The service tunnel was no longer a corridor of shadows; it was a throat constricting around me. The psychic alarm from the Vault was a physical force, a pressure in my skull that throbbed with the rhythm of a panicked heart. Distant, actual sirens began to wail, their echoes twisting through the stone like hunting horns. The academy was waking, and it was waking angry.
My body screamed. The graft in my core was a knot of fire, strained to its limit by the Engine's use and the null-seed's proximity. The lead-lined pouch at my belt was a cold sun of silent gravity, warping my sense of balance. The Invisibility Potion had long since worn off, leaving me exposed, a clear signature of panic and stolen divinity in the suddenly alert magical atmosphere.
I ran, not with grace, but with the frantic, stumbling haste of a wounded animal. My plan, so meticulously built, had ended at the theft. Escape was always the nebulous, desperate second half. Now, it was everything.
[ANALYSIS: SITUATION CRITICAL. HEADMASTER CAELUM'S AWARENESS IS FOCUSING. PROBABILITY OF INTERCEPTION BEFORE REACHING THE TOWER OF WEEPING STONE: 87%. ALTERNATIVE ROUTES CALCULATING…]
Machina's calm, sterile voice in my mind was a lifeline. A map of the tunnels superimposed over my vision, highlighting paths in red (warded), yellow (patrolled), and a single, thin, flickering green line—a maintenance shaft for steam vents, long disused, its security likely minimal but its environment… hazardous.
It was my only chance. The main tunnels would be sealed, flooded with security constructs and faculty within minutes.
I veered left, shoulder-checking a damp wall, and found the access hatch—a rusted iron wheel set into the stone. I gripped it, my muscles protesting. It didn't budge. Decades of corrosion had frozen it solid.
A sob of frustration tore from my throat. I was trapped. The hunting pressure grew stronger; I could feel tendrils of awareness, cold and vast as a glacier, beginning to sweep the lower levels. The Headmaster.
Think. Principles.
I didn't have the strength to break the rust. I couldn't use the Engine; it was dead. My [Flicker Step] was useless over this distance, in this state.
But I had other stolen things. The [Mana-Sense] that showed me the world's energy. The [Kinetic Dispersal] that softened blows. And the understanding of decay.
I placed both hands on the frozen wheel. I didn't try to turn it. I focused my senses on the metal, feeling its structure, the points where oxygen and moisture had wedged themselves into its crystalline lattice, the weak points created by time and neglect.
Then, I pushed. Not with physical force, but with a strand of my refined mana, sharp as a surgeon's lance, imbued with the principle of accelerated oxidation I'd learned from Vane's lectures on metallic entropy. I didn't attack the whole wheel. I targeted a single, critical stress point at the base of the central spindle.
A tiny, focused burst of corrosive intent.
A sharp crack, like a snapping twig, echoed in the tunnel. A hairline fracture appeared in the rust. The wheel groaned, shifted a millimeter.
It was enough. I threw my weight against it, the [Kinetic Dispersal] spreading the strain through my body to prevent my shoulders from dislocating. The wheel screamed in protest, then gave, rotating with a shower of orange dust.
I wrenched the hatch open. A blast of hot, damp, sulfurous air hit me in the face. The shaft beyond was a vertical climb into roaring darkness, lit from below by a faint, hellish orange glow and the hiss of pressurized steam.
No time for hesitation. I climbed in, pulling the hatch shut behind me. The ladder was iron, scalding to the touch even through my gloves. I ascended, each rung burning my palms, the heat sapping my already depleted strength. Below, the geothermal vents churned; a misstep meant a fall into boiling water or live steam.
Halfway up, a wave of disorientation hit me. Not from heat or exhaustion, but from the null-seed. Its silence was a vacuum, and it was beginning to pull at the edges of my own being. The void-datum in my mind resonated, a howl of kinship. The stasis-graft strained, a dam holding back a tide of nothingness. My thoughts grew fuzzy, distant. It was hard to remember why I was climbing, why my hands burned.
[PSYCHIC INTEGRITY WARNING: PROXIMITY TO DORMANT NULL-SEED IS INDUCING COGNITIVE DISSOCIATION. FOCUS ON ANCHOR MEMORY.]
An anchor. What did I have left? Not hope. Not friends. A memory.
The Mossback. The first theft. The simple, patient principle of persistence. One foot. Then the other. Just move.
I clung to that. I became the Mossback, slow, patient, enduring. The burning metal, the stifling heat, the psychic weight of the seed—they were just the stone I had to crawl across.
I reached the top of the shaft, another hatch. This one opened into a basement boiler room, long automated and deserted. I collapsed onto the cool, dusty floor, gasping, my hands blistered and raw.
But I wasn't safe. The Headmaster's search would be comprehensive. He would feel the hole in the Vault's reality, the missing seed's signature. He would track its null-gravity like a shark scenting blood in water.
I had to get to the one place in the academy that might mask such a signature: the Tower of Weeping Stone. Its sub-basement's quiet cage was designed to contain energetic and metaphysical anomalies. It was my only hope of hiding the seed long enough to… to do what? I had no plan beyond survival.
I staggered to my feet. Moving through the service areas of the academy now was a different game. The alarms were louder here, in the inhabited spaces. Shouts echoed. The thunderous clank of security golems mobilizing vibrated through the floor. I used my remaining Dampeners—tiny, single-use discs—to slip past activated door wards, creating fleeting holes in the net that was closing around me.
Every corner was a potential ambush. Every open space felt like a shooting gallery. I was a ghost haunting my own home, and the exorcists were coming.
I reached the tower's outer door. I didn't knock. I used the last dregs of my will to trigger a hidden release rune Vane had shown me—an emergency bypass for "specimen containment breaches."
The door swung open. I fell inside, into the familiar, dusty dark.
And found Professor Vane waiting.
He stood in the center of his main chamber, not working, just standing, his gaunt frame a silhouette against the greenish glow of his desk stone. He held a scalpel, not as a tool, but like a conductor's baton.
"You," he rasped, his voice devoid of its usual dry curiosity. It was flat. Final. "You triggered a Category Omega breach alert. The Vault. The null-seed is gone."
He knew. Of course he knew. The psychic shockwave would have been unmistakable to a specialist in decay.
I didn't deny it. I couldn't. I just leaned against the wall, breathing in ragged, painful gulps, the pouch with the seed a lead weight threatening to pull me through the floor.
Vane took a step forward. "You have it. On your person. I can feel the… hole in the world you're carrying." His magnified eyes were wide, not with anger, but with a kind of horrific awe. "You didn't just steal it. You took it. From the heart of the defenses. How?"
"It doesn't matter," I croaked. "I need the quiet cage. To hide it. To…" To what? Stabilize it? Study it? I didn't know.
"Hide it?" Vane let out a short, sharp bark that might have been a laugh. "Boy, you cannot hide a silent supernova. Caelum will tear this tower apart stone by stone. He will unmake every preservation ward, dissect every memory in this dust. He will find it. And he will find you."
"Then help me," I pleaded, the words ash in my mouth. "You're the only one who understands… this." I gestured vaguely at my chest, at the graft, at the void-datum, at the seed.
"I understand it is the end," Vane said softly. "For you. For me. For this entire carefully balanced farce." He looked at the pouch on my belt as if it were a venomous serpent. "That seed… it is not just a fragment. It is a potential. A possibility of a different kind of end. A quiet one. Caelum fears it. The Venati covet it. And you… you have made it your pet."
He took another step, closer. He wasn't threatening me. He was… examining me. "You are unraveling, Kaelen. The graft is failing under the strain. Your mind is fraying at the edges of that silence. You are a complex system undergoing cascading failure, and you have just attached a bomb to the core."
"I know," I whispered.
For a long moment, he was silent. The distant alarms were a muffled throb through the tower's thick walls.
Then, he sighed, a sound of infinite weariness. "The quiet cage will not hide it from Caelum. But it might… stabilize you. Long enough for a choice."
"A choice?"
"To give it to him," Vane said. "Or to try and use it." He looked at me, and in his watery eyes, I saw not pity, but a scientist's brutal fascination. "If you choose the latter, you will need to integrate it. As you did the carapace. But this… this is not a bandage. This is a rewrite. It will not graft. It will consume. You will either become something new, or you will become nothing at all."
He turned and walked towards the stairs leading down to the sub-basement. "The cage is yours. For twelve hours. Then, I must report your presence. That is the limit of my… professional curiosity."
He left me there, standing in the dust.
I had stolen the heart of the hush. Now, I had twelve hours to decide whether to surrender it, or to let it swallow me whole. The web of my plans was unraveling, and at its center was no longer a thief, but a choice between two kinds of ending: the Headmaster's justice, or the seed's perfect, silent void.