The darkness was not empty. It was a presence.
The door sealed behind them with a soft, final snick, severing the last ghost-light from the gallery tunnel. For a moment, there was only the sound of their own breathing and the distant, echoing drip… drip… drip from some unseen height. The air was cool, damp, and carried an odor of wet stone, stale water, and something else—a faint, organic tang like rust and turned earth.
Elijah's senses stretched into the black. His hearing mapped the space: the skittering wasn't animal. It was the sound of shifting, settling stone, like pebbles trickling down a slope somewhere in the vastness. The floor beneath his feet was uneven, knobby, as if they stood on a fossilized root system.
Beside him, Chloe was a silhouette of contained tension. In the absolute dark, stripped of visual reference, her mind turned inward.
He moves like water around steel.
The thought was clear, unbidden. She replayed the last hours—the way he'd deciphered the bridge's tilt as a logarithmic function, the brutal efficiency of his intercepts in the shaft, not as heroism, but as optimal damage distribution. That's not B-rank field agility. That's A-rank operational calculus. Principle-level. The terms were from her uncle's hushed lessons. B-rank were tools—skilled, disposable. A-rank were assets—rare, multifaceted. 'Principles' were theoretical; operatives whose predictive modeling and adaptive logic bordered on precognition. They were ghosts in the MOC's own ledgers.
She had been groomed as an A-rank analyst, a strategic mind to be paired with field operatives. But Elijah… he operated as both mind and weapon, a closed loop. A chill that had nothing to do with the damp crept down her spine, entwined with a profound, terrifying sense of relief. With him here, she thought, her eyes straining to find his shape in the dark, we have a chance. A real one.
As if sensing her gaze, a faint, refracted glow began to emanate from the very ground beneath them, a deep blue bioluminescence seeping up through the stone. In the ethereal light, she saw his profile—the sharp line of his jaw, the focused stillness. He turned his head, his grey eyes catching the low light. He offered a small, tight smile. It wasn't warm. It was a shared signal between two pieces of surviving machinery. Acknowledgment.
The moment shattered as the wall beside them shimmered. The wooden door reappeared, not opening, but expelling. Vivian tumbled through it as if shoved, landing on her hands and knees on the knobby floor with a cry. The door vanished, leaving no seam.
Vivian lifted her head. Her face was a pale mask in the blue glow, streaked with dried tears and new terror. Her eyes found Elijah and Chloe, standing close together in the emerging light—a unit. A pair.
For a fraction of a second, Vivian's expression changed.
It wasn't fear. It was a convulsion of pure, ugly feeling—a snarl of jealousy, resentment, and a hatred so deep it seemed to peel her features back from her skull. It was the face of someone seeing a cherished prize in another's hands. Then, like a shutter slamming down, it was gone. Replaced by the familiar, wide-eyed, helpless terror. She whimpered, pushing herself up.
Elijah saw it. The micro-expression was a flash of a different program running beneath the hysterical code. Variable Vivian: emotional state volatile and contains hostile subroutines. Threat potential: low (physically compromised), but psychological vector unknown. He stored the data, his own face betraying nothing but a neutral assessment of their new environment.
"W-where…" Vivian stammered.
Her words were swallowed by the floor itself. The faint blue glow intensified, pulsing. The uneven, organic stone beneath them began to smooth, to harden, to clarify. It was turning transparent, like black glass or smoked crystal. And beneath that clarifying surface, an image began to form.
It was vast, intricate, breathtaking. It looked like an ancient, frescoed ceiling from a buried temple, but alive. Mythological figures were interwoven with delicate, glowing circuitry. Veins of light pulsed through the stone like luminous blood vessels. Some threads shone a brilliant white-gold, others a deep black-crimson, and still others a murky, uncertain grey-violet, flickering as if barely there.
"Ooh, you found the storybook!"
The little girl's voice giggled, echoing from the walls, the ceiling, from inside their own heads. It was sugary and bright.
"This one's my favorite! It's not about being right, silly billies. It's about being… you. And what a messy, messy 'you' you are!"
Chloe flinched, wrapping her arms around herself. The dissonance was a physical nausea. "The antics," she whispered, more to herself than to Elijah. "He wraps pure malice in a child's voice. It's… it's vile."
As she spoke, a semi-transparent overlay of user comments flickered at the edge of their vision, a ghost from the broadcast they could no longer see but was clearly still transmitting.
User 'MythNerd': Is that a depiction of the Moirai? The Fates? But with… cybernetics?
User 'JudgeJudy': Place your bets! What's the Halvern heiress's tragic flaw? Pride? Daddy issues?
The mural clarified further, demanding their attention. At its exact center, a figure resolved. A Weaver-God, kneeling. It was androgynous, powerful, and blindfolded, the cloth stitched with golden runes that swam before the eyes, refusing to be read. Its mouth was sewn shut, thick black stitches, yet from the seams, dark ink welled and dripped, vanishing into the tapestry below.
It had six arms. Three reached forward, fingers delicately pulling and tying glowing threads from a monstrous loom. Three arms reached behind, holding shears that severed other threads.
The loom was not made of wood or metal. Its frame was constructed of interlocked spinal columns. Its beams were shattered clock gears. And where a weaver would brace their work, there were children's handprints, fossilized into stone.
From this horrific loom, thousands of threads spread out across the vast floor, a luminous nervous system. Each thread originated from a small, carved relief of a human action: a hand offering bread, a hand pulling a trigger, a hand turning a doorknob away, a hand signing a parchment.
And each thread did not lead to one outcome, but branched, split, looped back, and intertwined with others in a dizzying, chaotic web of potential consequence.
Above the Weaver, three crowns floated in a slow, rotating orbit: one of cracked, blinding Light, one of stacked, yellowed Bone, one of pure, light-absorbing Shadow. Each crown cast a different, shifting silhouette over the scene below.
At the very bottom of the mural, three kneeling, faceless human figures were etched. One bled from the chest, one from the palms, one from the empty sockets where eyes should be. Their blood did not pool. It ran upward, feeding into the lowest threads of the weave.
A countdown timer materialized in the air before them, its numbers glowing a calm, terrible white.
05:00
The Karma Floor was ready. The storybook was open.
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