The countdown hung in the vast interior of Golgant’s armored skull, a digital scar against the green and violet readouts. The machine's strides, a rhythmic tremor through the cyber-silk couch, marked each impact toward the world's heart. Tassio kept his eyelids shut, feigning sleep, though the chassis hum vibrated against bone. The network apparatus was synchronizing with deep geodetic markers, searching out long-buried coordinates. Sudden cold nausea seized his gut. [Mortis-Engine: First Architect Memory Fragment Retrieved. Core Access Codes Corrupted. Root Cause: Historical Transaction #374-Rho. Initiating Playback.] His thoughts blurred, ripped from the present. He stood not in the colossus, but in a pristine chamber of crystalline light, observing a holographic globe of Kravos before the fall. Young, impossibly arrogant, he had been at the peak of his genius, exhausted by the endless demands of planetary defense, dreaming only of peace and an undisturbed slumber. “A trivial matter, my lords,” his own voice echoed from decades back, smooth and dismissive. Before him, across a secured subspace channel, hovered three dark, amorphous silhouettes: the nascent Abyssal Lords. “You wish for a pathway. A back door, a ‘nexus anchor’ into deep conduits, for… academic observation. To understand our dimension, you say.” His younger self scoffed. “Very well. A single, temporary conduit. Minimal processing power. You leave Kravos alone, you leave *me* alone. And in return, I grant you schematics for a stable bypass. Consider it a truce.” He had given them the very keys to his kingdom. Not to invade, not to conquer, but to *observe*. A lazy, self-serving bargain, a shortcut to the peace he craved, never imagining their ‘observation’ would become an invasion, their ‘bypass’ a gaping maw that would swallow his entire world. The vision collapsed in a wrenching headache, leaving Tassio gasping, fingers clawing the armrest upholstery. Bitter bile coated his tongue. He had drafted the defense grid, only to leave the side door unlatched to buy an afternoon of quiet. Vellera, her hand resting near his, caught the shift. The casual smirk, the half-lidded indifference, had vanished, replaced by a raw, naked despair that clawed at her own composure. “Tassio? What was that?” When his eyelids lifted, dull slate stared back at her. “It was me. All of it. The rifts. The breach. The drill. I gave them the codes.” His voice went flat and thin. “Centuries ago. I just wanted to sleep undisturbed. I traded them passage, a neat little conduit, in exchange for quiet. They lied.” He looked toward the floorplates. “I ruined Kravos. You should draw your sidearm. End it before I compound the wreckage.” Vellera stared at him—the builder who could drag legions from scrap, crippled by pure, catastrophic indolence. Her fingers lunged forward, twisting into the cloth of his tunic collar. She wrenched him off the seat, crashing her mouth against his. Her lips, fierce and demanding, crushed against his. It wasn’t gentle, not romantic in the soft sense. It was a kiss of frustration, of fury, of a desperate, unyielding refusal to let him wallow. Her hand tangled in his hair, holding him captive for a long, breathless moment before she pulled back, her forehead still pressed against his, their breaths mingling, ragged and fast. “You don’t get to give up, Thassio Velt,” she hissed, her voice a low growl, her eyes blazing. “You don’t get to die a martyr for your own foolishness. You broke it. Now you fix it. You understand? You built the damn door, now you lock it.” She pulled back completely, her hand sweeping to the sidearm at her hip, a silent, powerful promise. “And if you try to run, if you try to lie down and sleep while my world burns, *then* I will execute you myself. But first, you fight.” Before Tassio could process her words or the salt on his mouth, the hull lurched violently. A shriek of tortured metal echoed through the hull. “Hostiles!” Vellera snapped, spinning around, her weapon already raised, the brief, raw intimacy vanishing into the instant demand of battle. [Mortis-Engine: Interdiction detected. Multiple high-level Abyssal Warlord signatures. Threat Level: Severe. Automated Defense Protocol Engaged.] From three collapsed towers, grotesque horrors lunged. A hulking brute of chitin and fused cannons slammed into the iron flank. A coiled horror of bio-cables and talons whipped around the knee joint, spraying corrosive bile. Above, an obsidian gargoyle plunged from the ash, black fire gouging armor plate. Tassio stayed sunk in the seat while Vellera vaulted through the hatch. Shoulder battery mounts whined, spitting particle fire that sheared through the winged monster's ribs. Vaulting off the stabilizing struts, she dropped onto the cable-beast's neck, severing the spinal bundle with two clean strokes. Golgant's left hydraulic arm slammed the armored brute through a derelict spire, burying it in shattered masonry. Vellera kept moving, driving her edge through exposed nerve nodes while automated point-defense spikes skewered the winged monstrosity. Heavy railgun slugs shredded the crawling brute before it could right its cannons. The three behemoths collapsed into steaming heaps. Vellera dropped back through the observation hatch, wiping a scrape near her ear with a gauntlet cuff, watching Tassio stare down at the corpses. “Satisfied?” she panted, wiping the blood away with the back of her gauntlet. “You want to sleep now?” Tassio pushed himself upright, a faint, almost mischievous glint returning to his eyes. “Sleep? Not yet. There is field work to handle. Those three look sturdy enough to haul supplies.” He raised an arm, flicking pale data streamers from his knuckles. [Mortis-Engine: Abyssal Warlord Biometrics Acquired. Synthetic Necromancy Protocol Engaged. Reward: Cyber-Warlord Reanimated. Status: Loyal.] Mutilated flesh and severed wiring jerked into alignment. Synthetic sinew snapped taut, cracked carapace fused under green sparks, and dull sensory bulbs reignited with cold emerald glow. The winged horror hauled itself upright, flanked by the reformed cable-beast and the reassembled siege brute. Vellera exhaled slowly as the three horrors dipped their massive skullplates toward the cockpit platform. The war machine resumed its stride, escorted by the reassembled vanguard. The planetary core vault opened into an obsidian cavern rumbling with magma conduits. At its heart, a colossal drill, dozens of meters thick, burrowed into the living rock, pulsing with dark, corrupted energy. And there, at the nexus of the drill and the core’s protective shell, stood Jorlan Kryk. He was no longer the charming scout. His form was a blasphemous fusion of flesh and machine, his body grotesquely distended, wires and conduits snaking from his skin into the drill itself. His eyes, once a vibrant blue, glowed with an unholy crimson light, his voice, when he spoke, a booming chorus of a thousand tormented souls. “The Architect arrives,” Jorlan boomed, his new form rippling with titanic might. “Just in time to witness my ascension! I have become one with the planetary mechanism! I am the final anchor! I am the new… God of Kravos!”

Sins of the Past