Adriana didn't pull back.
She let her muscles go limp, surrendering the "Mundane" control of her body.
In an instant, her posture changed.
Her spine straightened with an impossible, predatory grace, and her eyes stopped weeping, turning into twin pools of swirling white starlight.
Vaelen had taken the lead.
The Sentinel shrieked and lunged, its mirror-shards reflecting a thousand versions of a terrified Adriana.
But Vaelen-within-Adriana didn't look at the reflections.
He raised his hands, and the golden threads of the Root began to spin around his fingers like a spider's silk.
"You are a scavenger of the Void," Vaelen's voice projected through Adriana's throat, deep and echoing. "But I am the breath that made the first star."
As the Sentinel struck, Vaelen moved with a fluidity that defied physics.
He stepped through the creature's shadow.
With a sharp, rhythmic flick of his wrists, he caught the Sentinel's needle-limbs in a web of resonance.
He wasn't just fighting; he was Unmaking.
He struck the creature in three places the joints where the Architect's logic met the Void's entropy.
With every strike, he hummed a low, vibrating note that shattered the mirrors on the Sentinel's hide.
"Caius! The Core!"
Vaelen-Adriana commanded.
Caius, staring in awe at the ancient Weaver combat, snapped into action. He realized the Sentinel was distracting them from the fact that the Sea of Static was rising.
The bridge was being submerged.
"The Spark is moving!"
Caius shouted. "The Architect is relocating the Core to prevent the breach!"
The Sentinel let out a final, dying frequency as Vaelen-Adriana pulled the central gear from its eye.
The creature dissolved into a shower of rusted needles, falling harmlessly into the Sea.
Adriana's consciousness rushed back into her body like cold water.
She gasped, her knees buckling as the starlight faded from her eyes.
The exhaustion was a physical weight.
"Vaelen..." she whispered, feeling his presence retreat to the back of her mind, his energy almost entirely spent.
"He can't do that again,"
Caius said, catching her.
"He's flickering.
And the bridge is gone."
They looked ahead.
The golden path had ended.
Between them and the Great Spark was a mile of raw, churning Static, and it was getting louder.
The "Trash Folder" was sensing the intrusion, and the shadows of other, larger Sentinels were beginning to circle in the purple clouds above.
"I can't give any more memories," Adriana said, her voice trembling.
"I don't know who I am anymore."
"You don't need to give a memory," Caius said, his violet eyes glowing with a sudden, desperate logic.
"We need a Signal.
If we can't walk to the Core, we have to make the Core come to us."
He looked at the thousands of souls Adriana was carrying in her chest
the neighbors, the shopkeepers, the ghosts of the Museum district.
"They have to sing, Adriana.
All of them. If they all sound the same Note at the same time, the Core will recognize them as 'Existing' data and pull them in automatically."