The alarm was still howling when the door on the opposite side of the office burst open.

"Lord Corvin!"

A man stumbled in, lean, sharp featured, with insect-like compound eyes that reflected the emergency lights in fractured patterns. Behind him, two more subordinates, one carrying a canister, the other already raising his hands to summon.

Corvin, still standing over his desk despite the hole in his chest, turned his pale gray eyes toward the newcomer. A thin smile stretched across his lips.

"You’re late."

"What happened? The sensors?"

"Happened?" Corvin laughed, a wet, rattling sound. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth, but he didn’t fall. "What happened is that the Ghost walked into my home and tried to kill me."

Julian didn’t move. His hand was still coated in Corvin’s blood. "Tried?"

Corvin’s smile widened. "Oh, you did. Make no mistake, my heart stopped for a second there." He tapped his chest where Julian’s fist had struck. Something hard lay beneath the shirt, a metal plate. "But I’ve had redundancies installed."

The man didn’t wait for further orders. His compound eyes flashed, and he slammed his palm against the floor.

[Summon Swarm].

From every crack in the concrete, from the ventilation shafts, from the shadows beneath the cabinets, insects poured. These were mutated: thumb sized beetles with chitinous armor, wasps with stingers that dripped black venom, centipedes as long as arms. They flowed across the floor in a chittering tide.

At the same time, the subordinate with the canister tore the seal open. A yellowish gas hissed out, spreading fast. Neurotoxin. One breath and muscles locked. Two breaths and the lungs stopped.

The third subordinate, a burly man with rock-like skin, charged. His fists swelled into boulders, and he swung at Zoe.

Julian didn’t blink.

[Gravity].

The world pressed.

The insects flattened against the floor, their shells cracking under multiplied weight. The yellow gas stopped spreading, collapsing into a dense pool on the ground. The burly man’s charge halted mid-stride, his body slammed down as if a mountain had been placed on his shoulders. His rock fists crumbled.

Renn staggered but didn’t fall. His compound eyes leaked fluid. "Lord Corvin?"

"I know." Corvin raised his hands.

His eyes went white.

Instantly. The transformation was violent, the pale gray swallowed by milky nothing. His fingers began tracing the circle in the air, but the motion was faster now, practiced, desperate.

"Too late," Corvin whispered. "You’re all too late."

The air behind him split.

A vertical tear in reality, three meters tall, rimmed with shadow that bled like ink into the office lights. From within that tear, shapes moved. Hands. Dozens of hands, made of pure darkness, fingers elongated and twitching, reaching, grasping. They pressed against the edges of the gate, trying to push through.

The gate wasn’t fully open.

But the pressure was already unbearable.

Julian felt it, a weight on his existence. The Void wasn’t empty. It was hungry. And Corvin’s Abyss Gate was a window into that hunger.

Reality began to crack.

The walls of the office developed fissures, thin, glowing lines that pulsed with the same dark energy. The air itself shimmered, bending toward the gate like water circling a drain.

"My soldiers," Corvin said, his white eyes fixed on Julian. "They will die too. But they would have died for me anyway."

The man’s compound eyes went wide with horror. "Lord Corvin!"

The gate pulled.

A vacuum. The desk slid across the floor, its metal legs screeching. Papers, weapons, broken glass, all of it flew toward the tear. The man dug his heels into the ground, his insects already being sucked past him, their crushed bodies disappearing into the darkness. The scarred woman screamed, grabbing a pipe, her hair whipping forward. The burly man, his rock skin cracking under the gravitational pull, clung to the doorframe.

None of it mattered.

The gate didn’t discriminate. Everyone was prey.

The man lost his grip. He tumbled into the tear, his compound eyes still open, still betraying him until the darkness swallowed him whole. The scarred woman followed, her scream cut off mid-pitch. The burly man held on for three more seconds, then his fingers broke, and he vanished.

Corvin laughed, a manic sound.

"See?" He spread his arms, the gate pulsing behind him. "No one can defeat me. My Abyss Gate consumes everything. And you," he pointed at Julian, at Zoe, at Dori, who had pressed herself against the far wall, her Conceal useless now, "you will beg for the mercy of oblivion."

Zoe snarled, shifting into her beast form, but the pull was stronger now. Her claws dug grooves into the concrete floor. Dori screamed, her feet sliding.

Julian stood at the center of the maelstrom, his hair whipping, his coat torn. The gate’s light reflected in his dark blue eyes.

"I told you," Julian said. His voice was calm. "You wasted your time talking."

"What?" Corvin’s laugh faltered.

Julian turned to Dori and Zoe. "Get behind me."

Dori didn’t argue. She grabbed a broken pipe jutting from the wall and wrapped her arms around it. Zoe shifted back, her human hands clamping onto the same pipe, her body shielding Dori from the pull.

Julian faced the gate alone.

He raised his right hand. Lightning arced between his fingers. Shadows coiled around his forearm like living serpents. And at the center of his palm, gravity collapsed into a point smaller than a pinprick.

[Combine].

[Void Sphere].

But not the small, unstable orb he had used against Mike in Greenday.

This one grew.

It swelled from a marble to a fist to a head. The sphere was black, but not empty. Within its depths, lightning flashed like trapped storms, and shadows writhed like dying things. It drank the light from the room. It bent the pull of the gate toward itself, creating a second gravity well.

Corvin’s white eyes widened. "That’s... that’s impossible. You can’t "

"Nothing is impossible," Julian said. And he smiled. "Nothing is ever impossible."

He threw the Void Sphere.

The sphere crossed the distance in less than a heartbeat. It struck the exact center of the tear, where reality was thinnest, where the shadow hands were already clawing through.

Then the gate screamed.

The sound was wrong, a vibration that bypassed the ears and resonated directly in the bones, in the teeth, in the soul. The shadow hands recoiled, pulling back into the darkness. The tear pulsed once, twice, and then

The first explosion was silent. A white blur that swallowed sound.

The second explosion cracked reality further. The fissures in the walls spread across the floor, up the ceiling, branching like lightning frozen in stone.

The third explosion pushed. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

Julian moved faster than thought. He crossed the room in a single step, Gravity lightening his body, Boost accelerating his muscles, and wrapped his arms around Zoe and Dori. He pulled them close, one arm around each, and shoved off the wall with his legs, propelling them toward the corridor.

Behind them, light swallowed everything.

A cold, absolute brightness that erased shadows. The gate collapsed inward, then outward, then both directions at once. The office disintegrated. The centipede’s body vaporized. Corvin himself opened his mouth to scream, but the light filled him before sound could escape.

The shockwave came.

It threw Julian, Zoe, and Dori down the corridor like rag dolls. Julian twisted mid-air, taking the impact on his back, his arms still locked around the two women. They tumbled together, rolling across the metal floor until they slammed into a junction box.

Then the ringing in Julian’s ears faded, replaced by the sound of dripping water and distant, settling rubble.

Dori coughed, her face buried against Julian’s chest. "Is... is it over?"

Zoe lifted her head, her ears still ringing. She looked back toward the office.

There was no office. There was a crater, a perfect hemisphere carved into the rock, its edges glassy and smooth. Beyond the crater, the lower levels of Neo’s mine were visible, open to the sky where the ceiling had collapsed.

Julian released them and sat up slowly. His back ached. His arms were bleeding from shrapnel cuts. But his eyes were clear.

"Corvin’s dead," he said. "The gate is closed."

Dori stared at the crater. "You... you destroyed it. With that sphere."

"It was a gamble." Julian stood, offering a hand to each of them. "It worked."

Zoe took his hand, her claws retracting. "The rest of Neo will be in chaos. We should move before they reorganize."

Julian nodded. He looked at Dori, whose face was still pale but whose hands had stopped trembling. "You did well. Both of you."

From somewhere above, through the new hole in the ceiling, sunlight filtered down. The alarm had stopped. In its place was the sound of confusion, shouting, running footsteps, conflicting orders.

Julian’s expression hardened.

"Now," he said, "we find Neo’s mineral stockpile. And we take it."