I sat cross-legged on the cold stone of the overlook, the bracelet feeling heavy and lifeless on my wrist.

  For the tenth time in an hour, I channeled a specific frequency of mana into it. First Fire, then Void, then pure raw Essence. The rusty iron band did nothing. It didn’t glow, it didn’t vibrate, it didn’t even warm up. It sat there, an inert loop of oxidized metal mocking my victory over Korthos.

  “I will figure you out,” I muttered, flicking it with a fingernail. It made a dull, flat thud.

  “You just need to find the key,” Nyx suggested from her perch on a boulder nearby. She was sharpening her daggers, the screech of metal on whetstone cutting through the howling wind of the wasteland. “Your Glimpse should be up again. Let’s go, the city isn’t going to scout itself.”

  “You’re right,” I dropped my hand. “Let’s see what horrors Vayne and company are up to this week.”

  I closed my eyes. The familiar pull of the strings within my Soul took hold.

  [Glimpse of a Path].

  The world shifted. The cliff edge vanished, replaced by the chaotic noise of the Akkadia perimeter.

  In the vision, we moved fast.

  We tried the cargo tunnels first. They were blocked by high-density mana fields that scrambled organic signatures. Then we tried the sky-bridges. Mana signatures detected us before we hit the midway point.

  “They have already detected us, direct physical approach might not be possible,” Nyx reported. “Too messy. I need to take a persona before entry.”

  “You go ahead, let’s separate and have you report through comms. I’ll go through the gates my own way,” I decided. “Using the Void.”

  “Good luck, I’ll report any findings,” Nyx said.

  She shifted. It wasn’t just an illusion; her body cracked and reformed. Her skin turned grey, her armor shifted into the standard-issue white uniform of a Logistics Officer. Her face melted and solidified into the harried, tired features of a middle-aged woman we had seen entering a checkpoint earlier.

  I watched her go, impressed, then faded my own [Veil].

  I slipped into [Void Walk], maximizing my [Perception] to detect any signature. I bypassed the physical wall, sliding through the hard-light shield without a sound.

  I materialized inside the city, leaving the Lattice.

  Akkadia was quiet. That was the first thing that hit me.

  It wasn’t the bustling, dangerous metropolis of the tournament. The streets were meticulously clean, patrolled by silent, hovering drones. The civilians — what few remained — walked with their heads down, wearing ident-collars that pulsed with a soft, ominous green light.

  I haunted the Administration District.

  The halls of the Governor’s Palace were a maze of white marble and cascading data streams. I drifted through walls, eavesdropping on private channels.

  “Sector 45 quota is down again,” a hologram of a bald man was shouting in one office. “If we don’t hit the energy targets, the Overseer will liquidate the entire management. Find more bodies, now!”

  “There are no more people!” his subordinate hissed back. “They’re running to the Safe Zones! We’re reduced to grabbing street wanderers and drunken Tier 1s.”

  “Then grab them! Vayne doesn’t care about the quality of the vessel, only the yield of the Soul. The Incubator is running low.”

  The Incubator, I thought, should be my destination for this vision.

  The location was flagged on their map. A secure facility deep within the central spire of the capital.

  I reconvened with Nyx in a service corridor an hour later. She looked pale, even in her disguise.

  “I accessed the prisoner transport manifest,” she murmured, reverting to her own form as we huddled in the dark. “They aren’t arresting dissidents, Eren. They’re arresting bloodlines. Anyone with a registered elemental affinity, Tier 3 or higher. They’re being routed to the Sub-Level.”

  “I’ll go take a look.”

  I moved toward the Pyramid’s anchor point. It wasn’t a building; it was a hole in the city center, a vertical shaft plunging miles into the crust, reinforced by black steel ribs. The hum from below vibrated in my teeth.

  As I descended, the pressure built.

  I switched to [Void Walk] to bypass a door with Runic engravings.

  But the moment I stepped into the Void, I hit a wall.

  A barrier that seemed to affect the Lattice itself.

  The grey world, usually empty and fluid, was filled with a gelatinous, purple static. It clung to my limbs, weighing me down. It screamed at me — a high-pitched psychic alarm.

  “Detection grid,” I hissed, retreating back to reality. “They warded the sub-space.”

  “Can you go in?” Nyx asked through my comms bracelet.

  “I can,” I checked my internal timer. I had maybe thirty minutes left in the Glimpse. “But it will trip every alarm in the building. I can burn through it, but I’ll have to go loud.”

  “I’ll send all the data I acquired through,” Nyx replied. “You can read over them before ending the Glimpse.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Will do.”

  I read over the data Nyx sent, learning the important locations and names to convey to her post Glimpse.

  Then, I drew a sword of Ash. I didn’t slice the door; I sliced the Ward itself. I poured my [Domain] into the edge of the blade and tore a hole in the purple static.

  Sirens shattered the silence of the facility. Red strobe lights turned the hallway into a nightmare.

  The air shimmered ahead of me. Three figures materialized.

  They were the same guards I encountered during my last visit to the capital.

  They floated inches off the ground, draped in flowing cloaks of refractive material that acted like a mirror, showing me my own face distorted and screaming. They wore porcelain masks with no features, just a smooth, blank, reflective surface.

  Through my improved Perception, I could now tell they were around mid Tier 7, a tough but maybe possible victory.

  One of them spoke in unidentifiable sounds. The voice sounded like glass grinding on bone.

  They moved.

  It wasn’t speed. They folded the hallway. The floor buckled, distance shrinking.

  I engaged [Void Walk], trying to flee down the corridor toward the lab entrance.

  I expected to leave them behind. In the Void, time outside was usually frozen. I moved at the speed of thought.

  I looked back.

  They were chasing me in the Void.

  They didn’t walk; they swam through the grey slush I had created by breaking the Ward. They were much slower than me — visibly fighting the viscosity of the Lattice — but they were tracking perfectly. Their mirrored cloaks rippled with gravity distortion, pushing the Void away.

  They have spatial abilities, I realized with a jolt of horror. With personal anchor fields that let them move in sub-space.

  I outran them easily, but they were relentless, gliding through walls, their featureless masks locked onto my Void signature.

  I burst through the final security blast door, sending a blast of [Ashen Flame] behind me through the Void, buying some more time.

  I looked up. And forgot how to breathe.

  I was in a cavern the size of a cathedral. But instead of pews, there were rows upon rows of vertical glass tanks. Thousands of them. They stretched up into the darkness, connected by a web of pulsing, vein-like tubes.

  Inside the tanks were people.

  They were suspended in a clear, amber liquid. Tubes were drilled directly into their spines, glowing with a harsh, violet light.

  “Not again,” I whispered.

  I walked to the nearest tank. Inside was a young man, maybe twenty. His eyes were wide open, locked in a silent scream. His skin was translucent, pale as death. I could see the mana network of his body — his veins lit up like neon signs.

  The tubes weren’t feeding him. They were draining him.

  I followed the tubes with my gaze. They ran along the floor, converging in the center of the room into a massive aperture that led... up.

  They were pumping the Soul Essence directly into singularity in the middle of the hall. It had a signature I instantly recognized, the same one I encountered in their Ship.

  But it wasn’t just draining.

  I moved deeper, past the battery-rows, into the ‘Surgery’ sector.

  Here, the tanks were different. The liquid was green.

  I looked into one.

  Inside was a human warrior. Or, parts of one. His arm had been replaced — crude, blackened metal grafted directly onto the bone. His chest had been cracked open, a pulsing, synthetic Core shoved into the cavity next to his beating heart.

  And on the table next to the tank lay something else. A severed arm from a Behemoth Stalker.

  I saw the schematic floating above the console.

  [Hybridization Protocol 9]

  [Subject: Baseline Humanoid]

  [Graft: High-Tier Fauna Essence]

  [Objective: Artificial Tier 5 Shock Trooper]

  They were stitching monsters onto people.

  I looked around. I saw horrors that defied sanity. A Dweorg whose head had been fused with the optical sensor array of a drone. A human woman whose skin had been entirely replaced with the chitin of an armored beetle, weeping blood where the grafts rejected the flesh.

  It smelled of antiseptic, copper, and burned soul.

  “They’re taking them…” I touched the glass of a tank holding a small child who was glowing with uncontrollable Fire mana. “They’re taking the High-Potential natives… And fusing them with these creatures…”

  I walked to the main console.

  [Current Yield: 78% Efficiency]

  [Pyramid Anchor Status: Charging]

  [Project: Divine Flesh - Synthesis Rate 12%]

  The pyramid wasn’t just a ship. It was a vampire. It was sucking the Essence out of the population to fuel its engines, and using the leftovers to build hybrid monsters.

  The battery-rows... they were the fuel. The people I had tried to save in the glimpses, the ones who fled to the Safe Zones — this was the fate they escaped. They must have known something was wrong when people kept disappearing and fled in horror.

  My [Void Perception] traced the main conduit. It punched through the ceiling, a solid beam of stolen souls feeding a Singularity engine in the ship above. It was a desecration of the Lattice itself. It felt like a cancerous tumor on the world’s aura.

  The Mirror Spectres were coming up on the blast door behind me. The wall of Flame should hold them for a little longer but not for much.

  I looked one last time at the young man in the tank. His eyes tracked me. He was conscious.

  Trapped in amber. Drained slowly.

  The rage that hit me was cold.

  The Glimpse flickered then.

  The world snapped back.

  I was sitting on the cliff edge outside the city. The cold wind bit my face.

  I scrambled up, my chest heaving, the phantom smell of rotting antiseptic clinging to my nose. I fell to my knees and vomited dryly onto the rocks.

  “Eren?” Nyx was there instantly, her hand on my back. “What have you seen? You look... haunted.”

  I wiped my mouth, spitting bile. I looked down at the glittering lights of Akkadia. From here, it looked peaceful. But now I knew. I knew what powered those lights. I knew what the Pyramid was doing in the dark.

  “It’s a slaughterhouse,” I whispered, my voice rough.

  “What is?”

  “They're farming us, Nyx,” I stood up, gripping the hilt of my sword until the leather creaked. “Not resources. Us. Our souls. Our bodies. They're stitching people together like dolls.”

  I looked at the black shape hovering over the city.

  I thought I hated them before. I thought Vayne was just a tyrant.

  But this... this wasn’t tyranny. It was a cruel, revolting industry. They had looked at the miracle of Essence and seen an assembly line.

  “We must put an end to it,” Nyx said, seeing the look in my eyes. It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” I said, the Flame of Ending flaring hot in my core, responding to the cold murder in my heart. “We don’t just stop it.”

  I looked at the city walls.

  “We are going to burn it down. Every brick. Every tank. Every single one of those faceless mirrors and the masters they serve.”

  I turned away from the cliff, pacing, my mind racing through the logistics of destruction. This mission wasn't about just scouting anymore.

  It was time for an extermination.