The sealed blast plates deadened all sound from the Sinks outside, dropping the room into sudden, thick silence. The executive, or what remained of him, pulsed with pale azure radiance along the fibrous growths fused to his flesh, his single human eye gleaming. [ALERT: CONTAINMENT FIELD ENGAGED.] [HOSTILE CONGLOMERATE ENTITY ATTEMPTING NON-CONSENSUAL HARVEST OF REGISTERED SPATIAL SIGNATURES.] [UPKEEP TIMER: 21 HOURS REMAINING.] “Harvest?” Orik muttered, his pipe tool feeling flimsy in his grip. The idea of losing square footage, let alone having square footage seized, made his stomach turn. This was about territory. [CRITICAL OBJECTIVE UPDATE: SEVER THE CORPORATE RIFT-TETHERS AND CLAIM OWNERSHIP.] “Sever?” Tarkis said, shifting his grip on the hilt of his borrowed steel blade, the metal reflecting the mutated CEO’s unnatural glare. “Good. Simpler than haggling over a lease agreement.” “You don’t sever a man,” Zoya hissed, her eyes frantically scanning the locked-down room, her data-slate clutched like a shield. “You *subdue* him.” The director produced a dry, grating laugh. “You misunderstand. The harvest has already begun.” The polished chrome along the perimeter rippled, stretched thin, and snapped back with a sharp crack. A porcelain urn on an end table twisted into a brittle filament before collapsing into grey powder. “He bends the room itself,” Tarkis said, dropping into a wide crouch as the floor plates buckled beneath his boots. The blade in his hand hummed with faint vibration. The creature’s outline split, multiplying across the suite. Scores of identical copies took form along the walls, the root-sprouts across their shoulders glowing blue against the dim carpet. “Draw them off!” Orik called, digging a handful of glowing raw gems from his pouch. He had hoarded these cut stones from the Greenhouse’s output, loath to spend a single micro-gram. Now, facing an unstable rift-host, he had no alternative. As the duplicates converged, Tarkis stepped forward with fluid precision. His steel severed two of the figures into wisps of vapor, but passed clean through a third. The host chuckled through fifty throats. “A crude edge, sword-master. My mass is fluid.” A duplicate solidified behind Tarkis, its knuckles erupting in a thorny vine that coiled around the swordsman’s forearm. Tarkis yanked himself clear with a grunt, though his sleeve burned away at the point of contact, leaving scorched skin. Orik struck two blue gems together against his palm. They split with a sharp crack, venting bright azure heat. He hurled the glowing fragments at the nearest phantom. The miniature detonation erased the duplicate in a pop of displaced air and ozone. More copies coalesced, their root-whips snapping toward Zoya. Orik broke a third mineral node, then a fourth, throwing them to carve out small pockets of firm footing. Every shattered facet cost him valuable inventory, but losing his spatial deed would cost far more. “Give me a mark!” Tarkis shouted, ducking beneath a whipping root that singed the carpet. “He is dispersed across the whole floor!” Zoya, crouched behind a heavy steel credenza, tapped rapidly into her terminal. “I am tracking the line feed through the environmental board. If I sever his localized anchors—” Before she could finish, a replica phased through the metal slab, whipping a filament toward her neck. Orik flung an amber vial from his pouch. It shattered over the figure’s breastplate, dissolving the phantom in a spray of acid vapor. *Three hundred credits of refined solvent,* he noted bitterly. *Straight from the lab shelf.* “The conduit feeds directly to the tower’s upper hub,” Zoya said without looking up from the screen. “The architecture calls it the Axial Rift-Tether. He draws siphon pressure through it and projects his mass into the room. The system locks behind an Executive Override Key—and he has the physical token on him!” Orik signaled to Tarkis, who adjusted his grip and nodded. “Draw his mass together. I will clear the line.” Orik struck his palms together, triggering [Cinder Fist]. Pale orange heat pooled under his skin. He still held two intact energy stones in his pocket. As the copies surged, Orik charged into the open to pull their focus. His ignited strikes burnt straight through the weaker projections, while his last two energy stones shattered against the central cluster to scatter the phantoms. Tarkis drove his blade through the denser bodies with steady economy, taking shallow cuts along his shoulders to keep the target off Orik. The false projections collapsed inward as the creature was forced to consolidate its dispersed mass. Soon only the primary host remained, rooted at the center of the hall, the blue fibrous growths along his collar flaring with frantic light. “You miserable scrap-merchant!” the corporate officer roared, his voice rattling the ceiling beams. “You think you can dismantle an integrated conduit? I *am* the source!” “You’re an unregistered squatter,” Orik barked, unhooking the heavy iron wrench from his loop. “And your lease just expired.” He closed the distance, ducking past two trailing root-whips. Bypassing his leased martial skill, he brought the heavy cast-iron wrench down in a flat, vicious arc aimed straight at the knot of rift-fibers in the director's sternum. The wrench slammed home with a brittle crunch against the calcified core buried in the stalk-bundle. A blue splinter fractured loose, tearing a wet screech from the CEO's throat. The fungal growths shriveled back into his chest cavity, dropping a rectangular obsidian card-key to the carpet. [OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: HOSTILE CONGLOMERATE ENTITY SUBDUED.] [REWARD: EXECUTIVE OVERRIDE KEY (ONE-TIME USE).] Zoya darted out, scooping up the obsidian token and slotting it into her terminal. “That confirms it. The Axial Rift-Tether Hub sits three levels up via the maintenance shaft. All extraction channels feed there.” The fallen executive crawled backward against the perimeter wall, coughing black bile. “Idiots. Aethel Corp will not surrender extraction rights. If the harvest fails, the whole block goes into the void.” Zoya looked up sharply from her monitor readout. “He tripped the scuttle protocols. The primary tether is building to an overload purge!” The building frame groaned under tectonic strain. Along the sealed window plates, metal seams peeled inward, sucked toward the center of the tower. From the stairwell shafts rose an ear-splitting howl of collapsing pressure. The mutilated CEO hacked up a jagged laugh as the deck tilted five degrees under their feet. The skyscraper was tearing itself apart.

Ascending the Tower