Elora had been quiet before—but never quite like this.
Up on the surface, the mountain city was slowly coming back to life, one level at a time.
Those solar towers that had been cracked and belching smoke? Now they were wrapped in ash-grey scaffolding.
Engineers drifted through the streets like spirits, fixing busted cables and getting the defense pylons back online.
You'd see Thornkin healers working right alongside Ashari medics in the main squares, patching people up with singing roots and soil-made salves. The smoke from all those recent fires still hung around the walls.
Nobody wanted to say it out loud, but every breath you took tasted like you'd barely made it through.
Down below though, where the mountain's core hummed with that artificial warmth, the lab had gone completely dead.
Lio Venn stood there by himself under those harsh white lights, watching machines that just wouldn't listen anymore.
The three Infinity-class Ascendants—IF-1 Solarblade, IF-2 Fission Lance, IF-3 Guardian—sat there on their reinforced magnetic platforms, massive bodies dark and lifeless.
No energy flowing through their armor anymore. Their core nodes had gone quiet, barely warm when you touched them, like they were trying to remember when they used to burn bright.
Lio hadn't bothered with sleep. Couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten anything. His eyes stayed glued to that diagnostic display, watching thousands of lines of shutdown code scroll by.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," he said under his breath. His voice came out all scratchy from not talking. He ran his fingers through his hair and tapped the screen one more time.
The playback kicked in right from when everything went sideways.
First came the battle sounds—explosions, people screaming, that rising whine of Omnikill charging up.
Then those words came through.
Crystal clear. Calm as anything. Like someone reading from a holy book.
> "Second-generation tech. Predictable. Obsolete."
Lio's hands went still.
He watched that moment again. And again.
Omnikill's voice wasn't just full of contempt—it carried this absolute certainty. *Knowledge.* The kind that only someone like Dr. Eland Voss could've handed over.
> "Welcome to Generation Three."
Lio stepped back from the console like he'd been smacked. His heart started hammering, ears filling up with static.
Generation Three.
The words kept spinning around in his head like some song he couldn't shake.
The IF units—their most advanced war machines—were second-generation stuff. Years ahead of most field units, but Omnikill had made them useless in seconds. He hadn't even *bothered* fighting them. Just... flipped a switch. Turned all that brilliance into scrap metal.
Lio ground his teeth, eyes stinging.
He turned to the table next to him, where open blueprints fluttered under the projection light. There were the control cores. The feedback dampeners. The soul-link stabilizers—Lio's own creation that let the Infinity units think for themselves.
All of it compromised. All of it vulnerable.
He tapped a side console, bringing up a fresh interface. Blank slate. New design.
His fingers flew across the screen.
> Adaptive feedback loop.
> Hollow-resistant firewall.
> Triple-layered override buffer.
He wasn't just fixing them. He was *rebuilding* them from scratch. Not as soldiers. As *solutions.*
"They think we're playing catch-up," he whispered, his voice getting sharper, full of steel now. "They think they've left us eating dust."
The IF-1 core gave a faint hum. A spark flickered and died out.
"Dr. Voss built his future on backstabbing," Lio said. "I'm building one that can't be switched off."
He worked faster now, pulling from every field he'd ever touched—neural mapping, quantum coding, emotional ghost-logic. The lab got brighter with each line of code, each schematic burning across the consoles like fire.
He dug up old logs, pulled memories from the IF units. *Solarblade's charge. Fission Lance's plasma blast. Guardian's last desperate block before the shutdown.* Precision. Loyalty. Raw power. All thrown away by a traitor's betrayal.
Lio clenched his fist. "Not this time."
A low rumble rolled through the floor—maybe an aftershock from up top, or just the mountain settling into its grief. But it felt like a heartbeat. Like Elora itself was paying attention.
Lio walked over to IF-1's still form. Solarblade's frame caught the light even without power—all those curves designed for speed, strength, and grace. His hand hung over the cold armor.
"I'm going to bring you back," he said quietly. "But not like you were before."
He moved to Guardian next, pressing his palm gently against the center of that broad, shield-like chest.
"You held the line when everything else crumbled. This time, they won't be able to take that away from you."
And Fission Lance last—brilliant, unpredictable, devastating.
"You're not just fire," Lio said. "You're pure defiance."
He stepped back, taking all three of them in. Not sleeping anymore. Just waiting. Like he was.
Lio turned back to his console, saving the blueprint under a new name:
> **Project Ascendancy IV.**
One last look at the screen—then he locked it down with secure encryption.
As the lights dimmed and the lab's machines went into standby mode, Lio stood alone in that soft glow.
"I'm done chasing Voss's shadow," he whispered. "From here on out, I'm leaving it behind."
Then he turned and walked out of that quiet lab, fire in every step.
The Evershade Forest took its children back, but the wind moving through the leaves carried no music. As the Thornkin envoys passed under those towering, ancient trees, even the magic here—old as dirt itself—felt restless.
Warden Velan led the procession, his bark-plated armor groaning with each step. Around him, Thornkin soldiers rode mounts grown from twisted vines and hardened sap. The trees murmured, recognizing their return, but those voices carried worry instead of welcome.
"You feel that?" asked Rootspeaker Thyla, riding alongside him. Her eyes, shimmering with saplight, swept the canopy overhead. "The forest remembers pain."
Velan grunted. "It remembers more than pain. It remembers when it couldn't protect us."
Nobody argued with that. They all remembered what it cost the Evershade to push back that last Omniraith attack—a swarming, chittering tide of rot and steel that clawed at the forest's borders. They'd stopped it then. But what if the next thing that showed up didn't give a damn about roots or magic?
"What if the next Omnikill just walks through the trees like they're not even there?" someone muttered from the back.
Nobody had an answer for that. Because none of them could think of one.
Way down beneath the waves, the ocean faded to black.
The Myrvane convoy dropped in silence, sleek subs gliding toward the abyssal gates of Vael'tor. Inside one of the lead vessels, Commander Yethar hunched over the console, checking sonar patterns and energy readings from the upper trenches. Next to him, Lieutenant Seris fiddled with the sensor arrays, her movements jumpy.
"Nothing following us," she reported. "But…" She paused. "The deep's stirring."
Yethar didn't look up. "It's always stirring. What gets to me is how long it stays quiet."
The water pressure down here would crush most machines flat. Hydroform drones had tried to break through their defenses weeks back and got torn apart by gravity trenches and magnetic bursts. Aegis Sorrowhelm herself had smashed half a dozen with her trident alone.
But still…
"If the Core Nexus builds something new," Seris said, keeping her voice low, "something that doesn't care about pressure, that can move through water like a hunter…"
Yethar nodded grimly. "Then even our safe places aren't safe anymore."
Back in the Evershade, Velan stood outside a vine-covered outpost built right into a living tree. The spire above it pulsed with slow green light. A Thornkin soldier walked up, the glow of her tattoos dim with worry.
"Is it real?" she asked quietly. "About the hybrid? The one with a human mind and Hollow power?"
Velan didn't answer right away. He looked east, where the sky had started darkening even though it was still morning.
Finally he spoke: "They're calling it Steelborn. A weapon designed to change the rules. To turn soil into steel. To make the world forget what it means to breathe."
"And if it comes here?"
"We hope the forest decides to fight back. And we hope we're enough."
In the Myrvane capital's outer docking ring, soldiers climbed out of their subs into the glowing pressure domes of Vael'tor. Coral walls shimmered with living light. The ocean outside looked peaceful, but everyone knew how fast that could change.
Seris found herself standing next to an older Myrvane tactician named Kolenn, who stared at the reinforced gates like he expected them to buckle any second.
"They'll send it," Kolenn muttered. "Not just drones or Omnikill this time. They'll send something smarter. Something built for diving."
Seris swallowed hard. "Would the alliance help? If we got hit first?"
Kolenn shook his head. "They'd try. But Elora's still healing. The Thornkin are guarding their forest. Everyone's protecting their own."
"And if it's already too late?"
"Then we count on the ones who've already gone underground."
Seris looked up at the ceiling, imagining the mountain far above the sea, where a strike team moved through shadows and tunnels.
"The Ghostline," she whispered.
Back in the forest, Velan took off his helmet and set it at the base of an ancient tree. Moss wrapped around it like a blessing—or maybe a burial shroud.
"Can we trust them?" Thyla asked softly. "The Ashari. The Myrvane. Even the Ghostline?"
"We have to," he said. "Because if they don't make it…"
He didn't finish that thought.
Above them all, across forest, ocean, and mountain, storm clouds were gathering.
In a small shrine made from coral and glass, Seris lit a shard-lantern and placed it next to a sculpture of a drifting jellyflower—the symbol of resilience in Myrvane culture.
A whisper drifted through the shrine, carried by old water and fresh hope.
"May they swim the dark unseen, strike fast, and come home whole."
In the sacred hollow at the forest's heart, Velan pressed his hand against a vine-covered stone. His voice joined the memory of every warrior who'd protected this place.
"May the roots remember your names, Ghostline. And may your steps stay silent… until the last shadow falls."
Together, in different worlds, two quiet voices rose:
"We're hoping they pull this off."
Because if they didn't…
There wouldn't be anyone left to hope for.