The descent began in silence.

Selistar led them down corridors that had no name, no banners, no sigils to mark allegiance. The place was carved from stone but stripped of identity, as if the builders had gone to great pains to erase every trace of where they came from. Pale lights hummed from hidden fixtures, their glow a clinical white with no warmth. The walls carried no Systems, no ornament—only the quiet geometry of necessity. This was not a prison tied to any city-state or Seat. It was nowhere. That was its strength.

Every door admitted them one at a time, sighing open at Selistar's command and locking behind them.

Helena walked at Selistar's left. Her half-mask gleamed faintly in the sterile light, a smooth plate of white metal that erased the ruin beneath. She never touched it, never adjusted it; the mask had long ago become a part of her face. Rage had burned her scars into iron, and she carried them now like a standard.

On Selistar's right, Franky's mechanical arm flexed with quiet whirs. The false skin had been designed to mimic the living, but under this unforgiving light, it betrayed itself in too-perfect reflections. The armored gauntlet on his forearm bore dozens of tiny hatch marks scratched in by hand.

Hachiman followed behind, blindfold tied clean and tight across his eyes. He walked as though he could see the walls through sound, his head turning slightly to follow the echo of each footstep and the faint hum of air through unseen vents. His blindness had stripped him of ornament and left only precision.

None of them spoke until the last lift stopped and released them into the antechamber. Ahead stood a single pane of reinforced crystal, so clear it seemed to erase the line between them and the cell beyond. A narrow bench sat bolted to the floor, but none of them sat.

Cefketa waited on the other side.

He sat on the cot as though it were a throne. Barefoot, hands clasped loosely, his head bowed until the door behind them sealed with a heavy click. Then he looked up.

There were no chains. He needed none. The room was threaded with safeguards invisible to the eye—dead Systems buried in the walls, designed to collapse space itself if he ever tried to break free. This was not mercy. It was containment of the highest order, far from the knowledge of nations. Even with all these precautions, they all knew it was decorative. There was nothing that could stop the beast before them from escaping if he wished to.

Helena broke the silence first.

"We didn't come to gloat," she said evenly. "Knowing you, you chose this place."

Cefketa's mouth tilted. "No."

Franky frowned. "No?"

"No," Cefketa repeated, with faint amusement. "Mythara acted beyond my expectations. That's why I'm here."

"You don't seem upset," Franky said.

"I'm not. Humanity will free me. If not today, then tomorrow. And if they don't…" Cefketa's gaze drifted to the floor, as though he could see through the stone to the centuries buried beneath. "They won't last ten thousand years without me. I can wait."

Helena's fingers curled against the railing. "Then what are you planning?"

Cefketa studied her. Not the mask. Her. "No."

"'No' what?" Hachiman asked.

"No, I won't tell you."

Silence stretched again, thin and taut.

"You still hate us?" Helena asked finally.

"I never hated you," Cefketa said. "I was just disappointed. But that's over. You are what you are. Only human."

Franky pressed his metal palm to the glass, leaving a faint oval of warmth. "When I woke up missing this arm, I wanted to tear the world apart. Instead, I buried myself in my Program. I learned more in three months than in the years before. You made that happen."

Franky remembered the weeks after losing his arm as a blur of sleepless nights. The stump throbbed with phantom fire, a reminder of everything he could no longer touch. He buried himself in salvage, tearing down old tech left behind by the Twins, and stitching them together, until he weaved together this gauntlet that had become his hand.

The gauntlet had become his diary: every hatch mark carved was a failure turned into a function. With every failure, he discovered something new. He didn't thank Cefketa for it. The man across the glass would have been the first he would have shared his triumph with. But now there was nothing there but a void of what once was.

Helena touched the seam of her mask. "Every time I looked into the mirror. Rage threatened to consume me. It should have hollowed me. Instead, I followed it until I found something. I'm more focused now and far more powerful."

The first time Helena wore the mask, she had ripped it off before the hour ended, sobbing at the reflection it offered back: a face without expression, without proof of who she was. For weeks, she avoided mirrors. Then one day she stood in front of one until the tears dried.

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She forced herself to practice smiling beneath the steel, frowning, screaming, until the truth struck: the mask would never betray her again. It was blank, invulnerable, her weapon against the world. Rage hadn't hollowed her; it had filled her with something permanent. She dug past the surface of not only herself but her power, and discovered a strength she did not know she possessed or needed.

Hachiman crossed his arms. "Blindness stripped every previous notion I had of myself. So I discarded it all and started over. I think the man I am now could give the you back then a fight worth seeing."

Blindness had not come as silence; it had come as chaos. At first, he stumbled through walls, desperate for the faintest glimmer. Nights passed where he pressed his palms against his eyelids, certain that if he just pushed harder, light would come back. It never did. But in the black, sound sharpened.

He began to map the world in clicks, in heartbeats, in the brush of wind against cloth... he felt the wind. What he viewed as an afterthought, as a tool to enhance his sword, became his everything. Sight had been an illusion. The wind, the air was his truth. It now guided his every move. Every small twitch of his finger, every slight tilt of the head. He was guided by the subtle, imperceptible movements of air that only he could feel. His sight was taken, but he was now able to feel.

Cefketa's grin flashed as quick as a blade. "I'd like to test that. And I'm sure we'll get our chance."

Selistar lifted his hand. A faint ring of Systems shimmered to life above his palm, glyphs rotating like distant stars. "Without your hints, I'd never have even tried. Now I wonder if I'm late—or just on time." He closed his fist, and the ring vanished.

Selistar carried no mask, no prosthetic, no blindfold. His scars were carved in the choices he failed to balance. He had tried to be loyal to both blood and friendship, to family and duty, and in that hesitation had watched the greatest tragedy of his life unfold. He had watched his best friend lose everything and fall into the abyss.

Yet in Zac's darkest moment—when Selistar thought he had lost him—his friend had given him something he never deserved: hints, quiet and cutting, on how to bend Vaylora. A grace disguised as an insult. Instruction sharpened as ridicule. He had no right to it, but he clung to it anyway. If Zac could leave him even that, then Selistar's only answer was to use it, to drag him back into the light, even if he was the last man who deserved to try.

"That's for you to figure out." Cefketa's eyes narrowed with a private pleasure.

Selistar didn't take the bait. "What are you after, Zac? Truly."

Cefketa savored the name before letting it fall. "Don't delude yourselves. Whatever strength you gained came from your own hands. Not mine. I only seek one thing: humanity's destruction. I will watch it fall."

"Then why help us?" Selistar asked. "Why give us just enough to survive, again and again? Is it guilt? A twisted apology? You want forgiveness? Because whether you like it or not, we still see you as a friend."

Laughter erupted from Cefketa, sharp and echoing, until it felt as though the crystal should shiver apart. He stopped as suddenly as he started, his eyes gleaming.

"I wasn't helping you. I wanted to break you. I don't seek forgiveness. I don't need understanding. I do what I must to gain what I want—nothing more, nothing less. That you drew strength out of pain is not my victory. It's a correction of your weakness."

Cefketa leaned forward, the glass between them catching the gleam of his eyes. His voice was soft, almost conversational.

"Helena. You wear iron over half your face and pretend it's strength. But every glare you give me leaks through the cracks."

He turned to Franky. "That arm clicks and whirs with ingenuity. I bet you fiddle with it every day, don't you? A desperate attempt to take back what was lost. Regardless of how much you polish it, you'll never get back what you lost."

Finally Selistar. A pause, heavy. "And you. Always standing between one side and the other, until both collapse. You tried to carry loyalty in both hands, and blood spilled through your fingers. Now you cling to a whim, hoping your friend is still there. Tell me, Devin—do you hear Zac's voice, or Lord Cefketa's?"

He leaned back, hands loose, eyes steady. "You see yourselves as survivors. But the truth is simpler. You are monuments. And I built you."

"You're not in control here," Selistar said.

Cefketa tilted his head. "Aren't I?"

"Humanity is moving without you," Helena said. "They're bolder now."

"They'll soon crumble under the weight of power," Cefketa said. "And when they have nowhere to look for help. They'll come back. "

"You think they'll come to you," Franky said.

"They won't have a choice," Cefketa answered calmly. "There is only one absolute in all of creation."

Helena leaned forward. "Do you really think humans are that weak, that we are that hopeless?"

"Yes," Cefketa said simply.

"Good," Helena replied. "I will enjoy showing you how wrong you are."

"You have empathy for your own. It's admirable, but misplaced," he said. "That's why you'll lose. That empathy you have for the hopeless is suicidal."

Franky withdrew his hand from the glass. "We came to see if anything was left of you worth talking to. There isn't."

"Then this was a waste of time, wasn't it?" Cefketa said brightly. "Go. Train. Be like my Tiny Tots. At least they learned to read the writing on the wall without weeping over the unfortunate."

Selistar's mouth twisted. "Don't call them yours."

"They were," Cefketa said. "And they will be again. All roads run downhill. I'll be waiting at the bottom."

Hachiman shifted. "What if you're wrong?"

Cefketa smiled. "I won't be."

The silence after was heavier than chains.

Selistar touched the door panel. The locks disengaged with a sigh. He lingered, then said quietly, "You called us only human. That isn't an insult."

"It should be," Cefketa replied.

"It isn't, we may be slow learners, we may be weak. But we survive, we adapt." Selistar said, and the door opened.

One by one, they turned away. Franky tapped the glass twice with his gauntlet, letting out a disappointed sigh. Helena's mask caught Cefketa's reflection in a white smear as she turned. Hachiman said nothing.

The seals closed. The pane cleared. On the other side, Cefketa lowered his head again. But the faint lift of his mouth was not rest. It was laughter waiting to happen. As he coldly said, only loud enough for himself to hear.

"You survive and you adapt, true. But it has always been under the guiding hand of your keepers."

Selistar did not look back. But as they climbed into the waiting lift, the unease coiled tight in his chest refused to leave.

"Why," he murmured to the empty air, "does it still feel like he's in control?"

The lift carried them up, away from the secret hollow where the world's most dangerous man sat unchained. Behind them, the prison locked itself once more, as if it had never been opened.

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