The General shoved the door of the SUV open, but I was already out, my boots cracking the pavement. The stolen energy from Master Yan was a jagged, violet fire behind my eyes, and with it came his memories—flashes of maps, ancient texts, and a pulsing heat signature buried deep in the city's crust.
"Sire, the Bone-Giants are closing in! We need to extract!"
"Change of plans, General. We're going back to where it started." I pointed at the jagged silhouette of the Thorne Financial Tower. "There's a Spirit Vein directly beneath the foundation. Yan knew it. The Void Eye knows it. That's why they wanted this specific territory."
"A Spirit Vein? Under a hedge fund office?" The General looked skeptical, but he signaled the fleet to pivot.
"The perfect hiding place," I said, my voice vibrating with the power of the Anchor. "Hidden in plain sight under tons of steel and corporate greed."
We tore through the lobby. I didn't wait for security. I waved a hand, and the reinforced glass doors exploded into fine sand. The elevator was too slow. I grabbed the General and leaped into the service shaft, kicking off the walls until we reached the sub-basement.
The air down here was thick, smelling of ozone and wet earth. And something else. Something rotting.
"Who's there?" a voice wetly rasped from the darkness.
I flared my aura. The gold light illuminated the boiler room. Standing in the center of the chamber was a nightmare wearing the remnants of a bespoke Italian suit.
"Marcus?"
It was him, but his skin had turned a bruised, translucent gray. Black veins pulsated like worms under his cheeks, and his right arm had elongated into a jagged, chitinous blade. His eyes were no longer human—just two pits of swirling, oily void.
"Elias," Marcus hissed, a string of black bile dripping from his maw. "The Eye... they gave me a gift. They said if I killed you, I could have Clara back. I could have the world back."
"You sold your soul for a promotion again, Marcus?" I walked toward him, my footsteps heavy. "You're not a man anymore. You're a stray dog with a parasite."
"I am a God!" Marcus roared. He moved with a sickening, twitching speed, his blade-arm whistling through the air.
I caught the edge of the blade with my bare hand. The chitin hissed against my golden skin.
"You're a mistake," I said.
I slammed a fist into his chest. The impact sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a bag of wet gravel. Marcus flew back, crashing into a massive concrete pillar, but he didn't stop. He scrambled up the wall like an insect, his movements jerky and unnatural.
"You think you're the only one who changed?" Marcus shrieked. "The Void Eye saw my ambition! They filled the hole you left in me!"
"They filled you with trash," I countered. I leaped, meeting him mid-air. We crashed through a brick partition into the lowest level of the foundation—the forbidden zone.
The ground here wasn't concrete. It was carved obsidian. A massive, pulsing vein of blue light ran through the floor, thrumming with a power that made my Anchor hum in recognition.
"The Spirit Vein," I whispered.
"Mine!" Marcus lunged, his body distending, ribs snapping outward to form a cage of bone meant to impale me. "I'll drink the vein and then I'll drink you!"
"You couldn't even handle a desk job, Marcus. You think you can handle the essence of the world?"
I grabbed his protruding ribs and twisted. The sound of snapping bone filled the chamber. I slammed him down onto the obsidian floor, my knee pinning his mutated throat. I raised my glowing fist, the power of Master Yan and the Anchor merging into a singular, blinding point of light.
"Any last words? For the 'worthless' husband?"
Marcus grinned, his mouth filling with black ichor. "Look... down... Elias."
The obsidian floor didn't just crack. It groaned with the weight of five thousand years of silence.
"Sire, get back!" the General screamed from the ledge above.
The ground beneath us disintegrated. A chasm opened up, swallowing the Spirit Vein, Marcus, and me. We fell through the dark for what felt like miles, the air becoming warm and smelling of ancient incense and cold stone.
CRASH.
I hit the ground hard, my Sovereign body the only thing keeping me from turning into a pulp. I rolled to my feet, the golden light from my skin illuminating a world that shouldn't exist.
We weren't in a cave.
I was standing in the middle of a paved plaza. Around me rose towering spires of white marble, bioluminescent moss clinging to arched bridges that spanned bottomless canyons. Massive statues of kings with four arms stared down at me with emerald eyes. It was a city—silent, preserved, and vast enough to house millions.
Marcus lay ten feet away, his mutated body twitching as the black veins began to withdraw in terror.
"What is this?" I breathed.
A low, tectonic rumble shook the plaza. From the shadows of the nearest temple, a row of torches ignited with blue fire, one by one, stretching miles into the distance.
"Welcome back, High Heir," a voice boomed—not from a speaker, but from the very stones of the city.
"Who's there?" I demanded, the Anchor flaring to life.
A figure emerged from the temple. It wasn't a shadow or a mutant. It was a mechanical construct, twenty feet tall, draped in rotting silk and holding a spear that hummed with the power of the Spirit Vein.
"The Wardens have waited five millennia for the key to turn," the construct rumbled, its stone face shifting into a mask of judgment. "But you brought a rot into the Holy City."
The construct pointed its spear at Marcus, then shifted the tip to my heart.
"To save the city, the intruders must be purged. All of them."
Behind the first construct, a thousand more stepped out from the shadows, their eyes igniting with blue fire.