"Are you out of your mind?" Ivy asked as she hurriedly approached Damon.

He raised a brow. "What do you mean?"

"You kept them alive on purpose. I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to die because you find pleasure in toying with your enemies."

"I had my reasons," he replied flatly, offering no real explanation.

She stared at him for a few more moments before she decided to drop it, her gaze turning back to the slain enemies.

"Most people back home wouldn’t be able to last against me for more than a minute, and I probably wouldn’t fare too well against more than one of them at once. If Jax’s numbers are correct, then we have a real problem on our hands."

Damon nodded.

Although he was able to deal with them with fair ease, the same couldn’t be said about anyone else.

"That’s why I said what I said in the council meeting," he finally replied.

While his words might’ve seemed harsh back then, they came from a good place. He didn’t wish to leave anyone behind. He was willing to give them a hand when possible, just as he helped Eve evolve her class, but he was not going to let anyone be a dead weight to him or to their citadel, not anymore.

"What now?" Ivy asked, taking a quick look around them.

"We close the rift and head back home." 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

"Any idea where the rift core might be?"

"I have the feeling that it might be that way," Damon replied, pointing toward one of the streets that had a lot more vines around it. The gas lamps were almost all diminished, leaving only a path of darkness ahead of them.

"Figures," she murmured and the two of them began to walk toward it.

***

The street ahead was darker than anything they’d passed through yet.

Every gas lamp along it had gone out completely, leaving only the faint bioluminescence of the black vines to light the way, a dim, pulsing black smoke that made everything look wrong.

More Town Keepers emerged as they moved.

They dealt with them quickly. Their rhythm was established enough that neither needed to direct the other. Ivy’s flames found angles, Damon closed gaps, and the creatures fell faster than the earlier ones had.

The street narrowed as they went deeper.

The buildings pressed closer together until the architecture above them merged entirely, creating a covered passage where the rain couldn’t reach. The silence inside it was different from the open street, heavier, and a lot more deliberate.

Then the passage opened.

A cathedral filled the space ahead.

It was enormous, its spires lost in the dark above, its doors standing open with the particular permanence of something that had never been closed. Black vines covered every surface completely, the smoke pouring from them in steady streams that converged at the entrance like breath.

The rift core hung above the altar inside, visible through the open doors.

Ivy stopped beside Damon, whose gaze narrowed as he looked ahead.

"You think it’s in there?" Ivy asked, though she felt like she already knew the answer.

Looking at the creepy building in front of them, Damon had no doubts that if there was one place the system would put a rift core, it would be there.

"Yeah," he replied. "I’d be surprised if it wasn’t."

With that, they walked through the entrance.

The interior swallowed them whole.

The cathedral was vast, far larger inside than the exterior had suggested, the kind of architectural impossibility that only existed within rifts. Rows of pews stretched the length of the nave, each one covered in black vines to the point where the wood beneath was no longer visible.

Stained glass lined the walls on either side, but the images within it were wrong. Not religious figures but hunched shapes, twisted mid-motion, depicted in deep purples and blacks that let through almost no light.

Candles burned along the walls in iron holders.

Not gas lamps they saw outside, but actual candles, their flames the same pale blue as the street lamps outside. They provided just enough light to see and nothing more.

The floor was cracked down the centre, the gap running the full length of the nave toward the altar. Something black and slow moved through it far below, visible only as a suggestion of depth.

The altar stood at the far end.

It was carved from the same dark stone as everything else, its surface completely consumed by vines.

Above it, suspended in the air without any visible means of support, hung the rift core.

It was larger than any Damon had encountered. The darkness of it pulled at the light in the cathedral the way a drain pulled water, slow, continuous and inescapable.

The candle flames nearest to it bent toward it rather than upward.

Then, a figure suddenly moved.

It had been standing before the altar so still that Damon had mistaken it for a statue.

It stood roughly three meters tall, clad in plate armour that had been consumed and reshaped by the black vines. Not covered like everything else, but merged, the metal and the organic nature of the vines grew together into something that was neither entirely one nor the other.

Its helmet had no visor.

Where a face should have been was a smooth plate of dark metal with a single horizontal crack of pale blue light running across it, the same blue as the candles and the gas lamps outside.

It carried a weapon that took Damon a moment to identify.

A glaive, but slightly wrong in its proportions. The blade extended from both ends of the shaft rather than one, curving in opposite directions to form a shape closer to a crescent. The metal of it was dark and eaten through with the same vine growth as the armour, but the edges caught the candlelight in a way that suggested it remained sharp regardless.

Its footsteps echoed across the cathedral as it turned toward them.

The pale blue crack across its helmet brightened, as if taking notice of them, and a second later, the figure disappeared just as all the candles around them extinguished at once.