The silence in the server room was absolute, broken only by the hum of Lyra's portable power unit as she jacked it into the ancient data-core. The inert nanite dust coated the floor like metallic frost, a testament to the controlled power of the gauntlet. Kaelen flexed his fingers, the ceramic and quartz construct feeling less like a foreign object and more like a part of his anatomy—a reinforced exoskeleton for his curse.
"The core has secondary power," Lyra reported, her fingers flying across her own data-slate, which was now linked to the console. "It's damaged, but there are intact sectors. I'm bypassing the primary security protocols now."
Elara stood guard at the door, her posture rigid, her eyes constantly scanning the dark corridor. Jax leaned against a bank of dead servers, his crossbow held loosely but ready, his gaze occasionally flicking to Kaelen with a look that was no longer pure hostility, but a wary, professional assessment.
Kaelen, however, was distracted. With the immediate threat gone, the psychic residue of the place pressed in on him again. It was stronger here, near the core. The gauntlet didn't block it; it merely translated the chaotic scream into a structured, painful hum. He could feel the final moments of the people who had died here not as a memory, but as a persistent, emotional scar on the fabric of the space.
"They were betrayed," Kaelen said softly, his eyes closed.
Elara turned from the door. "What?"
"The people here. They weren't overrun by the Weep. They were locked in." He pointed a gauntleted finger at the massive blast door they had cut through. "From the outside. The order came from a higher command. A 'Scorched Earth' protocol. They were left here to die, to prevent the Weep from accessing whatever was in this core."
Lyra paused her work, looking up at him. "You can feel that?"
"It's all I can feel," Kaelen replied, his voice strained. "Their panic. Their confusion. The moment they realized the air scrubbers had been shut off remotely." He opened his eyes, looking at a dusty skeleton slumped in the corner, a rusted sidearm lying near its bony fingers. "That one… he was the commander. He shot himself before the oxygen ran out."
A grim silence fell over the group. The Gleaners preached of the noble preservation of the old world, but this was a darker, more brutal truth. The Cataclysm hadn't just been an ecological disaster; it had been a societal collapse paved with human sacrifice.
"Found something," Lyra said, her voice pulling them from the morbid revelation. "It's not navigation data. It's a sealed, priority-one communiqué. The encryption is military-grade, but the header is clear. It's from a Dr. Aris. Addressed to 'Project Chimera.'"
Kael's head snapped up from where he was examining the dead nanites. "Aris? Are you certain?"
"The name is clear. You know it?"
"It's a legend in salvage circles," Kael rasped, moving to look over her shoulder. "Dr. Elias Aris. The architect of the 'Aethelburg Solution.' The man who supposedly designed the Spire-cities as arks. If anyone knew the truth of the Cataclysm, it was him."
"Can you open it?" Elara demanded, her strategic mind seeing the value instantly. Knowledge of the past was a currency more valuable than any pre-Cataclysm weapon.
"I'm trying. The encryption is… unlike anything I've seen. It's not just a code. It has a psionic lock. It's designed to be read by a specific mind." Lyra's eyes widened as she looked at her slate. "It's rejecting my attempts. The file is degrading with each failed passkey."
"A psionic lock?" Elara's gaze shifted to Kaelen. "Try him."
"Captain, if the file degrades completely—" Lyra started.
"It's useless to us if we can't open it. Do it."
Lyra hesitated for only a second before unplugging her slate and offering the interface cable to Kaelen. "The port is universal. Just… hold the end. Let the gauntlet make the connection."
Kaelen took the cable. The moment the metal tip touched the quartz plate on his palm, his world dissolved.
He was no longer in the bunker. A flood of raw data, images, and emotions—not the residual echoes of the dead, but a curated, intense recording—slammed into his consciousness.
He saw a laboratory, white and sterile, a stark contrast to the rust and decay he knew. A man with a kind, but desperately weary face—Dr. Aris—spoke directly to a recorder, his eyes haunted.
"—cannot stop the Sporefall. The Weep is beyond containment. The Aethelburg Spires will preserve a seed of humanity, but they are a delaying action, not a solution. The Solution is Project Chimera. Not a weapon to fight the Weep, but a key to… harmonize with it. To create a bridge. A Still Heart."
The image flickered. Aris looked over his shoulder, fear in his eyes. "They don't understand. The military, the politicians… they see a tool for domination. They want a weapon to control the Weep, to bend it to our will. But you cannot control a symphony by silencing the orchestra. You must find the conductor."
He leaned closer, his voice a whisper. "The Conduit is not a machine. It is a person. A specific genetic matrix, a psionic resonance that can act as the Still Heart. I've hidden the template. The key to finding it is in the—"
The vision shattered. A jolt of searing, defensive energy—a digital immune response—surged back through the cable. It was not a physical shock, but a psychic one, designed to obliterate the mind of any unauthorized user.
Kaelen's gauntlet flared violently, the quartz plates glowing red-hot. The controlled channel was overwhelmed by the sheer force of the defensive blast. A scream was torn from his throat as the foreign energy met the chaotic power of his own mutation. It wasn't a fusion; it was a catastrophic collision.
The gauntlet shattered.
Ceramic and quartz exploded outwards from his arm. Shards embedded themselves in the server banks. A wave of uncontrolled, raw energy—white, lanced with the angry red of the security protocol—erupted from his bare, crystalline hand. It wasn't a directed blast. It was a nova.
The blast threw everyone in the room from their feet. Server banks exploded in showers of sparks. Lyra's data-slate screen cracked and went dark. The ancient lights on the ceiling flickered and died, plunging them into near-darkness, the only illumination the frantic, strobing emergency lights and the raging inferno of Kaelen's exposed hand.
He was on his knees, clutching his wrist, agony screaming up his arm. The crystals were glowing with a ferocious, painful intensity, and he could feel them growing, crawling past his elbow, the pattern more jagged and aggressive than before.
Elara was the first to her feet, her rifle raised, not at him, but at the doorway. The explosion would have been heard for miles. Jax scrambled up, coughing in the smoke, his crossbow searching for a target.
Lyra crawled towards Kaelen, her face cut from a flying shard of ceramic. "The file… it's gone! It self-destructed!"
But Kaelen barely heard her. Amidst the psychic backlash, one clear, terrifying image from the data-stream remained burned into his mind. It wasn't a map or a set of coordinates. It was a single, looping sequence of DNA, a complex psionic signature. And he recognized it. It was the same signature he had felt in the Spirehold grotto, the same one that resonated in his own mutated cells.
Dr. Aris's final, desperate words echoed in his soul.
The Conduit is not a machine. It is a person.
Kaelen looked at his hand, the power raging unchecked, the crystals climbing his arm. The shattered gauntlet lay in pieces around him.
He wasn't a tool to be fixed. He wasn't just a navigator or a weapon.
He was the key. He was the template.
And the Gleaners outside, with their sensors and their protocols, had just felt the lock try to turn. The explosion wasn't just an accident. It was a beacon.
Elara grabbed his shoulder, her grip like iron. "Can you stand? We have to move. Now."
Kaelen looked up at her, his eyes wide with a new, profound horror. "They're not coming to take a contaminant," he whispered, his voice raw. "They're coming to take the master key."