Her voice was thin as dried parchment. Blood pooled on the stained linoleum beneath her shattered arm. Dovjen knelt, pressing bare knuckles to her forehead. A pale blue circuit light scanned beneath her skin, tracing ragged bio-signatures.
“Szilard,” Dovjen stated, his voice calm, cutting through Bato’s panicked whimpers. “She needs repairs. Immediately.”
Szilard, who had been muttering incantations to repair the cafe’s structural damage, snapped to attention. His boney fingers, usually poised over arcane runes, now hovered, calculating. “Ah, a temporal displacement of cellular integrity, combined with blunt force trauma and significant haemoglobin loss. Fascinating. A mundane wound, yet quite... extensive.” He shuffled closer, pulling a glowing vial from his robe. “Standard reanimation serum, fortified with a cellular repair accelerant. Should mend the flesh, though the pain will be... considerable.”
He uncorked the vial and poured the shimmering, opalescent liquid directly over Margit’s bent arm. She let out a choked cry, her body seizing as sinews knitted themselves back into place with audible pops and clicks. The raw flesh beneath her shredded coat began to reform, knitting with grotesque speed. In moments, the wound puckered into a jagged pink seam. She pushed herself up, wincing, jaw trembling.
“The Crucible Aegis,” Margit rasped, clutching her ribs. “Compromised. The World-Eater... it isn't waiting in orbit. It's written into the core routines, rotting the perimeter field from the root.” She struggled for breath, her gaze fixed on Dovjen. “That’s why the trials grew butcherous. It starved the barrier to feed the rot. The wardens aren't arbiters now—they're puppets hunting anyone who stops the bleed.”
“You mean,” Bato squeaked, wiping foam off his apron, “the program wants us culled? So the sky-maw feeds faster?”
“Precisely,” Margit said, spitting blood. “Every tally I harvested was a temporary solder on the hull. But the Aegis turned on me, sending hounds to rip out the battery.”
[Crucible Aegis: Soul Residue Harvested: 98,712 units. Void-Scar Anomaly entity generation rate increased by 400%.]
The Aegis’s message flashed, cold and indifferent, a stark counterpoint to Margit’s revelation. Dovjen tapped a rhythmic pulse against his knee. If the core logic had decayed, tinkering with the regulator was useless; he would take the entire apparatus apart with a blowtorch.
A shadow dropped through the sheared rafters, landing without a scrape on the tiled entry. Matte black plating sheathed the intruder, face hidden behind an unreflective visor. “Cull-Master Margit,” an artificial voice droned through the faceplate. “Your designation is revoked. The Aegis mandates liquidation.”
Margit shrank back against the table leg. “Kaelar? No—not you.”
The enforcer crossed the room in a blur of hydraulics, driving a humming monomolecular shard through her spine. The tip tore out through her sternum, biting two inches into the pine floorboards. Margit shuddered once and went limp.
Bato let out a terrified shriek, stumbling backward, knocking over a stack of pristine mugs. Beyond the collapsed wall, the swarm bayed. Tibor and the troll halted their sweeping fire, pivot-mounts whining as they locked their barrels onto the assassin.
Dovjen rose. The blue optic filaments behind his irises cooled to a matte, non-reflective pitch. Broken glass crunched under his boots as he stepped past a shattered sugar dispenser.
He raised his left hand, five fingers spread, gray static hissing off the copper rings welded into his knuckles.
The assassin gripped the hilt, head cocking sideways as sensors swept the mechanic. “The Anomaly follows. Compliance is mandatory.”
“No,” Dovjen stated, his voice quiet, almost a whisper, yet it resonated with an chilling finality. “You won’t.”
Dovjen snapped his fingers. Atmospheric pressure inside the assassin's gorget spiked ten thousand PSI, rupturing cervical vertebrae with the crack of a splitting timber. The armored helmet sheared free, ricocheting off a steel stanchion before denting the coffee bar. The headless carcass dropped like scrap iron.
Bato gagged. Szilard rubbed his skeletal chin, the tiny cogwheels in his ocular socket clicking in rapid appraisal. Dovjen stepped over Margit's blood, kneeling by the twitching heap of composite armor.
Necrotic thread whipped from Dovjen's fingertips, boring through synthetic sinew and titanium weave. Bone sheared, resetting into four short, splayed struts; the chest plate collapsed flat, locking into a low leather-padded tier. Rivets cinched tight with sharp metallic pings.
Where the assassin had stood lay an angular, low-slung footstool of burnished black plate and fused ribs, balanced on four rubber-tipped leg stumps.
Dovjen nudged it gently with his foot, then gestured toward Bato. “For your comfort, Bato. When you rest your feet.”
Bato stared at the macabre furniture, then at Dovjen, then back at the footstool, which still radiated a faint, malevolent aura. “You… you made a footstool out of him?” he stammered, his face pale.
“A comfortable one,” Dovjen affirmed, a hint of satisfaction in his tone. “And quite sturdy. It will serve its purpose.”
[Crucible Aegis: World-Threat Anomaly detected. System directive: Exterminate. Bastion Veszagrad structural integrity compromised. Deconstruction sequence initiated.]
Before anyone could react, the very ground beneath them shuddered. A deep, resonant groan echoed through the vast cavern of Bastion Veszagrad. The colossal, mechanized ribcage that formed the city’s protective shell began to move. Not just vibrate, but *flex*. Rivets popped like gunshots. Twisted metal shrieked. One by one, the massive, meter-thick iron ribs of the downed dreadnought began to slowly, inexorably, *contract*.
Bastion Veszagrad was folding like a crushed can.