The entrance to Neo’s territory was less a gate and more a wound, a jagged gash in the earth where the city’s eastern suburbs had collapsed into a labyrinth of old mine shafts and repurposed industrial tunnels. The air smelled of rust, damp stone, and something acrid, like burnt coolant.

Orin waited for them in the shadow of a broken excavator. He was a lean, wiry man in his late thirties, with sunken cheeks and eyes that moved too quickly, scanning for threats even when there were none. Vex had described him as "my best burrower"—a former miner who’d survived the virus by learning the bones of the earth better than the monsters did. Orin wore a patched leather coat over a scavenged chest rig, and his left hand was a crude prosthetic of interlocking metal plates, salvaged from scrap. He didn’t smile when Julian approached. He just nodded, once.

"You’re the Ghost," Orin said.

Julian didn’t bother confirming or denying. "You know the way in."

"I know every crack in this corpse of a city." Orin spat on the ground. "But knowing and walking are different things. Neo ain’t like Rain or Greenday. Down there, the rocks have ears. And Corvin? He’s got the worst kind of patience."

Zoe, still in her human form but with her senses already sharpening, tilted her head. "Patience kills."

"Not his," Orin muttered. He crouched, pulling a small glow-stick from his pocket, cracking it to cast a dim green light. "Listen close. I’m only saying this once."

Orin traced a rough map on the dusty ground with a finger. "Neo’s main base is three hundred meters below the old processing plant. Four levels. Top level is storage and barracks twenty to thirty guards, most with minor combat skills. Second level is the refinery. That’s where they process the mineral nodes. Third level is the armory and comms. But the bottom level..." He paused, his jaw tightening. "That’s Corvin’s den. No one goes down there except his inner circle."

"What’s his skill?" Julian asked. His voice was flat, but Orin felt the weight beneath it.

"Abyss Gate." Orin’s prosthetic fingers twitched. "You ever seen a man fold space like paper? Corvin opens a gate not to somewhere else, but to nothing. A void pocket. Anything caught inside gets stretched, compressed, torn apart on a molecular level. Doesn’t matter if you’re steel or stone or flesh. Once that gate closes, you’re gone."

Dori, who had been standing quietly behind Julian, pressed a hand to her mouth. "Then how do you fight him?"

"You don’t," Orin said. "You kill him before he opens it. The gate takes three seconds to form. Three seconds where he can’t move and defend himself. That’s your window. If you see his eyes go white and his hands start tracing a circle in the air—" Orin made a slicing motion across his throat. "End him."

Julian absorbed this without a change in expression. "Three seconds is enough."

"It’s not," Orin insisted, his voice rising slightly. "Because he knows it too. He’ll have traps, decoys, bodyguards. He won’t let you get close unless he’s already winning." He looked at Julian with something like pity. "Vex told me you’re good. But good doesn’t matter against Abyss Gate. Only speed and ruthlessness."

Zoe stepped closer to Julian, her shoulder brushing his. She says, "We’ll be ready."

Orin sighed and stood. "Fine. The quickest route is through the old water treatment tunnel. It’s tight, dark, and half-collapsed. But it spits you out right below the storage level. No patrols because the mutants nest in there. But I assume you have a way around that."

Dori’s cheeks flushed, but she nodded. "I can hide us. As long as we stay close and don’t make loud noises."

"Then let’s move," Julian said.

They entered through a drainage pipe wide enough for a single file. Water splashed around their ankles. Orin led, his prosthetic scraping against the curved walls. Julian came second, then Dori, her hands clasped in front of her, focusing. Zoe brought up the rear, her breathing slow and controlled.

Dori’s Conceal unfolded like a silk shroud. The few mutant creatures they passed a cluster of blind, pale crawlers feeding on mineral residue simply looked through them, their heads swiveling without focus. One brushed against Dori’s leg, and she bit her lip to keep from gasping, but the creature moved on, disinterested.

After twenty minutes of silent trudging, the pipe opened into a wider cavern. Artificial lights flickering revealed the underbelly of Neo’s first level. Catwalks, rusted containers, and the distant murmur of voices.

Orin pointed upward. "That grating leads to the storage bay. Corvin’s office is on the far side, past the central lift. I can’t go further, they know my face." He handed Julian a small, magnetized data-slate. "Layout’s on there. Good luck, Ghost. You’ll need it."

Julian took the slate. "You’ve done enough."

Orin disappeared back into the pipe, his footsteps fading.

Dori expanded her Conceal to cover the three of them as they climbed the ladder to the grating. Julian pried it open with a whisper of Gravity. They slipped through. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

The storage bay was huge, filled with crates of refined mineral cores. Workers moved between them, humans branded with Neo’s crescent-moon insignia, most of them unskilled, exhausted.

Zoe pointed to a staircase at the far end, leading down. Julian nodded.

They descended to the second level, then the third. Each floor had more guards, more cameras, but Dori’s Conceal held. Sweat beaded on her forehead, her steps grew heavier. Julian placed a hand on her back a brief, grounding touch.

’Almost there.’

Finally, they reached a reinforced door at the end of a dim corridor. A sign read: CORVIN – PRIVATE. NO ENTRY.

Julian pressed his ear to the metal. Inside, a voice was speaking calm.

"...tell Darwin that Greenday’s loss is tolerable. We have enough mineral stock to last six months. The Ghost is overextended. He’ll make a mistake."

Julian’s lips curved into a thin, cold line. ’No. I won’t.’

He looked at Zoe. She shifted into her beast form, her black fur bristling. Dori kept the Conceal wrapped around them until the last possible second.

Julian raised three fingers.

One.

Two.

Three.

He kicked the door off its hinges.

The Door Comes Off.

The reinforced door didn’t just swing open, it flew across the room, shearing off one of its hinges and crashing into a steel cabinet. Corvin shot up from his chair, his hand already mid-reach for a weapon on his desk.

He was thinner than Julian expected, with slicked-back gray hair and pale eyes that widened for just a fraction of a second before narrowing into cold calculation. His office was large, map tables, communication arrays, and four guards stationed at the corners, each one snapping to attention.

Corvin didn’t yell. He didn’t panic. He simply pointed at Julian and said, "Kill him."

The guards moved. Two stepped in front of Corvin, raising their arms. Their skin rippled, metal plating pushing through like second-rate armor, low-level Ferrokinesis. The other two slammed their palms against the floor. Cracks spread, and from the shadows beneath the office, something massive stirred.

A centipede. Not a natural one. Its body was segmented with rusted iron, each leg a sharpened spike, its mandibles dripping with some corrosive secretion. It rose from a hidden maintenance hatch, easily four meters long, and coiled protectively around Corvin’s desk.

Julian didn’t blink. "Zoe. Open the way."

Zoe was already moving. She blurred forward, shifting mid-stride into her beast form a massive black wolf with eyes like molten gold. She slammed into the first two guards, her claws raking across their metal-reinforced arms. Sparks flew. One guard staggered back, the other held his ground, stabbing a jagged iron shard toward her throat. Zoe twisted, biting down on his wrist and pulling.

But the centipede lunged.

Its iron-plated head smashed into Zoe’s side, sending her skidding across the floor. She rolled, came up snarling, but the creature was faster than something that size had any right to be. It blocked her path to Corvin, its segmented body forming a living wall.

Dori’s voice cut through the chaos.

"I’ll attack too."

Julian glanced back at her. She stood in the doorway, her Conceal dropped, her face pale but her jaw set. In her hands was a pistol—a compact, high-caliber Tech-Savant model, loaded with armor-piercing rounds.

Julian’s lips moved into something that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t anything else. "Good."

Dori raised the pistol and fired. Two shots, precise, aimed at the gaps in their metal plating. One guard cried out, clutching his shoulder. The other ducked behind the centipede’s bulk.

Corvin, still behind his desk, began to move his hands. Slowly. Deliberately. His eyes were losing color, turning white from the edges inward. He was tracing a circle in the air, the beginning of Abyss Gate.

Three seconds.

Zoe lunged again, but the centipede intercepted her, its mandibles snapping shut inches from her face. She dug her claws into its iron segments, but it was like tearing at rock. It threw her off again, this time into a wall.

Two seconds.

Julian moved.

[Boost – Activated]

His muscles swelled, his perception sharpened. Lightning. Blue-white arcs crawled across his skin, his hair lifting as static charged the air. He shot forward, the floor cracking beneath his feet.

The centipede swung its head toward him.

Julian sidestepped, and with a thought, he summoned Shadow. Half a dozen spikes of pure darkness erupted from the floor, from the walls, from the ceiling. They stabbed into the centipede’s segmented body between the plates, into the soft connective tissue underneath. Black ichor sprayed. The creature screamed, a horrible metallic shriek, and thrashed wildly.

One second.

Corvin’s hands were almost there. The circle was nearly closed. His white eyes locked onto Julian with something between terror and triumph.

But Julian was already inside his guard.

He used his hand and slammed it into Corvin’s chest.

Corvin’s ribcage caved. His half-formed Abyss Gate collapsed into a flicker of dead light. His white eyes returned to their natural pale gray, wide and disbelieving.

He was too late.

The centipede, mortally wounded, collapsed across the desk, its body twitching. The remaining guards hesitated, looking at their leader, then at Julian, then at the black wolf growling at his side and the small woman with the still-smoking pistol.

Julian straightened. He looked down at Corvin’s body without pity.

"Three seconds," he said quietly. "You wasted two of them talking."

He turned to Dori. "Good shooting."

Zoe shifted back to human form, wiping centipede blood from her cheek. "The rest of Neo will know we’re here now. We need to secure the lower levels before reinforcements arrive."

From somewhere deep in the mine, an alarm began to howl.

And they saw Corvin rise again with his body covered in wounds looking at them with a vengeful gaze.