rings now adorned his fingers—each of distinct, obscure make, sitting snug against the bone. In his grasp were two short staves. Their surfaces were a matte, dark grey metal etched with fine conduits, capped with crystals of deep crimson that pulsed with a steady, low light.
He hefted one, testing its balance.
Then he turned and walked to the clear space at the room's center.
He stood.
In the next instant—with no warning, no sound—
The circular section of floor beneath him, roughly two meters across, dropped away. The ground seemed to vanish, taking him with it into a vertical shaft that opened below. Streaks of light raced up the shaft's walls as it sealed itself shut above him.
The sitting room was as it had been.
Only the two stunned youths remained.
And in the air, hanging like the faint scent of ozone, his final, cool murmur—
spoken as if to himself, requiring no answer:
"…Time to collect the experimental debris."